Essays by Hamood

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772
Dedication,
To my mentor SIR AHMAD RAZA KHAN

who instilled in me, the courage to know, the art to
teach and the passion to serve.

Acknowledgement
This work would not have been completed without

support and contributions of Akhlaq Ullah Tarar,Hafiz
Karim Dad Chugtai, Sharjeel Shahid, Masood Ali Thahim,
and Zohaib Mumtaz Gondal.

FOREWORD
It is an established fact that good writing is dependent upon good
reading. Reading is the first step which builds a solid stair to climb up
achieving something extraordinary. What makes reading so important
for an aspirant? Reading can be a great benefit in many ways. Writing is
not a sudden outburst of randomly arranged ideas. It is a systematic
process, where ideas are germinated from the existing stock of
knowledge supplemented by the ability to apply mind ingeniously and
logically. With reading, thoughts are licked into a shape and are
effectively presented keeping in view the principles of relevance, clarity
and organization. After reading the timeless wisdom of the classics
along with the contemporaries, HAMOOD UR REHMAN RANJHA has
embarked upon a painstaking endeavor and laboriously collected diverse
yet great writings of all times to facilitate serious and great aspirants of
CSS particularly and competitive exams generally. This comprehensive
collection would certainly evoke a sense of curiosity among aspirants.
They will understand the art of persuasion that how a discreet writing
style is chosen where ideas take precedence over verbosity. This
collection will not only enrich an aspirant with a diverse source of ideas
and knowledge but will also widen their mental horizon. Moreover, it
will help to fill intellectual vacuum of candidates from different
educational backgrounds. Eventually candidates will be able to make an
informed opinion about different issues and realities of out times.it is
hoped that a great benefit will be accrued from this beautiful and all-
encompassing compilation of hundred great readings.
AKHLAQ ULLAH TARAR
(PSP)

Tit
lePage
Dedicat
ion
Acknowledgement
Foreword
Cont
ent
s
Ber
trandRussel
l
1. Freeman' swor shi p
2. Anout l
ineofi nt ellect ual rubbi
sh
3. Sent encesy nt ax, par tofspeech
4. Theuseofl anguage
5. Cultofcommonusage
6. Educat ion
7. Aimsofeducat ion
8. Emot ionanddi sci pline
9. TheFunct i
onsofat eacher
10. WhyIam notacommuni st
11. Onhi story
12. East ernandwest erni deasofhappi ness
13. EssenceofRel igi on
14. Whati sanagnost ic
15. WhyIam notaChr istian
16. Canr eligi
oncur eourt roubles?
17. ScienceandEducat ion
18. Scienceandv alues
19. Lifewi t
houtf ear
20. Met hodsofset tli
ngDi sput esi
nnuclearage
21. Ideast hathelpedmanki nd
22. Ideast hathar medmanki nd
23. Freedom i nsoci et y
24. Freedom andaut hor it
yi neducati
on
25. Thenegat i
vet heor yofeducat i
on
26. Religioni nEducat i
on
27. Patriot i
sm ineducat i
on
28. Inpr aiseofi dleness
29. Usel essknowl edge
30. Scy l
laandChar y bdi s,Communi sm andFascism

31. Thecasef orsocial
ism
32. Wester
nci vi
li
sati
on
33. Man,versusinsects
34. Educat
ionanddi scipl
ine
35. Hasrel
igionmadeusef ulcont
ri
but
ionst
oci
vi
li
zat
ion?
36. Sci
enceandt radi
t i
on
37. Sci
enceandWar
Wi
l
lDur
ant
38. Onrel i
gion
39. Onrel i
gionandmor al s
40. Onwar
41. Onpol it
ics
42. Oncapi talism andcommuni sm
43. Onsci ence
44. Oneducat ion
45. Onthei nsi ghtsofhi story
46. Shamel esswor shi
pofher oes
47. Thet engr eat estthinker s
48. Thet enpeaksofhumanpr ogress
49. Twelv evitaldat esi nwor ldhi st
ory
50. Hist
or yandt heear th
51. Characterandhi story
52. Reli
gionandhi story
53. Economi csandhi stor y
54. Sociali
sm andHi stor y
55. Warandhi story
56. Growt handdecay
57. I
spr ogressr eal
58. Themoder nwomen
59. Thedest inyofci vi
lisation
60. I
npr aiseOfFr eedom ( all5)
61. I
sdemocr acyaf ail
ur e(all4)
62. Thef unctionofr el
igi on

Fr
anci
sFukuy
ama
63. Democr
acy
:
a.Whydi ddemocracyspr
ead
b.Thelongroadtodemocracy
c.From 1848toArabSpri
ng
d.Themi ddl
eclassanddemocracy
'sf
utur
e
Yuv
alNoahHar
ari
64. Libert
y
65. Equalit
y
66. Civil
i
sat i
on
67. Nationalism
68. Immi gration
69. Terrori
sm
70. War
71. Secularism
72. Ignorance
73. Education
St
evenpi
nker
74. I
nequal i
ty
75. Theenv ir
onment
76. Terrori
sm
77. Democr acy
78. Equal Ri
ghts
79. Existent
ialThreat
80. Futureofpr ogress
81. Reason, Sci
enceandhumani
sm
82. Rightsrevoluti
on
83. Betterangel
AlGor
e
84. Edge
Ral
phWal
doEmer
son
85. Sel
f-
Rel
i
ance

E.M.For
ster
86. Tol
erance
JohnSt
uar
tMi
ll
87. Onli
bert
y
88. Thesubj
ect
ionofWoman
Fr
anci
sBacon
89. Oftr
uth,
Ofadver
sit
y,Off
ri
endshi
p,
90. Ofambit
ion,
Ofbeauty
Al
dousHuxl
ey
91. Wordsandbehav ior
92. Decentral
i
zati
onandSel fGover
nment
93. Poli
ti
csandRel i
gion
94. Thesci
entist
sRole
95. TomorrowandTomor r
owandTomor r
ow
96. Madness,badness,sadness
Noam Chomsky
97. Manufactur
ingconsent
98. Theresponsibi
l
ityofi
ntel
l
ect
ual
s
Geor
geOr
wel
l
99. Shoot
ingandEl
ephant
Amar
tyaSen
100. Gl
obal
i
sat
ion

6
A FREE MAN’S WORSHIP
To Dr Faustus in his study Mephistophelis told the history of the Creation,

saying:
‘The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome;
for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless
joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain underserved praise, to be
worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved
that the great drama should be performed.
‘For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At
length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets
cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from black
masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the
first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in
the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge ferns springing from the
damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away.
And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the
power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for
worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that
all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before
Death’s inexorable decree. And Man said: “There is a hidden purpose, could
we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something,
and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.” And Man
stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come
out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which
God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it
Sin, and asked God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly
forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by which God’s wrath was to have

a free man’s worship 39
been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that
thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength
that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled;
and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship,
he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man’s sun; and all
returned again to nebula.
‘ “Yes,” he murmured, “it was a good play; I will have it performed
again.” ’
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the
world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere,
our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes
which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his
growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of
accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of
thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all
the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday
brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of
the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must
inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these
things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no phil-
osophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of
these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s
habitation henceforth be safely built.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as
Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature,
omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the
abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power,
but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of
judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark
and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to
examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in
the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies
his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the
powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than
Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring
whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long
history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured
in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer
thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood
must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch—
as such creeds may be generically called—is in essence the cringing

40 the basic writings of bertrand russell
submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought
that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is
not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an
unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.
But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world
begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to gods of
another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they feel the
demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still urging that naked
Power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude inculcated in God’s answer to
Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge are paraded, but
of the divine goodness there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who,
in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintain-
ing that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with
an answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we
have become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in
some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the world
of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity
of what is and what should be.
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judge-
ment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must
be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing
him as far as possible from the tyranny of non-human Power. When we have
realized that Power is largely bad, that Man, with his knowledge of good and
evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the
choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship
Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the
creation of our own conscience?
The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly
our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche
and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to
maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate
submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to
be respected, let us respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false
‘recognition of facts’ which fails to recognize that facts are often bad. Let us
admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be better
otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not
realized in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for
beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain,
though none of these things meet with the approval of the unconscious
universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In
this lies Man’s true freedom: in determination to worship only the God
created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which

inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit
perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we
are free, free from our fellow men, free from the petty planet on which our
bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.
Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in
the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact,
with that vision always before us.
When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of
fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of
freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its
evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of
Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the
inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to
be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which
rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the
wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of
our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the
submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of
our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our
thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of
beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision
of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not
weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those
who no longer ask of life that is shall yield them any of those personal goods
that are subject to the mutations of Time.
Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil,
yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the
Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted that, of the things
we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are yet real goods; others,
however, as ardently longed for, do not form part of a fully purified ideal. The
belief that what must be renounced is bad, though sometimes false, is far less
often false than untamed passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by
providing a reason for proving that it is never false, has been the means of
purifying our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.
But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when
they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes,
sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there is nothing
unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will,
and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by
poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world
was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave,
Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune

comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our
thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only
just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.
But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunci-
ation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunt-
ing foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in
music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the
golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from
the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures
and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these
things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a
touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to
fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the
sacred temple.
Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of
darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the
cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned
hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire
must be slain, for only so can the soul be free from the empire of Fate. But out
of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom,
by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to
gladden the pilgrim’s heart.
When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to
resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognize that the non-
human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to
transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the
crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old
idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world—in the visual shapes of
trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of Man, even in the
very omnipotence of Death—the insight of creative idealism can find the
reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind
asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil
the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the
greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden
treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell
the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most
triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy’s
country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable
watch-towers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed;
within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain
and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of
that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts,

thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave
warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the
priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders
the home of the unsubdued.
But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more
or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spec-
tacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness
of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the
vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by
some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds
of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary
desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial
things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we
see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human
comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour;
from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the
loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the indi-
vidual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can com-
mand, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes
and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true
baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the
over-mastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the
soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and
with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul
the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be—Death and change, the
irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind
hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity—to feel these things and know
them is to conquer them.
This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its
motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn,
when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against
the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like Duncan, after
life’s fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty
and transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal
shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is
unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.
The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with
the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and
Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because
all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to
think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And
such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in

Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To
abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of tempor-
ary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things—this is emancipation, and
this is the free man’s worship. And this liberation is effected by a contempla-
tion of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be
purged by the purifying fire of Time.
United with his fellow men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common
doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over
every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the
night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards
a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by
one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent
orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help
them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed
sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to
give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing cour-
age, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales
their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need—of the sorrows,
the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives;
let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in
the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their
good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it
ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was
the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we
were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which
high courage glowed.
Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure
doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction,
omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to
lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it
remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow fall, the lofty thoughts that ennoble
his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at
the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of
chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his
outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a
moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but
unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the
trampling march of unconscious power.
(The Independent Review, December 1903, subsequently reprinted in
Mysticism and Logic, London: Allen & Unwin, 1917; New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1929.)

7
AN OUTLINE OF
INTELLECTUAL RUBBISH
Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life,
I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far
I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in
many countries spread over three continents. On the contrary, I have seen the
world plunging continually further into madness. I have seen great nations,
formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic non-
sense. I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps
and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rational-
ity is held to mark a man as an old fogy regrettably surviving from a bygone
age. All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape
from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had
formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial
and yet the human race has survived. The follies of our own times are easier
to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies. In what
follows I shall mix the sillinesses of our day with those of former centuries.
Perhaps the result may help in seeing our own times in perspective, and as
not much worse than other ages that our ancestors lived through without
ultimate disaster.
Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man
is a rational animal. His reason for this view was one which does not now
seem very impressive; it was, that some people can do sums. He thought that
there are three kinds of soul: the vegetable soul, possessed by all living things,
both plants and animals, and concerned only with nourishment and growth;
the animal soul, concerned with locomotion, and shared by man with the
lower animals; and finally the rational soul, or intellect, which is the Divine

mind, but in which men participate to a greater or less degree in propor-
tion to their wisdom. It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational
animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by
mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that
the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations
could only be made by very clever people. Nowadays, however, calculating
machines do sums better than even the cleverest people, yet no one con-
tends that these useful instruments are immortal, or work by divine inspir-
ation. As arithmetic has grown easier, it has come to be less respected. The
consequence is that, though many philosophers continue to tell us what
fine fellows we are, it is no longer on account of our arithmetical skill that
they praise us.
Since the fashion of the age no longer allows us to point to calculating boys
as evidence that man is rational and the soul, at least in part, immortal, let us
look elsewhere. Where shall we look first? Shall we look among eminent
statesmen, who have so triumphantly guided the world into its present condi-
tion? Or shall we choose the men of letters? Or the philosophers? All these
have their claims, but I think we should begin with those whom all right-
thinking people acknowledge to be the wisest as well as the best of men,
namely the clergy. If they fail to be rational, what hope is there for us lesser
mortals? And alas—though I say it with all due respect—there have been
times when their wisdom has not been very obvious, and, strange to say,
these were especially the times when the power of the clergy was greatest.
The Ages of Faith, which are praised by our neoscholastics, were the time
when the clergy had things all their own way. Daily life was full of miracles
wrought by saints and wizardry perpetrated by devils and necromancers.
Many thousands of witches were burnt at the stake. Men’s sins were punished
by pestilence and famine, by earthquake, flood, and fire. And yet, strange to
say, they were even more sinful than they are nowadays. Very little was known
scientifically about the world. A few learned men remembered Greek proofs
that the earth is round, but most people made fun of the notion that there are
antipodes. To suppose that there are human beings at the antipodes was
heresy. It was generally held (though modern Catholics take a milder view)
that the immense majority of mankind are damned. Dangers were held to
lurk at every turn. Devils would settle on the food that monks were about to
eat, and would take possession of the bodies of incautious feeders who
omitted to make the sign of the Cross before each mouthful. Old-fashioned
people still say ‘bless you’ when one sneezes, but they have forgotten the
reason for the custom. The reason was that people were thought to sneeze out
their souls, and before their souls could get back lurking demons were apt to
enter the un-souled body; but if any one said ‘God bless you’, the demons
were frightened off.

an outline of intellectual rubbish 47
Throughout the last four hundred years, during which the growth of
science has gradually shown men how to acquire knowledge of the ways of
nature and mastery over natural forces, the clergy have fought a losing battle
against science, in astronomy and geology, in anatomy and physiology, in
biology and psychology and sociology. Ousted from one position, they have
taken up another. After being worsted in astronomy, they did their best to
prevent the rise of geology; they fought against Darwin in biology, and at the
present time they fight against scientific theories of psychology and educa-
tion. At each stage, they try to make the public forget their earlier obscurant-
ism, in order that their present obscurantism may not be recognized for what
it is. Let us note a few instances of irrationality among the clergy since the rise
of science, and then inquire whether the rest of mankind are any better.
When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in
England and America, with the enthusiastic support of George III, condemned
it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God. For, as all right-thinking
people were aware, lightning is sent by God to punish impiety or some other
grave sin—the virtuous are never struck by lightning. Therefore if God wants
to strike anyone, Benjamin Franklin ought not to defeat His design; indeed, to
do so is helping criminals to escape. But God was equal to the occasion, if we
are to believe the eminent Dr Price, one of the leading divines of Boston.
Lightning having been rendered ineffectual by the ‘iron points invented by
the sagacious Dr Franklin’, Massachusetts was shaken by earthquakes, which
Dr Price perceived to be due to God’s wrath at the ‘iron points’. In a sermon
on the subject he said: ‘In Boston are more erected than elsewhere in New
England, and Boston seems to be more dreadfully shaken. Oh! there is no
getting out of the mighty hand of God.’ Apparently, however, Providence
gave up all hope of curing Boston of its wickedness, for, though lightning-
rods became more and more common, earthquakes in Massachusetts have
remained rare. Nevertheless, Dr Price’s point of view, or something very like
it, was still held by one of the most influential men of recent times. When,
at one time, there were several bad earthquakes in India, Mahatma Gandhi
solemnly warned his compatriots that these disasters had been sent as a
punishment for their sins.
Even in my own native island this point of view still exists. During the
1914–18 war, the British Government did much to stimulate the production
of food at home. In 1916, when things were not going well, a Scottish
clergyman wrote to the newspapers to say that military failure was due to
the fact that, with government sanction, potatoes had been planted on the
Sabbath. However, disaster was averted, owing to the fact that the Germans
disobeyed all the Ten Commandments, and not only one of them.
Sometimes, if pious men are to be believed, God’s mercies are curiously
selective. Toplady, the author of Rock of Ages, moved from one vicarage to

another; a week after the move, the vicarage he had formerly occupied burnt
down, with great loss to the new vicar. Thereupon Toplady thanked God; but
what the new vicar did is not known. Borrow, in his Bible in Spain, records how
without mishap he crossed a mountain pass infested by bandits. The next
party to cross, however, were set upon, robbed, and some of them murdered;
when Borrow heard of this, he, like Toplady, thanked God.
Although we are taught the Copernican astronomy in our textbooks, it has
not yet penetrated to our religion or our morals, and has not even succeeded
in destroying belief in astrology. People still think that the Divine Plan has
special reference to human beings, and that a special Providence not only
looks after the good, but also punishes the wicked. I am sometimes shocked
by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious—for instance, the
nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When
asked why, since no man can see them, they reply ‘Oh, but you forget the
good God.’ Apparently they conceive of the Deity as a Peeping Tom, whose
omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled
by bathrobes. This view strikes me as curious.
The whole conception of ‘sin’ is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless
owing to my sinful nature. If ‘sin’ consisted in causing needless suffering, I
could understand; but on the contrary, sin often consists in avoiding needless
suffering. Some years ago, in the English House of Lords, a Bill was introduced
to legalize euthanasia in cases of painful and incurable disease. The patient’s
consent was to be necessary, as well as several medical certificates. To me, in
my simplicity, it would seem natural to require the patient’s consent, but the
late Archbishop of Canterbury, the English official expert on sin, explained
the erroneousness of such a view. The patient’s consent turns euthanasia into
suicide, and suicide is sin. Their Lordships listened to the voice of authority,
and rejected the Bill. Consequently, to please the Archbishop—and his God, if
he reports truly—victims of cancer still have to endure months of wholly
useless agony, unless their doctors or nurses are sufficiently humane to risk a
charge of murder. I find difficulty in the conception of a God who gets
pleasure from contemplating such tortures; and if there were a God capable of
such wanton cruelty, I should certainly not think Him worthy of worship. But
that only proves how sunk I am in moral depravity.
I am equally puzzled by the things that are sin and by the things that are
not. When the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals asked the
Pope for his support, he refused it, on the ground that human beings owe no
duty to the lower animals, and that ill-treating animals is not sinful. This is
because animals have no souls. On the other hand, it is wicked to marry your
deceased wife’s sister—so at least the Church teaches—however much you
and she may wish to marry. This is not because of any unhappiness that
might result, but because of certain texts in the Bible.

The resurrection of the body, which is an article of the Apostles’ Creed, is a
dogma which has various curious consequences. There was an author not
very many years ago, who had an ingenious method of calculating the date of
the end of the world. He argued that there must be enough of the necessary
ingredients of a human body to provide everybody with the requisites at the
Last Day. By carefully calculating the available raw material, he decided that it
would all have been used up by a certain date. When that date comes, the
world must end, since otherwise the resurrection of the body would become
impossible. Unfortunately, I have forgotten what the date was, but I believe it
is not very distant.
St Thomas Aquinas, the official philosopher of the Catholic Church, dis-
cussed lengthily and seriously a very grave problem, which, I fear, modern
theologians unduly neglect. He imagines a cannibal who has never eaten
anything but human flesh, and whose father and mother before him had like
propensities. Every particle of his body belongs rightfully to someone else.
We cannot suppose that those who have been eaten by cannibals are to go
short through all eternity. But, if not, what is left for the cannibal? How is he
to be properly roasted in hell, if all his body is restored to its original owners?
This is a puzzling question, as the Saint rightly perceives.
In this connection the orthodox have a curious objection to cremation,
which seems to show an insufficient realization of God’s omnipotence. It is
thought that a body which has been burnt will be more difficult for Him
to collect together again than one which has been put underground and
transformed into worms. No doubt collecting the particles from the air and
undoing the chemical work of combustion would be somewhat laborious,
but it is surely blasphemous to suppose such a work impossible for the Deity.
I conclude that the objection to cremation implies grave heresy. But I doubt
whether my opinion will carry much weight with the orthodox.
It was only very slowly and reluctantly that the Church sanctioned the
dissection of corpses in connection with the study of medicine. The pioneer
in dissection was Vesalius, who was Court physician to the Emperor Charles V.
His medical skill led the Emperor to protect him, but after the Emperor was
dead he got into trouble. A corpse which he was dissecting was said to have
shown signs of life under the knife, and he was accused of murder. The
Inquisition was induced by King Philip II to take a lenient view, and only
sentenced him to a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On the way home he was
shipwrecked and died of exhaustion. For centuries after this time, medical
students at the Papal University in Rome were only allowed to operate on lay
figures, from which the sexual parts were omitted.
The sacredness of corpses is a widespread belief. It was carried furthest by
the Egyptians, among whom it led to the practice of mummification. It still
exists in full force in China. A French surgeon who was employed by the

Chinese to teach Western medicine, relates that his demand for corpses to
dissect was received with horror, but he was assured that he could have
instead an unlimited supply of live criminals. His objection to this alternative
was totally unintelligible to his Chinese employers.
Although there are many kinds of sin, seven of which are deadly, the most
fruitful field for Satan’s wiles is sex. The orthodox Catholic doctrine on this
subject is to be found in St Paul, St Augustine, and St Thomas Aquinas. It is
best to be celibate, but those who have not the gift of continence may marry.
Intercourse in marriage is not sin, provided it is motivated by desire for
offspring. All intercourse outside marriage is sin, and so is intercourse within
marriage if any measures are adopted to prevent conception. Interruption of
pregnancy is sin, even if, in medical opinion, it is the only way of saving the
mother’s life; for medical opinion is fallible, and God can always save a life by
miracle if He sees fit. (This view is embodied in the law of Connecticut.)
Venereal disease is God’s punishment for sin. It is true that, through a guilty
husband, this punishment may fall on an innocent woman and her children,
but this is a mysterious dispensation of Providence which it would be
impious to question. We must also not inquire why venereal disease was not
divinely instituted until the time of Columbus. Since it is the appointed
penalty for sin, all measures for its avoidance are also sin—except, of course,
a virtuous life. Marriage is nominally indissoluble, but many people who
seem to be married are not. In the case of influential Catholics, some ground
for nullity can often be found, but for the poor there is no such outlet, except
perhaps in cases of impotence. Persons who divorce and remarry are guilty of
adultery in the sight of God.
The phrase ‘in the sight of God’ puzzles me. One would suppose that God
sees everything, but apparently this is a mistake. He does not see Reno, for
you cannot be divorced in the sight of God. Register offices are a doubtful
point. I notice that respectable people, who would not call on anybody who
lives in open sin, are quite willing to call on people who have had only a civil
marriage; so apparently God does see register offices.
Some eminent men think even the doctrine of the Catholic Church deplor-
ably lax where sex is concerned. Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi, in their old age,
laid it down that all sexual intercourse is wicked, even in marriage and with a
view to offspring. The Manicheans thought likewise, relying upon men’s
native sinfulness to supply them with a continually fresh crop of disciples. This
doctrine, however, is heretical, though it is equally heretical to maintain that
marriage is as praiseworthy as celibacy. Tolstoy thinks tobacco almost as bad as
sex; in one of his novels, a man who is contemplating murder smokes a
cigarette first in order to generate the necessary homicidal fury. Tobacco,
however, is not prohibited in the Scriptures, though, as Samuel Butler points
out, St Paul would no doubt have denounced it if he had known of it.

It is odd that neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns
petting, provided it stops short at a certain point. At what point sin begins is a
matter as to which casuists differ. One eminently orthodox Catholic divine
laid it down that a confessor may fondle a nun’s breasts, provided he does it
without evil intent. But I doubt whether modern authorities would agree
with him on this point.
Modern morals are a mixture of two elements: on the one hand, rational
precepts as to how to live together peaceably in a society, and on the other
hand traditional taboos derived originally from some ancient superstition,
but proximately from sacred books, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or
Buddhist. To some extent the two agree; the prohibition of murder and theft,
for instance, is supported both by human reason and by Divine command.
But the prohibition of pork or beef has only scriptural authority, and that
only in certain religions. It is odd that modern men, who are aware of what
science has done in the way of bringing new knowledge and altering the
conditions of social life, should still be willing to accept the authority of texts
embodying the outlook of very ancient and very ignorant pastoral or agri-
cultural tribes. It is discouraging that many of the precepts whose sacred
character is thus uncritically acknowledged should be such as to inflict much
wholly unnecessary misery. If men’s kindly impulses were stronger, they
would find some way of explaining that these precepts are not to be taken
literally, any more than the command to ‘sell all that thou hast and give to
the poor’.
There are logical difficulties in the notion of sin. We are told that sin
consists in disobedience to God’s commands, but we are also told that God is
omnipotent. If He is, nothing contrary to His will can occur; therefore when
the sinner disobeys His commands, He must have intended this to happen.
St Augustine boldly accepts this view, and asserts that men are led to sin by a
blindness with which God afflicts them. But most theologians, in modern
times, have felt that, if God causes men to sin, it is not fair to send them to
hell for what they cannot help. We are told that sin consists in acting contrary
to God’s will. This, however, does not get rid of the difficulty. Those who,
like Spinoza, take God’s omnipotence seriously, deduce that there can be no
such thing as sin. This leads to frightful results. What! said Spinoza’s con-
temporaries, was it not wicked of Nero to murder his mother? Was it not
wicked of Adam to eat the apple? Is one action just as good as another?
Spinoza wriggles, but does not find any satisfactory answer. If everything
happens in accordance with God’s will, God must have wanted Nero to
murder his mother; therefore, since God is good, the murder must have been
a good thing. From this argument there is no escape.
On the other hand, those who are in earnest in thinking that sin is dis-
obedience to God are compelled to say that God is not omnipotent, This gets

out of all the logical puzzles, and is the view adopted by a certain school of
liberal theologians. It has, however, its own difficulties. How are we to know
what really is God’s will? If the forces of evil have a certain share of power,
they may deceive us into accepting as Scripture what is really their work. This
was the view of the Gnostics, who thought that the Old Testament was the
work of an evil spirit.
As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon
authority, there is no end to our troubles. Whose authority? The Old
Testament? The New Testament? The Koran? In practice, people choose the
book considered sacred by the community in which they are born, and out
of that book they choose the parts they like, ignoring the others. At one
time, the most influential text in the Bible was: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch
to live.’ Nowadays, people pass over this text, in silence if possible; if
not, with an apology. And so, even when we have a sacred book, we still
choose as truth whatever suits our own prejudices. No Catholic, for instance,
takes seriously the text which says that a bishop should be the husband of
one wife.
People’s beliefs have various causes. One is that there is some evidence
for the belief in question. We apply this to matters of fact, such as ‘what is
so-and-so’s telephone number?’ or ‘who won the World Series?’ But as soon
as it comes to anything more debatable, the causes of belief become less
defensible. We believe, first and foremost, what makes us feel that we are fine
fellows. Mr Homo, if he has a good digestion and a sound income, thinks to
himself how much more sensible he is than his neighbour so-and-so, who
married a flighty wife and is always losing money. He thinks how superior
his city is to the one fifty miles away: it has a bigger Chamber of Commerce
and a more enterprising Rotary Club, and its mayor has never been in prison.
He thinks how immeasurably his country surpasses all others. If he is an
Englishman, he thinks of Shakespeare and Milton, or of Newton and Darwin,
or of Nelson and Wellington, according to his temperament. If he is a
Frenchman, he congratulates himself on the fact that for centuries France has
led the world in culture, fashions, and cookery. If he is a Russian, he reflects
that he belongs to the only nation which is truly international. If he is a
Yugoslav, he boasts of his nation’s pigs; if a native of the Principality of
Monaco, he boasts of leading the world in the matter of gambling.
But these are not the only matters on which he has to congratulate himself.
For is he not an individual of the species homo sapiens? Alone among animals he
has an immortal soul, and is rational; he knows the difference between good
and evil, and has learnt the multiplication table. Did not God make him in His
own image? And was not everything created for man’s convenience? The sun
was made to light the day, and the moon to light the night—though the
moon, by some oversight, only shines during half the nocturnal hours. The

raw fruits of the earth were made for human sustenance. Even the white tails
of rabbits, according to some theologians, have a purpose, namely to make it
easier for sportsmen to shoot them. There are, it is true, some inconveni-
ences: lions and tigers are too fierce, the summer is too hot, and the winter
too cold. But these things only began after Adam ate the apple; before that, all
animals were vegetarians, and the season was always spring. If only Adam had
been content with peaches and nectarines, grapes and pears and pineapples,
these blessings would still be ours.
Self-importance, individual or generic, is the source of most of our religious
beliefs. Even sin is a conception derived from self-importance. Borrow relates
how he met a Welsh preacher who was always melancholy. By sympathetic
questioning he was brought to confess the source of his sorrow: that at the
age of seven he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. ‘My dear
fellow,’ said Borrow, ‘don’t let that trouble you; I know dozens of people in
like case. Do not imagine yourself cut off from the rest of mankind by this
occurrence; if you inquire, you will find multitudes who suffer from the
same misfortune.’ From that moment, the man was cured. He had enjoyed
feeling singular, but there was no pleasure in being one of a herd of sinners.
Most sinners are rather less egotistical; but theologians undoubtedly enjoy
the feeling that Man is the special object of God’s wrath, as well as of His love.
After the Fall, so Milton assures us—
The Sun
Had first his precept so to move, so shine,
As might affect the Earth with cold and heat
Scarce tolerable, and from the North to call
Decrepit Winter, from the South to bring
Solstitial summer’s heat.
However disagreeable the results may have been, Adam could hardly help
feeling flattered that such vast astronomical phenomena should be brought
about to teach him a lesson. The whole of theology, in regard to hell no less
than to heaven, takes it for granted that Man is what is of most importance in
the universe of created beings. Since all theologians are men, this postulate
has met with little opposition.
Since evolution became fashionable, the glorification of Man has taken a
new form. We are told that evolution has been guided by one great Purpose:
through the millions of years when there were only slime, or trilobites,
throughout the ages of dinosaurs and giant ferns, of bees and wild flowers,
God was preparing the Great Climax. At last, in the fullness of time, He
produced Man, including such specimens as Nero and Caligula, Hitler and
Mussolini, whose transcendent glory justified the long painful process. For

my part, I find even eternal damnation less incredible, and certainly less
ridiculous, than this lame and impotent conclusion which we are asked to
admire as the supreme effort of Omnipotence. And if God is indeed omnipo-
tent, why could He not have produced the glorious result without such a
long and tedious prologue?
Apart from the question whether Man is really so glorious as the theo-
logians of evolution say he is, there is the further difficulty that life on this
planet is almost certainly temporary. The earth will grow cold, or the atmos-
phere will gradually fly off, or there will be an insufficiency of water, or, as
Sir James Jeans genially prophesies, the sun will burst and all the planets will
be turned into gas. Which of those will happen first, no one knows; but in
any case the human race will ultimately die out. Of course, such an event is of
little importance from the point of view of orthodox theology, since men are
immortal, and will continue to exist in heaven and hell when none are left on
earth. But in that case why bother about terrestrial developments? Those who
lay stress on the gradual progress from the primitive slime to Man attach an
importance to this mundane sphere which should make them shrink from
the conclusion that all life on earth is only a brief interlude between the
nebula and the eternal frost, or perhaps between one nebula and another. The
importance of Man, which is the one indispensable dogma of the theo-
logians, receives no support from a scientific view of the future of the solar
system.
There are many other sources of false belief besides self-importance. One
of these is love of the marvellous. I knew at one time a scientifically minded
conjurer, who used to perform his tricks before a small audience, and then
get them, each separately, to write down what they had seen happen. Almost
always they wrote down something much more astonishing than the reality,
and usually something which no conjurer could have achieved; yet they all
thought they were reporting truly what they had seen with their own eyes.
This sort of falsification is still more true of rumours. A tells B that last night
he saw Mr—, the eminent prohibitionist, slightly the worse for liquor; B tells
C that A saw the good man reeling drunk, C tells D that he was picked up
unconscious in the ditch, D tells E that he is well known to pass out every
evening. Here, it is true, another motive comes in, namely malice. We like to
think ill of our neighbours, and are prepared to believe the worst on very
little evidence. But even where there is no such motive, what is marvellous is
readily believed unless it goes against some strong prejudice. All history until
the eighteenth century is full of prodigies and wonders which modern his-
torians ignore, not because they are less well attested than facts which the
historians accept, but because modern taste among the learned prefers what
science regards as probable. Shakespeare relates how on the night before
Caesar was killed,

A common slave—you know him well by sight—
Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn
Like twenty torches join’d; and yet his hand,
Not sensible of fire, remain’d unscorch’d.
Besides—I have not since put up my sword—
Against the Capitol I met a lion,
Who glar’d upon me, and went surly by,
Without annoying me; and there were drawn
Upon a heap a hundred ghastly women,
Transformed with their fear, who swore they saw
Men all in fire walk up and down the streets.
Shakespeare did not invent these marvels; he found them in reputable histor-
ians, who are among those upon whom we depend for our knowledge
concerning Julius Caesar. This sort of thing always used to happen at the
death of a great man or the beginning of an important war. Even so recently
as 1914 the ‘angels of Mons’ encouraged the British troops. The evidence for
such events is very seldom first-hand, and modern historians refuse to accept
it—except, of course, where the event is one that has religious importance.
Every powerful emotion has its own myth-making tendency. When the
emotion is peculiar to an individual, he is considered more or less mad if he
gives credence to such myths as he has invented. But when an emotion is
collective, as in war, there is no one to correct the myths that naturally arise.
Consequently in all times of great collective excitement unfounded rumours
obtain wide credence. In September 1914 almost everybody in England
believed that Russian troops had passed through England on the way to the
Western Front. Everybody knew someone who had seen them, though no
one had seen them himself.
This myth-making faculty is often allied with cruelty. Ever since the
Middle Ages, the Jews have been accused of practising ritual murder. There is
not an iota of evidence for this accusation, and no sane person who has
examined it believes it. Nevertheless it persists. I have met White Russians
who were convinced of its truth, and among many Nazis it was accepted
without question. Such myths give an excuse for the infliction of torture, and
the unfounded belief in them is evidence of the unconscious desire to find
some victim to persecute.
There was, until the end of the eighteenth century, a theory that insanity is
due to possession by devils. It was inferred that any pain suffered by the
patient is also suffered by the devils, so that the best cure is to make the
patient suffer so much that the devils will decide to abandon him. The insane,
in accordance with this theory, were savagely beaten. This treatment was tried
on King George III when he was mad, but without success. It is a curious and

painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been
believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused
acute suffering to the patient. When anaesthetics were discovered pious
people considered them an attempt to evade the will of God. It was pointed
out, however, that when God extracted Adam’s rib He put him into a deep
sleep. This proved that anaesthetics are all right for men; women, however,
ought to suffer, because of the curse of Eve. In the West votes for women
proved this doctrine mistaken, but in Japan, to this day, women in childbirth
are not allowed any alleviation through anaesthetics. As the Japanese do not
believe in Genesis, this piece of sadism must have some other justification.
The fallacies about ‘race’ and ‘blood’, which have always been popular, and
which the Nazis embodied in their official creed, have no objective justifica-
tion; they are believed solely because they minister to self-esteem and to the
impulse towards cruelty. In one form or another, these beliefs are as old as
civilization; their forms change, but their essence remains. Herodotus tells
how Cyrus was brought up by peasants, in complete ignorance of his royal
blood; at the age of twelve, his kingly bearing towards other peasant boys
revealed the truth. This is a variant of an old story which is found in all
Indo-European countries. Even quite modern people say that ‘blood will tell’.
It is no use for scientific physiologists to assure the world that there is
no difference between the blood of a Negro and the blood of a white man.
The American Red Cross, in obedience to popular prejudice, at first, when
America became involved in the last war, decreed that no Negro blood should
be used for blood transfusion. As a result of an agitation, it was conceded
that Negro blood might be used, but only for Negro patients. Similarly, in
Germany, the Aryan soldier who needed blood transfusion was carefully
protected from the contamination of Jewish blood.
In the matter of race, there are different beliefs in different societies. Where
monarchy is firmly established, kings are of a higher race than their subjects.
Until very recently, it was universally believed that men are congenitally
more intelligent than women; even so enlightened a man as Spinoza decides
against votes for women on this ground. Among white men, it is held that
white men are by nature superior to men of other colours, and especially to
black men; in Japan, on the contrary, it is thought that yellow is the best
colour. In Haiti, when they make statues of Christ and Satan, they make Christ
black and Satan white. Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately
superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek
and the slave barbarian. The American legislators who made the immigration
laws consider the Nordics superior to Slavs or Latins or any other white
men. But the Nazis, under the stress of war, were led to the conclusion that
there are hardly any true Nordics outside Germany; the Norwegians, except
Quisling and his few followers, had been corrupted by intermixture with

Finns and Lapps and such. Thus politics are a clue to descent. The biologically
pure Nordic love Hitler, and if you did not love Hitler, that was proof of
tainted blood.
All this is, of course, pure nonsense, known to be such by everyone who
has studied the subject. In schools in America, children of the most diverse
origins are subjected to the same educational system, and those whose busi-
ness it is to measure intelligence quotients and otherwise estimate the native
ability of students are unable to make any such racial distinctions as are
postulated by the theorists of race. In every national or racial group there are
clever children and stupid children. It is not likely that, in the United States,
coloured children will develop as successfully as white children, because of
the stigma of social inferiority; but in so far as congenital ability can be
detached from environmental influence, there is no clear distinction among
different groups. The whole conception of superior races is merely a myth
generated by the overweening self-esteem of the holders of power. It may be
that, some day, better evidence will be forthcoming; perhaps, in time, educa-
tors will be able to prove (say) that Jews are on the average more intelligent
than Gentiles. But as yet no such evidence exists, and all talk of superior races
must be dismissed as nonsense.
There is a special absurdity in applying racial theories to the various popu-
lations of Europe. There is not in Europe any such thing as a pure race.
Russians have an admixture of Tartar blood, Germans are largely Slavonic,
France is a mixture of Celts, Germans, and people of Mediterranean race, Italy
the same with the addition of the descendants of slaves imported by the
Romans. The English are perhaps the most mixed of all. There is no evidence
that there is any advantage in belonging to a pure race. The purest races now
in existence are the Pygmies, the Hottentots, and the Australian aborigines;
the Tasmanians, who were probably even purer, are extinct. They were not the
bearers of a brilliant culture. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, emerged
from an amalgamation of northern barbarians and an indigenous population;
the Athenians and Ionians, who were the most civilized, were also the most
mixed. The supposed merits of racial purity are, it would seem, wholly
imaginary.
Superstitions about blood have many forms that have nothing to do with
race. The objection to homicide seems to have been, originally, based on the
ritual pollution caused by the blood of the victim. God said to Cain: ‘The
voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.’ According to
some anthropologists, the mark of Cain was a disguise to prevent Abel’s
blood from finding him; this appears also to be the original reason for
wearing mourning. In many ancient communities no difference was made
between murder and accidental homicide; in either case equally ritual ablu-
tion was necessary. The feeling that blood defiles still lingers, for example in

the Churching of Women and in taboos connected with menstruation. The
idea that a child is of his father’s ‘blood’ has the same superstitious origin. So
far as actual blood is concerned, the mother’s enters into the child, but not
the father’s. If blood were as important as is supposed, matriarchy would be
the only proper way of tracing descent.
In Russia, where, under the influence of Karl Marx, people since the revo-
lution have been classified by their economic origin, difficulties have arisen
not unlike those of German race theorists over the Scandinavian Nordics.
There were two theories that had to be reconciled: on the one hand, proletar-
ians were good and other people were bad; on the other hand, Communists
were good and other people were bad. The only way of effecting a reconcili-
ation was to alter the meaning of words. A ‘proletarian’ came to mean a
supporter of the government; Lenin, though born a noble, was reckoned a
member of the proletariat. On the other hand, the word ‘kulak’, which was
supposed to mean a rich peasant, came to mean any peasant who opposed
collectivization. This sort of absurdity always arises when one group of
human beings is supposed to be inherently better than another. In America,
the highest praise that can be bestowed on an eminent coloured man after he
is safely dead is to say ‘he was a white man’. A courageous woman is called
‘masculine’; Macbeth, praising his wife’s courage, says:
Bring forth men children only,

For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.
All these ways of speaking come of unwillingness to abandon foolish

generalizations.
In the economic sphere there are many widespread superstitions.
Why do people value gold and precious stones? Not simply because of
their rarity: there are a number of elements called ‘rare earths’ which are
much rarer than gold, but no one will give a penny for them except a few
men of science. There is a theory, for which there is much to be said, that
gold and gems were valued originally on account of their supposed magical
properties. The mistakes of governments in modern times seem to show that
this belief still exists among the sort of men who are called ‘practical’. At the
end of the 1914–18 war, it was agreed that Germany should pay vast sums to
England and France, and they in turn should pay vast sums to the United
States. Everyone wanted to be paid in money rather than goods; the ‘practical’
men failed to notice that there is not that amount of money in the world.
They also failed to notice that money is no use unless it is used to buy goods.
As they would not use it in this way, it did no good to anyone. There was
supposed to be some mystic virtue about gold that made it worth while to

dig it up in the Transvaal and put it underground again in bank vaults in
America. In the end, of course, the debtor countries had no more money,
and, since they were not allowed to pay in goods, they went bankrupt. The
great depression was the direct result of the surviving belief in the magical
properties of gold. This superstition now seems dead, but no doubt others
will replace it.
Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of
truth.
One of the most widespread popular maxims is, ‘human nature cannot be
changed’. No one can say whether this is true or not without first defining
‘human nature’. But as used it is certainly false. When Mr A utters the maxim,
with an air of portentous and conclusive wisdom, what he means is that all
men everywhere will always continue to behave as they do in his own home
town. A little anthropology will dispel this belief. Among the Tibetans, one
wife has many husbands, because men are too poor to support a whole wife;
yet family life, according to travellers, is no more unhappy than elsewhere.
The practice of lending one’s wife to a guest is very common among uncivil-
ized tribes. The Australian aborigines, at puberty, undergo a very painful
operation which, throughout the rest of their lives, greatly diminishes sexual
potency. Infanticide, which might seem contrary to human nature, was
almost universal before the rise of Christianity, and is recommended by Plato
to prevent over-population. Private property is not recognized among some
savage tribes. Even among highly civilized people, economic considerations
will override what is called ‘human nature’. In Moscow, where there is an
acute housing shortage, when an unmarried woman is pregnant, it often
happens that a number of men contend for the legal right to be considered
the father of the prospective child, because whoever is judged to be the father
acquires the right to share the woman’s room, and half a room is better than
no roof.
In fact, adult ‘human nature’ is extremely variable, according to the cir-
cumstances of education. Food and sex are very general requirements, but the
hermits of the Thebaid eschewed sex altogether and reduced food to the
lowest point compatible with survival. By diet and training, people can be
made ferocious or meek, masterful or slavish, as may suit the educator. There
is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority
by adequate governmental action. Plato intended his Republic to be founded
on a myth which he admitted to be absurd, but he was rightly confident that
the populace could be induced to believe it. Hobbes, who thought it import-
ant that people should reverence the government, however unworthy it
might be, meets the argument that it might be difficult to obtain general
assent to anything so irrational by pointing out that people have been
brought to believe in the Christian religion, and, in particular, in the dogma

of transubstantiation. If he had been alive in 1940, he would have found
ample confirmation of his contention in the devotion of German youth to the
Nazis.
The power of governments over men’s beliefs has been very great ever since
the rise of large States. The great majority of Romans became Christian after
the Roman Emperors had been converted. In the parts of the Roman Empire
that were conquered by the Arabs, most people abandoned Christianity for
Islam. The division of Western Europe into Protestant and Catholic regions
was determined by the attitude of governments in the sixteenth century. But
the power of governments over belief in the present day is vastly greater than
at any earlier time. A belief, however untrue, is important when it dominates
the actions of large masses of men. In this sense, the beliefs inculcated before
the last war by the Japanese, Russian, and German governments were import-
ant. Since they were completely divergent, they could not all be true, though
they could well all be false. Unfortunately, they were such as to inspire men
with an ardent desire to kill one another, even to the point of almost com-
pletely inhibiting the impulse of self-preservation. No one can deny, in face
of the evidence, that it is easy, given military power, to produce a population
of fanatical lunatics. It would be equally easy to produce a population of sane
and reasonable people, but many governments do not wish to do so, since
such people would fail to admire the politicians who are at the head of these
governments.
There is one peculiarly pernicious application of the doctrine that human
nature cannot be changed. This is the dogmatic assertion that there will
always be wars, because we are so constituted that we feel a need of them.
What is true is that a man who has had the kind of diet and education that
most men have will wish to fight when provoked. But he will not actually
fight unless he has a chance of victory. It is very annoying to be stopped by a
policeman, but we do not fight him because we know that he has the over-
whelming forces of the State at his back. People who have no occasion for
war do not make any impression of being psychologically thwarted. Sweden
has had no war since 1814, but the Swedes are one of the happiest and most
contented nations in the world. The only cloud upon their national happiness
is fear of being involved in the next war. If political organization were such as
to make war obviously unprofitable, there is nothing in human nature that
would compel its occurrence, or make average people unhappy because of its
not occurring. Exactly the same arguments that are now used about the
impossibility of preventing war were formerly used in defence of duelling,
yet few of us feel thwarted because we are not allowed to fight duels.
I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit to the absurdities that can,
by government action, come to be generally believed. Give me an adequate
army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the

lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within thirty years, to make the
majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water
freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense
that might seem to serve the interest of the State. Of course, even when these
beliefs had been generated, people would not put the kettle in the refriger-
ator when they wanted it to boil. That cold makes water boil would be a
Sunday truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to
be acted on in daily life. What would happen would be that any verbal denial
of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and obstinate heretics would be
‘frozen’ at the stake. No person who did not enthusiastically accept the
official doctrine would be allowed to teach or to have any position of power.
Only the very highest officials, in their cups, would whisper to each other
what rubbish it all is; then they would laugh and drink again. This is hardly a
caricature of what happens under some modern governments.
The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that gov-
ernments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the
causes of our misfortunes. There is as much difference between a collection
of mentally free citizens and a community moulded by modern methods of
propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship.
Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to
read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By
instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm.
If all governments taught the same nonsense, the harm would not be so great.
Unfortunately each has its own brand, and the diversity serves to produce
hostility between the devotees of different creeds. If there is ever to be peace
in the world, governments will have to agree either to inculcate no dogmas,
or all to inculcate the same. The former, I fear, is a Utopian ideal, but perhaps
they could agree to teach collectively that all public men, everywhere, are
completely virtuous and perfectly wise. Perhaps, after the next war, the sur-
viving politicians may find it prudent to combine on some such programme.
But if conformity has its dangers, so has nonconformity.
Some ‘advanced thinkers’ are of opinion that any one who differs from the
conventional opinion must be in the right. This is a delusion; if it were not,
truth would be easier to come by than it is. There are infinite possibilities of
error, and more cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable
truths. I met once an electrical engineer whose first words to me were: ‘How
do you do. There are two methods of faith-healing, the one practised by
Christ and the one practised by most Christian Scientists. I practise the
method practised by Christ.’ Shortly afterwards, he was sent to prison for
making out fraudulent balance-sheets. The law does not look kindly on the
intrusion of faith into this region. I knew also an eminent lunacy doctor who
took to philosophy, and taught a new logic which, as he frankly confessed, he

had learnt from his lunatics. When he died he left a will founding a profes-
sorship for the teaching of his new scientific methods, but unfortunately he
left no assets. Arithmetic proved recalcitrant to lunatic logic. On one occasion
a man came to ask me to recommend some of my books, as he was interested
in philosophy. I did so, but he returned next day saying that he had been
reading one of them, and had found only one statement he could understand,
and that one seemed to him false. I asked him what it was, and he said it
was the statement that Julius Caesar is dead. When I asked him why he did
not agree, he drew himself up and said: ‘Because I am Julius Caesar.’ These
examples may suffice to show that you cannot make sure of being right by
being eccentric.
Science, which has always had to fight its way against popular beliefs, now
has one of its most difficult battles in the sphere of psychology.
People who think they know all about human nature are always hopelessly
at sea when they have to do with any abnormality. Some boys never learn to
be what, in animals, is called ‘house-trained’. The sort of person who won’t
stand any nonsense deals with such cases by punishment; the boy is beaten,
and when he repeats the offence he is beaten worse. All medical men who
have studied the matter know that punishment only aggravates the trouble.
Sometimes the cause is physical, but usually it is psychological, and only
curable by removing some deepseated and probably unconscious grievance.
But most people enjoy punishing anyone who irritates them, and so the
medical view is rejected as fancy nonsense. The same sort of thing applies to
men who are exhibitionists; they are sent to prison over and over again, but
as soon as they come out they repeat the offence. A medical man who special-
ized in such ailments assured me that the exhibitionist can be cured by the
simple device of having trousers that button up the back instead of the front.
But this method is not tried because it does not satisfy people’s vindictive
impulses.
Broadly speaking, punishment is likely to prevent crimes that are sane in
origin, but not those that spring from some psychological abnormality.
This is now partially recognized; we distinguish between plain theft, which
springs from what may be called rational self-interest, and kleptomania,
which is a mark of something queer. And homicidal maniacs are not treated
like ordinary murderers. But sexual aberrations rouse so much disgust that it
is still impossible to have them treated medically rather than punitively.
Indignation, though on the whole a useful social force, becomes harmful
when it is directed against the victims of maladies that only medical skill
can cure.
The same sort of thing happens as regards whole nations. During the
1914–18 war, very naturally, people’s vindictive feelings were aroused against
the Germans, who were severely punished after their defeat. During the

Second World War it was argued that the Versailles Treaty was ridiculously
mild, since it failed to teach a lesson; this time, we were told, there must be
real severity. To my mind, we should have been more likely to prevent a
repetition of German aggression if we had regarded the rank and file of
the Nazis as we regard lunatics than by thinking of them as merely and
simply criminals. Lunatics, of course, have to be restrained. But lunatics are
restrained from prudence, not as a punishment, and so far as prudence per-
mits we try to make them happy. Everybody recognizes that a homicidal
maniac will only become more homicidal if he is made miserable. There
were, of course, many men among the Nazis who were plain criminals, but
there must also have been many who were more or less mad. If Germany is to
be successfully incorporated in Western Europe, there must be a complete
abandonment of all attempt to instil a feeling of special guilt. Those who are
being punished seldom learn to feel kindly towards the men who punish
them. And so long as the Germans hate the rest of mankind peace will be
precarious.
When one reads of the beliefs of savages, or of the ancient Babylonians and
Egyptians, they seem surprising by their capricious absurdity. But beliefs that
are just as absurd are still entertained by the uneducated even in the most
modern and civilized societies. I have been gravely assured, in America, that
people born in March are unlucky and people born in May are peculiarly
liable to corns. I do not know the history of these superstitions, but probably
they are derived from Babylonian or Egyptian priestly lore. Beliefs begin in
the higher social strata, and then, like mud in a river, sink gradually down-
wards in the educational scale; they may take 3,000 or 4,000 years to sink all
the way. In America you may find your coloured maid making some remark
that comes straight out of Plato—not the parts of Plato that scholars quote,
but the parts where he utters obvious nonsense, such as that men who do not
pursue wisdom in this life will be born again as women. Commentators on
great philosophers always politely ignore their silly remarks.
Aristotle, in spite of his reputation, is full of absurdities. He says that
children should be conceived in the winter, when the wind is in the north,
and that if people marry too young the children will be female. He tells us
that the blood of females is blacker than that of males; that the pig is the only
animal liable to measles; that an elephant suffering from insomnia should
have its shoulders rubbed with salt, olive-oil, and warm water; that women
have fewer teeth than men, and so on. Nevertheless, he is considered by the
great majority of philosophers a paragon of wisdom.
Superstitions about lucky and unlucky days are almost universal. In ancient
times they governed the actions of generals. Among ourselves the prejudice
against Friday and the number 13 is very active, sailors do not like to sail on a
Friday, and many hotels have no 13th floor. The superstitions about Friday

and 13 were once believed by those reputed wise; now such men regard
them as harmless follies. But probably 2,000 years hence many beliefs of the
wise of our day will have come to seem equally foolish. Man is a credulous
animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief,
he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Belief in ‘nature’ and what is ‘natural’ is a source of many errors. It used to
be, and to some extent still is, powerfully operative in medicine. The human
body, left to itself, has a certain power of curing itself; small cuts usually heal,
colds pass off, and even serious diseases sometimes disappear without med-
ical treatment. But aids to nature are very desirable, even in these cases. Cuts
may turn septic if not disinfected, colds may turn to pneumonia, and serious
diseases are only left without treatment by explorers and travellers in remote
regions, who have no option. Many practices which have come to seem
‘natural’ were originally ‘unnatural’, for instance clothing and washing.
Before men adopted clothing they must have found it impossible to live in
cold climates. Where there is not a modicum of cleanliness, populations
suffer from various diseases, such as typhus, from which Western nations
have become exempt. Vaccination was (and by some still is) objected to
as ‘unnatural’. But there is no consistency in such objections, for no one
supposes that a broken bone can be mended by ‘natural’ behaviour. Eating
cooked food is ‘unnatural’; so is heating our houses. The Chinese philosopher
Lao-tse, whose traditional date is about 600 b.c., objected to roads and
bridges and boats as ‘unnatural’, and in his disgust at such mechanistic
devices left China and went to live among the Western barbarians. Every
advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.
The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against ‘nature’. (For
some reason we are not allowed to say that celibacy is against nature; the only
reason I can think of is that it is not new.) Malthus saw only three ways
of keeping down the population: moral restraint, vice, and misery. Moral
restraint, he admitted, was not likely to be practised on a large scale.
‘Vice’, i.e. birth control, he, as a clergyman, viewed with abhorrence. There
remained misery. In his comfortable parsonage, he contemplated the misery
of the great majority of mankind with equanimity, and pointed out the
fallacies of the reformers who hoped to alleviate it. Modern theological
opponents of birth control are less honest. They pretend to think that God
will provide, however many mouths there may be to feed. They ignore the
fact that He has never done so hitherto, but has left mankind exposed to
periodical famines in which millions died of hunger. They must be deemed
to hold—if they are saying what they believe—that from this moment
onwards God will work a continual miracle of loaves and fishes which He
has hitherto thought unnecessary. Or perhaps they will say that suffering
here below is of no importance; what matters is the hereafter. By their own

theology, most of the children whom their opposition to birth control will
cause to exist will go to hell. We must suppose, therefore, that they oppose
the amelioration of life on earth because they think it a good thing that many
millions should suffer eternal torment. By comparison with them, Malthus
appears merciful.
Women, as the object of our strongest love and aversion, rouse complex
emotions which are embodied in proverbial ‘wisdom’.
Almost everybody allows himself or herself some entirely unjustifiable
generalization on the subject of Woman. Married men, when they generalize
on that subject, judge by their wives; women judge by themselves. It would
be amusing to write a history of men’s views on women. In antiquity, when
male supremacy was unquestioned and Christian ethics were still unknown,
women were harmless but rather silly, and a man who took them seriously
was somewhat despised. Plato thinks it a grave objection to the drama that the
playwright has to imitate women in creating his female roles. With the com-
ing of Christianity woman took on a new part, that of the temptress; but at
the same time she was also found capable of being a saint. In Victorian days
the saint was much more emphasized than the temptress; Victorian men
could not admit themselves susceptible to temptation. The superior virtue of
women was made a reason for keeping them out of politics, where, it was
held, a lofty virtue is impossible. But the early feminists turned the argument
round, and contended that the participation of women would ennoble polit-
ics. Since this has turned out to be an illusion, there has been less talk of
women’s superior virtue, but there are still a number of men who adhere to
the monkish view of woman as the temptress. Women themselves, for the
most part, think of themselves as the sensible sex, whose business it is to
undo the harm that comes of men’s impetuous follies. For my part I distrust
all generalizations about women, favourable and unfavourable, masculine and
feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of
experience.
The deeply irrational attitude of each sex towards women may be seen in
novels, particularly in bad novels. In bad novels by men, there is the woman
with whom the author is in love, who usually possesses every charm, but is
somewhat helpless, and requires male protection; sometimes, however, like
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, she is an object of exasperated hatred, and is thought
to be deeply and desperately wicked. In portraying the heroine, the male
author does not write from observation, but merely objectifies his own emo-
tions. In regard to his other female characters, he is more objective, and may
even depend upon his notebook; but when he is in love, his passion makes a
mist between him and the object of his devotion. Women novelists, also, have
two kinds of women in their books. One is themselves, glamorous and kind,
an object of lust to the wicked and of love to the good, sensitive, high-souled,

and constantly misjudged. The other kind is represented by all other women,
and is usually portrayed as petty, spiteful, cruel, and deceitful. It would seem
that to judge women without bias is not easy either for men or for women.
Generalizations about national characteristics are just as common and just
as unwarranted as generalizations about women. Until 1870, the Germans
were thought of as a nation of spectacled professors, evolving everything out
of their inner consciousness, and scarcely aware of the outer world, but since
1870 this conception has had to be very sharply revised. Frenchmen seem
to be thought of by most Americans as perpetually engaged in amorous
intrigue; Walt Whitman, in one of his catalogues, speaks of ‘the adulterous
French couple on the sly settee’. Americans who go to live in France are
astonished, and perhaps disappointed, by the intensity of family life. Before
the Russian Revolution, the Russians were credited with a mystical Slav soul,
which, while it incapacitated them for ordinary sensible behaviour, gave
them a kind of deep wisdom to which more practical nations could not hope
to attain. Suddenly everything was changed: mysticism was taboo, and only
the most earthly ideals were tolerated. The truth is that what appears to one
nation as the national character of another depends upon a few prominent
individuals, or upon the class that happens to have power. For this reason,
all generalizations on this subject are liable to be completely upset by any
important political change.
To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no
superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all
error, but from silly error.
If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation
yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women
have fewer teeth than men by the simple device of asking Mrs Aristotle to
keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought
he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to
which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles,
because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the
habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoy-
ing this unappetizing diet. Aristotle, however, was less cautious. Ancient and
medieval authors knew all about unicorns and salamanders; not one of them
thought it necessary to avoid dogmatic statements about them because he had
never seen one of them.
Many matters, however, are less easily brought to the test of experience. If,
like most of mankind, you have passionate convictions on many such matters,
there are ways in which you can make yourself aware of your own bias.
If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you
are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you
do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on

the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of
arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary convic-
tion. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there
is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in
arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is
only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference
of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that
your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.
A good way of ridding yourself of certain kinds of dogmatism is to become
aware of opinions held in social circles different from your own. When I was
young, I lived much outside my own country—in France, Germany, Italy,
and the United States. I found this very profitable in diminishing the intensity
of insular prejudice. If you cannot travel, seek out people with whom you
disagree, and read a newspaper belonging to a party that is not yours. If the
people and the newspaper seem mad, perverse, and wicked, remind yourself
that you seem so to them. In this opinion both parties may be right, but they
cannot both be wrong. This reflection should generate a certain caution.
Becoming aware of foreign customs, however, does not always have a
beneficial effect. In the seventeenth century, when the Manchus conquered
China, it was the custom among the Chinese for the women to have small
feet, and among the Manchus for the men to wear pigtails. Instead of each
dropping their own foolish custom, they each adopted the foolish custom of
the other, and the Chinese continued to wear pigtails until they shook off the
dominion of the Manchus in the revolution of 1911.
For those who have enough psychological imagination, it is a good plan
to imagine an argument with a person having a different bias. This has
one advantage, and only one, as compared with actual conversation with
opponents; this one advantage is that the method is not subject to the same
limitations of time and space. Mahatma Gandhi deplored railways and steam-
boats and machinery; he would have liked to undo the whole of the indus-
trial revolution. You may never have an opportunity of actually meeting
anyone who holds this opinion, because in Western countries most people
take the advantage of modern technique for granted. But if you want to make
sure that you are right in agreeing with the prevailing opinion, you will find
it a good plan to test the arguments that occur to you by considering what
Gandhi might have said in refutation of them. I have sometimes been led
actually to change my mind as a result of this kind of imaginary dialogue,
and, short of this, I have frequently found myself growing less dogmatic
and cocksure through realizing the possible reasonableness of a hypothetical
opponent.
Be very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem. Both men and
women, nine times out of ten, are firmly convinced of the superior excellence

of their own sex. There is abundant evidence on both sides. If you are a man,
you can point out that most poets and men of science are male; if you are a
woman, you can retort that so are most criminals. The question is inherently
insoluble, but self-esteem conceals this from most people. We are all, what-
ever part of the world we come from, persuaded that our own nation is
superior to all others. Seeing that each nation has its characteristic merits and
demerits, we adjust our standard of values so as to make out that the merits
possessed by our nation are the really important ones, while its demerits are
comparatively trivial. Here, again, the rational man will admit that the ques-
tion is one to which there is no demonstrably right answer. It is more difficult
to deal with the self-esteem of man as man, because we cannot argue out the
matter with some non-human mind. The only way I know of dealing with
this general human conceit is to remind ourselves that man is a brief episode
in the life of a small planet in a little corner of the universe, and that, for
aught we know, other parts of the cosmos may contain beings as superior to
ourselves as we are to jelly-fish.
Other passions besides self-esteem are common sources of error; of these
perhaps the most important is fear. Fear sometimes operates directly, by
inventing rumours of disaster in war-time, or by imagining objects of terror,
such as ghosts; sometimes it operates indirectly, by creating belief in some-
thing comforting, such as the elixir of life, or heaven for ourselves and hell
for our enemies. Fear has many forms—fear of death, fear of the dark, fear of
the unknown, fear of the herd, and that vague generalized fear that comes to
those who conceal from themselves their more specific terrors. Until you
have admitted your own fears to yourself, and have guarded yourself by a
difficult effort of will against their myth-making power, you cannot hope to
think truly about many matters of great importance, especially those with
which religious beliefs are concerned. Fear is the main source of superstition,
and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of
wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavour after a worthy manner
of life.
There are two ways of avoiding fear: one is by persuading ourselves that we
are immune from disaster, and the other is by the practice of sheer courage.
The latter is difficult, and to everybody becomes impossible at a certain point.
The former has therefore always been more popular. Primitive magic has the
purpose of securing safety, either by injuring enemies, or by protecting
oneself by talismans, spells, or incantations. Without any essential change,
belief in such ways of avoiding danger survived throughout the many centur-
ies of Babylonian civilization, spread from Babylon throughout the Empire
of Alexander, and was acquired by the Romans in the course of their absorp-
tion of Hellenistic culture. From the Romans it descended to medieval
Christendom and Islam. Science has now lessened the belief in magic, but

many people place more faith in mascots than they are willing to avow, and
sorcery, while condemned by the Church, is still officially a possible sin.
Magic, however, was a crude way of avoiding terrors, and, moreover, not a
very effective way, for wicked magicians might always prove stronger than
good ones. In the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dread of
witches and sorcerers led to the burning of hundreds of thousands convicted
of these crimes. But newer beliefs, particularly as to the future life, sought
more effective ways of combating fear. Socrates on the day of his death (if
Plato is to be believed) expressed the conviction that in the next world he
would live in the company of the gods and heroes, and surrounded by just
spirits who would never object to his endless argumentation. Plato, in his
Republic, laid it down that cheerful views of the next world must be enforced
by the State, not because they were true, but to make soldiers more willing to
die in battle. He would have none of the traditional myths about Hades,
because they represented the spirits of the dead as unhappy.
Orthodox Christianity, in the Ages of Faith, laid down very definite rules
for salvation. First, you must be baptized; then, you must avoid all theological
error; last, you must, before dying, repent of your sins and receive absolution.
All this would not save you from purgatory, but it would ensure your ultim-
ate arrival in heaven. It was not necessary to know theology. An eminent
cardinal stated authoritatively that the requirements of orthodoxy would be
satisfied if you murmured on your death-bed: ‘I believe all that the Church
believes; the Church believes all that I believe.’ These very definite directions
ought to have made Catholics sure of finding the way to heaven. Nevertheless,
the dread of hell persisted, and has caused, in recent times, a great softening
of the dogmas as to who will be damned. The doctrine, professed by many
modern Christians, that everybody will go to heaven, ought to do away with
the fear of death, but in fact this fear is too instinctive to be easily vanquished.
F. W. H. Myers, whom spiritualism had converted to belief in a future life,
questioned a woman who had lately lost her daughter as to what she sup-
posed had become of her soul. The mother replied: ‘Oh well, I suppose she is
enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn’t talk about such unpleasant
subjects.’ In spite of all that theology can do, heaven remains, to most people,
an ‘unpleasant subject’.
The most refined religions, such as those of Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza,
are still concerned with the conquest of fear. The Stoic doctrine was simple: it
maintained that the only true good is virtue, of which no enemy can deprive
me; consequently, there is no need to fear enemies. The difficulty was that no
one could really believe virtue to be the only good, not even Marcus Aurelius,
who, as Emperor, sought not only to make his subjects virtuous, but to
protect them against barbarians, pestilences, and famines. Spinoza taught a
somewhat similar doctrine. According to him, our true good consists in

indifference to our mundane fortunes. Both these men sought to escape from
fear by pretending that such things as physical suffering are not really evil.
This is a noble way of escaping from fear, but is still based upon false belief.
And if genuinely accepted, it would have the bad effect of making men
indifferent, not only to their own sufferings, but also to those of others.
Under the influence of great fear, almost everybody becomes superstitious.
The sailors who threw Jonah overboard imagined his presence to be the
cause of the storm which threatened to wreck their ship. In a similar spirit
the Japanese, at the time of the Tokyo earthquake, took to massacring
Koreans and Liberals. When the Romans won victories in the Punic wars, the
Carthaginians became persuaded that their misfortunes were due to a certain
laxity which had crept into the worship of Moloch. Moloch liked having
children sacrificed to him, and preferred them aristocratic; but the noble
families of Carthage had adopted the practice of surreptitiously substituting
plebeian children for their own offspring. This, it was thought, had displeased
the god, and at the worst moments even the most aristocratic children were
duly consumed in the fire. Strange to say, the Romans were victorious in spite
of this democratic reform on the part of their enemies.
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity
towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd. So it was in the
French Revolution, when dread of foreign armies produced the reign of
terror. The Soviet Government would have been less fierce if it had met with
less hostility in its first years. Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore
promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty. Neither a man
nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely
under the influence of a great fear. And for this reason poltroons are more
prone to cruelty than brave men, and are also more prone to superstition.
When I say this, I am thinking of men who are brave in all respects, not only
in facing death. Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will
not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is
asked to die is an unworthy one. Obloquy is, to most men, more painful than
death; that is one reason why, in times of collective excitement, so few men
venture to dissent from the prevailing opinion. No Carthaginian denied
Moloch, because to do so would have required more courage than was
required to face death in battle.
But we have been getting too solemn. Superstitions are not always dark and
cruel; often they add to the gaiety of life. I received once a communication
from the god Osiris, giving me his telephone number; he lived, at that time,
in a suburb of Boston. Although I did not enrol myself among his worship-
pers, his letter gave me pleasure. I have frequently received letters from men
announcing themselves as the Messiah, and urging me not to omit to men-
tion this important fact in my lectures. During prohibition in America, there

was a sect which maintained that the communion service ought to be
celebrated in whisky, not in wine; this tenet gave them a legal right to a
supply of hard liquor, and the sect grew rapidly. There is in England a sect
which maintains that the English are the lost ten tribes; there is a stricter sect,
which maintains that they are only the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh.
Whenever I encounter a member of either of these sects, I profess myself an
adherent of the other, and much pleasant argumentation results. I like also the
men who study the Great Pyramid, with a view to deciphering its mystical
lore. Many great books have been written on this subject, some of which have
been presented to me by their authors. It is a singular fact that the Great
Pyramid always predicts the history of the world accurately up to the date of
publication of the book in question, but after that date it becomes less reli-
able. Generally the author expects, very soon, wars in Egypt, followed by
Armageddon and the coming of Antichrist, but by this time so many people
have been recognized as Antichrist that the reader is reluctantly driven to
scepticism.
I admire especially a certain prophetess who lived beside a lake in northern
New York State about the year 1820. She announced to her numerous follow-
ers that she possessed the power of walking on water, and that she proposed
to do so at 11 o’clock on a certain morning. At the stated time, the faithful
assembled in their thousands beside the lake. She spoke to them saying: ‘Are
you all entirely persuaded that I can walk on water?’ With one voice they
replied: ‘We are.’ ‘In that case’, she announced, ‘there is no need for me to do
so.’ And they all went home much edified.
Perhaps the world would lose some of its interest and variety if such beliefs
were wholly replaced by cold science. Perhaps we may allow ourselves to be
glad of the Abecedarians, who were so called because, having rejected all
profane learning, they thought it wicked to learn the abc. And we may enjoy
the perplexity of the South American Jesuit who wondered how the sloth
could have travelled, since the Flood, all the way from Mount Ararat to
Peru—a journey which its extreme tardiness of locomotion rendered almost
incredible. A wise man will enjoy the goods of which there is a plentiful
supply, and of intellectual rubbish he will find an abundant diet, in our own
age as in every other.
(Haldeman-Julius Publications, Kansas, 1943, subsequently
reprinted in Unpopular Essays. London: Allen & Unwin;
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950.)

10
SENTENCES, SYNTAX, AND PARTS
OF SPEECH
Sentences may be interrogative, optative, exclamatory, or imperative; they

may also be indicative. Throughout most of the remainder of our discussions,
we may confine ourselves to indicative sentences, since these alone are true or
false. In addition to being true or false, indicative sentences have two other
properties which are of interest to us, and which they share with other
sentences. The first of these is that they are composed of words, and have a
meaning derivative from that of the words that they contain; the second is
that they have a certain kind of unity, in virtue of which they are capable of
properties not possessed by their constituent words.
Each of these three properties needs investigation. Let us begin with the
unity of a sentence.
A single grammatical sentence may not be logically single. ‘I went out and
found it was raining’ is logically indistinguishable from the two sentences:
‘I went out’, ‘I found it was raining’. But the sentence ‘when I went out I
found it was raining’ is logically single: it asserts that two occurrences were
simultaneous. ‘Caesar and Pompey were great generals’ is logically two sen-
tences, but ‘Caesar and Pompey were alike in being great generals’ is logically
one. For our purposes, it will be convenient to exclude sentences which are
not logically single, but consist of two assertions joined by ‘and’ or ‘but’ or
‘although’ or some such conjunction. A single sentence, for our purposes,
must be one which says something that cannot be said in two separate
simpler sentences.
Consider next such a sentence as ‘I should be sorry if you fell ill’. This
cannot be divided into ‘I shall be sorry’ and ‘you will fall ill’; it has the kind
of unity that we are demanding of a sentence. But it has a complexity which

sentences, syntax, and parts of speech 91
some sentences do not have; neglecting tense, it states a relation between
‘I am sorry’ and ‘you are ill’. We may interpret it as asserting that at any time
when the second of these sentences is true, the first is also true. Such sen-
tences may be called ‘molecular’ in relation to their constituent sentences,
which, in the same relation, may be called ‘atomic’. Whether any sentences
are ‘atomic’ in a non-relative sense, may, for the present, be left an open
question; but whenever we find a sentence to be molecular, we shall do well,
while we are considering what makes the unity of sentences, to transfer our
attention, in the first place, to its atoms. Roughly, an atomic sentence is one
containing only one verb; but this would only be accurate in a strictly logical
language.
This matter is by no means simple. Suppose I say first ‘A’ and then ‘B’; you
may judge: ‘the sound “A” preceded the sound “B” ’. But this implies ‘the
sound “A” occurred’ and ‘the sound “B” occurred’, and adds that one occur-
rence was earlier than the other. Your statement, therefore, is really analogous
to such a statement as ‘after I went out I got wet’. It is a molecular statement
whose atoms are ‘A occurred’ and ‘B occurred’. Now what do we mean by ‘A
occurred’? We mean that there was a noise of a certain class, the class called
‘A’. Thus when we say ‘A preceded B’ our statement has a concealed logical
form, which is the same as that of the statement: ‘first there was the bark of a
dog, and then the neigh of a horse’.
Let us pursue this a little further. I say ‘A’. Then I say ‘what did I say?’ Then
you reply ‘you said “A” ’. Now the noise you make when saying ‘A’ in this
reply is different from the noise I originally made; therefore, if ‘A’ were the
name of a particular noise, your statement would be false. It is only because
‘A’ is the name of a class of noises that your statement is true; your statement
classifies the noise I made, just as truly as if you had said ‘you barked like a
dog’. This shows how language forces us into generality even when we most
wish to avoid it. If we want to speak about the particular noise that I made, we
shall have to give it a proper name, say ‘Tom’; and the noise that you made
when you said ‘A’ we will call ‘Dick’. Then we can say ‘Tom and Dick are A’s’.
We can say ‘I said Tom’ but not ‘I said “Tom” ’. Strictly, we ought not to say
‘I said “A” ’; we ought to say ‘I said an “A” ’. All this illustrates a general
principle, that when we use a general term, such as ‘A’ or ‘man’, we are not
having in our minds a universal, but an instance to which the present
instance is similar. When we say ‘I said “A” ’, what we really mean is ‘I made
a noise closely similar to the noise I am now about to make: “A”.’ This,
however, is a digression.
We will revert to the supposition that I say first ‘A’ and then ‘B’. We will
call the particular occurrence which was my first utterance ‘Tom’ and that
which was my second utterance ‘Harry’. Then we can say ‘Tom preceded
Harry’. This was what we really meant to say when we said ‘the sound “A”

preceded the sound “B” ’; and now, at last, we seem to have reached an
atomic sentence which does not merely classify.
It might be objected that, when I say ‘Tom preceded Harry’, this implies
‘Tom occurred’ and ‘Harry occurred’, just as when I said ‘the sound “A”
preceded the sound “B” ’, that implied ‘ “A” occurred’ and ‘ “B” occurred’.
This, I think, would be a logical error. When I say that an unspecified member
of a class occurred, my statement is significant provided I know what class is
meant; but in the case of a true proper name, the name is meaningless unless
it names something, and if it names something, that something must occur.
This may seem reminiscent of the ontological argument, but it is really only
part of the definition of ‘name’. A proper name names something of which
there are not a plurality of instances, and names it by a convention ad hoc, not
by a description composed of words with previously assigned meanings.
Unless, therefore, the name names something, it is an empty noise, not a
word. And when we say ‘Tom preceded Harry’, where ‘Tom’ and ‘Harry’ are
names of particular noises, we do not presuppose ‘Tom occurred’ and ‘Harry
occurred’, which are both strictly meaningless.
In practice, proper names are not given to single brief occurrences,
because most of them are not sufficiently interesting. When we have occa-
sion to mention them, we do so by means of descriptions such as ‘the death
of Caesar’ or ‘the birth of Christ’. To speak for the moment in terms of
physics, we give proper names to certain continuous stretches of space-time,
such as Socrates, France, or the moon. In former days, it would have been
said that we give a proper name to a substance or collection of sub-
stances, but now we have to find a different phrase to express the object of
a proper name.
A proper name, in practice, always embraces many occurrences, but not as
a class-name does: the separate occurrences are parts of what the name means,
not instances of it. Consider, say, ‘Caesar died’. ‘Death’ is a generic word for a
number of occurrences having certain resemblances to each other, but not
necessarily any spatio-temporal interconnection; each of these is a death.
‘Caesar’, on the contrary, stands for a series of occurrences, collectively, not
severally. When we say ‘Caesar died’, we say that one of the series of occur-
rences which was Caesar was a member of the class of deaths; this occurrence
is called ‘Caesar’s death’.
From a logical point of view, a proper name may be assigned to any
continuous portion of space-time. (Macroscopic continuity suffices.) Two
parts of one man’s life may have different names; for instance, Abram and
Abraham, or Octavianus and Augustus. ‘The universe’ may be regarded as a
proper name for the whole of space-time. We can give a proper name to very
small portions of space-time, provided they are large enough to be noticed. If
I say ‘A’ once at 6 p.m. on a given date, we can give a proper name to this

noise, or, to be still more particular, to the auditory sensation that some one
person present has in hearing me. But even when we have arrived at this
degree of minuteness, we cannot say that we have named something destitute
of structure. It may therefore be assumed, at least for the present, that every
proper name is the name of a structure, not of something destitute of parts.
But this is an empirical fact, not a logical necessity.
If we are to avoid entanglement in questions that are not linguistic, we
must distinguish sentences, not by the complexity which they may happen to
have, but by that implied in their form. ‘Alexander preceded Caesar’ is com-
plex owing to the complexity of Alexander and Caesar; but ‘x preceded y’
does not, by its form, imply that x and y are complex. In fact, since Alexander
died before Caesar was born, every constituent of Alexander preceded every
constituent of Caesar. We may thus accept ‘x precedes y’ as an atomic form of
proposition, even if we cannot actually mention an x and a y which give an
atomic proposition. We shall say, then, that a form of proposition is atomic if
the fact that a proposition is of this form does not logically imply that it
is a structure composed of subordinate propositions. And we shall add that it
is not logically necessary that a proper name should name a structure which
has parts.
The above discussion is a necessary preliminary to the attempt to discover
what constitutes the essential unity of a sentence; for this unity, whatever its
nature may be, obviously exists in a sentence of atomic form, and should be
first investigated in such sentences.
In every significant sentence, some connection is essential between what
the several words mean—omitting words which merely serve to indicate
syntactical structure. We saw that ‘Caesar died’ asserts the existence of a
common member of two classes, the class of events which was Caesar and the
class of events which are deaths. This is only one of the relations that sen-
tences can assert; syntax shows, in each case, what relation is asserted. Some
cases are simpler than ‘Caesar died’, others are more complex. Suppose
I point to a daffodil and say ‘this is yellow’; here ‘this’ may be taken as the
proper name of a part of my present visual field, and ‘yellow’ may be taken as
a class-name. This proposition, so interpreted, is simpler than ‘Caesar died’,
since it classifies a given object; it is logically analogous to ‘this is a death’. We
have to be able to know such propositions before we can know that two
classes have a common member, which is what is asserted by ‘Caesar died’.
But ‘this is yellow’ is not so simple as it looks. When a child learns the
meaning of the word ‘yellow’, there is first an object (or rather a set of
objects) which is yellow by definition, and then a perception that other
objects are similar in colour. Thus when we say to a child ‘this is yellow’,
what (with luck) we convey to him is: ‘this resembles in colour the object
which is yellow by definition’. Thus classificatory propositions, or such as

assign predicates, would seem to be really propositions asserting similarity. If
so, the simplest propositions are relational.
There is, however, a difference between relations that are symmetrical and
those that are asymmetrical. A relation is symmetrical when, if it holds
between x and y, it also holds between y and x; it is asymmetrical if, when it
holds between x and y, it cannot hold between y and x. Thus similarity is
symmetrical, and so is dissimilarity; but ‘before’, ‘greater’, ‘to the right of’,
and so on, are asymmetrical. There are also relations which are neither sym-
metrical nor asymmetrical; ‘brother’ is an example, since, if x is the brother
of y, y may be the sister of x. These and asymmetrical relations are called non-
symmetrical. Non-symmetrical relations are of the utmost importance, and
many famous philosophies are refuted by their existence.
Let us try to state what exactly are the linguistic facts about non-symmetrical
relations. The two sentences ‘Brutus killed Caesar’ and ‘Caesar killed Brutus’
consist of the same words, arranged, in each case, by the relation of temporal
sequence. Nevertheless, one of them is true and the other false. The use
of order for this purpose is, of course, not essential; Latin uses inflexions
instead. But if you had been a Roman schoolmaster teaching the difference
between nominative and accusative, you would have been compelled, at
some point, to bring in non-symmetrical relations, and you would have
found it natural to explain them by means of spatial or temporal order.
Consider for a moment what happened when Brutus killed Caesar: a dagger
moved swiftly from Brutus into Caesar. The abstract scheme is ‘A moved
from B to C’, and the fact with which we are concerned is that this is different
from ‘A moved from C to B’. There were two events, one A-being-at-B, the
other A-being-at-C, which we will name x and y respectively. If A moved
from B to C, x preceded y; if A moved from C to B, y preceded x. Thus the
ultimate source of the difference between ‘Brutus killed Caesar’ and ‘Caesar
killed Brutus’ is the difference between ‘x precedes y’ and ‘y precedes x’,
where x and y are events. Similarly in the visual field there are the spa-
tial relations above-and-below, right-and-left, which have the same pro-
perty of asymmetry. ‘Brighter’, ‘louder’, and comparatives generally, are also
asymmetrical.
The unity of the sentence is peculiarly obvious in the case of asymmetrical
relations: ‘x precedes y’ and ‘y precedes x’ consist of the same words, arranged
by the same relation of temporal succession; there is nothing whatever in
their ingredients to distinguish the one from the other. The sentences differ
as wholes, but not in their parts; it is this that I mean when I speak of a
sentence as a unity.
At this point, if confusions are to be avoided, it is important to remember
that words are universals.1 In the two sentential utterances ‘x precedes y’ and
‘y precedes x’, the two symbols ‘x’ are not identical, no more are the two

symbols ‘y’. Let S1 and S2 be proper names of these two sentential utterances;
let X1 and X2 be proper names of the two utterances of ‘x’, Y1 and Y2 of those
of ‘y’, and P1 and P2 of those of ‘precedes’. Then S1 consists of the three
utterances X1, P1, Y1 in that order, and S2 consists of the three utterances Y2, P2,
X2 in that order. The order in each case is a fact of history, as definite and
unalterable as the fact that Alexander preceded Caesar. When we observe that
the order of words can be changed, and that we can say ‘Caesar killed Brutus’
just as easily as ‘Brutus killed Caesar’, we are apt to think that the words are
definite things which are capable of different arrangements. This is a mistake:
the words are abstractions, and the verbal utterances can only have whichever
order they do have. Though their life is short, they live and die, and they are
incapable of resurrection. Everything has the arrangement it has, and is
incapable of rearrangement.
I do not wish to be thought needlessly pedantic, and I will therefore point
out that clarity on this matter is necessary for the understanding of possibility.
We say it is possible to say either ‘Brutus killed Caesar’ or ‘Caesar killed Brutus’,
and we do not realize that this is precisely analogous to the fact that it is
possible for a man to be to the left of a woman on one occasion, and for
another man to be to the right of another woman on another occasion. For:
let β be the class of verbal utterances which is the spoken word ‘Brutus’; let κ
be the class of verbal utterances which is the spoken word ‘killed’; and let γ
be the class of verbal utterances which is the spoken word ‘Caesar’. Then to
say that we can say either ‘Brutus killed Caesar’ or ‘Caesar killed Brutus’ is to
say that (1) there are occurrences x, P, y, such that x is a member of β, P is a
member of κ, y is a member of γ, x is just before P and P is just before y; (2)
there are occurrences x′, P′, y′ fulfilling the above conditions as to member-
ship of β, κ, γ but such that y′ is just before P′ and P′ just before x′. I maintain
that in all cases of possibility, there is a subject which is a variable, defined as
satisfying some condition which many values of the variable satisfy, and that
of these values some satisfy a further condition while others do not; we then
say it is ‘possible’ that the subject may satisfy this further condition. Symbol-
ically, if ‘x and ψx’ and ‘x and not ‘ψx’ are each true for suitable values of x,
then, given x, ψx is possible but not necessary. (One must distinguish
empirical and logical necessity; but I do not wish to go into this question.)
Another point is to be noted. When we say that the sentences ‘x P y’ and ‘y
P x’ (where P is an asymmetrical relation) are incompatible, the symbols ‘x’
and ‘y’ are universals, since, in our statement, there are two instances of each;
but they must be names of particulars. ‘Day precedes night’ and ‘night pre-
cedes day’ are both true. There is thus, in such cases, an absence of logical
homogeneity between the symbol and its meaning: the symbol is a universal
while the meaning is particular. This kind of logical heterogeneity is very
liable to lead to confusions. All symbols are of the same logical type: they are

classes of similar utterances, or similar noises, or similar shapes, but their
meanings may be of any type, or of ambiguous type, like the meaning of the
word ‘type’ itself. The relation of a symbol to its meaning necessarily varies
according to the type of the meaning, and this fact is important in the theory
of symbolism.
Having now dealt with the possible confusions that may arise through
saying that the same word can occur in two different sentences, we can
henceforth freely use this expression, just as we can say ‘the giraffe is to be
found in Africa and in the Zoo’, without being misled into the belief that this
is true of any particular giraffe.
In a language like English, in which the order of the words is essential to
the meaning of the sentence, we can put the matter of non-symmetrical
relations as follows: given a set of words which is capable of forming a
sentence, it often happens that it is capable of forming two or more sentences
of which one is true while the others are false, these sentences differing as to
the order of the words. Thus the meaning of a sentence, at any rate in some
cases, is determined by the series of words, not by the class. In such cases, the
meaning of the sentence is not obtainable as an aggregate of the meanings of
the several words. When a person knows who Brutus was, who Caesar was,
and what killing is, he still does not know who killed whom when he hears
the sentence ‘Brutus killed Caesar’; to know this, he requires syntax as well as
vocabulary, since the form of the sentence as a whole contributes to the
meaning.2
To avoid unnecessary lengthiness, let us assume, for the moment, that there
is only spoken speech. Then all words have a time order, and some words assert
a time order. We know that, if ‘x’ and ‘y’ are names of particular events, then
if ‘x precedes y’ is a true sentence, ‘y precedes x’ is a false sentence. My present
problem is this: can we state anything equivalent to the above in terms which
are not concerned with language, but with events? It would seem that we are
concerned with a characteristic of temporal relations, and yet, when we try to
state what this characteristic is, we appear to be driven to stating a character-
istic of sentences about temporal relations. And what applies to temporal
relations applies equally to all other asymmetrical relations.
When I hear the sentence ‘Brutus killed Caesar’, I perceive the time-order
of the words; if I did not, I could not know that I had heard that sentence
and not ‘Caesar killed Brutus’. If I proceed to assert the time-order by the
sentences ‘ “Brutus” preceded “killed” ’ and ‘ “killed” preceded “Caesar” ’, I
must again be aware of the time-order of the words in these sentences. We
must, therefore, be aware of the time-order of events in cases in which we do
not assert that they have that time-order, for otherwise we should fall into an
endless regress. What is it that we are aware of in such a case?
The following is a theory which might be suggested: when we hear the

word ‘Brutus’, there is an experience analogous to that of the gradually
fading tone of a bell; if the word was heard a moment ago, there is still now
an akoluthic sensation, analogous to that of a moment ago, but fainter. Thus
when we have just finished hearing the sentence ‘Brutus killed Caesar’, we are
still having an auditory sensation which might be represented by
Brutus killed CAESAR;
whereas when we have just finished hearing ‘Caesar killed Brutus’, our
sensation may be represented by
Caesar killed BRUTUS.
These are different sensations, and it is this difference—so it may be

contended—that enables us to recognize order in time. According to this
theory, when we distinguish between ‘Brutus killed Caesar’ and ‘Caesar
killed Brutus’, we are distinguishing, not between two wholes composed of
exactly similar parts which are successive, but between two wholes com-
posed of somewhat dissimilar parts which are simultaneous. Each of these
wholes is characterized by its constituents, and does not need the further
mention of an arrangement.
In this theory there is, no doubt, an element of truth. It seems clear, as a
matter of psychology, that there are occurrences, which may be classed as
sensations, in which a present sound is combined with the fading ghost of a
sound heard a moment ago. But if there were no more than this, we should
not know that past events have occurred. Assuming that there are akoluthic
sensations, how do we know their likeness to and difference from sensations
in their first vigour? If we only knew present occurrences which are in fact
related to past occurrences, we should never know of this relationship. Clearly
we do sometimes, in some sense, know the past, not by inference from the
present, but in the same direct way in which we know the present. For if this
were not the case, nothing in the present could lead us to suppose that there
was a past, or even to understand the supposition.
Let us revert to the proposition: ‘if x precedes y, y does not precede x’. It
seems clear that we do not know this empirically, but it does not seem to be a
proposition of logic.3 Yet I do not see how we can say that it is a linguistic
convention. The proposition ‘x precedes y’ can be asserted on the basis of
experience. We are saying that, if this experience occurs, no experience
will occur such as would lead to ‘y precedes x’. It is obvious that, however we
re-state the matter, there must always be a negation somewhere in our state-
ment; and I think it is also fairly obvious that negation brings us into the
realm of language. When we say ‘y does not precede x’, it might seem that we

can only mean: ‘the sentence “y precedes x” is false’. For if we adopt any
other interpretation, we shall have to admit that we can perceive negative
facts, which seems preposterous, but perhaps is not, for reasons to be given
later. I think something similar may be said about ‘if’: where this word
occurs, it must apply to a sentence. Thus it seems that the proposition we are
investigating should be stated: ‘at least one of the sentences “x precedes y”
and “y precedes x” is false, if x and y are proper names of events’. To carry the
matter further demands a definition of falsehood. We will therefore postpone
this question until we have reached the discussion of truth and falsehood.
Parts of speech, as they appear in grammar, have no very intimate relation
to logical syntax. ‘Before’ is a preposition and ‘precedes’ is a verb, but they
mean the same thing. The verb, which might seem essential to a sentence,
may be absent in many languages, and even in English in such a phrase as
‘more haste, less speed’. It is possible, however, to compose a logical language
with a logical syntax, and to find, when it has been constructed, certain
suggestions in ordinary language which lead up to it.
The most complete part of logic is the theory of conjunctions. These, as
they occur in logic, come only between whole sentences; they give rise to
molecular sentences, of which the atoms are separated by the conjunctions.
This part of the subject is so fully worked out that we need waste no time on
it. Moreover, all the earlier problems with which we are concerned arise in
regard to sentences of atomic form.
Let us consider a few sentences: (1) this is yellow; (2) this is before that;
(3) A gives a book to B.
(1) In ‘this is yellow’, the word ‘this’ is a proper name. It is true that, on
other occasions, other objects are called ‘this’, but that is equally true of
‘John’: when we say ‘here’s John’, we do not mean ‘here is some member of
the class of people called “John” ’; we regard the name as belonging to only
one person. Exactly the same is true of ‘this’. The word ‘men’ is applicable to
all the objects called severally ‘a man’, but the word ‘these’ is not applicable
to all the objects severally called ‘this’ on different occasions.
The word ‘yellow’ is more difficult. It seems to mean, as suggested above,
‘similar in colour to a certain object’, this object being yellow by definition.
Strictly, of course, since there are many shades of yellow, we need many
objects which are yellow by definition: but one may ignore this complica-
tion. But since we can distinguish similarity in colour from similarity in
other respects (e.g. shape), we do not avoid the necessity of a certain deg-
ree of abstraction in arriving at what is meant by ‘yellow’.4 We cannot see
colour without shape, or shape without colour; but we can perceive the
difference between the similarity of a yellow circle to a yellow triangle and
the similarity of a yellow circle to a red circle. It would seem, therefore, that
sensible predicates, such as ‘yellow’, ‘red’, ‘loud’, ‘hard’, are derived from

the perception of kinds of similarity. This applies also to very general predi-
cates such as ‘visual’, ‘audible’, ‘tactile’. Thus to come back to ‘this is yellow’,
the meaning seems to be ‘this has colour-similarity to that’, where ‘this’
and ‘that’ are proper names, the object called ‘that’ is yellow by definition,
and colour-similarity is a dual relation which can be perceived. It will be
observed that colour-similarity is a symmetrical relation. That is the reason
which makes it possible to treat ‘yellow’ as a predicate, and to ignore com-
parison. Perhaps, indeed, what has been said about the comparison applies
only to the learning of the word ‘yellow’; it may be that, when learnt, it is truly
a predicate.5
(2) ‘This is before that’ has already been discussed. Since the relation
‘before’ is asymmetrical, we cannot regard the proposition as assigning a
common predicate to this and that. And if we regard it as assigning different
predicates (e.g. dates) to this and that, these predicates themselves will have
to have an asymmetrical relation corresponding to ‘before’. We may, for-
mally, treat the proposition as meaning ‘the date of this is earlier than the
date of that’, but ‘earlier’ is an asymmetrical relation just as ‘before’ was. It
is not easy to find a logical method of manufacturing asymmetry out of
symmetrical data.6
The word ‘before’, like the word ‘yellow’, may be derived from com-
parison. We may start from some very emphatic case of sequence, such as a
clock striking twelve, and, by taking other cases of sequence which have no
other obvious resemblance to the striking clock, gradually lead to a concen-
tration of attention on sequence. It seems clear, however—whatever may be
the case in regard to ‘yellow’—that in regard to ‘before’ this only applies to
the learning of the word. The meaning of such words as ‘before’ or ‘colour-
similarity’ cannot always be derived from comparison, since this would lead
to an endless regress. Comparison is a necessary stimulus to abstraction, but
abstraction must be possible, at least as regards similarity. And if possible in
regard to similarity, it seems pointless to deny it elsewhere.
To say that we understand the word ‘before’ is to say that, when we
perceive two events A and B in a time-sequence, we know whether to say ‘A is
before B’ or ‘B is before A’, and concerning one of these we know that it
describes what we perceive.
(3) ‘A gives a book to B.’ This means: ‘there is an x such that A gives x to B
and x is bookish’—using ‘bookish’, for the moment, to mean the defining
quality of books. Let us concentrate on ‘A gives C to B’, where A, B, C are
proper names. (The questions raised by ‘there is an x such that’ we will
consider presently.) I want to consider what sort of occurrence gives us
evidence of the truth of this statement. If we are to know its truth, not by
hearsay, but by the evidence of our own senses, we must see A and B, and see
A holding C, moving C towards B, and finally giving C into B’s hands. (I am

assuming that C is some small object such as a book, not an estate or a
copyright or anything else of which possession is a complicated legal abstrac-
tion.) This is logically analogous to ‘Brutus killed Caesar with a dagger’.
What is essential is that A, B and C should all be sensibly present throughout a
finite period of time, during which the spatial relations of C to A and B
change. Schematically, the geometrical minimum is as follows: first we see
three shapes A1, B1, C1, of which C1 is close to A1; then we see three very
similar shapes A2, B2, C2, of which C2 is close to B2. (I am omitting a number
of niceties.) Neither of these two facts alone is sufficient; it is their occurrence
in quick succession that is asserted. Even this is not really sufficient: we have
to believe that A1 and A2, B1 and B2, C1 and C2 are respectively appearances of
the same material objects, however these may be defined. I will ignore the
fact that ‘giving’ involves intention; but even so the complications are alarm-
ing. At first sight, it would seem that the minimum assertion involved must be
something like this: ‘A1, B1, C1 are appearances of three material objects at
one time; A2, B2, C2 are appearances of the “same” objects at a slightly later
time; C1 touches A1 but not B1; C2 touches B2 but not A2.’ I do not go into the
evidence required to show that two appearances at different times are appear-
ances of the ‘same’ object; this is ultimately a question for physics, but in
practice and the law-courts grosser methods are tolerated. The important
point, for us, is that we have apparently been led to an atomic form involving
six terms, namely: ‘the proximity of C1 to A1 and its comparative remoteness
from B1 is an occurrence slightly anterior to the proximity of C2 to B2 and its
comparative remoteness from A2’. We are tempted to conclude that we can-
not avoid an atomic form of this degree of complexity if we are to have
sensible evidence of such a matter as one person handing an object to another
person.
But perhaps this is a mistake. Consider the propositions: C1 is near A1, C1 is
far from B1, A1 is simultaneous with B1, B1 is simultaneous with C1, A1 is
slightly anterior to A2, A2 is simultaneous with B2, B2 is simultaneous with C2,
C2 is near B2, C2 is far from A2. This set of nine propositions is logically
equivalent to the one proposition involving A1, B1, C1, A2, B2, C2. The one
proposition, therefore, can be an inference, not a datum. There is still a
difficulty: ‘near’ and ‘far’ are relative terms; in astronomy, Venus is near the
earth, but not from the point of view of a person handing something to
another person. We can, however, avoid this. We can substitute ‘C1 touches
A1’ for ‘C1 is near A1’, and ‘something is between C1 and B1’ for ‘C1 is far from
B1’. Here ‘touching’ and ‘between’ are to be visual data. Thus the three-term
relation ‘between’ seems the most complex datum required.
The importance of atomic forms and their contradictories is that—as we
shall see—all propositions, or at least all non-psychological propositions
justified by observation without inference are of these forms. That is to say, if

due care is taken, all the sentences which embody empirical physical data will
assert or deny propositions of atomic form. All other physical sentences can
theoretically be either proved or disproved (as the case may be), or rendered
probable or improbable, by sentences of these forms; and we ought not to
include as a datum anything capable of logical proof or disproof by means of
other data. But this is merely by way of anticipation.
In a sentence of atomic form, expressed in a strictly logical language, there
are a finite number of proper names (any finite number from one upwards),
and there is one word which is not a proper name. Examples are: ‘x is yellow’,
‘x is earlier than y’, ‘x is between y and z’, and so on. We can distinguish
proper names from other words by the fact that a proper name can occur in
every form of atomic sentence, whereas a word which is not a proper name
can only occur in an atomic sentence which has the appropriate number
of proper names. Thus ‘yellow’ demands one proper name, ‘earlier’ demands
two, and ‘between’ demands three. Such terms are called predicates, dyadic
relations, triadic relations, etc. Sometimes, for the sake of uniformity,
predicates are called monadic relations.
I come now to the parts of speech, other than conjunctions, that cannot
occur in atomic forms. Such are ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘many’, ‘none’. To
these, I think, ‘not’ should be added; but this is analogous to conjunctions.
Let us start with ‘a’. Suppose you say (truly) ‘I saw a man’. It is obvious that ‘a
man’ is not the sort of thing one can see; it is a logical abstraction. What you
saw was some particular shape, to which we will give the proper name A; and
you judged ‘A is human’. The two sentences ‘I saw A’ and ‘A is human’
enable you to deduce ‘I saw a man’, but this latter sentence does not imply
that you saw A, or that A is human. When you tell me that you saw a man,
I cannot tell whether you saw A or B or C or any other of the men that exist.
What is known is the truth of some proposition of the form:
‘I saw x and x is human.’
This form is not atomic, being compounded of ‘I saw x’ and ‘x is human’. It

can be deduced from ‘I saw A and A is human’; thus it can be proved by
empirical data, although it is not the sort of sentence that expresses a per-
ceptual datum, since such a sentence would have to mention A or B or C or
whoever it was that you saw. Per contra, no perceptual data can disprove the
sentence ‘I saw a man’.
Propositions containing ‘all’ or ‘none’ can be disproved by empirical data,
but not proved except in logic and mathematics. We can prove ‘all primes
except 2 are odd’, because this follows from definitions; but we cannot prove
‘all men are mortal’, because we cannot prove that we have overlooked no
one. In fact, ‘all men are mortal’ is a statement about everything, not only

about all men; it states, concerning every x, that x is either mortal or not
human. Until we have examined everything, we cannot be sure but that
something unexamined is human but immortal. Since we cannot examine
everything, we cannot know general propositions empirically.
No proposition containing the (in the singular) can be strictly proved by
empirical evidence. We do not know that Scott was the author of Waverley; what
we know is that he was an author of Waverley. For aught we know, somebody in
Mars may have also written Waverley. To prove that Scott was the author, we
should have to survey the universe and find that everything in it either did not
write Waverley or was Scott. This is beyond our powers.
Empirical evidence can prove propositions containing ‘a’ or ‘some’, and
can disprove propositions containing ‘the’, ‘all’, or ‘none’. It cannot disprove
propositions containing ‘a’ or ‘some’, and cannot prove propositions con-
taining ‘the’, ‘all’, or ‘none’. If empirical evidence is to lead us to disbelieve
propositions about ‘some’ or to believe propositions about ‘all’, it must be in
virtue of some principle of inference other than strict deduction—unless,
indeed, there should be propositions containing the word ‘all’ among our
basic propositions.
(An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, London: Allen & Unwin;
New York: W. W. Norton, 1940.)
NOTES
1 This does not imply that there are universals. It only asserts that the status of a word, as
opposed to its instances, is the same as that of Dog as opposed to various particular
dogs.
2 Sometimes there is ambiguity: cf. ‘The muse herself that Orpheus bore’.
3 To decide this question, we need a discussion of proper names, to which we shall come
later.
4 But consider Carnap’s Logischer Aufbau; yellow = (by definition) a group all similar to
this and each other, and not all similar to anything outside the group.
5 This question has no substance. The object is to construct a minimum vocabulary, and
in this respect it can be done in two ways.
6 As to this, Dr Sheffer has a way of distinguishing between the couple x-followed-by-y and
the couple y-followed-by-x which shows that it is technically possible to construct
asymmetry out of symmetrical materials. But it can hardly be maintained that it is more
than a technical device.

11
THE USES OF LANGUAGE
Language, like other things of mysterious importance, such as breath, blood,

sex and lightning, has been viewed superstitiously ever since men were cap-
able of recording their thoughts. Savages fear to disclose their true name to an
enemy, lest he should work evil magic by means of it. Origen assures us that
pagan sorcerers could achieve more by using the sacred name Jehovah than
by means of the names Zeus, Osiris or Brahma. Familiarity makes us blind to
the linguistic emphasis in the Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not take the name
of the Lord in vain.’ The habit of viewing language superstitiously is not yet
extinct. ‘In the beginning was the Word’, says our version of St John’s Gospel,
and in reading some logical positivists I am tempted to think that their view
is represented by this mistranslated text.
Philosophers, being bookish and theoretical folk, have been interested in
language chiefly as a means of making statements and conveying informa-
tion, but this is only one of its purposes, and perhaps not the most primitive.
What is the purpose of language to a sergeant-major? On the one hand there
is the language of words of command, designed to cause identical simul-
taneous bodily movements in a number of hearers; on the other hand there is
bad language, designed to cause humility in those in whom the expected
bodily movements have not been caused. In neither case are words used,
except incidentally, to state facts or convey information.
Language can be used to express emotions, or to influence the behaviour
of others. Each of these functions can be performed, though with less ade-
quacy, by pre-linguistic methods. Animals emit shrieks of pain, and infants,
before they can speak, can express rage, discomfort, desire, delight, and a
whole gamut of feelings, by cries and gurgles of different kinds. A sheep dog
emits imperatives to his flock by means hardly distinguishable from those

that the shepherd employs towards him. Between such noises and speech
no sharp line can be drawn. When the dentist hurts you, you may emit an
involuntary groan; this does not count as speech. But if he says ‘let me know
if I hurt you’, and you then make the very same sound, it has become
speech, and moreover speech of the sort intended to convey information.
This example illustrates the fact that, in the matter of language as in other
respects, there is a continuous gradation from animal behaviour to that of the
most precise man of science, and from pre-linguistic noises to the polished
diction of the lexicographer.
A sound expressive of emotion I shall call an ‘interjection’. Imperatives and
interjections can already be distinguished in the noises emitted by animals.
When a hen clucks at her brood of chickens, she is uttering imperatives, but
when she squawks in terror she is expressing emotion. But as appears from
your groan at the dentist’s, an interjection may convey information, and the
outside observer cannot tell whether or not it is intended to do so. Gregarious
animals emit distinctive noises when they find food, and other members of the
herd are attracted when they hear these noises, but we cannot know whether
the noises merely express pleasure or are also intended to state ‘food here’.
Whenever an animal is so constructed that a certain kind of circumstance
causes a certain kind of emotion, and a certain kind of emotion causes a
certain kind of noise, the noise conveys to a suitable observer two pieces of
information, first, that the animal has a certain kind of feeling, and second,
that a certain kind of circumstance is present. The sound that the animal
emits is public, and the circumstance may be public—e.g. the presence of a
shoal of fish if the animal is a sea-gull. The animal’s cry may act directly on
the other members of its species, and we shall then say that they ‘understand’
its cry. But this is to suppose a ‘mental’ intermediary between the hearing of
the cry and the bodily reaction to the sound, and there is no real reason to
suppose any such intermediary except when the response is delayed. Much of
the importance of language is connected with delayed responses, but I will
not yet deal with this topic.
Language has two primary purposes, expression and communication. In its
most primitive forms it differs little from some other forms of behaviour. A
man may express sorrow by sighing, or by saying ‘alas!’ or ‘woe is me!’ He
may communicate by pointing or by saying ‘look’. Expression and communi-
cation are not necessarily separated; if you say ‘look’ because you see a ghost,
you may say it in a tone that expresses horror. This applies not only to
elementary forms of language; in poetry, and especially in songs, emotion
and information are conveyed by the same means. Music may be considered
as a form of language in which emotion is divorced from information, while
the telephone book gives information without emotion. But in ordinary
speech both elements are usually present.

the uses of language 105
Communication does not consist only of giving information; commands
and questions must be included. Sometimes the two are scarcely separable:
if you are walking with a child, and you say ‘there’s a puddle there’, the
command ‘don’t step in it’ is implicit. Giving information may be due solely
to the fact that the information interests you, or may be designed to influence
behaviour. If you have just seen a street accident, you will wish to tell your
friends about it because your mind is full of it; but if you tell a child that
six times seven is forty-two you do so merely in the hope of influencing his
(verbal) behaviour.
Language has two interconnected merits: first, that it is social, and second
that it supplies public expression for ‘thoughts’ which would otherwise
remain private. Without language, or some pre-linguistic analogue, our
knowledge of the environment is confined to what our own senses have
shown us, together with such inferences as our congenital constitution may
prompt; but by the help of speech we are able to know what others can relate,
and to relate what is no longer sensibly present but only remembered. When
we see or hear something which a companion is not seeing or hearing, we
can often make him aware of it by the one word ‘look’ or ‘listen’, or even by
gestures. But if half an hour ago we saw a fox, it is not possible to make
another person aware of this fact without language. This depends upon
the fact that the word ‘fox’ applies equally to a fox seen or a fox remembered,
so that our memories, which in themselves are private, are represented
to others by uttered sounds, which are public. Without language, only that
part of our life which consists of public sensations would be communicable,
and that only to those so situated as to be able to share the sensations in
question.
It will be seen that the utility of language depends upon the distinction
between public and private experiences, which is important in considering
the empirical basis of physics. This distinction, in turn, depends partly on
physiology, partly on the persistence of sound-waves and light-quanta,
which makes possible the two forms of language, speech and writing. Thus
language depends upon physics, and could not exist without the approxi-
mately separable causal chains which, as we shall see, make physical know-
ledge possible, and since the publicity of sensible objects is only approximate,
language applying to them, considered socially, must have a certain lack of
precision. I need hardly say that I am not asserting that the existence of
language requires a knowledge of physics. What I am saying is that language
would be impossible if the physical world did not in fact have certain charac-
teristics, and that the theory of language is at certain points dependent upon a
knowledge of the physical world. Language is a means of externalizing and
publicizing our own experiences. A dog cannot relate his autobiography;
however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were

honest though poor. A man can do this, and he does it by correlating
‘thoughts’ with public sensations.
Language serves not only to express thoughts, but to make possible
thoughts which could not exist without it. It is sometimes maintained that
there can be no thought without language, but to this view I cannot assent:
I hold that there can be thought, and even true and false belief, without
language. But however that may be, it cannot be denied that all fairly elaborate
thoughts require words. I can know, in a sense, that I have five fingers,
without knowing the word ‘five’, but I cannot know that the population of
London is about eight millions unless I have acquired the language of arith-
metic, nor can I have any thought at all closely corresponding to what is
asserted in the sentence: ‘the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the
diameter is approximately 3.14159’. Language, once evolved, acquires a
kind of autonomy: we can know, especially in mathematics, that a sentence
asserts something true, although what it asserts is too complex to be appre-
hended even by the best minds. Let us consider for a moment what happens
psychologically in such cases.
In mathematics, we start from rather simple sentences which we believe
ourselves capable of understanding, and proceed, by rules of inference which
we also believe ourselves to understand, to build up more and more compli-
cated symbolic statements, which, if our initial assumptions are true, must be
true whatever they may mean. As a rule it is unnecessary to know what they
‘mean’, if their ‘meaning’ is taken to be a thought which might occur in the
mind of a superhuman mathematical genius. But there is another kind
of ‘meaning’, which gives occasion for pragmatism and instrumentalism.
According to those who adopt this view of ‘meaning’, what a complicated
mathematical sentence does is to give a rule for practical procedure in certain
kinds of cases. Take, for instance, the above statement about the ratio of the
circumference of a circle to the diameter. Suppose you are a brewer, and you
desire hoops of a given diameter for your beer barrels, then the sentence
gives you a rule by which you can find out how much material you will
need. This rule may consist of a fresh sentence for each decimal point,
and there is therefore no need ever to grasp its significance as a whole.
The autonomy of language enables you to forgo this tedious process of
interpretation except at crucial moments.
There are two other uses of language that are of great importance; it
enables us to conduct our transactions with the outer world by means of
symbols that have (1) a certain degree of permanence in time, (2) a consider-
able degree of discreteness in space. Each of these merits is more marked in
writing than in speech, but is by no means wholly absent in speech. Suppose
you have a friend called Mr Jones. As a physical object his boundaries
are somewhat vague, both because he is continually losing and acquiring

the uses of language 107
electrons, and because an electron, being a distribution of energy, does not
cease abruptly at a certain distance from its centre. The surface of Mr. Jones,
therefore, has a certain ghostly impalpable quality, which you do not like to
associate with your solid-seeming friend. It is not necessary to go into the
niceties of theoretical physics in order to show that Mr Jones is sadly
indeterminate. When he is cutting his toe nails, there is a finite time, though
a short one, during which it is doubtful whether the parings are still part of
him or not. When he eats a mutton chop, at what moment does it become
part of him? When he breathes out carbon dioxide, is the carbon part of him
until it passes his nostrils? Even if we answer in the affirmative, there is a
finite time during which it is questionable whether certain molecules have or
have not passed beyond his nostrils. In these and other ways, it is doubtful
what is part of Mr Jones and what is not. So much for spatial vagueness.
There is the same problem as regards time. To the question ‘what are you
looking at?’ you may answer ‘Mr Jones’, although at one time you see him
full-face, at another in profile, and at another from behind, and although
at one time he may be running a race and at another time dozing in an
arm-chair. There is another question, namely, ‘what are you thinking of?’ to
which you may also answer ‘Mr Jones’, though what is actually in your mind
may be very different on different occasions: it may be Mr Jones as a baby, or
Mr Jones being cross because his breakfast is late, or Mr Jones receiving the
news that he is to be knighted. What you are experiencing is very different on
these various occasions, but for many practical purposes it is convenient to
regard them as all having a common object, which we suppose to be the
meaning of the name ‘Mr Jones’. This name, especially when printed, though
it cannot wholly escape the indefiniteness and transience of all physical
objects, has much less of both than Mr Jones has. Two instances of the printed
words ‘Mr Jones’ are much more alike than (for instance) the spectacle of
Mr Jones running and the memory of Mr Jones as a baby. And each instance,
if printed, changes much more slowly than Mr Jones does: it does not eat or
breathe or cut its toe nails. The name, accordingly, makes it much easier than
it would otherwise be to think of Mr Jones as a single quasi-permanent
entity, which, though untrue, is convenient in daily life.
Language, as appears from the above discussion of Mr Jones, though a
useful and even indispensable tool, is a dangerous one, since it begins by
suggesting a definiteness, discreteness, and quasi-permanence in objects
which physics seems to show that they do not possess. The philosopher,
therefore, is faced with the difficult task of using language to undo the false
beliefs that it suggests. Some philosophers, who shrink from the problems
and uncertainties and complications involved in such a task, prefer to treat
language as autonomous, and try to forget that it is intended to have a relation
to fact and to facilitate dealings with the environment. Up to a point, such a

12
THE CULT OF ‘COMMON USAGE’
The most influential school of philosophy in Britain at the present day

maintains a certain linguistic doctrine to which I am unable to subscribe. I do
not wish to misrepresent this school, but I suppose any opponent of any
doctrine is thought to misrepresent it by those who hold it. The doctrine, as
I understand it, consists in maintaining that the language of daily life, with
words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy, which has no
need of technical terms or of changes in the signification of common terms.
I find myself totally unable to accept this view. I object to it:
(1) Because it is insincere;

(2) Because it is capable of excusing ignorance of mathematics, physics,
and neurology in those who have had only a classical education;
(3) Because it is advanced by some in a tone of unctuous rectitude, as if
opposition to it were a sin against democracy;
(4) Because it makes philosophy trivial;
(5) Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation among philos-
ophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense.
(1) Insincerity. I will illustrate this by a fable. The Professor of Mental

Philosophy, when called by his bedmaker one morning, developed a danger-
ous frenzy, and had to be taken away by the police in an ambulance. I heard a
colleague, a believer in ‘common usage’, asking the poor philosopher’s doc-
tor about the occurrence. The doctor replied that the professor had had an
attack of temporary psychotic instability, which had subsided after an hour.
The believer in ‘common usage’, so far from objecting to the doctor’s lan-
guage, repeated it to other inquirers. But it happened that I, who live on the

professor’s staircase, overheard the following dialogue between the bedmaker
and the policeman:
Policeman. ’Ere, I want a word with yer.
Bedmaker. What do you mean—‘A word’? I ain’t done nothing.
Policeman. Ah, that’s just it. Yer ought to ’ave done something. Couldn’t yer
see the pore gentleman was mental?
Bedmaker. That I could. For an ’ole hour ’e went on something chronic. But
when they’re mental you can’t make them understand.
In this little dialogue, ‘word’, ‘mean’, ‘mental’, and ‘chronic’ are all used
in accordance with common usage. They are not so used in the pages of Mind
by those who pretend that common usage is what they believe in. What in
fact they believe in is not common usage, as determined by mass observation,
statistics, medians, standard deviations, and the rest of the apparatus. What
they believe in is the usage of persons who have their amount of education,
neither more nor less. Less is illiteracy, more is pedantry—so we are given to
understand.
(2) An excuse for ignorance. Every motorist is accustomed to speedometers
and accelerators, but unless he has learnt mathematics he attaches no precise
significance to ‘speed’ or ‘acceleration’. If he does attach a precise signifi-
cance to these words, he will know that his speed and his acceleration are at
every moment unknowable, and that, if he is fined for speeding, the convic-
tion must be based on insufficient evidence if the time when he is supposed
to have speeded is mentioned. On these grounds I will agree with the advo-
cate of common usage that such a word as ‘speed’, if used in daily life, must
be used as in daily life, and not as in mathematics. But then it should be
realized that ‘speed’ is a vague notion, and that equal truth may attach to all
three of the statements in the conjugation of the following irregular verb:
‘I was at rest’ (motorist).
‘You were moving at 20 miles an hour’ (a friend).
‘He was travelling at 60 miles an hour’ (the police).
It is because this state of affairs is puzzling to magistrates that mathematicians
have abandoned common usage.
(3) Those who advocate common usage in philosophy sometimes speak
in a manner that suggests the mystique of the ‘common man’. They may
admit that in organic chemistry there is need of long words, and that quan-
tum physics requires formulae that are difficult to translate into ordinary
English, but philosophy (they think) is different. It is not the function of
philosophy—so they maintain—to teach something that uneducated people
do not know; on the contrary, its function is to teach superior persons that
they are not as superior as they thought they were, and that those who are
really superior can show their skill by making sense of common sense.
It is, of course, a dreadful thing in these days to lay claim to any kind of

the cult of ‘common usage’ 111
superiority except in athletics, movies, and moneymaking. Nevertheless I will
venture to say that in former centuries common sense made what we now
think mistakes. It used to be thought that there could not be people at the
antipodes, because they would fall off, or, if they avoided that, they would
grow dizzy from standing on their heads. It used to be thought absurd to say
that the earth rotates, because everybody can see that it doesn’t. When it was
first suggested that the sun may be as large as the Peloponnesus, common
sense was outraged. But all this was long ago. I do not know at what date
common sense became all-wise. Perhaps it was in 1776; perhaps in 1848; or
perhaps with the passing of the Education Act in 1870. Or perhaps it was
only when physiologists such as Adrian and Sherrington began to make
scientific inroads on philosophers’ ideas about perception.
(4) Philosophy, as conceived by the school I am discussing, seems to me a
trivial and uninteresting pursuit. To discuss endlessly what silly people mean
when they say silly things may be amusing but can hardly be important.
Does the full moon look as large as a half-crown or as large as a soup plate?
Either answer can be proved correct by experiment. It follows that there is an
ambiguity in the question. A modern philosopher will clear up the ambiguity
for you with meticulous care.
But let us take an example which is less unfair, say the question of
immortality. Orthodox Christianity asserts that we survive death. What does
it mean by this assertion? And in what sense, if any, is the assertion true? The
philosophers with whom I am concerned will consider the first of these
questions, but will say that the second is none of their business. I agree
entirely that, in this case, a discussion as to what is meant is important and
highly necessary as a preliminary to a consideration of the substantial ques-
tion, but if nothing can be said on the substantial question it seems a waste
of time to discuss what it means. These philosophers remind me of the
shopkeeper of whom I once asked the shortest way to Winchester. He called
to a man in the back premises:
‘Gentleman wants to know the shortest way to Winchester.’
‘Winchester?’ an unseen voice replied.
‘Aye.’
‘Way to Winchester?’
‘Aye.’
‘Shortest way?’
‘Aye.’
‘Dunno.’
He wanted to get the nature of the question clear, but took no interest
in answering it. This is exactly what modern philosophy does for the
earnest seeker after truth. Is it surprising that young people turn to other
studies?

(5) Common sense, though all very well for everyday purposes, is easily
confused, even by such simple questions as ‘Where is the rainbow?’ When
you hear a voice on a gramophone record, are you hearing the man who
spoke or a reproduction? When you feel a pain in a leg that has been ampu-
tated, where is the pain? If you say it is in your head, would it be in your head
if the leg had not been amputated? If you say yes, then what reason have you
ever for thinking you have a leg? And so on.
No one wants to alter the language of common sense, any more than we
wish to give up talking of the sun rising and setting. But astronomers find a
different language better, and I contend that a different language is better in
philosophy.
Let us take an example. A philosophy containing such a large linguistic
element cannot object to the question: What is meant by the word ‘word’?
But I do not see how this is to be answered within the vocabulary of common
sense. Let us take the word ‘cat’, and for the sake of definiteness let us take the
written word. Clearly there are many instances of the word, no one of which
is the word. If I say ‘Let us discuss the word “cat” ’, the word ‘cat’ does not
occur in what I say, but only an instance of the word. The word itself is no
part of the sensible world; if it is anything, it is an eternal super-sensible
entity in a Platonic heaven. The word, we may say, is a class of similar shapes,
and, like all classes, is a logical fiction.
But our difficulties are not at an end. Similarity is neither necessary nor
sufficient to make a shape a member of the class which is the word ‘cat’. The
word may be written in capitals or in small letters, legibly or illegibly, in
black on a white ground or in white on a blackboard. If I write the word
‘catastrophe’, the first three letters do not constitute an instance of the word
‘cat’. The most necessary thing in an instance of the word is intention. If a piece
of marble happened to have a vein making the shape ‘cat’ we should not
think this an instance of the word.
It thus appears that we cannot define the word ‘word’ without (a) a logical
theory of classes, and (b) a psychological understanding of intention. These
are difficult matters. I conclude that common sense, whether correct or
incorrect in the use of words, does not know in the least what words are—I
wish I could believe that this conclusion would render it speechless.
Let us take another problem, that of perception. There is here an admixture
of philosophical and scientific questions, but this admixture is inevitable
in many questions, or, if not inevitable, can only be avoided by confining
ourselves to comparatively unimportant aspects of the matter in hand.
Here is a series of questions and answers.
Q. When I see a table, will what I see be still there if I shut my eyes?
A. That depends upon the sense in which you use the word ‘see’.
Q. What is still there when I shut my eyes?

the cult of ‘common usage’ 113
A. This is an empirical question. Don’t bother me with it, but ask the
physicists.
Q. What exists when my eyes are open, but not when they are shut?
A. This again is empirical, but in deference to previous philosophers I will
answer you: coloured surfaces.
Q. May I infer that there are two senses of ‘see’? In the first, when I ‘see’ a
table, I ‘see’ something conjectural about which physics has vague notions
that are probably wrong. In the second, I ‘see’ coloured surfaces which cease
to exist when I shut my eyes.
A. That is correct if you want to think clearly, but our philosophy makes
clear thinking unnecessary. By oscillating between the two meanings, we
avoid paradox and shock, which is more than most philosophers do.
(Portraits from Memory, London: Allen & Unwin; New York:

45
EDUCATION
No political theory is adequate unless it is applicable to children as well as to

men and women. Theorists are mostly childless, or, if they have children, they
are carefully screened from the disturbances which would be caused by
youthful turmoil. Some of them have written books on education, but with-
out, as a rule, having any actual children present to their minds while they
wrote. Those educational theorists who have had a knowledge of children,
such as the inventors of Kindergarten and the Montessori system,1 have not
always had enough realization of the ultimate goal of education to be able to
deal successfully with advanced instruction. I have not the knowledge either
of children or of education which would enable me to supply whatever
defects there may be in the writings of others. But some questions, concern-
ing education as a political institution, are involved in any hope of social
reconstruction, and are not usually considered by writers on educational
theory. It is these questions that I wish to discuss.
The power of education in forming character and opinion is very great and
very generally recognized. The genuine beliefs, though not usually the pro-
fessed precepts, of parents and teachers are almost unconsciously acquired by
most children; and even if they depart from these beliefs in later life, some-
thing of them remains deeply implanted, ready to emerge in a time of stress
or crisis. Education is, as a rule, the strongest force on the side of what exists
and against fundamental change: threatened institutions, while they are still
powerful, possess themselves of the educational machine, and instil a respect
for their own excellence into the malleable minds of the young. Reformers
retort by trying to oust their opponents from their position of vantage. The
children themselves are not considered by either party; they are merely so
much material, to be recruited into one army or the other. If the children

themselves were considered, education would not aim at making them
belong to this party or that, but at enabling them to choose intelligently
between the parties; it would aim at making them able to think, not at
making them think what their teachers think. Education as a political weapon
could not exist if we respected the rights of children. If we respected the
rights of children, we should educate them so as to give them the knowledge
and the mental habits required for forming independent opinions; but educa-
tion as a political institution endeavours to form habits and to circumscribe
knowledge in such a way as to make one set of opinions inevitable.
The two principles of justice and liberty, which cover a very great deal of the
social reconstruction required, are not by themselves sufficient where educa-
tion is concerned. Justice, in the literal sense of equal rights, is obviously not
wholly possible as regards children. And as for liberty, it is, to begin with,
essentially negative: it condemns all avoidable interference with freedom,
without giving a positive principle of construction. But education is essen-
tially constructive, and requires some positive conception of what constitutes
a good life. And although liberty is to be respected in education as much as is
compatible with instruction, and although a very great deal more liberty than
is customary can be allowed without loss to instruction, yet it is clear that
some departure from complete liberty is unavoidable if children are to be
taught anything, except in the case of unusually intelligent children who are
kept isolated from more normal companions. This is one reason for the great
responsibility which rests upon teachers: the children must, necessarily, be
more or less at the mercy of their elders, and cannot make themselves the
guardians of their own interests. Authority in education is to some extent
unavoidable, and those who educate have to find a way of exercising authority
in accordance with the spirit of liberty.
Where authority is unavoidable, what is needed is reverence. A man who is to
educate really well, and is to make the young grow and develop into their full
stature, must be filled through and through with the spirit of reverence. It is
reverence towards others that is lacking in those who advocate machine-
made cast-iron systems: militarism, capitalism, Fabian scientific organization
and all the other prisons into which reformers and reactionaries try to force
the human spirit. In education, with its codes of rules emanating from a
Government office, its large classes and fixed curriculum and overworked
teachers, its determination to produce a dead level of glib mediocrity, the
lack of reverence for the child is all but universal. Reverence requires imagin-
ation and vital warmth; it requires most imagination in respect of those who
have least actual achievement or power. The child is weak and superficially
foolish, the teacher is strong, and in an everyday sense wiser than the child.
The teacher without reverence, or the bureaucrat without reverence, easily
despises the child for these outward inferiorities. He thinks it is his duty to

education 381
‘mould’ the child: in imagination he is the potter with the clay. And so he
gives to the child some unnatural shape, which hardens with age, producing
strains and spiritual dissatisfactions, out of which grow cruelty and envy, and
the belief that others must be compelled to undergo the same distortions.
The man who has reverence will not think it his duty to ‘mould’ the
young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and most of
all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something indi-
vidual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied
fragment of the dumb striving of the world. In the presence of a child he feels
an unaccountable humility—a humility not easily defensible on any rational
ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom than the easy self-confidence of
many parents and teachers. The outward helplessness of the child and the
appeal of dependence make him conscious of the responsibility of a trust. His
imagination shows him what the child may become, for good or evil, how its
impulses may be developed or thwarted, how its hopes must be dimmed and
the life in it grow less living, how its trust will be bruised and its quick
desires replaced by brooding will. All this gives him a longing to help the
child in its own battle; he would equip and strengthen it, not for some
outside end proposed by the State or by any other impersonal authority, but
for the ends which the child’s own spirit is obscurely seeking. The man who
feels this can wield the authority of an educator without infringing the
principle of liberty.
It is not in a spirit of reverence that education is conducted by States and
Churches and the great institutions that are subservient to them. What is
considered in education is hardly ever the boy or girl, the young man or
young woman, but almost always, in some form, the maintenance of the
existing order. When the individual is considered, it is almost exclusively
with a view to worldly success—making money or achieving a good pos-
ition. To be ordinary, and to acquire the art of getting on, is the ideal which is
set before the youthful mind, except by a few rare teachers who have enough
energy of belief to break through the system within which they are expected
to work. Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening
some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with
other groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects
taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides
what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is
done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have
had most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life,
devoid of impulse, and possessing only certain mechanical aptitudes which
take the place of living thought.
Some of the things which education achieves at present must continue to
be achieved by education in any civilized country. All children must continue

to be taught how to read and write, and some must continue to acquire the
knowledge needed for such professions as medicine or law or engineering.
The higher education required for the sciences and the arts is necessary for
those to whom it is suited. Except in history and religion and kindred mat-
ters, the actual instruction is only inadequate, not positively harmful. The
instruction might be given in a more liberal spirit, with more attempt to
show its ultimate uses; and of course much of it is traditional and dead. But in
the main it is necessary, and would have to form a part of any educational
system.
It is in history and religion and other controversial subjects that the actual
instruction is positively harmful. These subjects touch the interests by which
schools are maintained; and the interests maintain the schools in order that
certain views on these subjects may be instilled. History, in every country, is
so taught as to magnify that country: children learn to believe that their own
country has always been in the right and almost always victorious, that it has
produced almost all the great men, and that it is in all respects superior to all
other countries. Since these beliefs are flattering, they are easily absorbed, and
hardly ever dislodged from instinct by later knowledge.
To take a simple and almost trivial example: the facts about the battle of
Waterloo are known in great detail and with minute accuracy; but the facts as
taught in elementary schools will be widely different in England, France, and
Germany. The ordinary English boy imagines that the Prussians played hardly
any part; the ordinary German boy imagines that Wellington was practically
defeated when the day was retrieved by Blücher’s gallantry. If the facts were
taught accurately in both countries, national pride would not be fostered to
the same extent, neither nation would feel so certain of victory in the event of
war, and the willingness to fight would be diminished. It is this result which
has to be prevented. Every State wishes to promote national pride, and is
conscious that this cannot be done by unbiased history. The defenceless
children are taught by distortions and suppressions and suggestions. The false
ideas as to the history of the world which are taught in the various countries
are of a kind which encourages strife and serves to keep alive a bigoted
nationalism. If good relations between States were desired, one of the first
steps ought to be to submit all teaching of history to an international com-
mission, which should produce neutral textbooks free from the patriotic bias
which is now demanded everywhere.2
Exactly the same thing applies to religion. Elementary schools are practic-
ally always in the hands either of some religious body or of a State which has
a certain attitude towards religion. A religious body exists through the fact
that its members all have certain definite beliefs on subjects as to which the
truth is not ascertainable. Schools conducted by religious bodies have to
prevent the young, who are often inquiring by nature, from discovering that

education 383
these definite beliefs are opposed by others which are no more unreasonable,
and that many of the men best qualified to judge think that there is no good
evidence in favour of any definite belief. When the State is militantly secular,
as in France, State schools become as dogmatic as those that are in the hands
of the Churches (I understand that the word ‘God’ must not be mentioned in
a French elementary school). The result in all these cases is the same: free
inquiry is checked, and on the most important matter in the world the child
is met with dogma or with stony silence.
It is not only in elementary education that these evils exist. In more
advanced education they take subtler forms, and there is more attempt to
conceal them, but they are still present. Eton and Oxford set a certain stamp
upon a man’s mind, just as a Jesuit College does. It can hardly be said that
Eton and Oxford have a conscious purpose, but they have a purpose which is
none the less strong and effective for not being formulated. In almost all
who have been through them they produce a worship of ‘good form’, which
is as destructive to life and thought as the medieval Church. ‘Good form’ is
quite compatible with a superficial open-mindedness, a readiness to hear
all sides, and a certain urbanity towards opponents. But it is not compatible
with fundamental open-mindedness, or with any inward readiness to give
weight to the other side. Its essence is the assumption that what is most
important is a certain kind of behaviour, a behaviour which minimizes
friction between equals and delicately impresses inferiors with a conviction
of their own crudity. As a political weapon for preserving the privileges of
the rich in a snobbish democracy it is unsurpassable. As a means of pro-
ducing an agreeable social milieu for those who have money with no strong
beliefs or unusual desires it has some merit. In every other respect it is
abominable.
The evils of ‘good form’ arise from two sources: its perfect assurance of its
own rightness, and its belief that correct manners are more to be desired than
intellect, or artistic creation, or vital energy, or any of the other sources of
progress in the world. Perfect assurance, by itself, is enough to destroy all
mental progress in those who have it. And when it is combined with con-
tempt for the angularities and awkwardnesses that are almost invariably
associated with great mental power, it becomes a source of destruction to all
who come in contact with it. ‘Good form’ is itself dead and incapable of
growth; and by its attitude to those who are without it it spreads its own
death to many who might otherwise have life. The harm which it has done to
well-to-do Englishmen, and to men whose abilities have led the well-to-do to
notice them, is incalculable.
The prevention of free inquiry is unavoidable so long as the purpose of
education is to produce belief rather than thought, to compel the young to
hold positive opinions on doubtful matters rather than to let them see the

doubtfulness and be encouraged to independence of mind. Education ought
to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is
the truth. But it is creeds that hold men together in fighting organizations:
Churches, States, political parties. It is intensity of belief in a creed that
produces efficiency in fighting: victory comes to those who feel the strongest
certainty about matters on which doubt is the only rational attitude. To
produce this intensity of belief and this efficiency in fighting, the child’s
nature is warped, and its free outlook is cramped, by cultivating inhibitions
as a check to the growth of new ideas. In those whose minds are not very
active the result is the omnipotence of prejudice; while the few whose
thought cannot be wholly killed become cynical, intellectually hopeless,
destructively critical, able to make all that is living seem foolish, unable
themselves to supply the creative impulses which they destroy in others.
The success in fighting which is achieved by suppressing freedom of
thought is brief and very worthless. In the long run mental vigour is as
essential to success as it is to a good life. The conception of education as a
form of drill, a means of producing unanimity through slavishness, is very
common, and is defended chiefly on the ground that it leads to victory.
Those who enjoy parallels from ancient history will point to the victory of
Sparta over Athens to enforce their moral. But it is Athens that has had power
over men’s thoughts and imagination, not Sparta: any one of us, if we could
be born again into some past epoch, would rather be born an Athenian than
a Spartan. And in the modern world so much intellect is required in practical
affairs that even the external victory is more likely to be won by intelligence
than by docility. Education in credulity leads by quick stages to mental decay;
it is only by keeping alive the spirit of free inquiry that the indispensable
minimum of progress can be achieved.
Certain mental habits are commonly instilled by those who are engaged in
educating: obedience and discipline, ruthlessness in the struggle for worldly
success, contempt towards opposing groups, and an unquestioning credulity,
a passive acceptance of the teacher’s wisdom. All these habits are against life.
Instead of obedience and discipline, we ought to aim at preserving independ-
ence and impulse. Instead of ruthlessness, education should try to develop
justice in thought. Instead of contempt, it ought to instil reverence, and the
attempt at understanding; towards the opinions of others it ought to produce,
not necessarily acquiescence, but only such opposition as is combined with
imaginative apprehension and a clear realization of the grounds for oppos-
ition. Instead of credulity, the object should be to stimulate constructive
doubt, the love of mental adventure, the sense of worlds to conquer by
enterprise and boldness in thought. Contentment with the status quo, and
subordination of the individual pupil to political aims, owing to indifference
to the things of the mind, are the immediate causes of these evils; but beneath

education 385
these causes there is one more fundamental, the fact that education is treated
as a means of acquiring power over the pupil, not as a means of nourishing
his own growth. It is in this that lack of reverence shows itself; and it is only
by more reverence that a fundamental reform can be effected.
Obedience and discipline are supposed to be indispensable if order is to
be kept in a class, and if any instruction is to be given. To some extent this is
true; but the extent is much less than it is thought to be by those who regard
obedience and discipline as in themselves desirable. Obedience, the yielding
of one’s will to outside direction, is the counterpart of authority. Both may
be necessary in certain cases. Refractory children, lunatics and criminals may
require authority, and may need to be forced to obey. But in so far as this
is necessary it is a misfortune: what is to be desired is the free choice of
ends with which it is not necessary to interfere. And educational reformers
have shown that this is far more possible than our fathers would ever have
believed.3
What makes obedience seem necessary in schools is the large classes and
overworked teachers demanded by a false economy. Those who have no
experience of teaching are incapable of imagining the expense of spirit
entailed by any really living instruction. They think that teachers can reason-
ably be expected to work as many hours as bank clerks. Intense fatigue and
irritable nerves are the result, and an absolute necessity of performing the
day’s task mechanically. But the task cannot be performed mechanically
except by exacting obedience.
If we took education seriously, and thought it as important to keep alive
the minds of children as to secure victory in war, we should conduct educa-
tion quite differently: we should make sure of achieving the end, even if the
expense were a hundredfold greater than it is. To many men and women a
small amount of teaching is a delight, and can be done with a fresh zest and
life which keeps most pupils interested without any need of discipline. The
few who do not become interested might be separated from the rest, and
given a different kind of instruction. A teacher ought to have only as much
teaching as can be done, on most days, with actual pleasure in the work, and
with an awareness of the pupil’s mental needs. The result would be a relation
of friendliness instead of hostility between teacher and pupil, a realization on
the part of most pupils that education serves to develop their own lives and is
not merely an outside imposition, interfering with play and demanding
many hours of sitting still. All that is necessary to this end is a greater expend-
iture of money, to secure teachers with more leisure and with a natural love
of teaching.
Discipline, as it exists in schools, is very largely an evil. There is a kind of
discipline which is necessary to almost all achievement, and which perhaps
is not sufficiently valued by those who react against the purely external

discipline of traditional methods. The desirable kind of discipline is the kind
that comes from within, which consists in the power of pursuing a distant
object steadily, forgoing and suffering many things on the way. This involves
the subordination of minor impulses to will, the power of a directing action
by large creative desires even at moments when they are not vividly alive.
Without this, no serious ambition, good or bad, can be realized, no consist-
ent purpose can dominate. This kind of discipline is very necessary, but can
only result from strong desires for ends not immediately attainable, and can
only be produced by education if education fosters such desires, which it
seldom does at present. Such discipline springs from one’s own will, not
from outside authority. It is not this kind which is sought in most schools,
and it is not this kind which seems to me an evil.
Although elementary education encourages the undesirable discipline that
consists in passive obedience, and although hardly any existing education
encourages the moral discipline of consistent self-direction, there is a certain
kind of purely mental discipline which is produced by the traditional higher
education. The kind I mean is that which enables a man to concentrate his
thoughts at will upon any matter that he has occasion to consider, regardless
of preoccupations or boredom or intellectual difficulty. This quality, though
it has no important intrinsic excellence, greatly enhances the efficiency of the
mind as an instrument. It is this that enables a lawyer to master the scientific
details of a patent case which he forgets as soon as judgment has been given,
or a civil servant to deal quickly with many different administrative questions
in succession. It is this that enables men to forget private cares during busi-
ness hours. In a complicated world it is a very necessary faculty for those
whose work requires mental concentration.
Success in producing mental discipline is the chief merit of traditional
higher education. I doubt whether it can be achieved except by compelling or
persuading active attention to a prescribed task. It is for this reason chiefly
that I do not believe methods such as Madame Montessori’s applicable when
the age of childhood has been passed. The essence of her method consists in
giving a choice of occupations, any one of which is interesting to most
children, and all of which are instructive. The child’s attention is wholly
spontaneous, as in play; it enjoys acquiring knowledge in this way, and does
not acquire any knowledge which it does not desire. I am convinced that this
is the best method of education with young children: the actual results make
it almost impossible to think otherwise. But it is difficult to see how this
method can lead to control of attention by the will. Many things which must
be thought about are uninteresting, and even those that are interesting at first
often become very wearisome before they have been considered as long as is
necessary. The power of giving prolonged attention is very important, and it
is hardly to be widely acquired except as a habit induced originally by outside

education 387
pressure. Some few boys, it is true, have sufficiently strong intellectual desires
to be willing to undergo all that is necessary by their own initiative and free
will; but for all others an external inducement is required in order to make
them learn any subject thoroughly. There is among educational reformers a
certain fear of demanding great efforts, and in the world at large a growing
unwillingness to be bored. Both these tendencies have their good side, but
both also have their dangers. The mental discipline which is jeopardized can
be preserved by mere advice without external compulsion whenever a boy’s
intellectual interest and ambition can be sufficiently stimulated. A good
teacher ought to be able to do this for any boy who is capable of much mental
achievement; and for many of the others the present purely bookish educa-
tion is probably not the best. In this way, so long as the importance of mental
discipline is realized, it can probably be attained, whenever it is attainable,
by appealing to the pupil’s consciousness of his own needs. So long as
teachers are not expected to succeed by this method, it is easy for them to
slip into a slothful dullness, and blame their pupils when the fault is really
their own.
Ruthlessness in the economic struggle will almost unavoidably be taught
in schools so long as the economic structure of society remains unchanged.
This must be particularly the case in middle-class schools, which depend for
their numbers upon the good opinion of parents, and secure the good opin-
ion of parents by advertising the successes of pupils. This is one of many ways
in which the competitive organization of the State is harmful. Spontaneous
and disinterested desire for knowledge is not at all uncommon in the young,
and might be easily aroused in many in whom it remains latent. But it is
remorselessly checked by teachers who think only of examinations, diplomas
and degrees. For the abler boys there is no time for thought, no time for the
indulgence of intellectual taste, from the moment of first going to school
until the moment of leaving the university. From first to last there is nothing
but one long drudgery of examination tips and textbook facts. The most
intelligent, at the end, are disgusted with learning, longing only to forget it
and to escape into a life of action. Yet there, as before, the economic machine
holds them prisoners, and all their spontaneous desires are bruised and
thwarted.
The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as
training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely
utilitarian point of view, as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.
This would not matter so much if it affected only those who have no genuine
intellectual interests. But unfortunately it affects most those whose intel-
lectual interests are strongest, since it is upon them that the pressure of
examinations falls with most severity. To them most, but to all in some
degree, education appears as a means of acquiring superiority over others;

it is infected through and through with ruthlessness and glorification of
social inequality. Any free, disinterested consideration shows that, whatever
inequalities might remain in a Utopia, the actual inequalities are almost all
contrary to justice. But our educational system tends to conceal this from all
except the failures, since those who succeed are on the way to profit by the
inequalities, with every encouragement from the men who have directed
their education.
Passive acceptance of the teacher’s wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It
involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the
teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour
of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive
acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes men to seek a leader, and
to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position. It makes the
power of Churches, Governments, party caucuses, and all the other organiza-
tions by which plain men are misled into supporting old systems which are
harmful to the nation and to themselves. It is possible that there would not be
much independence of thought even if education did everything to promote
it; but there would certainly be more than there is at present. If the object
were to make pupils think, rather than to make them accept certain conclu-
sions, education would be conducted quite differently: there would be less
rapidity of instruction and more discussion, more occasions when pupils are
encouraged to express themselves, more attempt to make education concern
itself with matters in which the pupils feel some interest.
Above all, there would be an endeavour to rouse and stimulate the love of
mental adventure. The world in which we live is various and astonishing:
some of the things that seem plainest grow more and more difficult the more
they are considered; other things, which might have been thought quite
impossible to discover, have nevertheless been laid bare by genius and indus-
try. The powers of thought, the vast regions which it can master, the much
more vast regions which it can only dimly suggest to imagination, give to
those whose minds have travelled beyond the daily round an amazing rich-
ness of material, an escape from the triviality and wearisomeness of familiar
routine, by which the whole of life is filled with interest, and the prison walls
of the commonplace are broken down. The same love of adventure which
takes men to the South Pole, the same passion for a conclusive trial of
strength which leads some men to welcome war, can find in creative thought
an outlet which is neither wasteful nor cruel, but increases the dignity of
man by incarnating in life some of that shining splendour which the human
spirit is bringing down out of the unknown. To give this joy, in a greater or
less measure, to all who are capable of it, is the supreme end for which the
education of the mind is to be valued.
It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are

education 389
few who can appreciate it, and that ordinary education can take no account of
so aristocratic a good. I do not believe this. The joy of mental adventure is far
commoner in the young than in grown men and women. Among children it
is very common, and grows naturally out of the period of make-believe and
fancy. It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during
education. Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than
ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary,
destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institu-
tions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to
authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into
the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by
unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if
it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of
the world, and the chief glory of man.
But if thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of
the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men back—fear lest
their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by
which they live should prove harmful, fear lest they themselves should prove
less worthy of respect than they have supposed themselves to be. ‘Should the
working man think freely about property? Then what will become of us, the
rich? Should young men and young women think freely about sex? Then
what will become of morality? Should soldiers think freely about war? Then
what will become of military discipline? Away with thought! Back into the
shades of prejudice, lest property, morals, and war should be endangered!
Better men should be stupid, slothful, and oppressive than that their thoughts
should be free. For if their thoughts were free they might not think as we do.
And at all costs this disaster must be averted.’ So the opponents of thought
argue in the unconscious depths of their souls. And so they act in their
churches, their schools, and their universities.
No institution inspired by fear can further life. Hope, not fear, is the
creative principle in human affairs. All that has made man great has sprung
from the attempt to secure what is good, not from the struggle to avert what
was thought evil. It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a
great hope that it so seldom achieves a great result. The wish to preserve the
past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those
who control the teaching of the young. Education should not aim at a passive
awareness of dead facts, but at an activity directed towards the world that our
efforts are to create. It should be inspired, not by a regretful hankering after
the extinct beauties of Greece and the Renaissance, but by a shining vision of
the society that is to be, of the triumphs that thought will achieve in the time
to come, and of the ever-widening horizon of man’s survey over the uni-
verse. Those who are taught in this spirit will be filled with life and hope and

joy, able to bear their part in bringing to mankind a future less sombre than
the past, with faith in the glory that human effort can create.
(Principles of Social Reconstruction, London: Allen & Unwin; Why Men
Fight, New York: The Century Companies (Appleton-Century-
Crofts), 1916.)
NOTES
1 As regards the education of young children, Madame Montessori’s methods seem to
me full of wisdom.
2 The Teaching of Patriotism. His Majesty’s Approval
The King has been graciously pleased to accept a copy of the little book containing
suggestions to local education authorities and teachers in Wales as to the teaching
of patriotism which has just been issued by the Welsh Department of the Board of
Education in connection with the observance of the National Anniversary of St Dav-
id’s Day. His Private Secretary (Lord Stamfordham), in writing to Mr Alfred T. Davies,
the Permanent Secretary of the Welsh Department, says that His Majesty is much
pleased with the contents of the book, and trusts that the principles inculcated in it
will bear good fruit in the lives and characters of the coming generation.—Morning
Post, January 29, 1916.
3 What Madame Montessori has achieved in the way of minimizing obedience and discip-
line with advantage to education is almost miraculous.

46
THE AIMS OF EDUCATION
Before considering how to educate, it is well to be clear as to the sort of result

which we wish to achieve. Dr Arnold wanted ‘humbleness of mind’, a quality
not possessed by Aristotle’s ‘magnanimous man’. Nietzsche’s ideal is not that
of Christianity. No more is Kant’s: for while Christ enjoins love, Kant teaches
that no action of which love is the motive can be truly virtuous. And even
people who agree as to the ingredients of a good character may differ as to
their relative importance. One man will emphasize courage, another learning,
another kindliness, and another rectitude. One man, like the elder Brutus,
will put duty to the State above family affection; another, like Confucius, will
put family affection first. All these divergences will produce differences as
to education. We must have some conception of the kind of person we wish
to produce, before we can have any definite opinion as to the education
which we consider best.
Of course, an educator may be foolish, in the sense that he produces results
other than those at which he was aiming. Uriah Heep was the outcome of
lessons in humility at a Charity School, which had had an effect quite differ-
ent from what was intended. But in the main the ablest educators have been
fairly successful. Take as examples the Chinese literati, the modern Japanese,
the Jesuits, Dr Arnold, and the men who direct the policy of the American
public schools. All these, in their various ways, have been highly successful.
The results aimed at in the different cases were utterly different, but in the
main the results were achieved. It may be worth while to spend a few
moments on these different systems, before attempting to decide what we
should ourselves regard as the aims which education should have in view.
Traditional Chinese education was, in some respects, very similar to that of
Athens in its best days. Athenian boys were made to learn Homer by heart

from beginning to end; Chinese boys were made to learn the Confucian
classics with similar thoroughness. Athenians were taught a kind of reverence
for the gods which consisted in outward observances, and placed no barrier
in the way of free intellectual speculation. Similarly, the Chinese were taught
certain rites connected with ancestor-worship, but were by no means obliged
to have the beliefs which the rites would seem to imply. An easy and elegant
scepticism was the attitude expected of an educated adult: anything might be
discussed, but it was a trifle vulgar to reach very positive conclusions. Opin-
ions should be such as could be discussed pleasantly at dinner, not such as
men would fight for. Carlyle calls Plato ‘a lordly Athenian gentleman, very
much at his ease in Zion’. This characteristic of being ‘at his ease in Zion’ is
also found in Chinese sages, and is, as a rule, absent from the sages produced
by Christian civilizations, except when, like Goethe, they have deeply
imbibed the spirit of Hellenism. The Athenians and the Chinese alike wished
to enjoy life, and had a conception of enjoyment which was refined by an
exquisite sense of beauty.
There were, however, great differences between the two civilizations,
owing to the fact that, broadly speaking, the Greeks were energetic and the
Chinese were lazy. The Greeks devoted their energies to art and science and
mutual extermination, in all of which they achieved unprecedented success.
Politics and patriotism afforded practical outlets for Greek energy: when a
politician was ousted, he led a band of exiles to attack his native city. When a
Chinese official was disgraced, he retired to the hills and wrote poems on the
pleasures of country life. Accordingly, the Greek civilization destroyed itself,
but the Chinese civilization could only be destroyed from without. These
differences, however, seem not wholly attributable to education, since Confu-
cianism in Japan never produced the indolent cultured scepticism which
characterized the Chinese literati, except in the Kyoto nobility, who formed
a kind of Faubourg Saint Germain.
Chinese education produced stability and art; it failed to produce progress
or science. Perhaps this may be taken as what is to be expected of scepticism.
Passionate beliefs produce either progress or disaster, not stability. Science,
even when it attacks traditional beliefs, has beliefs of its own, and can scarcely
flourish in an atmosphere of literary scepticism. In a pugnacious world
which has been unified by modern inventions, energy is needed for national
self-preservation. And without science, democracy is impossible: the Chinese
civilization was confined to the small percentage of educated men, and the
Greek civilization was based on slavery. For these reasons, the traditional
education of China is not suited to the modern world, and has been aban-
doned by the Chinese themselves. Cultivated eighteenth-century gentlemen,
who in some respects resembled Chinese literati, have become impossible for
the same reasons.

the aims of education 393
Modern Japan affords the clearest illustration of a tendency which is prom-
inent among all the Great Powers—the tendency to make national greatness
the supreme purpose of education. The aim of Japanese education is to pro-
duce citizens who shall be devoted to the State through the training of their
passions, and useful to it through the knowledge they have acquired. I cannot
sufficiently praise the skill with which this double purpose has been pursued.
Ever since the advent of Commodore Perry’s squadron, the Japanese have
been in a situation in which self-perservation was very difficult; their success
affords a justification of their methods, unless we are to hold that self-
preservation itself may be culpable. But only a desperate situation could have
justified their educational methods, which would have been culpable in any
nation not in imminent peril. The Shinto religion, which must not be called
in question even by university professors, involves history which is just as
dubious as Genesis; the Dayton trial pales into insignificance beside the theo-
logical tyranny in Japan. There is an equal ethical tyranny; nationalism, filial
piety, Mikado-worship, etc., must not be called in question, and therefore
many kinds of progress are scarcely possible. The great danger of a cast-iron
system of this sort is that it may provoke revolution as the sole method of
progress. This danger is real, though not immediate, and is largely caused by
the educational system.
We have thus in modern Japan a defect opposite to that of ancient China.
Whereas the Chinese literati were too sceptical and lazy, the products of
Japanese education are likely to be too dogmatic and energetic. Neither
acquiescence in scepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education
should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attain-
able in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for
knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the
mistakes can be rectified by care and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we
should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; neverthe-
less it is upon our beliefs that we must act. This state of mind is rather
difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional
atrophy. But though difficult, it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific
temper. Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible;
the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the sceptic denies the possibility. Both are
mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster.
The Jesuits, like the modern Japanese, made the mistake of subordinating
education to the welfare of an institution—in their case, the Catholic Church.
They were not concerned primarily with the good of the particular pupil, but
with making him a means to the good of the Church. If we accept their
theology, we cannot blame them: to save souls from hell is more important
than any merely terrestrial concern, and is only to be achieved by the Catholic
Church. But those who do not accept this dogma will judge Jesuit education

by its results. These results, it is true, were sometimes quite as undesired as
Uriah Heep: Voltaire was a product of Jesuit methods. But on the whole, and
for a long time, the intended results were achieved: the counter-reformation,
and the collapse of Protestantism in France, must be largely attributed to
Jesuit efforts. To achieve these ends, they made art sentimental, thought
superficial, and morals loose; in the end, the French Revolution was needed
to sweep away the harm that they had done. In education, their crime was
that they were not actuated by love of their pupils, but by ulterior ends.
Dr Arnold’s system, which has remained in force in English public schools
to the present day, had another defect, namely that it was aristocratic. The
aim was to train men for positions of authority and power, whether at home
or in distant parts of the empire. An aristocracy, if it is to survive, needs
certain virtues: these were to be imparted at school. The product was to be
energetic, stoical, physically fit, possessed of certain unalterable beliefs, with
high standards of rectitude, and convinced that it had an important mission
in the world. To a surprising extent, these results were achieved. Intellect was
sacrificed to them, because intellect might produce doubt. Sympathy was
sacrificed, because it might interfere with governing ‘inferior’ races or
classes. Kindliness was sacrificed for the sake of toughness; imagination, for
the sake of firmness. In an unchanging world, the result might have been a
permanent aristocracy, possessing the merits and defects of the Spartans. But
aristocracy is out of date, and subject populations will no longer obey even
the most wise and virtuous rulers. The rulers are driven into brutality, and
brutality further encourages revolt. The complexity of the modern world
increasingly requires intelligence, and Dr Arnold sacrificed intelligence to
‘virtue’. The battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of
Eton, but the British Empire is being lost there. The modern world needs a
different type, with more imaginative sympathy, more intellectual supple-
ness, less belief in bull-dog courage and more belief in technical knowledge.
The administrator of the future must be the servant of free citizens, not the
benevolent ruler of admiring subjects. The aristocratic tradition embedded in
British higher education is its bane. Perhaps this tradition can be eliminated
gradually; perhaps the older educational institutions will be found incapable
of adapting themselves. As to that, I do not venture an opinion.
The American public schools achieve successfully a task never before
attempted on a large scale: the task of transforming a heterogeneous selection
of mankind into a homogeneous nation. This is done so ably, and is on the
whole such a beneficent work, that on the balance great praise is due to those
who accomplish it. But America, like Japan, is placed in a peculiar situation,
and what the special circumstances justify is not necessarily an ideal to be
followed everywhere and always. America has had certain advantages and
certain difficulties. Among the advantages were: a higher standard of wealth;

freedom from the danger of defeat in war; comparative absence of cramping
traditions inherited from the Middle Ages. Immigrants found in America a
generally diffused sentiment of democracy and an advanced stage of indus-
trial technique. These, I think, are the two chief reasons why almost all of
them came to admire America more than their native countries. But actual
immigrants, as a rule, retain a dual patriotism; in European struggles they
continue to take passionately the side of the nation to which they originally
belonged. Their children, on the contrary, lose all loyalty to the country from
which their parents have come, and become merely and simply Americans.
The attitude of the parents is attributable to the general merits of America;
that of the children is very largely determined by their school education. It is
only the contribution of the school that concerns us.
In so far as the school can rely upon the genuine merits of America, there is
no need to associate the teaching of American patriotism with the inculcation
of false standards. But where the old world is superior to the new, it becomes
necessary to instil a contempt for genuine excellences. The intellectual level in
Western Europe and the artistic level in Eastern Europe are, on the whole,
higher than in America. Throughout Western Europe, except in Spain and
Portugal, there is less theological superstition than in America. In almost all
European countries the individual is less subject to herd domination than in
America: his inner freedom is greater even where his political freedom is less.
In these respects, the American public schools do harm. The harm is essential
to the teaching of an exclusive American patriotism. The harm, as with the
Japanese and the Jesuits, comes from regarding the pupils as means to an end,
not as ends in themselves. The teacher should love his children better than his
State or his Church; otherwise he is not an ideal teacher.
When I say that pupils should be regarded as ends, not as means, I may be
met by the retort that, after all, everybody is more important as a means than
as an end. What a man is as an end perishes when he dies; what he produces
as a means continues to the end of time. We cannot deny this, but we can
deny the consequences deduced from it. A man’s importance as a means may
be for good or for evil; the remote effects of human actions are so uncertain
that a wise man will tend to dismiss them from his calculations. Broadly
speaking, good men have good effects, and bad men bad effects. This, of
course, is not an invariable law of nature. A bad man may murder a tyrant,
because he has committed crimes which the tyrant intends to punish; the
effects of his act may be good, though he and his act are bad. Nevertheless, as
a broad general rule, a community of men and women who are intrinsically
excellent will have better effects than one composed of people who are
ignorant and malevolent. Apart from such considerations, children and
young people feel instinctively the difference between those who genuinely
wish them well and those who regard them merely as raw material for some

scheme. Neither character nor intelligence will develop as well or as freely
where the teacher is deficient in love; and love of this kind consists essentially
in feeling the child as an end. We all have this feeling about ourselves: we desire
good things for ourselves without first demanding a proof that some great
purpose will be furthered by our obtaining them. Every ordinarily affection-
ate parent feels the same sort of thing about his or her children. Parents want
their children to grow, to be strong and healthy, to do well at school, and so
on, in just the same way in which they want things for themselves; no effort
of self-denial and no abstract principle of justice is involved in taking trouble
about such matters. This parental instinct is not always strictly confined to
one’s own children. In its diffused form, it must exist in anyone who is to be
a good teacher of little boys and girls. As the pupils grow older, it grows less
important. But only those who possess it can be trusted to draw up schemes
of education. Those who regard it as one of the purposes of male education
to produce men willing to kill and be killed for frivolous reasons are clearly
deficient in diffused parental feeling; yet they control education in all civilized
countries except Denmark and China.
But it is not enough that the educator should love the young; it is necessary
also that he should have a right conception of human excellence. Cats teach
their kittens to catch mice and play with them; militarists do likewise with
the human young. The cat loves the kitten, but not the mouse; the militarist
may love his own son, but not the sons of his country’s enemies. Even those
who love all mankind may err through a wrong conception of the good
life. I shall try, therefore, before going any further, to give an idea of what
I consider excellent in men and women, quite without regard to practicality,
or to the educational methods by which it might be brought into being. Such
a picture will help us afterwards, when we come to consider the details of
education; we shall know the direction in which we wish to move.
We must first make a distinction: some qualities are desirable in a certain
proportion of mankind, others are desirable universally. We want artists, but
we also want men of science. We want great administrators, but we also want
ploughmen and millers and bakers. The qualities which produce a man of
great eminence in some one direction are often such as might be undesirable
if they were universal. Shelley describes the day’s work of a poet as follows:
He will watch from dawn to gloom

The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow-bees in the ivy bloom,
Nor heed nor see what things they be.
These habits are praiseworthy in a poet, but not—shall we say—in a postman.

We cannot therefore frame our education with a view to giving everyone the

temperament of a poet. But some characteristics are universally desirable, and
it is these alone that I shall consider at this stage.
I make no distinction whatever between male and female excellence.
A certain amount of occupational training is desirable for a woman who is to
have the care of babies, but that only involves the same sort of difference as
there is between a farmer and a miller. It is in no degree fundamental, and
does not demand consideration at our present level.
I will take four characteristics which seem to me jointly to form the basis
of an ideal character: vitality, courage, sensitiveness, and intelligence. I do not
suggest that this list is complete, but I think it carries us a good way. More-
over, I firmly believe that, by proper physical, emotional, and intellectual care
of the young, these qualities could all be made very common. I shall consider
each in turn.
Vitality is rather a physiological than a mental characteristic; it is presum-
ably always present where there is perfect health, but it tends to ebb with
advancing years, and gradually dwindles to nothing in old age. In vigorous
children it quickly rises to a maximum before they reach school age, and then
tends to be diminished by education. Where it exists, there is pleasure in
feeling alive, quite apart from any specific pleasant circumstance. It heightens
pleasures and diminishes pains. It makes it easy to take an interest in whatever
occurs, and thus promotes objectivity, which is an essential of sanity. Human
beings are prone to become absorbed in themselves, unable to be interested
in what they see and hear or in anything outside their own skins. This is a
great misfortune to themselves, since it entails at best boredom and at worst
melancholia; it is also a fatal barrier to usefulness, except in very exceptional
cases. Vitality promotes interest in the outside world; it also promotes the
power of hard work. Moreover, it is a safeguard against envy, because it makes
one’s own existence pleasant. As envy is one of the great sources of human
misery, this is a very important merit in vitality. Many bad qualities are of
course compatible with vitality—for example, those of a healthy tiger. And
many of the best qualities are compatible with its absence: Newton and
Locke, for example, had very little. Both these men, however, had irritabilities
and envies from which better health would have set them free. Probably the
whole of Newton’s controversy with Leibniz, which ruined English math-
ematics for over a hundred years, would have been avoided if Newton had
been robust and able to enjoy ordinary pleasures. In spite of its limitations,
therefore, I reckon vitality among the qualities which it is important that all
men should possess.
Courage—the second quality on our list—has several forms, and all of
them are complex. Absence of fear is one thing, and the power of controlling
fear is another. And absence of fear, in turn, is one thing when the fear is
rational, another when it is irrational. Absence of irrational fear is clearly

good; so is the power of controlling fear. But absence of rational fear is a
matter as to which debate is possible. However, I shall postpone this question
until I have said something about the other forms of courage.
Irrational fear plays an extraordinarily large part in the instinctive emo-
tional life of most people. In its pathological forms, as persecution mania,
anxiety complex, or what not, it is treated by alienists. But in milder forms it
is common among those who are considered sane. It may be a general feeling
that there are dangers about, more correctly termed ‘anxiety’, or a specific
dread of things that are not dangerous, such as mice or spiders.1 It used to be
supposed that many fears were instinctive, but this is now questioned by
most investigators. There are apparently a few instinctive fears—for instance,
of loud noises—but the great majority arise either from experience or from
suggestion. Fear of the dark, for example, seems to be entirely due to sugges-
tion. Vertebrates, there is reason to think, do not usually feel instinctive fear of
their natural enemies, but catch this emotion from their elders. When human
beings bring them up by hand, many fears usual among the species are found
to be absent. But fear is exceedingly infectious: children catch it from their
elders even when their elders are not aware of having shown it. Timidity in
mothers or nurses is very quickly imitated by children through suggestion.
Hitherto, men have thought it attractive in women to be full of irrational
terrors, because it gave men a chance to seem protective without incurring
any real danger. But the sons of these men have acquired the terrors from
their mothers, and have had to be afterwards trained to regain a courage
which they need never have lost if their fathers had not desired to despise
their mothers. The harm that has been done by the subjection of women is
incalculable; this matter of fear affords only one incidental illustration.
I am not at the moment discussing the methods by which fear and anxiety
may be minimized; that is a matter which I shall consider later. There is,
however, one question which arises at this stage, namely: can we be content
to deal with fear by means of repression, or must we find some more radical
cure? Traditionally, aristocracies have been trained not to show fear, while
subject nations, classes and sexes have been encouraged to remain cowardly.
The test of courage has been crudely behaviouristic: a man must not run away
in battle; he must be proficient in ‘manly’ sports; he must retain self-
command in fires, shipwrecks, earthquakes, etc. He must not merely do the
right thing, but he must avoid turning pale, or trembling, or gasping for
breath, or giving any other easily observed sign of fear. All this I regard as of
great importance: I should wish to see courage cultivated in all nations, in all
classes, and in both sexes. But when the method adopted is repressive, it
entails the evils usually associated with that practice. Shame and disgrace have
always been potent weapons in producing the appearance of courage; but in
fact they merely cause a conflict of terrors, in which it is hoped that the dread

of public condemnation will be the stronger. ‘Always speak the truth except
when something frightens you’ was a maxim taught to me in childhood.
I cannot admit the exception. Fear should be overcome not only in action, but
in feeling; and not only in conscious feeling, but in the unconscious as well.
The purely external victory over fear, which satisfies the aristocratic code,
leaves the impulse operative underground, and produces evil twisted reac-
tions which are not recognized as the offspring of terror. I am not thinking of
‘shell shock’, in which the connection with fear is obvious. I am thinking
rather of the whole system of oppression and cruelty by which dominant
castes seek to retain their ascendancy. When recently in Shanghai a British
officer ordered a number of unarmed Chinese students to be shot in the
back without warning, he was obviously actuated by terror just as much as a
soldier who runs away in battle. But military aristocracies are not sufficiently
intelligent to trace such actions to their psychological source; they regard
them rather as showing firmness and a proper spirit.
From the point of view of psychology and physiology, fear and rage are
closely analogous emotions; the man who feels rage is not possessed of the
highest kind of courage. The cruelty invariably displayed in suppressing
negro insurrections, communist rebellions, and other threats to aristocracy, is
an offshoot of cowardice, and deserves the same contempt as is bestowed
upon the more obvious forms of that vice. I believe that it is possible so to
educate ordinary men and women that they shall be able to live without fear.
Hitherto, only a few heroes and saints have achieved such a life; but what they
have done others could do if they were shown the way.
For the kind of courage which does not consist in repression, a number
of factors must be combined. To begin with the humblest: health and vitality
are very helpful, though not indispensable. Practice and skill in dangerous
situations are very desirable. But when we come to consider, not courage in
this or that respect, but universal courage, something more fundamental is
wanted. What is wanted is a combination of self-respect with an impersonal
outlook on life. To begin with self-respect: some men live from within, while
others are mere mirrors of what is felt and said by their neighbours. The latter
can never have true courage: they must have admiration, and are haunted by
the fear of losing it. The teaching of ‘humility’, which used to be thought
desirable, was the means of producing a perverted form of this same vice.
‘Humility’ suppressed self-respect, but not the desire for the respect of
others; it merely made nominal self-abasement the means of acquiring credit.
Thus it produced hypocrisy and falsification of instinct. Children were taught
unreasoning submission, and proceeded to exact it when they grew up; it
was said that only those who have learned to obey know how to command.
What I suggest is that no one should learn how to obey, and no one should
attempt to command. I do not mean, of course, that there should not be

leaders in co-operative enterprises; but their authority should be like that of
a captain of a football team, which is suffered voluntarily in order to achieve
a common purpose. Our purposes should be our own, not the result of
external authority; and our purposes should never be forcibly imposed upon
others. This is what I mean when I say no one should command and no one
should obey.
There is one thing more required for the highest courage, and that is what
I called just now an impersonal outlook on life. The man whose hopes and
fears are all centred upon himself can hardly view death with equanimity,
since it extinguishes his whole emotional universe. Here, again, we are met
by a tradition urging the cheap and easy way of repression: the saint must
learn to renounce Self, must mortify the flesh, and forgo instinctive joys. This
can be done, but its consequences are bad. Having renounced pleasure for
himself, the ascetic saint renounces it for others also, which is easier. Envy
persists underground, and leads him to the view that suffering is ennobling,
and may therefore be legitimately inflicted. Hence arises a complete inversion
of values: what is good is thought bad, and what is bad is thought good. The
source of all the harm is that the good life has been sought in obedience to a
negative imperative, not in broadening and developing natural desires and
instincts. There are certain things in human nature which take us beyond Self
without effort. The commonest of these is love, more particularly parental
love, which in some is so generalized as to embrace the whole human race.
Another is knowledge. There is no reason to suppose that Galileo was particu-
larly benevolent, yet he lived for an end which was not defeated by his death.
Another is art. But in fact every interest in something outside a man’s own
body makes his life to that degree impersonal. For this reason, paradoxical as
it may seem, a man of wide and vivid interests finds less difficulty in leaving
life than is experienced by some miserable hypochondriac whose interests
are bounded by his own ailments. Thus the perfection of courage is found in
the man of many interests, who feels his ego to be but a small part of the
world, not through despising himself, but through valuing much that is not
himself. This can hardly happen except where instinct is free and intelligence
is active. From the union of the two grows a comprehensiveness of outlook
unknown both to the voluptuary and to the ascetic; and to such an outlook
personal death appears a trivial matter. Such courage is positive and instinct-
ive, not negative and repressive. It is courage in this positive sense that
I regard as one of the major ingredients in a perfect character.
Sensitiveness, the third quality in our list, is in a sense a corrective of mere
courage. Courageous behaviour is easier for a man who fails to apprehend
dangers, but such courage may often be foolish. We cannot regard as satisfac-
tory any way of acting which is dependent upon ignorance or forgetfulness:
the fullest possible knowledge and realization are an essential part of what is

desirable. The cognitive aspect, however, comes under the head of intelli-
gence; sensitiveness, in the sense in which I am using the term, belongs to
the emotions. A purely theoretical definition would be that a person is emo-
tionally sensitive when many stimuli produce emotions in him; but taken
thus broadly the quality is not necessarily a good one. If sensitiveness is to be
good, the emotional reaction must be in some sense appropriate: mere intensity
is not what is needed. The quality I have in mind is that of being affected
pleasurably or the reverse by many things, and by the right things. What are
the right things, I shall try to explain. The first step, which most children take
at the age of about five months, is to pass beyond mere pleasures of sensation,
such as food and warmth, to the pleasure of social approbation. This pleasure,
as soon as it has arisen, develops very rapidly: every child loves praise and
hates blame. Usually the wish to be thought well of remains one of the
dominant motives throughout life. It is certainly very valuable as a stimulus
to pleasant behaviour, and as a restraint upon impulses of greed. If we were
wiser in our admirations, it might be much more valuable. But so long as
the most admired heroes are those who have killed the greatest number of
people, love of admiration cannot alone be adequate to the good life.
The next stage in the development of a desirable form of sensitiveness is
sympathy. There is a purely physical sympathy: a very young child will cry
because a brother or sister is crying. This, I suppose, affords the basis for the
further developments. The two enlargements that are needed are: first, to feel
sympathy even when the sufferer is not an object of special affection; sec-
ondly, to feel it when the suffering is merely known to be occurring, not
sensibly present. The second of these enlargements depends largely upon
intelligence. It may only go so far as sympathy with suffering which is
portrayed vividly and touchingly, as in a good novel; it may, on the other
hand, go so far as to enable a man to be moved emotionally by statistics. This
capacity for abstract sympathy is as rare as it is important. Almost everybody
is deeply affected when someone he loves suffers from cancer. Most people
are moved when they see the sufferings of unknown patients in hospitals. Yet
when they read that the death-rate from cancer is such-and-such, they are as a
rule only moved to momentary personal fear lest they or someone dear to
them should acquire the disease. The same is true of war: people think it
dreadful when their son or brother is mutilated, but they do not think it a
million times as dreadful that a million people should be mutilated. A man
who is full of kindliness in all personal dealings may derive his income
from incitement to war or from the torture of children in ‘backward’ coun-
tries. All these familiar phenomena are due to the fact that sympathy is
not stirred, in most people, by a merely abstract stimulus. A large proportion
of the evils in the modern world would cease if this could be remedied.
Science has greatly increased our power of affecting the lives of distant

people, without increasing our sympathy for them. Suppose you are a share-
holder in a company which manufactures cotton in Shanghai. You may be a
busy man, who has merely followed financial advice in making the invest-
ment; neither Shanghai nor cotton interest you, but only your dividends. Yet
you become part of the force leading to massacres of innocent people, and
your dividends would disappear if little children were not forced into
unnatural and dangerous toil. You do not mind, because you have never seen
the children, and an abstract stimulus cannot move you. That is the funda-
mental reason why large-scale industrialism is so cruel, and why oppression
of subject races is tolerated. An education producing sensitiveness to abstract
stimuli would make such things impossible.
Cognitive sensitiveness, which should also be included, is practically the
same thing as a habit of observation, and this is more naturally considered
in connection with intelligence. Aesthetic sensitiveness raises a number of
problems which I do not wish to discuss at this stage. I will therefore pass on
to the last of the four qualities we enumerated, namely, intelligence.
One of the great defects of traditional morality has been the low estimate
it placed upon intelligence. The Greeks did not err in this respect, but the
Church led men to think that nothing matters except virtue, and virtue con-
sists in abstinence from a certain list of actions arbitrarily labelled ‘sin’. So
long as this attitude persists, it is impossible to make men realize that intelli-
gence does more good than an artificial conventional ‘virtue’. When I speak
of intelligence, I include both actual knowledge and receptivity to know-
ledge. The two are, in fact, closely connected. Ignorant adults are unteachable;
on such matters as hygiene or diet, for example, they are totally incapable of
believing what science has to say. The more a man has learnt, the easier it is
for him to learn still more—always assuming that he has not been taught in a
spirit of dogmatism. Ignorant people have never been compelled to change
their mental habits, and have stiffened into an unchangeable attitude. It is not
only that they are credulous where they should be sceptical; it is just as much
that they are incredulous where they should be receptive. No doubt the word
‘intelligence’ properly signifies rather an aptitude for acquiring knowledge
than knowledge already acquired; but I do not think this aptitude is acquired
except by exercise, any more than the aptitude of a pianist or an acrobat. It is,
of course, possible to impart information in ways that do not train intelli-
gence; it is not only possible, but easy, and frequently done. But I do not
believe that it is possible to train intelligence without imparting information,
or at any rate causing knowledge to be acquired. And without intelligence
our complex modern world cannot subsist; still less can it make progress.
I regard the cultivation of intelligence, therefore, as one of the major pur-
poses of education. This might seem a commonplace, but in fact it is not. The
desire to instil what are regarded as correct beliefs has made educationists too

often indifferent to the training of intelligence. To make this clear, it is neces-
sary to define intelligence a little more closely, so as to discover the mental
habits which it requires. For this purpose I shall consider only the aptitude
for acquiring knowledge, not the store of actual knowledge which might
legitimately be included in the definition of intelligence.
The instinctive foundation of the intellectual life is curiosity, which is
found among animals in its elementary forms. Intelligence demands an alert
curiosity, but it must be of a certain kind. The sort that leads village neigh-
bours to try to peer through curtains after dark has no very high value. The
widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge, but by
malice: no one gossips about other people’s secret virtues, but only about
their secret vices. Accordingly most gossip is untrue, but care is taken not to
verify it. Our neighbour’s sins, like the consolations of religion, are so agree-
able that we do not stop to scrutinize the evidence closely. Curiosity properly
so-called, on the other hand, is inspired by a genuine love of knowledge. You
may see this impulse, in a moderately pure form, at work in a cat which has
been brought to a strange room, and proceeds to smell every corner and
every piece of furniture. You will see it also in children, who are passionately
interested when a drawer or cupboard, usually closed, is open for their
inspection. Animals, machines, thunderstorms, and all forms of manual
work, arouse the curiosity of children, whose thirst for knowledge puts the
most intelligent adult to shame. This impulse grows weaker with advancing
years until at last what is unfamiliar inspires only disgust, with no desire for
a closer acquaintance. This is the stage at which people announce that the
country is going to the dogs, and that ‘things are not what they were in my
young days’. The thing which is not the same as it was in that far-off time is
the speaker’s curiosity. And with the death of curiosity we may reckon that
active intelligence, also, has died.
But although curiosity lessens in intensity and in extent after childhood, it
may for a long time improve in quality. Curiosity about general propositions
shows a higher level of intelligence than curiosity about particular facts;
broadly speaking, the higher the order of generality, the greater is the intelli-
gence involved. (This rule, however, must not be taken too strictly.) Curiosity
dissociated from personal advantage shows a higher development than curi-
osity (say) with a chance of food. The cat that sniffs in a new room is not a
wholly disinterested scientific inquirer, but probably also wants to find out
whether there are mice about. Perhaps it is not quite correct to say that
curiosity is best when it is disinterested, but rather that it is best when the
connection with other interests is not direct and obvious, but discoverable
only by means of a certain degree of intelligence. This point, however, it is
not necessary for us to decide.
If curiosity is to be fruitful, it must be associated with a certain technique

for the acquisition of knowledge. There must be habits of observation, belief
in the possibility of knowledge, patience and industry. These things will
develop of themselves, given the original fund of curiosity and the proper
intellectual education. But since our intellectual life is only a part of our
activity, and since curiosity is perpetually coming into conflict with other
passions, there is need of certain intellectual virtues, such as open-
mindedness. We become impervious to new truth both from habit and from
desire; we find it hard to disbelieve what we have emphatically believed for a
number of years, and also what ministers to self-esteem or any other funda-
mental passion. Open-mindedness should therefore be one of the qualities
that education aims at producing. At present, this is only done to a very
limited extent, as is illustrated by the following paragraph from the Daily
Herald, July 31, 1925:
A special committee, appointed to inquire into the allegations of the subver-

sion of children’s minds in Bootle schools by their school teachers, has
placed its findings before the Bootle Borough Council. The Committee was of
opinion that the allegations were substantiated, but the Council deleted the
word ‘substantiated’ and stated that ‘the allegations gave cause for reason-
able inquiry’. A recommendation made by the Committee, and adopted by
the Council, was that in future appointments of teachers they shall undertake
to train the scholars in habits of reverence towards God and religion, and of
respect for the civil and religious institutions of the country.
Thus whatever may happen elsewhere, there is to be no open-mindedness

in Bootle. It is hoped that the Borough Council will shortly send a deputation
to Dayton, Tennessee, to obtain further light upon the best methods of carry-
ing out their programme. But perhaps that is unnecessary. From the wording
of the resolution, it would seem as if Bootle needed no instruction in
obscurantism.
Courage is essential to intellectual probity, as well as to physical heroism.
The real world is more unknown than we like to think; from the first day of
life we practise precarious inductions, and confound our mental habits with
laws of external nature. All sorts of intellectual systems—Christianity, Social-
ism, Patriotism, etc.—are ready, like orphan asylums, to give safety in return
for servitude. A free mental life cannot be as warm and comfortable and
sociable as a life enveloped in a creed: only a creed can give the feeling of
a cosy fireside while the winter storms are raging without.
This brings us to a somewhat difficult question: to what extent should the
good life be emancipated from the herd? I hesitate to use the phrase ‘herd
instinct’, because there are controversies as to its correctness. But, however
interpreted, the phenomena which it describes are familiar. We like to stand

well with those whom we feel to be the group with which we wish to
co-operate—our family, our neighbours, our colleagues, our political party,
or our nation. This is natural, because we cannot obtain any of the pleasures
of life without co-operation. Moreover, emotions are infectious, especially
when they are felt by many people at once. Very few people can be present at
an excited meeting without getting excited: if they are opponents, their
opposition becomes excited. And to most people such opposition is only
possible if they can derive support from the thought of a different crowd in
which they will win approbation. That is why the Communion of Saints has
afforded such comfort to the persecuted. Are we to acquiesce in this desire
for co-operation with a crowd, or shall our education try to weaken it? There
are arguments on both sides, and the right answer must consist in finding
a just proportion, not in a whole-hearted decision for either party.
I think myself that the desire to please and to co-operate should be strong
and normal, but should be capable of being overcome by other desires on
certain important occasions. The desirability of a wish to please has already
been considered in connection with sensitiveness. Without it, we should all
be boors, and all social groups, from the family upwards, would be impos-
sible, Education of young children would be very difficult if they did not
desire the good opinion of their parents. The contagious character of emo-
tions also has its uses, when the contagion is from a wiser person to a more
foolish one. But in the case of panic fear and panic rage it is of course the very
reverse of useful. Thus the question of emotional receptivity is by no means
simple. Even in purely intellectual matters, the issue is not clear. The great
discoverers have had to withstand the herd, and incur hostility by their
independence. But the average man’s opinions are much less foolish than
they would be if he thought for himself: in science, at least, his respect for
authority is on the whole beneficial.
I think that in the life of a man whose circumstances are not very
exceptional there should be a large sphere where what is vaguely termed herd
instinct dominates, and a small sphere into which it does not penetrate. The
small sphere should contain the region of his special competence. We think
ill of a man who cannot admire a woman unless everybody else also admires
her: we think that in the choice of a wife a man should be guided by his own
independent feelings, not by a reflection of the feelings of his society. It is no
matter if his judgments of people in general agree with those of his neigh-
bours, but when he falls in love he ought to be guided by his own independ-
ent feelings. Much the same thing applies in other directions. A farmer should
follow his own judgment as to the capacities of the fields which he cultivates
himself, though his judgment should be formed after acquiring a knowledge
of scientific agriculture. An economist should form an independent
judgment on currency questions but an ordinary mortal had better follow

authority. Wherever there is special competence, there should be independ-
ence. But a man should not make himself into a kind of hedgehog, all bristles
to keep the world at a distance. The bulk of our ordinary activities must be
co-operative, and co-operation must have an instinctive basis. Nevertheless,
we should all learn to be able to think for ourselves about matters that are
particularly well known to us, and we ought all to have acquired the courage
to proclaim unpopular opinions when we believe them to be important. The
application of these broad principles in special cases may, of course, be
difficult. But it will be less difficult than it is at present in a world where men
commonly have the virtues we have been considering in this chapter. The
persecuted saint, for instance, would not exist in such a world. The good man
would have no occasion to bristle and become self-conscious; his goodness
would result from following his impulses, and would be combined with
instinctive happiness. His neighbours would not hate him, because they
would not fear him; the hatred of pioneers is due to the terror they inspire,
and this terror would not exist among men who had acquired courage. Only
a man dominated by fear would join the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascisti. In a
world of brave men, such persecuting organizations could not exist, and the
good life would involve far less resistance to instinct than it does at present.
The good world can only be created and sustained by fearless men, but the
more they succeed in their task the fewer occasions there will be for the
exercise of their courage.
A community of men and women possessing vitality, courage, sensitive-
ness and intelligence, in the highest degree that education can produce,
would be very different from anything that has hitherto existed. Very few
people would be unhappy. The main causes of unhappiness at present are: ill-
health, poverty and an unsatisfactory sex life. All of these would become very
rare. Good health could be almost universal, and even old age could be
postponed. Poverty, since the industrial revolution, is only due to collective
stupidity. Sensitiveness would make people wish to abolish it, intelligence
would show them the way, and courage would lead them to adopt it. (A
timid person would rather remain miserable than do anything unusual.)
Most people’s sex life, at present, is more or less unsatisfactory. This is partly
due to bad education, partly to persecution by the authorities and Mrs
Grundy. A generation of women brought up without irrational sex fears
would soon make an end of this. Fear has been thought the only way to make
women ‘virtuous’, and they have been deliberately taught to be cowards,
both physically and mentally. Women in whom love is cramped encourage
brutality and hypocrisy in their husbands, and distort the instincts of their
children. One generation of fearless women could transform the world, by
bringing into it a generation of fearless children, not contorted into
unnatural shapes, but straight and candid, generous, affectionate, and free.

Their ardour would sweep away the cruelty and pain which we endure
because we are lazy, cowardly, hard-hearted, and stupid. It is education that
gives us these bad qualities, and education that must give us the opposite
virtues. Education is the key to the new world.
(On Education, London: Allen & Unwin; Education and the Good Life,
New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926.)
NOTE
1 On fear and anxiety in childhood, see e.g. William Stern, Psychology of Early Childhood,
chapter xxxv. (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1924.)

47
EMOTION AND DISCIPLINE
Education has at all times had a twofold aim, namely instruction and training
in good conduct. The conception of good conduct varies with the political
institutions and social traditions of the community. In the middle ages, when
there was a hierarchical organization proceeding from the serf by gradual
stages up to God, the chief virtue was obedience. Children were taught to
obey their parents and to reverence their social superiors, to feel awe in the
presence of the priest and submission in the presence of the Lord of the
Manor. Only the Emperor and the Pope were free, and, since the morality of
the time afforded no guidance to free men, they spent their time in fighting
each other. The moderns differ from the men of the thirteenth century both
in aim and in method. Democracy has substituted co-operation for submis-
sion and herd instinct for reverence; the group in regard to which herd
instinct is to be most operative has become the nation, which was formerly
rendered unimportant by the universality of the Church. Meanwhile propa-
ganda has become persuasive rather than forceful, and has learnt to proceed
by the instilling of suitable sentiments in early youth. Church music, school
songs, and the flag determine, by their influence on the boy, the subsequent
actions of the man in moments of strong emotion. Against these influences
the assaults of reason have but little power.
The influence of political conceptions on early education is not always
obvious, and is often unconcious on the part of the educator. For the present,
therefore, I wish to consider education in behaviour with as little regard as
possible to the social order, to which I shall return at a later stage.
When it is sought to produce a certain kind of behaviour in a child or
animal, there are two different techniques which may be followed. We may,
on the one hand, by means of rewards and punishments cause the child or

emotion and discipline 409
animal to perform or abstain from certain precise acts; or we may, on the
other hand, seek to produce in the child or animal such emotions as will lead,
on the whole, to acts of the kind desired.
By a suitable distribution of rewards and punishments, it is possible to
control a very large part of overt behaviour.
Usually the only form of reward or punishment required will be praise or
blame. By this method boys who are naturally timid can acquire physical
courage, and children who are sensitive to pain can be taught a stocial endur-
ance. Good manners, if not imposed earlier, can be learnt in adolescence by
means of no worse punishment than the contemptuous lifting of an eyebrow.
What is called ‘good form’ is acquired by almost all who are exposed to it,
merely from fear of the bad opinion incurred by infringing it. Those who
have been taught from an early age to fear the displeasure of their group as
the worst of misfortunes will die on the battlefield, in a war of which they
understand nothing, rather than suffer the contempt of fools. The English
public schools have carried this system to perfection, and have largely steril-
ized intelligence by making it cringe before the herd. This is what is called
making a boy manly.
As a social force, the behaviourist method of ‘conditioning’ is therefore
very powerful and very successful. It can and does cause men to act in ways
quite different from those in which they would otherwise have acted,
and it is capable of producing an impressive uniformity of overt behaviour.
Nevertheless, it has its limitations.
It was through Freud that these limitations first became known in a scien-
tific manner, though men of psychological insight had long ago perceived
them in an intuitive way. For our purposes, the essential discovery of psycho-
analysis is this: that an impulse which is prevented, by behaviourist methods,
from finding overt expression in action, does not necessarily die, but is
driven underground, and finds some new outlet which has not been
inhibited by training. Often the new outlet will be more harmful than the one
that has been prevented, and in any case the deflection involves emotional
disturbance and unprofitable expenditure of energy. It is therefore necessary
to pay more attention to emotion, as opposed to overt behaviour, than is done
by those who advocate conditioning as alone sufficient in the training of
character.
There are, moreover, some undesirable habits in regard to which the
method of rewards and punishments fails completely, even from its own
point of view. One of these is bed-wetting. When this persists beyond the age
at which it usually stops, punishment only makes it more obstinate. Although
this fact has long been known to psychologists, it is still unknown to most
schoolmasters, who for years on end punish boys having this habit, without
ever noticing that the punishment does not produce reform. The cause of the

habit, in older boys, is usually some deep-seated unconscious psychological
disturbance, which must be brought to the surface before a cure can be
effected.
The same kind of psychological mechanism applies in many less obvious
instances. In the case of definite nervous disorders this is now widely recog-
nized. Kleptomania, for example, is not uncommon in children, and, unlike
ordinary thieving, it cannot be cured by punishment, but only by ascertain-
ing and removing its psychological cause. What is less recognized is that we
all suffer, to a greater or less degree, from nervous disorders having an emo-
tional origin. A man is called sane when he is as sane as the average of his
contemporaries; but in the average man many of the mechanisms which
determine his opinions and actions are quite fantastic, so much so that in a
world of real sanity they would be called insane. It is dangerous to produce
good social behaviour by means which leave the anti-social emotions
untouched. So long as these emotions, while persisting, are denied all outlet,
they will grow stronger and stronger, leading to impulses of cruelty which
will at last become irresistible. In the man of weak will, these impulses may
break out in crime, or in some form of behaviour to which social penalties
are attached. In the man of strong will, they take even more undesirable
forms. He may be a tyrant in the home, ruthless in business, bellicose in
politics, persecuting in his social morality; for all these qualities other men
with similar defects of character will admire him; he will die universally
respected, after having spread hatred and misery over a city, a nation, or an
epoch according to his ability and his opportunities. Correct behaviour com-
bined with bad emotions is not enough, therefore, to make a man a contribu-
tor to the happiness of mankind. If this is our criterion of desirable conduct,
something more must be sought in the education of character.
Such considerations, as well as the sympathetic observation of children,
suggest that the behaviourist method of training character is inadequate, and
needs to be supplemented by a quite different method.
Experience of children shows that it is possible to operate upon feeling,
and not only upon outward behaviour, by giving children an environment in
which desirable emotions shall become common and undesirable emotions
rare. Some children (and some adults) are of a cheerful disposition, others
are morose; some are easily contented with any pleasure that offers, while
others are inconsolable unless they can have the particular pleasure on which
their hearts are set; some, in the absence of evidence, regard the bulk of
human beings with friendly confidence, while others regard most people
with terrified suspicion. The prevalent emotional attitude of the child gener-
ally remains that of the adult, though in later life men learn to conceal their
timidities and grudges by disguises of greater or lesser effectiveness. It is
therefore very important that children should have predominantly those

emotion and discipline 411
emotional attitudes which, both in childhood and subsequently, will make
them happy, successful, and useful, rather than those that lead to unhappi-
ness, failure, and malevolence. There is no doubt that it is within the power of
psychology to determine the kind of environment that promotes desirable
emotions, and that often intelligent affection without science can arrive at the
right result. When this method is rightly used, its effect on character is more
radical and far more satisfactory than the effect to be obtained by rewards and
punishments.
The right emotional environment for a child is a delicate matter, and of
course varies with the child’s age. Throughout childhood, though to a con-
tinually diminishing extent, there is need of the feeling of safety. For this
purpose, kindness and a pleasant routine are the essentials. The relation with
adults should be one of play and physical ease, but not of emotional caresses.
There should be close intimacy with other children. Above all, there should
be opportunity for initiative in construction, in exploration, and in intel-
lectual and artistic directions. The child has two opposite needs, safety and
freedom, of which the latter gradually grows at the expense of the former.
The affection given by adults should be such as to cause a feeling of safety,
but not such as to limit freedom or to arouse a deep emotional response in
the child. Play, which is a vital need of childhood, should be contributed not
only by other children, but also by parents, and is essential to the best relation
between parents and children.
Freedom is the most difficult element to secure under existing conditions.
I am not an advocate of absolute freedom, for reasons which we considered
in an earlier chapter; but I am an advocate of certain forms of freedom which
most adults find unendurable. There should be no enforced respect for
grown-ups, who should allow themselves to be called fools whenever chil-
dren wish to call them so. We cannot prevent our children from thinking us
fools by merely forbidding them to utter their thoughts; in fact, they are
more likely to think ill of us if they dare not say so. Children should not be
forbidden to swear—not because it is desirable that they should swear, but
because it is desirable that they should think that it does not matter whether
they do or not, since this is a true proposition. They should be free entirely
from the sex taboo, and not checked when their conversation seems to
inhibited adults to be indecent. If they express opinions on religion or politics
or morals, they may be met with argument, provided it is genuine argument,
but not if it is really dogma: the adult may, and should, suggest considerations
to them, but should not impose conclusions.
Given such conditions, children may grow up fearless and fundamentally
happy, without the resentment that comes of thwarting or the excessive
demands that are produced by an atmosphere of hothouse affection. Their
intelligence will be untrammelled, and their views on human affairs will have

the kindliness that comes of contentment. A world of human beings with this
emotional equipment would make short work of our social system, with its
wars, its oppressions, its economic injustice, its horror of free speech and free
inquiry, and its superstitious moral code. The toleration of these evils
depends upon timidity in thought and malevolent feeling due to lack of
freedom. Dr Watson, who minimizes the congenital aspects of character,
nevertheless allows, as one of the unlearnt reactions of infants, rage at any
constriction of the limbs. This instinctive emotion is the basis of the love of
freedom. The man whose tongue is constricted by laws or taboos against free
speech, whose pen is constricted by the censorship, whose loves are con-
stricted by an ethic which considers jealousy a better thing than affection,
whose childhood has been imprisoned in a code of manners and whose
youth has been drilled in a cruel orthodoxy, will feel against the world that
hampers him the same rage that is felt by the infant whose arms and legs are
held motionless. In his rage he will turn to destruction, becoming a revo-
lutionary, a militarist, or a persecuting moralist according to temperament
and opportunity. To make human beings who will create a better world is a
problem in emotional psychology: it is the problem of making human beings
who have a free intelligence combined with a happy disposition. This prob-
lem is not beyond the powers of science; it is the will, not the power, that is
lacking.
(Education and the Social Order, London: Allen & Unwin; Education and
the Modern World, New York: W. W. Norton, 1932.)

48
THE FUNCTIONS OF A TEACHER
Teaching, more even than most other professions, has been transformed
during the last hundred years from a small, highly skilled profession con-
cerned with a minority of the population, to a large and important branch of
the public service. The profession has a great and honourable tradition,
extending from the dawn of history until recent times, but any teacher in the
modern world who allows himself to be inspired by the ideals of his pre-
decessors is likely to be made sharply aware that it is not his function to teach
what he thinks, but to instil such beliefs and prejudices as are thought useful
by his employers. In former days a teacher was expected to be a man of
exceptional knowledge or wisdom, to whose words men would do well to
attend. In antiquity, teachers were not an organized profession, and no con-
trol was exercised over what they taught. It is true that they were often
punished afterwards for their subversive doctrines. Socrates was put to death
and Plato is said to have been thrown into prison, but such incidents did not
interfere with the spread of their doctrines. Any man who has the genuine
impulse of the teacher will be more anxious to survive in his books than in
the flesh. A feeling of intellectual independence is essential to the proper
fulfilment of the teacher’s functions, since it is his business to instil what he
can of knowledge and reasonableness into the process of forming public
opinion. In antiquity he performed this function unhampered except by
occasional spasmodic and ineffective interventions of tyrants or mobs. In the
middle ages teaching became the exclusive prerogative of the Church, with
the result that there was little progress either intellectual or social. With the
Renaissance, the general respect for learning brought back a very consider-
able measure of freedom to the teacher. It is true that the Inquisition com-
pelled Galileo to recant, and burnt Giordano Bruno at the stake, but each of

these men had done his work before being punished. Institutions such as
universities largely remained in the grip of the dogmatists, with the result
that most of the best intellectual work was done by independent men of
learning. In England, especially, until near the end of the nineteenth century,
hardly any men of first-rate eminence except Newton were connected with
universities. But the social system was such that this interfered little with their
activities or their usefulness.
In our more highly organized world we face a new problem. Something
called education is given to everybody, usually by the State, but sometimes by
the Churches. The teacher has thus become, in the vast majority of cases, a
civil servant obliged to carry out the behests of men who have not his
learning, who have no experience of dealing with the young, and whose only
attitude towards education is that of the propagandist. It is not very easy to
see how, in these circumstances, teachers can perform the functions for
which they are specially fitted.
State education is obviously necessary, but as obviously involves certain
dangers against which there ought to be safeguards. The evils to be feared
were seen in their full magnitude in Nazi Germany and are still seen in Russia.
Where these evils prevail no man can teach unless he subscribes to a dogmatic
creed which few people of free intelligence are likely to accept sincerely. Not
only must he subscribe to a creed, but he must condone abominations and
carefully abstain from speaking his mind on current events. So long as he is
teaching only the alphabet and the multiplication table, as to which no con-
troversies arise, official dogmas do not necessarily warp his instruction; but
even while he is teaching these elements he is expected, in totalitarian coun-
tries, not to employ the methods which he thinks most likely to achieve the
scholastic result, but to instil fear, subservience, and blind obedience by
demanding unquestioned submission to his authority. And as soon as he
passes beyond the bare elements, he is obliged to take the official view on all
controversial questions. The result is that the young in Nazi Germany
became, and Russia become, fanatical bigots, ignorant of the world outside
their own country, totally unaccustomed to free discussion, and not aware
that their opinions can be questioned without wickedness. This state of
affairs, bad as it is, would be less disastrous than it is if the dogmas instilled
were, as in medieval Catholicism, universal and international; but the whole
conception of an international culture is denied by the modern dogmatists,
who preached one creed in Germany, another in Italy, another in Russia and
yet another in Japan. In each of these countries fanatical nationalism was
what was most emphasized in the teaching of the young, with the result that
the men of one country have no common ground with the men of another,
and that no conception of a common civilization stands in the way of warlike
ferocity.

the functions of a teacher 415
The decay of cultural internationalism has proceeded at a continually
increasing pace ever since the First World War. When I was in Leningrad in
1920, I met the Professor of Pure Mathematics, who was familiar with London,
Paris, and other capitals, having been a member of various international
congresses. Nowadays the learned men of Russia are very seldom permitted
such excursions, for fear of their drawing comparisons unfavourable to their
own country. In other countries nationalism in learning is less extreme, but
everywhere it is far more powerful than it was. There is a tendency in England
(and, I believe, in the United States) to dispense with Frenchmen and Germans
in the teaching of French and German. The practice of considering a man’s
nationality rather than his competence in appointing him to a post is dam-
aging to education and an offence against the ideal of international culture,
which was a heritage from the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, but is
now being submerged under a new barbarian invasion, proceeding from
below rather than from without.
In democratic countries these evils have not yet reached anything like the
same proportions, but it must be admitted that there is grave danger of
similar developments in education, and that this danger can only be averted if
those who believe in liberty of thought are on the alert to protect teachers
from intellectual bondage. Perhaps the first requisite is a clear conception of
the services which teachers can be expected to perform for the community.
I agree with the governments of the world that the imparting of definite
uncontroversial information is one of the least of the teacher’s functions. It is,
of course, the basis upon which the others are built, and in a technical
civilization such as ours it has undoubtedly a considerable utility. There must
exist in a modern community a sufficient number of men who possess the
technical skill required to preserve the mechanical apparatus upon which our
physical comforts depend. It is, moreover, inconvenient if any large percent-
age of the population is unable to read and write. For these reasons we are all
in favour of universal compulsory education. But governments have per-
ceived that it is easy, in the course of giving instruction, to instil beliefs on
controversial matters and to produce habits of mind which may be conveni-
ent or inconvenient to those in authority. The defence of the state in all
civilized countries is quite as much in the hands of teachers as in those of the
armed forces. Except in totalitarian countries, the defence of the state is
desirable, and the mere fact that education is used for this purpose is not in
itself a ground of criticism. Criticism will only arise if the state is defended by
obscurantism and appeals to irrational passion. Such methods are quite
unnecessary in the case of any state worth defending. Nevertheless, there is a
natural tendency towards their adoption by those who have no first-hand
knowledge of education. There is a widespread belief that nations are made
strong by uniformity of opinion and by the suppression of liberty. One hears

it said over and over again that democracy weakens a country in war, in spite
of the fact that in every important war since the year 1700 the victory has
gone to the more democratic side. Nations have been brought to ruin much
more often by insistence upon a narrow-minded doctrinal uniformity than
by free discussion and the toleration of divergent opinions. Dogmatists the
world over believe that although the truth is known to them, others will be
led into false beliefs provided they are allowed to hear the arguments on both
sides. This is a view which leads to one or another of two misfortunes: either
one set of dogmatists conquers the world and prohibits all new ideas, or,
what is worse, rival dogmatists conquer different regions and preach the
gospel of hate against each other, the former of these evils existing in the
middle ages, the latter during the wars of religion, and again in the present
day. The first makes civilization static, the second tends to destroy it com-
pletely. Against both, the teacher should be the main safeguard.
It is obvious that organized party spirit is one of the greatest dangers of our
time. In the form of nationalism it leads to wars between nations, and in
other forms it leads to civil war. It should be the business of teachers to stand
outside the strife of parties and endeavour to instil into the young the habit of
impartial inquiry, leading them to judge issues on their merits and to be on
their guard against accepting ex parte statements at their face value. The teacher
should not be expected to flatter the prejudices either of the mob or of
officials. His professional virtue should consist in a readiness to do justice to
all sides, and in an endeavour to rise above controversy into a region of
dispassionate scientific investigation. If there are people to whom the results
of his investigation are inconvenient, he should be protected against their
resentment, unless it can be shown that he has lent himself to dishonest
propaganda by the dissemination of demonstrable untruths.
The function of the teacher, however, is not merely to mitigate the heat of
current controversies. He has more positive tasks to perform, and he cannot
be a great teacher unless he is inspired by a wish to perform these tasks.
Teachers are more than any other class the guardians of civilization. They
should be intimately aware of what civilization is, and desirous of imparting
a civilized attitude to their pupils. We are thus brought to the question: what
constitutes a civilized community?
This question would very commonly be answered by pointing to merely
material tests. A country is civilized if it has much machinery, many motor
cars, many bathrooms, and a great deal of rapid locomotion. To these things,
in my opinion, most modern men attach much too much importance. Civil-
ization in the more important sense, is a thing of the mind, not of material
adjuncts to the physical side of living. It is a matter partly of knowledge,
partly of emotion. So far as knowledge is concerned, a man should be aware
of the minuteness of himself and his immediate environment in relation to

the world in time and space. He should see his own country not only as home,
but as one among the countries of the world, all with an equal right to live
and think and feel. He should see his own age in relation to the past and the
future, and be aware that its own controversies will seem as strange to future
ages as those of the past seem to us now. Taking an even wider view, he
should be conscious of the vastness of geological epochs and astronomical
abysses; but he should be aware of all this, not as a weight to crush the
individual human spirit, but as a vast panorama which enlarges the mind that
contemplates it. On the side of the emotions, a very similar enlargement from
the purely personal is needed if a man is to be truly civilized. Men pass from
birth to death, sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy; sometimes generous,
sometimes grasping and petty; sometimes heroic, sometimes cowardly and
servile. To the man who views the procession as a whole, certain things stand
out as worthy of admiration. Some men have been inspired by love of man-
kind; some by supreme intellect have helped us to understand the world in
which we live; and some by exceptional sensitiveness have created beauty.
These men have produced something of positive good to outweigh the long
record of cruelty, oppression, and superstition. These men have done what
lay in their power to make human life a better thing than the brief turbulence
of savages. The civilized man, where he cannot admire, will aim rather at
understanding than at reprobating. He will seek rather to discover and
remove the impersonal causes of evil than to hate the men who are in its grip.
All this should be in the mind and heart of the teacher, and if it is in his mind
and heart he will convey it in his teaching to the young who are in his care.
No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection
towards his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he himself
believes to be of value. This is not the attitude of the propagandist. To the
propagandist his pupils are potential soldiers in an army. They are to serve
purposes that lie outside their own lives, not in the sense in which every
generous purpose transcends self, but in the sense of ministering to unjust
privilege or to despotic power. The propagandist does not desire that his
pupils should survey the world and freely choose a purpose which to them
appears of value. He desires, like a topiarian artist, that their growth shall be
trained and twisted to suit the gardener’s purpose. And in thwarting their
natural growth he is apt to destroy in them all generous vigour, replacing it
by envy, destructiveness, and cruelty. There is no need for men to be cruel;
on the contrary, I am persuaded that most cruelty results from thwarting in
early years, above all from thwarting what is good.
Repressive and persecuting passions are very common, as the present state
of the world only too amply proves. But they are not an inevitable part of
human nature. On the contrary, they are, I believe, always the outcome of
some kind of unhappiness. It should be one of the functions of the teacher to

open vistas before his pupils showing them the possibility of activities that
will be as delightful as they are useful, thereby letting loose their kind
impulses and preventing the growth of a desire to rob others of joys that they
will have missed. Many people decry happiness as an end, both for them-
selves and for others, but one may suspect them of sour grapes. It is one thing
to forgo personal happiness for a public end, but it is quite another to treat
the general happiness as a thing of no account. Yet this is often done in the
name of some supposed heroism. In those who take this attitude there is
generally some vein of cruelty based probably upon an unconscious envy,
and the source of the envy will usually be found in childhood or youth. It
should be the aim of the educator to train adults free from these psycho-
logical misfortunes, and not anxious to rob others of happiness because they
themselves have not been robbed of it.
As matters stand today, many teachers are unable to do the best of which
they are capable. For this there are a number of reasons, some more or less
accidental, others very deep-seated. To begin with the former, most teachers
are overworked and are compelled to prepare their pupils for examinations
rather than to give them a liberalizing mental training. The people who are
not accustomed to teaching—and this includes practically all educational
authorities—have no idea of the expense of spirit that it involves. Clergymen
are not expected to preach sermons for several hours every day, but the
analogous effort is demanded of teachers. The result is that many of them
become harassed and nervous, out of touch with recent work in the subjects
that they teach, and unable to inspire their students with a sense of the
intellectual delights to be obtained from new understanding and new
knowledge.
This, however, is by no means the gravest matter. In most countries certain
opinions are recognized as correct, and others as dangerous. Teachers whose
opinions are not correct are expected to keep silent about them. If they
mention their opinions it is propaganda, while the mentioning of correct
opinions is considered to be merely sound instruction. The result is that the
inquiring young too often have to go outside the classroom to discover what
is being thought by the most vigorous minds of their own time. There is in
America a subject called civics, in which, perhaps more than in any other, the
teaching is expected to be misleading. The young are taught a sort of copy-
book account of how public affairs are supposed to be conducted, and are
carefully shielded from all knowledge as to how in fact they are conducted.
When they grow up and discover the truth, the result is too often a complete
cynicism in which all public ideals are lost; whereas if they had been taught
the truth carefully and with proper comment at an earlier age they might
have become men able to combat evils in which, as it is, they acquiesce with
a shrug.

The idea that falsehood is edifying is one of the besetting sins of those who
draw up educational schemes. I should not myself consider that a man could
be a good teacher unless he had made a firm resolve never in the course of his
teaching to conceal truth because it is what is called ‘unedifying’. The kind of
virtue that can be produced by guarded ignorance is frail and fails at the first
touch of reality. There are, in this world, many men who deserve admiration,
and it is good that the young should be taught to see the ways in which these
men are admirable. But it is not good to teach them to admire rogues by
concealing their roguery. It is thought that the knowledge of things as they
are will lead to cynicism, and so it may do if the knowledge comes suddenly
with a shock of surprise and horror. But if it comes gradually, duly inter-
mixed with a knowledge of what is good, and in the course of a scientific
study inspired by the wish to get at the truth, it will have no such effect. In
any case, to tell lies to the young, who have no means of checking what they
are told, is morally indefensible.
The thing, above all, that a teacher should endeavour to produce in his
pupils if democracy is to survive, is the kind of tolerance that springs from an
endeavour to understand those who are different from ourselves. It is perhaps
a natural human impulse to view with horror and disgust all manners and
customs different from those to which we are used. Ants and savages put
strangers to death. And those who have never travelled either physically or
mentally find it difficult to tolerate the queer ways and outlandish beliefs of
other nations and other times, other sects and other political parties. This
kind of ignorant intolerance is the antithesis of a civilized outlook, and is one
of the gravest dangers to which our overcrowded world is exposed. The
educational system ought to be designed to correct it, but much too little is
done in this direction at present. In every country nationalistic feeling is
encouraged, and school children are taught, what they are only too ready to
believe, that the inhabitants of other countries are morally and intellectually
inferior to those of the country in which the school children happen to
reside. Collective hysteria, the most mad and cruel of all human emotions, is
encouraged instead of being discouraged, and the young are encouraged to
believe what they hear frequently said rather than what there is some rational
ground for believing. In all this the teachers are not to blame. They are not
free to teach as they would wish. It is they who know most intimately the
needs of the young. It is they who through daily contact have come to care for
them. But it is not they who decide what shall be taught or what the methods
of instruction are to be. There ought to be a great deal more freedom than
there is for the scholastic profession. It ought to have more opportunities of
self-determination, more independence from the interference of bureaucrats
and bigots. No one would consent in our day to subject the medical men to
the control of non-medical authorities as to how they should treat their

patients, except of course where they depart criminally from the purpose of
medicine, which is to cure the patient. The teacher is a kind of medical man
whose purpose is to cure the patient of childishness, but he is not allowed to
decide for himself on the basis of experience what methods are most suitable
to this end. A few great historic universities, by the weight of their prestige,
have secured virtual self-determination, but the immense majority of edu-
cational institutions are hampered and controlled by men who do not under-
stand the work with which they are interfering. The only way to prevent
totalitarianism in our highly organized world is to secure a certain degree of
independence for bodies performing useful public work, and among such
bodies teachers deserve a foremost place.
The teacher, like the artist, the philosopher, and the man of letters, can only
perform his work adequately if he feels himself to be an individual directed
by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside
authority. It is very difficult in this modern world to find a place for the
individual. He can subsist at the top as a dictator in a totalitarian state or a
plutocratic magnate in a country of large industrial enterprises, but in the
realm of the mind it is becoming more and more difficult to preserve
independence of the great organized forces that control the livelihoods of
men and women. If the world is not to lose the benefit to be derived from its
best minds, it will have to find some method of allowing them scope and
liberty in spite of organization. This involves a deliberate restraint on the part
of those who have power, and a conscious realization that there are men to
whom free scope must be afforded. Renaissance Popes could feel in this way
towards Renaissance artists, but the powerful men of our day seem to have
more difficulty in feeling respect for exceptional genius. The turbulence of
our times is inimical to the fine flower of culture. The man in the street is full
of fear, and therefore unwilling to tolerate freedoms for which he sees no
need. Perhaps we must wait for quieter times before the claims of civilization
can again override the claims of party spirit. Meanwhile, it is important that
some at least should continue to realize the limitations of what can be done
by organization. Every system should allow loopholes and exceptions, for if it
does not it will in the end crush all that is best in man.
(Harper’s Magazine, June 1940, subsequently reprinted in Unpopular
Essays, London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Simon & Schuster,
1950.)

52
WHY I AM NOT A COMMUNIST1
In relation to any political doctrine there are two questions to be asked:

(1) Are its theoretical tenets true? (2) Is its practical policy likely to increase
human happiness? For my part, I think the theoretical tenets of Communism
are false, and I think its practical maxims are such as to produce an
immeasurable increase of human misery.
The theoretical doctrines of Communism are for the most part derived
from Marx. My objections to Marx are of two sorts: one, that he was muddle-
headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by
hatred. The doctrine of surplus value, which is supposed to demonstrate the
exploitation of wage-earners under capitalism, is arrived at: (a) by surrepti-
tiously accepting Malthus’s doctrine of population, which Marx and all his
disciples explicitly repudiate; (b) by applying Ricardo’s theory of value to
wages, but not to the prices of manufactured articles. He is entirely satisfied
with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it
is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-
earners. Marx’s doctrine that all historical events have been motivated by
class conflicts is a rash and untrue extension to world history of certain
features prominent in England and France a hundred years ago. His belief that
there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human
history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology. His theoretical
errors, however, would not have mattered so much but for the fact that, like
Tertullian and Carlyle, his chief desire was to see his enemies punished, and
he cared little what happened to his friends in the process.
Marx’s doctrine was bad enough, but the developments which it under-
went under Lenin and Stalin made it much worse. Marx had taught that there
would be a revolutionary transitional period following the victory of the

proletariat in a civil war and that during this period the proletariat, in accord-
ance with the usual practice after a civil war, would deprive its vanquished
enemies of political power. This period was to be that of the dictatorship of
the proletariat. It should not be forgotten that in Marx’s prophetic vision the
victory of the proletariat was to come after it had grown to be the vast
majority of the population. The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore as
conceived by Marx was not essentially anti-democratic. In the Russia of 1917,
however, the proletariat was a small percentage of the population, the great
majority being peasants. It was decreed that the Bolshevik party was the class-
conscious part of the proletariat, and that a small committee of its leaders
was the class-conscious part of the Bolshevik party. The dictatorship of the
proletariat thus came to be the dictatorship of a small committee, and ultim-
ately of one man—Stalin. As the sole class-conscious proletarian, Stalin con-
demned millions of peasants to death by starvation and millions of others to
forced labour in concentration camps. He even went so far as to decree that
the laws of heredity are henceforth to be different from what they used to be,
and that the germ-plasm is to obey Soviet decrees but not that reactionary
priest Mendel. I am completely at a loss to understand how it came about that
some people who are both humane and intelligent could find something to
admire in the vast slave camp produced by Stalin.
I have always disagreed with Marx. My first hostile criticism of him was
published in 1896. But my objections to modern Communism go deeper
than my objections to Marx. It is the abandonment of democracy that I find
particularly disastrous. A minority resting its powers upon the activities of a
secret police is bound to be cruel, oppressive and obscurantist. The dangers
of irresponsible power came to be generally recognized during the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries, but those who have been dazzled by the
outward success of the Soviet Union have forgotten all that was painfully
learnt during the days of absolute monarchy, and have gone back to what was
worst in the Middle Ages under the curious delusion that they were in the
vanguard of progress.
There are signs that in course of time the Russian régime will become
more liberal. But, although this is possible, it is very far from certain. In the
meantime, all those who value not only art and science but a sufficiency of
daily bread and freedom from the fear that a careless word by their children
to a schoolteacher may condemn them to forced labour in a Siberian wilder-
ness, must do what lies in their power to preserve in their own countries a
less servile and more prosperous manner of life.
There are those who, oppressed by the evils of Communism, are led to the
conclusion that the only effective way to combat these evils is by means of a
world war. I think this a mistake. At one time such a policy might have been
possible, but now war has become so terrible and Communism has become

why i am not a communist 459
so powerful that no one can tell what would be left after a world war, and
whatever might be left would probably be at least as bad as present-day
Communism. This forecast does not depend upon which side, if either, is
nominally victorious. It depends only upon the inevitable effects of mass
destruction by means of hydrogen and cobalt bombs and perhaps of ingeni-
ously propagated plagues. The way to combat Communism is not war. What
is needed in addition to such armaments as will deter Communists from
attacking the West, is a diminution of the grounds for discontent in the less
prosperous parts of the non-Communist world. In most of the countries of
Asia, there is abject poverty which the West ought to alleviate as far as it lies
in its power to do so. There is also a great bitterness which was caused by
the centuries of European insolent domination in Asia. This ought to be
dealt with by a combination of patient tact with dramatic announcements
renoucing such relics of white domination as survive in Asia. Communism is
a doctrine bred of poverty, hatred and strife. Its spread can only be arrested by
diminishing the area of poverty and hatred.
(Portraits from Memory, London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1956.)
NOTE
1 Originally appeared in the Background Book, Why I Opposed Communism, published by
Phoenix House, Ltd.

56
ON HISTORY
Of all the studies by which men acquire citizenship of the intellectual

commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past. To
know how the world developed to the point at which our individual memory
begins; how the religions, the institutions, the nations among which we live,
became what they are; to be acquainted with the great of other times, with
customs and beliefs differing widely from our own—these things are
indispensable to any consciousness of our position, and to any emancipation
from the accidental circumstances of our education. It is not only to the
historian that history is valuable, not only to the professed student of archives
and documents, but to all who are capable of a contemplative survey of
human life. But the value of history is so multiform that those to whom
some one of its sides appeals with especial force are in constant danger of
forgetting all the others.
I
History is valuable, to begin with, because it is true; and this, though not the
whole of its value, is the foundation and condition of all the rest. That all
knowledge, as such, is in some degree good, would appear to be at least
probable; and the knowledge of every historical fact possesses this element of
goodness, even if it possesses no other. Modern historians, for the most part,
seem to regard truth as constituting the whole of the value of history. On this
ground they urge the self-effacement of the historian before the document;
every intrusion of his own personality, they fear, will involve some degree of

falsification. Objectivity before all things is to be sought, they tell us; let the
facts be merely narrated, and allowed to speak for themselves—if they can
find tongues. It follows, as a part of the position, that all facts are equally
important; and, although this doctrine can never be quite conformed to in
practice, it seems nevertheless to float before many minds as an ideal towards
which research may gradually approximate.
That the writing of history should be based on the study of documents is
an opinion which it would be absurd to controvert. For they alone contain
evidence as to what really occurred; and it is plain that untrue history can
have no great value. Moreover, there is more life in one document than in fifty
histories (omitting a very few of the best); by the mere fact that it contains
what belongs to that actual past time, it has a strangely vivid life-in-death,
such as belongs to our own past when some sound or scent awakens it. And a
history written after the event can hardly make us realize that the actors were
ignorant of the future; it is difficult to believe that the late Romans did not
know their empire was about to fall, or that Charles I was unaware of so
notorious a fact as his own execution.
But if documents are, in so many ways, superior to any deliberate history,
what function remains to the historian? There is, to begin with, the business
of selection. This would be admitted by all; for the materials are so vast that it
is impossible to present the whole of them. But it is not always realized that
selection involves a standard of value among facts, and therefore implies that
truth is not the sole aim in recording the past. For all facts are equally true;
and selection among them is only possible by means of some other criterion
than their truth. And the existence of some such criterion is obvious; no one
would maintain, for example, that the little Restoration scandals recorded by
Grammont are as important as the letters on the Piedmontese massacres,
by which Milton, in the name of Cromwell, summoned the tardy potentates
of Europe.
It may be said, however, that the only true principle of selection is the
purely scientific one; those facts are to be regarded as important which lead
to the establishment of general laws. Whether there ever will be a science of
history it is quite impossible to guess; at any rate it is certain that no such
science exists at present, except to some slight degree in the province of
economics. In order that the scientific criterion of importance among facts
should be applicable, it is necessary that two or more hypotheses should have
been invented, each accounting for a large number of the facts, and that then
a crucial fact should be discovered which discriminates between the rivals.
Facts are important, in the inductive sciences, solely in relation to theories;
and new theories give importance to new facts. So, for example, the doctrine
of Natural Selection brought into prominence all transitional and intermediate
species, the existence of rudiments, and the embryological record of descent.

on history 501
But it will hardly be maintained that history has reached, or is soon likely to
reach, a point where such standards are applicable to its facts. History,
considered as a body of truth, seems destined long to remain almost purely
descriptive. Such generalizations as have been suggested—omitting the
sphere of economics—are, for the most part, so plainly unwarranted as to be
not even worthy of refutation. Burke argued that all revolutions end in
military tyrannies, and predicted Napoleon. In so far as his argument was
based on the analogy of Cromwell, it was a very lucky hit; but certainly not a
scientific law. It is true that numerous instances are not always necessary to
establish a law, provided the essential and relevant circumstances can be easily
disentangled. But, in history, so many circumstances of a small and accidental
nature are relevant that no broad and simple uniformities are possible.
And there is a further point against this view of history as solely or chiefly a
causal science. Where our main endeavour is to discover general laws, we
regard these as intrinsically more valuable than any of the facts which they
interconnect. In astronomy, the law of gravitation is plainly better worth
knowing than the position of a particular planet on a particular night, or even
on every night throughout a year. There are in the law a splendour and
simplicity and sense of mastery which illuminate a mass of otherwise
uninteresting details. And so again in biology: until the theory of evolution
put meaning into the bewildering variety of organic structures, the particular
facts were interesting only to the professed naturalist. But in history the matter
is far otherwise. In economics, it is true, the data are often subordinate to the
attempts at science which are based upon them; but in all other departments,
the data are more interesting, and the scientific superstructure less satisfac-
tory. Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound inter-
est on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart
from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws.
The study of history is often recommended on the ground of its utility in
regard to the problems of present-day politics. That history has great utility in
this respect it is impossible to deny; but it is necessary very carefully to limit
and define the kind of guidance to be expected from it. The ‘teachings of
history’, in the crude sense, presuppose the discovery of causal laws, usually
of a very sweeping kind; and ‘teachings’ of this sort, though in certain cases
they may do not harm, are always theoretically unsound. In the eighteenth
century perpetually, and in our own day occasionally, arguments as to the
value of liberty or democracy are drawn from Greece and Rome; their
greatness or their decay, according to the bias of the author, is attributed to
these causes. What can be more grotesque than to hear the rhetoric of
the Romans applied to the circumstances of the French Revolution! The
whole organization of a City State, based on slavery, without representative
institutions, and without printing, is so utterly remote from any modern

democracy as to make all analogy, except of the vaguest kind, totally frivolous
and unreal. So with regard to imperialism, arguments are drawn from the
successes and failures of the ancients. Shall we believe, for example, that
Rome was ruined by the perpetual extension of her frontiers? Or shall we
believe, with Mommsen, that the failure to conquer the Germans between the
Rhine and the Danube was one of her most fatal errors? All such arguments
will always be conducted according to the prejudices of the author; and all
alike, even if they have some measure of truth in regard to the past, must be
quite inapplicable to the present.
This evil is greatest when history is regarded as teaching some general
philosophical doctrine, such as: Right, in the long run, is Might; Truth always
prevails in the end; or, Progress is a universal law of society. All such doctrines
require, for their support, a careful choice of place and time, and, what is
worse, a falsification of values. A very flagrant instance of this danger is
Carlyle. In the case of Puritanism, it led him to justify all Cromwell’s acts of
impatience and illegality, and arbitrarily to arrest his survey in 1658; how he
accounted for the Restoration it is impossible to say. In other cases, it led him
still further astray. For it is often hard to discover on which side the Right lies,
but the Might is visible to all men; thus the doctrine that Right is Might slides
insensibly into the belief that Might is Right. Hence the praise of Frederick
and Napoleon and Bismarck, the pitiless contempt for the negroes, the Irish,
and the ‘thirty-thousand distressed needlewomen’. In some such way, every
general theory that all is for the best must be forced by the facts into defence
of the indefensible.
Nevertheless, history has a function in regard to current affairs, but a
function less direct, less exact, and less decisive. It may, in the first place,
suggest minor maxims, whose truth, when they are once propounded, can
be seen without the help of the events that suggested them. This is largely the
case in economics, where most of the motives concerned are simple. It is the
case also, for a similar reason, in regard to strategy. Wherever, out of the facts,
a simple deductive argument from indubitable premises can be elicited,
history may yield useful precepts. But these will only apply where the end is
given, and are therefore of a technical nature. They can never tell the
statesman what end to pursue, but only, within certain limits, how some of
the more definite ends, such as wealth, or victory in war, are to be attained.
II
Another and a greater utility, however, belongs also to history. It enlarges the
imagination, and suggests possibilities of action and feeling which would not

on history 503
have occurred to an uninstructed mind. It selects from past lives the elements
which were significant and important; it fills our thoughts with splendid
examples, and with the desire for greater ends than unaided reflection would
have discovered. It relates the present to the past, and thereby the future to the
present. It makes visible and living the growth and greatness of nations,
enabling us to extend our hopes beyond the span of our own lives. In all these
ways, a knowledge of history is capable of giving to statesmanship, and to our
daily thoughts, a breadth and scope unattainable by those whose view is
limited to the present.
What the past does for us may be judged, perhaps, by the consideration of
those younger nations whose energy and enterprise are winning the envy of
Europe. In them we see developing a type of man, endowed with all the
hopefulness of the Renaissance or of the Age of Pericles, persuaded that his
more vigorous efforts can quickly achieve whatever has proved too difficult
for the generations that preceded him. Ignorant and contemptuous of the
aims that inspired those generations, unaware of the complex problems
that they attempted to solve, his rapid success in comparatively simple
achievements encourages his confident belief that the future belongs to him.
But to those who have grown up surrounded by monuments of men and
deeds whose memory they cherish, there is a curious thinness about the
thoughts and emotions that inspire this confidence; optimism seems to be
sustained by a too exclusive pursuit of what can be easily achieved; and hopes
are not transmuted into ideals by the habit of appraising current events by
their relation to the history of the past. Whatever is different from the present
is despised. That among those who contributed nothing to the dominion of
Mammon great men lived, that wisdom may reside in those whose thoughts
are not dominated by the machine, is incredible to this temper of mind.
Action, Success, Change, are its watchwords; whether the action is noble, the
success in a good cause, or the change an improvement in anything except
wealth, are questions which there is no time to ask. Against this spirit,
whereby all leisure, all care for the ends of life, are sacrificed to the struggle to
be first in a worthless race, history and the habit of living with the past are the
surest antidotes; and in our age, more than ever before, such antidotes are
needed.
The record of great deeds is a defeat of Time; for it prolongs their power
through many ages after they and their authors have been swallowed by the
abyss of the non-existent. And, in regard to the past, where contemplation is
not obscured by desire and the need for action, we see, more clearly than in
the lives about us, the value for good and evil, of the aims men have pursued
and the means they have adopted. It is good, from time to time, to view the
present as already past, and to examine what elements it contains that will
add to the world’s store of permanent possessions, that will live and give

life when we and all our generation have perished. In the light of this
contemplation all human experience is transformed, and whatever is sordid
or personal is purged away. And, as we grow in wisdom, the treasure-house
of the ages opens to our view; more and more we learn to know and love the
men through whose devotion all this wealth has become ours. Gradually, by
the contemplation of great lives, a mystic communion becomes possible,
filling the soul like music from an invisible choir. Still, out of the past, the
voices of heroes call us. As, from a lofty promontory, the bell of an ancient
cathedral, unchanged since the day when Dante returned from the kingdom
of the dead, still sends its solemn warning across the waters, so their voice
still sounds across the intervening sea of time; still, as then, its calm deep
tones speak to the solitary tortures of cloistered aspiration, putting the
serenity of things eternal in place of the doubtful struggle against ignoble
joys and transient pleasures. Not by those about them were they heard; but
they spoke to the winds of heaven, and the winds of heaven tell the tale to the
great of later days. The great are not solitary; out of the night come the voices
of those who have gone before, clear and courageous; and so through the
ages they march, a mighty procession, proud, undaunted, unconquerable. To
join in this glorious company, to swell the immortal paeon of those whom
fate could not subdue—this may not be happiness; but what is happiness to
those whose souls are filled with that celestial music? To them is given what is
better than happiness: to know the fellowship of the great, to live in the
inspiration of lofty thoughts, and to be illumined in every perplexity by
the fire of nobility and truth.
But history is more than the record of individual men, however great: it is
the province of history to tell the biography, not only of men, but of Man; to
present the long procession of generations as but the passing thoughts of
one continuous life; to transcend their blindness and brevity in the slow
unfolding of the tremendous drama in which all play their part. In the
migrations of races, in the birth and death of religions, in the rise and fall of
empires, the unconscious units, without any purpose beyond the moment,
have contributed unwittingly to the pageant of the ages; and, from the
greatness of the whole, some breath of greatness breathes over all who
participated in the march. In this lies the haunting power of the dim history
beyond written records. There, nothing is known but the cloudy outlines of
huge events; and, of all the separate lives that came and went, no memory
remains. Through unnumbered generations, forgotten sons worshipped at
the tombs of forgotten fathers, forgotten mothers bore warriors whose bones
whitened the silent steppes of Asia. The clash of arms, the hatreds and
oppressions, the blind conflicts of dumb nations, are all still, like a distant
waterfall; but slowly, out of the strife, the nations that we know emerged,
with a heritage of poetry and piety transmitted from the buried past.

on history 505
And this quality, which is all that remains of pre-historic times, belongs
also to the later periods where the knowledge of details is apt to obscure the
movement of the whole. We, too, in all our deeds, bear our part in a process
of which we cannot guess the development: even the obscurest are actors in a
drama of which we know only that it is great. Whether any purpose that we
value will be achieved, we cannot tell; but the drama itself, in any case, is full
of Titanic grandeur. This quality it is the business of the historian to extract
from the bewildering multitude of irrelevant details. From old books,
wherein the loves, the hopes, the faiths of bygone generations lie embalmed,
he calls pictures before our minds, pictures of high endeavours and brave
hopes, living still through his care, in spite of failure and death. Before all is
wrapped in oblivion, the historian must compose afresh, in each succeeding
age, the epitaph upon the life of Man.
The past alone is truly real: the present is but a painful, struggling birth
into the immutable being of what is no longer. Only the dead exist fully. The
lives of the living are fragmentary, doubtful, and subject to change; but the
lives of the dead are complete, free from the sway of Time, the all-but
omnipotent lord of the world. Their failures and successes, their hopes and
fears, their joys and pains, have become eternal—our efforts cannot now
abate one jot of them. Sorrows long buried in the grave, tragedies of which
only a fading memory remains, loves immortalized by Death’s hallowing
touch—these have a power, a magic, an untroubled calm, to which no
present can attain.
Year by year, comrades die, hopes prove vain, ideals fade; the enchanted
land of youth grows more remote, the road of life more wearisome; the
burden of the world increases until the labour and the pain become almost
too heavy to be borne; joy fades from the weary nations of the earth and the
tyranny of the future saps men’s vital force; all that we love is waning, waning
from the dying world. But the past, ever devouring the transient offspring of
the present, lives by the universal death; steadily, irresistibly, it adds new
trophies to its silent temple, which all the ages build; every great deed, every
splendid life, every achievement and every heroic failure, is there enshrined.
On the banks of the river of Time, the sad procession of human generations is
marching slowly to the grave; in the quiet country of the Past, the march
is ended, the tired wanderers rest, and all their weeping is hushed.
(The Independent Review, July 1904.)

60
EASTERN AND WESTERN IDEALS
OF HAPPINESS
Everybody knows Wells’s Time Machine, which enabled its possessor to

travel backwards or forwards in time, and see for himself what the past was
like and what the future will be. But people do not always realize that a great
deal of the advantages of Wells’s device can be secured by travelling about the
world at the present day. A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees
the future, the future to which Europe is likely to come if it escapes economic
disaster. On the other hand, when he goes to Asia he sees the past. In India,
I am told, he can see the Middle Ages; in China he can see the eighteenth
century. If George Washington were to return to earth, the country which he
created would puzzle him dreadfully. He would feel a little less strange in
England, still less strange in France; but he would not feel really at home
until he reached China. There, for the first time in his ghostly wanderings,
he would find men who still believe in ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness’, and who conceive these things more or less as Americans of
the War of Independence conceived them. And I think it would not be long
before he became President of the Chinese Republic.
Western civilization embraces North and South America, Europe excluding
Russia, and the British self-governing dominions. In this civilization the
United States leads the van; all the characteristics that distinguish the West
from the East are most marked and furthest developed in America. We are
accustomed to take progress for granted: to assume without hesitation that
the changes which have happened during the last hundred years were
unquestionably for the better, and that further changes for the better are
sure to follow indefinitely. On the Continent of Europe, the war and its
consequences have administered a blow to this confident belief, and men

have begun to look back to the time before 1914 as a golden age, not likely
to recur for centuries. In England there has been much less of this shock
to optimism, and in America still less. For those of us who have been accus-
tomed to take progress for granted, it is especially interesting to visit a coun-
try like China, which has remained where we were one hundred and fifty
years ago, and to ask ourselves whether, on the balance, the changes which
have happened to us have brought any real improvement.
The civilization of China, as everyone knows, is based upon the teaching of
Confucius, who flourished five hundred years before Christ. Like the Greeks
and Romans, he did not think of human society as naturally progressive; on
the contrary, he believed that in remote antiquity rulers had been wise, and
the people had been happy to a degree which the degenerate present could
admire but hardly achieve. This, of course, was a delusion. But the practical
result was that Confucius, like other teachers of antiquity, aimed at creating
a stable society, maintaining a certain level of excellence, but not always
striving after new successes. In this he was more successful than any other
man who ever lived. His personality has been stamped on Chinese civilization
from his day to our own. During his lifetime the Chinese occupied only a
small part of present-day China, and were divided into a number of warring
states. During the next three hundred years they established themselves
throughout what is now China proper, and founded an empire exceeding
in territory and population any other that existed until the last fifty years. In
spite of barbarian invasions, Mongol and Manchu dynasties, and occasional
longer or shorter periods of chaos and civil war, the Confucian system sur-
vived, bringing with it art and literature and a civilized way of life. It is only
in our own day, through contact with the West and with the westernized
Japanese, that this system has begun to break down.
A system which has had this extraordinary power of survival must have
great merits, and certainly deserves our respect and consideration. It is not a
religion, as we understand the word, because it is not associated with the
supernatural or with mystical beliefs. It is a purely ethical system, but its
ethics, unlike those of Christianity, are not too exalted for ordinary men to
practise. In essence, what Confucius teaches is something very like the old-
fashioned ideal of a ‘gentleman’ as it existed in the eighteenth century. One
of his sayings will illustrate this (I quote from Lionel Giles’s Sayings of
Confucius):
The true gentleman is never contentious. If a spirit of rivalry is anywhere

unavoidable, it is at a shooting-match. Yet even here he courteously salutes
his opponents before taking up his position, and again when, having lost, he
retires to drink the forfeit-cup. So that even when competing he remains a
true gentleman.

eastern and western ideals of happiness 537
He speaks much, as a moral teacher is bound to do, about duty and virtue
and such matters, but he never exacts anything contrary to nature and the
natural affections. This is shown in the following conversation:
The Duke of She addressed Confucius, saying: We have an upright man in our
country. His father stole a sheep, and the son bore witness against him.—In
our country, Confucius replied, uprightness is something different from this.
A father hides the guilt of his son, and a son hides the guilt of his father. It is
in such conduct that true uprightness is to be found.
Confucius was in all things moderate, even in virtue. He did not believe
that we ought to return good for evil. He was asked on one occasion: ‘How
do you regard the principle of returning good for evil?’ And he replied:
‘What, then, is to be the return for good? Rather should you return justice
for injustice, and good for good.’ The principle of returning good for evil
was being taught in his day in China by the Taoists, whose teaching is much
more akin to that of Christianity than is the teaching of Confucius. The
founder of Taoism, Lao-Tze (supposed to have been an older contemporary
of Confucius), says: ‘To the good I would be good; to the not-good I would
also be good, in order to make them good. With the faithful I would keep
faith; with the unfaithful I would also keep faith, in order that they may
become faithful. Even if a man is bad, how can it be right to cast him off?
Requite injury with kindness.’ Some of Lao-Tze’s words are amazingly like
parts of the Sermon on the Mount. For instance, he says:
He that humbles himself shall be preserved entire. He that bends shall be

made straight. He that is empty shall be filled. He that is worn out shall be
renewed. He who has little shall succeed. He who has much shall go astray.
It is characteristic of China that it was not Lao-Tze but Confucius who

became the recognized national sage. Taoism has survived, but chiefly as
magic and among the uneducated. Its doctrines have appeared visionary to
the practical men who administered the empire, while the doctrines of
Confucius were eminently calculated to avoid friction. Lao-Tze preached a
doctrine of inaction: ‘The empire’, he says, ‘has ever been won by letting
things take their course. He who must always be doing is unfit to obtain the
empire.’ But Chinese governors naturally preferred the Confucian maxims of
self-control, benevolence, and courtesy, combined, as they were, with a great
emphasis upon the good that could be done by wise government. It never
occurred to the Chinese, as it has to all modern white nations, to have one
system of ethics in theory and another in practice. I do not mean that they
always live up to their own theories, but that they attempt to do so and are

expected to do so, whereas there are large parts of the Christian ethic which
are universally admitted to be too good for this wicked world.
We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach
but do not practise, and another which we practise but seldom preach.
Christianity, like all religions except Mormonism, is Asiatic in origin; it had
in the early centuries that emphasis on individualism and other-worldliness
which is characteristic of Asiatic mysticism. From this point of view, the
doctrine of non-resistance was intelligible. But when Christianity became
the nominal religion of energetic European princes, it was found necessary to
maintain that some texts were not to be taken literally, while others, such as
‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’, acquired great popularity. In
our own day, under the influence of competitive industrialism, the slightest
approach to non-resistance is despised, and men are expected to be able to
keep their end up. In practice, our effective morality is that of material success
achieved by means of a struggle; and this applies to nations as well as to
individuals. Anything else seems to us soft and foolish.
The Chinese do not adopt either our theoretical or our practical ethic. They
admit in theory that there are occasions when it is proper to fight, and in
practice that these occasions are rare; whereas we hold in theory that there are
no occasions when it is proper to fight and in practice that such occasions are
very frequent. The Chinese sometimes fight, but are not a combative race, and
do not greatly admire success in war or in business. Traditionally, they admire
learning more than anything else; next to that, and usually in combination
with it, they admire urbanity and courtesy. For ages past, administrative posts
have been awarded in China on the results of competitive examinations. As
there has been no hereditary aristocracy for two thousand years—with the
sole exception of the family of Confucius, the head of which is a Duke—
learning has drawn to itself the kind of respect which, in feudal Europe, was
given to powerful nobles, as well as the respect which it inspired on its own
account. The old learning, however, was very narrow, consisting merely in an
uncritical study of the Chinese classics and their recognized commentators.
Under the influence of the West, it has come to be known that geography,
economics, geology, chemistry, and so on, are of more practical use than
the moralizings of former ages. Young China—that is to say, the students
who have been educated on European lines—recognize modern needs, and
have perhaps hardly enough respect for the old tradition. Nevertheless, even
the most modern, with few exceptions, retain the traditional virtues of mod-
eration, politeness, and a pacific temper. Whether these virtues will survive a
few more decades of Western and Japanese tuition is perhaps doubtful. If I
were to try to sum up in a phrase the main difference between the Chinese
and ourselves, I should say that they, in the main, aim at enjoyment, while
we, in the main, aim at power. We like power over our fellow-men, and we

like power over Nature. For the sake of the former we have built up strong
states, and for the sake of the latter we have built up Science. The Chinese are
too lazy and too good-natured for such pursuits. To say that they are lazy
is, however, only true in a certain sense. They are not lazy in the way that
Russians are, that is to say, they will work hard for their living. Employers of
labour find them extraordinarily industrious. But they will not work, as
Americans and Western Europeans do, simply because they would be bored
if they did not work, nor do they love hustle for its own sake. When they
have enough to live on, they live on it, instead of trying to augment it by
hard work. They have an infinite capacity for leisurely amusements—going
to the theatre, talking while they drink tea, admiring the Chinese art of earlier
times, or walking in beautiful scenery. To our way of thinking, there is
something unduly mild about such a way of spending one’s life; we respect
more a man who goes to his office every day, even if all that he does in his
office is harmful.
Living in the East has, perhaps, a corrupting influence upon a white man,
but I must confess that, since I came to know China, I have regarded laziness
as one of the best qualities of which men in the mass are capable. We achieve
certain things by being energetic, but it may be questioned whether, on the
balance, the things that we achieve are of any value. We develop wonderful
skill in manufacture, part of which we devote to making ships, automobiles,
telephones, and other means of living luxuriously at high pressure, while
another part is devoted to making guns, poison gases, and aeroplanes for
the purpose of killing each other wholesale. We have a first-class system of
administration and taxation, part of which is devoted to education, sanita-
tion, and such useful objects, while the rest is devoted to war. In England at
the present day most of the national revenue is spent on past and future wars
and only the residue on useful objects. On the Continent, in most countries,
the proportion is even worse. We have a police system of unexampled effi-
ciency, part of which is devoted to the detection and prevention of crime
and part to imprisoning anybody who has any new constructive political
ideas. In China, until recently, they had none of these things. Industry was too
inefficient to produce either automobiles or bombs; the State too inefficient
to educate its own citizens or to kill those of other countries; the police too
inefficient to catch either bandits or Bolsheviks. The result was that in China,
as compared to any white man’s country, there was freedom for all, and a
degree of diffused happiness which was amazing in view of the poverty of
all but a tiny minority.
Comparing the actual outlook of the average Chinese with that of the
average Westerner, two differences strike one: first, that the Chinese do not
admire activity unless it serves some useful purpose; secondly, that they
do not regard morality as consisting in checking our own impulses and

interfering with those of others. The first of these differences has been
already discussed, but the second is perhaps equally important. Professor
Giles, the eminent Chinese scholar, at the end of his Gifford Lectures on
‘Confucianism and its Rivals’, maintains that the chief obstacle to the
success of Christian missions in China has been the doctrine of original sin.
The traditional doctrine of orthodox Christianity—still preached by most
Christian missionaries in the Far East—is that we are all born wicked, so
wicked as to deserve eternal punishment. The Chinese might have no dif-
ficulty in accepting this doctrine if it applied only to white men, but when
they are told that their own parents and grandparents are in hell-fire they
grow indignant. Confucius taught that men are born good, and that if they
become wicked, that is through the force of evil example or corrupting
manners. This difference from traditional Western orthodoxy has a profound
influence on the outlook of the Chinese.
Among ourselves, the people who are regarded as moral luminaries are
those who forgo ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in
interfering with the pleasures of others. There is an element of the busybody
in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a
great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man.
This attitude comes from our notion of sin. It leads not only to interference
with freedom, but also to hypocrisy, since the conventional standard is too
difficult for most people to live up to. In China this is not the case. Moral
precepts are positive rather than negative. A man is expected to be respectful
to his parents, kind to his children, generous to his poor relations, and
courteous to all. These are not very difficult duties, but most men actually
fulfil them, and the result is perhaps better than that of our higher standard,
from which most people fall short.
Another result of the absence of the notion of sin is that men are much
more willing to submit their differences to argument and reason than they
are in the West. Among ourselves, differences of opinion quickly become
questions of ‘principle’: each side thinks that the other side is wicked, and
that any yielding to it involves sharing in its guilt. This makes our disputes
bitter, and involves in practice a great readiness to appeal to force. In China,
although there were military men who were ready to appeal to force, no one
took them seriously, not even their own soldiers. They fought battles which
were nearly bloodless, and they did much less harm than we should expect
from our experience of the fiercer conflicts of the West. The great bulk of
the population, including the civil administration, went about its business
as though these generals and their armies did not exist. In ordinary life,
disputes are usually adjusted by the friendly mediation of some third party.
Compromise is the accepted principle, because it is necessary to save the face
of both parties. Saving face, though in some forms it makes foreigners smile,

is a most valuable national institution, making social and political life far
less ruthless than it is with us.
There is one serious defect, and only one, in the Chinese system, and that
is, that it does not enable China to resist more pugnacious nations. If the
whole world were like China, the whole world could be happy; but so long
as others are warlike and energetic, the Chinese, now that they are no longer
isolated, will be compelled to copy our vices to some degree if they are to
preserve their national independence. But let us not flatter ourselves that this
imitation will be an improvement.
(Sceptical Essays, London: Allen & Unwin; New York;
W. W. Norton, 1928.)

61
THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION
The decay of traditional religious beliefs, bitterly bewailed by upholders of

the Churches, welcomed with joy by those who regard the old creeds as mere
superstition, is an undeniable fact. Yet when the dogmas have been rejected,
the question of the place of religion in life is by no means decided. The
dogmas have been valued, not so much on their own account, as because they
were believed to facilitate a certain attitude towards the world, an habitual
direction of our thoughts, a life in the whole, free from the finiteness of self
and providing an escape from the tyranny of desire and daily cares. Such a life
in the whole is possible without dogma, and ought not to perish through the
indifference of those to whom the beliefs of former ages are no longer
credible. Acts inspired by religion have some quality of infinity in them: they
seem done in obedience to a command, and though they may achieve great
ends, yet it is no clear knowledge of these ends that makes them seem
imperative. The beliefs which underlie such acts are often so deep and so
instinctive as to remain unknown to those whose lives are built upon them.
Indeed, it may be not belief but feeling that makes religion: a feeling which,
when brought into the sphere of belief, may involve the conviction that this
or that is good, but may, if it remains untouched by intellect, be only a
feeling and yet be dominant in action. It is the quality of infinity that makes
religion, the selfless, untrammelled life in the whole which frees men from
the prison house of eager wishes and little thoughts. This liberation from the
prison is given by religion, but only by a religion without fettering dogmas;
and dogmas become fettering as soon as assent to them becomes unnatural.
The soul of man is a strange mixture of God and brute, a battleground
of two natures, the one particular, finite, self-centred, the other universal,
infinite, and impartial. The finite life, which man shares with the brutes, is

tied to the body, and views the world from the standpoint of the here and now.
All those loves and hatreds which are based upon some service to the self
belong to the finite life. The love of man and woman, and the love of parents
and children, when they do not go beyond the promptings of instinct, are
still part of the animal nature: they do not pass into the infinite life until they
overcome instinct and cease to be subservient only to the purposes of the
finite self. The hatred of enemies and the love of allies in battle are part of
what man shares with other gregarious animals: they view the universe as
grouped about one point, the single struggling self. Thus the finite part of our
life contains all that makes the individual man essentially separate from other
men and from the rest of the universe, all those thoughts and desires that
cannot, in their nature, be shared by the inhabitant of a different body, all the
distortions that make error, and all the insistent claims that lead to strife.
The infinite part of our life does not see the world from one point of view:
it shines impartially, like the diffused light on a cloudy sea. Distant ages and
remote regions of space are as real to it as what is present and near. In
thought, it rises above the life of the senses, seeking always what is general
and open to all men. In desire and will, it aims simply at the good, without
regarding the good as mine or yours. In feeling, it gives love to all, not only to
those who further the purposes of self. Unlike the finite life, it is impartial: its
impartiality leads to truth in thought, justice in action, and universal love in
feeling. Unlike the nature which man shares with the brutes, it has a life
without barriers, embracing in its survey the whole universe of existence and
essence; nothing in it is essentially private, but its thoughts and desires are
such as all may share, since none depend upon the exclusiveness of here and
now and me. Thus the infinite nature is the principle of union in the world, as
the finite nature is the principle of division. Between the infinite nature in
one man and the infinite nature in another, there can be no essential conflict:
if its embodiments are incomplete, they supplement each other; its division
among different men is accidental to its character, and the infinite in all
constitutes one universal nature. There is thus a union of all the infinite
natures of different men in a sense in which there is no union of all the finite
natures. In proportion as the infinite grows strong in us, we live more
completely the life of that one universal nature which embraces what is
infinite in each of us.
The finite self, impelled by the desire for self-preservation, builds prison
walls round the infinite part of our nature, and endeavours to restrain it from
that free life in the whole which constitutes its being. The finite self aims at
dominion: it sees the world in concentric circles round the here and now, and
itself as the God of that wished-for heaven. The universal soul mocks at this
vision, but the finite self hopes always to make it true, and thus to quiet its
troublesome critic. In many men, the finite self remains always the gaoler of

the essence of religion 547
the universal soul; in others, there is a rare and momentary escape; in a few,
the prison walls are demolished wholly, and the universal soul remains free
through life. It is the escape from prison that gives to some moments and
some thoughts a quality of infinity, like light breaking through from some
greater world beyond. Sudden beauty in the midst of strife, uncalculating
love, or the night wind in the trees, seem to suggest the possibility of a life
free from the conflicts and pettinesses of our everyday world, a life where
there is peace which no misfortune can disturb. The things which have
this quality of infinity seem to give an insight deeper than the piecemeal
knowledge of our daily life. A life dominated by this insight, we feel, would
be a life free from struggle, a life in harmony with the whole, outside the
prison walls built by the instinctive desires of the finite self.
It is this experience of sudden wisdom which is the source of what is
essential in religion. Mysticism interprets this experience as a contact with a
deeper, truer, more unified world than that of our common beliefs. Behind a
thin veil, it sees the glory of God, dimly as a rule, sometimes with dazzling
brightness. All the evils of our daily world it regards as merely shadows on
the veil, illusions, nothings, which vanish from the sight of those who see the
splendour beyond. But in this interpretation mysticism diminishes the value
of the experience upon which it is based. The quality of infinity, which we
feel, is not to be accounted for by the perception of new objects, other
than those that at most times seem finite; it is to be accounted for, rather,
by a different way of regarding the same objects, a contemplation more
impersonal, more vast, more filled with love, than the fragmentary, disquiet
consideration we give to things when we view them as means to help or
hinder our own purposes. It is not in some other world that that beauty and
that peace are to be found; it is in this actual everyday world, in the midst of
action and the business of life. But it is in the everyday world as viewed by the
universal soul, and in the midst of action and business inspired by its vision.
The evils and the smallnesses are not illusions, but the universal soul finds
within itself a love to which imperfections are no barrier, and thus unifies the
world by the unity of its own contemplation.
The transition from the life of the finite self to the infinite life in the whole
requires a moment of absolute self-surrender, when all personal will seems to
cease, and the soul feels itself in passive submission to the universe. After
passionate struggle for some particular good, there comes some inward or
outward necessity to abandon the pursuit of the object which has absorbed
all our desire, and no other desire is ready to replace the one that has been
relinquished. Hence arises a state of suspension of the will, when the soul no
longer seeks to impose itself upon the world, but is open to every impression
that comes to it from the world. It is at such a time that the contemplative
vision first comes into being, bringing with it universal love and universal

worship. From universal worship comes joy, from universal love comes a
new desire, and thence the birth of that seeking after universal good which
constitutes the will of our infinite nature. Thus from the moment of self-
surrender, which to the finite self appears like death, a new life begins, with a
larger vision, a new happiness, and wider hopes.
The self-surrender in which the infinite life is born may be made easier to
some men by belief in an all-wise God to whom submission is a duty. But it
is not in its essence dependent upon this belief or upon any other. The
religions of the past, it is true, have all depended to a greater or less degree
upon dogma, upon some theory as to the nature and the purpose of the
universe. But the decay of traditional beliefs has made every religion that rests
on dogma precarious, and even impossible, to many whose nature is strongly
religious. Hence those who cannot accept the creeds of the past, and yet
believe that a religious outlook requires dogma, lose what is infinite in
life, and become limited in their thoughts to everyday matters; they lose
consciousness of the life of the whole, they lose that inexplicable sense
of union which gives rise to compassion and the unhesitating service of
humanity. They do not see in beauty the adumbration of a glory which a
richer vision would see in every common thing, or in love a gateway to that
transfigured world in which our union with the universe is fulfilled. Thus
their outlook is impoverished, and their life is rendered smaller even in its
finite parts. For right action they are thrown back upon bare morality; and
bare morality is very inadequate as a motive for those who hunger and
thirst after the infinite. Thus it has become a matter of the first importance
to preserve religion without any dependence upon dogmas to which an
intellectually honest assent grows daily more difficult.
There are in Christianity three elements which it is desirable to preserve if
possible: worship, acquiescence, and love. Worship is given by Christianity to
God; acquiescence is given to the inevitable because it is the will of God; love
is enjoined towards my neighbours, my enemies, and, in fact, towards all
men. The love which Christianity enjoins, and indeed any love which is to be
universal and yet strong, seems in some way dependent upon worship and
acquiescence. Yet these, in the form in which they appear in Christianity,
depend upon belief in God, and are therefore no longer possible to those
who cannot entertain this belief. Something, in worship, must be lost when
we lose belief in the existence of supreme goodness and power combined.
But much can be preserved, and what can be preserved seems sufficient to
constitute a very strong religious life. Acquiescence, also, is rendered more
difficult by loss of belief in God, since it takes away the assurance that
apparent evil in the constitution of the world is really good. But it is
not rendered impossible; and in consequence of its greater difficulty it
becomes, when achieved, nobler, deeper, more filled by self-surrender than

any acquiescence which Christianity produces. In some ways, therefore, the
religion which has no dogma is greater and more religious than one which
rests upon the belief that in the end our ideals are fulfilled in the outer world.
1. Worship.—Worship is not easily defined, because it grows and changes as
the worshipper grows. In crude religions it may be inspired by fear alone, and
given to whatever is powerful. This element lingers in the worship of God,
which may consist largely of fear and be given largely from respect for power.
But the element of fear tends more and more to be banished by love, and in
all the best worship fear is wholly absent. As soon as the worship inspired by
fear has been surpassed, worship brings joy in the contemplation of what is
worshipped. But joy alone does not constitute worship: there must be also
some reverence and sense of mystery not easy to define. These three things,
contemplation with joy, reverence, and sense of mystery, seem essential to
constitute any of the higher forms of worship.
Within worship in this very wide sense there are varieties which it is
important to distinguish. There is a selective worship, which demands that its
object shall be good, and admits an opposite attitude towards a bad object;
and there is an impartial worship, which can be given to whatever exists,
regardless of its goodness or badness. Besides this division, there is another,
equally important. There is a worship which can only be given to an actually
existing object, and another worship which can be given to what merely has
its place in the world of ideals; these two kinds may be distinguished as
worship of the actual and worship of the ideal. The two are combined in
worship of God, since God is conceived as both actual and the complete
embodiment of the ideal.
Worship of God is selective, since it depends upon God’s goodness. So is all
worship of great men or great deeds, and of everything of which the worship
depends upon some pre-eminent quality which calls forth our admiration.
Worship of this sort, though it can be given to much of what exists in the
actual world, cannot be given unreservedly and so as to produce a religious
attitude towards the universe as a whole, except by those who believe in an
omnipotent Creator or in a pantheistic all-pervading spiritual unity. For those
in whom there is no such belief, the selective worship finds its full object
only in the ideal good which creative contemplation imagines. The ideal
good forms an essential part of the religious life, since it supplies the motive
to action by giving content to the desire for universal good which forms a
part of universal love. Without the knowledge and worship of the ideal good,
the love of man is blind, not knowing in what direction to seek the welfare of
those whom it loves. Every embodiment of good in the actual world is
imperfect, if only by its brevity. Only the ideal good can satisfy fully our
hunger for perfection. Only the ideal good demands no surrender to power,
no sacrifice of aspiration to possibility, and no slavery of thought to fact. Only

the vision of the ideal good gives infinity to our pursuit, in action, of
those fragments of good which the world permits us to create, but the
worship of the ideal good, though it brings with it the joy that springs from
the contemplation of what is perfect, brings with it also the pain that results
from the imperfection of the actual world. When this worship stands alone, it
produces a sense of exile in a world of shadows, of infinite solitude amid
alien forces. Thus this worship, though necessary to all religious action, does
not alone suffice, since it does not produce that sense of union with the actual
world which compels us to descend from the world of contemplation and
seek, with however little success, to realize what is possible of the good
here on earth.
For this purpose we need the kind of worship which is only given to what
exists. Such worship, where there is belief in God, can be selective, since God
exists and is completely good. Where there is not belief in God, such worship
may be selective in regard to great men and great deeds, but towards such
objects selective worship is always hampered by their imperfection and their
limitation of duration and extent. The worship which can be given to
whatever exists must not be selective, it must not involve any judgement as to
the goodness of what is worshipped, but must be a direct impartial emotion.
Such a worship is given by the contemplative vision, which finds mystery and
joy in all that exists, and brings with it love to all that has life. This impartial
worship has been thought, wrongly, to require belief in God, since it has
been thought to involve the judgement that whatever exists is good. In fact,
however, it involves no judgement whatever; hence it cannot be intellectually
mistaken, and cannot be in any way dependent upon dogma. Thus the
combination of this worship with the ideal good gives a faith wholly
independent of beliefs as to the nature of the actual world, and therefore not
assailable by the arguments which have destroyed the tenets of traditional
religion.
Religion, therefore, results from the combination of two different kinds of
worship—the selective, which is given to the good on account of its goodness,
and the impartial, which is given to everything that exists. The former is the
source of the belief in theism, the latter of the belief in pantheism, but in
neither case is such a belief necessary for the worship which gives rise to it.
The object of the selective worship is the ideal good, which belongs to the
world of universals. Owing to oblivion of the world of universals, men have
supposed that the ideal good could not have being or be worshipped unless it
formed part of the actual world; hence they have believed that without God
this worship could not survive. But the study of the world of universals shows
that this was an error: the object of this worship need not exist, though it will
be an essential part of the worship to wish it to exist as fully as possible. The
object of the impartial worship, on the other hand, is whatever exists; in this

case, though the object is known to exist, it is not known to be good, but it is
an essential part of the worship to wish that it may be as good as possible.
Pantheism, from the contemplative joy of impartial worship, and from the
unity of its outlook on the universe, infers, mistakenly, that such worship
involves the belief that the universe is good and is one. This belief is no more
necessary to the impartial worship than the belief in God is to the selective
worship. The two worships subsist side by side, without any dogma: the one
involving the goodness but not the existence of its object, the other involving
the existence but not the goodness of its object. Religious action is a
continual endeavour to bridge the gulf between the objects of these two
worships, by making more good exist and more of existence good. Only in
the complete union of the two could the soul find permanent rest.
2. Acquiescence.—Although, in a world where much evil exists and much
good does not exist, no religion which is true can give permanent rest or free
the soul from the need for action, yet religion can give acquiescence in evil
which it is not within our power to cure. Christianity effects this by the belief
that, since the apparent evil is in accordance with the will of God, it cannot
really be evil. This view, however, demands a falsification of our standard of
good and evil, since much that exists is evil to any unbiased consideration.
Moreover, if pursued to a conclusion, it destroys all motive to action, since
the reason given for acquiescence, namely, that whatever happens must be for
the best, is a reason which renders our efforts after the best superfluous. If, to
avoid this consequence, we limit either the omnipotence or the goodness of
God, acquiescence can no longer be urged on the same ground, since what
happens may be either not in accordance with the will of God, or not good
in spite of being in accordance with His will. For these reasons, though
Christianity is in fact often effective both in causing acquiescence and in
providing a religious motive for action, yet this effectiveness is due to a
confusion of thought, and tends to cease as men grow more clear-sighted.
The problem we have to deal with is more difficult than the Christian’s
problem. We have to learn to acquiesce in the inevitable without judging that
the inevitable must be good, to keep the feeling which prompts Christians to
say, ‘Thy will be done’, while yet admitting that what is done may be evil.
Acquiescence, whatever our religion may be, must always require a large
element of moral discipline. But this discipline may be made easier, and more
visibly worth the pain which it involves, by religious considerations. There
are two different though closely related kinds of acquiescence, the one in our
private griefs, the other in the fundamental evils of the world. Acquiescence
in our private griefs comes in the moment of submission which brings about
the birth of the impartial will. Our private life, when it absorbs our thoughts
and wishes, becomes a prison, from which, in times of grief, there is no
escape but by submission. By submission our thoughts are freed, and our will

is led to new aims which, before, had been hidden by the personal goods
which had been uselessly desired. A large contemplation, or the growth of
universal love, will produce a certain shame of absorption in our own life;
hence the will is led away from protest against the inevitable, towards the
pursuit of more general goods which are not wholly unattainable. Thus
acquiescence in private griefs is an essential element in the growth of
universal love and the impartial will.
Acquiescence does not consist in judging that things are not bad when in
fact they are so. It consists in freedom from anger and indignation and
preoccupied regret. Anger and indignation against those who cause our griefs
will not be felt if universal love is strong; preoccupied regret will be avoided
where the desire of contemplative freedom exists. The man to whom a large
contemplation has become habitual will not readily allow himself to be long
turned aside from the thoughts which give breadth to his life: in the absence
of such thoughts he will feel something small and unworthy, a bondage of
the infinite to the finite. In this way both contemplation and universal love
will promote asquiescence so far as our own sorrows are concerned.
It is possible, however, to emerge from private protest, not into complete
acquiescence, but into a Promethean indignation against the universe. Con-
templation may only universalize our griefs; it may show us all life as a
tragedy, so full of pain as to make us wish that consciousness could vanish
wholly from the world. The belief that this would be desirable if it were
possible is one which cannot be refuted, though it also cannot be shown to
be true. But even this belief is not incompatible with acquiescence. What is
incompatible is indignation, and a preoccupation with evils which makes
goods invisible or only partially visible. Indignation seems scarcely possible
in regard to evils for which no one is responsible; those who feel indignation
in regard to the fundamental evils of the universe feel it against God or
the Devil or an imaginatively personified Fate. When it is realized that the
fundamental evils are due to the blind empire of matter, and are the wholly
necessary effects of forces which have no consciousness and are therefore
neither good nor bad in themselves, indignation becomes absurd, like Xerxes
chastising the Hellespont. Thus the realization of necessity is the liberation
from indignation. This alone, however, will not prevent an undue preoccupa-
tion with evil. It is obvious that some things that exist are good, some bad,
and we have no means of knowing whether the good or the bad preponder-
ate. In action, it is essential to have knowledge of good and evil; thus in all
the matters subject to our will, the question what is good and what bad must
be borne in mind. But in matters which lie outside our power, the question
of good or bad, though knowledge about it, like all knowledge, is worth
acquiring, has not that fundamental religious importance which has been
assigned to it in discussions of theism and optimism. The dualism of good

and bad, when it is too strongly present to our minds, prevents impartial
contemplation and interferes with universal love and worship. There is, in
fact, something finite and unduly human about the practice of emphasizing
good and bad in regard to matters with which action is not concerned. Thus
acquiescence in fundamental evils, like acquiescence in personal griefs,
is furthered by the impartiality of contemplation and universal love and
worship, and must already exist to some extent before these become possible.
Acquiescence is at once a cause and an effect of faith, in much the same way
when faith dispenses with dogma as when it rests upon a belief in God. In
so far as acquiescence is a cause of faith, it rests upon moral discipline, a
suppression of self and its demands, which is necessary to any life in
harmony with the universe, and to any emergence from the finite into the
infinite. This discipline is more severe in the absence of all optimistic dogma,
but in proportion as it is more severe its outcome is greater, more unshakable,
more capable of so enlarging the bounds of self as to make it welcome with
love whatever of good or evil may come before it.
3. Love.—Love is of two kinds, the selective earthly love, which is given to
what is delightful, beautiful, or good, and the impartial heavenly love, which
is given to all indifferently. The earthly love is balanced by an opposing
hatred: to friends are opposed foes; to saints, sinners; to God, the Devil. Thus
this love introduces disunion into the world, with hostile camps and a
doubtful warfare. But the heavenly love does not demand that its object shall
be delightful, beautiful, or good; it can be given to everything that has life, to
the best and the worst, to the greatest and to the least. It is not merely
compassion, since it does not merely wish to relieve misfortune, but finds joy
in what it loves, and is given to the fortunate as well as to the unfortunate.
Though it includes benevolence, it is greater than benevolence: it is contem-
plative as well as active, and can be given where there is no possibility of
benefiting the object. It is love, contemplative in origin, but becoming active
wherever action is possible; and it is a kind of love to which there is no
opposing hatred.
To the divine love, the division of the world into good and bad, though
it remains true, seems lacking in depth; it seems finite and limited in
comparison with the boundlessness of love. The division into two hostile
camps seems unreal; what is felt to be real is the oneness of the world in love.
It is in the birth of divine love that the life of feeling begins for the
universal soul. What contemplation is to the intellect of the universal soul,
divine love is to its emotions. More than anything else, divine love frees the
soul from its prison and breaks down the walls of self that prevent its union
with the world. Where it is strong, duties become easy, and all service is filled
with joy. Sorrow, it is true, remains, perhaps deeper and wider than before,
since the lives of most human beings are largely tragic. But the bitterness of

personal defeat is avoided, and aims become so wide that no complete
overthrow of all hopes is possible. The loves of the natural life survive, but
harmonized with universal love, and no longer setting up walls of division
between the loved and the unloved. And above all, through the bond of
universal love the soul escapes from the separate loneliness in which it is
born, and from which no permanent deliverance is possible while it remains
within the walls of its prison.
Christianity enjoins love of God and love of man as the two great com-
mandments. Love of God differs, however, from love of man, since we cannot
benefit God, while we cannot regard man as wholly good. Thus love of God is
more contemplative and full of worship, while love of man is more active and
full of service. In a religion which is not theistic, love of God is replaced
by worship of the ideal good. As in Christianity, this worship is quite as
necessary as love of man, since without it love of man is left without
guidance in its wish to create the good in human lives. The worship of good
is indeed the greater of the two commandments, since it leads us to know
that love of man is good, and this knowledge helps us to feel the love of man.
Moreover, it makes us conscious of what human life might be, and of the
gulf between what it might be and what it is; hence springs an infinite
compassion, which is a large part of love of man, and is apt to cause the
whole. Acquiescence, also, greatly furthers love of man, since in its absence
anger and indignation and strife come between the soul and the world,
preventing the union in which love of man has its birth. The three elements
of religion, namely worship, acquiescence, and love, are intimately intercon-
nected; each helps to produce the others, and all three together form a unity
in which it is impossible to say which comes first, which last. All three can
exist without dogma, in a form which is capable of dominating life and of
giving infinity to action and thought and feeling; and life in the infinite,
which is the combination of the three, contains all that is essential to religion,
in spite of its absence of dogmatic beliefs.
Religion derives its power from the sense of union with the universe
which it is able to give. Formerly, union was achieved by assimilating the
universe to our own conception of the good; union with God was easy since
God was love. But the decay of traditional belief has made this way of union
no longer one which can be relied upon: we must find a mode of union
which asks nothing of the world and depends only upon ourselves. Such a
mode of union is possible through impartial worship and universal love,
which ignore the difference of good and bad and are given to all alike. In
order to free religion from all dependence upon dogma, it is necessary to
abstain from any demand that the world shall conform to our standards.
Every such demand is an endeavour to impose self upon the world. From this
endeavour the religion which can survive the decay of dogma must be freed.

And in being freed from this endeavour, religion is freed from an element
extraneous to its spirit and not compatible with its unhampered development.
Religion seeks union with the universe by subordination of the demands of
self; but this subordination is not complete if it depends upon a belief that the
universe satisfies some at least of the demands of self. Hence for the sake of
religion itself, as well as because such a belief appears unfounded, it is
important to discover a form of union with the universe which is independent
of all beliefs as to the nature of the universe. By life in the infinite, such a
form of union is rendered possible; and to those who achieve it, it gives
nearly all, and in some ways more than all, that has been given by the
religions of the past.
The essence of religion, then, lies in subordination of the finite part of our
life to the infinite part. Of the two natures in man, the particular or animal
being lives in instinct, and seeks the welfare of the body and its descendants,
while the universal or divine being seeks union with the universe, and desires
freedom from all that impedes its seeking. The animal being is neither good
nor bad in itself; it is good or bad solely as it helps or hinders the divine being
in its search for union with the world. In union with the world the soul finds
its freedom. There are three kinds of union: union in thought, union in
feeling, union in will. Union in thought is knowledge, union in feeling is
love, union in will is service. There are three kinds of disunion: error, hatred,
and strife. What promotes disunion is insistent instinct, which is of the
animal part of man: what promotes union is the combination of knowledge,
love, and consequent service which is wisdom, the supreme good of man.
The life of instinct views the world as a means for the ends of instinct; thus
it makes the world of less account than self. It confines knowledge to what is
useful, love to allies in conflict of rival instincts, service to those with whom
there is some instinctive tie. The world in which it finds a home is a narrow
world, surrounded by alien and probably hostile forces; it is prisoned in a
beleaguered fortress, knowing that ultimate surrender is inevitable.
The life of wisdom seeks an impartial end, in which there is no rivalry, no
essential enmity. The union which it seeks has no boundaries: it wishes to
know all, to love all, and to serve all. Thus it finds its home everywhere: no
lines of circumvallation bar its progress. In knowledge it makes no division of
useful and useless, in love it makes no division of friend and foe, in service it
makes no division of deserving and undeserving.
The animal part of man, knowing that the individual life is brief and
impotent, is appalled by the fact of death, and, unwilling to admit the
hopelessness of the struggle, it postulates a prolongation in which its failures
shall be turned into triumphs. The divine part of man, feeling the individual
to be but of small account, thinks little of death, and finds its hopes
independent of personal continuance.

The animal part of man, being filled with the importance of its own
desires, finds it intolerable to suppose that the universe is less aware of this
importance; a blank indifference to its hopes and fears is too painful to
contemplate, and is therefore not regarded as admissible. The divine part of
man does not demand that the world shall conform to a pattern: it accepts the
world, and finds in wisdom a union which demands nothing of the world. Its
energy is not checked by what seems hostile, but interpenetrates it and
becomes one with it. It is not the strength of our ideals, but their weakness,
that makes us dread the admission that they are ours, not the world’s.
We with our ideals must stand alone, and conquer, inwardly, the world’s
indifference. It is instinct, not wisdom, that finds this difficult and shivers at
the solitude it seems to entail. Wisdom does not feel this solitude, because it
can achieve union even with what seems most alien. The insistent demand
that our ideals shall be already realized in the world is the last prison from
which wisdom must be freed. Every demand is a prison, and wisdom is only
free when it asks nothing.
(The Hibbert Journal, Vol. II, October 1912.)

62
WHAT IS AN AGNOSTIC?
An Agnostic thinks it impossible to know the truth in matters such as God

and the future life with which Christianity and other religions are concerned.
Or, if not impossible, at least impossible at the present time.
ARE AGNOSTICS ATHEISTS?

No. An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is
a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that
we can know there is not. The Agnostic suspends judgment, saying that there
are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial. At the same
time, an Agnostic may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible,
is very improbable; he may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth
considering in practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism. His
attitude may be that which a careful philosopher would have towards the
gods of ancient Greece. If I were asked to prove that Zeus and Poseidon and
Hera and the rest of the Olympians do not exist, I should be at a loss to find
conclusive arguments. An Agnostic may think the Christian God as improb-
able as the Olympians; in that case, he is, for practical purposes, at one with
the atheists.
SINCE YOU DENY ‘GOD’S LAW’, WHAT AUTHORITY DO YOU

ACCEPT AS A GUIDE TO CONDUCT?
An Agnostic does not accept any ‘authority’ in the sense in which religious
people do. He holds that a man should think out questions of conduct for
himself. Of course, he will seek to profit by the wisdom of others, but he will

have to select for himself the people he is to consider wise, and he will not
regard even what they say as unquestionable. He will observe that what passes
as ‘God’s law’ varies from time to time. The Bible says both that a woman
must not marry her deceased husband’s brother, and that, in certain circum-
stances, she must do so. If you have the misfortune to be a childless widow
with an unmarried brother-in-law, it is logically impossible for you to avoid
disobeying ‘God’s law’.
HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT IS GOOD AND WHAT IS EVIL?

WHAT DOES AN AGNOSTIC CONSIDER A SIN?
The Agnostic is not quite so certain as some Christians are as to what is good
and what is evil. He does not hold, as most Christians in the past held, that
people who disagree with the government on abstruse points of theology
ought to suffer a painful death. He is against persecution, and rather chary of
moral condemnation.
As for ‘sin’, he thinks it not a useful notion. He admits, of course, that
some kinds of conduct are desirable and some undesirable, but he holds that
the punishment of undesirable kinds is only to be commended when it is
deterrent or reformatory, not when it is inflicted because it is thought a good
thing on its own account that the wicked should suffer. It was this belief in
vindictive punishment that made men accept Hell. This is part of the harm
done by the notion of ‘sin’.
DOES AN AGNOSTIC DO WHATEVER HE PLEASES?

In one sense, no; in another sense, everyone does whatever he pleases. Sup-
pose, for example, you hate someone so much that you would like to murder
him. Why do you not do so? You may reply: ‘Because religion tells me that
murder is a sin.’ But as a statistical fact, Agnostics are not more prone to
murder than other people; in fact, rather less so. They have the same motives
for abstaining from murder as other people have. Far and away the most
powerful of these motives is the fear of punishment. In lawless conditions,
such as a gold rush, all sorts of people will commit crimes, although in
ordinary circumstances they would have been law-abiding. There is not only
actual legal punishment; there is the discomfort of dreading discovery, and
the loneliness of knowing that, to avoid being hated, you must wear a mask
even with your closest intimates. And there is also what may be called ‘con-
science’. If you ever contemplated a murder, you would dread the horrible
memory of your victim’s last moments or lifeless corpse. All this, it is
true, depends upon your living in a law-abiding community, but there are
abundant secular reasons for creating and preserving such a community.

what is an agnostic? 559
I said that there is another sense in which every man does as he pleases. No
one but a fool indulges every impulse, but what holds a desire in check is
always some other desire. A man’s anti-social wishes may be restrained by a
wish to please God, but they may also be restrained by a wish to please his
friends, or to win the respect of his community, or to be able to contemplate
himself without disgust. But if he has no such wishes, the mere abstract
precepts of morality will not keep him straight.
HOW DOES AN AGNOSTIC REGARD THE BIBLE?

An Agnostic regards the Bible exactly as enlightened clerics regard it. He does
not think that it is divinely inspired; he thinks its early history legendary, and
no more exactly true than that in Homer; he thinks its moral teaching some-
times good, but sometimes very bad. For example: Samuel ordered Saul, in a
war, to kill not only every man, woman, and child of the enemy, but also all
the sheep and cattle. Saul, however, let the sheep and cattle live, and for this
we are told to condemn him. I have never been able to admire Elisha for
cursing the children who laughed at him, or to believe (what the Bible
asserts) that a benevolent Deity would send two she-bears to kill the children.
HOW DOES AN AGNOSTIC REGARD JESUS, THE VIRGIN

BIRTH, AND THE HOLY TRINITY?
Since an Agnostic does not believe in God, he cannot think that Jesus was
God. Most Agnostics admire the life and moral teachings of Jesus as told in
the Gospels, but not necessarily more than those of certain other men. Some
would place him on a level with Buddha, some with Socrates and some with
Abraham Lincoln. Nor do they think that what He said is not open to question,
since they do not accept any authority as absolute.
They regard the Virgin Birth as a doctrine taken over from pagan myth-
ology, where such births were not uncommon. (Zoroaster was said to have
been born of a virgin; Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess, is called the Holy
Virgin.) They cannot give credence to it, or to the doctrine of the Trinity,
since neither is possible without belief in God.
CAN AN AGNOSTIC BE A CHRISTIAN?

The word ‘Christian’ has had various different meanings at different times.
Throughout most of the centuries since the time of Christ, it has meant a
person who believed in God and immortality and held that Christ was God.
But Unitarians call themselves Christians, although they do not believe in the
divinity of Christ, and many people nowadays use the word God in a much

less precise sense than that which it used to bear. Many people who say they
believe in God no longer mean a person, or a trinity of persons, but only a
vague tendency or power or purpose immanent in evolution. Others, going
still further, mean by ‘Christianity’ merely a system of ethics which, since they
are ignorant of history, they imagine to be characteristic of Christians only.
When, in a recent book, I said that what the world needs is ‘love, Christian
love, or compassion’, many people thought this showed some change in my
views, although, in fact, I might have said the same thing at any time. If you
mean by a ‘Christian’ a man who loves his neighbour, who has wide sym-
pathy with suffering and who ardently desires a world freed from the cruel-
ties and abominations which at present disfigure it, then, certainly, you will
be justified in calling me a Christian. And, in this sense, I think you will find
more ‘Christians’ among Agnostics than among the orthodox. But, for my
part, I cannot accept such a definition. Apart from other objections to it, it
seems rude to Jews, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and other non-Christians,
who, so far as history shows, have been at least as apt as Christians to practise
the virtues which some modern Christians arrogantly claim as distinctive of
their own religion.
I think also that all who called themselves Christians in an earlier time, and
a great majority of those who do so at the present day, would consider that
belief in God and immortality is essential to a Christian. On these grounds, I
should not call myself a Christian, and I should say that an Agnostic cannot be
a Christian. But, if the word ‘Christianity’ comes to be generally used to mean
merely a kind of morality, then it will certainly be possible for an Agnostic to
be a Christian.
DOES AN AGNOSTIC DENY THAT MAN HAS A SOUL?

This question has no precise meaning unless we are given a definition of the
word ‘soul’. I suppose what is meant is, roughly, something non-material
which persists throughout a person’s life and even, for those who believe in
immortality, throughout all future time. If this is what is meant, an Agnostic
is not likely to believe that man has a soul. But I must hasten to add that this
does not mean that an Agnostic must be a materialist. Many Agnostics
(including myself) are quite as doubtful of the body as they are of the soul,
but this is a long story taking one into difficult metaphysics. Mind and matter
alike, I should say, are only convenient symbols in discourse, not actually
existing things.

DOES AN AGNOSTIC BELIEVE IN A HEREAFTER,

IN HEAVEN OR HELL?
The question whether people survive death is one as to which evidence is
possible. Psychical research and spiritualism are thought by many to supply
such evidence. An Agnostic, as such, does not take a view about survival
unless he thinks that there is evidence one way or the other. For my part, I do
not think there is any good reason to believe that we survive death, but I am
open to conviction if adequate evidence should appear.
Heaven and hell are a different matter. Belief in hell is bound up with the
belief that the vindictive punishment of sin is a good thing, quite independ-
ently of any reformative or deterrent effect that it may have. Hardly any
Agnostic believes this. As for heaven, there might conceivably someday be
evidence of its existence through spiritualism, but most Agnostics do not
think that there is such evidence, and therefore do not believe in heaven.
ARE YOU NEVER AFRAID OF GOD’S JUDGMENT IN

DENYING HIM?
Most certainly not. I also deny Zeus and Jupiter and Odin and Brahma, but
this causes me no qualms. I observe that a very large portion of the human
race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in con-
sequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have
such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.
HOW DO AGNOSTICS EXPLAIN THE BEAUTY AND HARMONY

OF NATURE?
I do not understand where this ‘beauty’ and ‘harmony’ are supposed to be
found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each
other. Most of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of
hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in
the tapeworm. Let it not be said that this creature is sent as a punishment for
our sins, for it is more prevalent among animals than among humans. I
suppose the questioner is thinking of such things as the beauty of the starry
heavens. But one should remember that stars every now and again explode
and reduce everything in their neighbourhood to a vague mist. Beauty, in any
case, is subjective and exists only in the eye of the beholder.

HOW DO AGNOSTICS EXPLAIN MIRACLES AND OTHER

REVELATIONS OF GOD’S OMNIPOTENCE?
Agnostics do not think that there is any evidence of ‘miracles’ in the sense
of happenings contrary to natural law. We know that faith healing occurs and
is in no sense miraculous. At Lourdes, certain diseases can be cured and
others cannot. Those that can be cured at Lourdes can probably be cured by
any doctor in whom the patient has faith. As for the records of other miracles,
such as Joshua commanding the sun to stand still, the Agnostic dismisses
them as legends and points to the fact that all religions are plentifully sup-
plied with such legends. There is just as much miraculous evidence for the
Greek gods in Homer as for the Christian God in the Bible.
THERE HAVE BEEN BASE AND CRUEL PASSIONS, WHICH

RELIGION OPPOSES. IF YOU ABANDON RELIGIOUS
PRINCIPLES, COULD MANKIND EXIST?
The existence of base and cruel passions is undeniable, but I find no evidence
in history that religion has opposed these passions. On the contrary, it has
sanctified them, and enabled people to indulge them without remorse. Cruel
persecutions have been commoner in Christendom than anywhere else. What
appears to justify persecution is dogmatic belief. Kindliness and tolerance
only prevail in proportion as dogmatic belief decays. In our day, a new
dogmatic religion, namely, Communism, has arisen. To this, as to other
systems of dogma, the Agnostic is opposed. The persecuting character of
present-day Communism is exactly like the persecuting character of Christi-
anity in earlier centuries. In so far as Christianity has become less persecuting,
this is mainly due to the work of free-thinkers who have made dogmatists
rather less dogmatic. If they were as dogmatic now as in former times, they
would still think it right to burn heretics at the stake. The spirit of tolerance
which some modern Christians regard as essentially Christian is, in fact, a
product of the temper which allows doubt and is suspicious of absolute
certainties. I think that anybody who surveys past history in an impartial
manner will be driven to the conclusion that religion has caused more suffer-
ing than it has prevented.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE TO THE AGNOSTIC?

I feel inclined to answer by another question: What is the meaning of ‘the
meaning of life’? I suppose what is intended is some general purpose. I do
not think that life in general has any purpose. It just happened. But individual
human beings have purposes, and there is nothing in agnosticism to cause

them to abandon these purposes. They cannot, of course, be certain of achiev-
ing the results at which they aim; but you would think ill of a soldier who
refused to fight unless victory was certain. The person who needs religion to
bolster up his own purposes is a timorous person, and I cannot think as well
of him as of the man who takes his chances, while admitting that defeat is not
impossible.
DOES NOT THE DENIAL OF RELIGION MEAN THE DENIAL

OF MARRIAGE AND CHASTITY?
Here again, one must reply by another question: Does the man who asks this
question believe that marriage and chastity contribute to earthly happiness
here beiow, or does he think that, while they cause misery here below, they
are to be advocated as means of getting to heaven? The man who takes the
latter view will no doubt expect agnosticism to lead to a decay of what he
calls virtue, but he will have to admit that what he calls virtue is not what
ministers to the happiness of the human race while on earth. If, on the other
hand, he takes the former view, namely, that there are terrestrial arguments in
favour of marriage and chastity, he must also hold that these arguments are
such as should appeal to an Agnostic. Agnostics, as such, have no distinctive
views about sexual morality. But most of them would admit that there are
valid arguments against the unbridled indulgence of sexual desires. They
would derive these arguments, however, from terrestrial sources and not
from supposed divine commands.
IS NOT FAITH IN REASON ALONE A DANGEROUS CREED?

IS NOT REASON IMPERFECT AND INADEQUATE WITHOUT
SPIRITUAL AND MORAL LAW?
No sensible man, however Agnostic, has ‘faith in reason alone’. Reason is
concerned with matters of fact, some observed, some inferred. The question
whether there is a future life and the question whether there is a God concern
matters of fact, and the Agnostic will hold that they should be investigated in
the same way as the question, ‘Will there be an eclipse of the moon tomor-
row?’ But matters of fact alone are not sufficient to determine action, since
they do not tell us what ends we ought to pursue. In the realm of ends, we
need something other than reason. The Agnostic will find his ends in his own
heart and not in an external command. Let us take an illustration: Suppose
you wish to travel by train from New York to Chicago; you will use reason to
discover when the trains run, and a person who thought that there was some
faculty of insight or intuition enabling him to dispense with the timetable
would be thought rather silly. But no timetable will tell him that it is wise to

travel to Chicago. No doubt, in deciding that it is wise, he will have to take
account of further matters of fact; but behind all the matters of fact, there will
be the ends that he thinks fitting to pursue, and these, for an Agnostic as for
other men, belong to a realm which is not that of reason, though it should
be in no degree contrary to it. The realm I mean is that of emotion and
feeling and desire.
DO YOU REGARD ALL RELIGIONS AS FORMS OF

SUPERSTITION OR DOGMA? WHICH OF THE EXISTING
RELIGIONS DO YOU MOST RESPECT, AND WHY?
All the great organized religions that have dominated large populations have
involved a greater or less amount of dogma, but ‘religion’ is a word of which
the meaning is not very definite. Confucianism, for instance, might be called
a religion, although it involves no dogma. And in some forms of liberal
Christianity, the element of dogma is reduced to a minimum.
Of the great religions of history, I prefer Buddhism, especially in its earliest
forms, because it has had the smallest element of persecution.
COMMUNISM LIKE AGNOSTICISM OPPOSES RELIGION. ARE

AGNOSTICS COMMUNISTS?
Communism does not oppose religion. It merely opposes the Christian
religion, just as Mohammedanism does. Communism, at least in the form
advocated by the Soviet Government and the Communist Party, is a new system
of dogma of a peculiarly virulent and persecuting sort. Every genuine Agnostic
must therefore be opposed to it.
DO AGNOSTICS THINK THAT SCIENCE AND RELIGION ARE

IMPOSSIBLE TO RECONCILE?
The answer turns upon what is meant by ‘religion’. If it means merely a
system of ethics, it can be reconciled with science. If it means a system of
dogma, regarded as unquestionably true, it is incompatible with the scientific
spirit, which refuses to accept matters of fact without evidence, and also
holds that complete certainty is hardly ever attainable.
WHAT KIND OF EVIDENCE COULD CONVINCE YOU

THAT GOD EXISTS?
I think that if I heard a voice from the sky predicting all that was going to
happen to me during the next twenty-four hours, including events that

would have seemed highly improbable, and if all these events then proceeded
to happen, I might perhaps be convinced at least of the existence of some
superhuman intelligence. I can imagine other evidence of the same sort
which might convince me, but so far as I know, no such evidence exists.
(Look Magazine, Copyright © 1953 Cowles Magazine, Inc.,
subsequently reprinted in The Religions of America, ed.
Leo Rosten, London: Heinemann.)

63
WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN
This lecture was delivered on March 6, 1927, at Battersea Town Hall,

under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National
Secular Society.
As your chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak
to you tonight is ‘Why I am not a Christian’. Perhaps it would be as well, first
of all, to try to make out what one means by the word ‘Christian’. It is used
these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean
no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense
I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think
that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that
all the people who are not Christians—all the Buddhists, Confucians,
Mohammedans, and so on—are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean
by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights.
I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have
a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a
full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St Augustine and
St Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was
known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were
set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you
believed with the whole strength of your convictions.
WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our
meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items

why i am not a christian 567
which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is
one of a dogmatic nature—namely, that you must believe in God and
immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you
can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name
implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans,
for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not
call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief
that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are
not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right
to call yourself a Christian. Of course there is another sense which you find in
Whitaker’s Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the
world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish
worshippers, and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. The geog-
raphy books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which
I suppose we can ignore. Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not
a Christian I have to tell you two different things; first, why I do not believe in
God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the
best and wisest of men, although I grant Him a very high degree of moral
goodness.
But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so
elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had
a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included the belief in hell.
Belief in eternal hell fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty
recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item
because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this
country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy
Council was able to override Their Graces and hell was no longer necessary
to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe
in hell.
THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

To come to this question of the existence of God, it is a large and serious
question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner
I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to
excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of
course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the exist-
ence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious
dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one
time the free-thinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and
such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God,

but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments
and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that
they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be
proved by the unaided reason, and they had to set up what they considered
were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall
take only a few.
THE FIRST CAUSE ARGUMENT

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First
Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and
as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a
First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argu-
ment, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the
first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and
the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the
vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument
that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say
that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very ser-
iously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause,
until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography,
and I there found this sentence: ‘My father taught me that the question,
“Who made me?” cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the
further question, “Who made God?” ’ That very simple sentence showed me,
as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything
must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything
without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot
be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the
Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested
upon a tortoise; and when they said, ‘How about the tortoise?’ the Indian
said, ‘Suppose we change the subject’. The argument is really no better than
that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being
without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not
have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a
beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to
the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any
more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
THE NATURAL LAW ARGUMENT

Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favourite
argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence

of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going
round the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God
had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that
was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explan-
ation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of
the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a
somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose
to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation as interpreted by Einstein,
because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the
sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some
reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion.
We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really
human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar
space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable
fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that
have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand,
where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you
will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the
laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would
emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice
you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not
regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the
contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was
design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them.
They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance;
and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than
it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state
of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply
a law-giver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human
laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which way you
may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are
a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description
of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who
told them to do that, because even supposing that there were you are then
faced with the question, ‘Why did God issue just those natural laws and no
others?’ If you say that He did it simply from His own good pleasure, and
without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not
subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as
more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues He had a
reason for giving those laws rather than others—the reason, of course, being
to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it—if
there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God Himself was

subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing
God as an intermediary. You have really a law outside and anterior to the
divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because He is not the
ultimate law-giver. In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer
has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am travelling on in time in
my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of
God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard, intel-
lectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come
to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and
more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.
THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN

The next step in this process brings us to the argument from design. You all
know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that
we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little
different we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design.
It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits
have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits
would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know
Voltaire’s remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit
spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the
mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the
time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted
to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable
to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of
adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.
When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most
astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things
that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence has
been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you
think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions
of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better
than the Ku-Klux-Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary
laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on
this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar
system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of tempera-
ture and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short
time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of
thing to which the earth is tending—something dead, cold, and lifeless.
I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes
tell you that if they believed that they would not be able to go on living. Do

not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries much about what is
going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying
much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried
about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion;
but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of some-
thing that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years
hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life
will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when
I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a
consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you
turn your attention to other things.
THE MORAL ARGUMENTS FOR DEITY

Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent
that the theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what are
called the moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course,
that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the
existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the
Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than
he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him.
He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was sceptical, but in
moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at
his mother’s knee. That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much
emphasize—the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associ-
ations have than those of later times.
Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and
that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century.
It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or
wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether
there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is
another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure
there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation:
is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then
for God Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no
longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say,
as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong
have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats
are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that He made them. If
you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through
God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence
logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was

a superior deity who gave orders to the God who made this world, or could
take up the line that some of the gnostics took up—a line which I often
thought was a very plausible one—that as a matter of fact this world that we
know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There
is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.
THE ARGUMENT FOR THE REMEDYING OF INJUSTICE

Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this:
they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the
world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and
often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows
which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in
the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the
balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there
must be heaven and hell in order that in the long run there may be justice.
That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific
point of view, you would say: ‘After all, I know only this world. I do not know
about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on prob-
abilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is
injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also.’ Supposing
you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer
of oranges bad, you would not argue: ‘The underneath ones must be good,
so as to redress the balance.’ You would say: ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad
consignment’; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about
the universe. He would say: ‘Here we find in this world a great deal of
injustice and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does
not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral
argument against deity and not in favour of one.’ Of course I know that the
sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not
what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not
any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have
been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.
Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety,
a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays
a very profound part in influencing people’s desire for a belief in God.
THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST

I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite
sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ
was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we

should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good
many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the
professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way,
but I could go with Him much farther than most professing Christians can.
You will remember that He said: ‘Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite
thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ That is not a new precept
or a new principle. It was used by Lao-Tze and Buddha some five or six
hundred years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact
Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister,1 for
instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go
and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text
was intended in a figurative sense.
Then there is another point which I consider is excellent. You will remem-
ber that Christ said: ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’ That principle I do not
think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries.
I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest
Christians, and they none of them felt that they were acting contrary to
Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says: ‘Give to him that
asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.’
That is a very good principle.
Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but
I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the
question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of
thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this
country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of
Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that
occasion.
Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it,
but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends.
He says: ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the
poor.’ That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised.
All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live
up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, it is not
quite the same thing as for a Christian.
DEFECTS IN CHRIST’S TEACHING

Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in
which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or
the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may
say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically it is
quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not

know anything about Him, so that I am not concerned with the historical
question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as He
appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one
does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, He
certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory
before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a
great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance: ‘Ye shall not have gone
over the cities of Israel, till the Son of Man be come.’ Then He says: ‘There are
some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into
His kingdom’; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He
believed that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many
then living. That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of
a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, ‘Take no thought for the
morrow’, and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought that
the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane
affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who
did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who
frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming
was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found
that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians did really believe
it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens,
because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was
imminent. In that respect clearly He was not so wise as some other people
have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise.
THE MORAL PROBLEM

Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my
mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not
myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in
everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did
believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive
fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching—an attitude
which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract
from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance, find that attitude in
Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane towards the people who
would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to
take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember
the sort of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of
things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.
You will find that in the Gospels Christ said: ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of
vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’ That was said to people

who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone,
and there are a great many of these things about hell. There is, of course, the
familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: ‘Whosoever speaketh
against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor
in the world to come.’ That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery
in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed
the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven
them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a
person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears
and terrors of that sort into the world.
Then Christ says: ‘The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, and they
shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do
iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and
gnashing of teeth’; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that
there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or
else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the
sheep and the goats; how at the second coming to divide the sheep and the
goats He is going to say to the goats: ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into
everlasting fire.’ He continues: ‘And these shall go away into everlasting fire.’
Then He says again: ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to
enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire
that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is not
quenched.’ He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this
doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a
doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of
cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him as His
chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly
responsible for that.
There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the
Gadarene swine where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the
devils into them and make them rush down the hill to the sea. You must
remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils
simply go away; but He chooses to send them into the pigs. Then there is the
curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember
what happened about the fig-tree. ‘He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar
off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and
when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was
not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: “No man eat fruit of thee
hereafter for ever”, . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: “Master, behold the fig-
tree which thou cursedst is withered away.” ’ This is a very curious story,
because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not

blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in
the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known
to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those
respects.
THE EMOTIONAL FACTOR

As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion
has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional
grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion,
because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You
know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler’s book, Erewhon
Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives
in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that
country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and
finds a new religion, in which he is worshipped under the name of the ‘Sun
Child’, and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the Feast of
the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and
Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they
hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun
Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says: ‘I am
going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was
only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon.’ He was told: ‘You must
not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth,
and if they once know that you did not ascend into heaven they will all
become wicked’; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away.
That is the idea—that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the
Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have
been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the
more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has
been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has
been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men did really
believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisi-
tion, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as
witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people
in the name of religion.
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in
humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards
the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured
races or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been
in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized Churches of the
world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its

churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in
the world.
HOW THE CHURCHES HAVE RETARDED PROGRESS

You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not
think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a
pleasant fact, but the Churches compel one to mention facts that are not
pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced
girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says: ‘This
is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life.’ And no steps of
any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to
syphilitic children. That is what the Catholic Church says. I say that that is
fiendish cruelty, and nobody whose natural sympathies have not been
warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all
sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of
things should continue.
That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which at the
present moment the Church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call
morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffer-
ing. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of
progress and of improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the
world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules
of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you
say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human
happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. ‘What has
human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make
people happy.’
FEAR THE FOUNDATION OF RELIGION

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the
terror of the unknown, and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you
have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and
disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of
defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no
wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at
the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to
understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has
forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the
Churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help
us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many

generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no
longer to look round for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the
sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit
place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these
centuries have made it.
WHAT WE MUST DO
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world—
its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it
is, and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely
by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole
conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despot-
isms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in
church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and
all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting
human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face.
We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we
wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in
all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it
does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free
intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a
fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not
looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be
far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
(Monograph published by C. A. Watts & Co., 1927
and subsequently reprinted in Why I am not a Christian, ed.
by Paul Edwards, London: Allen & Unwin; New York:
NOTE
1 Stanley Baldwin.

64
CAN RELIGION CURE OUR
TROUBLES?1
I
Mankind is in mortal peril, and fear now, as in the past, is inclining men to
seek refuge in God. Throughout the West there is a very general revival of
religion. Nazis and Communists dismissed Christianity and did things
which we deplore. It is easy to conclude that the repudiation of Christianity
by Hitler and the Soviet Government is at least in part the cause of our
troubles and that if the world returned to Christianity, our international
problems would be solved. I believe this to be a complete delusion born of
terror. And I think it is a dangerous delusion because it misleads men whose
thinking might otherwise be fruitful and thus stands in the way of a valid
solution.
The question involved is not concerned only with the present state of the
world. It is a much more general question, and one which has been debated
for many centuries. It is the question whether societies can practise a suf-
ficient modicum of morality if they are not helped by dogmatic religion. I do
not myself think that the dependence of morals upon religion is nearly as
close as religious people believe it to be. I even think that some very import-
ant virtues are more likely to be found among those who reject religious
dogmas than among those who accept them. I think this applies especially to
the virtue of truthfulness or intellectual integrity. I mean by intellectual
integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evi-
dence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This
virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of
dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more

likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized
beliefs.
Let us consider for a moment how moral rules have come to be accepted.
Moral rules are broadly of two kinds: there are those which have no basis
except in a religious creed; and there are those which have an obvious basis in
social utility. In the Greek Orthodox Church, two godparents of the same
child must not marry. For this rule, clearly, there is only a theological basis;
and, if you think the rule important, you will be quite right in saying that the
decay of religion is to be deprecated because it will lead to the rule being
infringed. But it is not this kind of moral rule that is in question. The moral
rules that are in question are those for which there is a social justification
independently of theology.
Let us take theft, for example. A community in which everybody steals is
inconvenient for everybody, and it is obvious that most people can get more
of the sort of life they desire if they live in a community where theft is rare.
But in the absence of laws and morals and religion a difficulty arises: for each
individual, the ideal community would be one in which everybody else is
honest and he alone is a thief. It follows that a social institution is necessary if
the interest of the individual is to be reconciled with that of the community.
This is effected more or less successfully by the criminal law and the police.
But criminals are not always caught, and the police may be unduly lenient to
the powerful. If people can be persuaded that there is a God who will punish
theft, even when the police fail, it would seem likely that this belief would
promote honesty. Given a population that already believes in God, it will
readily believe that God has prohibited theft. The usefulness of religion in this
respect is illustrated by the story of Naboth’s vineyard where the thief is the
king, who is above earthly justice.
I will not deny that among semi-civilized communities in the past such
considerations may have helped to promote socially desirable conduct. But in
the present day such good as may be done by imputing a theological origin
to morals is inextricably bound up with such grave evils that the good
becomes insignificant in comparison. As civilization progresses, the earthly
sanctions become more secure and the divine sanctions less so. People see
more and more reason to think that if they steal they will be caught and less
and less reason to think that if they are not caught God will nevertheless
punish them. Even highly religious people in the present day hardly expect to
go to hell for stealing. They reflect that they can repent in time, and that in any
case hell is neither so certain nor so hot as it used to be. Most people in
civilized communities do not steal, and I think the usual motive is the great
likelihood of punishment here on earth. This is borne out by the fact that in a
mining camp during a gold rush, or in any such disorderly community,
almost everybody does steal.

can religion cure our troubles? 581
But, you may say, although the theological prohibition of theft may no
longer be very necessary, it at any rate does no harm since we all wish people
not to steal. The trouble is, however, that as soon as men incline to doubt
received theology it comes to be supported by odious and harmful means. If
a theology is thought necessary to virtue and if candid inquirers see no
reason to think the theology true, the authorities will set to work to discour-
age candid inquiry. In former centuries, they did so by burning the inquirers
at the stake. In Russia they still have methods which are little better; but in
Western countries the authorities have perfected somewhat milder forms of
persuasion. Of these, schools are perhaps the most important: the young
must be preserved from hearing the arguments in favour of the opinions
which the authorities dislike, and those who nevertheless persist in showing
an inquiring disposition will incur social displeasure and, if possible, be
made to feel morally reprehensible. In this way, any system of morals which
has a theological basis becomes one of the tools by which the holders of
power preserve their authority and impair the intellectual vigour of the
young.
I find among many people at the present day an indifference to truth which
I cannot but think extremely dangerous. When people argue, for example, in
defence of Christianity, they do not, like Thomas Aquinas, give reasons for
supposing that there is a God and that He has expressed His will in the
Scriptures. They argue instead that, if people think this, they will act better
than if they do not. We ought not therefore—so these people contend—to
permit ourselves to speculate as to whether God exists. If, in an unguarded
moment, doubt rears its head, we must suppress it vigorously. If candid
thought is a cause of doubt we must eschew candid thought. If the official
exponents of orthodoxy tell you that it is wicked to marry your deceased
wife’s sister, you must believe them lest morals collapse. If they tell you that
birth control is sin, you must accept their dictum however obvious it may be
to you that without birth control disaster is certain. As soon as it is held that
any belief, no matter what, is important for some other reason than that it is
true, a whole host of evils is ready to spring up. Discouragement of inquiry,
which I spoke of before, is the first of these, but others are pretty sure to
follow. Positions of authority will be open to the orthodox. Historical records
must be falsified if they throw doubt on received opinions. Sooner or later
unorthodoxy will come to be considered a crime to be dealt with by the stake,
the purge, or the concentration camp. I can respect the men who argue that
religion is true and therefore ought to be believed, but I can only feel pro-
found moral reprobation for those who say that religion ought to be believed
because it is useful, and that to ask whether it is true is a waste of time.
It is customary among Christian apologists to regard Communism as
something very different from Christianity and to contrast its evils with the

supposed blessings enjoyed by Christian nations. This seems to me a pro-
found mistake. The evils of Communism are the same as those that existed in
Christianity during the Ages of Faith. The Ogpu differs only quantitatively
from the Inquisition. Its cruelties are of the same sort, and the damage that it
does to the intellectual and moral life of Russians is of the same sort as that
which was done by the Inquisitors wherever they prevailed. The Communists
falsify history, and the Church did the same until the Renaissance. If the
Church is not now as bad as the Soviet Government, that is due to
the influence of those who attacked the Church; from the Council of Trent to
the present day whatever improvements it has effected have been due to its
enemies. There are many who object to the Soviet Government because they
dislike the Communist economic doctrine, but this the Kremlin shares with
the early Christians, the Franciscans, and the majority of medieval Christian
heretics. Nor was the Communist doctrine confined to heretics: Sir Thomas
More, an orthodox martyr, speaks of Christianity as Communistic and says
that this was the only aspect of the Christian religion which commended it to
the Utopians. It is not Soviet doctrine in itself that can be justly regarded as a
danger. It is the way in which the doctrine is held. It is held as sacred and
inviolable truth, to doubt which is sin and deserving of the severest punish-
ment. The Communist, like the Christian, believes that his doctrine is essen-
tial to salvation, and it is this belief which makes salvation possible for him. It
is the similarities between Christianity and Communism that make them
incompatible with each other. When two men of science disagree, they do
not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue,
because as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two
theologians differ, since there are no criteria to which either can appeal, there
is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.
Christianity, I will admit, does less harm than it used to do; but that is
because it is less fervently believed. Perhaps, in time, the same change will
come over Communism; and, if it does, that creed will lose much of what
now makes it obnoxious. But if in the West the view prevails that Christianity
is essential to virtue and social stability, Christianity will once again acquire
the vices which it had in the Middle Ages; and, in becoming more and more
like Communism, will become more and more difficult to reconcile with it. It
is not along this road that the world can be saved from disaster.
II
In my first article I was concerned with the evils resulting from any system of
dogmas presented for acceptance, not on the ground of truth, but on the

ground of social utility. What I had to say applies equally to Christianity,
Communism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and all theological systems, except
in so far as they rely upon grounds making a universal appeal of the sort that
is made by men of science. There are, however, special arguments which are
advanced in favour of Christianity on account of its supposed special merits.
These have been set forth eloquently and with a show of erudition by Herbert
Butterfield, Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge,2
and I shall take him as spokesman of the large body of opinion to which he
adheres.
Professor Butterfield seeks to secure certain controversial advantages by
concessions that make him seem more open-minded than in fact he is. He
admits that the Christian Church has relied upon persecution and that it is
pressure from without that has led it to abandon this practice in so far as it
has been abandoned. He admits that the present tension between Russia and
the West is a result of power politics such as might have been expected even if
the Government of Russia had continued to adhere to the Greek Orthodox
Church. He admits that some of the virtues which he regards as distinctively
Christian have been displayed by some free-thinkers and have been absent in
the behaviour of many Christians. But, in spite of these concessions, he still
holds that the evils from which the world is suffering are to be cured by
adherence to Christian dogma, and he includes in the necessary minimum of
Christian dogma not only belief in God and immortality, but also belief in
the Incarnation. He emphasizes the connection of Christianity with certain
historical events, and he accepts these events as historical on evidence which
would certainly not convince him if it were not connected with his religion.
I do not think the evidence for the Virgin Birth is such as would convince any
impartial inquirer if it were presented outside the circle of theological beliefs
he was accustomed to. There are innumerable such stories in Pagan myth-
ology, but no one dreams of taking them seriously. Professor Butterfield,
however, in spite of being an historian, appears to be quite uninterested in
questions of historicity wherever the origins of Christianity are concerned.
His argument, robbed of his urbanity and his deceptive air of broad-
mindedness, may be stated crudely but accurately as follows: ‘It is not worth
while to inquire whether Christ really was born of a Virgin and conceived of
the Holy Ghost because, whether or not this was the case, the belief that it
was the case offers the best hope of escape from the present troubles of the
world.’ Nowhere in Professor Butterfield’s work is there the faintest attempt
to prove the truth of any Christian dogma. There is only the pragmatic argu-
ment that belief in Christian dogma is useful. There are many steps in Profes-
sor Butterfield’s contention which are not stated with as much clarity and
precision as one could desire, and I fear the reason is that clarity and precision
make them implausible. I think the contention, stripped of inessentials, is as

follows: it would be a good thing if people loved their neighbours, but they
do not show much inclination to do so; Christ said they ought to, and if they
believe that Christ was God, they are more likely to pay attention to His
teachings on this point than if they do not; therefore, men who wish people
to love their neighbours will try to persuade them that Christ was God.
The objections to this kind of argumentation are so many that it is difficult
to know where to begin. In the first place, Professor Butterfield and all who
think as he does are persuaded that it is a good thing to love your neighbour,
and their reasons for holding this view are not derived from Christ’s teaching.
On the contrary, it is because they already hold this view that they regard
Christ’s teaching as evidence of His divinity. They have, that is to say, not an
ethic based on theology, but a theology based upon their ethic. They appar-
ently hold, however, that the non-theological grounds which make them
think it a good thing to love your neighbour are not likely to make a wide
appeal, and they therefore proceed to invent other arguments which they
hope will be more effective. This is a very dangerous procedure. Many Prot-
estants used to think it as wicked to break the Sabbath as to commit murder. If
you persuaded them it was not wicked to break the Sabbath, they might infer
that it was not wicked to commit murder. Every theological ethic is in part
such as can be defended rationally, and in part a mere embodiment of super-
stitious taboos. The part which can be defended rationally should be so
defended, since otherwise those who discover the irrationality of the other
part may rashly reject the whole.
But has Christianity, in fact, stood for a better morality than that of its
rivals and opponents? I do not see how any honest student of history can
maintain that this is the case. Christianity has been distinguished from other
religions by its greater readiness for persecution. Buddhism has never been a
persecuting religion. The Empire of the Caliphs was much kinder to Jews and
Christians than Christian States were to Jews and Mohammedans. It left Jews
and Christians unmolested, provided they paid tribute. Anti-Semitism was
promoted by Christianity from the moment when the Roman Empire
became Christian. The religious fervour of the Crusades led to pogroms in
Western Europe. It was Christians who unjustly accused Dreyfus, and free-
thinkers who secured his final rehabilitation. Abominations have in modern
times been defended by Christians not only when Jews were the victims, but
also in other connections. The abominations of King Leopold’s government
of the Congo were concealed or minimized by the Church and were ended
only by an agitation conducted mainly by free-thinkers. The whole conten-
tion that Christianity has had an elevating moral influence can only be main-
tained by wholesale ignoring or falsification of the historical evidence.
The habitual answer is that the Christians who did things which we
deplore were not true Christians in the sense that they did not follow the

teachings of Christ. One might of course equally well argue that the Soviet
Government does not consist of true Marxists, for Marx taught that Slavs are
inferior to Germans and this doctrine is not accepted in the Kremlin. The
followers of a teacher always depart in some respects from the doctrine of the
master. Those who aim at founding a Church ought to remember this. Every
Church develops an instinct of self-preservation and minimizes those parts
of the founder’s doctrine which do not minister to that end. But in any case
what modern apologists call ‘true’ Christianity is something depending upon
a very selective process. It ignores much that is to be found in the Gospels: for
example, the parable of the sheep and the goats, and the doctrine that the
wicked will suffer eternal torment in hell-fire. It picks out certain parts of the
Sermon on the Mount, though even these it often rejects in practice. It leaves
the doctrine of non-resistance, for example, to be practised only by non-
Christians such as Gandhi. The precepts that it particularly favours are held to
embody such a lofty morality that they must have had a divine origin. And
yet Professor Butterfield must know that these precepts were all uttered by
Jews before the time of Christ. They are to be found, for example, in the
teaching of Hillel and in the ‘Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs’, concern-
ing which the Rev. Dr R. H. Charles, a leading authority in this matter, says:
‘The Sermon on the Mount reflects in several instances the spirit and even
reproduces the very phrases of our text: many passages in the Gospels exhibit
traces of the same, and St Paul seems to have used the book as a vade-mecum.’
Dr Charles is of the opinion that Christ must have been acquainted with this
work. If, as we are sometimes told, the loftiness of the ethical teaching proves
the divinity of its author, it is the unknown writer of these Testaments who
must have been divine.
That the world is in a bad way is undeniable, but there is not the faintest
reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out. Our troubles
have sprung, with the inexorability of Greek tragedy, from the First World
War, of which the Communists and the Nazis were products. The First World
War was wholly Christian in origin. The three Emperors were devout, and so
were the more warlike of the British Cabinet. Opposition to the war came, in
Germany and Russia, from the Socialists, who were anti-Christian; in France,
from Jaurès, whose assassin was applauded by earnest Christians; in England,
from John Morley, a noted atheist. The most dangerous features of Commun-
ism are reminiscent of the medieval Church. They consist of fanatical accept-
ance of doctrines embodied in a Sacred Book, unwillingness to examine these
doctrines critically, and savage persecution of those who reject them. It is not
to a revival of fanaticism and bigotry in the West that we must look for a
happy issue. Such a revival, if it occurs, will only mean that the hateful
features of the Communist régime have become universal. What the world
needs is reasonableness, tolerance, and a realization of the interdependence of

the parts of the human family. This interdependence has been enormously
increased by modern inventions, and the purely mundane arguments for a
kindly attitude to one’s neighbour are very much stronger than they were at
any earlier time. It is to such considerations that we must look, and not to
a return to obscurantist myths. Intelligence, it might be said, has caused our
troubles; but it is not unintelligence that will cure them. Only more and wiser
intelligence can make a happier world.
(Why I am not a Christian, London: Allen & Unwin; New York:
NOTES
1 The two parts of this essay originally appeared as articles in the Stockholm newspaper,
Dagens Nyheter, on November 9 and 11, 1954.
2 Christianity and History (London, 1950.)

66
SCIENCE AND EDUCATION
Education in the past has been a haphazard and traditional affair, supposed
not to begin until the child was at least six years old, and to be concerned
almost exclusively with the acquisition of knowledge. It has gradually come
to be realized that the earlier years have an enormous importance for the
whole of the rest of life, and that the traditional methods developed by
uneducated nurses and mothers are by no means the best.
It cannot be said that we know as yet what are the best methods for dealing
with very young children. Dr John B. Watson has pointed out the curious fact
that, while men of science have studied with great care the behaviour of
nearly everything in the world, they have abstained almost with one accord
from a scientific study of human infants. For this there have been several
reasons: in the first place, most men consider it infra dig. to notice an infant,
which, it is thought, should be left to the exclusive care of women; in the
second place, hardly any man of science had time to observe his own infants.
He can get a grant from a university or other learned body to study the
Papuans or the Andaman Islanders, but if he said he wanted to study his own
child, he would be laughed at. The observations of nurses and mothers
are rendered unreliable by partiality and by the fact that they are seldom
trained observers.
Babies are regarded by some as darlings, by others as nuisances, but by
practically no one as facts to be impartially studied. Anything that may be said
about them at present is, therefore, tentative and provisional. But I think we
may expect that in the near future scientific studies, such as those initiated by
Dr Watson, will become more frequent. We cannot, however, hope for really
valuable results until it has been possible to follow the development of large
numbers of young people from birth to the age of twenty, and to obtain such

data as will enable us to trace separately the effects of heredity and environ-
ment. One could wish that some wealthy scientist would offer a benefaction
consisting in giving, in a large number of cases, expensive education in a
well-to-do environment to one of two twins born of indigent parents, the
twins to be separated as soon as weaned. In this way we might gradually get
some data as to heredity, for the similarities between such twins when adult
might be fairly regarded as mainly congenital.
Whatever may be thought of psycho-analysis, there is one point in which
it is unquestionably in the right, and that is in the enormous stress which it
lays upon the emotional life. Given the right emotional development, both
character and intelligence ought to develop spontaneously. It is, therefore, to
the emotions above all that the scientific educator should direct his attention.
In regard to the emotional life, there are two elements to be considered: on
the one hand, the nature of the emotions; on the other hand, the objects
toward which they are directed. Take, for example, curiosity; this may take
the form of peeping or prying, in which case it must be regarded as undesir-
able, or it may take the form of a desire for scientific knowledge, in which
case it is in the highest degree useful. Or again, take hatred; a man may hate
the Government, in which case he is a subversive revolutionary, or he may
hate the Reds, in which case he is a pillar of society. The quality of the
emotions is the same, but the object is different. The scientific educator has
two things to think about: in the first place, he must produce emotions in the
right proportions; and in the second place, he must attach them to the right
objects. The first is probably, in the last analysis, a matter of chemistry; the
second is a matter of ‘conditioning’ in the sense of Pavlov and Watson. But,
although the first may be a matter of chemistry when it comes to be
adequately understood, it is at the moment much more easily dealt with
along the lines studied by psycho-analysis. Moreover, the two departments
overlap. A wrong object for an emotion may cause the emotion to increase or
decrease unduly, while a new emotion may be cultivated by providing it with
a suitable object.
Let us take first the question of the quality of the emotions. One may in a
sense divide emotional attitudes into positive and negative; the emotions of
hate, rage, and fear are negative, while emotions of affection, pleasure, and
experimentation are positive. Speaking broadly, it is a good thing to have
much of the positive emotions and little of the negative. There are, of
course, exceptions. It is useful to be afraid of snakes, tigers, precipices, and
interviewers. But often in such cases fear is not the ideally best reaction; the
ideally best reaction is prudence, that is to say, a rational apprehension of
danger without the emotion of terror. The more intelligent and rational
people become, the less need they have for negative attitudes. A pre-scientific
community can, for example, do nothing with criminals except hate, fear,

science and education 599
and punish them, whereas a scientific community can study the sources of
their criminality, and so attempt reform or prevention of criminal impulses.
Or, again, take lightning; fear alone would never have led to the construction
of lightning conductors, which depended upon the positive attitude of
curiosity.
Science has made life less dangerous than it used to be, and has thus greatly
diminished the need of fear as a motive. Education ought from the start to
take account of this fact, and to aim at producing the kind of attitude that
leads to lightning conductors rather than the kind that leads to cowering
terror during a thunderstorm. I am not at the moment concerned with
specific fears; these will come under our second heading; I am concerned at
the moment with timidity, that is to say, the habit of being frightened easily
and by many things.
Timidity depends partly upon physical health: a given child is more timid
on a day when his digestion is out of order than on a day when it is functioning
properly. But timidity also depends upon various mental causes: a child who
is frequently punished or frequently threatened with punishment will
become timid; so will, conversely, a child who is always carefully guarded
against minor dangers. Muscular activities, as unimpeded as possible, are the
best method of producing physical fearlessness in children, while mental
fearlessness is the product of unhampered curiosity. Indeed, curiosity is to
the mind exactly what muscular activity is to the body. It will be found that
mind and body interact in these respects, and that the unimpeded activity
which promotes courage also promotes a good digestion, except, of course,
in such cases as eating poisonous berries to see whether they are poisonous.
(All educational principles have to be applied with common sense.)
Dr Cameron, author of The Nervous Child, has lately written a paper1 in
which, although he has hitherto chiefly stressed the psychological causes and
cures of nervousness, he points out that the nervous child generally suffers
from excessive acidity and can often be greatly helped by the administration
of alkalis. This is a good example of the importance of keeping the psycho-
logical and chemical aspects of child-welfare equally prominent in our
thoughts.
Then again, take rage: both rage and fear, as we know from the work of
Cannon, are due to secretion of adrenalin in the blood. Presumably, anything
that makes the adrenal gland more active will make people more prone to
these emotions, of which the one or the other is felt according to the nature
of the external situation. Perhaps we shall learn in time to eliminate both
emotions by regulating the action of the adrenal gland or by administering
an antidote. But in the case of rage also, the psychological causes are for the
present easier to ascertain and control than the chemical causes.
The primitive stimulus to rage, as Dr Watson has shown, consists in

impediment to the free movement of the limbs. And the habit of rage in later
life is generated as a rule by the existence of some irritating obstacle to free
activity which is considered to be insurmountable, and, therefore, produces
feelings of anger which vent themselves upon other objects. Therefore, so far
as is compatible with social good behaviour, it is desirable, if men are to be
free from the habit of rage, that they should not have the sense of being
impeded in activities toward which they feel powerful impulses. One of the
really difficult problems of education is to secure in the young the necessary
minimum of good behaviour without producing this attitude of anger at the
existence of insurmountable obstacles, but this is a problem of conditioning.
Affectionateness is an emotional habit which is good in moderation,
but can easily be carried too far. When carried too far, it involves a lack of
self-dependence, which may have very undesirable effects upon character.
Some people who are moralists rather than psychologists confound affection
with benevolence, and imagine that it consists in a desire for the happiness of
the beloved object. This is only very partially the case; in fact, affection in its
instinctive manifestations is bound up with jealousy, and is not in all its
forms a desirable emotion. A good deal of psychological discrimination
is necessary in this matter; no child or adult can develop adequately without
affection, but at the same time affection should not play too large a part in
life, and great care should be taken to free it from jealousy and from undue
dependence upon others. This is a problem which is often very unwisely
handled in the home, largely from the mistaken notion that it is impossible
for children to be too fond of their parents.
I come now to the question of the object toward which emotions are
directed. This is the question of ‘conditioning’ which has been stressed by
the behaviourists. It is undoubtedly very important, but I do not agree with
them in thinking that it constitutes practically the whole of education. There
are not only good and bad objects for emotions, there are also, speaking
broadly, good and bad emotions. The cultivation of good emotions and the
elimination of bad ones is not in the main a question of conditioning, which
is concerned with the objects to which the emotions are attached. The great
work of Pavlov on Conditioned Reflexes has provided a wealth of material on this
subject, so far as dogs are concerned, but where human beings are concerned
experimentation is much more difficult, although Dr Watson made some
valuable investigations on infants in hospitals. Nevertheless, observation
affords considerable material which becomes easier to interpret in the light
of the experimental data concerning dogs.
The hatred of knowledge, which is general among civilized mankind, has
been produced by a procedure which was entirely correct from a scientific
point of view, namely, the creation of an association between lessons and
punishment. The modern educationalist aims at an entirely opposite kind of

science and education 601
conditioning. He aims at providing the children with comparatively easy
tasks, which can be surmounted with a moderate degree of effort and which
appear interesting from the first. By this method learning is associated with
the pleasure derived from success, and the efforts which it involves come to
be met as cheerfully as the muscular efforts involved in football. In sexual
education, to take another matter, the difference between wisdom and
unwisdom is almost wholly a question of conditioning.
One of the characteristics of the scientific method is that it is quantitative
and aims at discovering the just balance of the different ingredients required
to produce a good result, whereas pre-scientific methods consider some
things good and some bad without regard to quantity. Take, for example,
the question of the quantity of adult attention that is best for a child. In
old days most children got less of this than they should have had; nowadays,
most children of the well-to-do get more. When such children first come
to school they cling to the adults and find it difficult to mix with their
contemporaries, toward whom their first reaction is one of hatred and fear.
Many of them have been rendered nervous in a greater or less degree by
the constant anxiety of parents, and by the effort to understand grown-up
conversation.
The modern careful parent has been alarmed by all the dangers to which
children are exposed, and has tended to convey to them a certain timidity
through the contagion of the unconscious. At the same time, the child has
become accustomed to thinking of himself as the centre of the universe and
to expecting from the world at large a degree of solicitude which only
parents are likely to feel. This is a bad preparation for the world and is best
remedied by association with contemporaries. A child is, on the whole, better
fighting with other children than being coddled by grown-up people, but the
fighting must be kept within limits, and adult supervision is necessary to see
that the less vigorous, physically, are not made to suffer.
The spontaneous development of community feeling in a group of children
is an interesting study, but it is impossible where adults intervene constantly
to promote what they consider social behaviour. A good many years of study
and experiment will be necessary before anything very definite can be said on
this subject.
(Fiftieth Anniversary Number, St Louis Post
Dispatch, subsequently reprinted in The Drift of
Civilization, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1929.)
NOTE
1 An address on Children in General Practice: A Study Both of Temperament and of
Disease. The Lancet, January 7, 1928.

69
SCIENCE AND VALUES
The philosophy which has seemed appropriate to science has varied from
time to time. To Newton and most of his English contemporaries science
seemed to afford proof of the existence of God as the Almighty Lawgiver:
He had decreed the law of gravitation and whatever other natural laws had
been discovered by Englishmen. In spite of Copernicus, Man was still the
moral centre of the universe, and God’s purposes were mainly concerned with
the human race. The more radical among the French philosophes, being politic-
ally in conflict with the Church, took a different view. They did not admit
that laws imply a lawgiver; on the other hand, they thought that physical laws
could explain human behaviour. This led them to materialism and denial of
free will. In their view, the universe has no purpose and man is an insignifi-
cant episode. The vastness of the universe impressed them and inspired in
them a new form of humility to replace that which atheism had made obso-
lete. This point of view is well expressed in a little poem by Leopardi and
expresses, more nearly than any other known to me, my own feeling about
the universe and human passions:
THE INFINITE1
Dear to me always was this lonely hill
And this hedge that excludes so large a part
Of the ultimate horizon from my view.
But as I sit and gaze, my thought conceives
Interminable vastnesses of space
Beyond it, and unearthly silences,
And profoundest calm; whereat my heart almost

Becomes dismayed. And as I hear the wind
Blustering through these branches, I find myself
Comparing with this sound that infinite silence;
And then I call to mind eternity,
And the ages that are dead, and this that now
Is living, and the noise of it. And so
In this immensity my thought sinks drowned:
And sweet it seems to shipwreck in this sea.
But this has become an old-fashioned way of feeling. Science used to be

valued as a means of getting to know the world; now, owing to the triumph of
technique, it is conceived as showing how to change the world. The new point
of view, which is adopted in practice throughout America and Russia, and in
theory by many modern philosophers, was first proclaimed by Marx in 1845,
in his Theses on Feuerbach. He says:
The question whether objective truth belongs to human thinking is not a

question of theory, but a practical question. The truth, i.e. the reality and
power, of thought must be demonstrated in practice. The contest as to the
reality or non-reality of a thought which is isolated from practice, is a purely
scholastic question. . . . Philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways, but the real task is to alter it.
From the point of view of technical philosophy, this theory has been best
developed by John Dewey, who is universally acknowledged as America’s
most eminent philosopher.
This philosophy has two aspects, one theoretical and the other ethical. On
the theoretical side, it analyses away the concept ‘truth’, for which it substi-
tutes ‘utility’. It used to be thought that, if you believed Caesar crossed the
Rubicon, you believed truly, because Caesar did cross the Rubicon. Not so, say
the philosophers we are considering: to say that your belief is ‘true’ is another
way of saying that you will find it more profitable than the opposite belief.
I might object that there have been cases of historical beliefs which, after
being generally accepted for a long time, have in the end been admitted to be
mistaken. In the case of such beliefs, every examinee would find the accepted
falsehood of his time more profitable than the as yet unacknowledged truth.
But this kind of objection is swept aside by the contention that a belief may
be ‘true’ at one time and ‘false’ at another. In 1920 it was ‘true’ that Trotsky
had a great part in the Russian Revolution; in 1930 it was ‘false’. The results
of this view have been admirably worked out in George Orwell’s ‘1984’.
This philosophy derives its inspiration from science in several different
ways. Take first its best aspect, as developed by Dewey. He points out that

science and values 619
scientific theories change from time to time, and that what recommends a
theory is that it ‘works’. When new phenomena are discovered, for which it
no longer ‘works’, it is discarded. A theory—so Dewey concludes—is a tool
like another; it enables us to manipulate raw material. Like any other tool, it
is judged good or bad by its efficiency in this manipulation, and like any
other tool, it is good at one time and bad at another. While it is good it may
be called ‘true’, but this word must not be allowed its usual connotations.
Dewey prefers the phrase ‘warranted assertibility’ to the word ‘truth’.
The second source of the theory is technique. What do we want to know
about electricity? Only how to make it work for us. To want to know more is
to plunge into useless metaphysics. Science is to be admired because it gives us
power over nature, and the power comes wholly from technique. Therefore
an interpretation which reduces science to technique keeps all the useful
part, and dismisses only a dead weight of medieval lumber. If technique is all
that interests you, you are likely to find this argument very convincing.
The third attraction of pragmatism—which cannot be wholly separated
from the second—is love of power. Most men’s desires are of various kinds.
There are the pleasures of sense; there are aesthetic pleasures and pleasures of
contemplation; there are private affections; and there is power. In an indi-
vidual, any one of these may acquire predominance over the others. If love of
power dominates, you arrive at Marx’s view that what is important is not to
understand the world, but to change it. Traditional theories of knowledge
were invented by men who loved contemplation—a monkish taste, accord-
ing to modern devotees of mechanism. Mechanism augments human power
to an enormous degree. It is therefore this aspect of science that attracts the
lovers of power. And if power is all you want from science, the pragmatist
theory gives you just what you want, without accretions that to you seem
irrelevant. It gives you even more than you could have expected, for if you
control the police it gives you the god-like power of making truth. You cannot
make the sun cold, but you can confer pragmatic ‘truth’ on the proposition
‘the sun is cold’ if you can insure that everyone who denies it is liquidated.
I doubt whether Zeus could do more.
This engineer’s philosophy, as it may be called, is distinguished from
common sense and from most other philosophies by its rejection of ‘fact’ as
a fundamental concept in defining ‘truth’. If you say, for example, ‘the South
Pole is cold’, you say something which, according to traditional views, is
‘true’ in virtue of a ‘fact’, namely that the South Pole is cold. And this is a
fact, not because people believe it, or because it pays to believe it; it just is
a fact. Facts, when they are not about human beings and their doings, repre-
sent the limitations of human power. We find ourselves in a universe of a
certain sort, and we find out what sort of a universe it is by observation, not
by self-assertion. It is true that we can make changes on or near the surface

of the earth, but not elsewhere. Practical men have no wish to make changes
elsewhere, and can therefore accept a philosophy which treats the surface of
the earth as if it were the whole universe. But even on the surface of the earth
our power is limited. To forget that we are hemmed in by facts which are for
the most part independent of our desires is a form of insane megalomania.
This kind of insanity has grown up as a result of the triumph of scientific
technique. Its latest manifestation is Stalin’s refusal to believe that heredity
can have the temerity to ignore Soviet decrees, which is like Xerxes whipping
the Hellespont to teach Poseidon a lesson.
‘The pragmatic theory of truth [I wrote in 1907] is inherently connected
with the appeal to force. If there is a non-human truth, which one man may
know while another does not, there is a standard outside the disputants, to
which, we may urge, the dispute ought to be submitted; hence a pacific
and judicial settlement of disputes is at least theoretically possible. If, on the
contrary, the only way of discovering which of the disputants is in the right is
to wait and see which of them is successful, there is no longer any principle
except force by which the issue can be decided. . . . In international matters,
owing to the fact that the disputants are often strong enough to be independ-
ent of outside control, these considerations become more important. The
hopes of international peace, like the achievement of internal peace, depend
upon the creation of an effective force of public opinion formed upon an
estimate of the rights and wrongs of disputes. Thus it would be misleading to
say that the dispute is decided by force, without adding that force is depend-
ent upon justice. But the possibility of such a public opinion depends upon
the possibility of a standard of justice which is a cause, not an effect, of the
wishes of the community; and such a standard of justice seems incompatible
with the pragmatist philosophy. This philosophy, therefore, although it
begins with liberty and toleration, develops, by inherent necessity, into the
appeal to force and the arbitrament of the big battalions. By this development
it becomes equally adapted to democracy at home and to imperialism
abroad. Thus here again it is more delicately adjusted to the requirements of
the time than any other philosophy which has hitherto been invented.
‘To sum up: Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind which finds on the
surface of this planet the whole of its imaginative material; which feels con-
fident of progress, and unaware of non-human limitations to human power;
which loves battle, with all the attendant risks, because it has no real doubt
that it will achieve victory; which desires religion, as it desires railways and
electric light, as a comfort and a help in the affairs of this world, not as
providing non-human objects to satisfy the hunger for perfection. But for
those who feel that life on this planet would be a life in prison if it were not
for the windows into a greater world beyond; for those to whom a belief in
man’s omnipotence seems arrogant; who desire rather the stoic freedom that

comes of mastery over the passions than the Napoleonic domination that
sees the kingdoms of this world at its feet—in a word, to men who do not
find man an adequate object of their worship, the pragmatist’s world will
seem narrow and petty, robbing life of all that gives it value, and making man
himself smaller by depriving the universe which he contemplates of all its
splendour.’
Let us now try to sum up what increases in human happiness science has
rendered possible, and what ancient evils it is in danger of intensifying.
I do not pretend that there is any way of arriving at the millennium.
Whatever our social institutions, there will be death and illness (though in a
diminishing quantity); there will be old age and insanity; there will be either
danger or boredom. So long as the present family survives, there will be
unrequited love and parents’ tyranny and children’s ingratitude; and if some-
thing new were substituted for the family, it would bring new evils, probably
worse. Human life cannot be made a matter of unalloyed bliss, and to allow
oneself excessive hopes is to court disappointment. Nevertheless what can
be soberly hoped is very considerable. In what follows, I am not prophesying
what will happen, but pointing out the best that may happen, and the further
fact that this best will happen if it is widely desired.
There are two ancient evils that science, unwisely used, may intensify: they
are tyranny and war. But I am concerned now rather with pleasant possi-
bilities than with unpleasant ones.
Science can confer two kinds of benefits: it can diminish bad things, and
it can increase good things. Let us begin with the former.
Science can abolish poverty and excessive hours of labour. In the earliest
human communities, before agriculture, each human individual required
two or more square miles to sustain life. Subsistence was precarious and
death from starvation must have been frequent. At that stage, men had the
same mixture of misery and carefree enjoyment as still makes up the lives
of other animals.
Agriculture was a technical advance of the same kind of importance as
attaches to modern machine industry. The way that agriculture was used is an
awful warning to our age. It introduced slavery and serfdom, human sacrifice,
absolute monarchy and large wars. Instead of raising the standard of life,
except for a tiny governing minority, it merely increased the population. On
the whole, it probably increased the sum of human misery. It is not impos-
sible that industrialism may take the same course.
Fortunately, however, the growth of industrialism has coincided in the
West with the growth of democracy. It is possible now, if the population of
the world does not increase too fast, for one man’s labour to produce much
more than is needed to provide a bare subsistence for himself and his family.
Given an intelligent democracy not misled by some dogmatic creed this

possibility will be used to raise the standard of life. It has been so used, to a
limited extent, in Britain and America, and would have been so used more
effectively but for war. Its use in raising the standard of life has depended
mainly upon three things: democracy, trade unionism, and birth control. All
three, of course, have incurred hostility from the rich. If these three things
can be extended to the rest of the world as it becomes industrialized, and
if the danger of great wars can be eliminated, poverty can be abolished
throughout the whole world and excessive hours of labour will no longer be
necessary anywhere. But without these three things, industrialism will create
a régime like that in which the Pharaohs built the pyramids. In particular, if
world population continues to increase at the present rate, the abolition of
poverty and excessive work will be totally impossible.
Science has already conferred an immense boon on mankind by the
growth of medicine. In the eighteenth century people expected most of their
children to die before they were grown up. Improvement began at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, chiefly owing to vaccination. It has continued
ever since and is still continuing. In 1920 the infant mortality in England and
Wales was 80 per thousand, in 1948 it was 34 per thousand. The general
death rate in 1948 (10.8) was the lowest ever recorded up to that date. There
is no obvious limit to the improvement of health that can be brought about
by medicine. The sum of human suffering has also been much diminished
by the discovery of anaesthetics.
The general diminution of lawlessness and crimes of violence would not
have been possible without science. If you read eighteenth-century novels,
you get a strange impression of London: unlighted streets, footpads and
highwaymen, nothing that we should count as a police force, but, in a futile
attempt to compensate for all this, an abominably savage and ferocious crimi-
nal law. Street lighting, telephones, finger-printing, and the psychology of
crime and punishment are scientific advances which have made it possible for
the police to reduce crime below anything that the most Utopian philosopher
of the ‘Age of Reason’ would have imagined possible.
Coming now to positive goods, there is, to begin with, an immense
increase of education which has been rendered possible by the increased
productivity of labour. As regards general education, this is most marked in
America, where even university education is free. If I took a taxi in New York,
I would often find that the driver was a Ph.D., who would start arguing about
philosophy at imminent risk to himself and me. But in England as well as
in America the improvement at the highest level is equally remarkable. Read,
for instance, Gibbon’s account of Oxford.
With this goes an increase of opportunity. It is much easier than it used to
be for an able young man without what are called ‘natural’ advantages (i.e.
inherited wealth) to rise to a position in which he can make the best use of his

talents. In this respect there is still much to be done, but there is every reason
to expect that in England and in America it will be done. The waste of talent in
former times must have been appalling; I shudder to think how many ‘mute
inglorious Miltons’ there must have been. Our modern Miltons, alas, remain
for the most part inglorious, though not mute. But ours is not a poetic age.
Finally, there is more diffused happiness than ever before, and if the fear of
war were removed this improvement would be very much greater than it is.
Let us consider for a moment the kind of disposition that must be widely
diffused if a good world is to be created and sustained.
I will begin with the intellectual temper that is required. There must be
in many a desire to know the important facts, and in most an unwillingness
to give assent to pleasant illusions. There are in the world at the present day
two great opposing systems of dogma: Catholicism and Communism. If you
believe either with such intensity that you are prepared to face martyrdom,
you can live a happy life, and even enjoy a happy death if it comes quickly.
You can inspire converts, you can create an army, you can stir up hatred of
the opposite dogma and its adherents, and generally you can seem immensely
effective. I am constantly asked: What can you, with your cold rationalism,
offer to the seeker after salvation that is comparable to the cosy home-like
comfort of a fenced-in dogmatic creed?
To this the answer is many-sided. In the first place, I do not say that I can
offer as much happiness as is to be obtained by the abdication of reason. I do
not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained from drink or
drugs or amassing great wealth by swindling widows and orphans. It is not
the happiness of the individual convert that concerns me; it is the happiness
of mankind. If you genuinely desire the happiness of mankind, certain forms
of ignoble personal happiness are not open to you. If your child is ill, and you
are a conscientious parent, you accept medical diagnosis, however doubtful
and discouraging; if you accept the cheerful opinion of a quack and your
child consequently dies, you are not excused by the pleasantness of belief in
the quack while it lasted. If people loved humanity as genuinely as they love
their children, they would be as unwilling in politics as in the home to let
themselves be deceived by comfortable fairy tales.
The next point is that all fanatical creeds do harm. This is obvious when
they have to compete with other fanaticisms, since in that case they promote
hatred and strife. But it is true even when only one fanatical creed is in
the field. It cannot allow free inquiry, since this might shake its hold. It
must oppose intellectual progress. If, as is usually the case, it involves a
priesthood, it gives great power to a caste professionally devoted to mainten-
ance of the intellectual status quo, and to a pretence of certainty where in
fact there is no certainty.
Every fanatical creed essentially involves hatred. I knew once a fanatical

advocate of an international language, but he preferred Ido to Esperanto.
Listening to his conversation, I was appalled by the depravity of the
Esperantists, who, it seemed, had sunk to hitherto unimaginable depths of
wickedness. Luckily my friend failed to convince any government, and so the
Esperantists survived. But if he had been at the head of a state of two hundred
million inhabitants, I shudder to think what would have happened to them.
Very often the element of hatred in a fanatical doctrine becomes pre-
dominant. People who tell you they love the proletariat often in fact only hate
the rich. Some people who believe that you should love your neighbour as
yourself think it right to hate those who do not do so. As these are the vast
majority, no notable increase of loving kindness results from their creed.
Apart from such specific evils, the whole attitude of accepting a belief
unquestioningly on a basis of authority is contrary to the scientific spirit,
and, if widespread, scarcely compatible with the progress of science. Not
only the Bible, but even the works of Marx and Engels, contain demonstrably
false statements. The Bible says the hare chews the cud, and Engels said that
the Austrians would win the war of 1866. These are only arguments against
fundamentalists. But when a Sacred Book is retained while fundamentalism
is rejected, the authority of The Book becomes vested in the priesthood. The
meaning of ‘dialectical materialism’ changes every decade, and the penalty
for a belated interpretation is death or the concentration camp.
The triumphs of science are due to the substitution of observation and
inference for authority. Every attempt to revive authority in intellectual
matters is a retrograde step. And it is part of the scientific attitude that the
pronouncements of science do not claim to be certain, but only to be the
most probable on present evidence. One of the greatest benefits that science
confers upon those who understand its spirit is that it enables them to live
without the delusive support of subjective certainty. That is why science
cannot favour persecution.
The desire for a fanatical creed is one of the great evils of our time. There
have been other ages with the same disease: the late Roman Empire and
the sixteenth century are the most obvious examples. When Rome began to
decay, and when, in the third century, barbarian irruptions produced fear
and impoverishment, men began to look for safety in another world. Plotinus
found it in Plato’s eternal world, the followers of Mithra in a solar Paradise,
and the Christians in heaven. The Christians won, largely because their dog-
matic certainty was the greatest. Having won, they started persecuting each
other for small deviations, and hardly had leisure to notice the barbarian
invaders except to observe that they were Arians—the ancient equivalent
of Trotskyites. The religious fervour of that time was a product of fear and
despair; so is the religious fervour—Christian or Communist—of our age. It
is an irrational reaction to danger, tending to bring about what it fears. Dread

of the hydrogen bomb promotes fanaticism, and fanaticism is more likely
than anything else to lead to actual use of the hydrogen bomb. Heavenly
salvation perhaps, if the fanatics are right, but earthly salvation is not to be
found along that road.
I will say a few words about the connection of love with intellectual
honesty. There are several different attitudes that may be adopted towards the
spectacle of intolerable suffering. If you are a sadist, you may find pleasure
in it; if you are completely detached, you may ignore it; if you are a senti-
mentalist, you may persuade yourself that it is not as bad as it seems; but if
you feel genuine compassion you will try to apprehend the evil truly in order
to be able to cure it. The sentimentalist will say that you are coldly intel-
lectual, and that, if you really minded the sufferings of others, you could not
be so scientific about them. The sentimentalist will claim to have a tenderer
heart than yours, and will show it by letting the suffering continue rather
than suffer himself.
There is a tender-hearted lady in Gilbert and Sullivan who remarks:
I heard one day A gentleman say

That criminals who Are sawn in two
Do not much feel The fatal steel
But come in twain Without much pain.
If this be true How lucky for you.
Similarly, the men who made the Munich surrender would pretend,
(a) that the Nazis didn’t go in for pogroms, (b) that Jews enjoy being mas-
sacred. And fellow-travellers maintain, (a) that there is no forced labour in
Russia, (b) that there is nothing Russians find more delectable than being
worked to death in an Arctic winter. Such men are not ‘coldly intellectual’.
The most disquieting psychological feature of our time, and the one which
affords the best argument for the necessity of some creed, however irrational,
is the death wish. Everyone knows how some primitive communities, brought
suddenly into contact with white men, become listless, and finally die from
mere absence of the will to live. In Western Europe, the new conditions of
danger which exist are having something of the same effect. Facing facts is
painful, and the way out is not clear. Nostalgia takes the place of energy
directed towards the future. There is a tendency to shrug the shoulders and
say ‘Oh well, if we are exterminated by hydrogen bombs, it will save a lot
of trouble’. This is a tired and feeble reaction, like that of the late Romans
to the barbarians. It can only be met by courage, hope, and a reasoned
optimism. Let us see what basis there is for hope.
First: I have no doubt that, leaving on one side, for the moment, the danger
of war, the average level of happiness, in Britain as well as in America, is

higher than in any previous community at any time. Moreover improvement
continues whenever there is not war. We have therefore something important
to conserve.
There are certain things that our age needs, and certain things that it
should avoid. It needs compassion and a wish that mankind should be
happy; it needs the desire for knowledge and the determination to eschew
pleasant myths; it needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to
creativeness. The things that it must avoid, and that have brought it to the
brink of catastrophe, are cruelty, envy, greed, competitiveness, search for
irrational subjective certainty, and what Freudians call the death wish.
The root of the matter is a very simple and old-fashioned thing, a thing
so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it, for fear of the derisive
smile with which wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean—please
forgive me for mentioning it—is love, Christian love, or compassion. If you
feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide in action, a reason for
courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty. If you feel this, you
have all that anybody should need in the way of religion. Although you may
not find happiness, you will never know the deep despair of those whose
life is aimless and void of purpose; for there is always something that you can
do to diminish the awful sum of human misery.
What I do want to stress is that the kind of lethargic despair which is now
not uncommon, is irrational. Mankind is in the position of a man climbing a
difficult and dangerous precipice, at the summit of which there is a plateau
of delicious mountain meadows. With every step that he climbs, his fall, if
he does fall, becomes more terrible; with every step his weariness increases
and the ascent grows more difficult. At last there is only one more step to be
taken, but the climber does not know this, because he cannot see beyond the
jutting rocks at his head. His exhaustion is so complete that he wants nothing
but rest. If he lets go he will find rest in death. Hope calls: ‘One more effort—
perhaps it will be the last effort needed.’ Irony retorts: ‘Silly fellow! Haven’t
you been listening to hope all this time, and see where it has landed you.’
Optimism says: ‘While there is life there is hope.’ Pessimism growls: ‘While
there is life there is pain.’ Does the exhausted climber make one more effort,
or does he let himself sink into the abyss? In a few years those of us who are
still alive will know the answer.
Dropping metaphor, the present situation is as follows: science offers the
possibility of far greater well-being for the human race than has ever been
known before. It offers this on certain conditions: abolition of war, even
distribution of ultimate power, and limitation of the growth of population.
All these are much nearer to being possible than they ever were before. In
Western industrial countries, the growth of population is almost nil; the
same causes will have the same effect in other countries as they become

modernized, unless dictators and missionaries interfere. The even distribu-
tion of ultimate power, economic as well as political, has been nearly
achieved in Britain, and other democratic countries are rapidly moving
towards it. The prevention of war? It may seem a paradox to say that we are
nearer to achieving this than ever before, but I am persuaded that it is true. I
will explain why I think so.
In the past, there were many sovereign States, any two of which might at
any moment quarrel. Attempts on the lines of the League of Nations were
bound to fail, because, when a dispute arose, the disputants were too proud
to accept outside arbitration, and the neutrals were too lazy to enforce it.
Now there are only two sovereign States: Russia (with satellites) and the
United States (with satellites). If either becomes preponderant, either by
victory in war or by an obvious military superiority, the preponderant Power
can establish a single Authority over the whole world, and thus make future
wars impossible. At first this Authority will, in certain regions, be based on
force, but if the Western nations are in control, force will as soon as possible
give way to consent. When that has been achieved, the most difficult of world
problems will have been solved, and science can become wholly beneficent.
I do not think there is reason to fear that such a régime, once established,
would be unstable. The chief causes of large-scale violence are: love of
power, competition, hate, and fear. Love of power will have no national
outlet when all serious military force is concentrated in the international
army. Competition will be effectively regulated by law, and mitigated by
governmental controls. Fear—in the acute form in which we know it—will
disappear when war is no longer to be expected. There remains hate and
malevolence. This has a deep hold on human nature. We all believe at once
any gossip discreditable to our neighbours, however slender the evidence
may be. After the first world war many people hated Germany so much that
they could not believe in injury to themselves as a necessary result of extreme
severity to the Germans. One sees in Congress a widespread reluctance to
admit that self-preservation requires help to Western Europe. America wishes
to sell without buying, but finds that this often involves giving rather than
selling; the benefit to the recipients is felt by many to be almost unendurable.
This wide diffusion of malevolence is one of the most unfortunate things in
human nature, and it must be lessened if a world State is to be stable.
I am persuaded that it can be lessened, and very quickly. If peace becomes
secure there will be a very rapid increase of material prosperity, and this
tends more than anything else to provide a mood of kindly feeling. Consider
the immense diminution of cruelty in Britain during the Victorian age;
this was mainly due to rapidly increasing wealth in all classes. I think we
may confidently expect a similar effect throughout the world owing to the
increased wealth that will result from the elimination of war. A great deal,

also, is to be hoped from a change in propaganda. Nationalist propaganda,
in any violent form, will have to be illegal, and children in schools will not
be taught to hate and despise foreign nations. Active instruction in the evils
of the old times and the advantages of the new system would do the rest. I
am convinced that only a few psychopaths would wish to return to the daily
dread of radio-active disintegration.
What stands in the way? Not physical or technical obstacles, but only the
evil passions in human minds: suspicion, fear, lust for power, hatred, intoler-
ance. I will not deny that these evil passions are more dominant in the East
than in the West, but they certainly exist in the West as well. The human race
could, here and now, begin a rapid approach to a vastly better world, given
one single condition: the removal of mutual distrust between East and West.
I do not know what can be done to fulfil this condition. Most of the sugges-
tions that I have seen have struck me as silly. Meanwhile the only thing to
do is to prevent an explosion somehow, and to hope that time may bring
wisdom. The near future must either be much better or much worse than
the past; which it is to be will be decided within the next few years.
(The Impact of Science on Society, London: Allen & Unwin, 1952;
New York: Columbia University Press, 1951 and
NOTE
1 Translation by R. C. Trevelyan from Translations from Leopardi: Cambridge University
Press, 1941.

77
LIFE WITHOUT FEAR
The thing that above all others I have been concerned to say is that because of
fears that once had a rational basis mankind has failed to profit by the new
techniques that, if wisely used, could make him happy. Fear makes man
unwise in the three great departments of human conduct: his dealings with
nature, his dealings with other men, and his dealings with himself. I wish in
this chapter to consider the ways in which the world would be better if we
were exempt from the tyranny of ancient fears.
It is necessary first of all to distinguish between fear as an emotion and
rational apprehension of danger as a piece of knowledge. It would be foolish
to be unaware of dangers when they exist, but it is very seldom that a danger
can be dealt with as adequately by fear as by rational apprehension. Fear is a
reaction which we share with the animals. It is crude and slapdash. Sometimes
it serves the purposes of self-preservation, but sometimes it does quite the
opposite. The man who is not mastered by fear is much better able to think
out what kind of action will minimize the danger. Fear frequently prevents
people from admitting the danger which in fact they are fearing, and therefore
causes them not to take precautions that wisdom would advise. Sometimes
this takes very absurd forms, as, for example, when fear of death prevents a
man from making a will. It is important to make this point clear, since
otherwise it might be thought that in speaking against fear one is speaking
against a clear view of real perils.
Different kinds of dangers need different kinds of treatment. There are
limitations to which human beings are subject owing to the physical facts of
nature. These limitations are to a certain degree unavoidable, and to that
degree must be accepted. On the other hand, the obstacles to well-being
which arise from our relations to other people or to ourselves are to a very

great extent unnecessary. There is nothing unavoidable about the misery that
people cause each other through hatred or ill-will, nor about the misery that
they cause themselves from a sense of guilt. Methods of dealing with
the different kinds of evils are for this reason very different.
The limitations imposed by nature have to do with food and raw materials
and with the physiological fact of death. These are not absolute; by more
labour it is possible to produce more food, and by better technique it is
possible to economize raw materials or make use of new substances that were
previously thought worthless. Death can be postponed by medicine and wise
living. But in all these three respects, although we cannot place an exact limit
at one precise point, limits do exist. No amount of medicine will make a man
immortal, and no amount of science could provide food if there were only
standing room for the population. These limitations that are imposed by
nature must be considered scientifically, in order that they may be met in the
manner that will involve the smallest amount of suffering. In regard to food,
the solution lies in birth-control; as regards raw materials, the solution will
lie partly in a more scientific technique and partly in international control to
prevent waste and secure just distribution; the postponement of death is a
medical matter, but willing submission to it is a matter of psychology to
which I shall return later.
In the past, the limitations imposed by nature have been dealt with
superstitiously. There were gods or demons, or witches capable of invoking
evil spirits, and if they were not placated, they caused bad weather. To this
day, archbishops think that drought or excessive rain should be dealt with by
prayer. Very often the methods demanded by superstition aggravate the evil.
In the Middle Ages when there was a plague the population were encouraged
to assemble in churches to pray; this, of course, provided an ideal method
of spreading infection. Such evils, so far as they can be eradicated, can be
eradicated only by science. The scientific attitude has the two-fold merit of
causing willingness to admit the evil and intelligence in the search for
means of mitigating it. There are still many evils in the world, of which
over-population is perhaps the most menacing, in regard to which a large
proportion of even the most civilized nations are wholly unscientific.
Fear of other human beings in the world as we have known it is often well
founded, in the sense that there are those who will injure us if they can. But
even when this is the case, it is not by fear, as a rule, that those who wish us ill
can be best prevented from injuring us. If you have ever owned a dog that had
a propensity to pursue sheep, you will have noticed that although he may
remain well behaved so long as the sheep are stationary, he cannot resist
temptation if they begin to run away. In this respect many of us are like the
dog and many of us like the sheep. I once observed a purely psychological
encounter between a Great Dane and a kitten three weeks old. The kitten

life without fear 695
stayed its ground, and spat and bristled and hissed. What went on in the mind
of the Great Dane I do not know, but he behaved as if he thought the kitten
had supernatural protection. After staring for a while, he put his tail between
his legs and slunk away. If you have as much courage as this kitten, you will
find it capable of protecting you against a great deal of aggression from which
you might otherwise suffer. But this sort of behaviour is all within the
capacity of animals, and I am more concerned with the sort of behaviour of
which only human beings are capable. A great deal of the aggressiveness in
the world is inspired by fear. We bark at our neighbour for fear that he will
attack us, and he barks at us for the same reason. It happens not infrequently
that you can cure aggressiveness by a display of friendliness. This is the
element of truth in the doctrine of non-resistance, a doctrine which in its
theoretical and absolute form I cannot accept, but which certainly contains a
larger proportion of practical wisdom than most people would suppose. I
think that every individual who does not display aggressive impulses does
something to diminish some of such impulses in others. Even a mere external
code of manners has its good effect in this respect, but when the non-
aggressiveness is deeply rooted in character its effect is very much greater
than it can ever be when it springs from a mere conventional rule.
Whenever a fear is well grounded in the sense that the danger apprehended
is real, there are two different things that need to be done: one is to create in
the individual that kind of fortitude that makes him able to face possible
misfortunes calmly, and the other is to ameliorate the social system in such a
way as to cause the danger to disappear. This applies, for example, to the
fear of destitution, which is very widespread and very deep seated in all
competitive countries. A very great many people who seem otherwise sane
are quite irrational about money. There are men who, though they are will-
ing to write large cheques, cannot bear to part with loose cash, and rather
than do so will face black looks from untipped waiters. Arnold Bennett’s
Clayhanger, throughout a completely successful business career, continues to
be haunted by fear of the workhouse. To prevent such fears there are three
different sorts of things to be done. There is first the purely Stoic method of
persuading a man that he should face misfortune calmly, and not let himself
mind too much even when misfortunes occur. The supreme example of this
is Milton’s Satan. Then there is the method of persuading him that he is not
very likely to become destitute; in mild cases this may be done by economic
arguments, but in extreme cases it is a matter for the psychiatrist. Lastly there
is the political method of coping with the whole problem of destitution, and
making it no longer one of the things that befall the unfortunate. All these
methods should be pursued in all such cases. The Stoic method is admirable
when nothing better is possible, but although a man may face misfortune
bravely, it would still be better if he did not have to face it. And it is clear that

fear, when it exists to a morbid degree, is a product of a society in which real
misfortunes are not unusual. Methods which deal only with the individual,
therefore, useful as they may be, can never be substitutes for methods that
remove the evil wholly by political means. It is important to realize this, for
there are those who have so passionate an admiration for courage that they
rejoice in opportunities for its exercise. This is absurd. You may admire a man
who endures a long and painful illness without repining, but clearly it would
be better if he enjoyed good health. You may admire a soldier who dies nobly
in battle, but it would be much better if he did not die. In this respect the
Stoics were to blame, since they praised endurance so much as to make
cruelty seem almost a good thing, for cruelty was a necessary means to what
they considered the highest good. It used to be a custom to praise the patient
endurance of the poor, but that was before they had the vote.
Social dealings in private life are filled with fear, especially in Britain.
People take pains not to wear their heart on their sleeves for daws to peck at.
As far as they can, they keep their emotions to themselves. They will behave in
exactly the same way to you whether they like you or dislike you, provided
they have no motive of self-interest for making up to you. They are stiff
and shy and unspontaneous. They wear an armour designed to conceal the
frightened child within. The result is that social intercourse becomes boring,
that friendships have little life in them, and that love is only a pale shadow of
what it might be. People quote with approval Browning’s remark:
God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures

Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.
I am not a psycho-analyst, but I think that if I were I could find something

to say about Browning’s thankfulness on this point. The side that he faces the
world with is the one that he feels he can exploit without the fear of being
hurt, the one that gives no handle for ridicule and no knowledge that may be
used to inflict pain; the other ‘soul-side’, the one that he shows a woman
when he loves her, contains all the vanity and conceit and bombast that he
dare not show to the men at his club. It is almost as much a product of fear as
the other, because the other prevents him from letting fresh air into the inner
chambers of his ego, and no one can be admitted to these inner chambers
except in a relation of mutual adulation. The outer world is bleak, the inner
world is stuffy. This is not how human relations should be. They should be
free and spontaneous. Vanity should be less touchy and envy less widespread.
The habit of reserve not only makes it easy for self-deception to flourish
secretly, but also, owing to the energy spent in the purely negative occupation
of preventing self-expression, greatly diminishes the fruitful outflow of

life without fear 697
energy in useful ways. It has the further defect that men are particularly
anxious to conceal friendly impulses, since these especially, if known, make
them feel that they are vulnerable. Hours of tedium and years of ossification
result from this reign of social terror.
I do not imagine a world without fear as an anarchic world. There will be
freedom in certain directions in which now freedom is much restricted, but
in other directions where now there is freedom there will instead be law.
There will be laws regulating the food supply and the distribution of raw
materials. Above all, there will have to be laws for the prevention of war. I
think, also, that it is impossible to have a world in which there is much
freedom without excessive anarchy unless certain things are taught in the
process of education. Where man’s relation to physical nature is concerned,
there is to be scientific discipline, that is to say, a habit of trying to ascertain
the facts and admitting them when they have been ascertained. The world at
present is full of sentimentalists who, when they find a fact unpleasant,
merely refuse to admit that it is a fact. This habit of mind is capable of doing
untold harm, because the unpleasant facts will have their unpleasant effects
all the more fully for having been not recognized. Intellectual discipline, in
the sense of willingness to admit facts, should result from education. It is
merely stupid not to acknowledge the power of nature in so far as this power
exists. Any attempt at self-assertion in this sphere is a failure of sanity.
Owing to the power of physical nature, certain habits, which only education
is likely to create, are very useful for survival. I do not believe that any child
brought up without discipline will brush its teeth. Indeed it is unlikely that
the child will be sufficiently cleanly in its habits to be free from vermin. The
preservation of health demands physical discipline which it is not likely that
children will acquire through mere exhortations addressed to self-interest in
later years. I think a certain amount of discipline in education is necessary,
not only for reasons of health, but also to produce those habits of social
behaviour which make perpetual quarrelling unnecessary. We do not at
meal-times snatch the food from our neighbour, but the reason that we do
not is that we were taught not to at a very early age. Long before we are
grown up, the habit has become so engrained that we have ceased to be
conscious of it. Punctuality at meals, though it is a tedious virtue, is important,
since it minimizes the amount of service required. For such reasons, I think
that habit-formation must be an important part of early education. Some
modern educators have perhaps carried freedom in education somewhat too
far in this respect. There is, however, a kind of freedom which education
should preserve, though it seldom does so. I am thinking of emotional
freedom. The reasons in favour of emotional freedom are various: on the one
hand, too much control over the emotions is deadening, and causes loss of
vitality; on the other hand, emotions which are not allowed an outlet turn

bad, and find other outlets much more harmful than those that have been
forbidden. There is also a third reason, which is that wherever a society is
much bound by conventional rules, many emotions will be considered
undesirable which in fact are harmless. I think, therefore, that while discipline
is necessary in regard to scientific fact and in regard to certain habits without
which social life becomes difficult, there should in education be as little
as possible of discipline over the emotions. Above all, there must never
be any attempt to cause the expression of emotions which are likely to
be insincere.
Educators in the past tended too much to believe in original sin, and
to think that the child ought to be made into something quite different
from what nature would make it. The extreme example of this occurs in
St Augustine’s account of his learning Latin and Greek. Latin, he says, he
learned without difficulty at his mother’s knee, and, of course, in the end he
knew it well; Greek he learned from a cruel schoolmaster with many beatings
and much harshness, and with the result, so he tells us, that he never knew it
well. Nevertheless, he thinks better of the method by which he was taught
Greek, for this, he says, cured him of ‘pernicious blithesomeness’. This is the
exact antithesis of what an educator ought to feel. An educator should think
of a child as a gardener thinks of a plant, as something to be made to grow by
having the right soil and the right amount of water. If your roses fail to
bloom, it does not occur to you to whip them, but you try to find out what
has been amiss in your treatment of them. If your children fail to bloom, you
should treat them as you would the roses. With few exceptions, what is
wanted is positive, not negative. The important thing is what the children do,
not what they do not do. And what they do, if it is to have value, must be a
spontaneous expression of their own vital energy. You can, if you think fit,
prepare children for a military life by teaching them all to do the same thing
at the same moment when they hear the word of command. If you do, they
will grow up thwarted and stunted and full of a deep-seated anger against the
world—no doubt useful emotions if they are to be soldiers employed in
killing, but not if they are to be happy citizens of a world at peace.
(New Hopes for a Changing World, London: Allen &
Unwin; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951.)

81
METHODS OF SETTLING
DISPUTES IN THE NUCLEAR AGE
I shall assume the following three propositions conceded:

(1) A large-scale nuclear war would be an utter disaster, not only to the
belligerents, but to mankind, and would achieve no result that any sane man
could desire.
(2) When a small war occurs, there is a considerable risk that it may turn
into a great war; and in the course of many small wars the risk would
ultimately become almost a certainty.
(3) If all existing nuclear weapons had been destroyed and there were an
agreement that no new ones should be manufactured, any serious war would,
nevertheless, become a nuclear war as soon as the belligerents had time to
manufacture the forbidden weapons.
From these three theses, it follows that, if we are to escape unimaginable
catastrophes, we must find a way of avoiding all wars, whether great or small
and whether intentionally nuclear or not.
I think that, in a more or less undecided fashion, this conclusion is admit-
ted by most of those who have studied the subject. But statesmen, both in the
East and the West, have not arrived at any possible programme for imple-
menting the prevention of war. Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent,
the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr Dulles
calls ‘brinkmanship’. This is a policy adapted from a sport which, I am told, is
practised by the sons of very rich Americans. This sport is called ‘Chicken!’ It
is played by choosing a long straight road with a white line down the middle
and starting two very fast cars towards each other from opposite ends. Each
car is expected to keep the wheels of one side on the white line. As they
approach each other, mutual destruction becomes more and more imminent.

methods of settling disputes in the nuclear age 719
If one of them swerves from the white line before the other, the other, as he
passes, shouts ‘Chicken!’, and the one who has swerved becomes an object
of contempt. As played by youthful plutocrats, this game is considered deca-
dent and immoral, though only the lives of the players are risked. But when
the game is played by eminent statesmen, who risk not only their own lives
but those of many hundreds of millions of human beings, it is thought on
both sides that the statesmen on one side are displaying a high degree of
wisdom and courage, and only the statesmen on the other side are reprehen-
sible. This, of course, is absurd. Both are to blame for playing such an
incredibly dangerous game. The game may be played without misfortune a
few times, but sooner or later it will come to be felt that loss of face is more
dreadful than nuclear annihilation. The moment will come when neither
side can face the derisive cry of ‘Chicken!’ from the other side. When that
moment is come, the statesmen of both sides will plunge the world into
destruction.
Practical politicians may admit all this, but they argue that there is no
alternative. If one side is unwilling to risk global war, while the other side is
willing to risk it, the side which is willing to run the risk will be victorious in
all negotiations and will ultimately reduce the other side to complete impo-
tence. ‘Perhaps’—so the practical politician will argue—‘it might be ideally
wise for the sane party to yield to the insane party in view of the dread-
ful nature of the alternative, but, whether wise or not, no proud nation will
long acquiesce in such an ignominious role. We are, therefore, faced, quite
inevitably, with the choice between brinkmanship and surrender.’
This view has governed policy on both sides in recent years. I cannot admit
that brinkmanship and surrender are the only alternatives. What the situation
requires is a quite different line of conduct, no longer governed by the motives
of the contest for power, but by motives appealing to the common welfare and
the common interests of the rival parties. What needs to be done is, first of all,
psychological. There must be a change of mood and a change of aim, and this
must occur on both sides if it is to achieve its purpose. Possibly the initiative,
in so far as it is governmental, may have to come from uncommitted nations;
but the general attitude to be desired is one which, in the committed nations
of East and West, will have to be first advocated by individuals and groups
capable of commanding respect.
The argument to be addressed to East and West alike will have to be some-
thing on the following lines. Each side has vital interests which it is not
prepared to sacrifice. Neither side can defeat the other except by defeating
itself at the same time. The interests in which the two sides conflict are
immeasurably less important than those in which they are at one. The first
and most important of their common interests is survival. This has become a
common interest owing to the nature of nuclear weapons.

It might be possible for Americans, or some of them, to desire a world
containing no Russians; and it might be possible for Russians, or some of
them, to desire a world containing no Americans; but neither Americans
nor Russians would desire a world in which both nations had been wiped
out. Since it must be assumed that a war between Russia and America would
exterminate both, the two countries have a common interest in the preserva-
tion of peace. Their common survival should, therefore, be the supreme aim
of policy on both sides.
A second motive for agreement is the need to escape from the burdens of
the arms race. If present policies continue, this burden will grow greater and
greater as time goes on. More and more expensive weapons will be invented,
more and more labour will be diverted from the production of consumable
commodities to the production of lethal weapons. Before very long, the
population in each group will be reduced to subsistence level. New inven-
tions, which in other circumstances might be beneficent, will no longer be
so, since every increase in productivity will release more labour for warlike
purposes. If one side rebels sooner than the other against the burden of this
insanity, it will incur a risk of defeat and, in the bitter atmosphere produced
by the dreadful danger, this risk will appear one to be avoided at almost any
sacrifice.
It is not only prevention of evils, but the securing of immense goods, that
can result from a cessation of tension between the two groups. Scientific
technique has become capable of raising the standard of life in every part of
the world, and more especially in the poorer parts. There is no reason except
human folly for the perpetuation of a lower standard of life in Asia and Africa
than that which now prevails in America. But if the arms race continues, the
standard of life in America must gradually decline towards the level now
prevailing in the poorest parts of the world, and, instead of the universal
material well-being which has become technically possible, we shall have a
universal poverty as dire as mutual hatreds can cause rival nations to endure.
Nor is it only in material ways that the present hostility of East and West is
harmful. It is even more harmful in the sphere of morality and emotion. We
have been told on the highest governmental authority that, if Britain became
involved in a nuclear war, no serious attempt would be made to defend the
civilian population, but those in charge of missiles and bombs to be fired
against Russia would be kept alive a little longer than the civilians and could
in their last moments cause some hundreds of millions of deaths in Russia.
These last survivors would die knowing that their own nation no longer
existed, but enjoying (or so one must suppose) the sweet thought of a useless
revenge. I am not saying this as a special criticism of British policy. A very
similar policy is advocated throughout the two hostile groups. Even religion
is often enlisted in its support, and many people sincerely though mistakenly

methods of settling disputes in the nuclear age 721
believe that it can be justified by idealistic motives. The mentality which
makes such an outlook possible, however sincere it may be, is morally dread-
ful and poisons all wholesome thought and feeling in those who allow
themselves to be dominated by it.
For all these reasons, not only idealistic motives, but the plainest and most
insistent motives of self-interest make it imperative that East and West should
no longer seek to settle their differences by war or the threat of war. If
East and West, alike, can admit the force of the very plain and simple argu-
ments in favour of this conclusion, it will no longer seem impossible to find
other methods by which agreements as to disputed matters can be reached.
Hitherto, agreements have been difficult because they were not genuinely
desired by either side unless they constituted diplomatic victories. But, if it
comes to be realized by both sides that it is more important to reach agree-
ments than to win diplomatic victories, it will soon be found that impartial
agreements are not nearly so difficult as was thought.
It should be made clear by those who advocate the point of view that I have
been trying to recommend that it is a view put forward, not in the special
interests of the West or in the special interests of the East, and that it does not
aim at giving to either side any advantage not balanced by an equal advantage
to the other side. The essential points which both sides must realize are that
the continuation of conflict is disastrous to both, and that the gain to both to
be derived from concord is one of quite immeasurable magnitude.
(Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, London: Allen & Unwin; New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1959.)
the end

IX
Ideas That Have Helped
Mankind
we can discuss this

subject we must form some
conception as to the kind of effect that we consider
BEFORE
a help to mankind. Are mankind helped when they be-
come 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 an-
other? I think all these things come into our conception of
what helps mankind, and I will say a preliminary word about
them.
The 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 jun-
gles and
caves, terrified of wild beasts, having difficulty in se-
curing 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
124

IDEAS THAT HAVE HELPED MANKIND 125
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 tech-
nical 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.
We have also become, in certain
respects, progressively less
animals. I can think in
particular of two respects: first, that
like
acquired, as opposed to congenital, skills

play a continually in-
creasing part in human life, and, secondly, that forethought
more and more dominates impulse. In these respects we have
certainly become progressively less like animals.
As 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, orremember 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. Wesuffer 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 fore-
thought averts physical disaster at the cost of worry, and gen-

eral lack of joy. I do not think that the learned men of my ac-
quaintance, even when they enjoy a

secure income, are as
as the mice that eat the crumbs from their tables while
happy
the erudite gentlemen snooze. In this respect, therefore, I am
not convinced that there has been any progress at alL
As to diversity of enjoyments, however, the matter is other-
126 UNPOPULAR ESSAYS
wise. 1remember reading an account of some Hons 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 foot-
ball, 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.
But I shall be told that it is neither numbers nor multiplicity
of pleasures that make the glory of man. It is his intellectual
and moral qualities. It is obvious that we know more than ani-
mals do, and it is common to consider this one of our advan-
tages. Whether
it is, in fact, an advantage, may be doubted.
But at rate
any it is
something that distinguishes us from the
brutes.
Has 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 old-age pension. Within the herd we are more, friendly
to each other than are many species of animals, but in our at-
titude 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 ofany 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 confi-
dently, that the more humane attitude will in time come to
prevail, but
so far the omens are not very propitious.
All these different elements must be borne in mind in con-
sidering 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 tech-
nique, and those that are concerned with morals and politics.
I will treat first those that have to do with knowledge and
technique.
The 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 gradu-
ally.
Without it it would have been very difficult to hand on
from generation to generation the inventions and discoveries
thatwere gradually made.
Another 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 but the warmth must have
slept,
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 to be much better, and so the
was found
long his
tory of cookery began.
The 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 at-
people
tempted 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.
Even more important than the domestication of animals was

the invention of agriculture, which, however, introduced
bloodthirsty practices into religion that lasted for many cen-

turies. 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

when they kept
early days of industrialism, six-year-old chil-
dren 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.
The of the great prehistoric inventions was the art of
last
writing, which was indeed a prerequisite 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.
Coming to historic times, we find that the earliest important
steps were taken and astronomy, both of which

in mathematics
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
In the prosperous Greek commercial cities, rich men
fruitful.
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 per-

ceiving them to be at once analogous to, and different from,
the customs of surrounding inferior peoples, and so by the
sixth century B.C. some of them achieved a
degree of enlight-
ened 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 thek
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."
Some Greeks used thek emancipation from tradition in the
pursuit of mathematics and astronomy, in both of which they

made the most amazing Mathematics was not used
progress.
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 supersensible 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 defense of Syracuse against
the Romans. A Roman soldier killed him and the mathema-
ticians retired again into their
ivory tower.
Astronomy, which the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
pursued with ardor, largely because of its usefulness in naviga-
tion, 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 ofcalculating the distance of the sun

and moon, and Aristarchus of Samos even evolved the com-
plete Copernican hypothesis,

but his views were rejected by all
his followers except one, and after the third century B.C. no
very important progress was made. At the time

of the Renais-
sance, however, something of what the Greeks had done be-

came known, and greatly facilitated the rise of modem science*
The 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
has been achieved in
understanding of the physical world that
modern times. But many of them, including Aristotle, were
misled
by a belief that science coiid 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 purpose. For in-

is the
stance, 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 often appropriate, since human

"final" cause is
actions have purposes. But where inanimate nature is concerned,
only "efficient" causes have been found scientifically discover-

able, and the attempt to explain phenomena by "final" causes
has always led to bad science. There may, for aught we know,
be a purpose in natural phenomena, but if so it has remained
completely undiscovered, and all known scientific laws have to

do only with "efficient" causes. In this respect Aristotle led the
world astray, and it did not recover fully until the time of
Galileo.
The seventeenth century, especially Galileo, Descartes, New-
ton, and Leibniz, made an advance in our understanding of
nature more sudden and surprising than any other in history,
except that of the early Greeks. It is true that some of the

concepts used in the mathematical physics of that time had
not quite the validity that was then ascribed to them. It is true
also that the more recent advances of
physics often require
new concepts quite different from those of the seventeenth
century. Their concepts, in fact, were not the key to all the
secrets of nature, but they were the key to a great many. Mod-
em technique in industry and war, with the sole exception of
the atomic bomb, is still
wholly based upon a type of dynamics
out of the
developed principles of Galileo and Newton. Most
of astronomy still rests
upon these same principles, though
there are some problems such as "what
keeps the sun hot?" in
which the recent discoveries of
quantum mechanics are es-
The dynamics of Galileo and Newton
sential.
depended upon
two new principles and a new technique*
The first of the new principles was the law of inertia, which
stated that
any body, left to itself, will continue to move as
it is
moving in the same straight line, and with the same ve-
locity.The importance of this principle is only evident when
it contrasted with the
is
principles that the scholastics had
evolved out of Aristotle. Before Galileo it was held that there
was a between regions below the moon and
radical difference
from the moon
regions upwards. In the regions below the
moon, the "sublunary" sphere, there was change and decay;
the "natural" motion of bodies was rectilinear, but
any body
in motion, if left to itself, would
gradually slow up and pres-
ently stop. From the moon upwards, on the contrary, the
"natural" motion of bodies was circular, or
compounded of
circular motions, and in the heavens there was no such thing
as change or decay, except the periodic changes of the orbits
of the heavenly bodies. The movements of the
heavenly bodies
were not spontaneous, but were passed on to them from the
primwn mobile, which was the outermost of the moving
spheres, and itself derived its motion from the Unmoved
Mover, i.e. God. No one thought of making any appeal to
observation; for instance, it was held that a
projectile will first
move horizontally for a while, and then suddenly begin to fall
vertically, although it might have been supposed that anybody
watching a fountain could have seen that the drops move in

curves. Comets, since
they appear and disappear, had to be
supposed to be between the earth and the moon, for if they
had been above the moon they would have had to be inde-
IJ2 UNPOPULAR ESSAYS
stractible* It is evident that out of such a jumble nothing could
be developed. Galileo unified the principles of governing the
earth and the heavens by his single law of inertia, according to
which a body, once in motion, will not stop of itself, but will
move with a constant velocity in a straight line whether it is
on earth or in one of the celestial spheres. This principle made
it to develop a science of the motions of matter, with-

possible
out taking account of any supposed influence of mind or spirit,
and thus laid the foundations of the purely materialistic physics
in which men of science, however have ever since be-
pious,
lieved*
Fromthe seventeenth century onwards, it has become in-

if we wish to understand natural laws,
creasingly evident that
we must get rid of every kind of ethical and aesthetic bias. We
must cease to think that noble things have noble causes, that
intelligent things
have intelligent causes, or that order is im-
possible
without a celestial policeman. The Greeks admired
the sun and moon and planets,
and supposed them to be gods;
Plotinus explains
how superior they
are to human beings in
wisdom and virtue. Anaxagoras, who
taught otherwise, was
and compelled to fly from Athens. The
prosecuted for impiety
Greeks also allowed themselves to think that since the circle
is most perfect figure, the motions of the heavenly bodies
the
must be, or be derived from, circular motions. Every bias of
this sort had to be discarded by seventeenth-century astron-
omy. The Copernican system showed

that the earth is not the
center of the universe, and suggested to a few bold spirits that
perhaps man was not the supreme purpose

of the Creator. In
the main, however, astronomers were pious folk, and until the
nineteenth century most of them, except in France, believed
in Genesis.
It was geology, Darwin, and the doctrine of evolution, that
first
upset the faith of British
men of science. If man was
evolved by insensible gradations from lower forms of life, a
number of things became very difficult to understand. At what
moment in evolution did our ancestors
acquire free will? At
what stage
in the
long journey from the amoeba did they be-
have immortal souls? When did
gin to
they first become capa-
ble of the kinds of wickedness that would a benevolent
justify
Creator in sending them into eternal torment? Most people
felt that such
punishment would be hard on monkeys, in spite
of their propensity for throwing coconuts at the heads of
Europeans. But how about Pithecanthropus Erectus? Was it

really he who ate the Or was it Homo fekiniensis?
apple?
Or was it
perhaps the PHtdown man? I went to Piltdown
once, but saw no evidence of special depravity in that village,
nor did I see any signs of its having changed appreciably since
prehistoric ages. Perhaps then it was the Neanderthal men
who first sinned? This seems the more likely, as they lived in
Germany. But obviously there can be no answer to such
questions,
and those theologians who do not wholly reject
evolution have had to make profound readjustments.
One of the "grand" conceptions which have proved scien-
tifically
useless is do not mean that there is positive
the soul, I
evidence showing that men have no souls; I only mean that

the soul, if it exists, plays no part in any discoverable causal
law. There are all kinds of experimental methods of deter-
mining how men and animals behave under various circum-

stances. You can put rats in mazes and men in barbed wire
cages,
and observe methods of escape. You can administer
their
drugs and observe their effect. You

can turn a male rat into a
female, though so far nothing analogous has been done with

human at Buchenwald. It appears that socially
beings, even
undesirable conduct can be dealt with by medical means, or
creating a better environment,

and the conception of sin
by
has thus come to seem quite unscientific, except, of course, as
to the Nazis. There is real hope that, by getting to
applied
understand the science of human behavior, governments may
be even more able than they are at
present to turn mankind
into rabbles of mutually ferocious lunatics. Governments could,
of course, do exactly the opposite and cause the human race
to co-operate willingly and cheerfully in making themselves
happy, rather than in making others miserable, but only if

there is an international government with a monopoly of
armed force. It is
very doubtful whether this will take place.
This brings me to the second kind of idea that has helped
or may in time help mankind; I mean moral as opposed to
technical ideas. Hitherto I have been considering the increased
command over the forces of nature which men have derived
from scientific knowledge, but this, although it is a pre-condi-
tion of many forms of progress, does not of itself insure any-
thing desirable. On the

contrary, the present state of the world
and the fear of an atomic war show that scientific progress
without a corresponding moral and political progress may
only increase the magnitude of the disaster that misdirected
skill
may bring about. In superstitious moments I am
tempted to believe in the myth of the Tower of Babel, and to
suppose that in our own day a similar but greater impiety is

about to be visited by a more tragic and terrible punishment.
Perhaps so I sometimes allow myself to fancy God does
not intend us to understand the mechanism by which He
regulates the material universe. Perhaps the nuclear physicists

have come so near to the ultimate secrets that He thinks it
time to bring their activities to a stop. And what
simpler
method could He devise than to let them carry their ingenuity
to the point where they exterminate the human race? If I could
think that deer and squirrels, nightingales and larks, would
survive, I might view catastrophe with some equanimity,
this
since man has not shown himself worthy to be the lord of crea-
tion. But it is to be feared that the dreadful
alchemy of the
atomic bomb will destroy all forms of life equally, and that
the earth will remain forever a dead clod
senselessly whirling
round a futile sun. I do not know the immediate
precipitating
cause of this interesting occurrence.
Perhaps it will be a dis-
about Persian a
pute oil, perhaps disagreement as to Chinese
trade, perhaps a quarrel between Jews and Mohonimedans for
the control of Palestine. Any
patriotic person can see that these
issues are of such
importance as to make the extermination of
mankind preferable to
cowardly conciliation*
In case, however, there should be some
among my readers
who would like to see the human race survive, it be worth
may
while considering the stock of moral ideas that
great men have
put into the world and that might, if they were listened to,
secure happiness instead of misery for the mass of mankind,
Man, viewed morally, is a
strange amalgam of angel and
devil. He can feel the splendor of the night, the delicate
beauty
of spring flowers, the tender emotion of
parental love, and the
intoxication of intellectual
understanding. In moments of in-
sight visions come to him of how life should be lived and how
men should order their dealings one with another. Universal
love is an emotion which
many have felt and which many
more could feel if the world made it less difficult. This is one
side of the
picture. On the other side are
cruelty, greed, in-
diiference and overweening pride. Men, quite ordinary men,
will compel children to look on while their mothers are raped.
In pursuit of political aims men will submit their
opponents
to long years of unspeakable anguish. We
know what the
Nazis did to Jews at Auschwitz. In mass cruelty, the
expulsions
of Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of
the atrocities perpetuated by the Nazis. And how about our
noble selves? We would not do such deeds, oh no! But we
enjoy our juicy steaks and our hot rolls while German chil-
dren die of hunger because our governments dare not face our
indignation if they asked us to forgo some part of our pleasures.
If there were a Last Judgment as Christians believe, how do
you think our excuses would sound before that final tribunal?

UNPOPULAR ESSAYS
Moral ideas sometimes wait
upon political developments,
and sometimes outran them. The brotherhood of man is an
ideal which owed its first force to political developments.
When Alexander conquered the East he set to work to ob-
literate the distinction of Greek and barbarian, no doubt be-
cause his Greek and Macedonian army was too small to hold
down so vast an empire by force. He compelled his officers

to marry barbarian aristocratic ladies, while he himself, to set
a doubly excellent example, married two barbarian princesses.
As a result of this policy Greek pride and exclusiveness were
diminished, and Greek culture spread regions not in-
to many
habited by Hellenic stock. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, who
was
was probably boy at the time of Alexander's conquest,
a
a Phoenician, and few of the eminent Stoics were Greeks. It

was the Stoics who invented the conception of the brother-
hood of man. They taught that all men are children of Zeus
and that the sage will ignore the distinctions of Greek and
barbarian, bond and free. When Rome brought the whole
world under one government, the political environ-
civilized
ment was favorable to the spread of this doctrine. In a new

form, more capable of appealing to the emotions of ordinary
men and women, Christianity taught a similar doctrine.
Christ
said"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," and when asked

"who is thy neighbor?" went on to the parable of the Good
Samaritan. If you wish to understand this parable as it was
understood by Ms hearers, you should substitute "German" or
"Japanese" for "Samaritan."

I fear
many present-day Christians
would resent such a substitution, because it would compel
them to realize how far they have departed from the teaching
of the Founder of their religion. A similar doctrine had been
taught much earlier by

the Buddhists. According to them,
the Buddha declared that he could not be happy so long as
even one man remained miserable. It might seem as if these
lofty ethical teachings

had little effect upon the world; in
India Buddhism died out, in Europe Christianity was emptied
of most of the elements it derived from Christ. But I think
this would be a superficial view.
Christianity, as soon as it con-
quered the state, put an end to gladiatorial shows, not because
they were cruel, but because they were idolatrous. The result,
however, was to diminish the widespread education in cruelty
by which the populace of Roman towns were degraded. Chris-
tianity also did much to soften the lot of slaves. It established
charity on a large scale, and inaugurated hospitals. Although
the great majority of Christians failed
lamentably in Christian
charity, the ideal remained alive and in every age inspired
some notable saints. In a new
passed over into
form, it modern
Liberalism, and remains the inspiration of much that is most
hopeful in our somber world.
The watchwords of the French Revolution, Liberty, Equal-
ity,
and Fraternity, have Fraternity I have
religious origins. Of
already spoken. Equality was a characteristic of the Orphic
Societies in ancient Greece, from which, indirectly, a great
deal of Christian dogma took its rise. In these Societies, slaves
and women were admitted on equal terms with citizens. Plato's
advocacy of Votes for Women, which has seemed surprising
to some modern readers, is derived from Orphic practices.
The Orphics believed in transmigration and thought that a soul
which in one life inhabits body of a slave, may, in another*
the
inhabit that of a king. Viewed from the standpoint of religion,
it is therefore foolish to discriminate between a slave and a
to an immortal soul,
king; both share the dignity belonging
and neither, in religion, can claim anything more. This point
of view passed over from Orphism into Stoicism, and into
Christianity. For a long

time its practical effect was small, but
ultimately, whenever
circumstances were favorable, it helped
in bringing about the diminution of the inequalities in the
sockl system. Read, for instance, John Woolnian's Journal.
John Woolman was a Quaker, one of the first Americans to
oppose slavery. No doubt the real ground of his opposition was
humane feeling, but he was able to fortify this
feeling and to
make it controversially more effective by appeals to Christian
doctrines, which his
neighbors did not dare to repudiate
openly.
Liberty as an ideal has had a very checkered history. In
antiquity, Sparta,
which was a totalitarian state, had as little
use for the Nazis had. But most of the Greek city states
it as
allowed a degree of liberty which we should now think ex-

cessive, and, in fact, do think excessive when it is
practiced by
their descendants in the same part of the world. Politics was a
matter of assassination and rival armies, one of them supporting
the government, and the other composed of refugees. The
refugees would often ally themselves with their city's enemies

and march in in triumph on the heels of foreign conquerors.
This sort of thing was done by everybody, and, in spite of
much fine talk in the works of modem historians about Greek
nobody seemed to view such conduct
loyalty to the city state,
as particularly nefarious. This was carrying liberty to excess,
and led by reaction to admiration of Sparta.
The word "liberty" has had strange meanings at different
times. In Rome, in the last days of the
Republic and the early
days of the Empire, meant the right of powerful Senators
it
to plunder Provinces for their private profit. Brutus, whom

most English-speaking readers know as the high-minded hero
of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, was, in fact, rather different
from this. He would lend money to a municipality at 60
per
cent, and when they failed to pay the interest he would hire a
private army to besiege them, for which his friend Cicero
mildly expostulated with him. In our own day, the word

"liberty" bears a very similar meaning when used by industrial
magnates. Leaving these vagaries on one side, there are two

serious meanings of the word "liberty." On the one hand the
freedom of a nation from foreign domination, on the other
hand, the freedom of the citizen to pursue his legitimate avo-

cations. Each of these in a well-ordered world should be sub-
ject
to limitations, but unfortunately the former has been taken
in an absolute sense. To this
point of view I will return pres-
ently; it is the liberty of the individual citizen that I nowwish
to speak about.
This kind of liberty entered practical politics in the
first
form of religious toleration, a doctrine which came to be

widely adopted in the seventeenth century through the in-
ability of either Protestants or Catholics to exterminate the op-
posite party. After they had fought each other for a hundred
years, culminating in the horror of the thirty years' war, and
after it had appeared that as a result of all this bloodshed the
balance of parties at the end was almost exactly what it had

been at the beginning, certain men of genius, mostly Dutch-
men, suggested that perhaps all the killing had been unneces-
sary,
and that people might be allowed to think what they
chose on such matters as consubstantiation versus transubstan-
tiation, or whether theCup should be allowed to the laity. The
doctrine of religious toleration came to England with the Dutch
King William, along with the Bank of England and the Na-
tional Debt. In fact all three were products of the commercial
mentality.
The greatest of the theoretical advocates of liberty at that
period was John Locke, who devoted much thought to the
problem of reconciling the maximum of liberty with the in-
dispensable minimum of government, problem with which
a
his successors in the Liberal tradition have been occupied down
to the present day.

In addition to religious freedom, free press, free speech, and
freedom from arbitrary arrest came to be taken for granted
during the nineteenth century, at least among the Western
democracies. But their hold on men's minds was much more
precarious than was at the time supposed, and now, over the
UNPOPULAR ESSAYS
the earth's surface, nothing remains of them,
greater part of
either in practice or in theory. Stalin could neither understand
nor respect the point of view which led Churchill to allow
himself to be peaceably dispossessed as a result of a popular
vote. I am a firm believer in democratic representative govern-
ment as the best form for those who have the tolerance and
self-restraint that is
required to
make it workable. But its advo-
cates make a mistake if
they suppose that it can be at once in-
troduced into countries where the average citizen has hitherto
the give-and-take that In a

training in
lacked all it
requires.
Balkan country, not so many years ago, a party which had
been beaten by a narrow margin in a general election retrieved
its fortunes
by shooting a sufficient number of the representa-
tives of the other side to give it a majority. People in the West
this characteristic of the Balkans, forgetting that
thought
Cromwell and Robespierre had acted likewise.
And this brings me to the last pair of great political ideas to

which mankind owes whatever little success in social organiza-
tion it has achieved. I mean the ideas of law and government.
fundamental Government
Of government is the more
these,
can easily exist without law, but law cannot exist without
was those who
government a fact which forgotten by
framed the League of Nations and the Kellogg Pact. Govern-
ment may be defined as a concentration of the collective forces
of a community in a certain organization which, in virtue of
this concentration, is able to control individual citizens and to
resist pressure from foreign states. War has always been the
chief promoter of governmental power. The control of gov-
ernment over the private citizen is always greater where there
is war or imminent
danger of war than where peace seems
secure. But when governments have acquired power with a
view to have used

resisting foreign aggression, they naturally
it, if they could, to further their private interests at the ex-
pense of the citizens. Absolute monarchy was, until recently,

IDEAS THAT HAVE HELPED MANKIND 14!
the grossest form of this abuse of power. But in the modern

totalitarian state the same evil has been carried much further
than had been dreamed of by Xerxes or Nero or any of the
tyrants of earlier times.

Democracy was invented as a device for reconciling govern-
ment with liberty. It is clear that government is
necessary If
anything worthy to be called civilization is to exist, but all
history shows that any set of men entrusted with

power over
another set will abuse their power If they can do so with im-
punity. Democracy is intended to make men's tenure of power

temporary and dependent upon popular approval In so far as
it achieves this it
prevents the worst abuses of power. The
Second Triumvirate in Rome, when they wanted money with
a view to fighting Brutus and Cassius, made a list of rich men
and declared them public enemies, cut off their heads, and
seized their property. This sort of procedure is not possible in
America and England at the present day. We owe the fact that
it isnot possible not only to democracy, but also to the doc-
trine of personal liberty. This doctrine, in practice, consists
of two parts,
on the one hand that a mannot be punished
shall
except by due process of law, and on the other hand that there
shall be a sphere within which a man's actions are not to be
subject to governmental control.

This sphere includes free
free press and religious freedom. It used to include
speech,
freedom of economic enterprise. All these doctrines, of course,
are held in practice with certain limitations. The British for-
merly did not adhere to them in their dealings with India. Free-
dom not respected In the case of doctrines which
of the press Is
are thought dangerously subversive. Free speech would not be

held to exonerate public advocacy of assassination of an un-
popular politician. But in spite of

these limitations the doctrine
of personal liberty has been of great value throughout the
English-speaking world, as anyone

who lives in it will
quickly
realize when he finds himself in a police state.
'

In the history of social evolution it will be found that almost
invariably the establishment of some sort of government has

come first and attempts to make government compatible with
personal liberty have come later. In international affairs we
have not yet reached the first
stage, although it is now evident
that international government is at least as important to man-
kind as national government. I think it may be seriously
doubted whether the next twenty years would be more dis-
astrous to mankind if all government were abolished than they
will be if no effective international government is established.
I find it oftenurged that an international government would
be and I do not
oppressive, deny that this might be the case, at
any rate for a time, but national governments were oppressive
when they were new and are still
oppressive in most countries,
and yet hardly anybody would on this ground advocate an-
anarchy within a nation.
Ordered social life of a kind that could seem in any degree
desirable restsupon a synthesis and balance of certain slowly
developed ideas and institutions: government, law, individual
liberty, and democracy. Individual liberty, of course, existed
in the ages before there was government, but when it existed
without government civilized life was impossible. When gov-
ernments first arose they involved slavery, absolute monarchy,
and usually the enforcement of superstitition by a powerful
priesthood. All these were very great evils, and one can under-
stand Rousseau's nostalgia for the life of the noble savage. But
this was a mere romantic idealization, and, in fact, the life of
the savage was, as Hobbes said, "nasty, brutish, and short." The
history of man reaches occasional great crises. There must have

been a crisis when the apes lost their tails, and another when
our ancestors took to walking upright and lost their protective
covering of hair. As I remarked before, the human population
of the globe, which must at one time have been very small, was
greatly increased by the invention of agriculture, and was in-

creased again in our own time by modern industrial and medi-
cal technique. But modern technique has brought us to a new
crisis. In this new crisis we are faced with an alternative: either
man must again become a rare species as in the days of Homo
Pekiniensis, or we must learn to submit to an international
such government, whether
government. Any good, bad or in-
different, will make the continuation of the human species
years men have
possible, and, course of the past 5,000
as in the
climbed gradually from the despotism of the Pharaohs to the

of the American Constitution, so
glories perhaps in the next
5,000 they may climb from a bad international government to
a good one. But if they do not establish an international
gov-
ernment of some kind, new progress will have to begin at a
lower level, probably at that of tribal savagery, and will have
to begin after a cataclysmic destruction only to be
paralleled
by the Biblical account of the deluge. When we survey the
long development of mankind from a rare hunted animal, hid-
ing precariously in caves from the fury of wild beasts which
he was incapable of killing; subsisting doubtfully on the raw
fruits of the earth which he did not know how to cultivate;
reinforcing real terrorsby the imaginary terrors of ghosts and

evil
spirits
and malign spells; gradually acquiring the mastery
of his environment by the invention of fire, writing, weapons,
and at last science;
building up a social
organization which
curbed private violence and gave a measure of security to daily
using the leisure gained by his

life; skill, not only in idle luxury,
but in the production of beauty and the unveiling of the

secrets of natural law; learning gradually,
though imperfectly,
to view an increasing number of his neighbors as allies in the
task of production rather than enemies in the attempts at mu-
tual
depredation when we consider this long and arduous
journey, it becomes intolerable to think that it may all have

to be again from the beginning owing to failure to take
made
one step for which past developments, rightly viewed, have
been a preparation* Social cohesion, which among the apes is
confined to the family, grew in prehistoric times as far as the
tribe,and in the very beginnings of history reached the level
of small kingdoms in upper and lower Egypt and in Mesopo-
tamia. From these small kingdoms grew the empires of an-
tiquity,
and then gradually the great states of our own day,
far larger than even the Roman Empire. Quite recent develop-
ments have robbed the smaller states of any real independence,
until now there remain only two that are wholly capable of
independent self-direction: I mean, of course, the United

States and the ILS.S.R. All that is
necessary to save mankind
from disaster the step from two independent states to one
is
not by war, which would bring disaster, but by agreement.

If this step can be accomplished, all the great achievements
of mankind will quickly lead to an era of happiness and well-
being, such as has neêr before been dreamed of. Our scientific
skill will make it
possible
to abolish poverty throughout the
world without necessitating more than four or five hours a day
of productive labor. Disease, which has been very rapidly re-
duced during the last hundred years, will be reduced still fur-
ther. The leisure achieved through organization and science
will no doubt be devoted very largely to pure enjoyment, but
there will remain a number of people to whom the pursuit of
and science wiE seem important. There will be a new free-
art
dom from economic bondage to the mere necessities of keep-

ing alive, and the great mass of mankind may enjoy the kind of
carefree adventurousness that characterizes the rich young

Athenians of Plato's Dialogues. All this is easily within the
bounds of technical possibility. It requires for its realization
only one thing: that the men who hold power, and the popu-
lations that support them, should think it more important to
keep themselves alive than to cause the death of their enemies.

No very lofty or difficult ideal, one might think, and yet one
which so far has proved beyond the scope of human intelli-
gence.
The present moment is the most important and most crucial
that has ever confronted mankind. Upon our collective wis-
dom during the next twenty years depends the question
whether mankind shall be plunged into unparalleled disaster,
or shall achieve a new level of
happiness, security, well-being,
and intelligence.
I do not know which mankind will choose.
There is
grave reason for fear, but there is enough possibility
of a good solution to make hope not irrational. And it is on
this
hope that we must act.

X
Ideas That Have Harmed
Mankind
misfortunes of human beings may be divided into

wo classes: First, those inflicted by the nonhuman en-
THE dronment, and, second, those inflicted by other people.
As mankind have progressed in knowledge and technique, the
second class has become
a continually increasing
percentage
of the total In old times, famine, for example, was due to nat-
ural causes, and, although
people did their best to combat it,
large numbers of them died of starvation. At the present mo-

ment large parts of the world are faced with the threat of
famine, but although natural causes have contributed to the
situation, the principal causes are human. For six
years the
civilized nations of the world devoted all their best
energies
to killing each other,
and they find it difficult suddenly to
switch over to keeping each other alive.
Having destroyed
harvests, dismantled agricultural machinery, and disorganized
shipping, they find itno easy matter to relieve the shortage of
crops in one place by means of a superabundance in another,
as would easily be done if the economic system were in normal
working order. As this illustration shows, it is now man that is

146

IDEAS THAT HAVE HARMED MANKIND 147
man's worst enemy. Nature, it is true, still sees to it that we are
mortal, but with the progress in medicine it will become more
and more common for people to live until
they have had their
fill of Hfe. We are
supposed to wish to live forever and to
look forward to the unending
joys of heaven, of which, by
miracle, themonotony will never grow stale. But in fact, if
you question any candid person who is no longer young, he
is
very likely to tell you that, having tasted life in this world,
he has no wish to begin again as a "new
boy" in another. For
the future, therefore, it
may be taken that much the most im-
portant evils that mankind have to consider are those which

they inflict
upon each other through stupidity or malevolence
or both.
I think that the evils that men inflicton each other, and by
reflection upon themselves, have their main source in evil pas-
sions rather than in ideas or beliefs. But ideas and principles
that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil
In Lisbon when heretics were
passions. publicly burned, it
sometimes happened that one of them, by a

particularly edify-
ing recantation, would be granted the boon of being strangled
before being put into the flames. This would make the
spec-
tators so furious that the authorities had in great difficulty
preventing them from lynching the penitent and burning him
on their own account. The spectacle of the writhing torments
of the victims was, in fact, one of the
principal pleasures to
which the populace looked forward to enliven a somewhat
drab existence. I cannot
doubt that this pleasure greatly con-
tributed to the general belief that the
burning of heretics was
a righteous act. The same sort of thing
applies to war. People
who are vigorous and brutal often find war
enjoyable, pro-
vided that it is a victorious war and that there is not too much
interference with rape and
plunder. This is a great help in
persuading people that wars are righteous. Dr. Arnold, the
hero of Tom
Brown's Schooldays, and the admired reformer
of public schools, came across some cranks who thought it a
mistake to flog boys. Anyone reading his outburst of furious
will be forced to the con-
indignation against this opinion
clusion that he enjoyed inflicting floggings, and did not wish
to be of this pleasure,
deprived
would be easy to multiply
It instances in support of the
thesis that opinions which justify cruelty are inspired by

cruel
impulses.
When we pass
in review the opinions of former
times which are now recognized as absurd, it will be found that
nine times out of ten they were such as to justify the infliction
of suffering. Take, for instance, medical practice. When an-
aestheticswere invented they were thought to be wicked as
being an attempt to thwart
God's will. Insanity was thought
to be due to diabolic possession, and it was believed that de-
mons inhabiting a madman
could be driven out by inflicting
pain upon him,

and so making them uncomfortable. In pursuit
of this opinion/ lunatics were treated for years on end with
systematic and conscientious brutality. I cannot think of any

instance of an erroneous medical treatment that was agreeable
rather than disagreeable to the patient. Or again, take moral
education. Consider how much brutality has been justified by
the rhyme:
A dog, a wife, and a walnut tree,

The more you beat them the better they be.
I have no experience of the moral effect of flagellation on

walnut trees, but no civilized person would now justify the
rhyme as regards wives. The reformative effect of punishment
is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so
satisfy-
ing to our sadistic impulses.

But although passions have had more to do than beliefs with
what is amiss in human life, yet beliefs, especially where they
are ancient and systematic and embodied in organizations, have

a great power of delaying desirable changes of opinion and of
wrong direction people who otherwise would

Influencing In the
have no strong feelings either way. Since my subject is "Ideas
That Have Harmed Mankind," it is especially harmful systems
of beliefs that I shall consider.
The most obvious case as

regards past history is constituted
by the beliefs which may be called religious or superstitious,
according to one's personal bias. It was supposed that human

sacrifice would improve
the crops, at first for purely
magical
reasons, and then because the blood of victims was thought
pleasing to
the gods, who certainly were made in the image
of their worshipers. We
read in the Old Testament that it
was a religious duty to exterminate races com-
conquered
pletely,
and that to spare even their cattle and sheep was an
impiety. Dark terrors and misfortunes in the life to come op-

pressed the Egyptians and Etruscans, but never reached their
full development until the victory of Christianity. Gloomy
saints who abstained from all

pleasures of sense, who lived in
solitude in the desert, denying themselves meat and wine and

the society of women, were, nevertheless, not obliged to ab-
stain from all pleasures. The pleasures of the mind were con-
sidered to be superior to those of the body, and a high place
among the pleasures of the mind was assigned to the con-

the eternal tortures to which the pagans and
templation of
heretics would hereafter be subjected. It is one of the draw-
backs to asceticism that it sees no harm in pleasures other than
those of sense, and yet, in fact, not only the best pleasures,
but also the very worst, are purely mental. Consider the pleas-
ures of Milton's Satan when he contemplates the harm that
he could do to man. As Milton makes him say:
The mind is its own place, and of itself

Can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.
and his psychology is not so very different from that of Ter-

tullian, exulting in the thought that
he will be able to look out
from heaven at the sufferings of the damned. The ascetic de-
preciation of the pleasures of sense has not promoted kindliness
or tolerance, or any of the other virtues that a non-superstitious
outlook on human life would lead us to desire. On the contrary,
when a man tortures himself he feels that it gives him a right
to torture others, and inclines him to accept any system of
dogma by which this right is fortified.
The ascetic form of cruelty is, unfortunately, not confined
to the fiercer forms of Christian dogma, which are now seldom
believed with their former ferocity. The world has produced
new and menacing forms of the same psychological pattern.
The Nazis in the days before they achieved power lived labo-
rious lives, involving much sacrifice of ease and present pleas-

ure in obedience to the belief in strenuousness and Nietzsche's
maxim that one should make oneself hard. Even after they
achieved power, the slogan "guns rather than butter" still in-
volved a sacrifice of the pleasures of sense for the mental pleas-
ures of prospective victory the very pleasures, in fact, with
which Milton's Satan consoles himself while tortured by the
fires of hell. The same mentality is to be found among earnest
Communists, to whom luxury is an evil, hard work the princi-
pal duty,
and universal poverty the means to the millennium.
The combination of asceticism and cruelty has not disappeared
with the softening of Christian dogma, but has taken on new
forms hostile to Christianity. There is still much of the same
mentality: mankind are divided into saints and sinners; the

saints are to achieve bliss in the Nazi or Communist heaven,
while the sinners are to be liquidated, or to suffer such

pains
as human beings can inflict in concentration
camps inferior,
of course, to those which Omnipotence was thought to inflict
in hell, but the worst that human beings with their limited
powers are able to achieve. There is still, for the saints, a hard
by "the shout of them that

period of probation followed
triumph, the song of them that feast," as the Christian hymn

in describing the joys of heaven.
says
As this psychological pattern seems so persistent and so capa-
ble of clothing itself in completely new mantles of dogma, it
must have its roots somewhat deep in human nature. This is
the kind of matter that is studied by psychoanalysts, and

I am
while very far from subscribing to all their doctrines, I
think that their general methods are important if we wish to
seek out the source of evil in our innermost depths. The twin
conceptions of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at

the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and
politics.
I cannot believe, assome psychoanalysts do, that the
feeling of sin is innate, though I believe it to be a product of
very early infancy. I think that, if this
feeling could be eradi-
cated, the amount of cruelty in the world would be very
diminished. Given that we are all sinners and that we
greatly
alldeserve punishment, there is evidently much to be said for
a system that causes the punishment to fall upon others than
ourselves. Calvinists, byof undeserved mercy, would
the fiat
go to heaven, and their feelings that sin deserved punishment

would receive a merely vicarious satisfaction. Communists have
a similar outlook. When we are born we do not choose
whether we are to be born capitalists or proletarians, but if
we are among the elect, and if the former we are
the latter
not. Without any choice on our own parts, by the working
of economic determinism, we are fated to be on the right side
in the one case, and on the wrong side in the other. Marx's
father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and
some, 'at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem
to have borne fruit in his son's psychology.
One of the odd effects of the importance which each of
us attaches to himself is that we tend to imagine our own good
or evil fortune to be the purpose of other people's actions. If

you pass in a train a field containing grazing cows, you may
sometimes see them running away in terror as the train passes.
The cow, if it were a metaphysician, would argue: "Every-
thing in my own desires and hopes and fears has reference to
myself; hence by induction
I conclude that
everything in the
universe has reference to myself. This noisy train, therefore,
intends to do me either good or evil. I cannot suppose that it
intends to do me good, comes in such a terrifying
since it
form, and therefore, as a prudent cow, I shall endeavor to es-

cape from it."
If
you were to explain to this metaphysical
ruminant that the train has no intention of leaving the rails,
and is
totally indifferent to the fate of the cow, the poor beast
would be bewildered by anything so unnatural. The train that
ill would seem more cold and more
wishes her neither well nor
abysmally horrifying than a train that wished her ill. Just this
has happened with human beings. The course of nature brings
them sometimes good fortune, sometimes evil. They cannot
believe that this happens by accident. The cow, having known
of a companion which had strayed on to the railway line and
been killed by a train,would pursue her philosophical reflec-
tions, if she were endowed with that moderate degree of in-
telligence that characterizes most human beings, to the point
of concluding that the unfortunate cow had been punished
for sin by the god of the railway. She would be glad when his
priests put fences along the line, and would warn younger
and friskier cows never to avail themselves of accidental open-
ings in the fence, since the wages of sin is death. By similar

myths men have succeeded, without sacrificing their self-
importance, in explaining many of the misfortunes to which

they are subject. But sometimes misfortune befalls the wholly
virtuous, and what are we
to say in. this case? We
shall still be
prevented by our feeling that we must be the center of the

universe from admitting that misfortune has merely happened
to us without anybody's intending it, and since we are not
wicked by hypothesis, our misfortune must be due to some-

body's malevolence, that is to say, to somebody wishing to in-
us from mere hatred and not from the
jure hope of any ad-
vantage to himself. It was of mind that gave rise to
this state
demonology, and the belief in witchcraft and black magic. The

witch is a person who injures her neighbors from sheer hatred,
not from any hope of gain. The belief in witchcraft, until
about the middle of the seventeenth century, afforded a most
satisfying outlet for the delicious emotion of self-righteous

cruelty. There was Biblical warrant for the belief, since the
Bible says: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." And on
this ground the Inquisition punished not only witches, but
those who did not believe in the possibility of witchcraft, since
to disbelieve it was
heresy. Science, by giving some insight
into natural causation, dissipated the belief in magic, but could
not wholly dispel the fear and sense of insecurity that had
given rise to it. In modern times, these same emotions find an

outlet in fear of foreign nations, an outlet which, it must be
confessed, requires not much in the way of superstitious sup-
port.
One of the most powerful sources of false belief is
envy.
In any small town you will find, if you question the com-
paratively well-to-do, that they all
exaggerate their neighbors*
incomes, which gives them an opportunity to justify an ac-
cusation of meanness. The jealousies of women are proverbial
will find exactly the
among men, but in any large office you
same kind of jealousy among male officials. When one of them
secures promotion the others will say: "Humph! So-and-so
knows how to make up to the big men. I could have risen quite
as fast as he has if I had chosen to debase myself by using the
sycophantic arts of which he is not ashamed.

No doubt his
work has a flashy brilliance, but it lacks solidity, and sooner
or later the authorities will find out their mistake." So all the
mediocre men will say if a really able man is allowed to rise as

fast as his abilities deserve, and that is
why there is a
tendency
to adopt the rule of seniority, which, since it has nothing to
do with merit, does not give rise to the same envious dis-
content.
One of the most unfortunate results of our proneness to
envy is that it has caused a complete misconception of eco-

nomic self-interest, both individual and national. I will illustrate
by a parable. There was once upon a time a medium-sized

town containing a number of butchers, a number of bakers,
and so forth. butcher, who was exceptionally energetic,
One
decided that he would make much larger profits if all the other
butchers were ruined and he became a monopolist. By system-
atically underselling them he succeeded in his object, though

his losses meanwhile had almost exhausted his command of
capital and credit. At the same time an energetic baker had

had the same idea and had pursued it to a similar successful
conclusion. In every trade which lived by selling goods to
consumers the same thing had happened. Each of the successful
monopolists had a happy anticipation of making a fortune, but
unfortunately the ruined butchers were no longer in the
position to buy bread, and the rained bakers were no longer
in the position to buy meat. Their employees had had to be
dismissed and had gone elsewhere. The consequence was that,
although the butcher and the baker each had a monopoly,

they sold than they had done in the old days. They had
less
forgotten that while a man may be injured by his competitors

he is benefited by his customers, and that customers become
more numerous when the general level of prosperity is in-
creased. Envy had made them concentrate their attention upon
competitors and forget altogether the aspect of their prosperity

that depended upon customers.
This is a fable, and the town of which
have been speaking
I
never existed, but substitute for a town the world, and for
individuals nations, and
you will have a perfect picture of the
IDEAS THAT HAVE HARMED MANKIND 155:
economic policy universally pursued in the present day. Every

nation is
persuaded that its economic interest is opposed to
that of every other nation, and that it must if other
profit
nations are reduced to destitution. During the First World
War, I used to hear English people saying how immensely

British trade would benefit from the destruction of German
trade, which was to be one of the

principal fruits of our vic-
tory. After the war, although we should have liked to find
a market on the Continent of Europe, and although the
industrial life of Western Europe depended upon coal from
the Ruhr, we could not bring ourselves to allow the Ruhr
coal industry to produce more than a tiny fraction of what
it
produced before the Germans were defeated. The whole
philosophy of economic nationalism, which is now universal
throughout the world, is based upon the false belief that the
economic interest of one nation is
necessarily opposed to that
of another. This false belief, by producing international hatreds
and rivalries, is a cause of wâr, and in this way tends to make
itself true, since when war has once broken out the conflict of
national interests becomes only too real. If
you try to
explain
to someone, say, in the steel industry, that possibly prosperity
in other countries might be advantageous to him, you will
find quite impossible to make him see the argument, because
it
the only foreigners of whom he is vividly aware are his com-
petitors in
the steel industry. Other foreigners are shadowy
beings in whom he has no emotional interest. This is the

psychological root of economic nationalism, and war,
and
man-made starvation, and all the other evils which will bring
our and disgraceful end unless men
civilization to a disastrous
can be induced to take a wider and less hysterical view of their

mutual relations.
Another passion which gives rise to false beliefs that are
politically
harmful is pride pride of nationality, race, sexy
class, or creed. When I was young France was still regarded

as the traditional
enemy of England, and I
gathered as an un-
questionable truth that one Englishman conld defeat three
Frenchmen. When Germany became the enemy this belief
was modified and English people ceased to mention derisively
the French propensity for eating frogs. But in spite of gov-
ernmental efforts, I think few Englishmen succeeded in genu-
the French as their equals. Americans and
inely regarding
Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans,
feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual
enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, of Hungarians and Ruma-
nians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and
that the belief of each little nation in its ownsuperiority has

no objective basis. But most of them are quite unable to see
that the national pride of a Great Power is essentially as un-
as that of a little Balkan
justifiable country.
Pride of race iseven more harmful than national pride. When
I was in China I was struck by the fact that cultivated Chinese
were perhaps more highly civilized than any other human
bdngs that it has been my good fortune to meet. Nevertheless,
I found numbers of
gross and ignorant white men who de-
spised
even the best of the Chinese solely because their skins
were yellow. In general, the British were more to blame in
thisthan the Americans, but there were exceptions. I was once
in the company of a Chinese scholar of vast learning, not only
of the traditional Chinese kind, but also of the kind taught in
Western universities, a man with which
a breadth of culture
I
scarcely hoped to equal He went together into a garage
and I
to hire a motor car. The garage proprietor was a bad type of

American, who treated my Chinese friend like dirt, contemp-
tuously accused him of being Japanese, and made my blood
boil by his ignorant malevolence. The similar attitude of the
English in India, exacerbated by their political power, was

one of the main causes of the friction that arose In that coun-
try between the British and the educated Indians. The superi-
ority of one race to another is hardly ever believed in for

any good reason. Where the belief it Is alive
persists kept by
'military supremacy. So long as the
Japanese were victorious,
they entertained a contempt for the white man, which was

the counterpart of the
contempt that the white man had felt
for them while they were weak. Sometimes, however, the feel-
ing of superiority has nothing to do with military prowess,

The Greeks despised the barbarians, even at times when the
strength. The more en-
barbarians surpassed them in warlike
Greeks slavery was justifiable so
lightened among the held that
long as the masters were Greek and the slaves barbarian, but
that otherwise it was contrary to nature. The Jews had, in
antiquity, a quite peculiar belief in their own racial superiority;

ever since Christianity became the religion of the state Gen-
have had an equally irrational belief in their superiority to
tiles
Jews. Beliefs of this kind do infinite harm, and it should be,

but is not, one of the aims of education to eradicate them. I
spoke a moment ago about

the attitude of superiority that
Englishmen have permitted themselves in their dealings with

the inhabitants of India, which was naturally resented in that
country, but the caste system arose as a result of successive

invasions by "superior" races from the North, and Is every bit
as objectionable as white arrogance.
The belief in the superiority of the male sex, which has now
officially
died out in Western nations, is a curious example of
the sin of pride. There was, I think, never any reason to believe
in any innate superiority of the male, except his superior
muscle. I remember once going to a place where they kept a
number of pedigreed bulls, and what made a bull illustrious was
the milk-giving qualities of his female ancestors. But if bulls
had drawn up the pedigrees they would have been very differ-
ent.Nothing would have been said about the female ancestors,
except that they were docile and virtuous,
whereas the male
would have been celebrated for
ancestors their supremacy in
battle. In the case of cattle we can take a disinterested view of
the relative merits of the sexes, but in the case of our own
species we find this more difficult. Male superiority in former
days was easily demonstrated, because if a woman questioned

her husband's he could beat her. From superiority in this re-
spect others were thought to follow. Men were more reasonable

than women, more inventive, less
swayed by their emotions,
and so on. Anatomists, until the women had the vote, devel-
oped number of ingenious arguments from the study of the

a
brain to show that men's intellectual capacities must be greater

than women's. Each of these arguments in turn was proved to
be fallacious, but it always gave place to another from which
the same conclusion would follow. It used to be held that the
male foetus acquires a soul after six weeks, but the female only
after three months. This opinion also has been abandoned since
women have had the vote. Thomas Aquinas states parenthet-
ically,
as something entirely obvious, that men are more ra-
tional than women. For my part, I see no evidence of this.
Some few individuals have some slight glimmerings of ration-
ality
in some directions, but so far as
my observations go,
such glimmerings are no commoner among men than among
women.
Male domination has had some very unfortunate effects.
It made the most intimate of human relations, that of marriage,
one of master and of one between equal partners.
slave, instead
It made it
unnecessary for a man to please a woman in order
to acquire her as his wife, and thus confined the arts of court-
ship to irregular relations. By the seclusion which it forced

upon respectable women it made them dull and uninteresting;
the only women who could be interesting and adventurous
were social outcasts. Owing to the dullness of respectable
'women, the most civilized men in the most civilized countries
often became homosexual. Owing to the fact that there was no
equality in marriage men became confirmed in domineering
habits. All this has now more or less ended in civilized coun-
tries, but it will be a long time before either men or women
learn to adapt their behavior completely to the new state of
affairs.
Emancipation always has at first certain bad effects;
it leaves former superiors sore and former inferiors self-
assertive. But it is to be
hoped that time will bring adjustment
in this matter as in others.
Another kind of superiority which is rapidly disappearing
that of class, which now survives
is
only in Soviet Russia. In
that country the son of a proletarian has
advantages over the
son of a bourgeois, but elsewhere such hereditary privileges
are regarded as unjust. The disappearance of class distinctions
is,however, far from complete. In America everybody is of

opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal,
but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from
the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are
equal applies only upwards, not downwards. There is on this
subject profound and widespread hypocrisy whenever peo-

a
ple talk in general terms. What they really think and feel can
be discovered by reading second-rate novels, where one finds
that it is a dreadful thing to be born on the wrong side of the
tracks, and that there is much fuss about a mesalliance as

as
there used to be in a small German Court. So long as great
inequalities
it is not
of wealth surviveeasy to see how this can
be otherwise. In England, where snobbery is deeply ingrained,
the equalization of incomes which has been brought about by
the war
has had a profound effect, and among the young the
snobbery of their elders has begun to seem somewhat ridicu-

lous. There is still a very large amount of regrettable snobbery
in England, but it is connected more with education and manner
of speech than with income or with social status in the old
sense.
Pride of creed another variety of the same kind of feeling.

is
When I had recently returned from China I lectured on that

l6o UNPOPULAR ESSAYS
country to a number of women's clubs in America. There was
always one elderly woman who appeared to be sleeping
throughout the but at the end would ask me, some-
lecture,
what portentously, why I
had omitted to mention that the
Chinese, being heathen, could of course have no virtues. I
imagine that the Mormons of Salt Lake City must have had
a similar attitude when non-Mormons were first admitted
among them. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians and

Mohammedans were entirely persuaded of each other's wicked-
ness and were incapable of doubting their own superiority.
All these are pleasant ways of feeling "grand," In order to
be happy we require kinds of supports to our self-esteem.
all
We are human beings, therefore human beings are the purpose

of creation* We are Americans, therefore America is God's
own country. We are white, and therefore God cursed Ham
and his descendants who were black. We are Protestant or
Catholic, as the case may be, therefore Catholics or Protes-

tants, as the case may be, are an abomination. We are male, and
therefore women are unreasonable; or female, and therefore
men are brutes. We are Easterners, and therefore the West is
wild and woolly; or Westerners, and therefore the East is effete.

We work with our brains, and therefore it is the educated
classes that are
important; or we work with our hands, and
therefore manual labor alone gives dignity. Finally, and above
all, we each have one merit which is entirely unique: we are
Ourself. With these comforting reflections we go out to do

battle with the world; without them our courage might fail
Without them, as
things are, we should feel inferior because
we have not learned the sentiment of equality. If we could feel
genuinely that we are the equals of our neighbors, neither
their betters nor their perhaps life would become less
inferiors,
of a battle, and we should need less in the way of intoxicating
myth to give us Dutch courage.

One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which
IDEAS THAT HAVE HARMED MANKIND l6l
men and nations can be subjected Is that of imagining them-

selves special instruments of the Divine Will. know thatWe
when the Israelites invaded the Promised Land it was they
who were fulfilling
the Divine Purpose, and not the Hittites,
the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites,
the Hivites, or the Jebusites.
Perhaps if these others had
written long history books the matter might have looked a
little different. In fact, the Hittites did leave some
inscriptions,
from which you would never guess what abandoned wretches
they were. It was discovered, "after the fact," that Rome was
destined the gods for the conquest of the world. Then
by
came Islam with its fanatical belief that
every soldier dying
in battle for the True Faith went straight to a Paradise more
attractive than that of the Christians', as houris are more attrac-
tive than
harps. Cromwell was persuaded that he was the
Divinely appointed instrument of justice for suppressing Cath-

olics and
malignants. Andrew Jackson was the agent of Man-
ifest
Destiny in freeing North America from the incubus of
Sabbath-breaking Spaniards. In our day, the sword of the
Lord has been put into the hands of the Marxists. Hegel
thought that the Dialectic with fatalistic logic had given

supremacy to Germany. "No," said Marx, "not to Germany,
but to the Proletariat." This doctrine has kinship with the
earlier doctrines of the Chosen People and Manifest Destiny.
In its has viewed the struggle of op-

character of fatalism it
ponets as one against destiny, and argued that therefore the

wise man would put himself on the winning side as quickly
as
possible.
That is
why this argument is such a useful one
politically*
The only
objection to it is that it assumes a knowl-
edge of the Divine purposes to which no rational man can lay
claim, and that in the execution of them it justifies a ruthless
cruelty which would be condemned if our program had &

merely mundane origin.
It is
good to know that God is on our
side, but a little confusing when you find the enemy equally
convinced of the opposite. To quote the immortal lines of the
poet during the First World War:
Gott England, and God save the King.
strafe
God and God that, and God the other thing.
this,
"Good God," said God, "I've got my work cut out."
Belief in a Divine mission is one of the
many forms of certainty
that have afflicted the human race. I think perhaps one of the
wisest things ever said was when Cromwell said to the Scotch
before the battle of Dunbar: "I beseech you in the bowels of

Christ, think possible that you may be mistaken."
it But the
Scotch did not, and so he had to defeat them in battle. It is a
pity that Cromwell never addressed the same remark to him-
self.Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man
have come through people feeling quite certain about some-
thing which, in fact, was false. To know the truth is more
difficult than most men
suppose, and to act with
ruthless
determination in the belief that truth is the monopoly of their
party is to invite disaster. Long calculations that certain evil in

the present is worth inflicting for the sake of some doubtful
benefit in the future are always to be viewed with suspicion,
for, as Shakespeare says: "What's to come is still unsure."
Even the shrewdest men are apt to be wildly astray if they
prophesy so much as ten years ahead. Some people will con-

sider this doctrine immoral, but after the Gospel, which
all it is
says "take no thought for the morrow."

In public, as in private life, the important thing is tolerance
and kindliness, without the presumption of a superhuman abil-
ity to read the future.
Instead of calling this essay "Ideas That Have Harmed Man-
kind,'* I might perhaps have called it simply "Ideas Have
Harmed Mankind," for, seeing that the future cannot be fore-
told and that there an almost endless variety of possible
is
beliefs about the chance that any belief which a man may
it,
hold may be true is very slender. Whatever you think is going

to happen ten years hence, unless it is like the sun
something
rising tomorrow that has nothing to do with human relations,
you are almost sure to be wrong. I find this

thought consoling
when I remember some gloomy prophecies of which I
myself
have rashly been guilty.
But youwill say: how is
statesmanship possible except on
the assumption that the future can be to some extent foretold?
I admit that some degree of prevision
is
necessary, and I am not
suggesting that we are completely ignorant. It is a fair proph-
ecy that if you tell a man he is a knave and a fool he will
not love you, and it is a fair
prophecy that if
you say the same
thing to seventy million people they will not love you. It is
safe to assume that cut-throat competition will not produce
a feeling ofgood fellowship between the competitors. It is
highly probable that if two states equipped with modern
armament face each other across a frontier, and if their leading
statesmen devote themselves to mutual the population
insults,
of each side will in time become nervous, and one side will
attack for fear of the other doing so. It is safe to assume that
a great modern war will not raise the level of prosperity even
among the victors. Such generalizations are not difficult to

know. What is difficult is to foresee in detail the
long-run con-
sequences of a concrete policy. Bismarck with extreme astute-
ness won three wars and unified Germany. The long-run re-
sult of his policy has been that Germany has suffered two
colossal defeats. These resulted because he taught Germans to
be indifferent to the interests of countries except Germany,
all
and generated an aggressive spirit which in the end united the

world against his successors. Selfishness beyond a point,
whether individual or national, is not wise. may with luck
It
succeed, but if it fails failure is terrible. Few men will run this
risk unless they are supported by a theory, for it is
only theory
thatmakes men completely incautious.
Passing from the moral to
the purely intellectual point of
view, we have to ask ourselves what social science can do in

the way of establishing such causal laws as should be a help to
statesmen In making political decisions. Some things of real
importance have begun to be known, for example how to avoid

such as afflicted the
slumps and large-scale unemployment
world after the last war. It is also now generally known by
those who have taken the trouble to look into the matter that
only an international government can prevent war, and that

civilization is hardly likely to survive more than one more
great war, if that. But although these things are known, the
knowledge is not effective; it has not penetrated to the great
masses of men, and it is not strong enough to control sinister
interests. There is, in fact, a great deal more social science than
politicians
are
willing or able to apply. Some people attribute
this failure to democracy, but it seems to me to be more

marked in autocracy than anywhere else. Belief in democracy,
however, like any other belief, may be carried to the point

where becomes fanatical, and
it therefore harmful. A demo-
crat need not believe that the majority will always decide
that the decision of the ma-
wisely; what he must believe
is
whether wise or unwise, must be accepted until such

jority,
time the majority decides otherwise.
as And this he believes
not from any mystic conception of the wisdom
of the plain
man, but as the best practical device for putting the reign of
law in place of the reign of arbitrary force. Nor does the
democrat necessarily believe that democracy is the best system
always and everywhere. There are many nations which lack
the self-restraint and political experience that are required for
the success of parliamentary institutions, where the democrat,
while he would wish them to acquire the necessary political
education, will recognize that it is useless to thrust upon them
prematurely a system which is almost certain to break down.
In politics,
as elsewhere, it does not do to deal in absolutes;
what is
good and place may be bad in another,
in one time
and what the political instincts of one nation may
satisfies
to another seem wholly futile. The general aim of the democrat

is to substitute government by general assent for government
fay force,
but requires a population that has undergone a
this
certain kind of training. Given a nation divided into two

nearly
equal portions which hate each other and long to fly at each
other's throats, the portion which is just less than half will not
submit tamely to the domination of the other portion, nor will
the portion which is just more than half show, in the moment
of victory, the kind of moderation which might heal the
breach.
The world at the
present day stands in need of tw o kinds
r
of things. On the one hand, organization political organiza-

tion for the elimination of wars, economic organization to
enable men to work productively, especially in the countries
that have been devastated by war, educational organization to
generate a sane internationalism. On the other hand it needs

certain moral qualities the qualities which have been advo-
cated by moralists for many ages, but hitherto with little
success. The qualities
most needed are charity and tolerance,
not some form of fanatical faith such as is offered to us by the
various rampant isms. I think these two aims, the organizational
and the ethical, are closely interwoven; given either the other
would soon follow. But, in effect, if the world is to move in
the right direction it will have to move simultaneously in both
respects. There will have to be a gradual lessening of the evil

which are the natural aftermath of war, and a gradual
passions
increase of the organizations by means of which mankind can
bring each other mutual help. There will have to be a realiza-

tion at once intellectual and moral that we are one family,
all
and that the happiness of no one branch of this

family can be
another. At the present time,
built securely upon the ruin of
moral defects stand in the way of clear thinking, and muddled
thinking encourages moral defects. Perhaps, though I scarcely

dare to hope it, the hydrogen bomb will terrify mankind into
sanity and tolerance.
If this should happen we shall have reason
to bless its inventors.
13
FREEDOM IN SOCIETY
To what extent is freedom possible, and to what extent is it

desirable, among human beings who live in communities? That
is the general problem which I wish to discuss.
Perhaps it will be well to begin with definitions. ‘Freedom’ is
a term which is used in many senses, and we must decide upon
one of them before we can argue profitably. ‘Society’ is less
ambiguous, but here too some attempt at definition may be not
amiss.
I do not think it desirable to use words in fancy senses. For
instance, Hegel and his followers think that ‘true’ freedom con-
sists in the right to obey the police, who are generally called ‘the
moral law’. The police, of course, must obey their official
superiors, but the definition gives us no guidance as to what the
Government itself is to do. Accordingly, in practice, the
adherents of this view argue that the State is essentially and by
definition impeccable. This notion is inappropriate in a country
where there is democracy and party Government, since in such a
country nearly half the nation believes the Government to be

freedom in society 145
very wicked. We cannot therefore rest content with ‘true’

freedom as a substitute for freedom.
‘Freedom’ in its most abstract sense means the absence of
external obstacles to the realisation of desires. Taken in this
abstract sense, freedom may be increased either by maximising
power or by minimising wants. An insect which lives for a few
days and then dies of cold may have perfect freedom according
to the definition, since the cold may alter its desires, so that there
is no moment when it wishes to achieve the impossible. Among
human beings, also, this way of reaching freedom is possible. A
young Russian aristocrat, who had become a communist and a
Red Army Commissar, explained to me that the English do not,
like the Russians, need a physical strait-jacket, because they have
a mental one: their souls are always in strait-jackets. Probably
there is some truth in this. The people in Dostoevsky are no
doubt not quite like real Russians, but at any rate they are people
whom only a Russian could have invented. They have all sorts of
strange violent desires, from which the average Englishman is
free, at least so far as his conscious life is concerned. It is obvious
that a community who all wish to murder each other cannot
be so free as a community with more peaceable desires. Modifi-
cation of desire may, therefore, involve just as great a gain to
freedom as increase of power.
This consideration illustrates a necessity which is not always
satisfied by political thinking: I mean the necessity of what may
be called ‘psychological dynamics’. It has been far too common
to accept human nature as a datum in politics, to which external
conditions have to be adapted. The truth is, of course, that
external conditions modify human nature, and that harmony
between the two is to be sought by a mutual interaction. A man
taken from one environment and plunged suddenly into another
may be by no means free, and yet the new environment may
give freedom to those accustomed to it. We cannot therefore
deal with freedom without taking account of the possibility of

146 freedom in society
variable desires owing to changing environment. In some cases

this makes the attainment of freedom more difficult, since a new
environment, while satisfying old desires, may generate new
ones which it cannot satisfy. This possibility is illustrated by the
psychological effects of industrialism, which generates a host of
new wants: a man may be discontented because he cannot afford
a motor car, and soon we shall all want private aeroplanes. And a
man may be discontented because of unconscious wants. For
instance, Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this
to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the
United States.
Although men’s desires vary, there are certain fundamental
needs which may be taken as nearly universal: food, drink,
health, clothing, housing, sex and parenthood are the chief of
these. (Clothing and housing are not absolute necessaries in hot
climates, but except in the tropics they must be included in the
list.) Whatever else may be involved in freedom, certainly no
person is free who is deprived of anything in the above list,
which constitutes the bare minimum of freedom.
This brings us to the definition of ‘society’. It is obvious that
the above minimum of freedom can be better secured in a
society than by a Robinson Crusoe; indeed, sex and parenthood
are essentially social. One may define a ‘society’ as a group of
persons who co-operate for certain common purposes. Where
human beings are concerned, the most primitive social group is
the family. Economic social groups come quite early; apparently
groups which co-operate in war are not quite so primitive. In
the modern world, economics and war are the main motives for
social cohesion. Almost all of us are better able to satisfy our
physical needs than we should be if we had no larger social unit
than the family or the tribe, and in that sense society has served
to increase freedom. It is thought, also, that an organised State
makes us less likely to be killed by our enemies, but this is a
doubtful proposition.

If we take a man’s desires as a datum, i.e. if we ignore psycho-

logical dynamics, it is obvious that the obstacles to his freedom
are of two sorts, physical and social. To take the crudest instance:
the earth may not yield enough food for his sustenance, or
other people may prevent him from obtaining the food. Society
diminishes the physical obstacles to freedom, but creates social
obstacles. Here, however, we are liable to go wrong through
ignoring the effect of society upon desire. One may assume that
ants and bees, though they live in well-organised societies,
always do spontaneously the things that constitute their social
duties. The same is true of most of the individuals among higher
animals that are gregarious. According to Rivers, it is true of men
in Melanesia. This seems to depend upon a high degree of sug-
gestibility, and upon factors more or less akin to what happens
in hypnotism. Men so constituted can co-operate without loss of
freedom, and have little need of law. Oddly enough, though
civilised men have a far more elaborate social organisation than
savages have, they appear to be less social in their instincts: the
effect of society upon their actions is more external than it is
with savages. That is why they discuss the problem of freedom.
I do not, of course, wish to deny that social co-operation has
an instinctive basis, even in the most civilised communities.
People want to be like their neighbours, and to be liked by them;
they imitate, and they catch prevalent moods by suggestion.
Nevertheless, these factors seem to diminish in strength as men
become more civilised. They are much stronger in schoolboys
than in adults, and on the whole they have most power over the
least intelligent individuals. More and more, social co-operation
is coming to depend upon rational apprehension of its advan-
tages, rather than upon what is loosely termed herd instinct. The
problem of individual liberty does not arise among savages,
because they feel no need of it, but it arises among civilised men
with more and more urgency as they become more civilised.
And at the same time the part played by government in the

regulation of their lives is continually increasing, as it becomes

more clear that government can help to liberate us from the
physical obstacles to freedom. The problem of freedom in soci-
ety is therefore one which is likely to increase in urgency, unless
we cease to become more civilised.
It is, of course, obvious that freedom is not to be increased by
a mere diminution of government. One man’s desires are apt to
be incompatible with another man’s, so that anarchy means
freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak. Without gov-
ernment, the human population of the globe could hardly be a
tenth of what it is; it would be kept down by starvation and
infant mortality. This would be to substitute a physical slavery
far more severe than the worst social slavery to be found in
civilised communities in normal times. The problem we have to
consider is not how to do without government, but how to
secure its advantages with the smallest possible interference with
freedom. This means striking a balance between physical and
social freedom. To put it crudely: how much more governmental
pressure should we be prepared to endure in order to have more
food or better health?
The answer to this question, in practice, turns upon a very
simple consideration: are we to have the food and health, or is
someone else? People in a siege, or in England in 1917, have
been found willing to endure any degree of governmental pres-
sure, because it was obvious that it was to everyone’s advantage.
But when one person is to have the governmental pressure and
another person is to have the food, the question looks quite
different. In this form we arrive at the issue between capitalism
and Socialism. Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to
the sacred principles of liberty, which are all embodied in one
maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the
unfortunate.
Laissez-faire Liberalism, which was based upon this maxim,
must not be confounded with anarchism. It invoked the law to

prevent murder and armed insurrection on the part of the

unfortunate; as long as it dared, it opposed trade unionism.
But given this minimum of government action, it aimed at
accomplishing the rest by economic power. Liberalism con-
sidered it proper for an employer to say to an employee: ‘You
shall die of hunger’, but improper for the employee to retort,
‘You shall die first, of a bullet’. It is obvious that, apart from
legal pedantries, it is ridiculous to make a distinction between
these two threats. Each equally infringes the elementary min-
imum of freedom, but not one more than the other. It was not
only in the economic sphere that this inequality existed. The
sacred principles of liberty were also invoked to justify the
tyranny of husbands over wives and fathers over children; but
it must be said that Liberalism tended to mitigate the first of
these. The tyranny of fathers over children, in the form of com-
pelling them to work in factories, was mitigated in spite of the
Liberals.
But this is a well-worn theme, and I do not wish to linger on
it. I want to pass to the general question: How far should the
community interfere with the individual, not for the sake of
another individual, but for the sake of the community? And for
what objects should it interfere?
I should say, to begin with, that the claim to the bare min-
imum of freedom—food, drink, health, housing, clothing, sex
and parenthood—should override any other claim. The above
minimum is necessary for biological survival, i.e., for the leaving
of descendants. The things which I have just enumerated may,
therefore, be described as necessaries; what goes beyond them
may be called comforts or luxuries according to circumstances.
Now I should regard it as a priori justifiable to deprive one person
of comforts in order to supply another with necessaries. It may
not be politically expedient, it may not be economically feasible,
in a given community at a given moment; but it is not objection-
able on the ground of freedom, because to deprive a man

of necessaries is a greater interference with freedom than to

prevent him from accumulating superfluities.
But if this is admitted, it takes us very far. Consider health, for
instance. In Borough Council elections one of the questions to
be decided is the amount of public money to be spent on such
matters as public health, maternity care and infant welfare. Stat-
istics prove that what is spent on these objects has a remarkable
effect in saving life. In every borough in London, the well-to-do
have banded themselves together to prevent an increase, and
if possible to secure a diminution, of the expenditure in these
directions. That is to say, they are all prepared to condemn thou-
sands of people to death in order that they themselves may
continue to enjoy good dinners and motor cars. As they control
almost all the Press, they prevent the facts from being known to
their victims. By the methods familiar to psycho-analysts, they
avoid knowing the facts themselves. There is nothing surprising
in their action, which is that of all aristocracies in all ages. All
that I am concerned to say is that their action cannot be defended
on grounds of freedom.
I do not propose to discuss the right to sex and parenthood. I
will merely observe that, in a country where there is a great
excess of one sex over the other, existing institutions seem
hardly calculated to secure it; and that the tradition of Christian
asceticism has had the unfortunate effect of making people less
willing to recognise this right than to recognise the right to
food. Politicians, who have not time to become acquainted with
human nature, are peculiarly ignorant of the desires that move
ordinary men and women. Any political party whose leaders
knew a little psychology could sweep the country.
While admitting the abstract right of the community to inter-
fere with its members in order to secure the biological necessar-
ies to all, I cannot admit its right to interfere in matters where
what one man possesses is not obtained at the expense of
another. I am thinking of such things as opinion and knowledge

and art. The fact that the majority of a community dislikes an

opinion gives it no right to interfere with those who hold it.
And the fact that the majority of a community wishes not to
know certain facts gives it no right to imprison those who wish
to know them. I know a lady who wrote a long book giving an
account of family life in Texas, which I consider sociologically
very valuable. The British police hold that no one must know
the truth about anything; therefore it is illegal to send this book
through the post. Everybody knows that the patients of psycho-
analysts are often cured by the mere process of making them
become aware of facts of which they had repressed the recollec-
tion. Society is, in certain respects, like these patients, but
instead of allowing itself to be cured it imprisons the doctors
who bring unwelcome facts to its notice. This is a wholly
undesirable form of interference with freedom. The same
argument applies to interferences with personal morals: if a man
chooses to have two wives or a woman two husbands, it is his
affair and theirs, and no one else ought to feel called upon to
take action about it.
So far, I have been considering purely abstract arguments as to
the limitations of justifiable interferences with freedom. I come
now to certain more psychological considerations.
The obstacles to freedom, as we saw, are of two sorts, social
and physical. Given a social and a physical obstacle which cause
the same direct loss of liberty, the social obstacle is more harm-
ful, because it causes resentment. If a boy wants to climb a tree
and you forbid him, he will be furious; if he finds that he cannot
climb it, he will acquiesce in the physical impossibility. To pre-
vent resentment, it may often be desirable to permit things
which are in themselves harmful, such as going to church dur-
ing an epidemic. To prevent resentment, governments attribute
misfortunes to natural causes; to create resentment, oppositions
attribute them to human causes. When the price of bread goes
up, governments say it is due to bad harvests, and oppositions

say it is due to profiteers. Under the influence of industrialism,

people have come to believe more and more in the omnipotence
of man; they think there is no limit to what human beings can
do to obviate natural misfortunes. Socialism is a form of this
belief: we no longer regard poverty as sent by God, but as a
result of human folly and cruelty. This has naturally altered
the attitude of the proletariat towards its ‘betters’. Sometimes the
belief in human omnipotence is carried too far. Many socialists,
including the late Health Minister, apparently think that under
Socialism there would be plenty of food for everybody even if
the population multiplied until there was only standing room on
the earth’s surface. This, I am afraid, is an exaggeration. However
this may be, the modern belief in the omnipotence of man has
increased the resentment when things go wrong, because
misfortunes are no longer attributed to God or Nature, even
when they justly might be. This makes modern communities
harder to govern than the communities of the past, and accounts
for the fact that the governing classes tend to be exceptionally
religious, because they wish to regard the misfortunes of their
victims as due to the will of God. It makes interferences with the
minimum of freedom harder to justify than in former times,
because they cannot be camouflaged as immutable laws,
although every day in The Times there are letters from clergymen
trying to revive this ancient device.
In addition to the fact that interferences with social freedom
are resented, there are two other reasons which tend to make
them undesirable. The first is that people do not desire the wel-
fare of others, and the second is that they do not know in what it
consists. Perhaps, at bottom, these are one and the same, for
when we genuinely desire the good of some person, we usually
succeed in finding out what his needs are. At any rate, the prac-
tical results are the same whether people do harm from malevo-
lence or from ignorance. We may therefore take the two
together, and say that hardly any man or class can be trusted as

the trustee of another’s interests. This is, of course, the basis of

the argument for democracy. But democracy, in a modern State,
has to work through officials, and thus becomes indirect and
remote where the individual is concerned. There is a special
danger in officials, owing to the fact that they usually sit in
offices remote from the people whose lives they control. Take
education as a case in point. Teachers, on the whole, from con-
tact with children, have come to understand them and care from
them, but they are controlled by officials without practical
experience, to whom children may be merely nasty little brats.
Therefore the interferences of officials with freedom for teachers
are generally harmful. So in everything: power lies with those
who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon
which the money is to be spent. Thus the holders of power are,
in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise
their power the better.
The case for compulsion is strongest where the person com-
pelled gives a moral assent to the compulsion, although, if he
could, he would neglect what he recognises to be his duty. We
would all rather pay rates than have no roads, though if, by a
miracle, the rate-collector overlooked us, most of us would not
remind him of our existence. And we readily acquiesce in such
measures as the prohibition of cocaine, though alcohol is a
more dubious proposition. But the best case is that of children.
Children must be under authority, and are themselves aware that
they must be, although they like to play a game of rebellion at
times. The case of children is unique in the fact that those who
have authority over them are sometimes fond of them. Where
this is the case, the children do not resent the authority in gen-
eral, even when they resist it on particular occasions. Education
authorities, as opposed to teachers, have not this merit, and
do in fact sacrifice the children to what they consider the good
of the State by teaching them ‘patriotism’, i.e., a willingness
to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. Authority would be

comparatively harmless if it were always in the hands of people

who wish well to those whom they control, but there is no
known method of securing this result.
Compulsion is at its worst when the victim firmly believes the
act commanded to be wicked or harmful. It would be abomin-
able, even if it were possible, to compel a Mahometan to eat pork
or a Hindu to eat beef. Anti-vaccinationists ought not to be
compelled to be vaccinated. Whether their infant children
should be is another question: I should say not, but the question
is not one of freedom, since the child is not consulted in either
case. The question is one between the parent and the State, and
cannot be decided on any general principle. The parent who has
conscientious objections to education is not allowed to keep his
child uninstructed; yet, so far as general principles go, the two
cases are exactly analogous.
The most important distinction, in this matter of freedom, is
between those goods which one man holds at the expense of
another, and those in which one man’s gain is not another’s loss.
If I absorb more than my fair share of food, some other man
goes hungry; if I absorb an unusually large amount of mathe-
matics, I do no one any harm, unless I have monopolised edu-
cational opportunities. There is another point: such things as
food, houses and clothes are necessaries of life, about the need of
which there is not much controversy or much difference
between one man and another. Therefore they are suitable for
governmental action in a democracy. In all such matters justice
should be the governing principle. In a modern democratic
community, justice means equality. But it would not mean
equality in a community where there was a hierarchy of classes,
recognised and accepted by inferiors as well as superiors. Even in
modern England, a large majority of wage-earners would be
shocked if it were suggested that the King should have no more
pomp than they have. I should therefore define justice as the
arrangement of producing the least envy. This would mean

equality in a community free from superstition, but not in one

which firmly believed in social inequality.
But in opinion, thought, art, etc., one man’s possessions are
not obtained at the expense of another’s. Moreover, it is doubtful
what is good in this sphere. If Dives is having a feast while
Lazarus is eating a crust of bread, Dives will be thought a hypo-
crite if he preaches the advantages of poverty. But if I like math-
ematics and another man likes music, we do not interfere with
each other, and when we praise each other’s pursuits we are
merely being polite. And in matters of opinion, free competition
is the only way of arriving at truth. The old Liberal watchwords
were applied in the wrong sphere, that of economics; it is in the
mental sphere that they really apply. We want free competition
in ideas, not in business. The difficulty is that, as free competi-
tion in business dies out, the victors more and more seek to use
their economic power in the mental and moral sphere, and to
insist upon right living and right thinking as a condition of
being allowed to earn a living. This is unfortunate, since ‘right
living’ means hypocrisy and ‘right thinking’ means stupidity.
There is the gravest danger that, whether under plutocracy or
under Socialism, all mental and moral progress will be rendered
impossible by economic persecution. The liberty of the indi-
vidual should be respected where his actions do not directly,
obviously and indubitably do harm to other people. Otherwise
our persecuting instincts will produce a stereotyped society, as
in sixteenth-century Spain. The danger is real and pressing.
America is in the van, but we in England are almost sure to
follow suit, unless we can learn to value freedom in its proper
sphere. The freedom we should seek is not the right to oppress
others, but the right to live as we choose and think as we choose
where our doing so does not prevent others from doing
likewise.
Finally, I want to say a word about what, at the beginning, I
called ‘psychological dynamics’. A society where one type of

character is common can have more freedom than one in which

a different type prevails. A society composed of human beings
and tigers could not have much freedom: either the tigers or the
human beings must be enslaved. There cannot therefore be any
freedom in parts of the world where white men govern coloured
populations. To secure the maximum of freedom, it is necessary
to form character by education, so that men may find their hap-
piness in activities which are not oppressive. This is a matter of
formation of character during the first six years of life. Miss
McMillan at Deptford is training children who become capable
of creating a free community. If her methods were applied to all
children, rich and poor, one generation would suffice to solve
our social problems. But emphasis on instruction has made all
parties blind to what is important in education. In later years,
desires can only be controlled, not fundamentally altered; there-
fore it is in early childhood that the lesson of live-and-let-live
must be taught. Given men and woman who do not desire the
things which can only be secured through the misfortunes of
others, the obstacles to social freedom will be at an end.

14
FREEDOM VERSUS AUTHORITY
IN EDUCATION
Freedom, in education as in other things, must be a matter of

degree. Some freedoms cannot be tolerated. I met a lady once
who maintained that no child should ever be forbidden to do
anything, because a child ought to develop its nature from within.
‘How if its nature leads it to swallow pins?’ I asked; but I regret to
say the answer was mere vituperation. And yet every child, left to
itself, will sooner or later swallow pins, or drink poison out of
medicine bottles, or fall out of an upper window, or otherwise
bring itself to a bad end. At a slightly later age, boys, when they
have the opportunity, will go unwashed, overeat, smoke till they
are sick, catch chills from sitting in wet feet, and so on—let alone
the fact that they will amuse themselves by plaguing elderly
gentlemen, who may not all have Elisha’s powers of repartee.
Therefore one who advocates freedom in education cannot mean
that children should do exactly as they please all day long. An
element of discipline and authority must exist; the question is as
to the amount of it, and the way in which it is to be exercised.

158 freedom versus authority in education
Education may be viewed from many standpoints: that of the

State, of the Church, of the schoolmaster, of the parents, or even
(though this is usually forgotten) of the child itself. Each of these
points of view is partial; each contributes something to the ideal
of education, but also contributes elements that are bad. Let us
examine them successively, and see what is to be said for and
against them.
We will begin with the State, as the most powerful force in
deciding what modern education is to be. The interest of the
State in education is very recent. It did not exist in antiquity or
the Middle Ages; until the Renaissance, education was only
valued by the Church. The Renaissance brought an interest in
advanced scholarship, leading to the foundation of such institu-
tions as the Collège de France, intended to offset the ecclesi-
astical Sorbonne. The Reformation, in England and Germany,
brought a desire on the part of the State to have some control
over universities and grammar schools, to prevent them from
remaining hotbeds of ‘Popery’. But this interest soon evaporated.
The State took no decisive or continuous part until the quite
modern movement for universal compulsory education. Never-
theless the State, now, has more to say to scholastic institutions
than have all the other factors combined.
The motives which led to universal compulsory education
were various. Its strongest advocates were moved by the feeling
that it is in itself desirable to be able to read and write, that an
ignorant population is a disgrace to a civilised country, and that
democracy is impossible without education. These motives
were reinforced by others. It was soon seen that education gave
commercial advantages, that it diminished juvenile crime, and
that it gave opportunities for regimenting slum populations.
Anti-clericals perceived in State education an opportunity of
combating the influence of the Church; this motive weighed
considerably in England and France. Nationalists, especially after
the Franco-Prussion War, considered that universal education

freedom versus authority in education 159
would increase the national strength. All these other reasons,

however, were at first subsidiary. The main reason for adopt-
ing universal education was the feeling that illiteracy was
disgraceful.
This institution, once firmly established, was found by the
State to be capable of many uses. It makes young people more
docile, both for good and evil. It improves manners and dimin-
ishes crime; it facilitates common action for public ends; it
makes the community more responsive to direction from a
centre. Without it, democracy cannot exist except as an empty
form. But democracy, as conceived by politicians, is a form of
government, that is to say, it is a method of making people do what
their leaders wish under the impression that they are doing what
they themselves wish. Accordingly, State education has acquired
a certain bias. It teaches the young (so far as it can) to respect
existing institutions, to avoid all fundamental criticism of the
powers that be, and to regard foreign nations with suspicion and
contempt. It increases national solidarity at the expense both of
internationalism and of individual development. The damage to
individual development comes through the undue stress upon
authority. Collective rather than individual emotions are encour-
aged, and disagreement with prevailing beliefs is severely
repressed. Uniformity is desired because it is convenient to the
administrator, regardless of the fact that it can only be secured by
mental atrophy. So great are the resulting evils that it can be
seriously questioned whether universal education has hitherto
done good or harm on the balance.
The point of view of the Church as regards education is, in
practice, not very different from that of the State. There is, how-
ever, one important divergence: the Church would prefer that
the laity should not be educated at all, and only give them
instruction when the State insists. The State and the Church both
wish to instil beliefs which are likely to be dispelled by free
inquiry. But the State creed is easier to instil into a population

which can read the newspaper, whereas the Church creed is

easier to instil into a wholly illiterate population. State and
Church are both hostile to thought, but the Church is also
(though now surreptitiously) hostile to instruction. This will
pass, and is passing, as the ecclesiastical authorities perfect the
technique of giving instruction without stimulating mental
activity—a technique in which, long ago, the Jesuits led the way.
The schoolmaster, in the modern world, is seldom allowed a
point of view of his own. He is appointed by an education
authority, and is ‘sacked’ if he is found to be educating. Apart
from this economic motive, the schoolmaster is exposed to
temptations of which he is likely to be unconscious. He stands,
even more directly than the State and the Church, for discipline;
officially he knows what his pupils do not know. Without some
element of discipline and authority, it is difficult to keep a class
in order. It is easier to punish a boy for showing boredom than it
is to be interesting. Moreover, even the best schoolmaster is likely
to exaggerate his importance, and to deem it possible and desir-
able to mould his pupils into the sort of human beings that he
thinks they ought to be. Lytton Strachey describes Dr Arnold
walking beside the Lake of Como and meditating on ‘moral evil’.
Moral evil, for him, was whatever he wished to change in his
boys. The belief that there was a great deal of it in them justified
him in the exercise of power, and in conceiving of himself as a
ruler whose duty was even more to chasten than to love. This
attitude—variously phrased in various ages—is natural to any
schoolmaster who is zealous without being on the watch for the
deceitful influence of self-importance. Nevertheless the teacher
is far the best of the forces concerned in education, and it is
primarily to him or her that we must look for progress.
Then again, the schoolmaster wants the credit of his school.
This makes him wish to have his boys distinguish themselves in
athletic contests and scholarship examinations, which leads to
care for a certain selection of superior boys to the exclusion of

others. For the rank and file, the result is bad. It is much better
for a boy to play a game badly himself than to watch others
playing it well. Mr H.G. Wells, in his Life of Sanderson of Oundle, tells
how this really great schoolmaster set his face against everything
that left the faculties of the average boy unexercised and
uncared-for. When he became headmaster, he found that only
certain selected boys were expected to sing in chapel; they were
trained as a choir, and the rest listened. Sanderson insisted that all
should sing, whether musical or not. In this he was rising above
the bias which is natural to a schoolmaster who cares more for
his credit than for his boys. Of course, if we all apportioned
credit wisely there would be no conflict between these two
motives: the school which did best by the boys would get the
most credit. But in a busy world spectacular successes will always
win credit out of proportion to their real importance, so that
some conflict between the two motives is hardly avoidable.
I come now to the point of view of the parent. This differs
according to the economic status of the parent: the average
wage-earner has desires quite different from those of the average
professional man. The average wage-earner wishes to get his
children to school as soon as possible, so as to diminish bother at
home; he also wishes to get them away as soon as possible, so as
to profit by their earnings. When recently the British Govern-
ment decided to cut down expenditure on education, it pro-
posed that children should not go to school before the age of six,
and should not be obliged to stay after the age of thirteen. The
former proposal caused such a popular outcry that it had to be
dropped: the indignation of worried mothers (recently
enfranchised) was irresistible. The latter proposal, lowering
the age for leaving school, was not unpopular. Parliamentary
candidates advocating better education would get unanimous
applause from those who came to meetings, but would find, in
canvassing, that unpolitical wage-earners (who are the majority)
want their children to be free to get paid work as soon as

possible. The exceptions are mainly those who hope that their
children may rise in the social scale through better education.
Professional men have quite a different outlook. Their own
income depends upon the fact that they have had a better educa-
tion than the average, and they wish to hand on this advantage to
their children. For this object they are willing to make great
sacrifices. But in our present competitive society, what will be
desired by the average parent is not an education which is good
in itself, but an education which is better than other people’s.
This may be facilitated by keeping down the general level, and
therefore we cannot expect a professional man to be enthusiastic
about facilities for higher education for the children of wage-
earners. If everybody who desired it could get a medical educa-
tion, however poor his parents might be, it is obvious that
doctors would earn less than they do, both from increased com-
petition and from the improved health of the community. The
same thing applies to the law, the civil service, and so on. Thus
the good things which the professional man desires for his own
children he will not desire for the bulk of the population unless
he has exceptional public spirit.
The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society,
is that they want their children to be a credit to them. This is
rooted in instinct, and can only be cured by efforts directed to
that end. The defect exists also, though to a lesser degree, in
mothers. We all feel instinctively, that our children’s successes
reflect glory upon ourselves, while their failures make us feel
shame. Unfortunately, the successes which cause us to swell
with pride are often of an undesirable kind. From the dawn of
civilisation till almost our own time—and still in China and
Japan—parents have sacrificed their children’s happiness in mar-
riage by deciding whom they were to marry, choosing almost
always the richest bride or bridegroom available. In the Western
world (except partially in France) children have freed themselves
from this slavery by rebellion, but parents’ instincts have not

changed. Neither happiness nor virtue, but worldly success, is

what the average father desires for his children. He wants them
to be such as he can boast of to his cronies, and this desire
largely dominates his efforts for their education.
Authority, if it is to govern education, must rest upon one or
several of the powers we have considered: the State, the Church,
the schoolmaster and the parent. We have seen that no one of
them can be trusted to care adequately for the child’s welfare,
since each wishes the child to minister to some end which has
nothing to do with its own well-being. The State wants the child
to serve for national aggrandisement and the support of the
existing form of government. The Church wants the child to
serve for increasing the power of the priesthood. The school-
master, in a competitive world, too often regards his school as
the State regards the nation, and wants the child to glorify the
school. The parent wants the child to glorify the family. The
child itself, as an end in itself, as a separate human being with a
claim to whatever happiness and well-being may be possible,
does not come into these various external purposes, except very
partially. Unfortunately, the child lacks the experience required
for the guidance of its own life, and is therefore a prey to the
sinister interests that batten on its innocence. This is what makes
the difficulty of education as a political problem. But let us first
see what can be said from the child’s own point of view.
It is obvious that most children, if they were left to them-
selves, would not learn to read or write, and would grow up less
adapted than they might be to the circumstances of their lives.
There must be educational institutions, and children must be to
some extent under authority. But in view of the fact that no
authority can be wholly trusted, we must aim at having as little
authority as possible, and try to think out ways by which young
people’s natural desires and impulses can be utilised in educa-
tion. This is far more possible than is often thought, for, after all,
the desire to acquire knowledge is natural to most young people.

The traditional pedagogue, possessing knowledge not worth

imparting, and devoid of all skill in imparting it, imagined that
young people have a native horror of instruction, but in this he
was misled by failure to realise his own shortcomings. There is a
charming tale of Tchekov’s about a man who tried to teach a
kitten to catch mice. When it wouldn’t run after them, he beat it,
with the result that even as an adult cat, it cowered with terror in
the presence of a mouse. ‘This is the man,’ Tchekov adds, ‘who
taught me Latin.’ Now cats teach their kittens to catch mice, but
they wait till the instinct has awakened. Then the kittens agree
with their mammas that the knowledge is worth acquiring, so
that discipline is not required.
The first two or three years of life have hitherto escaped the
domination of the pedagogue, and all authorities are agreed that
those are the years in which we learn most. Every child learns to
talk by its own efforts. Anyone who has watched an infant knows
that the efforts required are very considerable. The child listens
intently, watches movements of the lips, practises sounds all day
long, and concentrates with amazing ardour. Of course grown-
up people encourage it by praise, but it does not occur to them
to punish it on days when it learns no new word. All that they
provide is opportunity and praise. It is doubtful whether more is
required at any stage.
What is necessary is to make the child or young person feel
that the knowledge is worth having. Sometimes this is difficult
because in fact the knowledge is not worth having. It is also
difficult when only a considerable amount of knowledge in any
direction is useful, so that at first the pupil tends to be merely
bored. In such cases, however, the difficulty is not insuperable.
Take, for instance, the teaching of mathematics. Sanderson of
Oundle found that almost all his boys were interested in
machinery, and he provided them with opportunities for mak-
ing quite elaborate machines. In the course of this practical
work, they came upon the necessity for making calculations, and

thus grew interested in mathematics as required for the success

of a constructive enterprise on which they were keen. This
method is expensive, and involves patient skill on the part of the
teacher. But it goes along the lines of the pupil’s instinct, and is
therefore likely to involve less boredom with more intellectual
effort. Effort is natural both to animals and men, but it must be
effort for which there is an instinctive stimulus. A football match
involves more effort than the treadmill, yet the one is a pleasure
and the other a punishment. It is a mistake to suppose that
mental effort can rarely be a pleasure; what is true is that certain
conditions are required to make it pleasurable, and that, until
lately, no attempt was made to create these conditions in educa-
tion. The chief conditions are: first, a problem of which the
solution is desired; secondly, a feeling of hopefulness as to the
possibility of obtaining a solution. Consider the way David
Copperfield was taught Arithmetic:
Even when the lessons are done, the worst is yet to happen, in
the shape of an appalling sum. This is invented for me, and
delivered to me orally by Mr Murdstone, and begins, “If I go
into a cheesemonger’s shop, and buy five thousand double-
Gloucester cheeses at fourpence-halfpenny each, present pay-
ment”—at which I see Miss Murdstone secretly overjoyed. I
pore over these cheeses without any result or enlightenment
until dinner-time; when, having made a mulatto of myself by
getting the dirt of the slate into the pores of my skin, I have
a slice of bread to help me out with the cheeses, and am
considered in disgrace for the rest of the evening.
Obviously the poor boy could not be expected to take any

interest in the cheeses, or to have any hope of doing the sum right.
If he had wanted a box of a certain size, and had been told to save
up his allowance until he could buy enough wood and nails, it
would have stimulated his arithmetical powers amazingly.

There should be nothing hypothetical about the sums that a

child is asked to do. I remember once reading a young boy’s
own account of his arithmetic lesson. The governess set the
problem: If a horse is worth three times as much as a pony, and
the pony is worth £22, what is the horse worth? ‘Had he been
down?’ asks the boy. ‘That makes no difference,’ says the gov-
erness. ‘Oh, but James (the groom) says it makes a great differ-
ence.’ The power of understanding hypothetical truth is one of
the latest developments of logical faculty, and ought not to be
expected in the very young. This, however, is a digression, from
which we must return to our main theme.
I do not maintain that all children can have their intellectual
interests aroused by suitable stimuli. Some have much less than
average intelligence, and require special treatment. It is very
undesirable to combine in one class children whose mental
capacities are very different: the cleverer ones will be bored by
having things explained that they clearly understand, and the
stupider ones will be worried by having things taken for
granted that they have not yet grasped. But subjects and
methods should be adapted to the intelligence of the pupil.
Macaulay was made to learn mathematics at Cambridge, but it
is obvious from his letters that it was a sheer waste of time. I was
made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of
opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer
spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of
classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month. After
the bare minimum, account should be taken of tastes, and
pupils should only be taught what they find interesting. This
puts a strain upon teachers, who find it easier to be dull, espe-
cially if they are over-worked. But the difficulties can be over-
come by giving teachers shorter hours and instruction in the art
of teaching, which is done at present in training teachers in
elementary schools, but not teachers in universities or public
schools.

Freedom in education has many aspects. There is first of all

freedom to learn or not to learn. Then there is freedom as to
what to learn. And in later education there is freedom of opin-
ion. Freedom to learn or not to learn can be only partially con-
ceded in childhood. It is necessary to make sure that all who are
not imbecile learn to read and write. How far this can be done by
the mere provision of opportunity, only experience can show.
But even if opportunity alone suffices, children must have the
opportunity thrust upon them. Most of them would rather play
out of doors, where the necessary opportunities would be lack-
ing. Later on, it might be left to the choice of young people
whether, for instance, they should go to the university; some
would wish to do so, others would not. This would make quite
as good a principle of selection as any to be got from entrance
examinations. Nobody who did not work should be allowed to
stay at a university. The rich young men who now waste their
time in college are demoralising others and teaching themselves
to be useless. If hard work were exacted as a condition of resi-
dence, universities would cease to be attractive to people with a
distaste for intellectual pursuits.
Freedom as to what to learn ought to exist far more than at
present. I think it is necessary to group subjects by their natural
affinities; there are grave disadvantages in the elective system,
which leaves a young man free to choose wholly unconnected
subjects. If I were organising education in Utopia, with
unlimited funds, I should give every child, at the age of about
twelve, some instruction in classics, mathematics, and science.
After two years, it ought to be evident where the child’s apti-
tudes lay, and the child’s own tastes would be a safe indication,
provided there were no ‘soft options’. Consequently I should
allow every boy and girl who so desired to specialise from the
age of fourteen. At first, the specialisation would be very broad,
growing gradually more defined as education advanced. The
time when it was possible to be universally well-informed is

past. An industrious man may know something of history and

literature, which requires a knowledge of classical and modern
languages. Or he may know some parts of mathematics, or one
or two sciences. But the ideal of an ‘all-round’ education is out
of date; it has been destroyed by the progress of knowledge.
Freedom of opinion, on the part of both teachers and pupils,
is the most important of the various kinds of freedom, and the
only one which requires no limitations whatever. In view of
the fact that it does not exist, it is worth while to recapitulate the
arguments in its favour.
The fundamental argument for freedom of opinion is the
doubtfulness of all our beliefs. If we certainly knew the truth,
there would be something to be said for teaching it. But in that
case it could be taught without invoking authority, by means of
its inherent reasonableness. It is not necessary to make a law that
no one shall be allowed to teach arithmetic if he holds heretical
opinions on the multiplication table, because here the truth is
clear, and does not require to be enforced by penalties. When the
State intervenes to ensure the teaching of some doctrine, it does
so because there is no conclusive evidence in favour of that doc-
trine. The result is that the teaching is not truthful, even if it
should happen to be true. In the State of New York, it was till
lately illegal to teach that Communism is good; in Soviet Russia,
it is illegal to teach that Communism is bad. No doubt one of
these opinions is true and one false, but no one knows which.
Either New York or Soviet Russia was teaching truth and pro-
scribing falsehood, but neither was teaching truthfully, because
each was representing a doubtful proposition as certain.
The difference between truth and truthfulness is important in
this connection. Truth is for the gods; from our point of view, it
is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we
cannot hope to reach. Education should fit us for the nearest
possible approach to truth, and to do this it must teach truthful-
ness. Truthfulness, as I mean it, is the habit of forming our

opinions on the evidence, and holding them with that degree of

conviction which the evidence warrants. This degree will always
fall short of complete certainty, and therefore we must be always
ready to admit new evidence against previous beliefs. Moreover,
when we act on a belief, we must, if possible, only take such
action as will be useful even if our belief is more or less inaccur-
ate; we should avoid actions which are disastrous unless our
belief is exactly true. In science, an observer states his results along
with the ‘probable error’; but who ever heard of a theologian or
a politician stating the probable error in his dogmas, or even
admitting that any error is conceivable? That is because in
science, where we approach nearest to real knowledge, a man
can safely rely on the strength of his case, whereas, where noth-
ing is known, blatant assertion and hypnotism are the usual ways
of causing others to share our beliefs. If the fundamentalists
thought they had a good case against evolution, they would not
make the teaching of it illegal.
The habit of teaching some one orthodoxy, political,
religious, or moral, has all kinds of bad effects. To begin with, it
excludes from the teaching profession men who combine hon-
esty with intellectual vigour, who are just the men likely to have
the best moral and mental effect upon their pupils. I will give
three illustrations. First, as to politics: a teacher of economics in
America is expected to teach such doctrines as will and to the
wealth and power of the very rich; if he does not, he finds it
advisable to go elsewhere, like Mr Laski, formerly of Harvard,
now one of the most valuable teachers in the London School
of Economics. Second, as to religion: the immense majority of
intellectually eminent men disbelieve the Christian religion, but
they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing
their incomes. Thus on the most important of all subjects most
of the men whose opinions and arguments would be best worth
having are condemned to silence. Third, as to morals: Practically
all men are unchaste at some time of their lives; clearly those

who conceal this fact are worse than those who do not, since
they add the guilt of hypocrisy. But it is only to the hypocrites
that teaching posts are open. So much for the effects of
orthodoxy upon the choice and character of teachers.
I come now to the effect upon the pupils, which I will take
under two heads, intellectual and moral. Intellectually, what is
stimulating to a young man is a problem of obvious practical
importance, as to which he finds that divergent opinions are
held. A young man learning economics, for example, ought to
hear lectures from individualists and socialists, protectionists
and free-traders, inflationists and believers in the gold standard.
He ought to be encouraged to read the best books of the various
schools, as recommended by those who believe in them. This
would teach him to weigh arguments and evidence, to know that
no opinion is certainly right, and to judge men by their quality
rather than by their consonance with preconceptions. History
should be taught not only from the point of view of one’s own
country, but also from that of foreigners. If history were taught
by Frenchmen in England, and by Englishmen in France, there
would be no disagreements between the two countries, each
would understand the other’s point of view. A young man
should learn to think that all questions are open, and that an
argument should be followed wherever it leads. The needs of
practical life will destroy this attitude all too soon when he
begins to earn his living; but until that time he should be
encouraged to taste the joys of free speculation.
Morally, also, the teaching of an orthodoxy to the young is
very harmful. There is not only the fact that it compels the abler
teachers to be hypocrites, and therefore to set a bad moral
example. There is also, what is more important, the fact that it
encourages intolerance and the bad forms of herd instinct.
Edmund Gosse, in his Father and Son, relates how, when he was a
boy, his father told him he was going to marry again. The boy
saw there was something his father was ashamed of, so at last he

asked, in accents of horror: ‘Father, is she a Paedo-Baptist?’ And

she was. Until that moment, he had believed all Paedo-Baptists to
be wicked. So children in Catholic schools believe that Protestants
are wicked, children in any school in an English-speaking coun-
try believe that atheists are wicked, children in France believe
that Germans are wicked, and children in Germany believe that
Frenchmen are wicked. When a school accepts as part of its task
the teaching of an opinion which cannot be intellectually
defended (as practically all schools do), it is compelled to give
the impression that those who hold an opposite opinion are
wicked, since otherwise it cannot generate the passion required
for repelling the assaults of reason. Thus for the sake of ortho-
doxy the children are rendered uncharitable, intolerant, cruel,
and bellicose. This is unavoidable so long as definite opinions are
prescribed on politics, morals, and religion.
Finally, arising out of this moral damage to the individual,
there is untold damage to society. Wars and persecutions are rife
everywhere, and everywhere they are rendered possible by the
teaching in the schools. Wellington used to say that the battle of
Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. He might have
said with more truth that the war against revolutionary France
was instigated in the classrooms of Eton. In our democratic age,
Eton has become unimportant; now, it is the ordinary elemen-
tary and secondary school that matters. In every country, by
means of flag-waving, Empire Day, Fourth-of-July celebrations,
Officer’s Training Corps, etc., everything is done to give boys a
taste for homicide, and girls a conviction that men given to
homicide are the most worthy of respect. This whole system of
moral degradation to which innocent boys and girls are exposed
would become impossible if the authorities allowed freedom of
opinion to teachers and pupils.
Regimentation is the source of the evil. Education authorities
do not look on children, as religion is supposed to do, as human
beings with souls to be saved. They look upon them as material

for grandiose social schemes: future ‘hands’ in factories or ‘bay-

onets’ in war or what not. No man is fit to educate unless he feels
each pupil an end in himself, with his own rights and his own
personality, not merely a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, or a soldier
in a regiment, or a citizen in a State. Reverence for human per-
sonality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question,
but above all in education.

2
THE NEGATIVE THEORY
OF EDUCATION
Three divergent theories of education all have their advocates

in the present day. Of these the first considers that the sole
purpose of education is to provide opportunities of growth and
to remove hampering influences. The second holds that the
purpose of education is to give culture to the individual and to
develop his capacities to the utmost. The third holds that educa-
tion is to be considered rather in relation to the community than
in relation to the individual, and that its business is to train
useful citizens. Of these theories the first is the newest while
the third is the oldest. The second and third theories, which
we considered in the preceding chapter, have in common the
view that education can give something positive, while the first
regards its function as purely negative. No actual education pro-
ceeds wholly and completely on any one of the three theories.
All three in varying proportions are found in every system that
actually exists. It is, I think, fairly clear that no one of the three
is adequate by itself, and that the choice of a right system of

16 education and the social order
education depends in great measure upon the adoption of a

due proportion between the three theories. For my part, while I
think that there is more truth in the first theory, which we may
call the negative view of education, I do not think that it contains
by any means the whole truth. The negative view has dominated
much progressive thinking on education. It is part of the general
creed of liberty which has inspired liberal thought since the
time of Rousseau. Oddly enough, political liberalism has been
connected with the belief in compulsory education, while the
belief in freedom in education exists in great measure among
Socialists, and even Communists. Nevertheless, this belief is ideo-
logically connected with liberalism, and has the same degree of
truth and falsehood that belongs to the conception of liberty in
other spheres.
Until very recent times hardly anybody questioned the view
that it is the business of education to train the child in the way he
should go. He was to be taught moral maxims, habits of indus-
try, and a stock of knowledge proportional to his social station.
The methods by which this was to be achieved were rough
and ready, in fact not unlike those employed in the training of
horses. What the whip was to do to the horse the rod was to
do to the child. It cannot be denied that this system, for all its
crudity, produced on the whole the results at which it aimed. It
was only a minority that suffered education, but in that minority
certain habits had been formed – habits of self-discipline and
social conformity, of capacity for command, and of harshness
that took no account of human needs. Men trained under
Dr Keate and similar pedagogues made our England what it is,
and extended the blessings of our civilisation to the benighted
heathen in India and Africa. I do not wish to belittle this
achievement, and I am not sure that it would have been possible
by any other method with the same economy of effort. Its prod-
ucts, owing to a certain Spartan toughness and to a complete
incapacity for intellectual doubt, acquired the qualities needed

the negative theory of education 17
by an imperial race among the backward peoples. They were

able to pass on the stern rule to which they had been subjected
in youth, and to avoid the realisation that what they supposed to
be their education had starved the intelligence and the emotions
in order to strengthen the will. In America a similar result was
achieved by Puritanism while it remained vigorous.
The Romantic Movement was essentially a protest in the name
of the emotions against the previous undue emphasis upon the
will. The Romantic Movement achieved something as regards
the treatment of very young children, but in the main the edu-
cational authorities were too firmly entrenched and too much
habituated to command to be appreciably affected by the softer
ideals of the Romantics. It is only in our own day that their
general outlook upon life has begun to produce any really wide-
spread effect upon educational theory, but just as laisser faire in
economics has had to give way to new forms of ordered plan-
ning, so in education laisser faire, while it is a necessary stage, is
not, I think, the last word. I propose in this chapter to state the
case in its favour, and then to examine its limitations.
The case for the greatest possible freedom in education is a
very strong one. To begin with, absence of freedom involves
conflicts with adults, which frequently have a much more pro-
found psychological effect than was realised until very recently.
The child who is in any way coerced tends to respond with
hatred, and if, as is usual, he is not able to give free vent to his
hatred, it festers inwardly, and may sink into the unconscious
with all kinds of strange consequences throughout the rest of
life. The father as the object of hatred may come to be replaced
by the State, the Church, or a foreign nation, thus leading a man
to become an anarchist, an atheist, or a militarist as the case may
be. Or again, hatred of the authorities who oppress the child
may become transferred into a desire to inflict equal oppression
later on upon the next generation. Or there may be merely a gen-
eral moroseness, making pleasant social and personal relations

impossible. I found one day in school a boy of medium size

ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs
hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he
epitomised the history of the human race.
Another effect of compulsion in education is that it destroys
originality and intellectual interest. Desire for knowledge, at any
rate for a good deal of knowledge, is natural to the young, but is
generally destroyed by the fact that they are given more than
they desire or can assimilate. Children who are forced to eat
acquire a loathing for food, and children who are forced to learn
acquire a loathing for knowledge. When they think, they do not
think spontaneously in the way in which they run or jump or
shout: they think with a view to pleasing some adult, and there-
fore with an attempt at correctness rather than from natural
curiosity. The killing of spontaneity is especially disastrous in
artistic directions. Children who are taught literature or painting
or music to excess, or with a view to correctness rather than
to self-expression, become progressively less interested in the
aesthetic side of life. Even a boy’s interest in mechanical devices
can be killed by too much instruction. If you teach a boy
the principle of the common pump in lesson-time, he will try
to avoid acquiring the knowledge you are trying to impart,
whereas if you have a pump in your back yard and forbid him to
touch it he will spend all his leisure studying it. A great many of
these troubles are avoided by making lessons voluntary. There is
no longer friction between teacher and pupil, and in a fairly
large proportion of cases the pupils consider the knowledge
imparted by the teacher worth having. Their initiative is not
destroyed, because it is by their own choice that they learn, and
they do not accumulate masses of undigested hate to lie festering
in the unconscious throughout the rest of life. The arguments for
free speech, for freedom from politeness, and for freedom in
regard to sex knowledge are even stronger, but I shall consider
these matters separately at a later stage.

For all these reasons, reforming educators tend, and I think

tend rightly, towards greater and greater freedom in the school.
I do not think, however, that freedom in school can be erected into
an absolute principle. It has its limitations, and it is important to
realise what they are.
As one of the most obvious examples we may take cleanliness.
I should like to say to begin with that most children of well-to-
do parents are kept a great deal too clean. Parents excuse their
behaviour on the ground that cleanliness is hygienic, but the
motive for making it excessive is one of snobbery. If you see two
children, one of whom is clean and the other is dirty, you tend
to suppose that the clean one’s parents have a larger income than
the parents of the dirty one. Consequently snobs try to keep their
children very clean. This is an abominable tyranny which inter-
feres with the children doing a great many of the things they had
better be doing. From the point of view of health it is well that
the children should be clean twice a day, when they get up in the
morning and when they go to bed at night. Between these
two painful moments they should be grubbing about exploring
the world, especially its grimier portions, ruining their clothes
and wiping muddy hands on their faces. To deprive children of
these pleasures is to lessen their initiative, their impulse towards
exploration, and their acquisition of useful muscular habits. But
although dirt is such an admirable thing, cleanliness also has
its place in the morning and evening, as we said before, and
even this limited place it will not secure in a child’s life except
through a good deal of coercion. If we wore no clothes and lived
in a hot climate, we should get all the cleanliness that would be
necessary through splashing in the water to keep cool. No doubt
pithecanthropus erectus managed in this way, but we who wear
clothes and live in temperate climates have not as much instinct
towards cleanliness as health requires, and we therefore have to
be taught to wash. The same thing applies to brushing teeth.
If we ate our food raw like our remote ancestors, we should not

need to brush our teeth, but so long as we retain the unnatural

habit of cooking we have to balance it by another unnatural
habit, namely the tooth-brush. The ‘back-to-nature’ cult, if it is
to be compatible with health, must be thoroughgoing, and must
involve the abandonment of clothes and cooking. If we are not
prepared to go to these lengths we must teach our children
certain habits which they will not acquire for themselves. In the
matter of cleanliness and hygiene, therefore, although present
conventional education involves much too great a limitation
of freedom, yet some limitation is necessary in the interests
of health.
Another rather humble virtue which is not likely to be pro-
duced by a wholly free education is punctuality. Punctuality is a
quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation.
It has nothing to do with the relation of the soul to God, or with
mystic insight, or with any of the matters with which the more
elevated and spiritual moralists are concerned. One would be
surprised to find a saint getting drunk, but one would not be
surprised to find him late for an engagement. And yet in the
ordinary business of life punctuality is absolutely necessary. It
would not do for the engine-driver or the postman to wait till
the spirit moved him to drive his engine or collect the letters.
All economic organisations of any complexity would become
unworkable if those concerned were often late. But habits of
punctuality are hardly likely to be learned in a free atmosphere.
They cannot exist in a man who allows his moods to dominate
him. For this reason they are perhaps incompatible with the
highest forms of achievement. Newton, as we know, was so
unpunctual at his meals that his dog ate them without Newton’s
ever finding it out. The highest achievement in most directions
demands capacity for absorption in a mood, but those whose
work is less skilled, from royalty downward, do much harm if
they are habitually unpunctual. It seems unavoidable, therefore,
that young people should be subjected to the necessity of doing

certain things at certain times if they are to be fitted to take any

ordinary part in modern life. Those who show extraordinary
talent, as poets or composers or pure mathematicians, may be
exempted, but 99 per cent of mankind need a discipline in
observing time which is quite impossible if they are allowed to
grow freely as their natural impulses dictate. The noble savage,
one presumes, went hunting when he was hungry, and not at
8.53 a.m. like his descendant in the suburbs. The education of
the noble savage, therefore, does not supply all that the dweller
in the suburbs requires.
A rather more serious matter, to which similar considerations
apply, is honesty. I do not mean this term in any fancy sense;
I mean merely respect for the property of others. This is not
a natural characteristic of human beings. The undisciplined
human being appropriates the property of others whenever he
considers it safe to do so. Perhaps even the disciplined human
being does this not infrequently, but discipline has taught him
that theft is often not safe when at first sight it seems so. There
is, I think, in the minds of some humane moderns a certain con-
fusion of thought on this subject. Having discovered that there
is such a thing as kleptomania, they are inclined to regard all
thieving as kleptomania. But this is quite a mistake. Kleptomania
consists of stealing things, which often the thief does not really
want, in circumstances where he is pretty sure to be caught.
It has as a rule some psychological source: the kleptomaniac,
unconsciously to himself, is stealing love, or objects having
some sexual significance. Kleptomania cannot be dealt with by
punishment, but only by psychological undertanding. Ordinary
thieving, however, is by no means irrational, and just because it
is rational it can be prevented by being made contrary to self-
interest through social penalties. In a community of children
whom their elders leave free, the thief, unless he is the biggest of
the group, will be severely punished by the others. The elders
may wash their hands of the punishment and say that in their

system there is no penal code, but in this they are guilty of self-
deception. The chances are that the penal code spontaneously
created by a group of children will be more severe and more
unreliable than one invented by adults. For the sake of the thief
himself, therefore, it is on the whole wise that adults should
take cognisance of acts of theft, and deal with them in a manner
which prevents the other children from wreaking vengeance on
their own account. An adequate respect for the property of
others is hardly possible except through the creation of a con-
ditioned reflex. Under the influence of temptation the chance of
detection always appears less than it is, and the person to whom
thieving is an active possibility is hardly likely to go through
life without yielding to the temptation sufficiently often to be
caught in the end.
Another respect in which, to my mind, many apostles of free-
dom go astray, is that they fail to recognise sufficiently the
importance of routine in the life of the young. I do not mean that
a routine should be rigid and absolute: there should be days
when it is varied, such as Christmas Day and holidays. But even
these variations should, on the whole, be expected by the child.
A life of uncertainty is nervously exhausting at all times, but
especially in youth. The child derives a sense of security from
knowing more or less what is going to happen day by day. He
wishes his world to be safe, and subject to the reign of law.
Our belief in the uniformity of nature is largely the projection
upon the cosmos of the child’s desire for routine in the nur-
sery. Adventurousness and courage are highly desirable qualities,
but they are most easily developed against a background of
fundamental security.
A further point in favour of a large element of routine is
that children find it both tiring and boring to have to choose
their own occupation at all odd times. They prefer that at many
times the initiative should not be theirs, and that their own
choice should be confined within a framework imposed by

friendly adults. Children, like grown-ups, enjoy the sense of

achievement derived from mastering a difficulty, but this requires
a consistency of effort of which few are capable without some
outside encouragement. The capacity for consistent self-direction
is one of the most valuable that a human being can possess. It is
practically unknown in young children, and is never developed
either by a very rigid discipline or by complete freedom. Very
rigid discipline, such as that of soldiers in war-time, makes a
man incapable of acting without the goad of external command.
On the other hand, complete freedom throughout childhood
does not teach him to resist the solicitations of a momentary
impulse: he does not acquire the capacity of concentrating upon
one matter when he is interested in another, or of resisting
pleasures because they will cause fatigue that will interfere with
subsequent work. The strengthening of the will demands, there-
fore, a somewhat subtle mixture of freedom and discipline, and
is destroyed by an excess of either.
What is important as imposing limitations upon the desir-
able amount of discipline is that all training should have the
co-operation of the child’s will, though not of every passing
impulse. Every child who is surrounded by friendly adults is
conscious at bottom that he himself is rather foolish, and is grate-
ful for a fair amount of guidance from those whom he can trust to
be really concerned with his good, and not only with their own
convenience or power. Athletes submit themselves to discipline as
a matter of course, and young people whose desire for intellectual
achievement is as great as the athlete’s desire for success in his
field will be equally ready to submit themselves to the necessary
discipline. But in an atmosphere where all discipline is thought
evil, it will not occur to young people that voluntary submission
of this sort is an essential of almost every kind of success. Difficult
success as an ideal should be present to the mind of the young if
they are not to become wayward and futile. But there are few to
whom it will occur in an environment where freedom is absolute.

The use of authority as opposed to persuasion can be reduced

almost to nothing where the right sort of adult is in charge of
not too large a number of children. Take, for example, such a
matter as kindliness. I do not think that precept or punishment
can do anything to produce a kindly disposition, though it
can restrain overt acts of cruelty. A kindly disposition requires,
on the one hand, instinctive happiness, and on the other hand
the example of kindly behaviour on the part of adults. The mere
teaching of kindliness as a moral principle is, to my mind,
almost useless.
It is of the highest importance that whatever discipline may
exist should not involve more than a minimum of emotional
restraint, for a child who feels himself thwarted in any important
way is liable to develop various undesirable characteristics
the nature of which will depend upon his strength of character.
If he is strong, he will become a whining hypocrite. Discipline,
therefore, while it cannot be entirely absent, should be reduced as
much as is compatible with the training of decent and competent
human beings.
The matter of instruction is the crux of the whole question.
Experience has persuaded me, somewhat to my surprise, that it
is possible to give adequate instruction, and to produce highly
educated human beings, without imposing any obligation to be
present at lessons. To do this requires a combination of circum-
stances which is not at present possible on a large scale. It
requires among adults a genuine and spontaneous interest in
intellectual pursuits. It requires small classes. It requires sym-
pathy and tact and skill in the teacher. And it requires an environ-
ment in which it is possible to turn a child out of a class and tell
him to go and play, if he wishes to be in class solely for the
purpose of creating a disturbance. It will be a long time before
these conditions can be realised in ordinary schools, and there-
fore, for the present, compulsory attendance in class is likely to
be necessary in the great majority of cases.

There are some who argue that if a child is left alone he will
teach himself to read and write and so forth from a wish not to
be inferior to his neighbours, and that therefore absence of
compulsion causes at most a delay of a year or two in the acquisi-
tion of knowledge. I think that this position is unconsciously
parasitic. In a world where every other child learns to read and
write, it is probable that any given child will in time wish to
escape the sense of inferiority which would be produced by
ignorance. But in a world where all children escaped compul-
sion, there would soon be no occasion for this sense of inferior-
ity, and each generation would be somewhat more ignorant than
its predecessor. Very few children have a spontaneous impulse
to learn the multiplication table. While their neighbours are
compelled to learn it, they may, for very shame, feel that they
ought to learn it too, but in a community where no child
was obliged to learn it there would, before long, be only a few
erudite pedants who would know what six times nine is.
The acquisition of concrete knowledge is pleasant to most
children: if they live on a farm they will watch the farmer’s
operations and get to know all about them. But abstract know-
ledge is loved by very few, and yet it is abstract knowledge
that makes a civilised community possible. Preservation of a civil-
ised community demands, therefore, some method of causing
children to behave in a manner which is not natural to them. It
may be possible to substitute coaxing for compulsion but it is
not possible to leave the matter to the unaided operation of
nature. The idea of education as merely affording opportunities
for natural growth is not, I think, one which can be upheld by a
person who realises the complexity of modern societies. It is,
of course, possible to say that this complexity is regrettable, and
that it would be better to return to a simpler way of life, but
unfortunately the process of so returning would involve the
death by starvation of a very large percentage of the population.
This alternative is so horrible that we are practically committed

to the whole complex apparatus of the modern industrial world,

and being so committed, we are also bound to fit our children
to take their part in carrying it on. The negative theory of educa-
tion, therefore, while it has many important elements of truth,
and is largely valid so far as the emotions are concerned, cannot
be accepted in its entirety as regards intellectual and technical
training. Where these are concerned, something more positive
is required.

8
RELIGION IN EDUCATION
Religion is a complex phenomenon, having both an individual

and a social aspect. At the beginning of historical times, religion
was already old: throughout history, increase of civilisation
has been correlated with decrease of religiosity. The earliest
religions of which we know were social rather than individual:
there were powerful spirits who punished or rewarded the whole
tribe according as individual members of the tribe behaved
offensively or pleasantly. The feelings of the spirits, as to the sort
of behaviour that was offensive or pleasant, were ascertained by
induction and recorded in priestly tradition. If an earthquake or
a pestilence destroyed the inhabitants of some region, prudent
men would inquire which of their habits were peculiar, and
decide that such habits were in future to be avoided. This point
of view is by no means extinct. I knew a Vicar in the Church of
England who thought that the defeat of the Germans in the Great
War was due to their fondness for the Higher Criticism, since he
held that the Creator of the universe objects to textual exegesis of
Hebrew manuscripts.

Religion, as its advocates are in the habit of telling us, is the

source of the sense of social obligation. When a man did some-
thing displeasing to the gods, they were apt to punish not only
the guilty individual but the whole tribe. Consequently his
conduct was a matter of general concern, since private vices
caused public calamities. This point of view still dominates the
criminal law. There are sexual abnormalities for which men suf-
fer imprisonment, although, from a rational standpoint, their
behaviour concerns only themselves; if any justification of their
punishment is to be attempted, it must be based upon what
befell the Cities of the Plain, since only so can their conduct
make any difference to the community. It is a curious fact that
the things to which the gods object are seldom things that
would do much harm if they did not arouse the divine wrath.
They object to one’s eating pork or eating beef or marrying
one’s deceased wife’s sister; in the time of King David, God
objected to a census, and slew so many people by a pestilence
that King David’s statistics were rendered worthless. The Aztecs’
gods insisted on human sacrifice and cannibalism before they
would show favour to their worshippers. Nevertheless, although
the moral codes resulting from religion have been curious, it
must be admitted that it is religion that has given rise to them. If
any morality is better than none, then religion has been a force
for good.
Although religion began as an affair of the tribe, it early
developed also a purely individual aspect. From about the sixth
century , widely separated movements began in the ancient
world, which concerned themselves with the individual soul
and with what a Christian would call salvation. Taoism in China,
Buddhism in India, the Orphic religion in Greece, and the
Hebrew prophets, all had this character: they arose from the
perception that the natural life is sorrowful, and from the search
for a way of life which should enable men to escape misfor-
tune, or at least to bear it. At a not much later date Parmenides

religion in education 71
inaugurated the great tradition of religious philosophy by his

doctrine of the unreality of time and the one-ness of all things.
From him as ancestor come Plato, Plotinus, the Fathers, Spinoza,
Hegel, Bergson, and all the philosophers of mysticism. From the
Hebrew prophets comes the type of religion which is concerned
less with metaphysics than with righteousness; this type is pre-
dominant in Protestantism. In every form of Christianity there
is both a moral and a metaphysical element, owing to the fact
that Christianity arose from an intimate blend of Judaism and
Hellenism; but on the whole, as Christianity travelled westward,
it became less metaphysical and more moral. Islam, except in
Persia, has always had only a very slight element of metaphysics,
while the religions emanating from India have been predomin-
antly philosophic.
Ever since the rise of individual religion, the personal and the
institutional elements in the religious life have been at war with
one another. The institutional elements have usually been polit-
ically the stronger, since they were supported by priests and
endowments and traditions, as well as by government and the
law. Personal religion is a private matter, which should in no way
concern the community. But institutional religion is a matter of
great political importance. Wherever institutional religion exists,
property is connected with it, and a man can make a living by
advocating its tenets, but not (or not so easily) by opposing
them. In so far as education is influenced by religion, it is influ-
enced by institutional religion, which controls ancient founda-
tions, and in many countries controls the State. At present, in
most of the countries of Western Europe, religion dominates the
education of the rich, while it has less influence on the educa-
tion of the poor. This is to some extent a political accident:
where no one religion is strong enough to impose itself on the
State, State schools cannot teach the doctrines of a particular sect,
but schools supported by the fees of the pupils can teach what-
ever parents think worth paying for. In England and France,

largely as a result of this state of affairs, the rich are much more
religious than the urban poor. When I say they are ‘religious’, I
am using the word in a political sense: I do not mean that they
are pious, nor even necessarily that they give a metaphysical
assent to Christian dogma, but only that they support the Church,
vote with it in legislative questions, and wish their children to be
in the care of those who accept its teaching. It is for this reason
that the Church is still important.
Among liberal-minded laymen, one meets, not infrequently,
the view that the Church has ceased to be a weighty factor in
the life of the community. This is, to my mind, a profound
error. The law of marriage and divorce, though not quite what
most ecclesiastics would wish, retains absurdities and cruelties –
such as the refusal of divorce for insanity – which would
not survive a week but for the influence of Christian Churches.
Open opponents of Christianity are handicapped in many ways
in competition with those who are more pious or more
discreet; in practice, many posts are not open to avowed atheists,
who require more ability to achieve success than is required by
the orthodox.
It is in education, more than anywhere else, that institutional
religion is important at the present day. In England, all public
schools and almost all preparatory schools are either Anglican or
Roman Catholic. It is sometimes said, by free-thinking parents
who send their children to such schools, that most people react
against their education, and that therefore it is as well to teach
falsehood to the young in order that, after they have reacted, they
may believe what is true. This argument is a mere excuse for
timid conventionality, which a moment’s reflection shows to be
statistically fallacious. The immense majority of adults believe
through life most of what they were taught in youth. Countries
remain Protestant, Catholic, Mahometan, or whatever they may
be, for centuries on end, whereas if the doctrine of reaction were
true they ought to change their religion in each generation. The

very men who advance such an argument for having their chil-
dren taught orthodoxy show, by their conduct, how little they
have reacted. If you believe privately that two and two are four,
but avoid proclaiming this opinion, and hold it right that public
money should be spent in teaching your children and the chil-
dren of others that two and two are five, your effective opinion,
from a social point of view, is that two and two are five, and your
private personal conviction to the contrary becomes unimport-
ant. So those who, while not themselves religious, believe a
religious education to be desirable, have not in any effective way
reacted against their own religious education, however they may
protest to the contrary.
Many of those who do not give an intellectual assent to the
dogmas of religion, hold that religion, nevertheless, is harmless
and perhaps even beneficent. On this point I find myself at one
with the orthodox, as opposed to what are called ‘liberal’
thinkers: it seems to me that the questions whether there is a God
and whether we persist after death are important, and that it is
well to think as truly as possible on these matters. I cannot take
the politician’s view that, even if there be not a God, it is desir-
able that most people should think there is, since this belief
encourages virtuous conduct. Where children are concerned,
many freethinkers adopt this attitude: how can you teach chil-
dren to be good, they ask, if you do not teach them religion?
How can you teach them to be good, I should reply, if you
habitually and deliberately lie to them on a subject of the greatest
importance? And how can any conduct which is genuinely
desirable need false beliefs as its motive? If there are no valid
arguments for what you consider ‘good’ conduct, your concep-
tion of goodness must be at fault. And in any case it is parental
authority rather than religion that influences the behaviour of
children. What religion mainly does is to give them certain emo-
tions, not very closely bound up with action, and not, for the
most part, very desirable. Indirectly, no doubt, these emotions

have effects upon behaviour, though by no means such effects as

religious educators profess to desire. This, however, is a subject
to which I shall return later.
The bad effects of religious education depend partly upon the
particular doctrines taught and partly upon the mere insistence
that various doubtful propositions are known to be true. Whether
these propositions are in fact true or not may be undiscoverable,
but in attempting to make the young regard them as certain,
religious teachers are teaching what is false, since, whether true
in fact or not, the propositions in question are emphatically not
certain. Take, for example, the future life. On this matter wise
men confess their ignorance: the evidence is insufficient, and
suspense of judgement is the only rational attitude. But the
Christian religion has pronounced in favour of a future life,
and the young who are brought up under its influence are
taught to regard survival after death as a certainty. ‘What does it
matter?’ the reader may say. ‘The belief is comforting, and
cannot do any harm.’ I should reply that it does harm in the
following ways.
First: any exceptionally intelligent child, who discovers by
reflection that the arguments for immortality are inconclusive,
will be discouraged by his teachers, perhaps even punished;
and other children who show any inclination to think likewise
will be discouraged from conversation on such topics, and if
possible prevented from reading books that might increase their
knowledge and their reasoning power.
Secondly: since most people whose intelligence is much
above the average are nowadays openly or secretly agnostic, the
teachers in a school which insists on religion must be either
stupid or hypocritical, unless they belong to that small class
of men who, owing to some kink, have intellectual ability
without intellectual judgement. What happens in practice is that
men who intend to adopt the scholastic profession begin at
an early age to close their minds against adventurous thoughts;

they become timid and conventional, first in theology and

then, by a natural transition, in everything else; like the fox
who had lost his tail, they tell their pupils that it is good to
be timid and conventional; after they have done this for a
sufficient length of time, their merit is observed by the author-
ities, and they are promoted to positions of power. The type
of man who can keep his job as a teacher and make a success
of his career is thus largely determined by the theological or
other tests which, explicitly or implicitly, limit the choice of
teachers, and exclude from the teaching profession most of
those who are best fitted to stimulate the young both intel-
lectually and morally.
Thirdly: it is impossible to instil the scientific spirit into the
young so long as any propositions are regarded as sacrosanct and
not open to question. It is of the essence of the scientific attitude
that it demands evidence for whatever is to be believed, and that
it follows the evidence regardless of the direction in which it
leads. As soon as there is a creed to be maintained, it is necessary
to surround it with emotions and taboos, to state in tones
vibrant with manly pathos that it contains ‘great’ truths, and to
set up criteria of truth other than those of science, more espe-
cially the feelings of the heart and the moral certainties of ‘good’
men. In the great days of religion, when men believed, as
Thomas Aquinas did, that pure reason could demonstrate the
fundamental propositions of Christian theology, sentiment was
unnecessary: St Thomas’s Summa is as cool and rational as David
Hume. But those days are past, and the modern theologian
allows himself to use words charged with emotion so as to
produce in his reader a state of mind in which the logical
cogency of an argument will not be too closely scrutinised. The
intrusion of emotion and sentimentality is always the mark of a
bad case. Imagine the methods of religious apologists applied to
the proposition 2 + 2 = 4. The result would be something as
follows: ‘This great truth is acknowledged alike by the busy man

of affairs in his office, by the statesman engaged in the computa-

tion of the national revenue, by the booking-office clerk in his
efforts to meet the claims of the so-called “rush hour”, by the
innocent child buying lollipops to delight his baby brother, and
by the humble Eskimo counting his catch of fish on the frozen
shores of the Arctic ocean. Can so wide a unanimity have been
produced by anything other than a deep human recognition of a
profound spiritual need? Shall we listen to the sneering sceptic
who would rob us of the shining heritage of wisdom handed
down to us from times less out of touch with the infinite than
our age of jazz? No! A thousand times No!’ But it may be
doubted whether boys would learn arithmetic better by this
method than by those in vogue at present.
For such reasons as we have been considering, any creed, no
matter what, is likely to be harmful in education when it is
regarded as exempt from the intellectual scrutiny to which our
more scientific beliefs are subjected. There are, however, vari-
ous special objections to the kind of religious instruction to
which, in Christian countries, a large percentage of children
are exposed.
In the first place, religion is a conservative force, and preserves
much of what was bad in the past. The Romans offered human
sacrifices to the gods as late as the second Punic War, but apart
from religion they would not have done anything so barbaric.
Similarly in our own day men do things from religious motives
which, apart from religion, would seem intolerably cruel. The
Roman Catholic Church still believes in hell. The Anglican
Church, as a result of a decision of the lay members of the Privy
Council against the opposition of the Archbishops of Canterbury
and York, does not regard hell as de fide; nevertheless, most Angli-
can clergymen still believe in hell. All who believe in hell must
regard vindictive punishment as permissible, and therefore have
a theoretical justification for cruel methods in education and the
treatment of criminals. The immense majority of ministers of

religion support war whenever it occurs,1 though in peace-time

they are often pacifists; in supporting war, they give emphatic
utterance to their conviction that God is on their side, and lend
religious support to the persecution of men who think whole-
sale slaughter unwise. While slavery existed, religious arguments
were found in support of it; nowadays, similar arguments are
found in support of capitalistic exploitation. Almost all trad-
itional cruelties and injustices have been supported by organised
religion until the moral sense of the lay community compelled a
change of front.
In the second place, the Christian religion offers comforts to
those who accept it, which it is painful to have to forgo when
belief fades. Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go
through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by sceptics.
A great many young people lose faith in these dogmas at an age
at which despair is easy, and thus have to face a much more
intense unhappiness than that which falls to the lot of those who
have never had a religious upbringing. Christinity offers reasons
for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to
teach adequately the virtue of courage. The craving for religious
faith being largely an outcome of fear, the advocates of faith tend
to think that certain kinds of fear are not to be deprecated. In
this, to my mind, they are gravely mistaken. To allow oneself to
entertain pleasant beliefs as a means of avoiding fear is not to live
in the best way. In so far as religion makes its appeal to fear, it is
lowering to human dignity.
In the third place, when religion is taken seriously, it involves
viewing this world as unimportant in comparison with the next,
thereby leading to the advocacy of practices which cause a
balance of misery here below, on the ground that they will lead
to happiness in heaven. The chief illustration of this point of
view is in questions of sex, which I shall consider in the next
1
On this subject, see quotations in Joad, Under the Fifth Rib, pp. 69ff.

chapter. But there is undoubtedly, in those who accept Christian

teaching genuinely and profoundly, a tendency to minimise
such evils as poverty and disease, on the ground that they belong
only to this earthly life. This doctrine falls in very conveniently
with the interests of the rich, and is perhaps one of the reasons
why most of the leading plutocrats are deeply religious. If there
is a future life, and if heaven is the reward for misery here below,
we do right to obstruct all amelioration of terrestrial conditions,
and we must admire the unselfishness of those captains of indus-
try who allow others to monopolise the profitable brief sorrow
on earth. But if the belief in a hereafter is mistaken, we shall
have thrown away the substance for the shadow, and shall
be as unfortunate as those who invest a life-time’s savings in
enterprises that go bankrupt.
In the fourth place, the effect of religious teaching upon mor-
ality is bad in various ways. It tends to sap self-reliance, especially
when it is associated with the confessional; through teaching the
young to lean upon authority, it often makes them incapable of
self-direction. I have known men who had been educated as
Roman Catholics and who, when they lost their faith, behaved in
ways which must be regarded as regrettable. Some would say that
such men show the moral utility of religion, but I should say
quite the opposite, since the weakness of will which they display
is a direct result of their education. Moreover, when religion is
presented as the only ground for morality, a man who ceases to
believe in religion is likely to cease to believe in morality. Samuel
Butler’s hero in The Way of all Flesh raped the housemaid as soon as
he ceased to be a Christian. There are many sound reasons for not
raping housemaids, but the young man in question had not been
taught any of them; he had only been taught that such acts are
displeasing to God. In view of the fact that, in our day, loss of
faith is a quite probable occurrence, it is imprudent to base all
morality, even the indispensable minimum, upon a foundation
so likely to give way.

Another morally undesirable aspect of religious education

is that it underestimates the intellectual virtues. Intellectual
impartiality, a most important quality, it regards as positively
bad; persistent attempts to understand difficult matters it views,
at best, with toleration. The individuals whom it holds up for
admiration in the present day are seldom men of first-rate intel-
ligence; when they are, it is because of some folly to which they
have given utterance in a foolish moment. Owing to the identi-
fication of religion with virtue, together with the fact that the
most religious men are not the most intelligent, a religious
education gives courage to the stupid to resist the authority of
educated men, as has happened, for example, where the
teaching of evolution has been made illegal. So far as I can
remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of
intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow
gospel authority more closely than in some others. This must
be reckoned as a serious defect in the ethics taught in Christian
educational establishments.
The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact
that it labels certain classes of acts ‘sins’ and others ‘virtues’ on
grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences.
An ethic not derived from superstition must decide first upon
the kind of social effects which it desires to achieve and the kind
which it desires to avoid. It must then decide, as far as our
knowledge permits, what acts will promote the desired con-
sequences; these acts it will praise, while those having a contrary
tendency it will condemn. Primitive ethics do not proceed in
this way. They select certain modes of behaviour for censure, for
reasons which are lost in anthropological obscurity. On the
whole, among successful nations, the acts condemned tend to be
harmful, and the acts praised tend to be beneficial, but this is
never the case as regards every detail. There are those who hold
that originally animals were domesticated for religious reasons,
not from utility, but that the tribes which tried to domesticate

the crocodile or the lion died out, while those which chose
sheep and cows prospered. Similarly, where tribes with different
ethical codes conflicted, those whose code was least absurd
might be expected to be victorious. But no code with a super-
stitious origin can fail to contain absurdities. Such absurdities
are to be found in the Christian code, though less now than
formerly. The prohibition of work on Sunday can be defended
rationally, but the prohibition of play and amusement cannot.
The prohibition of theft is, in general, sound, but not when it is
applied, as it was by the Churches in post-war Germany, to
prevent public appropriation of the property of exiled princes.
The superstitious origin of Christian ethics is most evident in the
matter of sex; but this is so large a subject that it demands a
separate chapter.

10
PATRIOTISM IN EDUCATION
Every man has a number of purposes and desires, some purely

personal, others of a sort which he can share with many other
men. Most men desire money, for example, and most ways of
growing rich involve co-operation with some group. The group
concerned depends upon the particular way of growing rich.
For most purposes two different firms in the same business
are rivals, but for purposes of a protective tariff they co-operate.
Money, of course, is not the only thing for which people fall into
groups of a political kind. They are organised into churches,
brotherhoods, learned societies, freemasons, and what not. The
motives which lead men to co-operate are many: identity of
interest is one; identity of opinion is another; and ties of blood
are yet a third. The Rothschild family co-operated owing to ties
of blood. They did not need formal articles of incorporation,
because they could trust each other, and a great part of their
success was due to the fact that there was a Rothschild in every
important financial centre in Europe. A form of co-operation based
upon identity of opinions is to be seen in the philanthropic work

patriotism in education 93
of the Quakers after the war. They were able to work together
easily because of their similarity of outlook. Ties of self-interest
are the basis of such organisations as joint-stock companies and
trade-unions.
A group of men organised for a purpose has collectively only
that purpose for the sake of which the organisation exists. Its
mentality is therefore simpler and cruder than that of any indi-
vidual. The Society for Psychical Research, let us say, cares only
for physical research, though each of its members cares for many
other things. The Federation of British Industries cares only about
British industries, although its individual members may enjoy
going to the play or watching a cricket match. A family as a whole
cares only about the family fortunes, and is frequently willing to
sacrifice individual members to this end.
Passions which are politically organised are much more power-
ful than those which remain unorganised. The people who wish
to go to cinemas on Sundays are a totally unorganised crowd,
and are politically of little account. The Sabbatarians who wish
them not to go are organised, and have political influence. The
cinema proprietors also are organised. From a political point of
view, therefore, the question of the Sunday opening of cinemas
is a conflict between cinema proprietors and Sabbatarians, in
which the wishes of the general public do not count.
A given man may belong to a number of organisations, some
useful, some harmful, some merely innocent. He belongs, let us
say, to the British Fascists, to the football club in his village and
to a society for anthropological research. In the third capacity he
is laudable, in the second innocent, and in the first abominable.
He himself is a mixture of good and bad, but the organisations
have an unmixed ethical character for good or evil which is not
to be found in their members. It is the purpose for which
men are organised which determines whether an organisation
is good or bad, not the character of the men composing
the organisation.

These somewhat trite remarks are intended to lead up to the

curious results which flow from the organisation of men into
States. In almost all civilised countries, the State is the most
powerful of the organisations to which a man belongs, so that
his purposes qua member of a State are much more effective
politically than any of his other purposes. It becomes important,
therefore, to consider what the purposes of the modern State are.
The functions of the State are partly internal, partly external.
For this purpose I include local government among the func-
tions of a State. One may say, broadly speaking, that the internal
purposes of the State are good, while its external purposes are
bad. This statement is, of course, too simple to be literally true,
but it represents a useful first approximation. The internal
purposes of the State include such matters as roads, lighting,
education, the police, the law, the post-office, and so on. One
may quarrel with this or that detail of administration, but only
an anarchist will hold that such purposes are in themselves
undesirable. So far as its internal activities are concerned, there-
fore, the State, on the whole, deserves the loyalty and support of
its citizens.
When we come to its external purposes the matter is other-
wise. In relation to the rest of the world, the purposes of a great
State are two: defence against aggression, and the support of its
citizens in foreign exploitation. Defence against aggression, in
so far as it is genuine and needed to prevent invasion, may be
allowed to be prima facie useful. But the difficulty is that the very
same means which are required to prevent invasion are also
convenient for foreign exploitation. The leading States of the
world aim at drawing an economic tribute from the labour and
the mineral wealth of less powerful countries, and employ in
securing this tribute the armed forces of which the nominal
purpose is defensive. When, for example, the Transvaal was
found to contain gold, the British invaded it. Lord Salisbury
assured the nation that ‘we seek no goldfields’. But somehow or

other we happened to go where goldfields were, and to find

ourselves in possession of them at the end of the war. To take
another illustration: everybody knows that the British went to
Southern Persia from a desire to benefit the Southern Persians,
but it is doubtful whether we should have taken so much interest
in their welfare if they had not inhabited a country full of oil.
Not dissimilar remarks might be made about some of the doings
of the United States in Central America. In like manner,
the motives of Japan in going to Manchuria are, of course, the
noblest possible; but they happen, by some curious accident,
to coincide with the interests of the Japanese.
It is not too much to say that most of the external activities
of powerful States in the present day are concerned with the
employment, or the threat, of armed forces, for the purpose of
taking away from the less powerful wealth which legally belongs
to them. Activities of this sort on the part of private individuals
are considered criminal, and are punished by law unless they
are on a very large scale. But on the part of nations, they are
considered admirable by the citizens of the nations concerned.
This brings me at last to the subject of the present chapter,
namely, the teaching of patriotism in schools. In order to judge
of this teaching it is necessary to be clear not only as to its inten-
tions, but also as to its actual effects. Patriotism, in intention, and
in the thought of those who advocate it, is a thing which is very
largely good. Love of home, love of one’s native country, even a
certain degree of pride in its historical achievements, in so far
as these are deserving of pride, is not to be deprecated. It is a
complex sentiment, partly concerned with actual love of the soil
and of familiar surroundings, partly with something anologous
to an extended love of family. The root of the sentiment is partly
geographical and partly biological. But this primitive feeling is
not in itself either political or economic. It is a feeling for one’s
own country, not against other countries. In its primitive form
it is hardly to be found except among those who live in rural

surroundings without much travel. The town-dweller who is per-

petually changing his habitation, and has no piece of land that he
can call his own, has much less of the primitive sentiment out of
which patriotism grows than has the rural land-owner or peasant.
The town-dweller has, instead, a sentiment largely artificial,
largely the product of his education and his newspapers, and
almost wholly harmful. This sentiment is not so much love of
home and of compatriots as hatred of foreigners and desire to
appropriate foreign countries. Like almost all bad sentiments, it
is disguised as loyalty. If you wish a man to commit some abom-
inable crime, from which he would naturally recoil in horror,
you first teach him loyalty to a gang of arch-criminals, and then
make his crime appear to him as exemplifying the virtue of
loyalty. Of this process, patriotism is the most perfect instance.
Take, for example, reverence for the flag. The flag is the symbol
for the nation in its martial capacity. It suggests battle, war, con-
quest, and deeds of heroism. The British flag suggests to a Briton
Nelson and Trafalgar, not Shakespeare or Newton or Darwin.
Things which have been done by Englishmen to further the
civilisation of mankind have not been done under the symbol of
the flag, and are not called to mind when that symbol is vener-
ated. The best deeds of Englishmen have been done by them not
as Englishmen, but as individuals. The deeds which Englishmen
do with the consciousness of being Englishmen, and because
they are Englishmen, are of a less admirable sort. But it is these
deeds that the flag calls upon us to admire. And what is true of
the British flag is equally true of the Stars and Stripes, or of the
flag of any powerful nation.
Throughout the Western world boys and girls are taught that
their most important social loyalty is to the State of which they
are citizens, and that their duty to the State is to act as its gov-
ernment may direct. Lest they should question this doctrine, they
are taught false history, false politics, false economics. They
are informed of the misdeeds of foreign States, but not of the

misdeeds of their own State. They are led to suppose that all the
wars in which their own State has engaged are wars of defence,
while the wars of foreign States are wars of aggression. They are
taught to believe that when, contrary to expectation, their own
country does conquer some foreign country, it does so in order
to spread civilisation, or the light of the gospel, or a lofty moral
tone, or prohibition, or something else which is equally noble.
They are taught to believe that foreign nations have no moral stan-
dards, and, as the British national anthem asserts, that it is the duty
of Providence to ‘frustrate their knavish tricks’ – a duty in which
Providence will not disdain to employ us as its instruments. The
fact is that every nation, in its dealings with every other, commits
as many crimes as its armed forces render possible. Citizens, even
decent citizens, give a full assent to the activities which make
these crimes possible, because they do not know what is being
done, or see the facts in a true perspective.
For this willingness of the ordinary citizen to become an
unconscious accomplice in murder for the sake of robbery, edu-
cation is chiefly to blame. There are those who blame the Press,
but in this I think they are mistaken. The Press is such as
the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers
because it has been badly educated. Patriotism of the nationalistic
type, so far from being taught in schools, ought to be mentioned
as a form of mass-hysteria to which men are unfortunately
liable, and against which they need to be fortified both intel-
lectually and morally. Nationalism is undoubtedly the most dan-
gerous vice of our time – far more dangerous than drunkenness,
or drugs, or commercial dishonesty, or any of the other vices
against which a conventional moral education is directed. All
who are capable of a survey of the modern world are aware that,
owing to nationalism, the continuance of a civilised way of life is
in jeopardy. This, I say, is generally known to all persons who are
well informed as to international affairs. Nevertheless, every-
where public money continues to be spent in propagating and

intensifying this destructive vice. Those who consider that chil-

dren should not be taught to regard wholesale slaughter as the
noblest work of man are denounced as renegades, and friends of
every country but their own. One would have supposed that
natural affection would cause many people to feel pain in the
thought of their children dying in agony. Such is not the case.
Although the danger is patent, all attempts to cope with it are
viewed as wicked by most of the holders of power in most
countries. Military service is represented as a noble preparation
for the defence of one’s own country, and not a word is said to
make young people aware that the military operations of their
own country, supposing it to be a powerful one, are much more
likely to consist of foreign aggression than of home defence.
The objections to patriotic teaching are various. There is the
objection which we have already considered that, unless the viru-
lence of nationalism can be abated, civilisation cannot continue.
There is the objection that it is hardly possible to teach civilised
human ideals of conduct in an institution which also teaches
people how to kill. There is the objection that the teaching of
hatred, which is a necessary part of a nationalistic education, is
in itself a bad thing. But over and above all these, there is the
purely intellectual objection that the teaching of nationalism
involves the teaching of false propositions. In every country of
the world, children are taught that their country is the best, and
in every country except one this proposition is false. Since the
nations cannot agree as to which is the one where it is true, it
would be better to give up the habit of emphasising the merits of
one nation at the expense of every other. The idea that what is
taught to children should, if possible, be true is, I know, very
subversive, and in some of its applications even illegal. But I
cannot resist the conviction that instruction is better when it
teaches truth than when it teaches falsehood. History ought to
be taught in exactly the same way in all countries of the world,
and history text-books ought to be drawn up by the League of

Nations, with an assistant from the United States, and another

from Soviet Russia. History should be world history rather than
national history, and should emphasise matters of cultural
importance rather than wars. In so far as wars must be taught,
they should not be taught only from the point of view of the
victor, and of heroic deeds. The pupil should linger on the battle-
field among the wounded, should be made to feel the plight of
the homeless in devastated regions, and should be made aware
of all the cruelties and injustices for which war affords an
opportunity. At present almost all the teaching is of a sort to
glorify war. Against the teaching of the schools, the labours of
pacifists are vain. This, of course, applies especially to schools for
the rich, which are everywhere morally and intellectually
inferior to schools for the poor. Children learn in school the
faults of other nations, but not the faults of their own. To know
the faults of other nations ministers only to self-righteousness
and war-like feeling, whereas to know the faults of one’s
own nation is salutary. What English boy is taught in school the
truth about the Black and Tans in Ireland? What French boy is
taught the truth about the occupation of the Ruhr by coloured
troops? What American boy is taught the facts about Sacco and
Vanzetti, or Mooney and Billings? Owing to such omissions, the
ordinary citizen of every civilised country is wrapped in self-
complacency. He knows about other nations all the things they
do not know about themselves; but the things they know about
his country, he does not know.
Most of the teaching of patriotism, while intellectually mis-
guided, is morally innocent. The men who teach have them-
selves been taught on a wrong system, and have learned to feel
that, in a world where foreigners are so wicked, only great mili-
tary efforts can preserve their own country from disaster. There
is, however, a less innocent side to patriotic propaganda. There
are interests which make money out of it, not only armament
interests, but also those who have investments in what are called

undeveloped countries. If you possess, let us say, oil in some

rather unsettled country, the expense of getting the oil consists
of two parts – first, the technical, straightforward expense of
extracting it, and second, the political or military expense of
keeping the ‘natives’ in order. Only the former part of the
expense falls upon you; the second part of the expense, which
may be much greater, falls upon the tax-payer, who is induced to
undertake it by means of patriotic propaganda. In this way,
a highly undesirable connection grows up between patriotism
and finance. This again is a fact which the young are carefully
prevented from knowing.
Patriotism in its more militant forms is intimately bound up
with money. The armed forces of the State can be, and are,
employed for the enrichment of its citizens. This is done partly
by exacting tribute or indemnities, partly by insisting upon the
payment of debts which would otherwise be repudiated, partly
by the seizure of raw materials, and partly by means of compul-
sory commercial treaties. If the whole process were not covered
by the glamour of patriotism, its sordidness and wickedness
would be evident to all sane people. Education could easily, if
men chose, produce a sense of the solidarity of the human race,
and of the importance of international co-operation. Within a
generation, the vehement nationalism from which the world is
suffering could be extinguished. Within a generation, the tariff
walls by which we are all making ourselves poor could be low-
ered, the armaments with which we are threatening ourselves
with death could be abolished, and the spite with which we
are cutting off our own noses could be replaced by goodwill.
The nationalism which is now everywhere rampant is mainly a
product of the schools, and if it is to be brought to an end, a
different spirit must pervade education.
This matter, like disarmament, will have to be dealt with by
international agreement. Perhaps the League of Nations, if it can
spare any time from the whitewashing of aggressors, may sooner

or later become aware of the importance of this matter. Perhaps

the governments may agree to a uniform teaching of history.
Perhaps after the next great war, the survivors, if any, may come
together and decide to substitute the flag of the League of
Nations for their several national flags. But no doubt these are
Utopian dreams. It is the nature of teachers to teach what they
know, however little that may be. Imagine English teachers of
history threatened by an international agreement with the neces-
sity of teaching world history. They would have to find out the
date of the Hegira and when Constantinople fell. They would
have to learn about Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible, about
how the mariner’s compass spread from China to the Arab
sailors, and how the Greeks were the first to make statues of the
Buddha. Their indignation at having such demands made upon
their time would know no bounds, and they would agitate for
a new government pledged to flout the League of Nations. The
active energy of our time throughout the Western world is in
capitalist enterprise, and is, on the whole, a force making for
destruction. The classes of men who should make for something
better, such as teachers, are for the most part fairly content with
the status quo. Any social amelioration would involve a change in
their lessons, and has on that account to be avoided if possible.
The effort that they wish to avoid is not only intellectual, but also
emotional. Familiar emotions come easily, and it is difficult to
teach oneself to feel new emotions on a familiar occasion, such
as the playing of the national anthem. And thus our modern
world, where the good are lazy and only the bad are energetic,
goes reeling drunkenly towards destruction. At moments men
see the abyss, but the intoxication of unreal sentiments soon
closes their eyes. To all who are not intoxicated, the danger is
clear. And nationalism is the chief force impelling our civilisation
to its doom.

2
HAS RELIGION MADE USEFUL
CONTRIBUTIONS TO
CIVILISATION? 1
My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a

disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the
human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some
contributions to civilisation. It helped in early days to fix the
calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses
with such care that in time they became able to predict them.
These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not
know of any others.
The word ‘religion’ is used nowadays in a very loose sense.
Some people, under the influence of extreme Protestantism,
employ the word to denote any serious personal convictions as
to morals or the nature of the universe. This use of the word is
quite unhistorical. Religion is primarily a social phenomenon.
1
First published in 1930.

has religion made useful contributions to civilisation? 21
Churches may owe their origin to teachers with strong individual

convictions, but these teachers have seldom had much influence
upon the Churches that they founded, whereas Churches have
had enormous influence upon the communities in which they
flourished. To take the case that is of most interest to members of
Western civilisation: the teaching of Christ, as it appears in the
Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of
Christians. The most important thing about Christianity, from a
social and historical point of view, is not Christ but the Church,
and if we are to judge of Christianity as a social force we must not
go to the Gospels for our material. Christ taught that you should
give your goods to the poor, that you should not fight, that you
should not go to church, and that you should not punish adul-
tery. Neither Catholics nor Protestants have shown any strong
desire to follow His teaching in any of these respects. Some of the
Franciscans, it is true, attempted to teach the doctrine of apostolic
poverty, but the Pope condemned them, and their doctrine was
declared heretical. Or, again, consider such a text as ‘Judge not
that ye be not judged,’ and ask yourself what influence such a text
has had upon the Inquisition and the Ku-Klux-Klan.
What is true of Christianity is equally true of Buddhism. The
Buddha was amiable and enlightened; on his death-bed he
laughed at his disciples for supposing that he was immortal. But
the Buddhist priesthood—as it exists, for example, in Tibet—has
been obscurantist, tyrannous, and cruel in the highest degree.
There is nothing accidental about this difference between a
Church and its Founder. As soon as absolute truth is supposed to
be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of
experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly
acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other
privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage.
They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privil-
eged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging
truth, revealed once, and for all in utter perfection, so that they

22 has religion made useful contributions to civilisation?
become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral

progress. The Church opposed Galileo and Darwin; in our own
day it opposes Freud. In the days of its greatest power it went
further in its opposition to the intellectual life. Pope Gregory the
Great wrote to a certain bishop a letter beginning: ‘A report has
reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou
expoundest grammar to certain friends.’ The bishop was com-
pelled by pontifical authority to desist from this wicked labour,
and Latinity did not recover until the Renaissance. It is not only
intellectually, but also morally, that religion is pernicious. I
mean by this that it teaches ethical codes which are not con-
ducive to human happiness. When, a few years ago, a plebiscite
was taken in Germany as to whether the deposed royal houses
should still be allowed to enjoy their private property, the
Churches in Germany officially stated that it would be contrary
to the teaching of Christianity to deprive them of it. The
Churches, as everyone knows, opposed the abolition of slavery
as long as they dared, and with a few well-advertised exceptions
they oppose at the present day every movement towards eco-
nomic justice. The Pope has officially condemned Socialism.
CHRISTIANITY AND SEX

The worst feature of the Christian religion, however, is its atti-
tude towards sex—an attitude so morbid and so unnatural that it
can be understood only when taken in relation to the sickness of
the civilised world at the time when the Roman Empire was
decaying. We sometimes hear talk to the effect that Christianity
improved the status of women. This is one of the grossest per-
versions of history that it is possible to make. Women cannot
enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered of the
utmost importance that they should not infringe a very rigid
moral code. Monks have always regarded Woman primarily as
the temptress; they have thought of her mainly as the inspirer of

impure lusts. The teaching of the Church has been, and still is,
that virginity is best, but that for those who find this impossible
marriage is permissible. ‘It is better to marry than to burn,’ as St
Paul brutally puts it. By making marriage indissoluble, and by
stamping out all knowledge of the ars amandi, the Church did
what it could to secure that the only form of sex which it permit-
ted should involve very little pleasure and a great deal of pain.
The opposition to birth control has, in fact, the same motive: if a
woman has a child a year until she dies worn out, it is not to be
supposed that she will derive much pleasure from her married
life; therefore birth control must be discouraged.
The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian eth-
ics is one that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it
affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be
legitimate, and even noble. Take, for example, the question of the
prevention of syphilis. It is known that, by precautions taken
in advance, the danger of contracting this disease can be made
negligible. Christians, however, object to the dissemination of
knowledge of this fact, since they hold it good that sinners
should be punished. They hold this so good that they are even
willing that punishment should extend to the wives and children
of sinners. There are in the world at the present moment many
thousands of children suffering from congenital syphilis who
would never have been born but for the desire of Christians to
see sinners punished. I cannot understand how doctrines leading
to this fiendish cruelty can be considered to have any good effect
upon morals.
It is not only in regard to sexual behaviour, but also in regard
to knowledge on sex subjects, that the attitude of Christians is
dangerous to human welfare. Every person who has taken the
trouble to study the question in an unbiased spirit knows
that the artificial ignorance on sex subjects which orthodox
Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dan-
gerous to mental and physical health, and causes in those who

pick up their knowledge by the way of ‘improper’ talk, as most

children do, an attitude that sex is in itself indecent and ridicu-
lous. I do not think there can be any defence for the view that
knowledge is ever undesirable. I should not put barriers in the
way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age. But
in the particular case of sex knowledge there are much weightier
arguments in its favour than in the case of most other know-
ledge. A person is much less likely to act wisely when he is
ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to give
young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity
about an important matter.
Every boy is interested in trains. Suppose we told him that an
interest in trains is wicked; suppose we kept his eyes bandaged
whenever he is in a train or on a railway station; suppose we
never allowed the word ‘train’ to be mentioned in his presence
and preserved an impenetrable mystery as to the means by
which he is transported from one place to another. The result
would not be that he would cease to be interested in trains; on
the contrary, he would become more interested than ever, but
would have a morbid sense of sin, because this interest had been
represented to him as improper. Every boy of active intelligence
could by this means be rendered in a greater or less degree
neurasthenic. This is precisely what is done in the matter of sex;
but, as sex is more interesting than trains, the results are worse.
Almost every adult in a Christian community is more or less
diseased nervously as a result of the taboo on sex knowledge
when he or she was young. And the sense of sin which is thus
artificially implanted is one of the causes of cruelty, timidity,
and stupidity in later life. There is no rational ground of any sort
or kind for keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may
wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter. And we
shall never get a sane population until this fact is recognised in
early education, which is impossible so long as the Churches are
able to control educational politics.

Leaving these comparatively detailed objections on one side, it

is clear that the fundamental doctrines of Christianity demand a
great deal of ethical perversion before they can be accepted. The
world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and
omnipotent. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain
and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for
all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to
sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes
rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it
were true, it would make no difference. If I were going to beget a
child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal
maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in
advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly
responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He
decided to create man. The usual Christian argument is that the
suffering in the world is a purification for sin, and is therefore a
good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalisation of
sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. I would invite
any Christian to accompany me to the children’s ward of a hos-
pital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and
then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally
abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to
bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all
feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make
himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man who
believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his
ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find
excuses for pain and misery.
THE OBJECTIONS TO RELIGION

The objections to religion are of two sorts—intellectual and
moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to
suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious

precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they
are, and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the
moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.
To take the intellectual objection first; there is a certain ten-
dency in our practical age to consider that it does not much
matter whether religious teaching is true or not, since the
important question is whether it is useful. One question cannot,
however, well be decided without the other. If we believe the
Christian religion, our notions of what is good will be different
from what they will be if we do not believe it. Therefore to
Christians the effects of Christianity may seem good, while to
unbelievers they may seem bad. Moreover, the attitude that one
ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of
the question whether there is evidence in its favour, is an attitude
which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our
minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
A certain kind of scientific candour is a very important quality,
and it is one which can hardly exist in a man who imagines that
there are things which it is his duty to believe. We cannot, there-
fore, really decide whether religion does good without investi-
gating the question whether religion is true. To Christians,
Mohammedans, and Jews the most fundamental question
involved in the truth of religion is the existence of God. In the
days when religion was still triumphant the word ‘God’ had a
perfectly definite meaning; but as a result of the onslaughts of
Rationalists the word has become paler and paler, until it is dif-
ficult to see what people mean when they assert that they believe
in God. Let us take for purposes of argument Matthew Arnold’s
definition: ‘A power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.’
Perhaps we might make this even more vague, and ask ourselves
whether we have any evidence of purpose in the universe apart
from the purposes of living beings on the surface of this planet.
The usual argument of religious people on this subject is
roughly as follows: ‘I and my friends are persons of amazing

intelligence and virtue. It is hardly conceivable that so much

intelligence and virtue could have come about by chance. There
must, therefore, be someone at least as intelligent and virtuous as
we are, who set the cosmic machinery in motion with a view to
producing us.’ I am sorry to say that I do not find this argument
so impressive as it is found by those who use it. The universe is
large; yet, if we are to believe Eddington, there are probably
nowhere else in the universe beings as intelligent as men. If you
consider the total amount of matter in the world and compare it
with the amount forming the bodies of intelligent beings, you
will see that the latter bears an almost infinitesimal proportion to
the former. Consequently, even if it is enormously improbable
that the laws of chance will produce an organism capable of
intelligence out of a casual selection of atoms, it is nevertheless
probable that there will be in the universe that very small num-
ber of such organisms that we do in fact find. Then again, con-
sidered as the climax to such a vast process, we do not really
seem to be sufficiently marvellous. Of course, I am aware that
many divines are far more marvellous than I am, and that I
cannot wholly appreciate merits so far transcending my own.
Nevertheless, even after making allowances under this head, I
cannot but think that Omnipotence operating through all eter-
nity might have produced something better. And then we have to
reflect that even this result is only a flash in the pan. The earth
will not always remain habitable; the human race will die out,
and if the cosmic process is to justify itself hereafter it will have
to do so elsewhere than on the surface of our planet. And even if
this should occur, it must stop sooner or later. The second law of
thermodynamics makes it scarcely possible to doubt that the
universe is running down, and that ultimately nothing of the
slightest interest will be possible anywhere. Of course, it is open
to us to say that when that time comes God will wind up the
machinery again; but if we do say this, we can base our assertion
only upon faith, not upon one shred of scientific evidence. So far

as scientific evidence goes, the universe has crawled by slow

stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth, and is going to
crawl by still more pitiful stages to a condition of universal
death. If this is to be taken as evidence of purpose, I can only say
that the purpose is one that does not appeal to me. I see no
reason therefore to believe in any sort of God, however vague
and however attenuated. I leave on one side the old metaphysical
arguments, since religious apologists themselves have thrown
them over.
THE SOUL AND IMMORTALITY

The Christian emphasis on the individual soul has had a pro-
found influence upon the ethics of Christian communities. It is a
doctrine fundamentally akin to that of the Stoics, arising as theirs
did in communities that could no longer cherish political hopes.
The natural impulse of the vigorous person of decent character
is to attempt to do good, but if he is deprived of all political
power and of all opportunity to influence events he will be
deflected from his natural course and will decide that the
important thing is to be good. This is what happened to the early
Christians; it led to a conception of personal holiness as some-
thing quite independent of beneficent action, since holiness had
to be something that could be achieved by people who were
impotent in action. Social virtue came therefore to be excluded
from Christian ethics. To this day conventional Christians think
an adulterer more wicked than a politician who takes bribes,
although the latter probably does a thousand times as much
harm. The mediaeval conception of virtue, as one sees in their
pictures, was of something wishy-washy, feeble, and senti-
mental. The most virtuous man was the man who retired from
the world; the only men of action who were regarded as saints
were those who wasted the lives and substance of their subjects
in fighting the Turks, like St Louis. The Church would never

regard a man as a saint because he reformed the finances, or the

criminal law, or the judiciary. Such mere contributions to
human welfare would be regarded as of no importance. I do not
believe there is a single saint in the whole calendar whose saint-
ship is due to work of public utility. With this separation
between the social and the moral person there went an increas-
ing separation between soul and body, which has survived
in Christian metaphysics and in the systems derived from
Descartes. One may say, broadly speaking, that the body repre-
sents the social and public part of a man, whereas the soul repre-
sents the private part. In emphasising the soul Christian ethics
has made itself completely individualistic. I think it is clear that
the net result of all the centuries of Christianity has been to make
men more egotistic, more shut up in themselves, than nature
made them; for the impulses that naturally take a man outside
the walls of his ego are those of sex, parenthood, and patriotism
or herd instinct. Sex the Church did everything it could to decry
and degrade; family affection was decried by Christ Himself
and by the bulk of His followers; and patriotism could find no
place among the subject populations of the Roman Empire. The
polemic against the family in the Gospels is a matter that has not
received the attention it deserves. The Church treats the Mother
of Christ with reverence, but He Himself showed little of this
attitude. ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ (John ii. 4) is
His way of speaking to her. He says also that He has come to set a
man at variance against his father, the daughter against her
mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and
that he that loveth father and mother more than Him is not
worthy of Him (Matt. x. 35–7). All this means the break-up of
the biological family tie for the sake of creed—an attitude which
had a great deal to do with the intolerance that came into the
world with the spread of Christianity.
This individualism culminated in the doctrine of the
immortality of the individual soul, which was to enjoy hereafter

endless bliss or endless woe according to circumstances. The

circumstances upon which this momentous difference
depended were somewhat curious. For example, if you died
immediately after a priest had sprinkled water upon you while
pronouncing certain words, you inherited eternal bliss; whereas,
if after a long and virtuous life you happened to be struck by
lightning at a moment when you were using bad language
because you had broken a bootlace, you would inherit eternal
torment. I do not say that the modern Protestant Christian
believes this, nor even perhaps the modern Catholic Christian
who has not been adequately instructed in theology; but I do say
that this is the orthodox doctrine and was firmly believed until
recent times. The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptise
Indian infants, and then immediately dash their brains out: by
this means they secured that these infants went to Heaven. No
orthodox Christian can find any logical reason for condemning
their action, although all nowadays do so. In countless ways the
doctrine of personal immortality in its Christian form has had
disastrous effects upon morals, and the metaphysical separation
of soul and body has had disastrous effects upon philosophy.
SOURCES OF INTOLERANCE
The intolerance that spread over the world with the advent of
Christianity is one of its most curious features, due, I think, to
the Jewish belief in righteousness and in the exclusive reality of
the Jewish God. Why the Jews should have had these peculiar-
ities I do not know. They seem to have developed during the
captivity as a reaction against the attempt to absorb the Jews into
alien populations. However that may be, the Jews, and more
especially the prophets, invented emphasis upon personal right-
eousness and the idea that it is wicked to tolerate any religion
except one. These two ideas have had an extraordinarily disas-
trous effect upon Occidental history. The Church has made

much of the persecution of Christians by the Roman State before

the time of Constantine. This persecution, however, was slight
and intermittent and wholly political. At all times, from the age
of Constantine to the end of the seventeenth century, Christians
were far more fiercely persecuted by other Christians than they
ever were by the Roman emperors. Before the rise of Christianity
this persecuting attitude was unknown to the ancient world
except among the Jews. If you read, for example, Herodotus, you
find a bland and tolerant account of the habits of the foreign
nations he has visited. Sometimes, it is true, a peculiarly barbar-
ous custom may shock him, but in general he is hospitable to
foreign gods and foreign customs. He is not anxious to prove
that people who call Zeus by some other name will suffer eternal
perdition, and ought to be put to death in order that their pun-
ishment may begin as soon as possible. This attitude has been
reserved for Christians. It is true that the modern Christian is less
robust, but that is not thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the
generations of Freethinkers, who, from the Renaissance to the
present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their
traditional beliefs. It is amusing to hear the modern Christian
telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is, and
ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to
the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all
orthodox Christians. Nobody nowadays believes that the world
was created in 4004 bc; but not so very long ago scepticism on
this point was thought an abominable crime. My great-great-
grandfather, after observing the depth of the lava on the slopes of
Etna, came to the conclusion that the world must be older than
the orthodox supposed, and published this opinion in a book.
For this offence he was cut by the County and ostracised from
society. Had he been a man in humbler circumstances, his pun-
ishment would doubtless have been more severe. It is no credit
to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities
that were believed 150 years ago. The gradual emasculation of

the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most

vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of
Freethinkers.
THE DOCTRINE OF FREE-WILL

The attitude of the Christians on the subject of natural law has
been curiously vacillating and uncertain. There was, on the one
hand, the doctrine of free-will, in which the great majority of
Christians believed; and this doctrine required that the acts of
human beings at least should not be subject to natural law. There
was, on the other hand, especially in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, a belief in God as the Lawgiver and in natural
law as one of the main evidences of the existence of a Creator. In
recent times the objection to the reign of law in the interests of
free-will has begun to be felt more strongly than the belief in
natural law as affording evidence for a Lawgiver. Materialists
used the laws of physics to show, or attempt to show, that the
movements of human bodies are mechanically determined, and
that consequently everything that we say and every change of
position that we effect fall outside the sphere of any possible
free-will. If this be so, whatever may be left for our unfettered
volitions is of little value. If, when a man writes a poem or
commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act
result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put
up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other.
There might in certain metaphysical systems remain a region of
pure thought in which the will would be free; but, since that can
be communicated to others only by means of bodily movement,
the realm of freedom would be one that could never be the
subject of communication, and could never have any social
importance.
Then, again, evolution has had a considerable influence upon
those Christians who have accepted it. They have seen that it will

not do to make claims on behalf of man which are totally differ-

ent from those which are made on behalf of other forms of life.
Therefore, in order to safeguard free-will in man, they have
objected to every attempt at explaining the behaviour of living
matter in terms of physical and chemical laws. The position of
Descartes, to the effect that all lower animals are automata, no
longer finds favour with liberal theologians. The doctrine of
continuity makes them inclined to go a step further still and
maintain that even what is called dead matter is not rigidly gov-
erned in its behaviour by unalterable laws. They seem to have
overlooked the fact that, if you abolish the reign of law, you also
abolish the possibility of miracles, since miracles are acts of God
which contravene the laws governing ordinary phenomena. I
can, however, imagine the modern liberal theologian maintain-
ing with an air of profundity that all creation is miraculous, so
that he no longer needs to fasten upon certain occurrences as
special evidence of Divine intervention.
Under the influence of this reaction against natural law, some
Christian apologists have seized upon the latest doctrines of the
atom, which tend to show that the physical laws in which we
have hitherto believed have only an approximate and average
truth as applied to large numbers of atoms, while the individual
electron behaves pretty much as it likes. My own belief is that
this is a temporary phase, and that the physicists will in time
discover laws governing minute phenomena, although these
laws may differ very considerably from those of traditional phys-
ics. However that may be, it is worth while to observe that the
modern doctrines as to minute phenomena have no bearing
upon anything that is of practical importance. Visible motions,
and indeed all motions that make any difference to anybody,
involve such large numbers of atoms that they come well within
the scope of the old laws. To write a poem or commit a murder
(reverting to our previous illustration), it is necessary to move an
appreciable mass of ink or lead. The electrons composing the ink

may be dancing freely round their little ballroom, but the ball-
room as a whole is moving according to the old laws of physics,
and this alone is what concerns the poet and his publisher.
The modern doctrines, therefore, have no appreciable bearing
upon any of those problems of human interest with which the
theologian is concerned.
The free-will question consequently remains just where it
was. Whatever may be thought about it as a matter of ultimate
metaphysics, it is quite clear that nobody believes in it in prac-
tice. Everyone has always believed that it is possible to train
character; everyone has always known that alcohol or opium will
have a certain effect on behaviour. The apostle of free-will main-
tains that a man can by will power avoid getting drunk, but he
does not maintain that when drunk a man can say ‘British Con-
stitution’ as clearly as if he were sober. And everybody who has
ever had to do with children knows that a suitable diet does
more to make them virtuous than the most eloquent preaching
in the world. The one effect that the free-will doctrine has in
practice is to prevent people from following out such common-
sense knowledge to its rational conclusion. When a man acts in
ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse
to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is a result of ante-
cedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take
you beyond the moment of his birth, and therefore to events
for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of
imagination.
No man treats a motor-car as foolishly as he treats another
human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its
annoying behaviour to sin; he does not say: ‘You are a wicked
motor-car, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you
go.’ He attempts to find out what is wrong, and to set it right. An
analogous way of treating human beings is, however, considered
to be contrary to the truths of our holy religion. And this applies
even in the treatment of little childen. Many children have bad

habits which are perpetuated by punishment, but will probably

pass away of themselves if left unnoticed. Nevertheless, nurses
with very few exceptions consider it right to inflict punishment,
although by so doing they run the risk of causing insanity.
When insanity has been caused it is cited in courts of law as
a proof of the harmfulness of the habit, not of the punishment.
(I am alluding to a recent prosecution for obscenity in the State
of New York.)
Reforms in education have come very largely through the
study of the insane and feeble-minded, because they have not
been held morally responsible for their failures, and have there-
fore been treated more scientifically than normal children. Until
very recently it was held that, if a boy could not learn his lessons,
the proper cure was caning or flogging. This view is nearly
extinct in the treatment of children, but it survives in the crim-
inal law. It is evident that a man with a propensity to crime must
be stopped, but so must a man who has hydrophobia and wants
to bite people, although nobody considers him morally respon-
sible. A man who is suffering from plague has to be imprisoned
until he is cured, although nobody thinks him wicked. The same
thing should be done with a man who suffers from a propensity
to commit forgery; but there should be no more idea of guilt in
the one case than in the other. And this is only common sense,
though it is a form of common sense to which Christian ethics
and metaphysics are opposed.
To judge of the moral influence of any institution upon a
community, we have to consider the kind of impulse which is
embodied in the institution, and the degree to which the institu-
tion increases the efficacy of the impulse in that community.
Sometimes the impulse concerned is quite obvious, sometimes
it is more hidden. An Alpine club, for example, obviously
embodies the impulse to adventure, and a learned society
embodies the impulse towards knowledge. The family as an insti-
tution embodies jealousy and parental feeling; a football club or

a political party embodies the impulse towards competitive play;

but the two great social institutions—namely, the Church and
the State—are more complex in their psychological motivation.
The primary purpose of the State is clearly security against both
internal criminals and external enemies. It is rooted in the ten-
dency of children to huddle together when they are frightened,
and to look for a grown-up person who will give them a sense of
security. The Church has more complex origins. Undoubtedly
the most important source of religion is fear; this can be seen at
the present day, since anything that causes alarm is apt to turn
people’s thoughts to God. Battle, pestilence, and shipwreck all
tend to make people religious. Religion has, however, other
appeals besides that of terror; it appeals especially to our human
self-esteem. If Christianity is true, mankind are not such pitiful
worms as they seem to be; they are of interest to the Creator of
the universe, who takes the trouble to be pleased with them
when they behave well and displeased when they behave badly.
This is a great compliment. We should not think of studying an
ants’ nest to find out which of the ants performed their formicu-
lar duty, and we should certainly not think of picking out those
individual ants who were remiss and putting them into a bon-
fire. If God does this for us, it is a compliment to our import-
ance; and it is even a pleasanter compliment if He awards to the
good among us everlasting happiness in heaven. Then there is
the comparatively modern idea that cosmic evolution is all
designed to bring about the sort of results which we call good—
that is to say, the sort of results that give us pleasure. Here again
it is flattering to suppose that the universe is controlled by a
Being who shares our tastes and prejudices.
THE IDEA OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

The third psychological impulse which is embodied in religion
is that which has led to the conception of righteousness. I am

aware that many Freethinkers treat this conception with great

respect, and hold that it should be preserved in spite of the decay
of dogmatic religion. I cannot agree with them on this point.
The psychological analysis of the idea of righteousness seems to
me to show that it is rooted in undesirable passions, and ought
not to be strengthened by the imprimatur of reason. Righteousness
and unrighteousness must be taken together; it is impossible to
stress the one without stressing the other also. Now, what is
‘unrighteousness’ in practice? It is in practice behaviour of a
kind disliked by the herd. By calling it unrighteousness, and by
arranging an elaborate system of ethics round this conception,
the herd justifies itself in wreaking punishment upon the objects
of its own dislike, while at the same time, since the herd is
righteous by definition, it enhances its own self-esteem at the
very moment when it lets loose its impulse to cruelty. This is the
psychology of lynching, and of the other ways in which crim-
inals are punished. The essence of the conception of righteous-
ness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking
cruelty as justice.
But, it will be said, the account you have been giving of right-
eousness is wholly inapplicable to the Hebrew prophets, who,
after all, on your own showing, invented the idea. There is truth
in this: righteousness in the mouths of the Hebrew prophets
meant what was approved by them and Yahveh. One finds the
same attitude expressed in the Acts of the Apostles, where the
Apostles began a pronouncement with the words: ‘For it seemed
good to the Holy Ghost, and to us’ (Acts xv. 28). This kind of
individual certainty as to God’s tastes and opinions cannot, how-
ever, be made the basis of any institution. That has always been
the difficulty with which Protestantism has had to contend: a
new prophet could maintain that his revelation was more
authentic than those of his predecessors, and there was nothing
in the general outlook of Protestantism to show that this claim
was invalid. Consequently Protestantism split into innumerable

sects, which weakened each other; and there is reason to sup-

pose that a hundred years hence Catholicism will be the only
effective representative of the Christian faith. In the Catholic
Church inspiration such as the prophets enjoyed has its place;
but it is recognised that phenomena which look rather like genu-
ine divine inspiration may be inspired by the Devil, and it is the
business of the Church to discriminate, just as it is the business
of an art connoisseur to know a genuine Leonardo from a
forgery. In this way revelation becomes institutionalised at the
same time. Righteousness is what the Church approves, and
unrighteousness is what it disapproves. Thus the effective part
of the conception of righteousness is a justification of herd
antipathy.
It would seem, therefore, that the three human impulses
embodied in religion are fear, conceit and hatred. The purpose
of religion, one may say, is to give an air of respectability to these
passions, provided they run in certain channels. It is because
these passions make on the whole for human misery that
religion is a force for evil, since it permits men to indulge these
passions without restraint, where but for its sanction they might,
at least to a certain degree, control them.
I can imagine at this point an objection, not likely to be
urged perhaps by most orthodox believers, but nevertheless
worthy to be examined. Hatred and fear, it may be said, are
essential human characteristics; mankind has always felt them
and always will. The best that you can do with them, I may be
told, is to direct them into certain channels in which they are
less harmful than they would be in certain other channels. A
Christian theologian might say that their treatment by the
Church is analogous to its treatment of the sex impulse, which
it deplores. It attempts to render concupiscence innocuous by
confining it within the bounds of matrimony. So, it may be
said, if mankind must inevitably feel hatred, it is better to direct
this hatred against those who are really harmful, and this

is precisely what the Church does by its conception of

righteousness.
To this contention there are two replies—one comparatively
superficial; the other going to the root of the matter. The super-
ficial reply is that the Church’s conception of righteousness is not
the best possible; the fundamental reply is that hatred and fear
can, with our present psychological knowledge and our present
industrial technique, be eliminated altogether from human life.
To take the first point first. The Church’s conception of right-
eousness is socially undesirable in various ways—first and fore-
most in its depreciation of intelligence and science. This defect is
inherited from the Gospels. Christ tells us to become as little
children, but little children cannot understand the differential
calculus, or the principles of currency, or the modern methods
of combating disease. To acquire such knowledge is no part of
our duty, according to the Church. The Church no longer con-
tends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did so in its
palmy days; but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not
sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to pride of intellect, and
hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma. Take, for
example, two men, one of whom has stamped out yellow fever
throughout some large region in the tropics, but has in the
course of his labours had occasional relations with women to
whom he was not married; while the other has been lazy and
shiftless, begetting a child a year until his wife died of exhaus-
tion, and taking so little care of his children that half of them
died from preventable causes, but never indulging in illicit sex-
ual intercourse. Every good Christian must maintain that the
second of these men is more virtuous than the first. Such an
attitude is, of course, superstitious and totally contrary to reason.
Yet something of this absurdity is inevitable so long as avoidance
of sin is thought more important than positive merit, and so
long as the importance of knowledge as a help to a useful life is
not recognised.

The second and more fundamental objection to the utilisation

of fear and hatred in the way practised by the Church is that
these emotions can now be almost wholly eliminated from
human nature by educational, economic and political reforms.
The educational reforms must be the basis, since men who feel
hate and fear will also admire these emotions and wish to per-
petuate them, although this admiration and wish will be prob-
ably unconscious, as it is in the ordinary Christian. An education
designed to eliminate fear is by no means difficult to create. It is
only necessary to treat a child with kindness, to put him in an
environment where initiative is possible without disastrous
results, and to save him from contact with adults who have
irrational terrors, whether of the dark, of mice, or of social
revolution. A child must also not be subject to severe punish-
ment, or to threats, or to grave and excessive reproof. To save a
child from hatred is a somewhat more elaborate business. Situ-
ations arousing jealousy must be very carefully avoided by
means of scrupulous and exact justice as between different chil-
dren. A child must feel himself the object of warm affection on
the part of some at least of the adults with whom he has to do,
and he must not be thwarted in his natural activities and curi-
osities except when danger to life or health is concerned. In
particular, there must be no taboo on sex knowledge, or on
conversation about matters which conventional people consider
improper. If these simple precepts are observed from the start,
the child will be fearless and friendly.
On entering adult life, however, a young person so educated
will find himself or herself plunged into a world full of injustice,
full of cruelty, full of preventable misery. The injustice, the
cruelty, and the misery that exist in the modern world are an
inheritance from the past, and their ultimate source is economic,
since life-and-death competition for the means of subsistence
was in former days inevitable. It is not inevitable in our age. With
our present industrial technique we can, if we choose, provide a

tolerable subsistence for everybody. We could also secure that

the world’s population should be stationary if we were not pre-
vented by the political influence of Churches which prefer war,
pestilence, and famine to contraception. The knowledge exists
by which universal happiness can be secured; the chief obstacle
to its utilisation for that purpose is the teaching of religion.
Religion prevents our children from having a rational education;
religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of
war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-
operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punish-
ment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden
age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that
guards the door, and this dragon is religion.

Science and Tradition
AN has existed for about a million years. He has
M possessed writing for about 6,000 years, agricul-

ture somewhat longer, but perhaps not much
longer. Science, as a dominant factor in determining the
beliefs of educated men, has existed for about 300 years; as a
source of economic technique, for about 150 years. In this
brief period it has proved itself an incredibly powerful
revolutionary force. When we consider how recently it has
risen to power, we find ourselves forced to believe that we
are at the very beginning of its work in transforming human
life. What its future effects will be is a matter of conjecture,
but possibly a study of its effects hitherto may make the
conjecture a little less hazardous.
The effects of science are of various very different kinds.
There are direct intellectual effects: the dispelling of many
traditional beliefs, and the adoption of others suggested by
the success of scientific method. Then there are effects on
technique in industry and war. Then, chiefly as a consequence
of new techniques, there are profound changes in social
organization which are gradually bringing about correspond-
ing political changes. Finally, as a result of the new control
over the environment which scientific knowledge has con-
I

2 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY
SCIENCE AND TRADITION 3
ferred, a new philosophy is growing up, involving a changed
from superstition into science. The Babylonians could pre-
conception of man's place in the universe.
dict them, though as regards solar eclipses their predictions
I shall deal successively with these aspects of the effects of
were not always right. But the priests kept this knowledge to
science on human life. First I shall recount its purely intellec-
themselves, and used it as a means of increasing their hold
tual effect as a solvent of unfounded traditional beliefs, such
over the populace. When the Greeks learned what the
as witchcraft. Next, I shall consider scientific technique,
Babylonians had to teach, they very quickly arrived at as-
especially since the industrial revolution. Last, I shall set
tonishing astronomical discoveries. Thucydides mentions an
forth the philosophy which is being suggested by the tri-
eclipse of the sun, and says that it occurred at the new ~oon,
umphs of science, and shall contend that this philosophy, if
which, he goes on to observe, is apparently the only tIme at
unchecked, may inspire a form of unwisdom from which
which such a phenomenon can occur. The Pythagoreans,
disastrous consequences may result.
very shortly after this time, discovered the correct theor~ of
The study of anthropology has made us vividly aware of
both solar and lunar eclipses, and inferred that the earth IS a
the mass of unfounded beliefs that influence the lives of un-
sphere from the shape of its shadow on the moon.
civilized human beings. Illness is attributed to sorcery, fail-
Although, for the best minds, eclipses were thus brought
ure of crops to angry gods or malignant demons. Human
within the domain of science, it was a long time before this
sacrifice is thought to promote victory in war and the fertility
knowledge was generally accepted. Milton could still speak
of the soil; eclipses and comets are held to presage disaster.
of times when the sun
The life of the savage is hemmed in by taboos, and the conse-
quences of infringing a taboo are thought to be frightful. In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
Some parts of this primitive outlook died out early in the On half the nations, and with fear of change
regions in which civilization began. There are traces of Perplexes monarchs.
human sacrifice in the Old Testament, for instance in the
But in Milton this had become only poetic license.
stories of Jephthah's daughter and of Abraham and Isaac,
It was very much longer before comets were brought
but by the time the Jews became fully historical they had
within the compass of science; indeed the process was com-
abandoned the practice. The Greeks abandoned it in about
pleted only by the work of Newton and his friend Halley.
the seventh century B.C. But the Carthaginians still practiced
Caesar's death was foretold by a comet; as Shakespeare
it during the Punic Wars. The decay of human sacrifice
makes Calpurnia say:
in Mediterranean countries is not attributable to science, but
presumably to humanitarian feelings. In other respects, When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
however, science has been the chief agent in dispelling primi- The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
tive superstitions.
The Venerable Bede asserted: "comets portend revolu-
Eclipses were the earliest natural phenomena to escape
tions of kingdoms, pestilence, war, winds, or heat." John

4 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY SCIENCE AND TRADITION 5
Knox regarded comets as evidence of divine anger, and his Bacon pretended to believe in witchcraft, and made no pro-
followers thought them "a warning to the King to extirpate test when a Parliament of which he was a member passed a
the Papists." Probably Shakespeare still held beliefs of a law increasing the severity of the punishment of witches.
superstitious kind about comets. It was only when they were The climax was reached under the Commonwealth, for it
found to obey the law of gravitation, and when some at least was especially Puritans who believed in the power of Satan.
were found to have calculable orbits, that educated men in It was partly for this reason that Charles II's government,
general ceased to regard them as portents. while not yet venturing to deny the possibility of witchcraft,
It was in the time of Charles II that scientific rejection of was much less zealous in searching it out than its predecessors
traditional superstitions became common among educated had been. The last witchcraft trial in England was in 1664,
men. Charles II perceived that science could be an ally when Sir Thomas Browne was a witness against the witch.
against the "fanatics," as those who regretted Cromwell The laws against it gradually fell into abeyance, and were
were called. He founded the Royal Society, and made science repealed in 1736-though, as late as 1768, John Wesley
fashionable. Enlightenment spread gradually downwards continued t~ support the old superstition. In Scotland the
from the Court. The House of Commons was as yet by no superstition lingered longer: the last conviction was in 1722.
means as modern in outlook as the King. After the plague The victory of humanity and common sense in this matter
and the Great Fire, a House of Commons Committee in- was almost entirely due to the spread of the scientific out-
quired into the causes of those misfortunes, which were look-not to any definite argument, but to the impossibility
generally attributed to divine displeasure, though it was not of the whole way of thinking that had been natural before the
clear to what the displeasure was due. The Committee age of rationalism that began in the time of Charles II, partly,
decided that what most displeased the Lord was the works of it must be confessed, as a revolt against a too rigid moral
Mr. Thomas Hobbes. It was decreed that no work of his code
should be published in England. This measure proved effec- Scientific medicine had, at first, to combat superstitions
tive: there has never since been a plague or a Great Fire in similar to those that inspired belief in witchcraft. When
London. But Charles, who liked Hobbes because Hobbes had Vesalius first practiced dissection of corpses, the Church was
taught him mathematics, was annoyed. He, however, was horrified. He was saved from persecution, for a time, by the
not thought by Parliament to be on intimate terms with Emperor Charles V, who was a valetudinarian, and believed
Providence. that no other physician could keep him in health. But after the
It was at this time that belief in witchcraft began to be Emperor died, Vesalius was accused of cutting people up
viewed as a superstition. James I was a fanatical persecutor before they were dead. He was ordered, as a penance, to go
of witches. Shakespeare's Macbeth was a piece of govern- on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; he was shipwrecked, and
ment propaganda, and no doubt the witches in that play made died of exposure. In spite of his work and that of Hervey and
it more acceptable as a piece of flattery of the monarch. Even other great men, medicine continued to be largely supersti-

6 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY SCIENCE AND TRADITION 7
tious. Insanity, in particular, was thought to be due to posses- who regard its effects as morally pernicious, I commend
sion by evil spirits, and was therefore treated by subjecting attention to these facts.
the insane to cruelties which it was hoped the demons would Something must be said about each of the above ingredients
dislike. George III, when mad, was still treated on this of the mechanistic outlook.
principle. The ignorance of the general public continued even (I) Observation versus Authority: To modern educated
longer.· An aunt of mine, when her husband quarreled with people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascer-
the War Office, was afraid that the worry would cause him tained by observation, not by consulting ancient authorities.
to develop typhus. It is hardly till the time of Lister and But this is an entirely modern conception, which hardly
Pasteur that medicine can be said to have become scientific. existed before the seventeenth century. Aristotle maintained
The diminution of human suffering owing to the advances in that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was
medicine is beyond all calculation. twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this state-
Out of the work of the great men of the seventeenth cen- ment by examining his wives' mouths. He said also that chil-
tury a new outlook on the world was developed, and it was dren will be healthier if conceived when the wind is in the
this outlook, not specific arguments, which brought about the north. One gathers that the two Mrs. Aristotles both had
decay of the belief in portents, witchcraft, demoniacal pos- to run out and look at the weathercock every evening before
session, and so forth. I think there were three ingredients in going to bed. He states that a man bitten by a mad dog will
the scientific outlook of the eighteenth century that were not go mad, but any other animal will (Rist. An. 7o¥); that
specially important: the bite of the shrewmouse is dangerous to horses, especially if
the mouse is pregnant (ibid., 604b); that elephants suffering
(I) Statements of fact should be based on observation, not from insomnia can be cured by rubbing their shoulders with
on unsupported authority. salt, olive oil, and warm water (ibid., 60sa); and so on and so
(2) The inanimate world is a self-acting, self-perpetuating on. Nevertheless, classical dons, who have never observed
system, in which all changes conform to natural laws. any animal except the cat and the dog, continue to praise
(3) The earth is not the center of the universe, and Aristotle for his fidelity to observation.
probably Man is not its purpose (if any); moreover, The conquest of the East by Alexander caused an immense
"purpose" is a concept which is scientifically useless. influx of superstition into the Hellenistic world. This was
particularly notable as regards astrology, which almost all
These items make up what is called the "mechanistic out- later pagans believed in. The Church condemned it, not on
look," which clergymen denounce. It led to the cessation of scientific grounds, but because it implied subjection to Fate.
persecution and to a generally humane attitude. It is now less There is, however, in St. Augustine, a scientific argument
accepted than it was, and persecution has revived. To those against astrology quoted from one of the rare pagan skeptics.

SCIENCE AND TRADITION II
to dead matter: earth and water naturally move downwards,
rant at the top of a mountain. The "efficient" cause is the
air and fire upwards; but beyond these simple "natural"
carrying up of the materials and the arranging of them in the
motions everything depends upon impulsion from the souls
pattern of a house. The "final" cause is to satisfy the hunger
of living beings.
and thirst of tourists. In human affairs, the question "why?"
So long as this view prevailed, physics as an independent
is more naturally answered, as a rule, by assigning the final
science was impossible, since the physical world was thought
cause than by setting out the efficient cause. If you ask "why
to be not causally self-contained. But Galileo and Newton
is there a restaurant here?" the natural answer is "because
between them proved that all the movements of the planets,
many hungry and thirsty people come this way." But the
and of dead matter on the earth, proceed according to the
answer by final cause is only appropriate where human
laws of physics, and once started, will continue indefinitely.
volitions are involved. If you ask "why do many people die of
There is no need of mind in this process. Newton still
cancer?" you will get no clear answer, but the answer you
thought that a Creator was. necessary to get the process
want is one assigning the efficient cause.
going, but that after that He left it to work according to its
This ambiguity in the word "why" led Aristotle to his
own laws.
distinction of efficient and final causes. He thought-and
Descartes held that not only dead matter, but the bodies of
many people still think-that both kinds are to be found
animals also, are wholly governed by the laws of physics.
everywhere: whatever exists may be explained, on the one
Probably only theology restrained him from saying the same
hand, by the antecedent events that have produced it, and, on
of human bodies. In the eighteenth century French free
the other hand, by the purpose that it serves. But although it
thinkers took this further step. In their view, the relation of
is still open to the philosopher or theologian to hold that
mind and matter was the antithesis of what Aristotle and the
everything has a "purpose," it has been found that "purpose"
scholastics had supposed. For Aristotle, first causes were
is not a useful concept when we are in search of scientific
always mental, as when an engine driver starts a freight train
laws. Weare told in the Bible that the moon was made to
moving and the impulsion communicates itself from truck to
give light by night. But men of science, however pious, do not
truck. Eighteenth-century materialists, on the contrary,
regard this as a scientific explanation of the origin of the
considered all causes material, and thought of mental occur-
moon. Or, to revert to the question about cancer, a man of
rences as inoperative by-products.
science may believe, in his private capacity, that cancer is
(3) The dethronement of "purpose": Aristotle maintained
sent as a punishment for our sins, but qua man of science he
that causes are of four kinds; modern science admits only one
must ignore this point of view. We know of "purpose" in
of the four . Two of Aristotle's four need not concern us; the
human affairs, and we may suppose that there are cosmic
two that do concern us are tee h "ffi· Clent" an d t h e "fi na 1"
purposes, but in science it is the past that determines the
cause. The "efficient" cause is what we should call simply
future, not the future the past. "Final" causes, therefore, do
"the cause"; the "final" cause is the purpose. In human
not occur in the scientific account of the world.
affairs this distinction has validity. Suppose you find a restau-
In this connection Darwin's work was decisive. What

I2 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY SCIENCE AND TRADITION 13
Galileo and Newton had done for astronomy, Darwin did for and with full receptiveness to the cosmos that they portray.
biology. The adaptations of animals and plants to their In Dante, the earth is the center of the universe; there are
environments were a favorite theme of pious naturalists in ten concentric spheres, all revolving about the earth; the
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These adapta- wicked, after death, are punished at the center of the earth;
tions were explained by the Divine Purpose. It is true that the the comparatively virtuous are purged on the Mount of
explanation was sometimes a little odd. If rabbits were Purgatory at the antipodes of Jerusalem; the good, when
theologians, they might think the exquisite adaptation of purged, enjoy eternal bliss in one or other of the spheres,
weasels to the killing of rabbits hardly a matter for thankful- according to the degree of their merit. The universe is tidy
ness. And there was a conspiracy of silence about the tape- and small: Dante visits all the spheres in the course of
worm. Nevertheless, it was difficult, before Darwin, to twenty-four hours. Everything is contrived in relation to
explain the adaptation of living things to their environment man: to punish sin and reward virtue. There are no myster-
otherwise than by means of the Creator's purposes. ies, no abysses, no secrets; the whole thing is like a child's
It was not the fact of evolution, but the Darwinian doll's house, with people as the dolls. But although the people
mechanis~ of the struggle for existence and the survival of were dolls they were important because they interested the
the fittest, that made it possible to explain adaptation without Owner of the doll's house.
bringing in "purpose." Random variation and natural selection The modern universe is a very different sort of place.
use only efficient causes. This is why many men who accept Since the victory of the Copernican system we have known
the general fact of evolution do not accept Darwin's view as that the earth is not the center of the universe. For a time the
to how it comes about. Samuel Butler, Bergson, Shaw, and sun replaced it, but then it turned out that the sun is by no
Lysenko will not accept the dethronement of purpose- means a monarch among stars, in fact, is scarcely even middle
though in the case of Lysenko it is not God's purpose, but class. There is an incredible amount of empty space in the
Stalin's, that governs heredity in winter wheat. universe. The distance from the sun to the nearest star is
(4) Man's place in the universe: The effect of science upon about 4.2 light years, or 25 X 1012 miles. This is in spite of
our view of man's place in the universe has been of two the fact that we live in an exceptionally crowded part of the
opposite kinds; it has at once degraded and exalted him. It universe, namely the Milky Way, which is an assemblage of
has degraded him from the standpoint of contemplation, and about 300,000 million stars. This assemblage is one of an
exalted him from that of action. The latter effect has gradu- immense number of similar assemblages; about 30 million
ally come to outweigh the former, but both have been im- are known, but presumably better telescopes would show
portant. I will begin with the contemplative effect. more. The average distance from one assemblage to the next
To get this effect with its full impact, you should read is about 2 million light years. But apparently they still feel
simultaneously Dante's Divine Comedy and Hubble on the they haven't elbow room, for they are all hurrying away from
Realm of the Nebulae-in each case with active imagination each other; some are moving away from us at the rate of

14,000 miles a second or more. The most distant of them so youngest of a large family, painful at times, but never alien
far observed are believed to be at a distance from us of about and incomprehensible.
500 million light years, so that what we see is what they
In the scientific world, all this is different. It is not by
were 500 million years ago. And as to mass: the sun weighs prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish,
about. 2 X 1027 tons, the Milky Way about 160,000 million but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws. The power you
times as much as the sun, and is one of a collection of galaxies acquire in this way is much greater and much more reliable
of which about 30 million are known. It is not easy to main- that that formerly supposed to be acquired by prayer, be-
tain a belief in one's own cosmic importance in view of such cause you never could tell whether your prayer would be
overwhelming statistics. favorably heard in heaven. The power of prayer, moreover,
So much for the contemplative aspect of man's place in a had recognized limits; it would have been impious to ask too
scientific cosmos. I come now to the practical aspect. much. But the power of science has no known limits. We
To the practical man, the nebulae are a matter of indiffer- were told that faith could remove mountains, but no one
ence. He can understand astronomers' thinking about them, believed it; we are now told that the atomic bomb can remove
because they are paid to, but there is no reason why he should mountains, and everyone believes it.
worry about anything so unimportant. What matters to him It is true that if we ever did stop to think about the cosmos
about the world is what he can make of it. And scientific man we might find it uncomfortable. The sun may grow cold or
can make vastly more of the world than unscientific man blow up; the earth may lose its atmosphere and become
could. uninhabitable. Life is a brief, small, and transitory phenome-
In the pre-scientific world, power was God's. There was non in an obscure corner, not at all the sort of thing that one
not much that man could do even in the most favorable cir- would make a fuss about if one were not personally con-
cumstances, and the circumstances were liable to become un- cerned. But it is monkish and futile---so scientific man will
favorable if men incurred the divine displeasure. This say-to dwell on such cold and unpractical thoughts. Let us
showed itself in earthquakes, pestilences, famines, and de- get on with the job of fertilizing the desert, melting Arctic
feats in war. Since such events are frequent, it was obviously ice, and killing each other with perpetually improving tech-
very easy to incur divine displeasure. Judging by the analogy nique. Some of our activities will do good, some harm, but all
of earthly monarchs, men decided that the thing most dis- alike will show our power. And so, in this godless universe,
pleasing to the Deity is a lack of humility. If you wished to we shall become gods.
slip through life without disaster, you must be meek; you Darwinism has had many effects upon man's outlook on
must be aware of your defenselessness, and constantly ready life and the world, in addition to the extrusion of purpose of
to confess it. But the God before whom you humbled your- which I have already spoken. The absence of any sharp line
self was conceived in the likeness of man, so that the universe between men and apes is very awkward for theology. When
seemed human and warm and cozy, like home if you are the did men get souls? Was the Missing Link capable of sin and

therefore worthy of hell? Did Pithecanthropus Erectus have endowment becomes dangerous when some group is singled
moral responsibility? Was Homo Pekiniensis damned? Did out as superior or inferior. If you say that the rich are abler
Piltdown Man go to heaven? Any answer must be arbitrary. than the poor, or men than women, or white men than black
But Darwinism-especially when crudely misinterpreted men, or Germans than men of any other nation, you proclaim
-threatened not only theological orthodoxy but also the a doctrine which has no support in Darwinism, and which is
creed of eighteenth-century liberalism. Condorcet was a almost certain to lead to either slavery or war. But such
typical liberal philosopher of the eighteenth century; Mal- doctrines, however unwarrantable, have been proclaimed in
thus developed his theory to refute Condorcet; and Darwin's the name of Darwinism. So has the ruthless theory that the
theory was suggested by Malthus's. Eighteenth-century weakest should be left to go to the wall, since this is Nature's
liberals had a conception of man as absolute, in its way, as method of progress. If it is by the struggle for existence that
that of the theologians. There were the "Rights of Man"; the race is improved-so say the devotees of this creed-let
all men were equal; if one showed more ability than another, us welcome wars, the more destructive the better. And so we
that was due entirely to a better education, as James Mill come back to Heraclitus, the first of fascists, who said:
told his son to prevent him from becoming conceited. "Homer was wrong in saying 'would that strife might
We m~st ask again: Should Pithecanthropus, if still alive, perish from among gods and men.' He did not see that he was
enjoy "The Rights of Man"? Would Homo Pekiniensis have praying for the destruction of the universe. . . . War is
been the equal of Newton if he could have gone to Cam- common to all, and strife is justice. . . . War is the father
bridge? Was the Piltdown Man just as intelligent as the of all and king of all; and some he has made gods and some
present inhabitants of that Sussex village? If you answer all men, some bond and some free."
all these questions in the democratic sense, you can be pushed It would be odd if the last effect of science were to revive a
back to the anthropoid apes, and if you stick to your guns, philosophy dating from 500 B.C. This was to some extent
you can be driven back ultimately on to the amoeba, which is true of Nietzsche and of the Nazis, but it is not true of any
absurd (to quote Euclid). You must therefore admit that men of the groups now powerful in the world. What is true is that
are not all congenitally equal, and that evolution proceeds by science has immensely increased the sense of human power.
selecting favorable variations. You must admit that heredity But this effect is more closely connected with science as
has a part in producing a good adult, and that education is not technique than with science as philosophy. In this chapter I
the only factor to be considered. If men are to be convention- have tried to confine myself to science as a philosophy,
ally equal politically, it must be not because they are really leaving science as technique for later chapters. After we have
equal biologically, but for some more specifically political have considered science as technique I shall return to the
reason. Such reflections have endangered political liberalism, philosophy of human power that it has seemed to suggest. I
though not, to my mind, justly. cannot accept this philosophy, which I believe to be very
The admission that men are not all equal in congenital dangerous. But of that I will not speak yet.

70 THE IMP ACT 0 F S C I ENe EON S 0 C lET Y
doesn't satisfy you, get yourself elected to Parliament. So

long as the old Liberal freedoms survive, you can engage in
propaganda for whatever excites you. Such activities suffice
to satisfy most men's combative instincts. Creative im-
pulses which are not combative, such as those of the artist
and the writer, cannot be satisfied in this way, and for them
the only solution, in a socialist State, is liberty to employ Science and War
your leisure as you like. This is the only solution, because
such activities are sometimes extremely valuable, but the
community has no way of judging, in a given case, whether
HE connection of science with war has grown gradu-
the artist's or writer's work is worthless or shows immortal
genius. Such activities, therefore, must not be systematized
or controlled. Some part of life--perhaps the most important
T ally more and more intimate. It began with Archi-
medes, who helped his cousin the tyrant of Syracuse
to defend that city against the Romans in 2 I 2 B.C. In Plu-
part~must be left to the spontaneous action of individual
tarch's Life of Marcellus there is a highly romantic and
impulse, for where all is system there will be mental and
obviously largely mythical account of the engines of war
spiritual death.
that Archimedes invented. I quote North.
(Before war had begun)

The king prayed him to make him some engines, both to assault
and defend, in all manner of sieges and assaults. So Archimedes
made him many engines, but King Hieron never occupied any of
them, because he reigned the most part of his time in peace without
any wars. But this provision and munition of engines served the
Syracusans marvellously at that time (when Syracuse was be-
sieged). When Archimedes fell to handle his engines, and to set
them at liberty, there flew in the air infinite kinds of shot, and
marvellous great stones, with an incredible great noise and force
on the sudden, upon the footmen that came to assault the city by
land, bearing down and tearing in pieces all those which came
against them, or in what place soever they lighted, no earthly
body being able to resist the violence of so heavy a weight: so that
all their ranks were marvellously disordered. And as for the galleys
that gave assault by sea, some were sunk with long pieces of
71

72 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY SCIENCE AND WAR 73
timber, which were suddenly blown over the walls with force of job, though I doubt if the Duke read as far as the last
their engines into their galleys, and so sunk them by their over- sentence. When Galileo wanted employment under the
great weight. Other being hoist up by their prows with hands of Grand Duke of Tuscany, it was on his calculations of the
iron, and hooks made like cranes' bills, plunged their poops into trajectories of cannon-balls that he relied. In the French
the sea. Other being taken up with certain engines fastened within,
Revolution, such men of science as were not guillotined
one contrary to another, made them turn in the air like a whirligig,
owed their immunity to their contributions to the war ef-
and so cast them upon the rocks by the tour walls, and splitted
fort. I know of only one instance on the other side. During
them all to fitters, to the great spoil and murder of the persons that
the Crimean War Faraday was consulted as to the use of
were within them. And sometimes the ships and galleys were lift
dean out of the water, that it was a fearful thing to see them hang poison gas. He replied that it was entirely feasible, but was
and turn in the air as they did: until that, casting their men within to be condemned on grounds of humanity. In those inefficient
them over the hatches, some here, some there, by this terrible days his opinion prevailed. But that was long ago.
turning, they came in the end to be empty, and to break against the The Crimean War could still be celebrated by Kinglake
walls, or else to fall into the sea again, when their engine left their in the romantic language of the ages of chivalry, but modern
hold. war is a very different matter. No doubt there are still
gallant officers and brave men who die nobly in the ancient
In spite of all this scientific technique, however, the manner, but it is not they who are important. One nuclear
Romans were victorious, and Archimedes was killed by a physicist is worth more than many divisions of infantry. And
plain infantry soldier. One can imagine the exultation of apart from applications of the latest science, what secures
Roman Blimps at the proof that once more these newfangled success in war is not heroic armies but heavy industry.
devices of long-haired scientists had been defeated by the Consider the success of the United States after Pearl Har-
old tried traditional forces by means of which the Empire's bor. No nation has ever shown more heroism than was shown
greatness had been built up. by the Japanese, but they were defeated by American in-
Nevertheless science continued to playa decisive part in dustrial productivity. It is to steel and oil and uranium, not
war. Greek fire kept the Byzantine Empire in existence for to martial ardor, that modern nations must look for victory
centuries. Artillery destroyed the feudal system, and by In war.
making English archery obsolete created the myth of Joan of Modern warfare, so far, has not been more destructive of
Arc. The greatest men of the Renaissance commended them- life than the warfare of less scientific ages, for the increased
selves to the powerful by their skill in scientific warfare. deadliness of weapons has been offset by the improvement in
When Leonardo wanted to get a job from the Duke of medicine and hygiene. Until recent times, pestilence almost
Milan, he wrote the Duke a long letter about his improve- invariably proved far more fatal than enemy action. When
ments in the art of fortification, and in the last sentence Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem, 185,000 of his army died in
mentioned briefly that he could also paint a bit. He got the one night, "and when they arose early in the morning, behold

74 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY SCIENCE AND WAR 75
they were all dead corpses" (II Kings xix. 35). The plague they only incurred discomfort. We seem, unfortunately, to
in Athens did much to decide the Peloponnesian War. The be entering upon an era in which wars are of the former sort.
many wars between Syracuse and Carthage were usually The atom bomb, and still more the hydrogen bomb, have
ended by pestilence. Barbarossa, after he had completely caused new fears, involving new doubts as to the effects of
defeated the Lombard League, lost almost his whole army science on human life. Some eminent authorities, including
by disease, and had to fly secretly over the Alps. The mor- Einstein, have pointed out that there is a danger of the extinc-
tality rate in such campaigns was far greater than in the two tion of all life on this planet. I do not myself think that this
great wars of our own century. I do not say that future wars will happen in the next war, but I think it may well happen
will have as Iowa casualty rate as the last two; that is a in the next but one, if that is allowed to occur. If this expec-
matter to which I will come shortly. I say only, what many tation is correct, we have to choose, within the next fifty
people do not realize, that up to the present science has not years or so, between two alternatives. Either we must allow
made war more destructive. the human race to exterminate itself, or we must forgo
There are, however, other respects in which the evils of certain liberties which are very dear to us, more especially
war hav.e much increased. France was at war, almost con- the liberty to kill foreigners whenever we feel so disposed.
tinuously, from 1792 to 1815, and in the end suffered com- I think it probable that mankind will choose its own exter-
plete defeat, but the population of France did not, after 18 I 5, mination as the preferable alternative. The choice will be
suffer anything comparable to what has been suffered made, of course, by persuading ourselves that it is not being
throughout Central Europe since 1945. A modern nation at made, since (so militarists on both sides will say) the victory
war is more organized, more disciplined, and more com- of the right is certain without risk of universal disaster. We
pletely concentrated on the effort to secure victory, than was are perhaps living in the last age of man, and, if so, it is to
possible in pre-industrial times; the consequence is that de- science that he will owe his extinction.
feat is more serious, more disorganizing, more demoralizing If, however, the human race decides to let itself go on
to the general population, than it was in the days of Napo- living, it will have to make very drastic changes in its ways of
leon. thinking, feeling, and behaving. We must learn not to say:
But even in this respect it is not possible to make a general "Never! Better death than dishonor." We, must learn to
rule. Some wars in the past were quite as disorganizing and submit to law, even when imposed by aliens whom we hate
as destructive of the civilization of devastated areas as was and despise, and whom we believe to be blind to all consider-
the Second World War. North Africa has never regained ations of righteousness. Consider some concrete examples.
the level of prosperity that it enjoyed under the Romans. Jews and Arabs will have to agree to submit to arbitration;
Persia never recovered from the Mongols nor Syria from the if the award goes against the Jews, the President of the
Turks. There have always been two kinds of wars, those in United States will have to insure the victory of the party to
which the vanquished incurred disaster, and those in which which he is opposed, since, if he supports the international

authority, he will lose the Jewish vote in New York State.

On the other hand, if the award goes in favor of the Jews, the
Mohammedan world will be indignant, and will be supported
by all other malcontents. Or, to take another instance, Eire
will demand the right to oppress the Protestants of Ulster,
and on this issue the United States will support Eire while
Britain will support Ulster. Could an international authority
survive such a dissension? Again: India and Pakistan cannot Science and Values
agree about Kashmir, therefore one of them must support
Russia and the other the United States. It will be obvious to
anyone who is an interested party in one of these disputes
that the issue is far more important than the continuance of HE philosophy which has seemed appropriate to
life on our planet. The hope that the human race will allow
itself to survive is therefore somewhat slender.
But if human life is to continue in spite of science, mankind
T science has varied from time to time. To Newton and
most of his English contemporaries science seemed to
afford proof of the existence of God as the Almighty Law-
will have to learn a discipline of the passions which, in the giver: He had decreed the law of gravitation and whatever
past, has not been necessary. Men will have to submit to the other natural laws had been discovered by Englishmen. In
law, even when they think the law unjust and iniquitous. spite of Copernicus, man was still the moral center of the
Nations which are persuaded that they are only demanding universe, and God's purposes were mainly concerned with
the barest justice will have to acquiesce when this demand is the human race. The more radical among the French
denied them by the neutral authority. I do not say that this is philosophes, being politically in conflict with the Church,
easy; I do not prophesy that it will happen; I say only that if took a different view. They did not admit that laws imply a
it does not happen the human race will perish, and will lawgiver; on the other hand, they thought that physical
perish as a result of science. laws could explain human behavior. This led them to
A clear choice must be made within fifty years, the choice materialism and denial of free will. In their view, the universe
between Reason and Death. And by "Reason" I mean will- has no purpose and man is an insignificant episode. The vast-
ingness to submit to law as declared by an international ness of the universe impressed them and inspired in them a
authority. I fear that mankind may choose Death. I hope I am new form of humility to replace that which atheism had
mistaken. made obsolete. This point of view is well expressed in a little
poem by Leopardi and expresses, more nearly than any other
known to me, my own feeling about the universe and human
paSSIOns:

SCIENCE AND VALUES 79
Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but
the real task is to alter it.
Dear to me always was this lonely hill
And this hedge that excludes so large a part
From the point of view of technical philosophy, this theory
Of the ultimate horizon from my view.
has been best developed by John Dewey, who is universally
But as I sit and gaze, my thought conceives
Interminable vastnesses of space acknowledged as America's most eminent philosopher.
Beyond it, and unearthly silences, This philosophy has two aspects, one thoretical and the
And profoundest calm; whereat my heart almost other ethical. On the theoretical side, it analyzes away the
Becomes dismayed. And as I hear the wind concept "truth," for which it substitutes "utility." It used
Blustering through these branches, I find myself to be thought that, if you believed Caesar crossed the Rubi-
Comparing with this sound that infinite silence; con, you believed truly, because Caesar did cross the
And then I call to mind eternity, Rubicon. Not so, say the philosophers we are considering: to
And the ages that are dead, and this that now say that your belief is "true" is another way of saying that
Is living, and the noise of it. And so you will find it more profitable than the opposite belief. I
In this immensity my thought sinks drowned: might object that there have been cases of historical beliefs
And sweet it seems to shipwreck in this sea.
which, after being generally accepted for a long time, have in
~ut this has become an old-fashioned way of feeling. the end been admitted to be mistaken. In the case of such
SCIence used to be valued as a means of getting to know the beliefs, every examinee would find the accepted falsehood of
world; now, owing to the triumph of technique, it is con- his time more profitable than the as yet unacknowledged
ceiv~d as sh~wi~g how to change the world. The new point truth. But this kind of objection is swept aside by the con-
of VIew, which IS adopted in practice throughout America tention that a belief may be "true" at one time and "false"
and Russia, and in theory by many modern philosophers, at another. In 1920 it was "true" that Trotsky had a great
was first proclaimed by Marx in 1845, in his Theses on part in the Russian Revolution; in 1930 it was "false." The
Feuerbach. He says: results of this view have been admirably worked out in
George Orwell's" 1984."
. The questi?n whether objective truth belongs to human thinking This philosophy derives its inspiration from science in
IS not a question of theory, but a practical question. The truth, i.e. several different ways. Take first its best aspect, as developed
the reality and power, of thought must be demonstrated in practice. by Dewey. He points out that scientific theories change from
!he contest as to the reality or non-reality of a thought which is time to time, and that what recommends a theory is that it
1solated from practice, is a purely scholastic question. . . .
"works." When new phenomena are discovered, for which it
1Translation by R. C. Trevelyan from Translations from Leopardi' no longer "works," it is discarded. A theory-so Dewey
Cambridge University Press, 1941. ' concludes-is a tool like another; it enables us to manipulate

80 THE 1M PAC T 0 F S C 1ENe EON S 0 C 1E T Y
raw material. Like any other tool, it is judged good or bad police it gives you the godlike power of making truth. You
by its efficiency in this manipulation, and like any other tool, cannot make the sun cold, but you can confer pragmatic
it is good at one time and bad at another. While it is good it "truth" on the proposition "the sun is cold" if you can
may be called "true," but this word must not be allowed its ensure that everyone who denies it is liquidated. I doubt
usual connotations. Dewey prefers the phrase "warranted whether Zeus could do more.
assertibility" to the word "truth." This engineer's philosophy, as it may be called, is dis-
The second source of the theory is technique. What do we tinguished from common sense and from most other philoso-
want to know about electricity? Only how to make it work phies by its rejection of "fact" as a fundamental concept in
for us. To want to know more is to plunge into useless defining "truth." If you say, for example, "the South Pole
metaphysics. Science is to be admired because it gives us is cold," you say something which, according to traditional
power over nature, and the power comes wholly from views, is "true" in virtue of a "fact," namely that the South
technique. Therefore an interpretation which reduces Pole is cold. And this is a fact, not because people believe
science to technique keeps all the useful part, and dismisses it, or because it pays to believe it; it just is a fact. Facts, when
only a dead weight of medieval lumber. If technique is all they are not about human beings and their doings, represent
that interests you, you are likely to find this argument very the limitations of human power. We find ourselves in a
convmcmg. universe of a certain sort, and we find out what sort of
The third attraction of prgamatism-which cannot be universe it is by observation, not by self-assertion. It is true
wholly separated from the second-is love of power. Most that we can make changes on or near the surface of the earth,
men's desires are of various kinds. There are the pleasures of but not elsewhere. Practical men have no wish to make
sense; there are aesthetic pleasures and pleasures of contem- changes elsewhere, and can therefore accept a philosophy
plation; there are private affections; and there is power. In which treats the surface of the earth as if it were the whole
an individual, anyone of these may acquire predominance universe. But even on the surface of the earth our power is
over the others. If love of power dominates, you arrive at limited. To forget that we are hemmed in by facts which are
Marx's view that what is important is not to understand the for the most part independent of our desires is a form of
world, but to change it. Traditional theories of knowledge insane megalomania. This kind of insanity has grown up as a
were invented by men who loved contemplation-a monkish result of the triumph of scientific technique. Its latest
taste, according to modern devotees of mechanism. Mecha- manifestation is Stalin's refusal to believe that heredity can
nism augments human power to an enormous degree. It is have the temerity to ignore Soviet decrees, which is like
therefore this aspect of science that attracts the lovers of Xerxes whipping the Hellespont to teach Poseidon a lesson.
power. And if power is all you want from science, the "The pragmatic theory of truth [I wrote in 1907] is
pragmatist theory gives you just what you want, without inherently connected with the appeal to force. If there is a
accretions that to you seem irrelevant. It gives you even non-human truth, which one man may know while another
more than you could have expected, for if you control the does not, there is a standard outside the disputants, to which,

82 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY SCIENCE AND VALUES 83
we may urge, the dispute ought to be submitted; hence a as it desires railways and electric light, as a comfort and a
pacific and judicial settlement of disputes is at least theoreti- help in the affairs of this world, not as providing non-human
cally possible. If, on the contrary, the only way of discover- objects to satisfy the hunger for perfection. But for those who
ing which of the disputants is in the right is to wait and see feel that life on this planet would be a life in prison if it were
which of them is successful, there is no longer any principle ,not for the windows into a greater world beyond; for those
except force by which the issue can be decided. . . . In to whom a belief in man's omnipotence seems arrogant; who
international matters, owing to the fact that the disputants desire r~ther the stoic freedom that comes of mastery over
are often strong enough to be independent of outside control, the paSSIOns than the Napoleonic domination that sees the
these considerations become more important. The hopes of kingdoms of this world at its feet-in a word, to men who
international peace, like the achievement of internal peace, do not find man an adequate object of their worship, the
depend upon the creation of an effective force of public pragmatist's world will seem narrow and petty, robbing life
opinion formed upon an estimate of the rights and wrongs of of al~ ~hat gives it.value, and making man himself smaller by
disputes. Thus it would be misleading to say that the dispute depnvmg the UnIverse which he contemplates of all its
is decided by force, without adding that force is dependent splendor."
upon justice. But the possibility of such a public opinion de-
pends upon the possibility of a standard of justice which is a Let us now try to sum up what increases in human happi-
cause, not an effect, of the wishes of the community; and ness science has rendered possible, and what ancient evils it is
such a standard of justice seems incompatible with the in danger of intensifYing.
pragmatist philosophy. This philosophy, therefore, although I do not pretend that there is any way of arriving at the
it begins with liberty and toleration, develops, by inherent millennium. Whatever our social institutions, there will be
necessity, into the appeal to force and the arbitrament of the death and illness (though in a diminishing quantity); there
big battalions. By this development it becomes equally will be old age and insanity; there will be either danger or
adapted to democracy at home and to imperialism abroad. boredom. So long as the present family survives, there will be
Thus here again it is more delicately adjusted to the require- unrequited love and parents' tyranny and children's ingrati-
ments of the time than any other philosophy which has tude; and if something new were substituted for the family,
hitherto been invented. it would bring new evils, probably worse. Human life cannot
"To sum up: Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind be made a matter of unalloyed bliss, and to allow oneself
which finds on the surface of this planet the whole of its excessive hopes is to court disappointment. Nevertheless
imaginative material; which feels confident of progress, and what can be soberly hoped is very considerable. In what
unaware of non-human limitations to human power; which follows, I am not prophesying what 'Will happen, but pointing
loves battle, with all the attendant risks, because it has no out the best that may happen, and the further fact that this
real doubt that it will achieve victory; which desires religion, best will happen if it is widely desired.

There are two ancient evils that science, unwisely used, effectively but for war. Its use in raising the standard of life
may intensify: they are tyranny and war. But I am concerned has depended mainly upon three things: democracy, trade
now rather with pleasant possibilities than with unpleasant unionism, and birth control. All three, of course, have in-
ones. curred hostility from the rich. If these three things can be
Science can confer two kinds of benefits: it can diminish extended to the rest of the world as it becomes industrialized,
bad things, and it can increase good things. Let us begin with and if the danger of great wars can be eliminated, poverty
the former. can be abolished throughout the whole world and excessive
Science can abolish poverty and excessive hours of labor. hours of labor will no longer be necessary anywhere. But
In the earliest human communities, before agriculture, each without these three things, industrialism will create a regime
human individual required two or more square miles to sus- like that in which the Pharaohs built the pyramids. In
tain life. Subsistence was precarious and death from starva- particular, if world population continues to increase at the
tion must have been frequent. At that stage, men had the same present rate, the abolition of poverty and excessive work
mixture of misery and carefree enjoyment as still makes up will be totally impossible.
the lives of other animals. Science has already conferred an immense boon on man-
Agriculture was a technical advance of the same kind of kind by the growth of medicine. In the eighteenth century
importance as attaches to modern machine industry. The people expected most of their children to die before they were
way that agriculture was used is an awful warning to our age. grown up. Improvement began at the beginning of the nine-
It intrQduced slavery and serfdom, human sacrifice, absolute teenth century, chiefly owing to vaccination. It has contin-
monarchy and large wars. Instead of raising the standard of ued ever since and is still continuing. In 1920 the infant
life, except for a tiny governing minority, it merely in- mortality in England and Wales. was 80 per thousand, in
creased the population. On the whole, it probably increased 1948 it was 34 per thousand. The general death rate in 1948
the sum of human misery. It is not impossible that indus- (10·8) was the lowest ever recorded up to that date. There
trialism may take the same course. is no obvious limit to the improvement of health that can be
Fortunately, however, the growth of industrialism has brought about by medicine. The sum of human suffering has
coincided in the West with the growth of democracy. It is also been much diminished by the discovery of anesthetics.
possible now, if the population of the world does not increase The general diminution of lawlessness and crimes of
too fast, for one man's labor to produce much more than is violence would not have been possible without science. If
needed to provide a bare subsistence for himself and his you read eighteenth-century novels, you get a strange im-
family. Given an intelligent democracy not misled by some pression of London: unlighted streets, footpads and high-
dogmatic creed, this possibility will be used to raise the waymen, nothing that we should count as a police force, but,
standard of life. It has been so used, to a limited extent, in in a futile attempt to compensate for all this, an abominably
Britain and America, and would have been so used more savage and ferocious criminal law . Street lighting, telephones,

86 THE IMP ACT 0 F S C I E N CEO N S 0 C lET Y SCIENCE AND VALUES 87
finger-printing, and the psychology of crime and punishment I will begin with the intellectual temper that is required.
are scientific advances which have made it possible for the There must be in many a desire to know the important facts,
police to reduce crime below anything that the most utopian and in most an unwillingness to give assent to pleasant illu-
philosopher of the "Age of Reason" would have imagined sions. There are in the world at the present day two great
possible. opposing systems of dogma: Catholicism and Communism.
Coming now to positive goods, there is, to begin with, an If you believe either with such intensity that you are pre-
immense increase of education which has been rendered pared to face martyrdom, you can live a happy life, and even
possible by the increased productivity of labor. As regards enjoy a happy death if it comes quickly. You can inspire
general education, this is most marked in America, where converts, you can create an army, you can stir up hatred of
even university education is free. If I took a taxi in New the opposite dogma and its adherents, and generally you can
York, I would often find that the driver was a Ph.D., who seem immensely effective. I am constantly asked: What can
would start arguing about philosophy at imminent risk to you, with your cold rationalism, offer to the seeker after
himself and me. But in England as well as in America the salvation that is comparable to the cozy homelike comfort of
improvement at the highest level is equally remarkable. a fenced-in dogmatic creed?
Read, for instance, Gibbon's account of Oxford. To this the answer is many-sided. In the first place, I do
With this goes an increase of opportunity. It is much not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be ob-
easier than it used to be for an able young man without what tained by the abdication of reason. I do not say that I can
are called "natural" advantages (i.e. inherited wealth) to offer as much happiness as is to be obtained from drink or
rise to a position in which he can make the best use of his drugs or amassing great wealth by swindling widows and
talents. In this respect there is still much to be done, but orphans. It is not the happiness of the individual convert that
there is every reason to expect that in England and in Amer- concerns me; it is the happiness of mankind. If you genuinely
ica it will be done. The waste of talent in former times must desire the happiness of mankind, certain forms of ignoble
have been appalling; I shudder to think how many "mute personal happiness are not open to you. If your child is ill,
inglorious Miltons" there must have been. Our modern and you are a conscientious parent, you accept medical
Miltons, alas, remain for the most part inglorious, though diagnosis, however doubtful and discouraging; if you accept
not mute. But ours is not a poetic age. the cheerful opinion of a quack and your child consequently
Finally, there is more diffused happiness than ever before, dies, you are not excused by the pleasantness of belief in the
and if the fear of war were removed this improvement would quack while it lasted. If people loved humanity as genuinely
be very much greater than it is. as they love their children, they would be as unwilling in
Let us consider for a moment the kind of disposition that politics as in the home to let themselves be deceived by
must be widely diffused if a good world is to be created and comfortable fairy tales.
sustained. The next point is that all fanatical creeds do harm. This is

88 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY sCI EN CE AND VA L U E s 89
obvious when they have to compete with other fanaticisms, 1866. These are only arguments against fundamentalists.
since in that case they promote hatred and strife. But it is But when a Sacred Book is retained while fundamentalism is
true even when only one fanatical creed is in the field. It can- rejected, the authority of The Book becomes vested in the
not allow free inquiry, since this might shake its hold. It must priesthood. The meaning of "dialectical materialism" changes
oppose intellectual progress. If, as is usually the case, it every decade, and the penalty for a belated interpretation
involves a priesthood, it gives great power to a caste profes- is death or the concentration camp.
sionally devoted to maintenance of the intellectual status quo The triumphs of science are due to the substitution of
and to a pretense of certainty where in fact there is no cer- observation and inference for authority. Every attempt to
tainty. revive authority in intellectual matters is a retrograde step.
Every fanatical creed essentially involves hatred. I knew And it is part of the scientific attitude that the pronounce-
once a fanatical advocate of an international language, but he ments of science do not claim to be certain, but only to be the
preferred Ido to Esperanto. Listening to his conversation, I most probable on present evidence. One of the greatest
was appalled by the depravity of the Esperantists, who, it benefits that science confers upon those who understand its
seemed, had sunk to hitherto unimaginable depths of wicked- spirit is that it enables them to live without the delusive
ness. Luckily, my friend failed to convince any government, support of subjective certainty. That is why science cannot
and so the Esperantists survived. But if he had been at the favor persecution.
head of a State of two hundred million inhabitants, I shudder The desire for a fanatical creed is one of the great evils of
to think what would have happened to them. our time. There have been other ages with the same disease:
Very often the element of hatred in a fanatical doctrine the late Roman Empire and the sixteenth century are the
becomes predominant. People who tell you they love the most obvious examples. When Rome began to decay, and
proletariat often in fact only hate the rich. Some people who when, in the third century, barbarian irruptions produced
believe that you should love your neighbor as yourself think fear and impoverishment, men began to look for safety in
it right to hate those who do not do so. As these are the vast another world. Plotinus found it in Plato's eternal world,
majority, no notable increase of loving-kindness results the followers of Mithra in a solar paradise, and the Christians
from their creed. in heaven. The Christians won, largely because their dog-
Apart from such specific evils, the whole attitude of matic certainty was the greatest. Having won, they started
accepting a belief unquestioningly on a basis of authority is persecuting each other for small deviations, and hardly had
contrary to the scientific spirit, and, if widespread, scarcely leisure to notice the barbarian invaders except to observe that
compatible with the progress of science. Not only the Bible, they were Arians-the ancient equivalent of Trotskyites.
but even the works of Marx and Engels, contain demon- The religious fervor of that time was a product of fear and
strably false statements. The Bible says the hare chews the despair; so is the religious fervor-Christian or communist-
cud, and Engels said that the Austrians would win the war of of our age. It is an irrational reaction to danger, tending to

bring about what it fears. Dread of the hydrogen bomb pro- worked to death in an arctic winter. Such men are not "coldly
motes fanaticism, and fanaticism is more likely than any- intellectual. "
thing else to lead to actual use of the hydrogen bomb. The most disquiting psychological feature of our time,
Heavenly salvation perhaps, if the fanatics are right, but and the one which affords the best argument for the necessity
earthly salvation is not to be found along that road. of some creed, however irrational, is the death wish. Every-
I will say a few words about the connection of love with one knows how some primitive communities, brought sud-
intellectual honesty. There are several different attitudes denly into contact with white men, become listless, and
that may be adopted towards the spectacle of intolerable finally die from mere absence of the will to live. In Western
suffering. If you are a sadist, you may find pleasure in it; if Europe, the new conditions of danger which exist are having
you are completely detached, you may ignore it; if you are a something of the same effect. Facing facts is painful, and the
sentimentalist, you may persuade yourself that it is not as way out is not clear. Nostalgia takes the place of energy
bad as it seems; but if you feel genuine compassion you will directed towards the future. There is a tendency to shrug the
try to apprehend the evil truly in order to be able to cure shoulders and say, "Oh well, if we are exterminated by
it. The sentimentalist will say that you are coldly intellectual, hydrogen bombs, it will save a lot of trouble." This is a tired
and that, if you really minded the sufferings of others, you and feeble reaction, like that of the late Romans to the bar-
could not be so scientific about them. The sentimentalist barians. It can only be met by courage, hope, and a reasoned
will claim to have a tenderer heart than yours, and will show optimism. Let us see what basis there is for hope.
it by letting the suffering continue rather than suffer himself. First: 1 have no doubt that, leaving on one side, for the
There is a tender hearted lady in Gilbert and Sullivan who moment, the danger of war, the average level of happiness,
remarks: in Britain as well as in America, is higher than in any previous
community at any time. Moreover improvement continues
I heard one day The fatal steel whenever there is not war. We have therefore something
A gentleman say But come in twain Important to conserve.
That criminals who Without much pain. There are certain things that our age needs, and certain
Are sawn in two If this be true things that it should avoid. It needs compassion and a wish
Do not much feel How lucky for you. that mankind should be happy; it needs the desire for knowl-
edge and the determination to eschew pleasant myths; it
Similarly, the men who made the Munich surrender needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creative-
would pretend, (a) that the Nazis didn't go in for pogroms, ness. The things that it must avoid, and that have brought it
(b) that Jews enjoyed being massacred. And fellow-travelers to the brink of catastrophe, are cruelty, envy, greed, com-
maintain, (a) that there is no forced labor in Russia, (b) that petitiveness, search for irrational subjective certainty, and
there is nothing Russians find more delectable than being what Freudians call the death wish.

92 THE IMP ACT 0 F S C I E N CEO N S 0 C lET Y SCIENCE AND VALUES 93
The root of the matter is a very simple and old-fashioned Dropping metaphor, the present situation is as follows:
thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention Science offers the possibility of far greater well-being for
it, for fear of the derisive smile with which wise cynics will the human race than has ever been known before. It offers
greet my words. The thing I mean-please forgive me for this on certain conditions: abolition of war, even distribution
mentioning it- is love, Christian love, or compassion. If you of ultimate power, and limitation of the growth of popula-
feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide in action, tion. All these are much nearer to being possible than they
a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual ever were before. In Western industrial countries, the
honesty. If you feel this, you have all that anybody should growth of population is almost nil; the same causes will have
need in the way of religion. Although you may not find the same effect in other countries as they become modern-
happiness, you will never know the deep despair of those ized, unless dictators and missionaries interfere. The even
whose life is aimless and void of purpose; for there is always distribution of ultimate power, economic as well as political,
something that you can do to diminish the awful sum of has been nearly achieved in Britain, and other democratic
human misery. countries are rapidly moving towards it. The prevention of
What I do want to stress is that the kind of lethargic war? It may seem a paradox to say that we are nearer to
despair which is now not uncommon, is irrational. Mankind achieving this than ever before, but I am persuaded that it is
is in the position of a man climbing a difficult and dangerous true. I will explain why I think so.
precipice, at the summit of which there is a plateau of deli- In the past, there were many sovereign States, any two of
cious mountain meadows. With every step that he climbs, his which might at any moment quarrel. Attempts on the lines
fall, if he does fall, becomes more terrible; with every step of the League of Nations were bound to fail, because, when
his weariness increases and the ascent grows more difficult. a dispute arose, the disputants were too proud to accept out-
At last there is only one more step to be taken, but the side arbitration, and the neutrals were too lazy to enforce it.
climber does not know this, because he cannot see beyond Now there are only two sovereign States: Russia (with
the jutting rocks at his head. His exhaustion is so complete satellites) and the United States (with satellites). If either
that he wants nothing but rest. If he lets go he will find rest becomes preponderant, either by victory in war or by an
in death. Hope calls: "One more effort-perhaps it will be obvious military superiority, the preponderant Power can
the last effort needed." Irony retorts: "Silly fellow! Haven't establish a single Authority over the whole world, and thus
you been listening to hope all this time, and see where it has make future wars impossible. At first this Authority will, in
landed you." Optimism says: "While there is life there is certain regions, be based on force, but if the Western nations
hope." Pessimism growls: "While there is life there is pain." are in control, force will as soon as possible give way to
Does the exhausted climber make one more effort, or does c()nsent. When that has been achieved, the most difficult of
he let himself sink into the abyss? In a few years those of us world problems will have been solved, and science can be-
who are still alive will know the answer. come wholly beneficent.

SCIENCE AND VALUES 95
I do not think there is reason to fear that such a regime, ganda, in any violent form, will have to be illegal.' and c~l-
once established, would be unstable. The chief causes of dren in schools will not be taught to hate and despIse foreIgn
large-scale violence are: love of power, competition, hate and nations. Active instruction in the evils of the old times and the
fear. Love of power will have no national outlet when all advantages of the new system would do the rest. I am con-
serious military force is concentrated in the international vinced that only a few psychopaths would wish to return to
army. Competition will be effectively regulated by law, and the daily dread of radioactive disintegration.
mitigated by governmental controls. Fear-in the acute form What stands in the way? Not physical or technical
in which we know it-will disappear when war is no longer obstacles, but only the evil passions in human minds: sus-
to be expected. There remains hate and malevolence. This picion, fear, lust for power, hatred, intolerance. I will not
has a deep hold on human nature. We all believe at once any deny that these evil passions are more dominant in the East
gossip discreditable to our neighbors, however slender the than in the West, but they certainly exist in the West as well.
evidence may be. After the First World War many people The human race could, here and now, begin a rapid approach
hated Germany so much that they could not believe in injury to a vastly better world, given one single condition: the
to themselves as a necessary result of extreme severity to the removal of mutual distrust between East and West. I do not
Germans. One sees in Congress a widespread reluctance to know what can be done to fulfill this condition. Most of the
admit that self-preservation requires help to Western Europe. suggestions that I have seen have struck me as silly. Mean-
America wishes to sell without buying, but finds that this while the only thing to do is to prevent an explosion some-
often involves giving rather than selling; the benefit to the how, and to hope that time may bring wisdom. The near
recipients is felt by many to be almost unendurable. This future must either be much better or much worse than the
wide diffusion of malevolence is one of the most unfortunate past; which it is to be will be decided within the next few
things in human nature, and it must be lessened if a world
years.
State is to be stable.
I am persuaded that it can be lessened, and very quickly.
If peace becomes secure there will be a very rapid increase of
material prosperity, and this tends more than anything else to
provide a mood of kindly feeling. Consider the immense
diminution of cruelty in Britain during the Victorian Age;
this was mainly due to rapidly increasing wealth in all
classes. I think we may confidently expect a similar effect
throughout the world owing to the increased wealth that
will result from the elimination of war. A great deal, also, is
to be hoped from a change in propaganda. Nationalist propa-

CHAPTER EIGHT
ON RELIGION
Some religions, like early Buddhism, were without belief in God; indeed, on March 31, 1967, news
came that the Buddhists of South Vietnam objected to admitting the idea of God into their new
constitution. I am not qualified to speak about the Asiatic religions, but I have some intimate
acquaintance with Christianity.
Ariel is probably right in smiling at me as still a Catholic below the neck. I received in childhood
and youth a pious training by nuns and priests, and I have only the fondest memories of them. I recall
with some nostalgia the modest girls in the parochial schools which I attended in Massachusetts and
New Jersey, and the lovely litanies of the Virgin, and the pleasant hymns that we youngsters of both
sexes (there were only two sexes then) sang under the leadership of our devoted and respected teachers. I
remember with gratitude my seven years under Jesuit educators in “academy” and college, though it was
in my sophomore year (1905) with them that my independent reading of Darwin and Spencer melted
my inherited theology.
Only the best side of Christianity was presented to us—a loving God, a gentle Christ, an ethics of
kindness and chastity and filial devotion; very little was said about Satan or hell, and probably those
dedicated nuns had never heard of the Inquisition. I was their pet, for I was bright, alert, and
troublesome, and perhaps they knew that my parents had destined me for the priesthood. They took
me into the arcane of their simple nunnery, and fed me the most convincing pies.
Of all the priests whom I have known the finest was Father (later Monsignor) James Mooney, stern
but kind, ascetic and devout, burning himself out in guiding youths in Seton Hall College and
Seminary. I entered the seminary in 1909, partly to please him, partly to avoid a crisis in my family,
and partly in the hope of turning the Catholic Church in America toward cooperation with the socialist
movement. For by 1906 I had replaced my Christian creed with a dream of socialism as the hope of the
world; so Utopia comes up as heaven goes down. By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my
pretenses to orthodoxy; I left the seminary, causing much grief to my parents, and years of mental
chaos and loneliness to myself.
Those who were deeply indoctrinated with Catholicism in their adolescence never quite recover
from the collapse of their faith, for Catholicism is the most attractive of religions, rich in drama, poetry,
and art, and tender to the flesh. Doubtless we denuded ones now idealize that faith, forgetting in it the
elements of absurdity, terror, and intolerance, and remembering the creed and the ritual as making us
participants in a magnificent epos that gave meaning and dignity to the simplest life, disciplined us into
decency, and brought consolation to millions of souls suffering pain, bereavement, or defeat. To me
the “death of God”
Hamood and Ranjha(PAS)
Ur Rehman the slow decay of Christianity in the educated classes of Christendom constitute
03227720772
the profoundest tragedy in modern Western history, of far deeper moment than the great wars or the
competition between capitalism and communism. I felt this when, in 1931, I wrote On the Meaning of
Life, and asked prominent persons in Europe and America what life meant for them now that God had
disappeared. I went through, in those years from 1906 to 1931, all the wondering and anguish and
sense of irreparable loss that afflicted the existentialists of France in the years that followed.
I have tried to keep some hold on the religion of my youth by interpreting its basic doctrines as
symbols that gave popular expression to philosophic truths. I can rephrase “original sin” as man’s
inherited disposition to follow those instincts of pugnacity, sexual promiscuity, and greed which may
have been necessary in the hunting stage of human history, but which need a variety of controls in an
organized society that guarantees its members protection against violence, theft, and rape; we are born
with the taint of ancestral passions in our blood. In the expulsion of “our first parents” from paradise
because they had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge I can see a forecast of Ecclesiastes’ somber
warning—“He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” for knowledge can destroy a happy
innocence and many a comforting or inspiring delusion. I can interpret Adam’s “sin,” like so many of
our own, as man’s forgivable surrender to the witchery of woman and the ecstasy of her charms.
Heaven and hell remain for me not places in another world, but states of mind often associated with
virtue and vice in this life. I can think of Christ as the personification of godliness because—barring his
rejection of his mother (Matt. 13:54–58) and some bitter words about hell (Matt. 13:37–42; Mark
9:48; Luke 16:25)—he preached a code of conduct which, if generally practiced, would make even
poverty an earthly paradise. I can praise Christianity for winning wider acceptance of moral ideas by
transforming these into pictures, narratives, dramas, and art, and thereby helping to tame the unsocial
impulses of mankind. In this sense I could think of Church leaders as religious statesmen who, whatever
they themselves might believe, used the Bible, theology, and ritual as aids in transforming congenital
savages into responsible and orderly citizens. I have at times dreamed of a reconciliation between
religion and philosophy through a “gentlemen’s agreement” in which educated men would leave
uncriticized the pictorial and consolatory creeds of simple souls, and the Church (Catholic, Protestant,
and Jewish) would refrain from hampering freedom of thought in circles and publications accessible
only to persons with time and capacity for abstract thought. There have been persons and places in
Christian history when such an entente in some measure operated: Italy under Leo X, England in the
Victorian compromise, Vienna in the days of Schnitzler and Freud.
Only a similar compromise could reconcile me to the coming control of American life by the
Catholic Church. That Church already controls South America, and it is powerful in Mexico and
French Canada. In the United States its future ascendancy is guaranteed by the higher birthrate of its
adherents. A Princeton University analysis issued in April 1967 reported that “Roman Catholic wives
were having, and expected to have, 21 percent more children than non-Catholic wives.”1
The differential between Catholic and non-Catholic fertility is diminishing through increasing use
of birth control by Catholic women; but the generally higher birthrate of the less educated as compared
with the better-educated classes, the prudent opposition of the Church to mechanical contraceptives,
and the esprit de corps of the Catholic population and clergy forecast a continued rise, even if at a
slower rate, of the Catholic proportion in our population. Many of our larger cities are already under
Catholic control; that control will in the near future extend to many legislatures; by 2100 it may
includeHamood Ur Rehman
Congress and theRanjha(PAS)
presidency. A like triumph of the birthrate over that of the Reformation
03227720772 and
the Enlightenment is taking place in French Switzerland and Western Germany, overcoming Calvin
and Luther, and may even prevail in France, laughing at Voltaire.
What kind of men will those triumphant priests be? Will they be as tolerant as Leo X and Benedict
XIV, or as dogmatic and domineering as Gregory VII and Innocent III? Today the Catholic hierarchy
is intolerant where it is supreme, as in Spain and South America; it favors and needs toleration where
Catholic power is checked by other religions, or by secular education, or by the current prestige of
science. But the prestige of science may be ruined by a war murderous beyond any precedent, and the
independence of secular education in state universities and colleges will increasingly be subject to
legislatures increasingly Catholic. We have seen federal help to education in the United States held up
by Catholic influence until the president and Congress agreed to extend aid to Catholic schools and
colleges, apparently overriding the constitutional separation of church and state. Freedom of
ecclesiastical property from taxation also seems to violate the Constitution, since in effect it is
governmental aid to religion; and the spread of such tax-exempt property places an ever-greater burden
upon the tax-paying public. The tax-free wealth of the churches in America is growing at a rate where it
may repeat in the next century the crisis of France in 1792—a government unable to meet its
obligations despite the discouragingly high taxation of its people, while vast areas of ecclesiastical
property enjoy tax-free status.
In any case I consider the “death of God” to have been as exaggerated as Mark Twain’s. Since all
men, even twins, are born unequal in some aspect of physical or mental capacity, an inequality of status
and possessions seems unavoidable short of a dictatorship complete enough to abolish all liberty; and
such dictatorships do not last. Standards of living may rise in interludes of peace, but the least affluent
nations and classes (however better off than their similars in previous centuries) will still feel and protest
against their exclusion from the possessions and privileges of the rich.
Historically such “underprivileged” nations and classes have sought consolation in supernatural
beliefs, dignifying themselves by association with mystic powers, and tempering the sting of poverty
with hopes of a better fortune in another world. Chronic illness, deformity, or grief may serve like
poverty to generate such creeds, and social heredity can sustain these, even in nations economically
prosperous. So many are the functions that supernatural religion fulfills that the skeptic must learn to
make his peace with it, only hoping that the love which radiated from Christ will overcome the fearful
intolerance of empowered creeds.

CHAPTER TEN
ON RELIGION AND MORALS
Shall we define our terms? Historically, religion has been the worship of supernatural powers. Webster
defines morality as “the quality of that which conforms to right ideals or principles of human conduct.”
But who is to determine which ideals are right? The individual himself? Reckless souls have tried to
define the right as any conduct which their conscience approves of; but in that case Casanova and the
Marquis de Sade were moral, for they tried to live up to their proclaimed ideal, which was to seduce or
beat as many women as other commitments would allow.
The word moral, of course, is from the Latin mos, moris, meaning “custom”; we may agree that what
at a given time or place is considered moral will depend upon the mores, customs, or standards
prevailing in the group. Personally I should define morality as the consistency of private conduct with
public interest as understood by the group. It implies a recognition by the individual that his life,
liberty, and development depend upon social organization, and his willingness, in return, to adjust
himself to the needs of the community.
On the basis of this definition the Church can make an impressive case for itself as an indispensable
bulwark of morality. It claims that the current relaxation of morals in Western Europe and America is
due principally to the decline of religious belief, and that the unforgivable criminals in the alleged
debacle are the philosophes of the eighteenth century, and their thousands of intellectual progeny who
have joined in the attack upon the Church. I can imagine some irate cardinal belaboring the infidels:
You ignorant fools! When will you grow up enough to understand that your individual security and
survival are the gifts of social order; that social order can be maintained only through the influence of
the family, the school, and the Church; that no number of laws or policemen can replace the moral
discipline inculcated by parents, teachers, and priests; that in attacking these formative and protective
institutions you are sapping the dykes that have been raised through the labor and wisdom of centuries
against the individualistic, disorderly, and savage impulses that lurk in the hearts of men? What will
you do when parental authority has been rejected by “liberated” youth, when young ruffians make life
a daily torture for the teachers in your schools, when your religious leaders are derided and defamed,
when the life-sustaining structure of Christian doctrine has been weakened, when your public officials
smile at their own corruption, when organized crime is more powerful than your police and your
courts, when your literature and your theaters madden men with incitements to sex, when your
daughters are raped, or seduced and abandoned by sex-crazed men, when you dare not walk the streets
at night for fear of robbery, assault, or assassination? There is only one thing you can do: come back
penitently to religion, and beg the Church to put into your children the love of Christ and the fear of
a living, avenging God.
I am touched by this argument, for I, too, have shot my pebbles against the Church, and now I am
not at all confident that man’s unsocial impulses can be controlled by a moral code shorn of religious
belief. Have I been an “unforgivable criminal” and an “ignorant fool”? I might plead that I tried to be
fair to the Catholic Church in The Age of Faith and The Reformation. I gave the attack upon
Christianity 182 of 799 pages in The Age of Voltaire, for that attack was the most important—the most
widely, deeply, lastingly influential—event of the eighteenth century; but I stated the case for the
Church with considerable sympathy in the epilogue to that book. I could never quite make up my
mind whether I was an anticlerical hero or a lover harboring a secret affection for a deserted ideal.
The ideal was deserted because it had disowned itself. The Church had overlaid the incomparable
ethics of Jesus with a complex structure of incredible dogma echoing St. Paul and mostly unknown to
Christ, and with an omnipresent incubus of organization and theocratical police lying heavy upon the
human mind, ready to stifle any independent thought by using the powers of the state to imprison,
confiscate, and kill. The local priests and nuns still remembered (and often practiced) Christianity, but
the hierarchy forgot it in a lust for unassailable and infallible authority.
The Church had begun with the Prince of Peace, who had bidden Peter put his sword back into its
sheath; it had become a warrior using swords, pikes, and guns against the Albigensians of France and
the Jews of Spain. The lowly carpenter of Nazareth had been replaced by a pope more richly housed
than most emperors, and controlling more wealth than most states. In disputes between oppressors and
oppressed the hierarchy had almost always supported the oppressors and suppressed the oppressed. The
success of humanists and humanitarians in freeing the mind and the serf emboldened men to demand
the taming of this dogmatic, obscurantist, intolerant, and reactionary power.
Has the weakening of that power been the main cause of our moral decline? No. It has been one
factor among many, but not the chief. The principal and overspreading cause of our moral “decay” has
been the Industrial Revolution. Almost every aspect of that economic convulsion has affected morality.
As examples:
1. The passage from rural mutual surveillance to concealment of the individual in the urban multitude
has almost ended the force of neighborly opinion to control personal behavior.
2. On the farm, till 1900, the family was the unit of economic production, and the authority of the
father was strengthened by his economic leadership and by family solidarity. Under industrialism
the corporation and the employee are the units of production; the family is dispersed to follow
scattered jobs; the son becomes financially independent of the father; parental authority loses its
economic base.
3. On the farm the youth reached economic maturity—i.e., the ability to support a wife and children
—almost as soon as he reached biological maturity—i.e., the ability to have children; marriage came
early, and premarital continence was less difficult than in our contemporary industrial society,
where the deferment of economic maturity has delayed marriage and made continence difficult.
4. On the farm the wife was a helpmate, an economic asset; children were economic assets after the
age of five; there was less reason than now to defer marriage or to practice birth control.
5. The postponement of marriage and the limitation of the family have spread contraceptive
knowledge
Hamood Ur and devices,
Rehman removing the sanction of fear from the prohibition 03227720772
Ranjha(PAS) of extramarital
relations.
6. Industrial competition among corporations and individuals has strengthened the profit motive and
other individualistic instincts, and has broken down moral restraints in the conduct of business.
7. The wealth spawned by improved methods of production and distribution has enabled thousands of
men and women to indulge in moral escapades that their ancestors could not afford.
8. Improvements in communication and transportation have given to local immorality and disorder a
publicity that stimulates similar deviations elsewhere; and those improvements have facilitated the
conspiracies of criminals and their flight from the scene of their crime.
9. The spread of education, while widening the classes that abstain from crime, has made the new
generation increasingly familiar with the historical and geographical diversity of moral codes and
their human origin; the inherited code has been thereby weakened, and much doubt has been cast
upon its allegedly divine sanctions and source.
10. Technology has extended and depersonalized war, and has vastly developed man’s ability to murder
or destroy.
The character and frequency of modern war is second only to the Industrial Revolution as a cause of
moral change. To fight such a war great numbers of young men are trained to use lethal weapons, and
to kill with zest and a good conscience. The survivors, returning to civil life, keep some of the habits
and temper of war, find it difficult to endure poverty amid surrounding wealth, and apply in the cities
the techniques and principles learned in the camp and on the battlefield. The military class rises in
prestige and influence, and its ways of thought, freed from moral considerations, affect the government
and the people. Lying becomes a major industry of states. News and history are colored to inculcate
hatred now of one enemy or competitor, now of another. Nationalism overrides morality, defers social
reform, and becomes a religion stronger than any church.
From this résumé of old and familiar facts we conclude that morals would have changed even if
religious beliefs had not been impaired by the conflict between religion and philosophy. Obviously the
old moral code was adjusted to an agricultural society, and could not be expected to fit, without many
alterations, the conditions of modern industrial life. Therefore we should speak of a moral change
rather than a moral decay; the present age is experimenting, at its own peril, to find how far individual
freedom can comport with the stability of society, the protection of women, and the security of person
and property.
Such a transformation is bound to involve transitional chaos and some reckless extremes, but
extremes often cancel themselves into moderation, and the chaos may compel new forms of discipline;
the proposal for requiring two years of national service may be one of such forms, but it may also be
the door to authoritarian government. As our young anarchists (barring a few congenital knights of the
road) reach economic competence and place, and mature into intellectual perspective and some
knowledge of the nature and limitations of man, they will probably adjust themselves to the discipline
of industry and parentage; the radicals of today will become the liberals of tomorrow and the frightened
conservatives of declining years. Which of us, if really alive, was not a rebel in his youth?
I am not sure, but I can reasonably hope, that as the United States has maintained a stable
government for almost two centuries despite the separation of church and state, our industrial society
will gradually develop a secular ethic that—with lessened poverty and widened education—will
function as effectively as a theological morality. We must not imagine that past generations were much
more moral than our own; the historian does not find them so, and the elders in every one of them
thought them abandoned to Satan. Having freed ourselves from an oppressive hierarchy, we must not
run away from our perilous liberty to seek mental quiet and asphyxiation in the womb of a loving but
tyrannical Mother Church.
I have been reading with pride and amusement the argument that I made, in a little book published
in 1917, for Socrates’s view that intelligence is the highest virtue, and that education in intelligence can
be made the basis of a natural morality. I must confess that I underestimated the role of sympathy—
fellow feeling—in moral sentiments, as analyzed by David Hume and Adam Smith; and I realize that
desire, instinct, and passion are the motive forces behind human behavior, even behind human reason.
But I defined intelligence as the coordination of desires through a “forecasting of effects,” and as
delayed reaction allowing fuller perception of the situation and a more adequate response. Intelligence
does not claim to be the source of action; it is the harmonious and effective unification of the sources.
Such intelligence is hard to teach, but it can be taught, in varying degrees, to differently developed
minds. It does not seem impossible to make youth understand that the stability of a society, and the
prevalence of moral restraint, are prerequisites to personal security, and that moral self-restraint is one
of the surest guarantees of personal advancement and fulfillment. Actually crime and immorality, by
and large, are least frequent in the best-educated ranks of a nation. Imagine what a natural ethic could
do if as much time and care were spent in teaching it as the Church spends in inculcating a supernatural
code. Let every grade in school, from kindergarten to PhD, have an hour per week of moral
instruction, using a succession of textbooks of rising complexity from simple primers to mature treatises
written by well-behaved philosophers, clergymen, and men of affairs, and rewritten by men allergic to
preaching and gifted with clarity. Let such courses by humanized with readable biographies of moral
leaders in thought and life: Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, Maimonides,
Spinoza, Florence Nightingale, Schweitzer. I dream of all churches welcoming to their naves, an hour
each week, all persons, of whatever theology or none, for discussion of practical ways in which human
behavior, even in a secular world, could approach to the ideals of Christ. If more and more each new
generation should receive more and more education it is reasonable to believe that morals would
improve.
They will never satisfy the moralist, for morality is unnatural, goes against the grain; we are
equipped by nature for a hunting life in woods and fields, rather than a mechanical life in cities, offices,
and factories. But the problem of moral degeneration must be solved, for in the last analysis morality
and civilization are one.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ON WAR
In the year 1830, a French customs official named Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes
unearthed in the valley of the Somme some strange implements of flint now interpreted by the learned
as the weapons with which the men of the Old Stone Age made war. These stones are called coups de
poing, or “blows of the fist,” for one end was rounded for grasping while the other was pointed for
persuasion. With these modest tools of death, it seems, Neanderthal men, from what is now Germany,
and Cro-Magnon men, from what is now France, fought fifty thousand years ago for the mastery of the
continent, and, after a day of lusty battle, left perhaps a score of dead on the field. In the First and
Second World Wars, modern Germans and modern Frenchmen fought again in that same valley, for
that same prize, with magnificent tools of death that killed ten thousand men in a day. The art that has
made the most indisputable progress is the art of war.
For five hundred centuries, two thousand generations have struggled for that terrain in a calendar of
wars whose beginning is as obscure as its end. Even the sophisticated mind, made blasé by habituation
to magnitude and marvels, is appalled by the panorama of historic war, from the occasional brawls and
raids of normally peaceful “savages,” through the sanguinary annals of Egypt, Sumer, Babylonia, and
Assyria, the untiring fratricide of the Greek city-states, the conquests of Alexander and Caesar, the
triumphs of Imperial Rome, the wars of expanding Islam, the slaughters of Mongol hordes,
Tamerlane’s pyramid of skulls, the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses, the Thirty Years’ War,
the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years’ War, the English, American, French, and Russian
Revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Spanish-American
War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Second World War . . . This, to our pessimistic
moments, seems to be the main and bloody current of history, beside which all the achievements of
civilization, all the illumination of literature and art, all the tenderness of women and the chivalry of
men, are but graceful incidents on the bank, helpless to change the course or character of the stream.
Such a chronicle of conflict exaggerates, without doubt, the role of war in the record of our race.
Strife is dramatic, and (to most of our historians) peaceful generations appear to have no history. So our
chroniclers leap from battle to battle, and unwittingly deform the past into a shambles. In our saner
moments we know that it is not so; that lucid intervals of peace far outweigh, in any nation’s story, the
mad seizures of war; that the history of civilization—of law and morals, science and invention, religion
and philosophy, letters and the arts—runs like hidden gold in the river of time.
Nevertheless, war has always been. Will it always be? What are its causes in the nature of men and in
the structure of societies? Can it be prevented, or diminished in frequency, or in any measure
controlled?
The causes of war are psychological, biological, economic, and political—that is, they lie in the
natural impulses of men, in the competitions of groups, in the material needs of societies, and in the
fluctuations of national ambition and power.
The basic causes are in ourselves, for the state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of
history. The major instincts of mankind—acquisition, mating, fighting, action, and association—are
the ultimate sources of war. For thousands, perhaps millions, of years men were uncertain of their food
supply; not knowing yet the bounty of husbanded soil, they depended upon the fortunes of the hunt.
Having captured prey they tore or cut it to pieces, often on the spot, and gorged themselves to their
cubic capacity with the raw flesh and the warm gore; how could they tell when they might eat again?
Greed is eating, or hoarding, for the future; wealth is originally a hedge against starvation; war is at first
a raid for food. Perhaps all vices were once virtues, indispensable in the struggle for existence; they
became vices only in the degree to which social order and increasing security rendered them
unnecessary for survival. Once men had to chase, to kill, to grasp, to overeat, to hoard; a hundred
millenniums of insecurity bred into the race those acquisitive and possessive impulses which no laws or
morals or ideals, but only centuries of security, can mitigate or destroy.
The desire for mates, and parental and filial love, write half of the private history of mankind, but
they have not often been the causes of war. Probably the “rape of the Sabine women” was the amorous
result of a conflict for land and food.
The fighting instinct enters more obviously into the analysis. Nature develops it vigorously as an aid
in getting food or mates; it arms every animal with organs of offense and defense, and lends to the
physically weaker species the advantages of cunning and association. Since, by and large, those groups
survived that excelled in food-getting, mate-getting, and fighting, these instincts have been selected and
intensified through the generations, and have budded into a hundred secondary forms of acquisition,
venery, and strife.
As the quest for food has expanded into the amassing of great fortunes, so the fighting instinct has
swelled into the lust for power and the waging of war. The lust for power is in most men a useful
stimulus to ambition and creation, but in exceptional men it can become a dangerous disease, a cancer
of the soul, which goads them on to fight a thousand battles, usually by proxy. Nietzsche, nervous and
sickly, disqualified for military service, thrilled at the sight and sound of cavalry galloping along a
Frankfurt street, and at once composed a paean in honor of war and the “will to power.”
The instinct of action enters into the picture as a love of adventure, or escape from relatives or
routine. A wider source is the instinct of association. Men fear solitude, and naturally seek the
protection of numbers. Slowly a society develops within whose guarded frontiers men are free to live
peaceably, to accumulate knowledge and goods, and to worship their gods. Since our self-love
overflows, by an extension of the ego, into love of our parents and children, our homes and
possessions, our habits and institutions, our wonted environment and transmitted faith, we form in
time an emotional attachment for the nation and the civilization of which these are constituent parts;
and when any of them is threatened, our instinct of pugnacity is aroused to the limit demanded by the
natural cowardice of mankind. In a divided and lawless world such patriotism is reasonable and
necessary, for without it the group could not survive, and the individual could not survive without the
group.Hamood Ur Rehman
Prejudice is fatal Ranjha(PAS)
to philosophy, but indispensable to a nation. 03227720772
Put all these passions together—gather into one force the acquisitiveness, pugnacity, egoism,
egotism, affection, and lust for power of a hundred million souls, and you have the psychological
sources of war. Take them in their mass, and they become biological sources. The group, too, as well as
the individual, can be hungry or angry, ambitious or proud; the group, too, must struggle for existence,
and be eliminated or survive. The protective fertility of organisms soon multiplies mouths beyond the
local food supply; the hunger of the parts, as in the body, becomes the hunger of the whole, and species
war against species, group against group, for lands or waters that may give more support to abounding
life. Euripides, twenty-three hundred years ago, attributed the Trojan War to the rapid multiplication
of the Greeks.
Group hunger begets group pugnacity, and pugnacity develops in the group, as in the individual,
organs of protection and attack. In the group these are called armament; and when they are powerful,
they may themselves, like the boy’s consciousness of his biceps, become a secondary source of war. On
either scale some armament is necessary, for struggle is inevitable, and competition is the trade of life.
These psychological and biological forces are the ultimate origins of human conflict. From them
flow the national rivalries that generate the proximate causes of war—those economic and political
causes with which superficial analysis so readily contents itself.
The basic economic cause is rivalry for land: land to receive a designedly expanding population, land
to provide material resources, land to open up new subjects to conscription and taxation. So the
ancient Greeks spread through the Aegean, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean to Byzantium,
Ephesus, Alexandria, Syracuse, Naples, Marseilles, and Spain; so the English spread through the world
in the last two centuries; and so the Americans are spreading now.
These standard provocations to conquest have been sharpened and magnified by the Industrial
Revolution. To make war successfully, a modern nation must be wealthy; to be wealthy it must develop
industry; to maintain industry, it must, in most cases, import food, fuel, and raw materials; to pay for
these, it must export manufactured goods; to sell these, it must find foreign markets; to win these, it
must undersell its competitors or wage foreign war. As like as not, it will make war for any of the goods
it considers vital, or for control of the routes by which they must come.
Greece fought for control of the Aegean, the Hellespont, and the Black Sea, because it was
dependent upon Russian grain. Rome had to conquer Egypt because it needed corn, and Asia Minor
because it needed markets for its handicrafts and fortunes for its politicians. Egyptian wheat, Near
Eastern oil, and Indian cotton explain many a battle in British history; Spanish silver explains the wars
of Rome with Carthage; Spanish copper has something to do with German aid to Fascist Spain. Our
sinless selves had a taste for sugar in 1898; and far back in 1853 we pointed our gifts and cannon at a
Japanese government and persuaded Japan to transform itself into an industrial nation eager for
foreign markets and spoils. These Japanese chickens came home to roost at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The business cycle adds its own contribution to the causes of modern war. Since men are by nature
unequal it follows that in any society a majority of abilities will be possessed by a minority of men;
from which it follows that sooner or later, in any society, a majority of goods will be possessed by a
minority of men. But this natural concentration of wealth impedes, by the repeated reinvestment of
profits in promoting production, widespread purchasing power among the people; production leaps
Hamood
ahead of Ur Rehman surpluses
consumption; Ranjha(PAS)rise and generate either depression or war. For either production
03227720772 must
stop to let consumption catch up, or foreign markets must be found to take the surplus that was
unpurchased at home.
Add a few political causes of war. The first law of governments is self-preservation; their second law
is self-extension; their appetite grows by what it feeds on, and they believe that when a state ceases to
expand it begins to die. Furthermore, the distribution of power among nations is always changing
through the discovery or development of new processes or resources, through the rise or decline of
population, through the weakening of religion, morals, and character, or through some other material,
biological, or psychological circumstance; and the nation that has become strong soon asserts itself over
the nation that has become weak. Hence the difficulty of writing a peace pact that will perpetuate a
present arrangement. Wonderful indeed is the treaty that does not generate a war. Peace is war by other
means.
If the foregoing analysis is substantially correct, we must not expect too much from those who seek
to end or mitigate war. William James, in his kindly way, hoped that the enrollment of the nation’s
youth, for a year or two, in a far-flung “War against Nature” would give creative expression to the
impulses of action, adventure, and association, and so provide a “moral equivalent for war”; America is
trying this in its excellent Peace Corps; but obviously such measures do not reach to the major sources
of international strife. The League of Nations (except under Briand and Stresemann) was a conspiracy
of the victors to preserve their gains; it had to fail as soon as the fertility and industry of the defeated
had altered the balance of national power prescribed by the Treaty of Versailles. The life of nations
cannot be straightjacketed into immutability. Pacifism would be a cure for war if it could survive the
call to arms and national defense; the same English youth that had, in the Oxford Union, vowed never
to take up arms for England, took them up manfully against Hitler.
Vague appeals to the conscience of mankind to put an end to war have had little effect throughout
history, for there is no conscience of mankind. Morality is a habit of order generated by centuries of
compulsion; international morality awaits international order; international order awaits international
force; conscience follows the policeman. A wise people will love peace and keep its powder dry.
An effective approach to the problem of war will proceed, not by large and generous emotions, but
by the specific study and patient adjustment of specific causes and disputes. Peace must be planned and
organized as realistically as war—with provision for every factor, and prevision for every detail. This
cannot be done in an occasional moment stolen by statesmen from internal affairs; it requires the full-
time attention of first-rate minds. The incentives to war are so numerous and powerful that each of
them should be the major concern of an international commission specifically appointed for its
consideration and adjustments. There are so many specialists, economists, and diplomats lying around
(to use this verb in a purely physical sense) that we might well distribute them into commissions
severally assigned to examine the economic causes of war, to hear the disputing groups patiently, to
investigate possibilities of conciliation, to make specific and practicable recommendations to their
governments, and to do their work without the explosive excitement of publicity. We must isolate the
germs of war at their source, and sterilize them with understanding and negotiation.
One such commission would study the problems generated by reckless human fertility. It could
promote policies and methods of family limitation wherever the birthrate (minus the death rate) is
Hamood
outrunning Ur Rehman
the Ranjha(PAS)
visible or prospective means of subsistence; it would prepare international procedures
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for mitigating local shortages of food; it would seek territorial outlets for the expansion of congested
populations. A permanent commission might study the access of industrial nations to material, fuels,
and markets. It should be a major function of the Department of State to wage peace vigorously and
continuously on every front.
In the end we must steel ourselves against utopias and be content, as Aristotle recommended, with a
slightly better state. We must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves. Perhaps, if
we can broaden our borders with intelligent study, impartial histories, modest travel, and honest
thought—if we can become conscious of the needs and views and hopes of other peoples, and sensitive
to the diverse values and beauties of diverse cultures and lands, we shall not so readily plunge into
competitive homicide, but shall find room in our hearts for a wider understanding and an almost
universal sympathy. We shall find in all nations qualities and accomplishments from which we may
learn and refresh ourselves, and by which we may enrich our inheritance and our posterity. Someday,
let us hope, it will be permitted us to love our country without betraying mankind.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ON POLITICS
In preparing these chapters I have often looked into my 1929 ebullition, The Mansions of Philosophy,
to avoid repeating old sallies and arguments. Sometimes I paused in admiration of my youthful
eloquence (I was only forty-four, which is childhood in philosophy). But one chapter shocked me as the
most one-sided, unfair, and immature disquisition that ever came from my pen.
It was entitled “Is Democracy a Failure?” And it described with enthusiasm all the faults of
democracy in America: its dependence upon a public opinion misinformed, misled, and thoughtlessly
passionate; its nominations controlled by political machines favoring obedient mediocrities; its
municipal officialdom corrupt and incompetent; its legislatures and Congress subservient to lobbies and
wealth; its leaders too busy with electioneering to have time to think. My nostrum for these ills was the
establishment, in our universities, of accredited schools of administration, diplomacy, and government;
the automatic right of any graduate of such a school to present himself as a candidate for municipal
office; the automatic eligibility to state office of any graduate after serving two terms as mayor of a
state’s largest city; the automatic eligibility to Congress of any graduate after serving two terms as
governor; and the automatic eligibility for the presidency or vice presidency of any graduate after
serving two terms as senator. Party and machine nominations would continue, and would be open to
all, regardless of fitness, but education would no longer be a disqualification for office; and even the
parties might now and then nominate a man as specifically trained for public administration as a
student is trained for the practice of medicine or law. I still cherish this nicely graduated scheme, and I
rejoice to note how many universities have organized schools of government. But, for the rest, I
repudiate that early article as a shameful outburst of ingratitude and spleen. (I shiver to imagine what I
should think of the present essay if by some mischance I should live to reread it many years hence.)
Since 1929 American democracy has matched its defects with its achievements. It has raised the
quality of its mayors, governors, and presidents: Franklin Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, John
Lindsay, and Nelson Rockefeller have inspired us with their courage, integrity, and vision. The national
government has met the challenges of depression, racial crisis, and two world wars. It has often been far
ahead of public opinion in measures that later won general acclaim. It has made almost as many
concessions to labor as to business; it has begun to protect borrowers from usurers, and purchasers from
false packaging or labeling. And it has saved the American economy by mitigating capitalistic rigors
with the welfare state.
I know that the welfare state is distrusted by many sincere conservatives as biologically unsound;
men, they believe, are naturally averse to labor, and need the fear of hunger or want as a prod to work.
Some Hamood
critics would addRanjha(PAS)
Ur Rehman that poverty is mostly due to native inferiority in body, mind, or character
03227720772
rather than to inequities in the relations between employers and employees; a few would secretly agree
with Nietzsche that the poor are the social organism’s natural waste, and we must stoutly resign
ourselves to its unseemly necessity. We recall Macaulay’s warning that democracy would collapse when
the poor used their electoral power to rob rich Peter to pay lazy Paul. Polybius expressed the same idea
in 130 BC:
When, by their foolish thirst for reputation, they [popular leaders] have created among the masses an
appetite for gifts and the habit of receiving them, democracy in its turn is abolished, and changes into
a rule of force and violence. . . . For the people, having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of
others, and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others, . . . degenerate into perfect savages,
and find once more a master and monarch.1
So the Greek historian, following Plato, thought that democracy would by its own excesses pass into
dictatorship.
The danger is real. I admit that thousands of people use pensions, relief checks, and unemployment
benefits to finance long periods of indolence; that many employees live apart from their wives and
children in order that these may be eligible for relief; and that voluntary idleness at public expense has
become a drain on municipal, state, and national treasuries, which are maintained by ever-rising
taxation. Nevertheless, the welfare state must be preserved and extended (in this matter we are far
behind the British), not only as a dictate of decency but as a measure of insurance against class conflict
at home and foreign competition for the suffrages of mankind.
It is to the honor of the American economy that it can flourish only if the power of the people to
purchase goods rises step by step with their power to produce them; and production is repeatedly
advanced by improved technology, management, and skills.
We have elsewhere argued that all men are born unequal; that these natural inequalities grow with
time and the complexity of productive techniques; that the consequently concentrated wealth is mostly
invested in mechanizing and accelerating production; that the gap between production and
consumption widens until production slows to let consumption catch up. But the retarding of
production lowers the total of wages paid, still further widens the gap between wealth and poverty, and
threatens the existence of the free enterprise system. The cheapest alternative to this vicious spiral is an
ampler distribution of the wealth generated by the zest and stimulations of capitalism. From 1933 to
1965 the government of the United States achieved this by encouraging the organization and
bargaining power of labor, by extending the graduated tax on incomes and estates, and by payments
from the treasury to promote public health, security, education, recreation, and employment; i.e., by
extending the welfare state. Next to the brilliant repulse of Fascist Germany and imperialistic Japan,
this has been the most vital achievement of American statesmanship in our time.
Largely for these reasons I have, since 1916, favored the Democratic as against the Republican Party,
except that in 1928 I supported Herbert Hoover. As an aging cub reporter for the Scripps-Howard
newspapers at the Democratic Convention in that year I was captivated by the handsome presence and
buoyant spirit of Franklin Roosevelt, who there nominated Alfred Smith; and I suggested that the
Convention would show good sense if it nominated the nominator rather than his religion-hobbled
nominee. Of course no one listened to me, but I had my way in 1932, and I voted for Roosevelt as
long as he lived. I rank him among our greatest presidents. He rescued democracy abroad by coming to
the aid of France and England in 1941; he rescued democracy at home by making government the
instrument of the common weal instead of the servant of capital. Because of him and his successors the
American system was so chastened and strengthened that it has been able to meet every challenge and
comparison. The grandchildren of our tycoons will build statues to him.
The war against poverty is in its early stages; it is an immense and unprecedented enterprise; it is
entitled to make mistakes. It is handicapped by the growth of ghettos in our cities and of racial
animosities in our hearts. In these respects Western Europe is more fortunate than the United States. Its
cities are better managed by officials better trained, its traditions of social order are more deeply rooted
in time and character, and its unassimilated ethnic minorities are relatively small. I have been appalled,
on my annual visits to New York, to see how foreign immigration, white emigration, and the
differential birthrate are conspiring to make our leading city a confusion of poor foreign people
surrounding poor white enclaves, amid a forest of hotel or office towers possessed by proud
suburbanites who enter in the morning and flee in the afternoon. Are our great cities doomed to race
hatreds, class war, and relief expenditures threatening municipal bankruptcy? How shall we ever absorb
these hostile millions into American life?
We shall do it by passing their children and grandchildren through our schools and colleges, through
our political institutions, and through the training of skills in an “equal opportunity” economy. For a
decade or more there will be suspicion, resentment, disorder, violence, but these will subside. Over a
century ago, when the Know Nothing Party and its riots inflamed America, it was dangerous to be a
Catholic; now in many of our cities it is dangerous not to be a Catholic. In my youth the Italians in
America were digging ditches; today Italians control the largest bank in the United States. Consider the
progress made by the American Jews in the last half-century: in my youth I knew them as the harassed
and impoverished people of the Lower East Side in New York; now I know their descendants as
forming one of the most numerous, affluent, and respected elements in Los Angeles. History does not
forbid us to hope for a similar rise of our darker-skinned brothers and sisters. The melting pot still
melts, though not so much by mingling bloods as by raising the level of education and the standard of
life. The process has been retarded by color differences and excessive immigration; and yet there are
hundreds of thousands of prosperous minorities in the United States today. How many more will there
be after another half-century of universal free schooling, and widened access to positions that develop
intelligence and responsibility?
I have followed with care the helpful criticisms that others have made of our educational system. My
own estimate of it derives from no systematic study but from experience as a teacher in a public school,
a private school, a college, and a university—all, however, before 1938. I believe that European schools
and colleges give the student a better training than ours do in knowledge, thinking, and discipline of
character and mind. But I count not on the superiority of our schools so much as upon their number
and reach. I see them responding to criticism, checking their laxity, paring their frills, and raising the
mental level and equipment of a whole people, including racial minorities. It is a heroic enterprise,
facing apathy, prejudice, and a taxpayers’ revolt; but when I am driven to my last stand I place my faith
in the courage of our people, and our educational institutions, to justify America in history.
I know the defects of democracy; I have too readily advertised and condemned them. I know also,
through Hamood Ur Rehman
history Ranjha(PAS)
and travel, the other forms of government. I have read of Louis XIV, his gorgeous
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robes and the grandeur of Versailles; but behind that costly façade I have seen the dehumanized
peasants described in the most famous pages of La Bruyère. I have no wish to exchange Moscow or
Peking for Washington or Los Angeles. I believe that ability has more abundant opportunities to reach
maturity and influence in our democracy than under aristocracies or monarchies—or under
democracies still obstructed by aristocratic privilege. I am grateful for the freedom of mind that I have
enjoyed in America; I do not think I should have found so wide and open a road in any other land.
I recognize that many evils tarnish our record—aggressive war, childish chauvinism, political
corruption, business chicanery, racial inequities, proliferating crime, broken marriages, declining
morals, and decadent arts. Nor do I expect that the nature of man will change to remove the biological
sources of our sins and ills. Against these woes the cries of our pessimists are justified and useful. But I
see the best as well as the worst, and I will not apologize for my country. If the Founding Fathers could
come back they would be amazed at the degree to which we have reduced poverty, drudgery, illiteracy,
and governmental tyranny. A large part of the utopias described by Thomas More, Samuel Butler,
Edward Bellamy, and H. G. Wells has been materially realized, along with the universal education,
adult suffrage, freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion which were among the hopes and
dreams of eighteenth-century philosophers.
Let us continue to complain, to demand, and to rebel; this, too, is part of our virtue. But as for me,
favored and fortunate (and countless Americans might say the same), I should be the worst ingrate if I
did not thank the fates that deposited me here between these seas, and within these liberties.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ON CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM
Why do we become more conservative as we age? Is it because we have found a place in the existing
system, have risen to a larger income, and have invested our savings in an economy, which any
significant revolt might alter to our loss? I believe this is the primary cause. But we should admit a
secondary cause, which conservatives hold to be fundamental: a growing knowledge of human nature,
and of the limits that human behavior puts upon the attainment of ideals. Presumably there is also a
physiological cause—a lessening of vital forces as the years advance.
My own passage from devout radicalism to cautious liberalism may illustrate the transition, and may
allow the reader to discount my conclusions. I have told this story elsewhere, I summarize it here.
Raised in a Roman Catholic family of confirmed Republicans, I leaped in a year (c. 1905, aged
nineteen) into agnosticism and socialism. I entered a Catholic seminary in 1909 in the delusion that I
might, as a priest, influence the Church to support socialist ideas. In 1911 I left the seminary, and
became the sole teacher and chief pupil in the Ferrer Modern School in New York. The school had
been named after a martyred Spanish rebel against Church control of schools in Spain, and was
managed by a board of anarchists and socialists led by Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Harry
Kelly, and Leonard Abbott. Emma Goldman was a doctrinaire and authoritarian apostle of liberty.
Berkman was a sincere and lovable unionist who, at the age of twenty-two, tried to kill Henry Clay
Frick (1892), head of the Carnegie Steel Company; deported to Soviet Russia in 1919, he left it as the
contrary of his ideal, lived in France in disillusionment and despair, and killed himself in 1936. Harry
Kelly was a tireless devotee, who opposed the printing of an article by me in the magazine Mother Earth
on the ground that I followed a socialist rather than an anarchist line; I learned then that rebels have the
same instincts as other people, without the caution that keeps others in line. Leonard Abbott was a
highly cultured “philosophical anarchist,” whose belief in liberty and rebellion was tempered by an
open mind and a generous spirit; we called him, in no financial sense, “the angel of the radical
movement.” He was one of the finest human beings that I have known.
I remained a socialist from 1905 till 1916, when I betrayed the faith by working for the reelection of
Woodrow Wilson. A socialist daily, the New York Call, branded my apostasy with a pungent editorial
entitled “We Know This Breed.” I joined Amos Pinchot’s “Wilson Volunteers,” who barnstormed New
York State. Walter Lippmann, who had already (1916) made his mark as a political philosopher,
addressed major gatherings in halls or theaters; I spoke to small groups in the streets. Wilson lost the
state.
My socialist sympathies survived that election, and were rekindled by the Russian Revolution
(1917),Hamood
whichUrI Rehman
hailed Ranjha(PAS)
as a blessing for all mankind. This faith endured till 1932, when Ariel and I
03227720772
traveled through Siberia and European Russia; there we saw not Utopia but chaos, regimentation,
brutality, and starvation; we came back so disillusioned that we have never been quite the same again. I
wrote in haste some magazine articles, which I gathered into a little book, The Tragedy of Russia (1933);
they lost me a host of friends among the radicals and literati of New York.
Of course I judged Russia foolishly in 1932. Despite my addiction to history I failed to interpret
those awful conditions in the light of the past. I forgot that Russia, for hundreds of years, had known
bitter exploitation and poverty; that it had just waged and lost a war which had shattered the order and
economy of the nation; that the new state had had to spend its surviving human and material resources
in fighting off enemies and former allies on a dozen fronts from Germany to Japan; and that fifteen
years were not enough to beat all that chaos into order, or to transform that agony and starvation into
plenty and content. I could not realize that in the economic disarray of 1917, the general illiteracy, and
the collapse of local and central government, a peaceful and operative democracy would have been
impossible. Russia in 1917–32 was a nation at war, surrounded and besieged, threatened with conquest
and disintegration. It did what any nation so situated would have to do: it put democracy aside as a
luxury of order, security, and peace, and set up a dictatorial regime as the sole alternative to disaster.
Communism in those years was a war economy, such as we ourselves may have to resort to in the next
world war; and perhaps its continuance depended upon the persistent threat and fear of war.
Meanwhile that once merciless dictatorship startled the world with its accomplishments. In fifty
years it had made Russia one of the strongest nations on earth. Despite droughts, starvation, revolts,
purges, and concentration camps, and a thousand mistakes of economic or political policy, the Russian
government brought its people out of devastation to a level of prosperity unknown to them in Czarist
days, and perhaps that level might have equaled that of Western Europe had not Russia been compelled
to spend so much of its resources and its manpower upon military reorganization and armament.
Though Russia was attacked in 1941 by the strongest, best-trained, best-equipped, and best-led army
then in existence, although its defenders were driven across the breadth of European Russia to
Stalingrad, its soldiers and people fought with heroic courage and perseverance, beat the invaders back
across Russia, back to Berlin, and there put an end to the Second World War. It was American
materials that made this historic recovery possible, but it was Russian flesh and blood that made it real.
It was to meet the challenge of communism, as well as to end a critical depression, that Franklin
Roosevelt, in the most brilliant statesmanship of the twentieth century, devised the welfare state.
President Truman carried this peaceful revolution forward; President Johnson extended it to a scope
exceeded only in Great Britain. These Democratic administrations did not enact socialism, but they
achieved such a Hegelian synthesis of capitalism and socialism that lifelong socialists like Norman
Thomas could feel that they had not lived in vain.
The architects of the welfare state recognized the virtues of capitalism: they perceived the creative
stimulus that had been given to invention, enterprise, production, and commerce by the freedom that
the laissez-faire governments, after 1789, had allowed to the acquisitive and competitive instincts of
mankind. But they also saw that unchecked liberty permitted the natural inequality of economic ability
to develop an extreme concentration of wealth, and that most of this wealth was reinvested in
accelerating production, and that this caused periodic depressions dangerous to the survival of the
system. Of what use was it that invention, mechanization, and able management multiplied production
Hamood Ur Rehman
if the purchasing power Ranjha(PAS)
of the people did not grow commensurately? 03227720772
So an increasing number of capitalists, under the tutelage of Democratic presidents, learned that
they might save—perhaps enrich—themselves by accepting unions, paying higher wages, and
surrendering more of their profits and salaries to the government. A rising rate of taxation enabled
federal and local administrations to spread money in relief, pensions, social services, education, medical
aid, hospital care, and public works. Some of the concentrated wealth was distributed; the purchasing
power of the people came closer to their ever-expanding productive capacity; the system worked and
spread abundance, until wealth was again concentrated and necessitated another distribution.
Year by year the government took and disseminated more of the wealth, managed or controlled
more of the economy. Socialism inserted itself into capitalism without destroying it; enterprise,
competition, and the pursuit of profit still enjoyed a stimulating freedom; great fortunes were still
made; some of these were squandered in luxury, revelry, or display—debutante parties costing $50,000;
some, to avoid taxation, were transformed into “foundations” generally helpful to education, science,
medicine, and religion; but the greater part of the new fortunes fell forfeit to the state. The consequent
extension of welfare services by the government, added to automated production and rationalized
distribution, reduced poverty to a point lower than any hitherto known to history, though still
alarmingly real. Now the rival systems—communism plus dictatorship vs. capitalism plus the welfare
state—stand face-to-face in competition for the allegiance of mankind.
My choice between them was not impartial. I was born in the United States; my roots and friends
are here; only in a democracy could I have had the opportunities that I have enjoyed for education,
freedom to travel, and uncensored authorship. Some of these liberties have been curtailed; for example,
I cannot visit Communist China without having my passport withdrawn. But much liberty remains: I
can go on strike and join a picket line and I can criticize my government even in fundamental
concerns.
Usually internal freedom varies inversely with external danger: the greater the danger the less the
freedom. Liberty has diminished in the United States because airplanes and missiles have reduced the
power of the oceans to protect us from external attack. As improved communications and transport
override frontiers, all major states are caught in a web of perils that erode liberty and make for
compulsory order. In the next world war all participating governments will be dictatorships, and all
involved economics will be socialist.
Each of the rival systems has drawbacks that their rivalry has helped to reduce. Capitalism still suffers
from a periodic imbalance between production and consumption; from dishonesty in advertising,
labeling, and trade; from the efforts of large corporations to crush competition; from involuntary
unemployment due to the replacement of labor—even of skilled labor—by machinery; and from
abnormally swollen fortunes generating resentment in the enclaves of poverty. Communism suffers
from the difficulty of substituting governmental prevision of what the consuming public will need or
demand for the capitalist way of letting public demand determine what shall be produced and supplied;
it suffers from restraints on competition, from inadequate incentives to invention, and from reluctance
to appeal to the profit motive in individuals and companies.
Will the cry for personal, political, economic, religious, and intellectual freedom become more
insistent in Communist countries while in the West such freedoms will decline as private property
yields Hamood Ur Rehman
more and more Ranjha(PAS)
of its wealth and independence to governmental control? As 03227720772
the Napoleonic
Wars hastened the development of industry and capitalism in Western Europe, and as the Civil War
had a like effect in the United States, so the two world wars accelerated the transition from
individualistic capitalism to state capitalism or government-controlled industry. A hundred signs suggest
that the nature of man, the danger and compulsions of conflict, and the growth of communication and
trade will eventually bring the competing economies toward basic similarity. (Meanwhile, the
diminishing difference can be emphasized by the rival governments to generate the hatreds useful in
nationalistic wars.)
The communist and capitalist systems already resemble each other in many basic ways. Each has
subordinated its internal economy to the needs of actual or potential war. Each aims at world
hegemony, though one disguises its aim in terms of “wars of liberation,” the other with the plea that it
must serve as the policeman or order in a dangerously chaotic world. Each might be described as a form
of capitalism if we define this as a system controlled by the managers of capital: in America some part of
the worker’s product is kept by private managers to provide private capital for private industry; in
communist countries part of the worker’s product is kept by public managers (actually by that small
fraction of the public called the Communist Party) to provide public capital for public industry.
Apparently the American worker—free to organize unions, to strike for higher wages, to radically
criticize his masters, to peacefully overthrow a party in power, and to vote himself (through his elected
officials) governmental services, pensions, and relief—plays a larger role in determining how much of
his product is left, or comes back, to him than does his Communist counterpart. In both systems the
men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things.
Human nature as now constituted seems to favor a system of relatively free enterprise. Every
economy, to succeed, must appeal to the acquisitive instinct—the desire for food, goods, and powers,
and never in historic times was that impulse so unchecked as under capitalism. The itch for profit may
not be overwhelming in the common man, but it is strong in men who are above the average in
economic ability; and it is this half of the nation that will sooner or later mold the economy and the
laws. We can understand, then, why communism had to make increasing concessions to this instinct.
Only slightly less powerful is the urge to sexual union and play; this has obviously more freedom in
America and Western Europe than it does in Communist countries, which struggle to preserve the
puritan code associated with their agricultural past. Third among the instincts is the impulse to fight
and to compete; this, too, has enjoyed a heady release under capitalism. Unquestionably it shares in
improving industrial products; what would Ford and General Motors cars be without their constant
rivalry? Despite secret and illegal agreements every product in America is subject to such stimulating
rivalry in methods, quality, and price. I wonder whether state control of production in communist
countries would allow sufficient competition, among individuals and groups, to realize similar benefits
to the consumer? How much of Russia’s rapid progress before 1960 was due to free imitation of foreign
inventions and processes (themselves the result of free enterprise and competition), and to the
importation of foreign machinery and technicians?
The instinct of aggregation favors the Communist system: most men are content, and many are
pleased, to follow a leader or join a crowd. We have crowds in America, too, but they are hiding places
for lonely individuals, rather than cooperating groups animated by collective actions, pride, and ideals.
Hamood
The reverse ofUrthe
Rehman Ranjha(PAS)
gregarious instinct—the desire for privacy, for freedom to move about, and to differ
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from the norm—gets wider play in Western Europe and America than it ever did in Russia, where
everyone seemed to live in a confining web of public surveillance, conformity, and control. All in all,
the average American (despite the natural protest of the unplaced minority, and of politicians out of
office) seems happier, laughs more, ventures more gaily, sins more freely, than his Communist
analogue.

CHAPTER TWENTY
ON SCIENCE
The progress of science has long since outstripped my understanding, and I must take the
pronouncements of scientists with the same humility with which I received the dictates of priests and
nuns in my youth. I leave it to my grandchildren to break the molecule into its atoms, the atom into its
electrons, and these into forces as mystical as the angels that never stood on the point of a pin.
Indeed, a new priesthood is forming above us. Its ordained members speak a language beyond the
ken of their worshippers; they censor one another with aromatic praise, and censor one another with
professional jealousy; they carry a split atom before them like a consecrated Host; we trust them because
they alone have direct access to God—i.e., to mass times the square of the velocity of light. They differ
from priests in allowing heresies among the initiated, but let them find an infallible leader, and they
would be a church. Already they are as useful and necessary to statesmen as the priests and bishops who
surrounded, anointed, and exploited kings.
I honor them, for they hold nothing true unless it has been repeatedly verified by experience. I
salute them, for they have worked miracles more marvelous than most of those that once supported
religious faith. The apostles, who, we are assured, had the “gift of tongues,” would be surprised to learn
that a United Nations delegate can address a hundred persons and be heard, a moment later, in half a
hundred languages. They would bow their heads before a man who, speaking in Washington, could
make himself heard at once through half the world. They would refuse to believe that a man-made
machine was sending us pictures taken on the surface of the moon; or that a horse race in Kentucky
could be seen as soon, as clearly, and as colorfully in California and Maine as by the spectators on the
spot. Verily we live in another age of miracles, and we behold an astonishing new breed of men.
But something of the skepticism that injured my religious faith has overflowed into timid doubts of
science. I distrust the astronomers when they calculate the distance of the fixed stars, and the geologists
when they tell us the age of the Earth or its strata. I am a bit dubious of the changing pictures by which
the physicists represent the inside of the atom; like Pascal, I am oppressed between the ever-elusive
infinitesimal and the unattainable, inconceivable infinite. I honor Charles Darwin as the greatest and
gentlest revolutionist in modern European history, but I note that biologists have not yet explained
how a tiny seed can contain a tree or ordain every branch on the trunk, every leaf on the branch, and
every line on the leaf. I think that biology has been misled by applying too widely the notion of
mechanism and hesitating to credit living things with inherent, guiding will.
I mourn when I see so much scientific genius dedicated to the art of massacre, so little to the
organization of peace; yet I realize that scientists are not made to rule, since their gift is for handling
ideas and facts,
Hamood not men.
Ur Rehman Meanwhile I breathe air, and drink water, and eat food 03227720772
Ranjha(PAS) polluted by the
products of science: by the burning of fuels in factories and cars, by industrial waste poured into our
rivers and seas, by dangerous chemicals used in growing or processing foods or disguising their decay.
Planes deafen me with their escalating noise, or threaten at any moment to fall upon my head.
Sometimes I wonder (as Carlyle did a century ago) would we not be happier if we were living on a
medieval farm, accustomed to immemorial poverty, disturbed by nothing beyond our village, and
trusting in the wisdom and justice of God.
I puzzle my wits with concocting nostrums for these ills. Many years ago I pled for electric
automobiles, and the replacement of filling stations by centers equipped to quickly recharge exhausted
batteries. Our chemists, amid all their miracles, have failed to substantially improve the battery in the
last thirty years. So now I dream of electric cables laid safely six inches underground in all lanes of our
major streets and highways, from which cables every automobile would draw meterable energy by a
trolley retractable when changing lanes or directions—in which intervals the car would rely on its own
battery. I envision a city clean with electricity produced by nuclear power.
In my Utopia every family, including philosophers, would apply half of its working hours to
growing its essential vegetables on a plot of land around or near its house. But since the acquisitive
nature of man, and the competitive spirit of states, make this very unlikely, I would beg our educators
to give us and our children plentiful instruction in dietetics, in the knowledge of our bodies, and in the
care of our health. I would ask our doctors to devote as much time to preventive as to curative
procedures, and to put less curative reliance upon drugs and more upon natural cures by diet and
physiotherapy. I would like to see health insurance offered to all ages at moderate cost, as in Great
Britain; and yet I sympathize with the reluctance of physicians to become governmental employees.
Since 1921 I have inveighed against the absurdities of psychoanalysis. I laughed at Freud’s dream
theories as soon as I read them. I had had sexual dreams, but never disguised them as cutting a cake.
Freud’s resort to symbolism in interpreting dreams seemed to me merely the bizarre and unconvincing
feat of a diseased imagination. I felt that he had exaggerated sex, and had underrated economic troubles,
in generating neuroses; and I had my doubts about “free association” as a means of diagnosis. I had no
memory—and had given no reported sign—of having hated my father or of having desired my mother
sexually; I don’t believe that more than one in a hundred mental disturbances can be traced to the
Oedipus complex. Psychotherapy has helped many sufferers, but hardly on the basis of Freudian
psychoanalysis. The exaltation and exaggeration of Freudian theories and procedures beyond Freud’s
own practice and desire has been an incident in the sexual revolution in America.
Every solution bares a new problem. The progress of science has brought new evils with new boons,
and its latest victory has given frail minds the power to destroy Western civilization. Periodically we
advance pugnaciously to the brink of total war. If such a calamity should come, science might be
finished: survivors would flee from their devastated and poisoned cities to the countryside to find or
grow food; the age of great cities would end, and a rural Dark Age would begin, as after the triumph of
the barbarians over decadent Rome. Religion would revive as the consolation of desperate souls, and
men would curse the science that had given them powers beyond their intelligence.
We need more knowledge, and must submit to a heavy stress upon science in education and
government, for we are subject to international challenges that force us to keep pace with every
technological advance. But we need something more than knowledge; we need the wisdom and
Hamood
character Ur Rehman
to use Ranjha(PAS)
our knowledge with foresight and caution, with both resolution and restraint. What is
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character? It is a rational harmony and hierarchy of desires in coordination with capacity. What is
wisdom? It is an application of experience to present problems, a view of the part in the light of the
whole, a perspective of the moment in the vista of years past and years to come.
I do not despair. Man has committed a million blunders evident to our hindsight, but has done
great and noble things. He has given us the words of Christ and the Ethics of Spinoza; he has built the
Parthenon and Notre Dame de Paris; he has adorned the Sistine Chapel and written the Iliad, The
Trojan Women, The Divine Comedy, Hamlet, Phèdre; he has composed the Messiah and the lament of
Orpheus for Eurydice. Sometimes, like Ashoka and Augustus, he has dared to call off the dogs of war.
Who now will arise to harness our knowledge to wisdom, our science to conscience, our power to
humane purposes, our jealous sovereignties to a federated peace? Who will call a halt to hatred, and
organize a Pax Christiana for our shattered, murderous, suicidal world?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ON EDUCATION
Herbert Spencer, in a pugnacious little book on education, once challenged the scholastic world with
the question: “What knowledge is of most worth?” He resented the devotion of youth’s years to dead
languages, ancient cultures, and the weary-tramping muses of eighteenth-century England; such a
training, he argued, fitted a man for nothing but an aristocratic boredom cluttered with classical
quotations. Trained as an engineer, living in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, hearing the call of
machinery for competent men, and witnessing with pleasure the rise of the middle class to economic
leadership and political influence, Spencer demanded a schooling that would prepare a man for
modern life, that would ground and equip him realistically for the problems of technology and trade.
He wrote with such clarity and power, and the spirit of the age was so much with him, that his cause
sighted victory before his death. America, with no strong traditions to impede her, heard him gladly;
Germany, industrializing herself in a generation with the French indemnity, applied the new theory of
education with characteristic thoroughness; Japan, forced into commerce and industry by a world that
insisted on arousing her out of her agricultural isolation and content, turned herself to technical
education with the immoderate zeal of an anxious convert; and under our eyes Russia moved through a
like hyperbola of feverish industrialization in the policy of her government and the training of her
youth. Knowledge is power.
Today our educators, who once bravely led the way toward the scientific and technical emphasis in
America’s schools, are disturbed by the completeness of their victory, and stand in sorrow before their
accomplished dream. They do not quite regret their efforts, or retract their aims; they know a modern
nation must choose between industry and vassalage, to meet the competition of an industrializing
world; these things are not matters of choice, for nations do not live in a vacuum of freedom or peace.
But our conscious educators perceive that, after generations of scholastic effort, they are failing to
produce either educated men or gentlemen; that the lavish equipment of our schools has not availed to
diminish political corruption, sexual irregularity, or violent crime; that certain virtues once prominent
in our forbearers seem to have lost standing with a generation skilled beyond precedent in unmoral
cleverness; and that the emphasis on science has brought no peace to the soul. These conditions are due
rather to economic changes than to pedagogical carelessness; but the educator begins to wonder
whether the schools have not surrendered too completely to the charms of the intellect, and offered too
mild a resistance to the forces of disorder and decay. When Spencer asked what knowledge is of most
worth, he betrayed his secret assumption that education is the transmission of knowledge. Is it? What
education is of most worth?
That education
Hamood is of Ranjha(PAS)
Ur Rehman most worth which opens to the body and the soul, to the citizen and the state,
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the fullest possibilities of their harmonious life. Three basic goods should determine education and
define its goals: First, the control of life, through health, character, intelligence, and technology;
second, the enjoyment of life, through friendship, nature, literature, and art; and, third, the
understanding of life, through history, science, religion, and philosophy. Two processes constitute
education and unite in it; in the one, the race transmits to the growing individual its profuse and
accumulated heritage of knowledge, techniques, morals, and art; in the other, the individual applies this
inheritance to the development of his capacities and the adornment of his life. In proportion as he
absorbs this legacy he is transformed from an animal into a man, from a savage into a citizen. Perhaps,
if his digestion is good, he is transformed from a simpleton to a sage. Education is the perfecting of life
—the enrichment of the individual by the heritage of the race. Let this vital process of transmission and
absorption be interrupted for half a century, and civilization would end; our grandchildren would be
more primitive than savages.
But these are dull generalities, not unheard before in the halls of education and philosophy. What
kind of education, in particular personal, should I wish our children to receive? First of all, and within
the limits of nature and circumstance, I should want them to acquire some control over the conditions
of their lives. Since the primary condition of life, and the strongest root of happiness, is health, I should
like to see them abundantly instructed in the knowledge and care of their bodies. The body is the
visible form and organ of the soul; perhaps, in some wondrous Lamarckian way, it is, through eons of
desire and effort, the creation of the soul—form follows function, function follows desire, and desire is
the essence of life. Therefore, there is nothing scandalously epicurean in the desire to be physically
healthy and clean; cleanliness has been rated next to godliness, and it is difficult to be vicious when one
is in perfect health. I should make education in health a required course in every year of schooling from
kindergarten to PhD. I should want our children to learn as much about the structure and functioning,
the care and healing, of their bodies, as can be taught in an hour a day for fifteen scholastic years. I
would have our physicians practice preventive medicine in the classroom by examination and
instruction, in the hope that this might reduce the fashionable scissoring of the body in hospitals. I
would have our dentists, through unrelenting education and observation in the schools, habituate our
children to a diet rough in form and rich in lime, rather than prospect and mine for gold in the
decayed teeth of the squirming uninformed. And if the day should come when our dietitians will have
at last made up their minds as to what they really know and believe, I should ask them to teach the
principles of diet for an hour in every school week for fifteen years, so that our people might make with
some corporate intelligence the dietetic changes required by the passage from an outdoor and physical
life to a mental and sedentary one. I would teach health and cleanliness first of all, and expect that all
things else would be added unto them.
Having sought a sound foundation for the body, I should ask next for the formation of character. I
should beg those august boards that exercise the vital function of choosing teachers for our schools to
select them—and, so far as possible, to train them—not merely for their technical competence in some
blinding specialty, but for the influence which their personalities, their morals, and their manners
might have upon the children. Morals and manners cannot easily be taught, but they can be formed;
and the presence of a gentleman—that is, a person continuously considerate of all—acts like some
mystic magnet upon the growing soul. We have no word in our language to express for the once-
weakerHamood Ur Rehman
sex those Ranjha(PAS)
qualities which in the male are now connoted by the word gentleman; lady brings to
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mind some haughty and bejeweled duchess rather than the simple and understanding kindliness of a
woman who has borne children and loved them. If I could have my reactionary way, I would separate
the sexes during school hours, though educating them in the same schools; I would have the boys taught
by educated gentlemen, and the girls by educated mothers. I am not sure but that some part of the
comparative sterility of our educated women is due to their having been trained by women condemned
to sterility by economic fears and foolish laws.
Since morality is rooted biologically in the family, I should base moral instruction upon a deliberate
exaltation of family life. I would restore the ancient stigma that was attached to celibacy, and would
suggest, as delicately as might be, the moral wisdom of marriage at a natural age. The gift of children
should be our payment to the race for the heritage of civilization. I would inculcate unremittingly the
virtue of filial piety as the foundation stone of morality: A good son makes a good brother, a good
father, a good neighbor, and a good citizen. I would extend to the city and the nation the principles of
the family; I would ask such persistent moral instruction as would help the individual to see his
neighbor as in some degree his brother, and his community as in some degree his family, and to apply
to them, in proportion to his development and his strength, those principles of mutual aid which the
family plants in the soil as the first necessity of social existence and the highest goal of social
organization.
I would solicit from each community some brief formulation of its moral ideals for daily inculcation
in the schools, some code of conduct adapted to urban and industrial life, and fitted to simulate
individual conscience, commercial honor, and civic pride. I would ask each state to establish and
encourage organizations, like the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, that might give to the growing
character such vigor and health as could never be instilled by precept alone. Moral excellence, as
Aristotle said, is a habit, not an idea. Nor should I hesitate to build up in the child a profound and
generous patriotism; for, though I respect and cherish all nations and races that have enriched our racial
inheritance, I do not understand how a country can defend itself against attack if its citizens have not
learned to love it in some special way as their national hearth and home. I would seek to instill, day
after day, a disdain of violence and a respect for law, but I would defend liberty as the essence of
personality in a soul or a people; and I would open the schools, at evening, to any public assemblage
desired by any significant portion of the community. I would teach not merely the forms and ideals of
government but also its worm-eaten reality, so that our children should not look upon corruption as
natural and universal, but should never rest until our public life should be as clean and honorable as the
best. In short, I should never think it the purpose of education to make scholars, so much as to form
human beings.
Perhaps the basic skill that we should ask a teacher to impart to his pupil is the ability to discipline
himself; for in this stormy age every individual, like every people, has in the long run only two choices
—effective self-government, or practical subjection; somewhere there must be will. In the art of self-
discipline intelligence merges with character and becomes the third element in that technique of
control, which is the first goal of education. Socrates thought that intelligence was the only real virtue;
and if one makes sure to distinguish intelligence from intellect, we may find much virtue and
intelligence in his view. Intellect is the capacity for acquiring and accumulating ideas; intelligence is the
ability Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS)
to use experience—even the experience of others—for the clarification and attainment of one’s
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ends. A man may have a million ideas and yet be a criminal or a fool; it is difficult for an intelligent
person to be either.
How shall we train intelligence? This is an esoteric matter, on which I am not competent to speak,
and which I prefer to leave to men who can approach it from the background of long experience and
patient experiment. Since researches indicate that most learning is by trial and error, we may
provisionally conclude that intelligence can hardly be taught in school, but must be acquired through
experience and action. The value of letters and literature is that they enable us to acquire more
experience than we can gather in the first person; by reading Thucydides, for example, we may learn
something of the experiences of Greece; by reading Dostoevsky, we may enter in some measure into
the life of Czarist Russia; by reading the Table Talk of Napoleon, we catch some glimpse of the world
as seen through the eyes of the most realistic of history’s Romantic souls. But such vicarious experience
is always vague and superficial; first, because only the greatest writers can seize and reveal the essence
and meaning of life; and, secondly, because things read seldom enter so deeply into the memory as to
affect conduct and character. Science, when it is really science, serves better than literature to train
intelligence; for it proceeds by the careful recording and sifting of evidence, the rigid distinction
between wishes and facts, and the experimental test of hypothetical conclusions, and it ends in a
formulation of some verifiable experience. Through mathematics, physics, and chemistry one may learn
to believe according to the evidence, and to weigh all evidence skeptically; if these habits of mind could
be formed in all of us, the ability to read or hear would cease to be an impediment to the acquisition of
truth, and our raucous age of propaganda might come to an end.
Perhaps the best way to train intelligence in school would be through the manual and domestic arts.
Every boy should learn to use the ordinary tools of carpentry and plumbing, and to make minor
repairs in the home and on an engine; and every girl should learn the secrets of cookery, household
management, and maternal care. There is much pleasure in the simple work of the hands, and, as the
old rabbis taught, even the scholar will find that the possession of a trade may save him from selling his
conclusions for an income.
As for the girl, it will avail her nothing to know a foreign language, archaeology, and trigonometry,
if she cannot manage a home, a husband, and a child; fidelity is nourished through the stomach, and
good pies do more for monogamy than all the languages that have ever died. One tongue is enough for
any woman, and a good mother is worth a thousand PhDs.
Health, character, and intelligence help us to control ourselves and our lives, and therefore
constitute the bases of a free personality, and the primary goals of education. But the same Goethe who
held that, in the end, personality is everything, warned us that limits are everywhere. The circle within
which we may guide our own lives is a narrow one; surrounding it are the biological, economic, and
political compulsions of our state; and beyond these is the spacious realm of accident and incalculable
destiny. Education should teach us not only the technique but also the limits of control, and the art of
accepting those limits graciously. Everything natural is forgivable.
Within those limits there is so rich a possibility of enjoyment that no lifetime can exhaust it. It
should be a second function of education to train us in the art of exploiting these possibilities. First of
all, there are human beings around us. They will be gadflies, many of them, and we shall learn to love
Hamood
our privacy asUr
theRehman
inner Ranjha(PAS)
citadel of our content; but many of them will be potential friends, and some of
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them may be our lovers. I should like my children to be instructed in the give-and-take of human
association, in the tolerance that alone can preserve a friendship through growing diversity of interests
and views, and in the mutual solitude that perpetually nourishes the fragile plant of love. I should want
them to learn something of the origin and development of love, so that they might approach this vital
and sometimes destructive experience with a modest measure of understanding. I envision vaguely
some leisurely course in human relations, running for perhaps an hour a week through fifteen years,
and culminating in a study of what the wisest of men and women, the most delicate of scientists and the
most forgiving of philosophers, have said about marriage.
Next to human beings around us, the greatest source of our pleasures and pains will be Nature
herself. I should like our children to recognize the terror as well as the beauty in Nature, and to accept
the naturalness of struggle, suffering, danger, and death; but I should wish them to be sensitive to all
those aspects of earth and sky that can move the soul with loveliness or sublimity. In my youth I
rejected astronomy, botany, and ornithology as dismal catalogues of names; I thought I should be able
to enjoy flowers, birds, and stars as well without as with a knowledge of their nature, their relationships,
and their names. I suspect now that I was wrong, and that our children are wrong today; for they, too,
with an obstinacy that I recognize as my own, refuse to have anything to do with these effeminate
sciences. But I wish I had learned better to distinguish a planet from a star, a sparrow from an eagle,
and a chrysanthemum from a rose; I think that if I knew these lustrous forms more intimately and
individually, and could call them by their first names, I should enjoy them more, if only with the half-
conscious pleasure that one derives from the presence of familiar things.
Certainly I should like our children to be at home with Nature’s infinite variety; to love not merely
her verdure and blossoming, but her mystic mists and mellow decay; to enjoy the ocean like Byron,
and the sun like Turner, and the rain like Whistler, and the nightingale like Keats. I think I should
have a course in Nature running pleasantly through my children’s years, and ranging from a
recognition of the Pleiades to the art of making a garden grow. I would have them explore the
Wissahickon, and camp in the Adirondacks, and paddle their own canoes up or down a hundred
streams with melodious names such as once lured the poets of England to dream of a Utopia on the
Susquehanna’s shores. I would be happy to see them enjoying the spectacle of sports, but happier to see
them sharing in them. I would give academic credit for swimming, baseball, football, basketball, and
those other lusty games that require and develop more intelligence and character than all the
conjugations of Greece and Rome.
I do not think I should bother them with foreign languages at all. I studied Latin and Greek for
seven years, taught them for four, and talked one of them, on and off, for two; I found some moments
of pleasure in them, but many hours of unnatural syntactic pain; they rarely helped me to enjoy or
understand the geniuses of the classical world; and today, when I wish to renew acquaintance with
Homer or Euripides, Virgil or Lucretius, I turn not to the originals, which are associated in my
memory with an aimless drudgery, but to such translations as Chapman or Gilbert Murray made, or
William Morris and William Ellery Leonard. Even the modern foreign languages are hardly fit for the
classroom; one never learns them from books, however patiently suffered and perused; if you wish to
learn French, go live with the French, and throw the grammars to the grammarians, who are the only
Hamood
ones that haveUrever
Rehman Ranjha(PAS)
profited from them. It is said that a knowledge of Latin helps one to write English
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well, and perhaps it is so, though nothing is so deadly as the English of Latinists; for my own part, I
would rather spend my tutelage in English with Bacon and Milton, Addison and Burke, Gibbon and
Macaulay and Newman than with a tongue idiomatically alien to my own. Philologists should be
encouraged to learn and preserve Latin and Greek for the purposes of scholarship and history, but there
is no more reason for making a dead language compulsory than for compelling the student to learn an
obsolete trade. There is but one decent thing for most of us to do with a dead language, and that is to
bury it.
But after interring the languages of Greece and Rome I would give to their living literatures most of
the time once spent on the dry bones of their grammars and lexicons. I never knew how rich the Greek
genius was until I stopped reading Greek. The dramas of Euripides had been a dreary task in the
original; the translations of Gilbert Murray, though overfree, were a revelation; let the reader give an
hour to The Trojan Women and share my exaltation. I would spare my pupils Greek, but not Greece; I
would spur them on to study that exuberant civilization as some standard by which to measure and
brighten their own. I would lure them into the fascinating gossip of Herodotus, and the vivid
biographies of Plutarch; they would take their time and pleasure leisurely with Homer, and sport awhile
with Sappho and Anacreon; they would watch Solon legislating for Athens, Pericles governing the mob,
Demosthenes denouncing demagogues, and Phidias carving the pediments of the Parthenon. Then we
should turn and study Caesar—not the cold and repetitious prose of the Gallic Wars, but Caesar
himself, in all his living personality and tragedy; we should abandon ourselves to Virgil’s Aeneid as a
very pleasant tale; we should meet the early emperors in Arthur Murphy’s Tacitus; we should drown
ourselves in the ocean of Gibbon’s prose, and pass with him into the somber magic, the scholastic
subtlety, and the rural jollity of the Middle Ages, and the pious butchery, the sensuous poetry, and
architectural embroidery of Islam.
Literature, then, would open for us a third portal to the enjoyment of life. We would read George
Moore’s Heloise and Abelard, and the profoundly beautiful letters ascribed to Heloise; we would wander
through Dante’s delectable Inferno with Norton or Cary; and we would pass over to Persia and lose
ourselves in the luscious quatrains of FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyám. We would browse at our pleasure in
Symonds’s exhilarating volumes on the Renaissance; we would listen to Machiavelli telling Cesare
Borgia how to be a successfully Machiavellian prince; we would let Cellini recount his incredible
adventures to us, and would have Vasari play Plutarch to Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. We
would smile with Montaigne, and laugh with Rabelais; we would smash windmills with Don Quixote,
and tear our hearts out with Shakespeare; we would sharpen our wits with Bacon’s Essays, and our
tongues with the divine monkey of Ferney; we would read some of Milton’s poetry, and more of his
royal prose; we would hear Rousseau’s confession, and let the mighty Johnson “sir” us to his heart’s
content. We would be willingly swallowed up in the Romantic Movement of European poetry; we
would fret and fume with Byron, laugh and cry with Heine, hope and mourn with Shelley, and suffer
the world’s beauty and tragedy with Keats; we would explore the sewers of Paris with Jean Valjean, and
the horrors of Carthage’s wars with the lovely Salammbô. We would enter the crowded world of
Balzac, and watch the sadistic Flaubert tear his heroes and heroines to pieces; we would share the
vicissitudes of Becky Sharp, David Copperfield, and the Pickwick Club; we would parse Browning and
Hamood Ur Then
sing Tennyson. RehmanweRanjha(PAS)
would come home and let Whitman chant his healthy song for us; we would
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whittle pencils at Walden Pond with Thoreau, and rock ourselves to sleep with the musical wisdom of
Emerson; we would read the letters and speeches of Lincoln slowly, and let his profound and
understanding spirit brood over us until we knew the worst and best of America.
Is this a heavy program for the helpless boys and girls of our schools and colleges? But still another
avenue of education for enjoyment must be traveled by them—and that the most difficult of all. I
should not bother them with art beyond their liking, for beauty need not be wasted on those who have
no eyes or ears for it; but if they cared at all for painting or sculpture, architecture or music, I would
put every opportunity in their way. I would ask them to hear every year for four years both the Emperor
Concerto and St. Matthew’s Passion, until through repetition these compositions might reach beneath
their ears and lift them above rubbish forever. I would take the most willing ones to the great museums
and bid them sit quietly for a while before Raphael’s Julius II, or Rembrandt’s rabbis or Rembrandts; I
would, if I could, take them all the way to England to worship the mother goddess Demeter or the
goddesses of Phidias in the British Museum; I would let them spend a week at Chartres or Rheims, a
week in Greece, a month in Italy, and a day at Granada, so that they might know that size is not
development, so that there might begin to burn in them that flame of the love of perfection which
builds amid the ocean of life, upon the volcano of civilization, the fragile citadel of art.
When my children enter college I trust that education will open to them many paths toward the
understanding of life. “May my son study history,” said Napoleon at St. Helena, “for it is the only true
philosophy, and the only true psychology.” Psychology is largely a theory of human behavior,
philosophy is too often an ideal of human behavior, and history is occasionally a record of human
behavior. We cannot trust all the historians, for sometimes, like Akbar’s, they were engaged by their
heroes and gave them all the virtues and the victories. But no man is educated, or fit for statesmanship,
who cannot see his time in the perspective of the past. Every lad and lass should begin, in high school,
an orderly recapitulation of the pageant of history; not, as we used to do, with Greece and Rome, which
were the old age of the ancient world, but with Mesopotamia and Egypt and Crete, from which
civilization flowed over into Greece and Rome, and through them to Northern Europe and ourselves.
In the second year of high school they would study the classical cultures with some such perfect
textbook as Breasted’s Ancient Times, and should steal at least a glance at Buddha’s India and the China
of Confucius; in the third year they would study the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the heyday of
Islam in Cordova and Baghdad, the great ages of India under the Guptas and the Moguls, and the
flowering of Chinese poetry and art in the Tang Dynasty.
In the first year of college they would begin modern history and try to absorb some of the wealth of
European culture, from Luther and Leo X to the French Revolution; in their second college year they
would follow the vicissitudes of revolution and democracy from 1789 to the Second World War; and
in the third they would review, with better understanding than in their grammar grades, the history of
America from the Mayas and the Incas to their own generation. It would be but an introduction to
history; the college mind could hardly cope with the master works of Thucydides and Grote,
Mommsen and Gibbon, Voltaire and Guizot, Ranke and Michelet, Macaulay and Carlyle, Charles and
Mary Beard. But it would give the young student such a perspective of human affairs from the first
pyramid to the last election as might fit him to think and move more intelligently among the issues of
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A second door to the understanding of life would be through science, understood now not as a tool
of conquest but as a description of the external world. Here would belong all the nebulous hypotheses
of astronomic origins and development; all the brave guesses of geology as to the history of the Earth;
all the theories of the origin and development of life. Better than these theories would be a firsthand
study of plant and animal life in the fields and the streams and the woods; perhaps a little dissection of
dead life in the laboratory; above all, a realistic understanding of life as a matter of hunger and love,
inequality and insecurity, competition and cooperation, elimination and selection, destruction and
creation, bloodshed and tenderness, peace and war.
A pleasanter path to understanding is philosophy. In Plato’s view, this “dear delight” should not be
permitted to youth for, said the master, youngsters debate the problems of human life with no desire
for truth but only a blind hunger for victory; they tear and bite at one another with arguments, and the
truth, in the end, lies torn and tattered at their feet. Perhaps the college student should content himself,
in his final year, with a course in the history of philosophy; a course that should center around the great
personalities, and make wisdom human for the adolescent mind. In such a course Plato’s Republic could
be a sufficient text; let the student realize how old our current problems are, and for how many
centuries the nature of men has played havoc with the ideals of philosophers and saints. Then, while he
winds his way slowly through the still fresh meadows of Plato’s thought, let our college boy or girl rub
elbows for a while with Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus, with Lucretius, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius,
with Aquinas and Occam, Descartes and Spinoza, Bacon and Hobbes, Kant and Schopenhauer, Comte
and Spencer, Nietzsche and Spengler. If these are too difficult for him, let the student seek wisdom
from those supreme writers who transformed philosophy into drama, fiction, and poetry; let him strike
up acquaintance with Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes, Dante and Shakespeare and Goethe,
Hardy and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It is good if he even merely learns the names of the philosophers,
and derives from them a firm conviction that there is such a thing as philosophy; in later years, if life
leaves him leisure for speculation, he may return to these men, grapple with them in a fierce resolve to
master them, and work his way through the unsettlement of every belief to some plateau of clearer
insight, of more modest aspiration and gentler doubt. Perhaps in that unimpeded air he will see all
philosophies as but one groping, all faiths as but a single hope; it will not be in his heart to fight any of
them any longer, or to refuse the fellowship of his mind to any honest creed; a great sympathy for all
the dreams of men, a loving understanding of all their harassed ways, will widen and deepen him, and
he will know the peace and simplicity, the tolerance and catholicity, of the sage.
It is evident that education cannot be completed in school or college or university; these offer us
only the tools and maps for those farther-ranging studies that lead to the control, the enjoyment, and
the understanding of life. I have said nothing of travel, which, if it is too varied and hurried, makes the
mind more superficial and confirms it in its prejudices, but which, if it implies a receptive residence in
foreign scenes, may reveal to the soul some image of that total perspective which is the ever-alluring
mirage of philosophy. I have said nothing of the technical disciplines that aim to prepare the student for
his avocation, for I do not believe that these should begin during his college years. I would shorten both
the high school and the college course to three years each; I would give the first fifteen years of
education to establishing the physical, moral, and cultural background of life, and would leave specific
Hamood
technical Ur Rehman
training Ranjha(PAS) schools. It is my hope that within my lifetime half
to postgraduate the youth of
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America will pass through college, and that half of these will pass through such graduate technical
schools. As invention proceeds, we shall need an ever-greater supply of trained technicians and an ever-
smaller supply of arms and legs. There is no reason why invention should not reduce nearly all menial
labor to machinery in the not-too-distant future, and leave man essentially an intellectual factor in
production. The proletariat, instead of dictating, will disappear.
I believe that European education is more thorough in its methods and finer in its product than
ours; partly through a longer and more stable tradition that intercepts fads and frills at their birth;
partly through a wise concentration of scholastic time upon a smaller variety of subjects; partly through
the separation of the sexes and the avoidance of sexual distraction in school; and partly through the
severer demands made upon the student both in the quantity of work required and in the strictness of
discipline maintained. We must not expect to rival the best European colleges in our generation, for
time is the chief ingredient of every institution; but we should send the ablest of our normal-school
graduates to study the educational methods of England, Germany, and France, in the hope that we may
add their excellences to ours, and go beyond them in the end.
Despite our difficulties and our sufferings in these hesitating years, we are well placed in America for
building better than men have ever built before. We have in our soil a physical legacy of unparalleled
resources, and in our population a stock still abounding in vitality, inventiveness, and skill. We have in
our traditions, our libraries, and our schools a cultural accumulation from many continents and ages
that is so full in scope and content that no one mind could compass a thousandth of its wealth. It is the
function and high destiny of education to pour this civilizing heritage into this vigorous stock, that the
gifts of the earth may be more intelligently exploited than before, that our prosperity may be more
widely distributed, and that our riches may flower into finer manners and morals, profounder literature
and saner art. I do not doubt that on this broadest basis of educational opportunity and material
possibilities ever known, we shall build a society and a civilization comparable with the best, and
capable of adding some measure of wisdom and beauty to the inheritance of mankind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ON THE INSIGHTS OF HISTORY
Let us now see what that vast laboratory of human history has to say about the issues I have so
imperfectly touched upon. To begin, the patterns of our behavior down through the centuries can only
be seen by looking at history in the large, rather than in isolated segments. I’ll admit that viewing
history this way is not popular with many academics and specialists. Still we proceed.
“History,” said Henry Ford, “is bunk.” As one who has written history for almost sixty years, and
studied it for almost eighty, I should largely agree with the great engineer who put half the world on
wheels. History as it is typically studied in schools—history as a dreary succession of dates and kings, of
politics and wars, of the rise and fall of states—this kind of history is verily a weariness of the flesh, stale
and flat and unprofitable. No wonder so few students in school are drawn to it; no wonder so few of us
learn any lessons from the past.
But there is another way in which to view history; history as man’s rise from savagery to civilization
—history as the record of the lasting contributions made to man’s knowledge, wisdom, arts, morals,
manners, skills—history as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments in economics, religion,
literature, science, and government—history as our roots and our illumination, as the road by which we
came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future—that kind of history is
not “bunk”; it is, as Napoleon said on St. Helena, “the only true philosophy and the only true
psychology.” Other studies may tell us how we might behave, or how we should behave; history tells us
how we have behaved for six thousand years. One who knows that record is in large measure protected
in advance against the delusions and disillusionments of his times. He has learned the limitations of
human nature, and bears with equanimity the faults of his neighbors and the imperfections of states. He
shares hopefully in the reforming enterprises of his age and people; but his heart does not break, nor his
faith in life fade out, when he perceives how modest are the results, and how persistently man remains
what he has been for sixty centuries, perhaps for a thousand generations.
It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without
influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of
time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of
what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of
every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every
book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your
memory, your body, your character, your soul. And so it is with a city, a country, a race; it is its past,
and cannot be understood without it. It is the present, not the past, that dies; this present moment, to
which Hamood
we giveUrsoRehman
muchRanjha(PAS)
attention, is forever flitting from our eyes and fingers into that pedestal and
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matrix of our lives which we call the past. It is only the past that lives.
Therefore I feel that we of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present,
too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. We know a thousand
items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred
peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, the victories and defeats of causes, armies, and
athletic teams—but how, without history, can we understand these events, discriminate their
significance, sift out the large from the small, see the basic currents underlying surface movements and
changes, and foresee the result sufficiently to guard against fatal error or the souring of unreasonable
hopes?
“History,” said Lord Bolingbroke, quoting Thucydides, “is philosophy teaching by examples.” And
so it is. It is a vast laboratory, using the world for its workshop, man for its material, and records for its
experience. A wise man can learn from other men’s experience; a fool cannot learn even from his own.
History is other men’s experience, in countless number through many centuries. By adding some
particles of that moving picture to our vision we may multiply our lives and double our understanding.
I propose now to look at man in the successive stages of life and the major phases of our activity, and to
ask if history has any light to shed upon the issues of our time.
OUR NATURE
History sees the newborn child as the product of millions of years, during most of which he was a
hunter fighting for his food and his life against beasts stronger than himself except for his use of
weapons and tools. Those years formed the basic nature of our species: acquisitiveness, greed,
competition, and pugnacity tending to violence. Man, to become civilized, must be subjected to a
system of national law possessing superior force, just as states, to be civilized, must be subjected to a
system of international law possessing superior force. So we must relinquish the childish dreams of
unfettered liberty that inspired many of us in our youth, and that still enthrall some college students in
America and abroad. And though we acknowledge that poverty is a spur to crime, we perceive that the
root of crime, in all classes, nations, and ages, is the basically lawless nature of man, formed by a million
years of hunting, fighting, killing, and greed.
History finds that human nature is essentially the same in ancient and in modern civilizations, in the
poor as in the rich, in radicals as in conservatives, in underprivileged peoples as in affluent states. If
anything is clear in the experience of mankind it is that successful revolutionists soon behave like the
men they have overthrown: Robespierre imitates the Bourbons, and Stalin imitates the czars. Hence
history smiles at revolutions as understandable reactions but unprofitable and transient; they may give
vent to just resentment, but they produce only surface change; under the new names and phrases the
old realities survive.
POPULATION
The child is an immediate problem as well as a potential delight, for he embodies both a threat of
quantity and a threat to quality. He cries out to be fed, and the food supply—taking the earth as a
whole—has seldom kept up with the birthrate. In some highly exceptional periods the deaths have
exceeded the births, as during the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century, or the Thirty Years’ War of
the seventeenth. But normally it is harder to produce food than to beget children; so in nearly all ages
the growth of population has outrun the production of food, and the balance between births and deaths
has been restored by the ruthless Malthusian trinity of famine, pestilence, and war.
The opening of new lands, and the improvement of agricultural methods and machinery in the last
hundred years, enabled Western Europe and North America to escape famine despite a rapid
population growth; and the recent spread of better seeds and artificial fertilizer has allowed China and
India to feed their proliferating millions. But how long can we defer the explosive confrontation
between the limited productivity of arable soil and the uncontrolled reproductive ecstasy of men?
Already the cry of the hungry threatens the stability of a world in which some nations and classes are
near starvation and others are deteriorating into luxury and obesity. I hail it as a sign of progress that
the United States is exporting contraceptives to India, and, in America, offering them to all who
legitimately need them.
Again, the child embodies a threat to quality, for he may be the careless product of parents unfit to
bear or rear offspring. Some studies have suggested that superior mental ability can be transmitted from
parent to child. Even if this is uncertain, and though superior intelligence may come rather from an
incalculable gamble of the genes and from environmental opportunity and stimulus, we must face the
fact that a reckless fertility can cancel much of the work of the educator in each generation. So we
advance in literacy but not visibly in intelligence; yet democracy must depend upon public intelligence.
It is usual to ascribe the fall of the Western Roman Empire to barbarian invasion from without;
could it have been due in part to barbarian multiplication within? Sometimes I think that we have
reached a similar peril in the United States: the older American stocks still dominate in industrial and
political leadership and skill but many families breed carelessly, live riotously, ignore the laws, and
transform America’s literature, art, music, and dance into primitive crudities while many of their
spokesmen proclaim and pray for the collapse of the American government. Civilization is a fragile
bungalow precariously poised on a live volcano of barbarism.
THE FAMILY
As mentioned earlier, until the nineteenth century the family was the economic as well as the biological
and moral unit of society. The father taught and managed his sons in work on the farm; the mother
taught and managed her daughters in the hundred arts of the home; and this dependence and tutelage
of the children formed the economic basis of parental authority. The Industrial Revolution, by drawing
sons and daughters into independent employment, deprived parental authority of its economic base. So
the family, which for thousands of years served as the fount and bastion of disciplined character and
social order, lost its economic functions and its moral force. The individual, freed from the family,
idolized liberty and did not learn till too late that liberty is a child of order and may be the mother of
chaos. He looked down upon his parents as belonging to an ignorant past, and proudly announced an
unbridgeable
Hamood gap between
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THE SCHOOL
The school tried to take over from the disintegrating family the task of disciplining the young and
passing on to them the civilizing heritage and experience of the past. But the growth of knowledge
compelled the teacher to specialize; he became an intellectual fragment transmitting intellectual
fragments to youths bewildered and unmoored; in the United States and France education became
almost wholly a furnishing of the intellect; the formation of character was turned back by the teacher to
the family and the Church. But as these were losing their power, the student grew daily in sharpness of
intellect and looseness of character. For the intellect is a constitutional individualist; it thinks of the self
first, and only in its mature development does it consider the group.
There have been student rebellions many times in history, and in some cases, as in thirteenth-
century Bologna, the students controlled the selection, payment, and dismissal of some professors; this
ended when Bologna became part of the Papal States and the Church appointed the faculty. Usually
student riots were against the townsmen rather than against the teachers or the curriculum. Today they
are against the relation, or lack of relation, between the curriculum and the world.
The angry student resents courses that do not prepare him for successful functioning in a
technological society, or that ignore the role of ethnic minorities in our history. He resents the
absorption of teachers in private research and the domination of physical, biological, and chemical
research by the needs of the army for ever more effective means of inflicting or avoiding wholesale
death. The student began by admiring the marvels of science; he ends by distrusting science as
mechanizing life and industry, and as selling itself to the military industrial complex that dominates
both the individual and the state.
An alarming number of our children turn their backs upon the struggle and drop out not only from
education but also from civilization, repudiating its graces and amenities. They reject the past as
irrelevant in a hectically changing world and repudiate the wisdom of their elders as geared to a
vanished scene. Finally they take to narcotics to escape the responsibilities of life; and we who rightly
reprove them are ourselves bewildered and groping, and paralyzed with fear of what our unmoored
children may do or become.
RELIGION
Once the task of civilizing the young was assumed by religion and its rituals; through twenty-five
centuries the synagogue and the Church inculcated morality by the Ten Commandments, and
strengthened them by ascribing to them a divine origin and an ever-present sanctioning of reward or
punishment. But the Church and the synagogue have lost much of their efficacy as sources of social
order because, in our major cities, half the adult population has discarded supernatural beliefs.
We enter an age like the Hellenistic in Greece and the Imperial in Rome, when the classical religions
had passed from creeds and rites encouraging patriotism and morality into a mythology providing poets
with pretty legends and Zeus with many mistresses. Caesar laughed when filling his required role as
supreme pontiff,
Hamood and Ovid
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Ranjha(PAS) Social chaos so
threatened the ancient order that the emperor Constantine, in AD 380, adopted Christianity as the state
religion, partly because it gave promise of restoring morality. From that time till Darwin religion was
relied upon by the state to give morals to youth, order to society, and hope to the oppressed. Where
now is the religion or the faith that will once again inspire us and give a soul to our civilization?
MORALITY
From these changes in the economics and theology of the last one hundred years has come the moral
dissolution of our time. The new freedom spread and released sexual behavior from old restraints.
Psychology has seemed to condemn every inhibition, and to justify every desire. Literature, in the
hands of some of its most skilled practitioners, has become a paramour of pornography.1 The
dissemination of wealth has opened a hundred doors that used to be called sin. Dishonesty among
adults—in business, advertising, politics, the practice and administration of the law—weakens the
preachments of the old. Inventions gave new tools to the criminal; the automobile made easier his
escape, court decisions made his conviction more difficult; and prison associations made murderers out
of petty thieves.
Has history known other periods of like moral laxity? Yes—usually in ages of mercantile wealth,
urban concentration, and religious decline. You will recall Sophist Hellenistic Greece, Imperial Rome,
Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, and the Stuart Restoration. Hear Plato, writing about 390 BC,
and using Socrates for his mouthpiece:
Socrates: In such a state the anarchy grows and finds a way into private houses, and ends by getting
among the animals and infecting them. . . . The father gets accustomed to descend to the level of
his sons . . . and the son to be on a level with his father, having no fear of his parents, and no
shame. . . . The master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and
tutors. . . . Young and old are alike, and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to
compete with him in word or deed; and old men . . . imitate the young. Nor must I forget to tell
of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other. . . . Truly, the horses and
asses come to have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of free men . . . all
things are just ready to burst with liberty. . . .
Adeimantus: But what is the next step?
Socrates: The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction. . . . The
excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pass into slavery . . . and the most
aggravated form of tyranny arises out of the most extreme form of liberty.2
Following the suggestion of Plato, we may expect to find pagan and puritan periods following in
mutual reaction in history. The Hellenistic and Roman relaxation was succeeded by the strict morality
of the spreading Christian communities, which continued till the thirteenth century. Then Italy, having
developed a rich commerce and collecting religious revenues from all Western Christendom, provided
the wealth that financed the Renaissance; with that wealth, and those foreign contacts and influences,
came the loosened faith of the humanists, and the loosened morals of princes, peoples, and popes.
The Protestant Reformation was in one sense a puritan reaction of the poorer North against an
opulent and re-paganized Italy; not so much in the lusty Luther, as in the stern Calvin and obsessed
Knox. But in England the spread of commerce under Elizabeth I and James II brought a growth of
luxury and a relaxing of morals that combined to release and promote an outburst of romantic poetry,
high drama, and noble prose.
The excesses of that pagan release brought in the ascendancy of the Puritans, who raised Cromwell
to power and put Charles I to death. The Puritan regime covered England with such gloom, hypocrisy,
and censorship that she rejoiced when Charles II brought a new age of moral laxity and literary license.
The Restoration ended when the Dutch stadtholder was called in and displaced the last of the Stuart
kings. Queen Anne, in 1702, began that Augustan Age which brought morality back in fashion, and
classical restraint back to style. This semi-Puritan compromise was interrupted by the revolutionary
ardor and romantic flair of Wordsworth’s youth, Shelley’s poetry, and Byron’s death but it was
resumed under Queen Victoria.
While Victoria brooded over her princes and paupers the Industrial Revolution changed and
darkened the face of England; English commerce covered the seas and British fleets made the world safe
for aristocracy. Women were emancipated from the home for labor in the shops, and sex was freed
from parentage; science flourished, religion declined, wealth liberated desire, and that new age of
paganism began in which we live today.
According to this historical alternation of paganism and puritanism, we should expect our present
moral laxity to be followed by some return to moral restraint under old or new forms of belief,
authority, and censorship. Every age reacts against its predecessor. If a Third World War should come,
shattering our cities, and driving the survivors back to agriculture, the age of science may end, and
religion may return with its consolatory myths and its moral discipline, and parental authority may be
restored.
WORK
Sooner or later the growing individual, unless he drops out from the game of life, leaves the
irresponsibilities of freedom for the demand and discipline of the job. Soon he begins to feel the
complexity of capitalism: its varied, far-reaching roots in enterprise, materials, fuels, science, money,
and men; its obligation to meet ever-new forms of competition and inventions, its grasping tentacles of
domestic marketing and foreign trade; its ever-changing relations to public demand, organized labor,
and state and federal law. A moment of modesty may come over him as he is confronted by his subtle
product of greed and genius, trial and error, through the centuries. He may wonder if his rebellious
generation can tear to pieces this vast mechanism of mind and matter, capital and skill, and put it
together again nearer to his dream.
How does this American capitalism compare with other economic systems in history? In
productivity, of course, it has no equal, and no precedent. Never before has an economic system
poured forth so great and varied an abundance of goods and services, tools and labor-saving devices,
books Hamood
and journals, comforts
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Ranjha(PAS) in almost every
home. Never before has woman been so free, so embellished, or so learned. Never before has labor had
such short hours or long leisure, such influence in government, such power of determining its own
rewards. Never before has so large a proportion of the people been raised to so high a standard of
living.
Is the worker dulled by the monotony of his task? Not so much as in the twelve-hour day of early
capitalism; probably no more than the shoemaker over his last, the tailor over his needle, the shepherd
with his flock, the plowman, tiller, and gleaner in the field.
Are the American people less happy than their ancestors? I think not. See them, even the poor, in
their games or on the bleachers, or driving off on a holiday in their Cadillacs or Fords, making all of
America their playground and their theater. Are they more materialistic than in preindustrial days? In
the Middle Ages few individuals had any hope of rising out of the class (even little hope of leaving the
locality) in which they had been born; so they may have been less agitated by that itch for advancement
which stimulates most Americans today. But we must not populate medieval Europe with replicas of
John Ruskin and William Morris; probably the Gothic architects and sculptors worked to support their
families, and Raphael’s Madonnas fed him as well as their bambini. Even the hope of heaven may have
been a long-term investment of pence and penance for a guaranteed perennial return.
Has history displayed any effective substitute for the profit motive as a spur to work, invention, or
production? Experiments have been made to get things done for nonfinancial rewards—prizes, medals,
ribbons, titles, etc.; they have succeeded for a time with select individuals but never long with the labor
force of a community. Soviet Russia, in its early ardor, tried to replace the profit motive with appeals to
communistic devotion, but it soon discovered that, as Aristotle had warned, “when everybody owns
everything nobody takes care of anything.” So the Soviets returned to unequal pay for unequally
valuable or skillful work. There is now in Russia as great a gap in remuneration between simple and
complex work as in American industry.
But our exciting capitalism is showing dangerous defects. It is poisoning our air, our waters, perhaps
even our food. It has been killing the fish in our streams and seas and the birds in the sky. It has been
using at a reckless rate the mineral resources of our soil. Above all, it seems by its very nature to
stimulate repeated concentrations of wealth, leading to contractions of purchasing power and to
depressions. Of course, wealth has always tended to flow uphill and seek a crest—whether in martial
conquerors, hereditary monarchs, ecclesiastical potentates, or feudal lords; you cannot make men equal
by passing laws.
Repeatedly, in history, this natural concentration of wealth has led to a pathological, almost
cancerous, condition. Sometimes it has led to ruinous surgery by revolution, as in Rome from the
Gracchi to Caesar, or in France from Mirabeau to Napoleon. Sometimes statesmanship has devised a
less sanguinary treatment, as by the remedial legislation of Solon in 594 BC or Franklin Roosevelt in
1933; then the tumor was reduced by the painful but bloodless taxation of swollen wealth and its partial
redistribution through made-work and the welfare state. But after each redistribution—violent or
peaceful—the concentration begins anew: the clever individual gets the best inventions, the best loans,
the best jobs, the best land, and the best homes; in time the inequality of possessions is as before. So,
economic history, in this aspect, is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast diastole and systole
Hamood Ur Rehman
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and explosive revolution. 03227720772
Naturally, therefore, the cry for revolution rises again in the Americas, France, and Italy; not only as
echoes of Russia and China, but as the protest of bitter poverty living side by side with proud wealth (as
in First and Fifth Avenues in New York), and as the plaint of college students eager to organize the
weak to overthrow the strong.
Revolt, of course, is an inborn right of youth; it is a mark of the ego become conscious of itself and
demanding a place in the world. My own generation shouted rebellious slogans—the right of labor to
organize, of women to vote, of workers to be better paid, of schools and universities to be open to all,
of speech and press to be free. I am encouraged when I think how many of these objectives have been
attained.
But the current revolt among the young goes deeper. They do not complain that they have not
become millionaires; many of them profess to scorn material possessions. (I am reminded of the
Lollards, wandering preachers of fourteenth-century England, or of the Anabaptists of sixteenth-
century Germany, or of the wandering scholars of the late Middle Ages, who composed and sang songs
of freedom and rebellion, even of free love.) Their challenge is to our ruthless competition, our greed
for possessing wealth and power, our barbaric wars for the raw materials of the earth, the refusal of our
governments to obey the moral code that it preaches to its citizens.
Just as those frockless preachers helped to prepare the Reformation, so it may be that our present
rebels will open the way to a constructive reshaping of our ideals in the decades to come. I leave aside
the aimless and disheveled minority that seem to have no higher purpose than to note what their elders
do and then do the opposite in order to flaunt their egos in the face of the world. These are the lost.
However, when our young students talk of revolution I wonder have they compared their light-armed
infantry with the heavy weaponry of a modern state? And when we ask how, if they won, they could
reorganize industry and government before chaos universalized destitution, they have no answers but
faith, hope, and love ending in dictatorship.
Such a dénouement of democracy would not be new to history. Almost four centuries before Christ,
Plato, in The Republic, reduced the transit of governments to a regular and repetitious cycle: from chaos
to dictatorship and monarchy, from monarchy to aristocracy, from aristocracy to democracy, from
democracy to chaos, from chaos to dictatorship . . .
I know of no way of avoiding the toboggan of democracy into revolutionary chaos and
authoritarian dictatorship except through the welfare state checked by birth control. Though there are
many sluggards among the poor, and discouraging abuses in the administration of relief, we must
recognize that the majority of the poor are victims of racial discrimination and environmental
handicaps. We must tax ourselves to provide adequate education, and a minimum of food, clothing,
contraceptives, and shelter for all, as a far less costly procedure than social and political disorder through
minority violence and authoritarian force, crushing between them not only democracy but perhaps
civilization itself.
WAR

The solution to domestic problems is hampered by the spiraling cost of protecting ourselves from alien
interference with our internal liberty or our access to the fuels, raw materials, and markets of the world.
Our armies have proved themselves to be a necessary evil in a world that has never accepted the
Buddhism of Buddha or the Christianity of Christ. Governments content that they must not be
deterred from war by the Ten Commandments, or the reluctance of the young to be killed, or of older
men to be taxed, say they must think not of present feelings only but of future perspectives and results.
Who can tell what our grandchildren will wish that we had done today? They, too, should be counted
in our polls.
So the Pentagon claims that to protect us from attack or subversion, from perils present or potential,
it must subordinate half of our industry, our science, our universities, and our taxes to the business of
developing and producing the latest and most deadly weapons, and for teaching ten million youngsters
to kill without moral or religious qualms.
Individuals lust for freedom, goods, and power, and our governments are ourselves and our desires
multiplied, ungoverned, and armed. War is the Darwinism or natural selection of states, and not all our
tears will wash it out of history until the people and governments of the world agree, or are forced, to
yield their sovereignties to some superstate; and then there will be revolutions and civil wars. For a
while we hoped that our progress from TNT to the hydrogen bomb would deter men from waging
war, but then history asked, “Did the progress from bows and arrows to Big Berthas and lethal rockets
diminish war or extend and intensify it?” Apparently our generation will be spared that holocaust; but
who can tell if statesmanship will overcome hatred when Americans tired of war face eight hundred
million Chinese remembering a century of white oppression and a decade of American hostility and
scorn?
THE PASSING OF CIVILIZATION
And so we come to the final chapter, which is death—not only of the individual but, sooner or later, of
our civilization and ultimately of the race. Every life, every society, every species is an experiment, and
must give way. The philosopher/historian adjusts himself to this kaleidoscope and does not despair
because his children will succeed him, and young civilizations will milk and supplant the old.
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul, which may, through death, give new youth to an
ancient heritage. In the train of life it is the old who yield their seats to the young.
SUGGESTIONS
Can we improve our heritage before we pass it on? You have a right to ask me what I would
recommend for the betterment of American life. I would make parentage a privilege and not a right.
No one has a right to bring a child into the community without having passed tests of physical and
mental fitness to breed. To parents who have passed such tests the government should offer an annuity
or a tax exemption, for the first eighteen years of the first and second child born to them in lawful
marriage, but not for any further child. Contraceptive information and devices should be made
available to all married persons at minimum cost. The unity of the family and the authority of the
parents should be strengthened by making parents legally responsible for their dependent children of
minor age and by making the earnings of such children subject to parental control.
Education should be provided to fit every high school graduate for practical employment in a
technological economy, but education in the humanities—literature, philosophy, history, and the arts
—should be equally stressed for the understanding of values and ends and the intelligent use of leisure.
Courses in anatomy, physiology, and hygiene should be required in every year of schooling.
All orderly proposals for high school, college, or university reform should be submitted to a board of
which the elected president of each class should be a voting member. Administrators should dismiss any
student who has violently interfered with the operation of the school. Students and the public should
recognize and protect our universities as the finest institutions in America and the last against which
protest should take a violent form, for they and a free press will be our strongest defense against
dictatorship.
To balance the commercialism and partiality of private broadcasting systems and news media, I
would recommend the establishment of a US broadcasting company, financed by the government but
controlled by our universities.
I should like every religious institution to preach morality rather than theology, and welcome into
its fellowship every person who accepts the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments as the ideal
toward which he strives to grow.
Education in morality—that is, the conscientious cooperation of the individual with the group—
should be given in every week of schooling from kindergarten to PhD. In the last two years of high
school and in every year of college, detailed instruction should be provided in sex education, and in the
effects of sexual promiscuity, narcotics, tobacco, and alcohol. Every high school girl should be
instructed in the physical, moral, and social results of extramarital relations; and every youth should be
taught his moral obligation to treat every girl as he would like youths to treat his sister.
The reduction of poverty, and the extension of education, will reduce (though they will not end)
crime. Temporary insanity should no longer be accepted as an excuse for crime. Prisons should be
replaced by well-enclosed state farms, each designed for a separate grade of offender, and all designed by
an orderly and open-air life to teach useful occupations and to restore the inmate to the behavior of a
responsible citizen.
Every encouragement should be given to the further organization of labor, as a desirable
counterpoise to the organization of industrialists, merchants, bankers, and generals. The National
Labor Relations Board should act to reduce, or, if possible, end, racial or religious discrimination by
admission to union membership or jobs.
The unemployed should be used by federal and state governments in works of social utility and
environmental improvement.
A department of consumers’ research should be made a well-financed part of the president’s cabinet.
Our industrial leaders should welcome and help to implement the welfare state as a humane
mitigation of the painful inequality of human fortune, and a saving substitute from social turmoil and
dictatorial repression.
I should advise youth to be skeptical of revolution as a monster that devours its own fathers and its
children. Less alluring, but less costly, are those processes of reform, by persistent propaganda and
gradual implementation, which have achieved so many beneficent changes in our economic and
political life in this century. Persons under thirty should never trust the economic, political, or moral
ideas of any person under thirty.
Schools of government should be promoted in our universities and prepare college graduates for
political administration, and a US civil academy should be established to give the graduates of such
schools further instruction in legislation, administration, and diplomacy. Perhaps we can persuade the
electorate to prefer such graduates for public office.
Treaties of nonaggression and nonsubversion should be promoted among all major states.
The jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague should be extended and
accepted as fast as the education of citizens and officeholders will permit.
Perhaps through such developments America may liberate itself from domination by men who
flourish in war and languish in peace.
I should recommend—though I cannot promise to practice—a peaceful acceptance of death when it
comes in due time or by unavoidable fate. I believe a physician should not artificially prolong the life of
a person whom three physicians have pronounced to be immediately near death; I hereby consent to
such an abbreviation of my vegetable days.
CONCLUSION
As I think back upon this discourse, I fear that I have stressed too heavily the problems that face us and
our children: the stifling of quality with quantity, the breakdown of marriage and the family, the racial
disorder in our schools, the loosening of morals, the hopeless ghettos in our cities, the crime in our
streets, the corruption in public office, the skepticism of democracy among radicals and reactionaries
alike, the erosion of our moral fiber by the brutalities of war. But these are the stark realities that distort
broadcast or printed news, that move our sons and daughters to revolt, and ourselves to wonder have
we the strength and courage to meet these accumulated ills.
We can meet them only by a resolute act of mutual understanding. We elders must find it in our
souls to be patient with our children, to hear them fondly even when they rant, to recognize that their
wild intransigence has spurred some remedial action in legislative chambers, and in administrative halls.
These youngsters have something to say that needs saying, and that no one else can say. Perhaps our
national vitality depends upon a continuing tension between youth and age, whereby innovation meets
tradition, and the ardor of experiment fuses with the coolness of experience.

CHAPTER ONE
A Shameless Worship of Heroes
OF THE MANY IDEALS which in youth gave life a meaning and radiance missing
from the chilly perspectives of middle age, one at least has remained with me as
bright and satisfying as ever before—the shameless worship of heroes. In an age
that would level everything and reverence nothing, I take my stand with
Victorian Carlyle, and light my candles, like Mirandola before Plato’s image, at
the shrines of great men.
I say shameless, for I know how unfashionable it is now to acknowledge in life
or history any genius loftier than ourselves. Our democratic dogma has leveled
not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are
only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. If we may believe historian H.
G.Wells, Caesar was a numbskull and Napoleon a fool. Since it is contrary to
good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating
how inferior are the great men of the earth. In some of us, perhaps, it is a noble
and merciless asceticism, which would root out of our hearts the last vestige of
worship and adoration, lest the old gods should return and terrify us again.
For my part, I cling to this final religion, and discover in it a content and
stimulus more lasting than came from the devotional ecstasies of youth. How
natural it seemed to greet the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore by that title
which so long had been given him by his countrymen, Gurudeva (“Revered
Master”)—for why should we stand reverent before waterfalls and
mountaintops, or a summer moon on a quiet sea, and not before the highest
miracle of all: a man who is both great and good? So many of us are mere
talents, clever children in the play of life, that when genius stands in our
presence we can only bow down before it as an act of God, a continuance of
creation. Such men are the very life-blood of history, to which politics and
industry are but frame and bones.
Part cause of the dry scholasticism from which we were suffering when James
Harvey Robinson summoned us to humanize our knowledge was the conception
of history as an impersonal flow of figures and “facts,” in which genius played

so inessential a role that histories prided themselves upon ignoring them. It was
to Karl Marx above all that this theory of history was due; it was bound up with
a view of life that distrusted the exceptional man, envied superior talent, and
exalted the humble as the inheritors of the earth. In the end men began to write
history as if it had never been lived at all, as if no drama had ever walked
through it; no comedies or tragedies of struggling or frustrated men. The vivid
narratives of Gibbon and Taine gave way to ash-heaps of irrelevant erudition in
which every fact was correct, documented—and dead.
No, the real history of man is not in prices and wages, nor in elections and
battles, nor in the even tenor of the common man; it is in the lasting
contributions made by geniuses to the sum of human civilization and culture.
The history of France is not, if one may say it with all courtesy, the history of
the French people; the history of those nameless men and women who tilled the
soil, cobbled the shoes, cut the cloth, and peddled the goods (for these things
have been done everywhere and always)—the history of France is the record of
her exceptional men and women, her inventors, scientists, statesmen, poets,
artists,musicians, philosophers, and saints, and of the additions which they made
to the technology and wisdom, the artistry and decency, of their people and
mankind. And so with every country, so with the world; its history is properly
the history of its great men. What are the rest of us but willing brick and mortar
in their hands, that they may make a race a little finer than ourselves? Therefore
I see history not as a dreary scene of politics and carnage, but as the struggle of
man through genius with the obdurate inertia of matter and the baffling mystery
of mind; the struggle to understand, control, and remake himself and the world.
I see men standing on the edge of knowledge, and holding the light a little
farther ahead; men carving marble into forms ennobling men; men molding
peoples into better instruments of greatness; men making a language of music
and music out of lan-guage; men dreaming of finer lives-and living them. Here
is a process of creation more vivid than in any myth; a godliness more real than
in any creed.
To contemplate such men, to insinuate ourselves through study into some
modest discipleship to them, to watch them at their work and warm ourselves at
the fire that consumes them, this is to recapture some of the thrill that youth
gave us when we thought, at the altar or in the confessional, that we were
touching or hearing God. In that dreamy youth we believed that life was evil,
and that only death could usher us into paradise.We were wrong; even now,
while we live, we may enter it. Every great book, every work of revealing art,

every record of a devoted life is a call and an open sesame to the Elysian Fields.
Too soon we extinguished the flame of our hope and our reverence.
Let us change the icons, and light the candles again.

CHAPTER TWO
The Ten “Greatest” Thinkers
WHAT IS THOUGHT? It baffles description because it includes everything through
which it might be defined. It is the most immediate fact that we know, and the
last mystery of our being. All other things come to us as its forms, and all
human achievements find in it their source and their goal. Its appearance is the
great turning point in the drama of evolution.
When did the miracle begin? Perhaps when the great surges of ice came down
relentlessly from the Pole, chilling the air, destroying vegetation almost
everywhere, eliminating countless species of helpless and unadaptable animals,
and pushing a few survivors into a narrow tropical belt, where for generations
they clung to the equator, waiting for the wrath of the North to melt. Probably it
was in those critical days, when all the old and wonted ways of life were
nullified by the invading ice, and inherited or traditional patterns of behavior
found no success in an environment where everything was altered, that animals
with comparatively complete but inflexible instinctive equipment were weeded
out because they could not change within to meet the change outside; while the
animal we call man, dowered with a precarious plasticity, learned and rose to an
unquestioned supremacy over all the species of the forest and the field.
It was on some such life-and-death emergency as this, presumably, that human
reasoning began. That same incompleteness and adaptability of native reactions
which we see today in the infant, which makes it so inferior to a newborn
animal but leaves it in recompense the possibility of learning—that same
plasticity saved man and the higher mammals; while powerful organisms like
the mammoth and the mastodon, that had prowled about hitherto supreme,
succumbed to the icy change and became mere sport for paleontological
curiosity. They shivered and passed away, while man, puny man, remained.
Thought and invention began: the bewilderment of baffled instinct begot the
first timid hypotheses, the first tentative putting together of two and two, the
first generalizations, the first painful studies of similarities of quality and
regularities of sequence, the first adaptation of things learned to situations so
novel that reactions instinctive and immediate broke down in utter failure. It was

then that certain instincts of action evolved into modes of thought and
instruments of intelligence: what had been watchful waiting or stalking a prey
became attention; fear and flight became caution and deliberation; pugnacity
and assault became curiosity and analysis; manipulation became experiment.
The animal stood up erect and became man, slave still to a thousand
circumstances, timidly brave before countless perils, but in his precarious way
destined henceforth to be lord of the earth.
The Adventure of Human Reason
From that obscure age to our own place and time the history of civilization has
been the adventure of human reason. At every step on the stairway of progress it
was thought that lifted us, slowly and tentatively, to a larger power and a higher
life. If ideas do not determine history, inventions do; and inventions are
determined by ideas. Certainly it is desire, the restlessness of our insatiable
wants, that agitates us into thinking; but however motivated or inspired, it is
thought that finds a way. We need not settle then the ancient dispute between
those hero-worshipers, like Carlyle and Nietzsche, who interpret history in
terms of great men, and those hero-scorners who, like Spencer and Marx, see
only economic causes behind historical events; we may be sure that no pressure
of economic circumstance would ever have sufficed to advance mankind if the
illuminating spark of thought had not intervened.
Perhaps Tarde and James are right, and all history is a succession of inventions
made by genius and turned into conventions by the people, a series of initiatives
taken by adventurous leaders and spread among the masses of mankind by the
waves of imitation. There is no doubt that at the beginning and summit of every
age some heroic genius stands, the voice and index of his time, the inheritor and
interpreter of the past, the guide and pioneer into the future. If we could find in
each epoch of unfolding civilization the representative and dominating figure in
its thought, we should have a living panorama of our history. But as we face the
task of selecting these persons of the drama, about whom the play revolves, a
dozen difficulties daunt us. What shall be our test of greatness? How, in the
roster of human genius, shall we know whom to omit and whom to name?
The Criteria
Well, we shall be ruthless and dogmatic here; and though it break our hearts we
shall admit no hero to our list whose thought, however subtle or profound, has
not had an enduring influence upon mankind. This must be our supreme test. We
shall try to take account of the originality and scope, the veracity and depth, of

each thinker’s thought; but what we must bear in mind above all is the extent
and persistence of his influence upon the lives and minds of men. Only so can
we control in some measure our personal prejudices, and arrive at some
moderate impartiality in our choice.
And now how shall we define a “thinker”? Presumably the word will embrace
philosophers and scientists—but only these? Shall we include men like
Euripides, or Lucretius, or Dante, or Leonardo, or Shakespeare, or Goethe? No;
we shall bow humbly to such great names and class them, despite the reach and
fathom of their thought, as only secondarily thinkers, as artists first and above
all. Shall we include such immensely influential leaders as Jesus, or Buddha, or
Augustine, or Luther? No; these founders and renewers of religion would
overlap our term; it was not thought or reason, but feeling and noble passion, a
mystic vision and an incorrigible faith that made them, from their little foot of
earth, move the world. Shall we admit into our council of ten those great men of
action whose names ring down the corridor of history—men like Pericles, or
Alexander, or Caesar, or Charlemagne, or Cromwell, or Napoleon, or Lincoln?
No; if we spread the word “thinker” to catch such heroes in its net we shall
deprive it of its distinctive meaning, and shall fail to catch the significance of
thought. We must embrace within it philosophers and scientists alone.We shall
seek for those men who by their thinking, rather than by their action or their
passion, have most influenced mankind.We shall search for them in the quiet
places of the world, far from the madding crowd; in those obscure corners
where great thoughts came to them “as on dove’s feet,” and where for a moment
they saw, as in a transfiguration, the countenance of truth. Who then shall be
first?
1. CONFUCIUS At once our doubts and quarrels begin. By what canon shall we
include Confucius and omit Buddha and Christ? By this alone: that he was a
moral philosopher rather than a preacher of religious faith; that his call to the
noble life was based upon secular motives rather than upon supernatural
considerations; that he far more resembles Socrates than Jesus.
Born (552 B.C.) in an age of confusion, in which the old power and glory of
China had passed into feudal disintegration and factional strife, Kung-fu-tse
undertook to restore health and order to his country. How? Let him speak:
The illustrious ancients,when they wished to make clear and to propagate the
highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order. Before putting their
states in proper order, they regulated their families. Before regulating their
families, they cultivated their own selves. Before cultivating their own selves,

they perfected their souls. Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere
in their thoughts. Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to
the utmost their knowledge. Such investigation of knowledge lay in the
investigation of things, and in seeing them as they really were. When things were
thus investigated, knowledge became complete. When knowledge was complete,
their thoughts became sincere. When their thoughts were sincere, their souls
became perfect.When their souls were perfect, their own selves became
cultivated.When their selves were cultivated, their families became
regulated.When their families were regulated, their states came to be put into
proper order.When their states were in proper order, then the whole world
became peaceful and happy.
Here is a sound moral and political philosophy within the compass of a
paragraph. It was a highly conservative system; it exalted manners and etiquette,
and scorned democracy; despite its clear enunciation of the Golden Rule it was
nearer to Stoicism than to Christianity. A pupil having asked him should one
return good for evil, Confucius replied: “With what then will you recompense
kindness? Return good for good, and for evil, justice.” He did not believe that
all men were equal; it seemed to him that intelligence was not a universal gift.
As his pupil Mencius put it: “That whereby man differs from the lower animals
is little. Most people throw it away.” The greatest fortune of a people would be
to keep ignorant persons from public office, and secure their wisest men to rule
them.
A great city, Chung-tu, took him at his word and made him magistrate. “A
marvelous reformation,” we are told, “ensued in the manners of the people….
There was an end of crime…. Dishonesty and dissoluteness hid their heads.
Loyalty and good faith became the characteristic of the men, chastity and
docility of the women.” It is too good to be true, and probably it did not last
very long. But even in his lifetime Confucius’ followers understood his
greatness and foresaw the timeless influence he was to have in molding the
courtesy and poise and placid wisdom of the Chinese. “His disciples buried him
with great pomp. A multitude of them built huts near his grave and remained
there, mourning as for a father, for nearly three years. When all the others were
gone, Tse-Kung,” who had loved him beyond the rest, “continued by the grave
for three years more, alone.”
2. PLATO And now we are faced with new problems. Whole civilizations
confront us in which we can find no dominating name, no powerful secular
personality voicing and forming his people with thought. It is so in India, and

among the Jews, and among the nomad races of Asia Minor’s “Fertile
Crescent”: we have a Buddha, an Isaiah, a Jesus, and a Mohammed, but we have
no world-scientist, no world-philosopher. And in another case—perhaps the
most lasting and marvelous civilization the world has ever known—we have a
hundred Pharaohs, and innumerable relics of a varied art, but no name stands
out as that of one who brought the past into the perspective of wisdom and
stamped his influence upon the intellectual development of his nation.We have
to pass respectfully by these peoples and these centuries, and consider the glory
of Periclean Greece.
Why do we love Plato? Because Plato himself was a lover: lover of comrades,
lover of the intoxication of dialectical revelry, passionate seeker of the elusive
reality behind thoughts and things. We love him for his unstinted energy, for the
wild nomadic play of his fancy, for the joy which he found in life in all its
unredeemed and adventurous complexity. We love him because he was alive
every minute of his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be forgiven
for whatever errors he has made.We love him because of his high passion for
social reconstruction through intelligent control; because he retained throughout
his eighty years that zeal for human improvement which is for most of us the
passing luxury of youth; because he conceived philosophy as an instrument not
merely for the interpretation but for the remolding of the world. We love him
because he worshiped beauty as well as truth, and gave to ideas the living
movement of drama, and clothed them in all the radiance of art. Here in the
Republic and the Dialogues is such a riotous play of the creative imagination as
might have made a Shakespeare; here is imagery squandered with lordly
abandon; here is humor such as one misses in our ponderous modern
philosophers; here is no system but all systems; here is one abounding
fountainhead of European thought; here is prose as strong and beautiful as the
great temples where Greek joy disported itself in marble; here literary prose is
born, and born adult.
Plato, then, must be our second name. But we shall have to defend him against a
very reasonable challenge: What of old Socrates, almost the father, and surely
the greatest martyr, of philosophy? It will seem ridiculous to omit him from a
list which will include heroes not half so great as he. The reader must not be
shocked to learn that Socrates is half a myth, and only half a man. A learned
Frenchman, M. Dupreel (in La Legende Socratique), has reduced the noble
gadfly to the misty historical status of Achilles, Oedipus, Romulus, and
Siegfried. No doubt when we are dead some careful and conscientious scholar
will prove that we never existed. But we may be certain that in good measure

Socrates owes his fame as a philosopher to the creative imagination of Plato,
who used the magnificent idler as the mouthpiece of his views.How much of
Plato’s Socrates was Socrates, and how much of it was Plato, we shall probably
never know. Let us take Plato as implying both.
His Dialogues are among the precious possessions of mankind. Here for the first
time philosophy took form, and by the very exuberance of youth achieved a
perfection unrivaled in after days. Do you wish to hear noble discourse of love
and friendship?—read the Lysis, the Charmides, and the Phaedrus. Would you
know what a great and tender soul—the Platonic Socrates—thought of another
life?—read the Phaedo, whose final pages are one of the peaks in the history of
prose. Are you interested in the puzzles of the mind, in the mystery of
knowledge?—read the Parmenides and the Theaetetus. Are you interested in
anything?—read the Republic: here you shall find metaphysics, theology, ethics,
psychology, theory of education, theory of statesmanship, theory of art; here you
shall find feminism and birth-control, communism and socialism with all their
virtues and their difficulties, eugenics and libertarian education, aristocracy and
democracy, vitalism and psychoanalysis—what shall you not find here? No
wonder Emerson awarded to the Republic the words which the occasionally
pious Omar had written of the Koran: “Burn the libraries, for their value is in
this book.”
As to Plato’s influence, how can we doubt? Consider the Academy which he
founded, the first and longest-lived of the universities of the world. Consider the
perpetual revival of Plato’s philosophy from the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria to
the Cambridge Platonists of England. Consider the permeation of Christian
theology with Platonic thought and symbolism, and the dominance of Plato in
the culture of the earlier Middle Ages. Consider the enthusiastic Platonism of
the Renaissance, when Lorenzo’s table recaptured some of the glory of the
Symposium, and Pico della Mirandola burned candles devoutly before the
Master’s image. Consider that at this moment, in a hundred countries and a
thousand cities, a hundred thousand students, young and old, are absorbed in the
Republic or the Dialogues, are being slowly and gratefully molded into a
sensitive wisdom by the ardor and subtlety of Plato. Here is an immortality of
the soul which makes almost insignificant the passing of the flesh.
3. ARISTOTLE All the world would agree that Aristotle must be in our list. The
Middle Ages called him The Philosopher, as if to say that he embodied the type
at the summit of its perfection. It is not that we love him; the texts he has left
behind him expound so monotonously a passionless moderation that after

feeling the radiance of Plato, we freeze at the touch of the Stagyrite’s tempered
mind. But it is unfair to rate him by his books; we know now that they were but
hasty notes made sometimes by himself, sometimes by his students, for the
guidance or remembrance of his lectures; it would be absurd to judge him by
comparing these technical fragments with the vivid dialogues through which
Plato won for the first time a public audience for philosophy.
But let us once overcome this barrier of scholastic terminology and scornfully
concentrated thought, and we shall find ourselves in the presence of an intellect
of almost unbelievable depth and range. Here is a circumnavigation of the globe
such as no mind has accomplished since; here every problem in science and
philosophy has its consideration, its illumination, and a defensible solution; here
knowledge is brought together as if through a thousand spies, and coordinated
into a united vision of the world. Here the phraseology of philosophy is born,
and today it is hardly possible to think without using the mintage of Aristotle’s
brain. Here is wisdom: calm, temperate, and well nigh complete, as of a
limitless intelligence majestically overspreading life. Here are new sciences,
founded with almost casual ease, as if these supreme creations of the human
intellect were but the recreations of a philosopher; here it is that biology
appears, and embryology, and logic. Not that no man had ever thought of these
matters before, but that none had controlled his thinking with patient
observation, careful experiment, and systematic formulation of results. Barring
astronomy and medicine, the history of science begins with the encyclopedic
labors of the tireless Stagyrite.
Confucius alone has had as great an influence. Everybody knows how, at
Alexandria and in Imperial Rome, the work of Aristotle became the foundation
of advancing science; how in the thirteenth century his philosophical writings,
brought by the invading Moors to reawakened Europe, played a fertilizing role
in the development of scholastic philosophy; how the great Summae of that
virile age were only adaptations of the Metaphysics and the Organon; how
Dante placed Aristotle first among all thinkers—“master of those who know”
how Constantinople brought the last lost treasures of his thought to the eager
students of the Renaissance; and how this quiet sovereignty of one man over a
millennium of intellectual history came to an end only with the audacious
irreverence of Occam and Ramus, the experimental science of Roger Bacon, and
the innovating philosophy of Francis Bacon.We shall not find again, in this tour
of the world upon which we are engaged, another name that so long inspired and
enthralled the minds of men.

4. SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS So Greece flits by, and we come to Rome. Who were
the great thinkers there? Lucretius first and finest of all.Yet, because his
philosophy was not his own, but with modest candor was ascribed to Epicurus,
and because his influence upon his own people and upon posterity was esoteric
and sporadic, touching only the topmost minds, we shall have to let him stand
outside our circle, consoled with his high place in the literature of the world.
And as to Seneca and Epictetus and Aurelius, they too were echoes of the
Greeks, adapters of Zeno’s apathy to a dying Rome. The old civilization was
disappearing as they wrote; the strength had gone from the sinews of its people;
freemen were everywhere replaced with slaves, and the proud free cities of the
past were humbled with vassalage and tribute. The master-class divided itself
into wastrel Epicureans, or Spartan Stoics too militantly stern to indulge in the
delights of philosophy. Suddenly the ancient edifice collapsed, and European
civilization lay in ruins.
It began again when the Church healed the strife of factions with the mystic
authority of the Word, and brought men back from the battlefields to a settled
life. The emperors passed, the popes remained; the legions marched no longer,
but the monks and missionaries of the rising faith created quietly a new order in
which thought could grow once more. How long and dreary was that second
adolescence of the conscious European mind! Even today we are so precariously
established in enlightenment that we can yet feel, as if in memory, the fearful
groping of those many years.
And then trade grew, towns graduated into cities, schools into universities; again
it was possible for some portion of mankind to be freed from toil for the leisure
and luxury of thought. Abelard stirred half a continent with his eloquence.
Bonaventure and Anselm laid down in majestic theology the rationale of
medieval faith. When the work of preparation was complete another Aristotle
came, Saint Thomas of Aquino, a man who took the universe for his specialty,
and flung a frail bridge of reason across the chasms between knowledge and
belief. What Dante did to the hopes and fears of the Catholic Renaissance,
Aquinas did for its thought: unifying knowledge, interpreting it, and focusing it
all upon the great problems of life and death. The world does not follow him
now, preferring a doubting Thomas to a dogmatic one, but there was a time
when every intellect honored the Angelic Doctor, and every philosophy took his
gigantic Summae as its premises. Even today, in a hundred universities, in a
thousand colleges, his thought is reverenced as still sounder than science, and
his philosophy is the official system of the most powerful church in
Christendom. We may not love him as we have loved the rebels and the martyrs

of philosophy, but because of his modest supremacy in a great century, and his
vast influence upon millions and millions of mankind, we must make a place for
him in our litany of thought.
No doubt some hearts will break at this selection, including the author’s own.
There are so many other names that one might here invoke more lovingly than
Thomas’s, names far more congenial to the modern world; names like Spinoza
or Nietzsche, for which one may have passionate affection rather than mere
intellectual respect. But if we prove unfaithful to the standards we have
ourselves laid down, we may as well abandon our quest at once; our list would
then be an album of favorites rather than a gallery of great minds….
5. COPERNICUS And then came a voice out of Poland, saying that this earth,
footstool of God and home of his redeeming pilgrimage, was a minor satellite of
a minor sun. It seemed so simple a thing to say; we cannot be moved to fear or
wonder by it now; we take it for granted that this soil on which we stand is a
passing thing, transiently compact of elements that will disintegrate and leave
not a wrack behind. But to the medieval world, whose whole philosophy had
rested on the neighborly nearness of earth and God, on the constant moral
solicitude of the Deity for man, this new astronomy was an atheistic blasphemy,
a ruthless blow that seemed to overthrow the Jacob’s ladder which faith had
built between angels and men.
Copernicus’ book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs was well named, for
no book in history has created a greater revolution. That pious Polish monk,
sitting patiently before the baffling stars, had meant no harm; he had no
suspicion of the bearings of his thought on the future of belief; he had lost
himself in the search for knowledge; he was sure that all truth must be good and
beautiful, and would make men free. And so, by the magic of his mathematics,
he transformed a geocentric and anthropocentric universe—a world that
revolved about the earth and man—into a kaleidoscope of planets and stars in
which the earth seemed but a moment’s precipitation of a floating nebula.
Everything was changed—distances, significances, destinies. And God, who
had been closer than hands and feet, who had seemed to inhabit the friendly and
flowing clouds, disappeared into the far reaches of an illimitable space. It was as
if the walls of a man’s house had been torn down by some blind and angry wind,
leaving him unsheltered in the darkness of infinity.
We do not know how profound a thinker Copernicus was, except through this
immeasurable influence of his work. With him modernity begins.With him
secularism begins.With him reason makes its French Revolution against a faith

immemorially enthroned, and man commences his long effort to rebuild with
thought the shattered palace of his dreams. Heaven becomes mere sky and space
and nothingness, or it descends upon the earth and breeds visions of Utopia in
the hungry hearts of men who once had hoped for Paradise. It was as in the fable
Plato told, of the gods who had cared for man till he had come of age, and then
had disappeared, leaving him to the devices of his own intelligence. It was as in
the ancient savage days, when the Old Man of the tribe drove the young men
forth and bade them seek some other soil and raise upon it their own homes and
their own happiness.With the Copernican revolution man was compelled to
become of age.
6. SIR FRANCIS BACON He did not falter at this sudden maturity. On the contrary,
the century that followed Copernicus was one of youthful audacity and courage
in every field. Little vessels began to explore the now round and limited earth;
frail minds began to explore the intellectual globe, careless of dogma,
unharassed by tradition, and never dreaming that mankind would fail. Oh, the
zest of those bright Renaissance days, when the poverty of a thousand years was
almost forgotten, and the labor of a thousand years had made men richer and
bolder, scornful of barriers and bounds! The flash of those alert eyes, the rich
blood in those strong frames, the warm color of their luxurious raiment, the
spontaneous poetry of that impassioned speech, the creative insatiable desires,
the search and sweep and fearlessness of newly liberated minds—shall we ever
know such days again?
Whom can we name as voice and symbol of that fermenting age? Leonardo?—
painter, musician, sculptor, etcher, architect, anatomist, physiologist, physicist,
inventor, engineer, chemist, astronomer, geologist, zoologist, botanist,
geographer, mathematician, and philosopher! Alas, our definitions and criteria
exclude him: he was (was he not?) an artist primarily, and only secondarily a
philosopher or a scientist; it is by his Last Supper and his Mona Lisa that we
remember him, and not by his theory of fossils, or his anticipation of Harvey, or
his majestic vision of universal and everlasting Law.—Or shall it be Giordano
Bruno, that forever seeking soul, unsatisfied with the finite, hungry for an
immeasurable unity, impatient of divisions, sects, dogmas, and creeds, only less
controllable than the winter’s winds, only less fiery than Etna, and doomed by
his own turbulent spirit to a martyr’s death?
No; it cannot be Bruno, for there was one greater than he: “the man who rang
the bell that called the wits together” who sent out a challenge to all the lovers
and servants of truth everywhere to bind themselves together in the new order

and ministry of science; who proclaimed the mission of thought as no vain
scholastic dispute, no empty academic speculation, but the inductive inquiry
into nature’s laws, the resolute extension of the mastery of man over the
conditions of his life; the man who mapped out as with royal authority the
unconquered fields of research, pointed a hundred sciences to their tasks, and
foretold their unbelievable victories; who inspired the Royal Society of Great
Britain and the great Encyclopedie of France, who turned men from knowledge
as meditation to knowledge as remolding power; who despised worship and
longed for control; who overthrew the Aristotelian logic of unobservant reason
and turned the gaze of science to the self-revealing face of nature; who carried
in his brave soul, beyond any other man of that spacious age, the full spirit and
purpose of the modern mind. Of course it was Francis Bacon.
7. SIR ISAAC NEWTON From that day to ours the history of the European intellect
has been predominantly the progress of the Baconian as against the medieval
conception of the world.
Predominantly but not continuously; there are many great figures that stood
aside from this main road. In Descartes the new struggles in the arms of the old,
and never quite liberates itself; in the great unifying soul of Leibnitz the
medieval tradition is still powerful enough to turn a mathematician into a
precarious theologian; and in Immanuel Kant the voice of ancestral faith speaks
amid the skepticism of the Enlightenment. Strangely bridging these two streams
of thought—the scientific and the religious—stands the figure of Spinoza:
polisher of lenses and God-intoxicated man; silent devotee of lonely
speculation, and formulator of the metaphysics of modern science; lover of
mechanics and geometry, and martyr equally with Bruno to philosophy, dying
only a slower and obscurer death. Every profound mind after him has felt his
power, every historian has attested the quiet depth of his wisdom. But we have
bound ourselves to judge these heroes of the mind in objective terms of
influence rather than by personal estimates of wisdom, and even a lover of
Spinoza must confess that the healing touch of the “gentle philosopher” has
fallen upon the rarer and loftier souls rather than upon the masses or even the
classes of mankind. He belongs to the islanded aristocracy of thought, and the
world has not mounted to him yet.
But of Sir Isaac Newton there can be no similar dispute. “Every schoolboy
knows” the story of his absent-minded genius; how the great scientist, left for a
moment to his own culinary wits, and told to boil an egg three minutes for his
lunch, dropped his watch into the water and watched the egg while the time-

piece boiled; or how the absorbed mathematician, going up to his room to
change his clothes for dinner, undressed and went contentedly to bed (it would
be sad if these delightful stories were not true). Not so many schoolboys know
that Newton’s Principia marked the quiet assumption, by science, of its now
unchallenged mastery over modern thought; that the laws of motion and
mechanics as established by Newton became the basis of all later practical
advance, of that reordered surface of the earth and that extended and intenser
life which are the miracles of science in our day; the discovery of gravitation
illuminated the whole world of astronomy and brought the bright confusion of
the stars into an almost organic unity. “Not long ago,” said Voltaire, “a
distinguished company were discussing the trite and frivolous question” (alas,
this is an untimely quotation!), “who was the greatest man—Caesar, Alexander,
Tamerlane, or Cromwell? Someone answered that without doubt it was Isaac
Newton. And rightly: for it is to him who masters our minds by the force of
truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our
reverence.” Even in his lifetime the world understood that Newton belonged to
its heroes.
8. VOLTAIRE It was Voltaire who introduced to France the mechanics of Newton
and the psychology of Locke, and thereby began the great age of the
Enlightenment. It will shock scholastic minds to see Voltaire included among
the supreme thinkers of mankind; they will protest that his thought was
borrowed rather than original, and that his influence was immoral and
destructive. But which of us is original except in form? What idea can we
conceive today that has not enjoyed, in one garb or another, a hoary antiquity of
time? It is easier to be original in error than in truth, for every truth displaces a
thousand falsehoods. An honest philosopher will admit, like Santayana, that
truth, in its outlines, is as old as Aristotle, and that all we need do today is to
inform and vary the design with our transient needs. Did not Spinoza,
profoundest of modern thinkers, take the essentials of his thought from Bruno,
Maimonides, and Descartes? Did not Ramus defend, as his thesis for the
doctorate, the modest proposition that everything in Aristotle is false except that
which he pilfered from Plato? And did not Plato, like Shakespeare, borrow
lavishly from every store, making these stolen goods his own by transforming
them with beauty? Granted that Voltaire, like Bacon, “lighted his candle at every
man’s torch” it remains that he made the torch burn so brightly that it
enlightened all mankind. Things came to him dull and he made them radiant;
things came to him obscure, and he cleansed and scoured them with clarity;
things came to him in useless scholastic dress, and he clothed them in such

language that the whole world could understand and profit from them. Never did
one man teach so many, or with such irresistible artistry.
Was his influence destructive? Who shall say? Shall we abandon here the
objectivity of judgment we proudly assumed, and reject the laughing
philosopher of Ferney because his thought was different from our own? But here
we have sacrificed Spinoza, though some of us swear by his philosophy;
sacrificed him because his influence has been, though deep, too narrowly
confined. Evidently we must ask of Voltaire, not do we accept his conclusions,
but did the world accept them, did his thinking mold the educated humanity of
his age and his posterity?
It did; there can be little doubt of it. Louis XVI, seeing in his Temple prison the
works of Voltaire and Rousseau, said, “Those two men have destroyed
France,”—meaning despotism. Perhaps the poor king did philosophy too much
honor; doubtless economic causes underlay the intellectual uprising that
centered in Voltaire. But just as physiological decay leads to no action unless it
sends its message of pain to consciousness, so the economic and political
corruption of Bourbon France might have proceeded to utter national
disintegration had not a hundred virile pens brought home the state of affairs to
the conscience and consciousness of their country. And in that great task
Voltaire was commander-in-chief; all the rest willingly acknowledged his lead,
and did his bidding proudly. Even the mighty Frederick greeted him as “the
finest genius that the ages have borne.”
Beneath the recrudescence of ancient beliefs amid which we live, the influence
of Voltaire quietly persists. As all Europe in his century bowed to the scepter of
his pen, so the great leaders of the mind in later centuries have honored him as
the fountainhead of intellectual enlightenment in our time. Nietzsche dedicated
one of his books to him, and drank deeply at the Voltairian spring; Anatole
France formed his thought, his wit, and his style on the ninety-nine volumes
which the great sage left behind him; and Brandes, aged survivor of many a
battle in the war of liberation, gives some of his dying years to a forgivably
idolatrous biography of the Great Emancipator of Ferney. When we forget to
honor Voltaire we shall be unworthy of freedom.
9. IMMANUEL KANT Nevertheless, there was another side to this irrepressible
conflict between simple faith and honest doubt. Something remained to be said
for the creeds which the Enlightenment had apparently destroyed. Voltaire
himself had retained a sincere belief in a personal Deity, and had raised “To
God” a pretty chapel at Ferney. But his followers had gone beyond him, and

when he died materialism had pursued every rival philosophy from the field.
Now there are two modes of approach to an analysis of the world; we may begin
with matter, and then we shall be forced to deduce from it all the mystery of
mind; or we may begin with mind, and then we shall be forced to look upon
matter as merely a bundle of sensations. For how can we know matter except
through our senses?—and what is it then for us but our idea of it? Matter, as
known to us, is but a form of mind.
When Berkeley for the first time clearly announced this novel conclusion to the
world, it made a stir among the pundits, and seemed to offer a splendid exit
from the infidelity of the Enlightenment. Here was a chance to reassert the
primacy of mind, to reduce its threatening enemy to a mere province in its
realm, and so to restore the philosophical bases of religious belief and immortal
hope.
The supreme figure in this idealistic development was Immanuel Kant, perfect
archetype of the abstract philosopher; Kant, who traveled much in Konigsberg,
and from its promenaded streets saw the starry heavens melt into a half-unreal
phenomenon, transfigured by perception into a subjective thing. It was Kant
who labored best to rescue mind from matter; who argued so irrefutably
(because so unintelligibly) against the uses of “pure reason” and who, by the
prestidigitation of his thought, brought back to life, magician-wise, the dear
beliefs of the ancient faith.
The world heard him gladly, for it felt that it could live by faith alone, and did
not love a science that merely darkened its aspirations and destroyed its hopes.
Throughout the nineteenth century the influence of Kant grew; time and again,
when rationalism and skepticism threatened the old citadels, men fled for
strength and refuge “back to Kant.” Even so matter-of-fact a man as
Schopenhauer, and rabid a heretic as Nietzsche, accepted him, and looked upon
his reduction of the world to mere appearance as the indispensable preliminary
of every possible philosophy. So vital was Kant’s work that in its outlines and its
bases it remains to our own day unshaken and intact; has not science itself,
through Pearson, Mach, and Poincaré, admitted that all reality, all “matter,” all
“nature” with its “laws,” are but constructs of the mind, possibly but never
certainly known in their own elusive truth? Apparently Kant had won the battle
against materialism and atheism, and the world could hope again.
10. CHARLES DARWIN And then Darwin came, and the war waged anew. We
cannot know now what Darwin’s work may finally mean in the history of

mankind. But it may well be that for posterity his name will stand as a turning
point in the intellectual development of our Western civilization. If Darwin was
wrong, the world may forget him as it has almost forgotten Democritus and
Anaxagoras; if he was right, men will have to date from 1859 the beginning of
modern thought.
For what did Darwin do but offer, quietly, and with a disarming humility, a
world-picture totally different from that which had contented the mind of man
before? We had supposed that it was a world of order, moving under divine
guidance and omnipotent intelligence to a just and perfect fulfillment in which
every virtue would find at last its fit reward. But Darwin, without attacking any
creed, described what he had seen. Suddenly the world turned red, and nature,
which had been so fair in the autumn’s colors under the setting sun, seemed to
be only a scene of slaughter and strife, in which birth was an accident, and only
death a certainty. “Nature” became “natural selection,” that is, a struggle for
existence; and not for existence merely, but for mates and power, a ruthless
elimination of the “unfit” of the tenderer flowers, the gentler animals, and the
kindlier men. The surface of the earth seethed with warring species and
competing individuals, every organism was the prey of some larger beast; every
life was lived at the expense of some other life; great “natural” catastrophes
came, ice ages, earthquakes, tornadoes, droughts, pestilences, famines, wars;
millions and millions of living things were “weeded out,” were quickly or
slowly killed. Some species and some individuals survived for a little while—
this was evolution. This was nature, this was reality.
Copernicus had reduced the earth to a speck among melting clouds; Darwin
reduced man to an animal fighting for his transient mastery of the globe. Man
was no longer the son of God; he was the son of strife, and his wars made the
fiercest brutes ashamed of their amateur cruelty. The human race was no longer
the favored creation of a benevolent deity; it was a species of ape, which the
fortunes of variation and selection had raised to a precarious dignity, and which
in its turn was destined to be surpassed and to disappear. Man was not immortal;
he was condemned to death from the hour of his birth.
Imagine the strain upon minds brought up in the tender philosophy of our youth,
and forced to adapt themselves to the harsh and bloody picture of a Darwinian
world. Is it any wonder that the old faith fought fiercely for its life, that for a
generation “the conflict between religion and science” was bitterer than at any
time since Galileo retracted and Bruno burned at the stake? And do not the
victors, exhausted by the contest, sit sadly today amid the ruins, secretly

mourning their triumph, secretly yearning for the old world which their victory
has destroyed?
Apologies
Well, there are our ten. Shall we see them in one glance?
1. Confucius
2. Plato
3. Aristotle
4. Saint Thomas Aquinas
5. Copernicus
6. Sir Francis Bacon
7. Sir Isaac Newton
8. Voltaire
8. Immanuel Kant
10. Charles Darwin
Those whom we have omitted would make as fair a list: Democritus, Epicurus,
Marcus Aurelius, Abelard, Galileo, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Spencer,
Nietzsche. And consider the vast movements of thought which we have ignored
—feminism, for example, with its great leaders from Mary Wollstonecraft to
Susan Anthony; and socialism, with its roster of hopeful theorists from
Diogenes and Zeno to Lassalle and Marx. It must be so; no list could exhaust
the treasure of man’s heritage or equal its infinite variety. And it is well; let us
have many lists and many heroes; we cannot honor them too much, or
commemorate them excessively.
Here, perhaps, is the true litany of saints; these are the names that should adorn
our calendars, with those that gave new beauty to the world, or counseled it to a
gentler humanity.

CHAPTER FIVE
The Ten “Peaks” of Human Progress
INTHE YEAR 1794 a young French aristocrat by the magnificent name of Marquis
Marie Jean de Condorcet was hiding from the guillotine in a little attic room on
the outskirts of Paris. There, far from any friend, lest the coming of a friend
should reveal his hiding place, he wrote the most optimistic book ever penned
by the hand of man, Esquisse d’un tableau des progrès de l’esprit humain (A
Sketch of a Tableau of the Progress of the Human Spirit).
Eloquently he described the recent liberation of science from the shackles of
superstition and gloried in the triumphs of Newton. “Given 100 years of
liberated knowledge and universal free education,” he said, “and all social
problems will, at the close of the next century, have been solved…. There is no
limit to progress except the duration of the globe upon which we are placed.”
Having completed his little manuscript, Condorcet handed it to his hostess.
Then, in the dark of the night, he fled to a distant village inn and flung his tired
body upon a bed. When he awoke, he found himself surrounded by the police.
Taking from his pocket a vial of poison which he had carried for this
culminating chapter of his romance, Condorcet drank it to the last drop and then
fell into the arms of his captors, dead.
I have never ceased to marvel that a man so placed—driven to the very last
stand of hope, with all his personal sacrifices of aristocratic privilege and
fortune gone for nothing, with that great revolution upon which the youth of all
Europe had pinned its hopes for a better world issuing in indiscriminate
suspicion and terror—should, instead of writing an epic of despondency and
gloom, have written a paean to progress.
Never before had man so believed in mankind, and perhaps never again since.
Search through all ancient Greek and Latin literature, and you will find no
affirmatory belief in human progress. Not until the Occident brought into the
Orient the virus of—the fever of—progress can you find in any Hindu or
Chinese thinker any belief in the notion that man marches forward through the
years. It is a relatively new idea for men to have and to hold.

Progress—A Definition
What shall we mean by “progress”? Subjective definitions will not do; we must
not conceive progress in terms of one nation, or one religion, or one code of
morals; an increase of kindness, for example, would alarm our young
Nietzscheans. Nor may we define progress in terms of happiness, for idiots are
happier than geniuses, and those whom we most respect seek not happiness but
greatness. Is it possible to find an objective definition for our term—one that
will hold for any individual, any group, even for any species? Let us
provisionally define progress as “increasing control of the environment by life,”
and let us mean by environment “all the circumstances that condition the
coordination and realization of desire.” Progress is the domination of chaos by
mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.
It need not be continuous in order to be real. There may be “plateaus” in it, Dark
Ages and disheartening retrogressions, but if the last stage is the highest of all
we shall say that man makes progress. And in assessing epochs and nations we
must guard against loose thinking. We must not compare nations in their youth
with nations in the mellowness of their cultural maturity, and we must not
compare the worst or the best of one age with the selected best or worst of all
the collected past. If we find that the type of genius prevalent in young countries
like America and Australia tends to the executive, explorative, and scientific
kind rather than to the painter of pictures or poems, the carver of statues or
words, we shall understand that each age and place calls for and needs certain
brands of genius rather than others, and that the cultural sort can only come
when its practical predecessors have cleared the forest and prepared the way. If
we find that civilizations come and go, and mortality is upon all the works of
man, we shall confess the irrefutability of death, and be consoled if, during the
day of our lives and our nations, we move slowly upward, and become a little
better than we were. If we find that philosophers are of slighter stature now than
in the days of broad-backed Plato and the substantial Socrates, that our sculptors
are lesser men than Donatello or Angelo, our painters inferior to Velázquez, our
poets and composers unnameable with Shelley and Bach, we shall not despair;
these stars did not all shine on the same night. Our problem is whether the total
and average level of human ability has increased, and stands at its peak today.
When we take a total view, and compare our modern existence, precarious and
chaotic as it is, with the ignorance, superstition, brutality, cannibalism, and
diseases of primitive peoples, we are a little comforted: the lowest strata of our
race may still differ only slightly from such men, but above those strata

thousands and millions have reached to mental and moral heights inconceivable,
presumably, to the early mind. Under the complex strain of city life we
sometimes take imaginative refuge in the quiet simplicity of savage days, but in
our less romantic moments we know that this is a flight-reaction from our actual
tasks, that this idolatry of barbarism, like so many of our young opinions, is
merely an impatient expression of adolescent mal-adaptation, part of the
suffering involved in the contemporary retardation of individual maturity. A
study of such savage tribes as survive shows their high rate of infantile
mortality, their short tenure of life, their inferior speed, their inferior stamina,
their inferior will, and their superior plagues. The friendly and flowing savage is
like Nature—delightful but for the insects and the dirt.
The savage, however, might turn the argument around, and inquire how we
enjoy our politics and our wars, and whether we think ourselves happier than the
tribes whose weird names resound in the textbooks of anthropology. The
believer in progress will have to admit that we have made too many advances in
the art of war, and that our politicians, with startling exceptions, would have
adorned the Roman Forum in the days of Milo and Clodius. As to happiness, no
man can say; it is an elusive angel, destroyed by detection and seldom amenable
to measurement. Presumably it depends first upon health, secondly upon love,
and thirdly upon wealth. As to wealth, we make such progress that it lies on the
conscience of our intellectuals; as to love, we try to atone for our lack of depth
by unprecedented inventiveness and variety. Our thousand fads of diet and drugs
predispose us to the belief that we must be ridden with disease as compared with
simpler men in simpler days, but this is a delusion. We think that where there
are so many doctors there must be more sickness than before. But in truth we
have not more ailments than in the past, but only more money; our wealth
allows us to treat and cherish and master illnesses from which primitive men
died without even knowing their Greek names.
The Outline Of History
Having made these admissions and modifications, let us try to see the problem
of progress in a total view. When we look at history in the large we see it as a
graph of rising and falling states—nations and cultures disappearing as on some
gigantic film. But in that irregular movement of countries and that chaos of men,
certain great moments stand out as the peaks and essence of human history,
certain advances which, once made, were never lost. Step by step man has
climbed from the savage to the scientist, and these are the stages of his growth:
1. SPEECH Think of it not as a sudden achievement, nor as a gift from the gods,

but as the slow development of articulate expression, through centuries of effort,
from the mating calls of animals to the lyric flights of poetry. Without words, or
common nouns, that might give to particular images the ability to represent a
class, generalization would have stopped in its beginnings, and reason would
have stayed where we find it in the brute.Without words, philosophy and poetry,
history and prose, would have been impossible, and thought could never have
reached the subtlety of Einstein or Anatole France. Without words man could
not have become man—nor woman woman.
2. FIRE Fire made man independent of climate, gave him a greater compass on
the earth, tempered his tools to hardness and durability, and offered him as food
a thousand things inedible before. Not least of all it made him master of the
night, and shed an animating brilliance over the hours of evening and dawn.
Picture the dark before man conquered it; even now the terrors of that primitive
abyss survive in our traditions and perhaps in our blood—once every twilight
was a tragedy, and man crept into his cave at sunset trembling with fear. Now
we do not creep into our caves until sunrise, and though it is folly to miss the
sun, how good it is to be liberated from our ancient fears! This overspreading of
the night with a billion man-made stars has brightened the human spirit, and
made for a vivacious jollity in modern life.We shall never be grateful enough for
light.
3. THE CONQUEST OF THE ANIMALS Our memories are too forgetful, and our
imagination too unimaginative, to let us realize the boon we have in our security
from the larger and subhuman beasts of prey. Animals are now our playthings
and our helpless food, but there was a time when man was hunted as well as
hunter, when every step from cave or hut was an adventure, and the possession
of the earth was still at stake. This war to make the planet human was surely the
most vital in human history; by its side all other wars were but family quarrels,
achieving nothing. That struggle between strength of body and power of mind
was waged through long and unrecorded years; and when at last it was won, the
fruit of man’s triumph—his safety on the earth—was transmitted across a
thousand generations, with a hundred other gifts from the past, to be part of our
heritage at birth. What are all our temporary retrogressions against the
background of such a conflict and such a victory?
4. AGRICULTURE Civilization was impossible in the hunting stage; it called for a
permanent habitat, a settled way of life. It came with the home and the school,
and these could not be till the products of the field replaced the animals of the
forest or the herd as the food of man. The hunter found his quarry with

increasing difficulty, while the woman whom he left at home tended an ever
more fruitful soil. This patient husbandry by the wife threatened to make her
independent of the male, and for his own lordship’s sake he forced himself at
last to the prose of tillage. No doubt it took centuries to make this greatest of all
transitions in human history, but when at last it was made, civilization began.
Meredith said that woman will be the last creature to be civilized by man. He
was as wrong as it is possible to be in the limits of one sentence. For civilization
came through two things chiefly: the home, which developed those social
dispositions that form the psychological cement of society, and agriculture,
which took man from his wandering life as hunter, herder, and killer, and settled
him long enough in one place to let him build homes, schools, churches,
colleges, universities, civilization. But it was woman who gave man agriculture
and the home; she domesticated man as she domesticated the sheep and the pig.
Man is woman’s last domestic animal, and perhaps he is the last creature that
will be civilized by woman. The task is just begun: one look at our menus
reveals us as still in the hunting stage.
5. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION Here are two men disputing: one knocks the other
down, kills him, and then concludes that he who is alive must have been right,
and that he who is dead must have been wrong—a mode of demonstration still
accepted in international disputes. Here are two other men disputing: one says to
the other, “Let us not fight—we may both be killed; let us take our difference to
some elder of the tribe, and submit to his decision.” It was a crucial moment in
human history! For if the answer was “No,” barbarism continued; if it was
“Yes,” civilization planted another root in the memory of man: the replacement
of chaos with order, of brutality with judgment, of violence with law. Here, too,
is a gift unfelt, because we are born within the charmed circle of its protection,
and never know its value till we wander into the disordered or solitary regions
of the earth. God knows that our congresses and our parliaments are dubious
inventions, the distilled mediocrity of the land, but despite them we manage to
enjoy a security of life and property which we shall appreciate more warmly
when civil war or revolution reduces us to primitive conditions. Compare the
safety of travel today with the robber-infested highways of medieval Europe.
Never before in history was there such order and liberty as exist in England
today, and may someday exist in America, when a way is found of opening
municipal office to capable and honorable men. However, we must not excite
ourselves too much about political corruption or democratic mismanagement:
politics is not life, but only a graft upon life; under its vulgar melodrama the
traditional order of society quietly persists, in the family, in the school, in the

thousand devious influences that change our native lawlessness into some
measure of cooperation and goodwill. Without consciousness of it, we partake
in a luxurious patrimony of social order built up for us by a hundred generations
of trial and error, accumulated knowledge, and transmitted wealth.
6. MORALITY Here we touch the very heart of our problem—are men morally
better than they were? So far as intelligence is an element in morals, we have
improved: the average of intelligence is higher, and there has been a great
increase in the number of what we may vaguely call “developed” minds. So far
as character is concerned, we have probably retrogressed: subtlety of thought
has grown at the expense of stability of soul; in the presence of our fathers we
intellectuals feel uncomfortably that though we surpass them in the number of
ideas that we have crowded into our heads, and though we have liberated
ourselves from delightful superstitions which still bring them aid and comfort,
we are inferior to them in uncomplaining courage, fidelity to our tasks and
purposes, and simple strength of personality.
But if morality implies the virtues exalted in the code of Christ, we have made
some halting progress despite our mines and slums, our democratic corruption,
and our urban addiction to lechery.We are a slightly gentler species than we
were: capable of greater kindness, and of generosity even to alien or recently
hostile peoples whom we have never seen. In one year (1928) the contributions
of our country to private charity and philanthropy exceeded two billion dollars
—which was then one half of all the money circulating in America.We still kill
murderers if, as occasionally happens, we catch them and convict them, but we
are a little uneasy about this ancient retributive justice of “a life for a life,” and
the number of crimes for which we mete out the ultimate punishment has
rapidly decreased. Two hundred years ago, in Merrie England, men might be
hanged by justification of the law for stealing a shilling, and people are still
severely punished if they do not steal a great deal. Not that many hundred years
ago miners were hereditary serfs in Scotland, criminals were legally and
publicly tortured to death in France, debtors were imprisoned for life in
England, and “respectable people” raided the African coast for slaves. Less than
one hundred years ago our jails were dens of filth and horror, colleges for the
graduation of minor criminals into major criminals; now our prisons are
vacation resorts for tired murderers. We still exploit the lower strata of our
working classes, but we soothe our consciences with “welfare work.” Eugenics
struggles to balance with artificial selection the interference of human kindliness
and benevolence with that merciless elimination of the weak and the infirm
which was once the mainspring of natural selection.

We think there is more violence in the world than before, but in truth there are
only more newspapers; vast and powerful organizations scour the planet for
crimes and scandals that will console their readers for stenography and
monogamy; and all the villainy and politics of five continents are gathered upon
one page for the encouragement of our breakfasts. We conclude that half the
world is killing the other half, and that a large proportion of the remainder are
committing suicide. But in the streets, in our homes, in public assemblies, in a
thousand vehicles of transportation, we are astonished to find no murderers and
no suicides, but rather a blunt democratic courtesy, and an unpretentious
chivalry a hundred times more real than when men mouthed chivalric phrases,
enslaved their women, and ensured the fidelity of their wives with irons while
they fought for Christ in the Holy Land.
Our prevailing mode of marriage, chaotic and deliquescent as it is, represents a
pleasant refinement on marriage by capture or purchase, and le droit de
seigneur. There is less brutality between men and women, between parents and
children, between teachers and pupils, than in any recorded generation of the
past. The emancipation of woman and her ascendancy over man indicate an
unprecedented gentility in the once murderous male. Love, which was unknown
to primitive men, or was only a hunger of the flesh, has flowered into a
magnificent garden of song and sentiment, in which the passion of a man for a
maid, though vigorously rooted in physical need, rises like incense into the
realm of living poetry. And youth, whose sins so disturb its tired elders, atones
for its little vices with such intellectual eagerness and moral courage as may be
invaluable when education resolves at last to come out into the open and cleanse
our public life.
7. TOOLS In the face of the romantics, the machine-wreckers of the intelligentsia,
the pleaders for a return to the primitive (dirt, chores, snakes, cobwebs, bugs),
we sing the song of the tools, the engines, the machines, that have enslaved and
are liberating man. We need not be ashamed of our prosperity: it is good that
comforts and opportunities once confined to barons and earls have been made
by enterprise the prerogatives of all; it was necessary to spread leisure—even
though at first misused—before a wide culture could come. These multiplying
inventions are the new organs with which we control our environment: we do
not need to grow them on our bodies, as animals must; we make them and use
them, and lay them aside till we need them again. We grow gigantic arms that
build in a month the pyramids that once consumed a million men; we make for
ourselves great eyes that search out the invisible stars of the sky, and little eyes
that peer into the invisible cells of life; we speak, if we wish, with quiet voices

that reach across continents and seas; we move over the land and the air with the
freedom of timeless gods. Granted that mere speed is worthless: it is as a symbol
of human courage and persistent will that the airplane has its highest meaning
for us: long chained, like Prometheus, to the earth, we have freed ourselves at
last, and now we may look the eagle in the face.
No, these tools will not conquer us. Our present defeat by the machinery around
us is a transient thing, a halt in our visible progress to a slaveless world. The
menial labor that degraded both master and man is lifted from human shoulders
and harnessed to the tireless muscles of iron and steel; soon every waterfall and
every wind will pour its beneficent energy into factories and homes, and man
will be freed for the tasks of the mind. It is not revolution but invention that will
liberate the slave.
8. SCIENCE In a large degree Buckle was right: we progress only in knowledge,
and these other gifts are rooted in the slow enlightenment of the mind. Here in
the untitled nobility of research, and the silent battles of the laboratory, is a story
fit to balance the chicanery of politics and the futile barbarism of war. Here man
is at his best, and through darkness and persecution mounts steadily toward the
light. Behold him standing on a little planet, measuring, weighing, analyzing
constellations that he cannot see; predicting the vicissitudes of earth and sun and
moon; and witnessing the birth and death of worlds. Or here is a seemingly
unpractical mathematician tracking new formulas through laborious labyrinths,
clearing the way for an endless chain of inventions that will multiply the power
of his race. Here is a bridge: a hundred thousand tons of iron suspended from
four ropes of steel flung bravely from shore to shore, and bearing the passage of
countless men; this is poetry as eloquent as Shakespeare ever wrote. Or consider
this citylike building that mounts boldly into the sky, guarded against every
strain by the courage of our calculations, and shining like diamond-studded
granite in the night. Here in physics are new dimensions, new elements, new
atoms, and new powers. Here in the rocks is the autobiography of life. Here in
the laboratories biology prepares to transform the organic world as physics
transformed matter. Everywhere you come upon them studying, these
unpretentious, unrewarded men; you hardly understand where their devotion
finds its source and nourishment; they will die before the trees they plant will
bear fruit for mankind. But they go on.
Yes, it is true that this victory of man over matter has not yet been matched with
any kindred victory of man over himself. The argument for progress falters here
again. Psychology has hardly begun to comprehend, much less to control,

human conduct and desire; it is mingled with mysticism and metaphysics, with
psychoanalysis, behaviorism, glandular mythology, and other diseases of
adolescence (careful and modified statements are made only by psychologists of
whom no one ever hears; in our country the democratic passion for extreme
statements turns every science into a fad). But psychology will outlive these ills
and storms; it will be matured, like older sciences, by the responsibilities which
it undertakes. If another Bacon should come to map out its territory, clarify the
proper methods and objectives of its attack, and point out the “fruits and
powers” to be won, which of us—knowing the surprises of history and the
pertinacity of men—would dare set limits to the achievements that may come
from our growing knowledge of the mind? Already in our day man is turning
round from his remade environment, and beginning to remake himself.
9. EDUCATION More and more completely we pass on to the next generation the
gathered experience of the past. It is almost a contemporary innovation, this
tremendous expenditure of wealth and labor in the equipment of schools and the
provision of instruction for all; perhaps it is the most significant feature of our
time. Once colleges were luxuries, designed for the male half of the leisure
class; today universities are so numerous that he who runs may become a Ph.D.
We have not excelled the selected geniuses of antiquity, but we have raised the
level and average of human knowledge far beyond any age in history. Think
now not of Plato and Aristotle, but of the stupid, bigoted, and brutal Athenian
Assembly, of the unfranchised mob and its Orphic rites, of the secluded and
enslaved women who could acquire education only by becoming courtesans.
None but a child would complain that the world has not yet been totally remade
by these spreading schools, these teeming bisexual universities; in the
perspective of history the great experiment of education is just begun. It has not
had time to prove itself; it cannot in a generation undo the ignorance and
superstition of ten thousand years; indeed, there is no telling but the high birth
rate of ignorance, and the determination of dogma by plebiscite, may triumph
over education in the end. This step in progress is not one of which we may yet
say that it is a permanent achievement of mankind. But already beneficent
results appear. Why is it that tolerance and freedom of the mind flourish more
easily in the northern states than in the South, if not because the South has not
yet won wealth enough to build sufficient schools? Who knows how much of
our preference for mediocrity in office, and narrowness in leadership, is the
result of a generation recruited from regions too oppressed with economic need
and political exploitation to spare time for the ploughing and sowing of the
mind? What will the full fruitage of education be when every one of us is

schooled till twenty, and finds equal access to the intellectual treasures of the
race? Consider again the instinct of parental love, the profound impulse of every
normal parent to raise his children beyond himself: here is the biological
leverage of human progress, a force more to be trusted than any legislation or
any moral exhortation, because it is rooted in the very nature of man.
Adolescence lengthens: we begin more helplessly, and we grow more
completely toward that higher man who struggles to be born out of our darkened
souls.We are the raw material of civilization.
We dislike education, because it was not presented to us in our youth for what it
is. Consider it not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates, but as an
ennobling intimacy with great men. Consider it not as the preparation of the
individual to “make a living,” but as the development of every potential capacity
in him for the comprehension, control, and appreciation of his world. Above all,
consider it, in its fullest definition, as the technique of transmitting as
completely as possible, to as many as possible, that technological, intellectual,
moral, and artistic heritage through which the race forms the growing individual
and makes him human. Education is the reason why we behave like human
beings. We are hardly born human; we are born ridiculous and malodorous
animals; we become human, we have humanity thrust upon us through the
hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and
cultural inheritance whose preservation, accumulation, and transmission place
mankind today, with all its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plane than any
generation has ever reached before.
10. WRITING AND PRINT Again our imagination is too weak-winged to lift us to a
full perspective; we cannot vision or recall the long ages of ignorance,
impotence, and fear that preceded the coming of letters. Through those
unrecorded centuries men could transmit their hard-won lore only by word of
mouth from parent to child; if one generation forgot or misunderstood, the
weary ladder of knowledge had to be climbed anew. Writing gave a new
permanence to the achievements of the mind; it preserved for thousands of
years, and through a millennium of poverty and superstition, the wisdom found
by philosophy and the beauty carved out in drama and poetry. It bound the
generations together with a common heritage; it created that Country of the
Mind in which, because of writing, genius need not die.
And now, as writing united the generations, print, despite the thousand
prostitutions of it, can bind the civilizations. It is not necessary any more that
civilization should disappear before our planet passes away. It will change its

habitat; doubtless the land in every nation will refuse at last to yield its fruit to
improvident tillage and careless tenancy; inevitably new regions will lure with
virgin soil the lustier strains of every race. But a civilization is not a material
thing, inseparably bound, like an ancient serf, to a given spot of the earth; it is
an accumulation of technical knowledge and cultural creation; if these can be
passed on to the new seat of economic power the civilization does not die, it
merely makes for itself another home. Nothing but beauty and wisdom deserve
immortality. To a philosopher it is not indispensable that his native city should
endure forever; he will be content if its achievements are handed down, to form
some part of the possessions of mankind.
We need not fret, then, about the future. We are weary with too much war, and
in our lassitude of mind we listen readily to a Spengler announcing the downfall
of the Western world. But this learned arrangement of the birth and death of
civilizations in even cycles is a trifle too precise; we may be sure that the future
will play wild pranks with this mathematical despair. There have been wars
before, and Man and civilization survived them; within fifteen years after
Waterloo, defeated France was producing so many geniuses that every attic in
Paris was occupied. Never was our heritage of civilization and culture so secure,
and never was it half so rich. We may do our little share to augment it and
transmit it, confident that time will wear away chiefly the dross of it, and that
what is finally fair and worthy in it will be preserved, to illuminate many
generations.

CHAPTER SIX
Twelve Vital Dates in World History
THE IDEA OF CREATING a list of twelve vital dates in history came to me at Manila
as I was preparing to set sail across the Pacific to America. It came at an
appropriate moment, for it found me struggling with the problem of dates in
working on the first volume of The Story of Civilization.
It was already quite clear to me that the inclusion of dates in the text would
make the story as accurate and dull as a good encyclopedia; that the
transformation of dead data into living narrative would require some other
disposition of dates than one that would infest with them every page of the tale.
The arrangement arrived at, after much pseudopodial trial and error, was to
confine all dates to the margin and the notes. Perhaps some such plan would
alleviate the pain inflicted by some of the textbooks of history used in our
colleges and schools.
I had occasion, some years back, to examine the texts employed in certain
institutions of lower learning in my neighborhood. The geography, which might
have been made one of the most fascinating studies of all, was especially
abominable; a mere massing of dead information, much of it made false or
worthless by the war,much of it restricted to the superficial features of a nation’s
life, much of it made ridiculous by provincial prejudice against the Orient. But
the textbook of history—Bear and Bagley’s History of the American People—
was intelligently and intelligibly written, recording the progress of civilization,
as well as the logic-chopping vicissitudes of politics, and presenting its sound
scholarship with pleasing artistry. It is a splendid volume.
In many high schools I have found, as the standard historical text of world
history, Breasted’s Ancient Times, which I regard as the finest schoolbook in
America, and along with it, only slightly inferior to it, the books of Robinson
and Beard on modern European history. In these volumes there is no excessive
use of dates, and if we are to agree that dates have been overdone, we shall have
to acknowledge, also, that some of our texts have avoided this fault, and many
of them represent a great improvement on the class books of our younger days.

I should hardly be content to have my pupils know only twelve dates, and I
presume that the choice of this baker’s number would not suggest an optimum,
but rather a minimum—dates, let us say, that every baker should know. How
many dates a man should carry with him will depend, of course, on his functions
and purposes. A farmer might do his job very well, and bring up a fine family,
with no other date in his head than that of the next state fair, but a man
condemned to the intellectual life, precluded from the deepening contacts of
experiment and action, ought to have sufficient knowledge of man’s chronology
to give him, as some poor substitute for wide personal experience, that historical
perspective which is one road to philosophy and understanding.
Such a man should be able to name the century (though not necessarily the
precise dates) of world-transforming inventions and discoveries like gunpowder,
printing, the steam engine, electricity, and the discovery of America. He should
know the centuries of the world’s greatest statesmen—say Hammurabi, Moses,
Darius I, Solon, Pericles, Alexander, Caesar, Charles V, Louis XIV, Peter the
Great, Frederick the Great, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Disraeli, Gladstone,
Bismarck, Cavour, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Lincoln; of the world’s
greatest scientists and philosophers—say Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant,
Schopenhauer, and Darwin; of the world’s greatest saints—say lknaton, Lao-tzu,
Isaiah, Buddha, Christ, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Loyola,
Luther, and Gandhi.
This man of intellectual interests should also know the centuries of the world’s
greatest poets—say Homer, the Psalmist, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Lipo, Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Pushkin, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, Poe,
Whitman, and Tagore; of the world’s greatest makers of music—say Palestrina,
Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Paganini, Brahms,
Tschaikowsky,Verdi,Wagner, Paderewski, and Stravinsky; and of the world’s
greatest artists or works of art—say Karnak and Luxor and the Pyramids,
Pheidias and Praxiteles, Wu Tao-tzu and Sesshiu and Hiroshige, Chartres and
the Taj Mahal, Giotto and Dürer, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, Titian
and Correggio, El Greco and Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck,
Reynolds and Gainsborough, Turner and Whistler, Millet and Cezanne.
I have left out the great prose writers, lest this chapter should read like a
telephone directory, or a list of radical expor-tees, or a register of “dirty
foreigners.” The reader can help me by making here his own pantheon. Let him
then examine his friends and himself on the centuries and work of these men

(perhaps we should also add a list of great women, from Queen Hatshepsut to
Madame Curie), and so rate them and himself with a new Binet-Simon test.
If, however, one is condemned to live on a mental desert island, and can take
only twelve dates with him, these dates should presumably be such as to carry in
their implications the essential history of mankind. About them should cluster
such associations that on their docket the greater achievements of the human
mind would string themselves in a concatenation of development, in an order
and perspective that would clarify old knowledge and facilitate the new. Since
history is varied, and all aspects of human activity in any age are bound up with
the rest, many such chains of pivotal events might be composed. What follows,
then, are not the twelve world dates; they are merely twelve.
1. 4241 B.C.—THE INTRODUCTION OF THE EGYPTIAN CALENDAR This date alone,
the earliest definite date in history, is sufficient to cause some disturbance to
fiercely orthodox souls who believe, as did Bishop Ussher, that the world was
created in 4004 B.C. To accept the testimony of Egyptologists that a calendar
existed on the Lower Nile 237 years before the creation of the world might
serve as a fertilizing shock to any virgin mind.
The implications of that calendar are endless. Consider the development of
astronomy and mathematics that must have preceded its formulation. Consider
how long even then a civilization must have endured to set aside from the
economic life men with leisure enough to chart the stars and capture the course
of the sun. It was a very sensible calendar compared with ours: it divided the
year into twelve months of thirty days each, with five intercalary days at the end
for roistering. And it stands in the memory for all Egypt, for three thousand
years of recorded civilization, with orderly government, security of life and
property, comforts for the body, delights for the senses, and instruction for the
mind. It stands for Cheops, who built the greatest of the pyramids; and
Thutmose III, who built Karnak; and Iknaton, who literally sold his kingdom for
a song (arousing revolution by writing a monotheistic hymn); and Cleopatra,
who led Antony to ruin by the nose—if one may speak so metonymically.
2. 543 B.C.—THE DEATH OF BUDDHA No other soul, I suppose, has ever been so
influential. It is not so much that several hundred million men and women
profess the Buddhist religion today; in truth, Buddhism does not follow Buddha,
but is a mass of legends and superstitions that have no more right to use his
name than the ferocious Christianity of Calvin or Torquemada or Tennessee has
to use the name of Christ. But Buddha means India, for the spirit of India lies in
religion rather than in science, in contemplation rather than in action, in a

fraternal gentleness rather than in the application of mathematics to artillery, or
of chemistry to bombs.
Life, said Buddha, is full of suffering; it can be made bearable only by doing no
injury to any living thing, and speaking no evil of any man—or woman either.
Let us hope that that simple religion is what lies behind the infinite superstitions
of the Hindu mind today, and let us take the date of Buddha as the beginning of
a civilization that has known every vicissitude, every injustice, every slavery,
and yet in the midst of it has produced geniuses and saints from Buddha and
Asoka to Gandhi and Tagore.
3. 478 B.C.—THE DEATH of CONFUCIUS We must have some symbol to represent
China for us—China, so gigantic in size that it calls itself “All Under Heaven,”
and so old that it records the doings of its kings for the last four thousand years.
I envy those Chinese schoolboys who were made to memorize every word of
Confucius. I have found every line profound and applicable, and sometimes I
think that if these maxims had sunk into my memory for twenty years, I might
have in me a little of the poise of soul, the simple dignity, the quiet
understanding, the depth of character, the infinite courtesy that I have found in
the educated Chinese everywhere. Never has one man so written his name upon
the face and spirit of a people as Confucius has done in China. Let us take him
again as a symbol and a suggestion: behind him are the delicate lyrics of the
T’ang Dynasty’s poets, the mystic landscapes of the Chinese painters, the
perfect vases of the Chinese potters, the secular and terrestrial wisdom of the
Chinese philosophers; perhaps the greatest of all historic civilizations is
summed up in his name.
4. 399 B.C.—THE DEATH OF SOCRATES When this man passed, drunk with
hemlock, also passed the most astonishing picture in ancient history—the Age
of Pericles. But this time I am not thinking of philosophy. Behind Socrates I see
his friend and lover, Alcibiades, and the destructive tragedy of the
Peloponnesian War. I see Aspasia, the learned courtesan, at whose feet the old
Gadfly sat with Pericles. I see Pericles gathering rich men around him and
persuading them to finance the Athenian drama. I see Euripides contending with
Sophocles for the dramatic prize in the Theater of Dionysius. I see Ictinus in
slow thought molding the columns of the Parthenon, and Pheidias carving the
gods and heroes of its frieze. I see young Plato winning the prize at the
Panathenaean games. I want some stopping-point in history that shall bring to
my memory a few of the thousand facets of this brave and varied age, when for
the first time a whole civilization liberated itself from superstition, and created

science, drama, democracy, and liberty, and passed on to Rome and Europe half
of our intellectual and aesthetic heritage.
5. 44 B.C.—THE DEATH OF CAESAR A few years before the death of Georg
Brandes, the Danish critic who helped the French Taine to make the British
understand English literature, an American student visited him and found him in
a very somber mood. “Why are you sad?” the visitor asked. “Don’t you know,”
answered Brandes, “that this is the anniversary of the greatest blunder in history
—the assassination of Caesar?”
The old critic might have found blunders nearer home, like the defeat of
Napoleon at Waterloo, and perhaps he exaggerated a little the importance of
Brutus’ sottise. For in a sense it is not Caesar whom we wish to remember; it is
the succession of developments that followed upon his death: the reconstruction
of Roman law and order by the statesmanlike Augustus on the basis and lines of
Caesar’s preliminary work, the flourishing of arts and letters under the extension
of the Pax Romana to Rome, the poetry of Virgil and Horace, the prose of Pliny
and Tacitus, the philosophy of Epictetus and Aurelius, the beneficent rule of
Hadrian and Antoninus, the beautification of the Forum and the capital with
architecture and statuary, the building of those roads, and the revision and
codification of those laws, which were to be Rome’s essential legacy to the
modern world. As the death of Socrates may be used to sum up the Periclean
Age of Athens, so the death of Caesar stands as the door to the Golden Age of
Rome.
6.? B.C.—THE BIRTH OF CHRIST This date the reader may place ad lib., since no
man knows it. For us it is the most important date of all, because it divides all
history in the West, gives us our greatest hero and model, provides us with that
body of myth and legend which is now passing from the theological to the
literary stage, and marks the beginning of that Christian age which seems today
to be approaching its close. After us the deluge; God knows what a mess of
occult faiths will in the present century replace the tender and cruel theologies
that praised and dishonored Christ.
7. A.D. 632—THE DEATH OF MOHAMMED It was in this year, so designated by us
infidels but known to the Mohammedans as A.H. 10 (the tenth year after the
Hegira), that Mohammed left this earth, after founding the faith that was to
overrun and dominate for centuries all northern Africa from Cairo to Morocco,
southern Europe in Turkey and Spain, and half of Asia from Jerusalem and
Bagdad to Teheran and Delhi. Even Christianity cannot boast of so many wars
waged in its name, or so many heathen killed.

With this trifling exception, it was a noble religion, sternly monotheistic,
rejecting images and priests and the polytheism of saints, building strong
characters with the doctrine of fatalism and the discipline of war, raising great
universities and cultures at Cordova, Granada, Cairo, Bagdad, and Delhi, giving
the world one of its greatest rulers—Akbar of India—and ennobling Spain,
Egypt, Constantinople, Palestine, and India with gracious architecture from the
Alhambra to the Taj Mahal. Today, despite their political dismemberment, they
are still growing in numbers and strength; in India and China they are making
converts every hour of every day. There is no surety that the future is not theirs.
8. 1294—THE DEATH OF ROGER BACON This date is almost as good as any other
to mark the first use of gunpowder, for the rebellious English monk who died in
this year may be held partly responsible for its invention. It was Roger Bacon
who first definitely described the explosive that would revolutionize the world
and offer to all pious statesmen a substitute for birth control. “One may cause to
burst forth from bronze,” he wrote, “thunderbolts more formidable than those
produced by nature. A small quantity of prepared matter occasions a terrible
explosion accompanied by brilliant light. One may multiply the phenomena so
far as to destroy an army or a city.”
Very likely. It was gunpowder that gave to the rising bourgeoisie of late
medieval Europe the means of overthrowing the feudal baron by bombarding
from a distance his once impregnable castle. It was gunpowder that made the
infantry as important as the cavalry, and gave the common man a new prestige
in war and a new power in revolutions. It was gunpowder that turned war from a
gentleman’s game, occasionally fatal, to a form of standardized mass
destruction, a mode of removing from the earth, with a few minutes’
bombardment, the work of a hundred thousand artists’ hands laboring for three
centuries. Perhaps this is the most important date in the story of the fall of man;
though some cynic might argue that a still more tragic event was the invention
of thinking, the liberation of intellect from instinct, the consequent separation of
sex from reproduction, and the abandonment of the perpetuation of the race to
the selected morons of every land.
9. 1454—THE PRESS OF JOHANNES GUTENBERG (AT MAINZ ON THE RHINE) ISSUES
THE FIRST PRINTED DOCUMENTS BEARING A PRINTED DATE The Germans had
used printing from movable types for some fourteen years before; the Chinese
had done such printing as far back as A.D. 1041; and in 1900 a block-printed
book was discovered in China which had been published in 868. Nothing is new
in China, democracy least of all. They invented gunpowder and used it chiefly

for fireworks. They invented printing and never used it for tabloid newspapers,
crime club fiction, or Freudian biographies.
In Western civilization, printing helped money and muskets to liberate the
middle class and put an end to the rule of the knights and the priests. It enabled
the people to read the Bible, and so engendered the Reformation. It immensely
widened the circle to which a writer might address his ideas. And by
transferring the making of books from monks to printers’ devils, and the
patronage of books from the aristocracy and the church to the commonalty and
the laity, it made possible the propaganda and development of democracy and
free thought.
Napoleon remarked that the Bourbons might have preserved themselves, and
prevented the French Revolution, by maintaining a governmental monopoly of
ink. Our empowered middle class has profited by the example and has made
literacy an impediment to the acquisition of truth. One hardly knows, today,
whether printing does more harm than good, or whether the growth of
knowledge and learning has not weakened character as much as it has stocked
the mind—but let us try it a little further!
10. 1492—COLUMBUS DISCOVERS AMERICA When Columbus discovered us, he
put an end to the Italian Renaissance by changing trade routes from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and bringing wealth and power first to Spain,
making possible Velázquez and Cervantes, Murillo and Calderon; then to
England, financing Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, and Hobbes; then to the
Netherlands, producing Rembrandt and Spinoza, Rubens and Van Dyck,
Hobbema and Vermeer; and then to France, generating Rabelais and Montaigne,
Poussin and Claude Lorraine. When, in 1564, Michelangelo died and
Shakespeare was born, it was a sign that the Renaissance had died in Italy and
been reborn in England. The discovery of America cooperated with the
Reformation, and the diminution of Peter’s Pence, in ending for a time the role
of Italy in history.
Later the development of the New World opened up a vast market for European
goods and a vast area for Europe’s surplus population. This is the secret of
Europe’s rapid growth in wealth and power, and its conquest of Africa and Asia
and Australia. And all the history of America, with its experiments in popular
sovereignty and popular education (would that the order had been reversed), lay
potential in that magnificent adventure of 1492.
11. 1769—JAMES Watt BRINGS THE STEAM ENGINETO PRACTICAL UTILITY This

event inaugurated the Industrial Revolution. Hero of Alexandria made a steam
engine in 130 B.C.; Della Porta, Savery, and Newcomen had made better ones in
1601, 1698, and 1705; but it was Watt’s stone that capped the arch and changed
the world.
Essentially there are only two fundamental and pivotal events in human history:
the Agricultural Revolution, in which men passed from hunting to tillage and
settled down to build homes, schools, and civilization; and the Industrial
Revolution, which threw millions and millions of men, first in England, then in
America and Germany, then in Italy and France, then in far away Japan, now in
China, the Soviet Union, and India, out of their homes and their farms into cities
and factories. It transformed society and government by empowering the owners
of machinery and the controllers of commerce beyond the owners of titles and
land. It transformed religion by generating science and its persuasive miracles
and inducing many men to think in terms of cause and effect and machines. It
transformed the mind by substituting novel and varied stimuli, necessitating
thought, for the old ancestral and domestic situations to which instinct had been
adapted and sufficient. It transformed woman by taking her work from the home
and forcing her into the factories to recapture it. It transformed morals by
complicating economic life, postponing marriage, multiplying contacts and
opportunities, liberating woman, reducing the family, and weakening religious
and parental authority and control. And it transformed art by subordinating
beauty to use, and subjecting the artist, not to a favored few with inherited
standards of judgment and trained tastes, but to a multitude who judged all
things in terms of power and cost and size.
All this, incredible as it may seem, is in that single invention of James Watt. All
this and more—Capitalism, Socialism, the Imperialism that must come when
industrialized nations need foreign markets and foreign food, the wars that must
come for these markets, and the revolutions that must come from these wars.
Even the Great War, and the vast experiment in Russia, were corollaries of the
Industrial Revolution. Seventeen-sixty-nine stands for the whole modern age.
12. 1789—THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The French Revolution must be taken not
as a single self-contained event, but as the political signature to economic and
psychological facts that had accumulated for centuries. Perhaps it began in
1543, when Copernicus published his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial
Orbs; for then began the twilight of the gods and the liberation of man. Cast
here upon this petty earth, no longer the center of things but an incident, forced
to realize that humanity is an interlude in biology, biology an interlude in

geology (as any earthquake will remind us), and geology an interlude in
astronomy, man was left to shift and think for himself. Thought became free and
boundless and fought its way out of superstition and ecclesiasticism to the time
when a whole age would be named after a writer, and Voltaire might say, “I have
no scepter, but I have a pen.”
I never cease admiring the French Enlightenment; all in all I consider it the peak
of human history, greater even than Periclean Greece, or Augustan Rome, or
Medicean Italy. Never had men thought so bravely, spoken so brilliantly, or
lifted themselves to a greater height of culture and courtesy. “Alas!” said Louis
XVI, standing in his Temple prison before the books of Voltaire and Rousseau,
“these are the men that have destroyed France.” Yes, they had destroyed one
France, but they had liberated another, not to speak of freeing America through
their disciples, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson.
This is the best I can do, far off here in the Pacific, between two hemispheres
and two ages. I look back to the Orient and wonder how a Confucian scholar or
a Hindu Brahman would smile at my dates. The one would inquire courteously
where the T’ang Dynasty entered into my list—an age as great in China as the
Enlightenment in France. The other would ask about Akbar or Asoka, and I
could only answer that Asoka belongs to Buddha, and Akbar to Mohammed.
I know how partial and provincial all lists must be.We are all born within
frontiers of space and time and, struggle as we will, we never escape from our
boxes. To us, civilization means Europe and America, and the Orient, which
considers us barbaric, seems barbarous.
I let the reader, then, make his own lists, helping himself to what he likes in
mine. Let him try to build for himself another perspective and unity that shall
clarify human development for him. And let him remember the words which
Napoleon bequeathed to the duke of Reichstadt at St. Helena: “May my son
study history, for it is the only true psychology, and the only true philosophy.”

II. History and the Earth
Let us define history, in its troublesome duplexity, as the events or

record of the past. Human history is a brief spot in space, and its
first lesson is modesty. At any moment a comet may come too close
to the earth and set our little globe turning topsy-turvy in a hectic
course, or choke its men and fleas with fumes or heat; or a fragment
of the smiling sun may slip off tangentially-as some think our planet
did a few astronomic moments ago-and fall upon us in a \vild em
brace ending all grief and pain. We accept these possibilities in our
stride, and retort to the cosmos in the words of Pascal: "When the
universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which
kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the
universe knows nothing." 7
History is subject to geology. Every day the sea encroaches some
\vhere upon the land, or the land upon the sea; cities disappear under
the water, and sunken cathedrals ring their melancholy bells. Moun
tains rise and fall in the rhythm of emergence and erosion; rivers
swell and flood, or dry up, or change their course; valleys become
deserts, and isthmuses become straits. To the geologic eye all the
14

CHAP. II) HISTORY AND THE EARTH 15
surface of the earth is a fluid form, and man moves upon it as inse
curely as Peter walking on the waves to Christ.
Climate no longer controls us as severely as Montesquieu and
Buckle supposed, but it limits us. Man's ingenuity often overcomes
geological handicaps: he can irrigate deserts and air-condition the
Sahara; he can level or surmount mountains and terrace the hills with
vines; he can build a floating city to cross the ocean, or gigantic birds
to navigate the sky. But a tornado can ruin in an hour the city that
took a century to build; an iceberg can overturn or bisect the floating
palace and send a thousand merrymakers gurgling to the Great Cer
tainty. Let rain become too rare, and civilization disappears under
sand, as in Central Asia; let it fall too furiously, and civilization will
be choked with jungle, as in Central America. Let the thermal aver
age rise by twenty degrees in our thriving zones, and we should
probably relapse into lethargic savagery. In a semitropical climate a
nation of half a billion souls may breed like ants, but enervating heat
may subject it to repeated conquest by warriors from more stimulat
ing habitats. Generations of men establish a growing mastery over
the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.
Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and dis
ciplining horne. Its rivers, lakes, oases, and oceans draw settlers to
their shores, for water is the life of organisms and towns, and offers
inexpensive roads for transport and trade. Egypt was "the gift of the
Nile," and Mesopotamia built successive civilizations "between the
rivers" and along their effluent canals. India was the daughter of the
Indus, the Brahmaputra and the Ganges; China owed its life and sor
rows to the great rivers that (like ourselves) often wandered from
their proper beds and fertilized the neighborhood with their over
flow. Italy adorned the valleys of the Tiber, the Arno, and the Po.
Austria grew along the Danube, Germany along the Elbe and the

16 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. D
Rhine, France along the Rhone, the Loire, and the Seine. Petra and
Palmyra were nourished by oases in the desert.
When the Greeks grew too numerous for their boundaries, they
founded colonies along the Mediterranean ("like frogs around a
pond," said Plato S) and along the Euxine, or Black, Sea. For two
thousand years-from the battle of Salamis (480 B.C.) to the defeat
of the Spanish Armada (1588) -the northern and southern shores of
the Mediterranean were the rival seats of the white man's ascend
ancy. But in and after 1492 the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da
Gama invited men to brave the oceans; the sovereignty of the Medi
terranean was challenged; Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Venice declined;
the Renaissance began to fade; the Atlantic nations rose, and finally
spread their suzerainty over half the world. "Westward the course of
empire takes its way," wrote George Berkeley about 1730. Will it
continue across the Pacific, exporting European and American in
dustrial and commercial techniques to China, as formerly to Japan?
Will Oriental fertility, working with the latest Occidental technol
ogy, bring tl1e decline of the West?
The development of the airplane will again alter the map of civili
zation. Trade routes will follow less and less the rivers and seas; men
and goods will be flown more and more directly to their goal. Coun
tries like England and France will lose the commercial advantage of
abundant coast lines conveniently indented; countries like Russia,
China, and Brazil, which were hampered by the excess of their land
mass over their coasts, will cancel part of that handicap by-taking to
the air. Coastal cities will derive less of their wealth from the clumsy
business of transferring goods from ship to train or from train to ship.
When sea power finally gives place to air power in transport and
war, we shall have seen one of the basic revolutions in history.
The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology
grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportuni

CHAP. II) HISTORY AND THE EARTH
ties for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and
initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can trans
form the possibilities into fact; and only a similar combination (as in
Israel today) can make a culture take form over a thousand natural
obstacles. Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

v . Character and History
Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man, and
the constitution of man rewrites the constitutions of states. But what
is the constitution of man?
We may define human nature as the fundamental tendencies and
feelings of mankind. The most basic tendencies we shall call in
stincts, though we recognize that much doubt has been cast upon
their inborn quality. We might describe human nature through the
"Table of Character Elements" given on the following page. In this
analysis human beings are normally equipped by "nature" (here
meaning heredity) with six positive and six negative instincts, whose
function it is to preserve the individual, the family, the group, or the
species. In positive personalities the positive tendencies predominate,
but most individuals are armed with both sets of instincts-to meet
or to avoid (according to mood or circumstance) the basic chal
lenges or opportunities of life. Each instinct generates habits and is
accompanied by feelings. Their totality is the nature of man.
But how far has human nature changed in the course of history?
Theoretically there must have been some change; natural selection
has presumably operated upon psychological as well as upon physio
32

CHAP. V) CHARACTER AND HISTORY 33
TABLE OF CHARACTER ELEMENTS
INSTINCTS
HABITS FEELINGS
Positive Negative
Positive Negative Positive Negative
Action Sleep Play Rest Buoyancy Fatigue

Work Sloth Energy Inertia
Curiosity Indifference Eagerness Boredom
Manipulation Hesita Wonder Doubt
tion
Thought Dreaming Absorption Vacuity
Innovation Imitation Resolution Acceptance
Art Disorder Aesthetic Confusion
feeling
Fight Flight Approach Retreat Courage Anxiety

Competition Co-opera Rivalry hiendliness
tion
Pugnacity Timidity Anger Fear
Mastery Submission Pride Humility
Acquisition Avoidance Eating Rejection Hunger Disgust

Hoarding Spending Greed Prodigality
Property Poverty Possessive- Insecurity
ness
Association Privacy Communica- Solitude Sociability Secretive

tion ness
Seeking Fearing dis Vanity Shyness
approval approval
Generosity Selfishness Kindliness Hostility
Mating Refusal Sexual Sexual per- Sexual imagi- Sexual

activity version nation neurosis
Courtship Blushing Sexual love Modesty
Parental Filial de- Homemaking Filial re Parental Filial re-

care pendence bellion love sentment

34 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. V
logical variations. Nevertheless, known history shows little altera

tion in the conduct of mankind. The Greeks of Plato's time behaved
very much like the French of modern centuries; and the Romans
behaved like the English. Means and instrumentalities change; mo
tives and ends remain the same: to act or rest, to acquire or give, to
fight or retreat, to seek association or privacy, to mate or reject, to
offer or resent parental care. Nor does human nature alter as between
classes: by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich,
with only less opportunity or skill to implement them. Nothing is
clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the meth
ods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.
"tvolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than
biological: it has proceeded not by heritable variations in the species,
but mostly by economic, political, intellectual, and moral innovation
transmitted to individuals and generations by imitation, custom, or
education. Custom and tradition within a group correspond to type
and heredity in the species, and to instincts in the individual; they
are ready adjustments to typical and frequently repeated situations.
New situations, however, do arise, requiring novel, unstereotyped
responses; hence development, in the higher organisms, requires a ca
pacity for experiment and innovation-the social correlates of varia
tion and mutation. Social evolution is an interplay of custom with
origination.
Here the initiative individual-the "great man," the "hero," the
"genius"-regains his place as a formative force in history. He is not
quite the god that Carlyle described; he grows out of his time and
land, and is the product and symbol of events as well as their agent
and voice; without some situation requiring a new response his new
ideas would be untimely and impracticable. When he is a hero of
action, the demands of his position and the exaltation. of crisis de
velop and inflate him to such magnitude and powers as would in nor

CHAP. V) CHARACTER AND HISTORY 35
mal times have remained potential and untapped. But he is not

merely an effect. Events take place through him as well as around
him; his ideas and decisions enter vitally into the course of history.
At times his eloquence, like Churchill's, may be worth a thousand
regiments; his foresight in strategy and tactics, like Napoleon's, may
win battles and campaigns and establish states. If he is a prophet like
Mohammed, wise in the means of inspiring men, his words may raise
a poor and disadvantaged people to unpremeditated ambitions and
surprising power. A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Wright, a
Marx, a Lenin, a Mao T se-tung are effects of numberless causes, and
causes of endless effects.
In our table of character elements imitation is opposed to innova
tion, but in vital ways it co-operates with it. As submissive natures
unite with masterful individuals to make the order and operation of a
society, so the imitative majority follows the innovating minority,
and this follows the originative individual, in adapting new responses
to the demands of environment or survival. History in the large is the
conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies
the human material of social experiment.
Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a
dissolvent and destructive power. Out of every hundred new ideas
ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional re
sponses which they propose to replace. No one man, however bril
liant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of
understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institu
tions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after
centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history. A youth boil
ing with hormones ,vill wonder why he should not give full freedom
to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or
laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to under
stand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. V
hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual

and the group.
So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical
who proposes it-perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more
vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the
sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas
should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition,
and conmmely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive
before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old
should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out
of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a
creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic
unity and movement of the whole.

VII. Religion and History
Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion,

since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every
land and age. To the unhappy, the suffering, the bereaved, the old, it
has brought supernatural comforts valued by millions of souls as
more precious than any natural aid. It has helped parents and teach
ers to discipline the young. It has conferred meaning and dignity
upon the lowliest existence, and through its sacraments has made for
stability by transforming human covenants into solemn relationships
with God. It has kept the poor (said Napoleon) from murdering the
rich. For since the natural inequality of men dooms many of us to
poverty or defeat, some supernatural hope may be the sole alterna
tive to despair. Destroy that hope, and class war is intensified.
Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the
other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.
Religion does not seem at first to have had any connection with
morals. Apparently (for we are merely guessing, or echoing Pctro
nius, who echoed Lucretius) "it was fear that first made the gods" 25
-fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, winds, and
sky. Religion became the propitiatory worship of these forces
43

44 THE LESSONS OF HISTOR.Y (CHAP. VII
through offerings, sacrifice, incantation, and prayer. Only when

priests used these fears and rituals to support morality and law did
religion become a force vital and rival to the state. It told the people
that the local code of morals and laws had been dictated by the gods.
It pictured the god Thoth giving laws to Menes for Egypt, the god
Shamash giving Hammurabi a code for Babylonia, Yahveh giving the
Ten Commandments and 613 precepts to Moses for the Jews, and
the divine nymph Egeria giving Numa Pompilius laws for Rome.
Pagan cults and Christian creeds proclaimed that earthly rulers were
appointed and protected by the gods. Gratefully nearly ever state
shared its lands and revenues with the priests.
Some recusants have doubted that religion ever promoted moral
ity, since immorality has flourished even in ages of religious domina
tion. Certainly sensuality, drunkenness, coarseness, greed, dishon
esty, robbery, and violence existed in the Middle Ages; but probably
the moral disorder born of half a millennium of barbarian invasion,
war, economic devastation, and political disorganization would have
been much worse without the moderating effect of the Christian
ethic, priestly exhortations, saintly exemplars, and a calming, unify
ing ritual. The Roman Catholic Church labored to reduce slavery,
family feuds, and national strife, to extend the intervals of truce and
peace, and to replace trial by combat or ordeal with the judgments of
established courts. It softened the penalties exacted by Roman or
barbarian law, and vastly expanded the scope and organization of
charity.
Though the Church served the state, it claimed to stand above all
states, as morality should stand above power. It taught men that pa
triotism unchecked by a higher loyalty can be a tool of greed and
crime. Over all the competing governments of Christendom it pro
mulgated one moral law. Claiming divine origin and spiritual hege
mony, the Church offered itself as an international court to which all

CHAP. VII) RELIGION AND HISTORY 45
rulers were to be morally responsible. The Emperor Henry IV rec

ognized this claim by submitting to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa
( 1077); and a century later Innocent III raised the authority and
prestige of the papacy to a height where it seemed that Gregory's
ideal of a moral superstate had come to fulfillment.
The majestic dream broke under the attacks of nationalism, skep
ticism, and human frailty. The Church was manned with men, vvho
often proved biased, venal, or extortionate. France grew in wealth
and power, and made the papacy her political tool. Kings became
strong enough to compel a pope to dissolve that Jesuit order which
had so devotedly supported the popes. The Church stooped to fraud,
as with pious legends, bogus relics, and dubious miracles; for centu
ries it profited from a mythical "Donation of Constantine" that had
allegedly bequeathed Western Europe to Pope Sylvester I (r.
314-35), and from "False Decretals" (c. 842) that forged a series
of documents to give a sacred antiquity to papal omnipotence.26
More and more the hierarchy spent its energies in promoting ortho
doxy rather than morality, and the Inquisition almost fatally dis
graced the Church. Even while preaching peace the Church fo
mented religious wars in sixteenth-century France and the Thirty
Years' War in seventeenth-century Germany. It played only a mod
est part in the outstanding advance of modern morality-the aboli
tion of slavery. It allowed the philosophers to take the lead in the
humanitarian movements that have alleviated the evils of our time.
History has justified the Church in the belief that the masses of
mankind desire a religion rich in miracle, mystery, and myth. Some
minor modifications have been allowed in ritual, in ecclesiastical cos
tume, and in episcopal authority; but the Church dares not alter the
doctrines that reason smiles at, for such changes would offend and
disillusion the millions whose hopes have been tied to inspiring and
consolatory imaginations. No reconciliation is possible between reli

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. VII
gion and philosophy except through the philosophers' recognition

that they have found no substitute for the moral function of the
Church, and the ecclesiastical recognition of religious and intellec
tual freedom.
Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the
creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benev
olent, the answer must be a reluctant negative. Like other depart
ments of biology, history remains at bottom a natural selection of the
fittest individuals and groups in a struggle wherein goodness receives
no favors, misfortunes abound, and the final test is the ability to sur
vive. Add to the crimes, wars, and cruelties of man the earthquakes,
storms, tornadoes, pestilences, tidal waves, and other "acts of God"
that periodically desolate human and animal life, and the total evi
dence suggests either a blind or an impartial fatality, with incidental
and apparently haphazard scenes to which we subjectively ascribe
order, splendor, beauty, or sublimity. If history supports any theol
ogy this would be a dualism like the Zoroastrian or Manichaean: a
good spirit and an evil spirit battling for control of the universe and
men's souls. These faiths and Christianity (which is essentially Mani
chaean) assured their followers that the good spirit would win in the
end; but of this consummation history offers no guarantee. Nature
and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they
define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under;
and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Gen
ghisKhan.
The growing awareness of man's minuscule place in the cosmos has
furthered the impairment of religious belief. In Christendom we may
date the beginning of the decline from Copernicus (1543). The
process was slow, but by 1611 John Donne was mourning that the
earth had become a mere "suburb" in the world, and that "new phi
losophy calls all in doubt"; and Francis Bacon, while tipping his hat

CHAP. VII) REI ·(GION AND HISTORY 47
occasionally to the bishops, was proclaiming science as the religion

of modern emancipated man. In that generation began the "death of
God" as an external deity .
So great an effect required many causes besides the spread of sci
ence and historical knowledge. First, the Protestant Reformation,
which originally defended private judgment. Then the multitude of
Protestant sects and conflicting theologies, each appealing to both
Scriptures and reason. Then the higher criticism of the Bible, dis
playing that marvelous library as the imperfect work of fallible men.
Then the deistic movement in England, reducing religion to a vague
belief in a God hardly distinguishable from nature. Then the grow
ing acquaintance with other religions, whose myths, many of them
pre-Christian, were distressingly similar to the supposedly factual
bases of one's inherited creed. Then the Protestant exposure of Cath
olic miracles, the deistic exposure of Biblical miracles, the general
exposure of frauds, inquisitions, and massacres in the history of reli
gion. Then the replacement of agriculture-which had stirred men
to faith by the annual rebirth of life and the mystery of growth
with industry, humming daily a litany of machines, and suggesting a
world machine. Add meanwhile the bold advance of skeptical schol
arship, as in Bayle, and of pantheistic philosophy, as in Spinoza; the
massive attack of the French Enlightenment upon Christianity; the
revolt of Paris against the Church during the French Revolution.
Add, in our own time, the indiscriminate slaughter of civilian popu
lations in modern war. Finally, the awesome triumphs of scientific
technology, promising man omnipotence and destruction, and chal
lenging the divine command of the skies.
In one way Christianity lent a hand against itself by developing in
many Christians a moral sense that could no longer stomach the
vengeful God of the traditional theology. The idea of hell disap
peared from educated thought, even from pulpit homilies. Presbyte

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. VII
rians became ashamed of the Westrninster Confession, which had

pledged them to belief in a God who had created billions of men and
\vomen despite his foreknowledge that, regardless of their virtues
and crimes, they were predestined to everlasting hell. Educated
Christians visiting the Sistine Chapel were shocked by Michelange
lo's picture of Christ hurling offenders pell-mell into an inferno
whose fires were never to be extinguished; was this the "gentle Jesus,
meek and mild," who had inspired our youth? Just as the moral de
nlopment of the Hellenes had weakened their belief in the quarrel
some and adulterous deities of Olympus ("A certain proportion of
mankind," wrote Plato, "do not believe at all in the existence of the
gods." 27), so the development of the Christian ethic slowly eroded
Christian theology. Christ destroyed Jehovah.
The replacement of Christian with secular institutions is the cul
minating and critical result of the Industrial Revolution. That states
should attempt to dispense with theological supports is one of the
many crucial experiments that bewilder our brains and unsettle our
ways today. Laws which were once presented as the decrees of a god
given king are now frankly the confused commands of fallible men.
Education, which was the sacred province of god-inspired priests,
becomes the task of men and women shorn of theological robes and
awe, and relying on reason and persuasion to civilize young rebels
who fear only the policeman and may never learn to reason at all.
Colleges once allied to churches have been captured by businessmen
and scientists. The propaganda of patriotism, capitalism, or Commu
nism succeeds to the inculcation of a supernatural creed and moral
code. Holydays give way to holidays. Theaters are full even on Sun
days, and even on Sundays churches are half empty. In Anglo-Saxon
families religion has become a social observance and protective color
ation; in American Catholic families it flourishes; in upper- and
middle-class France and Italy religion is "a secondary sexual

CHAP. VII) RELIGION AND HISTORY 49
characteristic of the female." A thousand signs proclaim that Christi

anity is undergoing the same decline that fell upon the old Greek
religion after the coming of the Sophists and the Greek Enlighten
ment.
Catholicism survives because it appeals to imagination, hope, and
the senses; because its mythology consoles and brightens the lives of
the poor; and because the commanded fertility of the faithful slowly
regains the lands lost to the Reformation. Catholicism has sacrificed
the adherence of the intellectual community, and suffers increasing
defections through contact with secular education and literature; but
it wins converts from souls wearied with the uncertainty of reason,
and from others hopeful that the Church will stem internal disorder
and the Communist wave.
If another great war should devastate Western civilization, the re
sultant destruction of cities, the dissemination of poverty, and the
disgrace of science may leave the Church, as in A.D. 476, the sole
hope and guide of those who survive the cataclysm.
One lesson of history is that religion has many lives, and a habit of
resurrection. How often in the past have God and religion died and
been reborn! Ikhnaton used all the powers of a pharaoh to destroy
the religion of Amon; within a year of Ikhnaton's death the religion
of Amon was restored. 28 Atheism ran wild in the India of Buddha's
youth, and Buddha himself founded a religion without a god; after
his death Buddhism developed a complex theology including gods,
saints, and hell.29 Philosophy, science, and education depopulated the
Hellenic pantheon, but the vacuum attracted a dozen Oriental faiths
rich in resurrection myths. In 1793 Hebert and Chaumette, wrongly
interpreting Voltaire, established in Paris the atheistic worship of the
Goddess of Reason; a year later Robespierre, fearing chaos and in
spired by Rousseau, set up the worship of the Supreme Being; in
1801 Napoleon, versed in history, signed a concordat with Pius VII,

50 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. VII
restoring the Catholic Church in France. The irreligion of eight

eenth-century England disappeared under the Victorian compro
mise with Christianity: the state agreed to support the Anglican
Church, and the educated classes would muffle their skepticism, on
the tacit understanding that the Church would accept subordination
to the state, and the parson would humbly serve the squire. In Amer
ica the rationalism of the Founding Fathers gave place to a religious
revival in the nineteenth century.
Puritanism and paganism-the repression and the expression of
the senses and desires-alternate in mutual reaction in history. Gen
erally religion and puritanism prevail in periods when the laws are
feeble and morals must bear the burden of maintaining social order;
skepticism and paganism (other factors being equal) progress as the
rising power of law and government permits the decline of the
church, the family, and morality without basically endangering the
stability of the state. In our time the strength of the state has united
with the several forces listed above to relax faith and morals, and to
allow paganism to resume its natural sway. Probably our excesses
will bring another reaction; moral disorder may generate a religious
revival; atheists may again (as in France after the debacle of 1870)
send their children to Catholic schools to give them the discipline of
religious belief. Hear the appeal of the agnostic Renan in 1866:
Let us enjoy the liberty of the sons of God, but let us take care lest
we become accomplices in the diminution of virtue which would
menace society if Christianity were to grow weak. \Vhat should we
do without it? . . . If Rationalism wishes to govern the world with
out regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the
French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a
blunder.so
Does history warrant Renan's conclusion that religion is necessary

to morality-that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the sav
agery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams,

CHAP. VII) RELIGION AND HISTORY .; 1
crimes, and wars? Joseph de Maistre answered: "I do not know what
the heart of a rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of an honest
man; it is horrible." 31 There is no significant example in history, be
fore our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life with
out the aid of religion. France, the United States, and some other
nations have divorced their governments from all churches, but they
have had the help of relig.ion in keeping social order. Only a few
Communist states have not merely dissociated themselves from reli
gion but have repudiated its aid; and perhaps the apparent and provi
sional success of this experiment in Russia owes much to the tempo
rary acceptance of Communism as the religion (or, as skeptics would
say, the opium) of the people, replacing the church as the vendor of
comfort and hope. If the socialist regime should fail in its efforts to
destroy relative poverty among the masses, this new religion may
lose its fervor and efficacy, and the state may wink at the restoration
of supernatural beliefs as an aid in quieting discontent. "As long as
there is poverty there will be gods." 32

VIII. Economics and History
History, according to Karl Marx, is economics in action-the con

test, among individuals, groups, classes, and states, for food, fuel, ma
terials, and economic power. Political forms, religious institutions,
cultural creations, are all rooted in economic realities. So the Indus
trial Revolution brought with it democracy, feminism, birth control,
socialism, the decline of religion, the loosening of morals, the libera
tion of literature from dependence upon aristocratic patronage, the
replacement of romanticism by realism in fiction-and the economic
interpretation of history. The outstanding personalities in these
movements were effects, not causes; Agamemnon, Achilles, and
Hector would never have been heard of had not the Greeks sought
commercial control of the Dardanelles; economic ambition, not the
face of Helen "fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a
thousand stars," launched a thousand ships on Ilium; those subtle
Greeks knew how to cover naked economic truth with the fig leaf of
a phrase.
Unquestionably the economic interpretation illuminates much his
tory. The money of the Delian Confederacy built the Parthenon; the
treasury of Cleopatra's Egypt revitalized the exhausted Italy of Au
52

CHAP. VIII) ECONOMICS AND HISTORY 53
gustus, gave Virgil an annuity and Horace a farm. The Crusades, like
the wars of Rome with Persia, were attempts of the West to capture
trade routes to the East; the discovery of America was a result of the
failure of the Crusades. The banking house of the Medici financed
the Florentine Renaissance; the trade and industry of Nuremberg
made Durer possible. The French Revolution came not because Vol
taire wrote brilliant satires and Rousseau sentimental romances, but
because the middle classes had risen to economic leadership, needed
legislative freedom for their enterprise and trade, and itched for so
cial acceptance and political power.
Marx did not claim that individuals were always actuated by eco
nomic interest; he was far from imagining that material considera
tions led to Abelard's romance, or the gospel of Buddha, or the
poems of Keats. But perhaps he underestimated the role played by
noneconomic incentives in the behavior of masses: by religious fer
vor, as in Moslem or Spanish armies; by nationalistic ardor, as in Hit
ler's troops or Japan's kamikazes; by the self-fertilizing fury of mobs,
as in the Gordon riots of June 2-8, 1780, in London, or the massacres
of September 2-7, 1792, in Paris. In such cases the motives of the
(usually hidden) leaders may be economic, but the result is largely
determined by the passions of the mass. In many instances political
or military power was apparently the cause rather than the result of
economic operations, as in the seizure of Russia by the Bolsheviks in
1917, or in the army coups that punctuate South American history.
Who would claim that the Moorish conquest of Spain, or the Mon
gol conquest of Western Asia, or the Mogul conquest of India, was
the product of economic power? In these cases the poor proved
stronger than the rich; military victory gave political ascendancy,
which brought economic control. The generals could write a mili
tary interpretation of history.
Allowing for these cautions, we may derive endless instruction

54 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. VIII
from the economic analysis of the past. We observe that the invading
barbarians found Rome weak because the agricultural population
which had formerly supplied the legions with hardy and patriotic
warriors fighting for land had been replaced by slaves laboring list
lessly on vast farms owned by one man or a few. Today the inability
of small farms to use the best machinery profitably is again forcing
agriculture into large-scale production under capitalistic or commu
nistic ownership. It was once said that "civilization is a parasite on
the man with the hoe," 33 but the man with the hoe no longer exists;
he is now a "hand" at the wheel of a tractor or a combine. Agricul
ture becomes an industry, and soon the farmer must choose between
being the employee of a capitalist and being the employee of a state.
At the other end of the scale history reports that "the men who
can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and
the men who can manage money manage all." 34 So the bankers,
watching the trends in agriculture, industry, and trade, inviting and
directing the flow of capital, putting our money doubly and trebly
to work, controlling loans and interest and enterprise, running great
risks to make great gains, rise to the top of the economic pyramid.
From the Medici of Florence and the Fuggers of Augsburg to the
Rothschilds of Paris and London and the Morgans of New York,
bankers have sat in the councils of governments, financing wars and
popes, and occasionally sparking a revolution. Perhaps it is one secret
of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, they
know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a
\vise man will hoard.
The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic
system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive
to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slav
ery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unpro
ductive, too expensive, or too transient. Normally and generally men

are judged by their ability to produce-except in war, when they are

ranked according to their ability to destroy.
Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority
of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of
men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this
concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of
concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic
freedom permitted by morals and the laws. Despotism may for a time
retard the concentration; democracy, allowing the most liberty,
accelerates it. The relative equality of Americans before 1776 has
been overwhelmed by a thousand forms of physical, mental, and
economic differentiation, so that the gap between the wealthiest and
the poorest is now greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic
Rome. In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point
where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of
ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a crit
ical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistri
buting wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
In the Athens of 594 B.C., according to Plutarch, "the disparity of
fortune between the rich and the poor had reached its height, so that
the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other means
for freeing it from disturbances . . . seemed possible but despotic
power." 35 The poor, finding their status worsened with each year
the government in the hands of their masters, and the corrupt courts
deciding every issue against them-began to talk of violent revolt.
The rich, angry at the challenge to their property, prepared to de
fend themselves by force. Good sense prevailed; moderate elements
secured the election of Solon, a businessman of aristocratic lineage,
to the supreme archonship. He devaluated the currency, thereby eas
ing the burden of all debtors (though he himself was a creditor); he
reduced all personal debts, and ended imprisonment for debt; he can

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. VIII
celed arrears for taxes and mortgage interest; he established a gradu

ated income tax that made the rich pay at a rate twelve times that
required of the poor; he reorganized the courts on a more popular
basis; and he arranged that the sons of those who had died in war for
Athens should be brought up and educated at the government's ex
pense. The rich protested that his measures were outright confisca
tion; the radicals complained that he had not redivided the land; but
within a generation almost all agreed that his reforms had saved
Athens from revolution. 36
The Roman Senate, so famous for its wisdom, adopted an uncom
promising course when the concentration of wealth approached an
explosive point in Italy; the result was a hundred years of class and
civil war. Tiberius Gracchus, an aristocrat elected as tribune of the
people, proposed to redistribute land by limiting ownership to 333
acres per person, and alloting surplus land to the restive proletariat of
the capital. The Senate rejected his proposals as confiscatory. He ap
pealed to the people, telling them, "You fight and die to give \vealth
and luxury to others; you are called the masters of the world, but
there is not a foot of ground that you can call your own." 37 Contrary
to Roman law, he campaigned for re-election as tribune; in an
election-day riot he was slain (133 B.C.). His brother Caius, taking
up his cause, failed to prevent a renewal of violence, and ordered his
servant to kill him; the slave obeyed, and then killed himself (12 I
B.C.); three thousand of Caius' followers \vere put to death by Sena
torial decree. Marius became the leader of the plebs, but withdrew
when the movement verged on revolution. Catiline, proposing to
abolish all debts, organized a revolutionary army of "wretched pau
pers"; he was inundated by Cicero's angry eloquence, and died in
battle against the state (62 B.C.). Julius Caesar attempted a compro
mise, but was cut down by the patricians (44 B.C.) after five years of
civil war. Mark Antony confused his support of Caesar's policies

with personal ambitions and romance; Octavius defeated him at

Actium, and established the "Principate" that for 2 10 years (30 B.C.
- A.D. 180) maintained the Pax Romana between the classes as well as
among the states within the Imperial frontiers. 38
After the breakdown of political order in the Western Roman
Empire (A.D. 476), centuries of destitution were followed by the
slow renewal and reconcentration of wealth, partly in the hierarchy
of the Catholic Church. In one aspect the Reformation was a redis
tribution of this wealth by the reduction of German and English
payments to the Roman Church, and by the secular appropriation of
ecclesiastical property and revenues. The French Revolution at
tempted a violent redistribution of wealth by Jacqueries in the coun
tryside and massacres in the cities, but the chief result was a transfer
of property and privilege from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie.
The government of the United States, in 1933-52 and 1960-65, fol
lowed Solon's peaceful methods, and accomplished a moderate and
pacifying redistribution; perhaps someone had studied history. The
upper classes in America cursed, complied, and resumed the concen
tration of wealth.
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevi
table, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial re
distribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat
of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating
wealth and compulsive recirculation.

IX . Socialism and History
The struggle of socialism against capitalism is part of the historic

rhythm in the concentration and dispersion of wealth. The capitalist,
of course, has fulfilled a creative function in history: he has gathered
the savings of the people into productive capital by the promise of
dividends or interest; he has financed the mechanization of industry
and agriculture, and the rationalization of distribution; and the result
has been such a flow of goods from producer to consumer as history
has never seen before. He has put the liberal gospel of liberty to his
use by arguing that businessmen left relatively free from transporta
tion tolls and legislative regulation can give the public a greater abun
dance of food, homes, comfort, and leisure than has ever come from
industries managed by politicians, manned by governmental employ
ees, and supposedly immune to the laws of supply and demand. In
free enterprise the spur of competition and the zeal and zest of own
ership arouse the productiveness and inventiveness of men; nearly
every economic ability sooner or later finds its niche and reward in
the shuffle of talents and the natural selection of skills; and a basic
democracy rules the process insofar as most of the articles to be pro
duced, and the services to be rendered, are determined by public de
S8

CHAP. IX) SOCIALISM AND HISTORY 59
mand rather than by governmental decree. Meanwhile competition

compels the capitalist to exhaustive labor, and his products to ever
rising excellence.
There is much truth in such claims today, but they do not explain
why history so resounds with protests and revolts against the abuses
of industrial mastery, price manipulation, business chicanery, and
irresponsible wealth. These abuses must be hoary with age, for there
have been socialistic experiments in a dozen countries and centuries.
We read that in Sumeria, about 2 100 B.C.,
the economy was organized by the state. Most of the arable land was
the property of the crown; labourers received rations from the crops
delivered to the royal storehouses. For the administration of this vast
state economy a very differentiated hierarchy was developed, and
records were kept of all deliveries and distributions of rations. Tens
of thousands of clay tablets inscribed with such records were found
in the capital Ur itself, in Lagash, Umma ... Foreign trade also was
carried out in the name of the central administration. s9
In Babylonia (c. 1750 B.C.) the law code of Hammurabi fixed wages
for herdsmen and artisans, and the charges to be made by physicians
for operations.40
In Egypt under the Ptolemies (323 B.C. - 30 B.C.) the state owned
the soil and managed agriculture: the peasant was told what land to
till, what crops to grow; his harvest was measured and registered by
government scribes, was threshed on royal threshing floors, and was
conveyed by a living chain of fellaheen into the granaries of the
king. The government owned the mines and appropriated the ore. It
nationalized the production and sale of oil, salt, papyrus, and textiles.
All commerce was controlled and regulated by the state; most retail
trade was in the hands of state agents selling state-produced goods.
Banking was a government monopoly, but its operation might be
delegated to private firms. Taxes were laid upon every person, indus
try, process, product, sale, and legal document. To keep track of tax

60 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. IX
able transactions and income, the government maintained a s\varm of

scribes and a complex system of personal and property registration.
The revenue of this system made the Ptolemaic the richest state of
the time. 41 Great engineering enterprises were completed, agricul
ture was improved, and a large proportion of the profits went
to develop and adorn the country and to finance its cultural life.
About 290 B.C. the famous Museum and Library of Alexandria were
founded. Science and literature flourished; at uncertain dates in this
Ptolemaic era some scholars made the "Septuagint" translation of the
Pentateuch into Greek. Soon, however, the pharaohs took to expen
sive wars, and after 246 B.C. they gave themselves to drink and ven
ery, allowing the administration of the state and the economy to fall
into the hands of rascals who ground every possible penny out of the
poor. Generation after generation the government's exactions grew.
Strikes increased in number and violence. In the capital, Alexandria,
the populace was bribed to peace by bounties and spectacles, but it
was watched by a large military force, was allowed no voice in the
government, and became in the end a violent mob. Agriculture and
industry decayed through lack of incentive; moral disintegration
spread; and order was not restored until Octavius brought Egypt
under Roman rule (30 B.C.).
Rome had its socialist interlude under Diocletian. Faced with in
creasing poverty and restlessness among the masses, and with immi
nent danger of barbarian invasion, he issued in A.D. 3°I an Edictum
de pretiis, which denounced monopolists for keeping goods from the
market to raise prices, and set maximum prices and wages for all im
portant articles and services. Extensive public works were under
taken to put the unemployed to work, and food was distributed gra
tis, or at reduced prices, to the poor. The government--which al
ready owned most mines, quarries, and salt deposits-brought nearly
all major industries and guilds under detailed control. "In every large

CHAP. IX) SOCIALISM AND HISTORY 61
town," we are told, "the state became a powerful employer,

standing head and shoulders above the private industrialists, who
were in any case crushed by taxation." 42 When businessmen pre
dicted ruin, Diocletian explained that the barbarians were at the gate,
and that individual liberty had to be shelved until collective liberty
could be made secure. The socialism of Diocletian was a war econ
omy, made possible by fear of foreign attack. Other factors equal,
internal liberty varies inversely as external danger.
The task of controlling men in economic detail proved too much
for Diocletian's expanding, expensive, and corrupt bureaucracy. To
support this officialdom-the army, the court, public works, and the
dole-taxation rose to such heights that men lost incentive to work
or earn, and an erosive contest began between lawyers finding de
vices to evade taxes and lawyers formulating laws to prevent evasion.
Thousands of Romans, to escape the taxgatherer, fled over the fron
tiers to seek refuge among the barbarians. Seeking to check this elu
sive mobility, and to facilitate regulation and taxation, the govern
ment issued decrees binding the peasant to his field and the worker to
his shop until all his debts and taxes had been paid. In this and other
ways medieval serfdom began.43
China has had several attempts at state socialism. Szuma Ch'ien (b.
c.I45 B.C.) informs us that to prevent private individuals from "re
serving to their sole use the riches of the mountains and the sea in
order to gain a fortune, and from putting the lower classes into sub
jection to themselves," 44 the Emperor Wu Ti (r. 140 B.C. - 87 B.C.)
nationalized the resources of the soil, extended governmental direc
tion over transport and trade, laid a tax upon incomes, and estab
lished public works, including canals that bound the rivers together
and irrigated the fields. The state accumulated stockpiles of goods,
sold these when prices were rising, bought more when prices were
falling; thus, says Szuma Ch'ien, "the rich merchants and large shop

keepers would be prevented from making big profits, . . . and

prices would be regulated in the Empire." 45 For a time, we are told,
China prospered as never before. A combination of "acts of God"
with human deviltry put an end to the experiment after the death of
the Emperor. Floods alternated with droughts, created tragic short
ages, and raised prices beyond control. Businessmen protested that
taxes were making them support the lazy and the incompetent. Har
assed by the high cost of living, the poor joined the rich in clamor
ing for a return to the old ways, and some proposed that the inventor
of the new system be boiled alive. The reforms were one by one
rescinded, and were almost forgotten when they were revived by a
Chinese philosopher-king.
\Vang Mang (r. A.D. 9-23) was an accomplished scholar, a patron
of literature, a millionaire who scattered his riches among his friends
and the poor. Having seized the throne, he surrounded himself with
men trained in letters, science, and philosophy. He nationalized the
land, divided it into equal tracts among the peasants, and put an end
to slavery. Like \Nu Ti, he tried to control prices by the accumula
tion or release of stockpiles. He made loans at low interest to private
enterprise. The groups whose profits had been clipped by his legisla
tion united to plot his fall; they were helped by drought and flood
and foreign invasion. The rich Liu family put itself at the head of a
general rebellion, slew Wang Mang, and repealed his legislation.
Everything was as before. 46
A thousand years later Wang An-shih, as premier (1068-85), un
dertook a pervasive governmental domination of the Chinese econ
omy. "The state," he held, "should take the entire management of
commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with a view
to succoring the working classes and preventing them from being
ground into the dust by the rich." 47 He rescued the peasants from
the moneylenders by loans at low interest. He encouraged new set

CHAP. IX) SOCIALISM AND HISTORY
tlers by advancing them seed and other aid, to be repaid out of the
later yield of their land. He organized great engineering works to
control floods and check unemployment. Boards were appointed in
every district to regulate wages and prices. Commerce was national
ized. Pensions were provided for the aged, the unemployed, and the
poor. Education and the examination system (by which admission to
governmental office ,vas determined) were reformed; "pupils threw
away their textbooks of rhetoric," says a Chinese historian, "and be
gan to study primers of history, geography, and political econ
omy." 48
What undermined the experiment? First, high taxes, laid upon all
to finance a swelling band of governmental employees. Second, con
scription of a male in every family to man the armies made necessary
by barbarian invasions. Third, corruption in the bureaucracy; China,
like other nations, was faced with a choice between private plunder
and public graft. Conservatives, led by Wang An-shih's brother, ar
gued that human corruptibility and incompetence make governmen
tal control of industry impracticable, and that the best economy is a
laissez-faire system that relies on the natural impulses of men. The
rich, stung by the high taxation of their fortunes and the monopoly
of commerce by the government, poured out their resources in a
campaign to discredit the new system, to obstruct its enforcement,
and to bring it to an end. This movement, well organized, exerted
constant pressure upon the Emperor. When another period of
drought and flood was capped by the appearance of a terrifying
comet, the Son of Heaven dismissed Wang An-shih, revoked his de
crees, and called the opposition to power. 49
The longest-lasting regime of socialism yet known to history was
set up by the Incas in \vhat we now call Peru, at some time in the
thirteenth century. Basing their power largely on popular belief that
the earthly sovereign was the delegate of the Sun God, the Incas or

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. IX
ganized and directed all agriculture, labor, and trade. A governmen

tal census kept account of materials, individuals, and income; profes
sional "runners," using a remarkable system of roads, maintained the
network of communication indispensable to such detailed rule over
so large a territory. Every person was an employee of the state, and
seems to have accepted this condition cheerfully as a promise of se
curity and food. This system endured till the conquest of Peru by
Pizarro in I 5 33·
On the opposite slope of South America, in a Portuguese colony
along the Uruguay River, IS0 Jesuits organized 200,000 Indians into
another socialistic society (c. 1620-175 0). The ruling priests man
aged nearly all agriculture, commerce, and industry. They allowed
each youth to choose among the trades they taught, but they re
quired every able-bodied person to work eight hours a day. They
provided for recreation, arranged sports, dances, and choral perform
ances of a thousand voices, and trained orchestras that played Euro
pean music. They served also as teachers, physicians, and judges, and
devised a penal code that excluded capital punishment. By all ac
counts the natives were docile and content, and when the
community was attacked it defended itself with an ardor and ability
that surprised the assailants. In I7 50 Portugal ceded to Spain terri
tory including seven of the Jesuit settlements. A rumor having
spread that the lands of these colonies contained gold, the Spanish in
America insisted on immediate occupation; the Portuguese govern
ment under Pombal (then at odds with the Jesuits) ordered the
priests and the natives to leave the settlements; and after some resist
ance by the Indians the experiment carne to an end. 50
In the social revolt that accompanied the Protestant Reformation
in Germany, communistic slogans based on the Bible were advanced
by several rebclleaders. Thomas Munzer, a preacher, called upon the

people to overthrow the princes, the clergy, and the capitalists, and
to establish a "refined society" in which all things vvere to be in com
mon. 51 He recruited an army of peasants, inspired them with ac
counts of communism among the Apostles, and led them to battle.
They were defeated, five thousand of them were slain, Munzer was
beheaded (1525). Hans Hut, accepting Munzer's teachings, organ
ized at Austerlitz an Anabaptist community that practiced commu
nism for almost a century (c. 1530-1622). John of Leiden led a
group of Anabaptists in capturing control of Munster, the capital of
Westphalia; there, for fourteen months, they maintained a commu
nistic regime (1534-35).52
In the seventeenth century a group of "Levellers" in Cromwell's
army begged him in vain to establish a communistic utopia in Eng
land. The socialist agitation subsided during the Restoration, but it
rose again when the Industrial Revolution revealed the greed and
brutality of early capitalism-child labor, woman labor, long hours,
low wages, and disease-breeding factories and slums. Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels gave the movement its Magna Carta in the Cmnmu
nist Manifesto of 1847, and its Bible in Das Kapital (1867-95).
They expected that socialism vV'Ould be effected first in England,
because industry was there most developed and had reached a stage
of centralized management that seemed to invite appropriation by
the government. They did not live long enough to be surprised by
the outbreak of Communism in Russia.
Why did modern socialism come first in a Russia where capitalism
was in its infancy and there were no large corporations to ease the
transition to state control? Centuries of peasant poverty and reams of
intellectual revolt had prepared the way, but the peasants had been
freed from serfdom in 1861, and the intellectuals had been inclined
toward an anarchism antipodal to an all-absorbing state. Probably the

Russian Revolution of 19 I 7 succeeded because the Czarist govern

ment had been defeated and disgraced by war and bad management;
the Russian economy had collapsed in chaos, the peasants returned
from the front carrying arms, and Lenin and Trotsky had been given
safe conduct and bon voyage by the German government. The Rev
olution took a Communistic form because the new state was chal
lenged by internal disorder and external attack; the people reacted as
any nation will react under siege-it put aside all individual freedom
until order and security could be restored. Here too Communism
was a war economy. Perhaps it survives through continued fear of
war; given a generation of peace it would presumably be eroded by
the nature of man.
Socialism in Russia is now restoring individualistic motives to give
its system greater productive stimulus, and to allow its people more
physical and intellectual liberty. Meanwhile capitalism undergoes a
correlative process of limiting individualistic acquisition by semi
socialistic legislation and the redistribution of wealth through the
"welfare state." Marx was an unfaithful disciple of Hegel: he inter
preted the Hegelian dialectic as implying that the struggle between
capitalism and socialism would end in the complete victory of social
ism; but if the Hegelian formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is
applied to the Industrial Revolution as thesis, and to capitalism versus
socialism as antithesis, the third condition would be a synthesis of
capitalism and socialism; and to this reconciliation the Western
world visibly moves. Year by year the role of Western governments
in the economy rises, the share of the private sector declines. Capital
ism retains the stimulus of private property, free enterprise, and
competition, and produces a rich supply of goods; high taxation,
falling heavily upon the upper classes, enables the government to
provide for a self-limited population unprecedented services in edu

cation, health, and recreation. The fear of capitalism has compelled

socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled
capitalism to increase equality. East is \Vest and West is East, and
soon the twain will meet.

XI. History and War
War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with
civilization or democracy. In the last 3,42 I years of recorded history
only 268 have seen no war. We have acknowledged war as at present
the ultimate form of competition and natural selection in the human
species. "Polemos pater panton," said Heracleitus; war, or competi
tion, is the father of all things, the potent source of ideas, inventions,
institutions, and states. Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can
be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among
individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for
food, land, materials, fuels, mastery. The state has our instincts with
out our restraints. The individual submits to restraints laid upon him
by morals and laws, and agrees to replace combat with conference,
because the state guarantees him basic protection in his life, prop
erty, and legal rights. The state itself acknowledges no substantial re
straints, either because it is strong enough to defy any interference
with its will or because there is no superstate to offer it basic protec
tion, and no international law or moral code wielding effective force.
In the individual, pride gives added vigor in the competitions of
81

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XI
life; in the state, nationalism gives added force in diplomacy and war.
When the states of Europe freed themselves from papal overlordship
and protection, each state encouraged nationalism as a supplement to
its army and navy. If it foresaw conflict ,vith any particular country
it fomented, in its people, hatred of that country, and formulated
catchwords to bring that hatred to a lethal point; meanwhile it
stressed its love of peace.
This conscription of the soul to international phobia occurred
only in the most elemental conflicts, and was seldom resorted to in
Europe between the Religious \Vars of the sixteenth century and the
Wars of the French Revolution. During that interval the peoples of
conflicting states were allowed to respect one another's achievements
and civilization; Englishmen traveled safely in France while France
was at war with England; and the French and Frederick the Great
continued to admire each other while they fought each other in the
Seven Years' War. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries war
was a contest of aristocracies rather than of peoples. In the twentieth
century the improvement of communication, transport, weapons,
and means of indoctrination made war a struggle of peoples, involv
ing civilians as well as combatants, and winning victory through the
wholesale destruction of property and life. One war can now de
stroy the labor of centuries in building cities, creating art, and devel
oping habits of civilization. In apologetic consolation war now pro
motes science and technology, whose deadly inventions, if they are
not forgotten in universal destitution and barbarism, may later
enlarge the material achievements of peace.
In every century the generals and the rulers (with rare exceptions
like Ashoka and Augustus) have smiled at the philosophers' timid
dislike of war. In the military interpretation of history war is the
final arbiter, and is accepted as natural and necessary by all but cow
ards and simpletons. What but the victory of Charles Martel at

CHAP. XI) HISTORY AND WAR
Tours (732) kept France and Spain from becoming Mohammedan?

\Vhat would have happened to our classic heritage if it had not been
protected by arms against Mongol and Tatar invasions? vVe laugh at
generals who die in bed (forgetting that they are more valuable alive
than dead), but we build statues to them when they turn back a Hit
ler or a Genghis Khan. It is pitiful (says the general) that so many
young men die in battle, but more of them die in automobile acci
dents than in war, and many of them riot and rot for lack of disci
pline; they need an outlet for their combativeness, their adventurous
ness, their weariness with prosaic routine; if they must die sooner or
later why not let them die for their country in the anesthesia of
battle and the aura of glory? Even a philosopher, if he knows his
tory, will admit that a long peace may fatally weaken the martial
muscles of a nation. In the present inadequacy of international law
and sentiment a nation must be ready at any moment to defend itself;
and when its essential interests are involved it must be allowed to use
any means it considers necessary to its survival. The Ten Command
ments must be silent when self-preservation is at stake.
It is clear (continues the general) that the United States must as
sume today the task that Great Britain performed so well in the nine
teenth century-the protection of Western civilization from exter
nal danger. Communist governments, armed with old birth rates and
new weapons, have repeatedly proclaimed their resolve to destroy
the economy and independence of non-Communist states. Young na
tions, longing for an Industrial Revolution to give them economic
wealth and military power, are impressed by the rapid industrializa
tion of Russia under governmental management; Western capitalism
might be more productive in the end, but it seems slower in develop
ment; the new governors, eager to control the resources and man
hood of their states, are a likely prey to Communist propaganda,
infiltration, and subversion. Unless this spreading process is halted

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XI
it is only a matter of time before nearly all Asia, Africa, and South
America will be under Communist leadership, and Australia, New
Zealand, North America, and Western Europe will be surrounded
by enemies on every side. Imagine the effect of such a condition
upon Japan, the Philippines, and India, and upon the powerful
Communist Party of Italy; imagine the effect of a Communist vic
tory in Italy upon the Communist movement in France. Great Brit
ain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and West Germany would be left
at the mercy of an overwhelmingly Communist Continent. Should
North America, now at the height of its power, accept such a future
as inevitable, withdraw within its frontiers, and let itself be encircled
by hostile states controlling its access to materials and markets, and
compelling it, like any besieged people, to imitate its enemies and
establish governmental dictatorship over every phase of its once free
and stimulating life? Should the leaders of America consider only the
reluctance of this epicurean generation to face so great an issue, or
should they consider also what future generations of Americans
would wish that these leaders had done? Is it not wiser to resist at
once, to carry the war to the enemy, to fight on foreign soil, to sacri
fice, if it need he, a hundred thousand American lives and perhaps a
million noncombatants, but to leave America free to live its own life
in security and freedom? Is not such a farsighted policy fully in ac
cord with the lessons of history?
The philosopher answers: Yes, and the devastating results will be
in accord with history, except that they will be multiplied in propor
tion to the increased number and mobility of the engaged forces, and
the unparalleled destructiveness of the weapons used. There is some
thing greater than history. Somewhere, sometime, in the name of hu
manity, we must challenge a thousand evil precedents, and dare to
apply the Golden Rule to nations, as the Buddhist King Ashoka did
(262 B.C.),64 or at least do what Augustus did when he bade Tiberius

CHAP. XI) HISTORY AND WAR 85
desist from further invasion of Germany (A.D. 9) .65 Let us refuse, at

whatever cost to ourselves, to make a hundred Hiroshimas in China.
"Magnanimity in politics," said Edmund Burke, "is not seldom the
truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together." 66
Imagine an American President saying to the leaders of China and
Russia:
"If we should follow the usual course of history we should make
war upon you for fear of what you may do a generation hence. Or
we should follow the dismal precedent of the Holy Alliance of 18 15,
and dedicate our wealth and our soundest youth to suppressing any
revolt against the existing order anywhere. But we are willing to try
a new approach. We respect your peoples and your civilizations as
among the most creative in history. We shall try to understand your
feelings, and your desire to develop your own institutions without
fear of attack. We must not allow our mutual fears to lead us into
war, for the unparalleled murderousness of our weapons and yours
brings into the situation an element unfamiliar to history. We pro
pose to send representatives to join with yours in a persistent confer
ence for the adjustment of our differences, the cessation of hostilities
and subversion, and the reduction of our armaments. Wherever, out
side our borders, we may find ourselves competing with you for the
allegiance of a people, we are willing to submit to a full and fair
election of the population concerned. Let us open our doors to each
other, and organize cultural exchanges that will promote mutual ap
preciation and understanding. Weare not afraid that your economic
system will displace ours, nor need you fear that ours will displace
yours; we believe that each system will learn from the other and be
able to live with it in co-operation and peace. Perhaps each of us,
while maintaining adequate defenses, can arrange nonaggression and
nonsubversion pacts with other states, and from these accords a
world order may take form within which each nation will remain

86 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XI
sovereign and unique, limited only by agreements freely signed. We

ask you to join us in this defiance of history, this resolve to extend
courtesy and civilization to the relations among states. We pledge
our honor before all mankind to enter into this venture in full sincer
ity and trust. If we lose in the historic gamble, the results could not
be worse than those that we may expect from a continuation of tradi
tional policies. If you and we succeed, we shall merit a place for cen
turies to come in the grateful memory of mankind."
The general smiles. "You have forgotten all the lessons of his
tory," he says, "and all that nature of man which you described.
Some conflicts are too fundamental to be resolved by negotiation;
and during the prolonged negotiations (if history may be our guide)
subversion would go on. A world order will come not by a gentle
men's agreement, but through so decisive a victory by one of the
great powers that it will be able to dictate and enforce international
law, as Rome did from Augustus to Aurelius. Such interludes of
widespread peace are unnatural and exceptional; they will soon be
ended by changes in the distribution of military power. You have
told us that man is a competitive animal, that his states must be like
himself, and that natural selection now operates on an international
plane. States will unite in basic co-operation only when they are in
common attacked from without. Perhaps we are now restlessly mov
ing toward that higher plateau of competition; we may make contact
with ambitious species on other planets or stars; soon thereafter there
will be interplanetary war. Then, and only then, will we of this earth
be one."

XII. Growth and Decay
We have defined civilization as "social order promoting cultural

creation." 07 It is political order secured through custom, morals, and
law, and economic order secured through a continuity of production
and exchange; it is cultural creation through freedom and facilities
for the origination, expression, testing, and fruition of ideas, letters,
manners, and arts. It is an intricate and precarious web of human
relationships, laboriously built and readily destroyed.
Why is it that history is littered with the ruins of civilizations, and
seems to tell us, like Shelley's "Ozymandias," that death is the des
tiny of all? Are there any regularities, in this process of growth and
decay, which may enable us to predict, from the course of past civili
zations, the future of our own?
Certain imaginative spirits have thought so, even to predicting the
future in detail. In his Fourth Eclogue Virgil announced that some
day, the ingenuity of change having been exhausted, the whole uni
verse, by design or accident, will fall into a condition precisely the
same as in some forgotten antiquity, and will then repeat, by
deterministic fatality and in every particular, all those events that
had followed that condition before.
87

88 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XII
Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae vehat Argo
delectos heroas; erunt etiam altera bella,
atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles
"there will then be another [prophet] Tiphys, and another Argo

will carry [Jason and other] beloved heroes; there will also be other
wars, and great Achilles will again be sent to Troy." 68 Friedrich
Nietzsche went insane with this vision of "eternal recurrence."
There is nothing so foolish but it can be found in the philosophers.
History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large. We may
reasonably expect that in the future, as in the past, some new states
will rise, some old states will subside; that new civilizations will be
gin with pasture and agriculture, expand into commerce and indus
try, and luxuriate with finance; that thought (as Vico and Comte
argued) will pass, by and large, from supernatural to legendary to
naturalistic explanations; that new theories, inventions, discoveries,
and errors will agitate the intellectual currents; that new generations
will rebel against the old and pass from rebellion to conformity and
reaction; that experiments in morals will loosen tradition and
frighten its beneficiaries; and that the excitement of innovation will
be forgotten in the unconcern of time. History repeats itself in the
large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness,
and man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently
occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex. But in a
developed and complex civilization individuals are more differenti
ated and unique than in a primitive society, and many situations
contain novel circumstances requiring modifications of instinctive
response; custom recedes, reasoning spreads; the results are less pre
dictable. There is no certainty that the future will repeat the past.
Every year is an adventure.
Some masterminds have sought to constrain the loose regularities
of history into majestic paradigms. The founder of French socialism,

CHAP. XII) GROWTH AND DECAY
Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), di

vided the past and the future into an alternation of "organic" and
"critical" periods:
The law of human development . . . reveals two distinct and al

ternative states of society: one, the organic, in which all human
actions are classed, foreseen, and regulated by a general theory, and
the purpose of social activity is clearly defined; the other, the critical,
in which all community of thought, all communal action, all co
ordination have ceased, and the society is only an agglomeration of
separate individuals in conflict with one another.
Each of these states or conditions has occupied two periods of
history. One organic period preceded that Greek era which we call
the age of philosophy, but which we shall more justly call the age of
criticism. Later a new doctrine arose, ran through different phases of
elaboration and completion, and finally established its political power
over Western civilization. The constitution of the Church began a
new organic epoch, which ended in the fifteenth century, when the
Reformers sounded the arrival of that age of criticism which has con
tinued to our time. . . .
In the organic ages all basic problems [theological, political, eco
nomic, moral] have received at least provisional solutions. But soon
the progress achieved by the help of these solutions, and under the
protection of the institutions realized through them, rendered them
inadequate, and evoked novelties. Critical epochs-periods of debate,
protest, . . . and transition, replaced the old mood with doubt, in
dividualism, and indifference to the great problems. . .. In organic
periods men are busy building; in critical periods they are busy de
stroying. 69
Saint-Simon believed that the establishment of socialism would begin

a new organic age of unified belief, organization, co-operation, and
stability. If Communism should prove to be the triumphant new
order of life Saint-Simon's analysis and prediction would be justified.
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) varied Saint-Simon's scheme by
dividing history into separate civilizations, each with an independent
life span and trajectory composed of four seasons but essentially two

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XII
periods: one of centripetal organization unifying a culture in all its

phases into a unique, coherent, and artistic form; the other a period
of centrifugal disorganization in which creed and culture decompose
in division and criticism, and end in a chaos of individualism, skepti
cism, and artistic aberrations. Whereas Saint-Simon looked forward
to socialism as the new synthesis, Spengler (like Talleyrand) looked
backward to aristocracy as the age in which life and thought were
consistent and orderly and constituted a work of living art.
For Western existence the distinction lies about the year rSoo-on
one side of that frontier, life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed
by growth from within, in one great, uninterrupted evolution from
Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon; and on the other the
autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fash
ioned by the intellect. . . . He who does not understand that this
outcome is obligatory and insusceptible of modification must forgo
all desire to comprehend history.70
On one point all are agreed: civilizations begin, flourish, decline,

and disappear-or linger on as stagnant pools left by once life-giving
streams. What are the causes of development, and what are the causes
of decay?
No student takes seriously the seventeenth-century notion that
states arose out of a "social contract" among individuals or between
the people and a ruler. Probably most states (i.e., societies politically
organized) took form through the conquest of one group by
another, and the establishment of a continuing force over the con
quered by the conqueror; his decrees were their first laws; and these,
added to the customs of the people, created a new social order. Some
states of Latin America obviously began in this way. When the mas
ters organized the work of their subjects to take advantage of some
physical boon (like the rivers of Egypt or Asia), economic prevision
and provision constituted another basis for civilization. A dangerous

CHAP. XU) GROWTH AND DECAY
tension between rulers and ruled might raise intellectual and emo
tional activity above the daily drift of primitive tribes. Further stim
ulation to growth could come from any challenging change in the
surroundings,71 such as external invasion or a continuing shortage of
rain-challenges that might be met by military improvements or
the construction of irrigation canals.
If we put the problem further back, and ask what determines
whether a challenge will or will not be met, the answer is that this
depends upon the presence or absence of initiative and of creative
individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will (which is almost
a definition of genius), capable of effective responses to new situa
tions (which is almost a definition of intelligence). If we ask what
makes a creative individual, we are thrown back from history to psy
chology and biology-to the influence of environment and the gam
ble and secret of the chromosomes. In any case a challenge success
fully met (as by the United States in 1917, 1933, and 1941), if it
does not exhaust the victor (like England in 1945), raises the temper
and level of a nation, and makes it abler to meet further challenges.
If these are the sources of growth, what are the causes of decay?
Shall we suppose, with Spengler and many others, that each civiliza
tion is an organism, naturally and yet mysteriously endowed with
the power of development and the fatality of death? It is tempting to
explain the behavior of groups through analogy with physiology or
physics, and to ascribe the deterioration of a society to some inherent
limit in its loan and tenure of life, or some irreparable running down
of internal force. Such analogies may offer provisional illumination,
as when we compare the association of individuals with an aggrega
tion of cells, or the circulation of money from banker back to banker
with the systole and diastole of the heart. But a group is no organism
physically added to its constituent individuals; it has no brain or
stomach of its own; it must think or feel with the brains or nerves of

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XII
its members. When the group or a civilization declines, it is through

no mystic limitation of a corporate life, but through the failure of its
political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenges of change.
The challenges may come from a dozen sources, and may by repe
tition or combination rise to a destructive intensity. Rainfall or oases
may fail and leave the earth parched to sterility. The soil may be
exhausted by incompetent husbandry or improvident usage. The re
placement of free with slave labor may reduce the incentives to pro
duction, leaving lands untilled and cities unfed. A change in the in
struments or routes of trade-as by the conquest of the ocean or the
air-may leave old centers of civilization becalmed and decadent,
like Pisa or Venice after 1492. Taxes may mount to the point of dis
couraging capital investment and productive stimulus. Foreign mar
kets and materials may be lost to more enterprising competition;
excess of imports over exports may drain precious metal from domes
tic reserves. The concentration of wealth may disrupt the nation in
class or race war. The concentration of population and poverty in
great cities may compel a government to choose between enfeebling
the economy with a dole and running the risk of riot and revolution.
Since inequality grows in an expanding economy, a society may
find itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority of
men and women too unfortunate by nature or circumstance to in
herit or develop standards of excellence and taste. As this majority
grows it acts as a cultural drag upon the minority; its ways of speech,
dress, recreation, feeling, judgment, and thought spread upward, and
internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the
minority pays for its control of educational and economic opportu
nity.
As education spreads, theologies lose credence, and receive an ex
ternal conformity without influence upon conduct or hope. Life and
ideas become increasingly secular, ignoring supernatural explana

CHAP. XU) GROWTH AND DECAY 93
tions and fears. The moral code loses aura and force as its human
origin is revealed, and as divine surveillance and sanctions are re
moved. In ancient Greece the philosophers destroyed the old faith
among the educated classes; in many nations of modern Europe the
philosophers achieved similar results. Protagoras became Voltaire,
Diogenes Rousseau, Democritus Hobbes, Plato Kant, Thrasymachus
Nietzsche, Aristotle Spencer, Epicurus Diderot. In antiquity and
modernity alike, analytical thought dissolved the religion that had
buttressed the moral code. New religions came, but they were di
vorced from the ruling classes, and gave no service to the state. An
age of weary skepticism and epicureanism followed the triumph of
rationalism over mythology in the last century before Christianity,
and follows a similar victory today in the first century after Christi
anity.
Caught in the relaxing interval between one moral code and the
next, an unmoored generation surrenders itself to luxury, corruption,
and a restless disorder of family and morals, in all but a remnant
clinging desperately to old restraints and ways. Few souls feel any
longer that "it is beautiful and honorable to die for one's country." A
failure of leadership may allow a state to weaken itself with internal
strife. At the end of the process a decisive defeat in war may bring a
final blow, or barbarian invasion from without may combine with
barbarism welling up from within to bring the civilization to a close.
Is this a depressing picture? Not quite. Life has no inherent claim
to eternity, whether in individuals or in states. Death is natural, and
if it comes in due time it is forgivable and useful, and the mature
mind will take no offcnse from its coming. But do civilizations die?
Again, not quite. Greek civilization is not really dead; only its frame
is gone and its habitat has changed and spread; it survives in thc
memory of the race, and in such abundance that no one life, however
full and long, could absorb it all. Homer has more readers now than

94 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XII
in his own day and land. The Greek poets and philosophers are in
every library and college; at this moment Plato is being studied by a
hundred thousand discoverers of the "dear delight" of philosophy
overspreading life with understanding thought. This selective sur
vival of creative minds is the most real and beneficent of immortali
ties.
Nations die. Old regions grow arid, or suffer other change. Resil
ient man picks up his tools and his arts, and moves on, taking his
memories with him. If education has deepened and broadened those
memories, civilization migrates with him, and builds somewhere an
other home. In the new land he need not begin entirely anew, nor
make his way without friendly aid; communication and transport
bind him, as in a nourishing placenta, with his mother country. Rome
imported Greek civilization and transmitted it to Western Europe;
America profited from European civilization and prepares to pass it
on, with a technique of transmission never equaled before.
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As life overrides
death with reproduction, so an aging culture hands its patrimony
down to its heirs across the years and the seas. Even as these lines are
being written, commerce and print, wires and waves and invisible
Mercuries of the air are binding nations and civilizations together,
preserving for all what each has given to the heritage of mankind.

XIII. Is Progress Real?72
Against this panorama of nations, morals, and religions rising and

falling, the idea of progress finds itself in dubious shape. Is it only the
vain and traditional boast of each "modern" generation? Since we
have admitted no substantial change in man's nature during historic
times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely
new means of achieving old ends-the acquisition of goods, the pur
suit of one sex by the other (or by the same), the overcoming of
competition, the fighting of wars. One of the discouraging discov
eries of our disillusioning century is that science is neutral: it will kill
for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily
than it can build. How inadequate now seems the proud motto of
Francis Bacon, "Knowledge is power"! Sometimes we feel that the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stressed mythology and art
rather than science and power, may have been wiser than we, who
repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our pur
poses.
Our progress in science and technique has involved some tincture
of evil with good. Our comforts and conveniences may have weak
ened our physical stamina and our moral fiber. We have immensely
95

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XIII
developed our means of locomotion, but some of us use them to facil

itate crime and to kill our fellow men or ourselves. We double, triple,
centuple our speed, but we shatter our nerves in the process, and are
the same trousered apes at two thousand miles an hour as when we
had legs. We applaud the cures and incisions of modern medicine if
they bring no side effects worse than the malady; we appreciate the
assiduity of our physicians in their mad race with the resilience of
microbes and the inventiveness of disease; we are grateful for the
added years that medical science gives us if they are not a burden
some prolongation of illness, disability, and gloom. We have multi
plied a hundred times our ability to learn and report the events of the
day and the planet, but at times we envy our ancestors, whose peace
was only gently disturbed by the news of their village. We have
laudably bettered the conditions of life for skilled workingmen and
the middle class, but we have allowed our cities to fester with dark
ghettos and slimy slums.
We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we devel
oped a natural ethic-a moral code independent of religion-strong
enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from
debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promis
cuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred
it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities? Are our
manners better than before, or worse? "j\1anners," said a nineteenth
century traveler, "get regularly worse as you go from the East to
the West; it is bad in Asia, not so good in Europe, and altogether bad
in the western states of America";73 and now the East imitates the
West. Have our laws offered the criminal too much protection
against society and the state? Have we given ourselves more freedom
than our intelligence can digest? Or are we nearing such moral and
social disorder that frightened parents will run back to Mother
Church and beg her to discipline their children, at whatever cost to

CHAP. XIII) IS PROGRESS REAL? 97
intellectual liberty? Has all the progress of philosophy since Des

cartes been a mistake through its failure to recognize the role of
myth in the consolation and control of man? "He that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow, and in much wisdom is much grief." 74
Has there been any progress at all in philosophy since Confucius?
Or in literature since Aeschylus? Are we sure that our music, with
its complex forms and powerful orchestras, is more profound than
Palestrina, or more musical and inspiring than the monodic airs that
medieval Arabs sang to the strumming of their simple instruments?
(Edward Lane said of the Cairo musicians, "I have been more
charmed with their songs . . . than with any other music that 1
have ever enjoyed." 75) How does our contemporary architecture
bold, original, and impressive as it is-compare with the temples of
ancient Egypt or Greece, or our sculpture with the statues of
Chephren and Hermes, or our bas-reliefs with those of Persepolis or
the Parthenon, or our paintings with those of the van Eycks or Hol
bein? If "the replacement of chaos with order is the essence of art
and civilization," 76 is contemporary painting in America and West
ern Europe the replacement of order with chaos, and a vivid symbol
of our civilization's relapse into confused and structureless decay?
History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclu
sion from it can be made by a selection of instances. Choosing our
evidence with a brighter bias, we might evolve some more comfort
ing reflections. But perhaps we should first define what progress
means to us. If it means increase in happiness its case is lost almost at
first sight. Our capacity for fretting is endless, and no matter how
many difficulties we surmount, how many ideals we realize, we shall
always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable; there is a
stealthy pleasure in rejecting mankind or the universe as unworthy
of our approval. It seems silly to define progress in terms that would
make the average child a higher, more advanced product of life than

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XIII
the adult or the sage-for certainly the child is the happiest of the
three. Is a more objective definition possible? We shall here define
progress as the increasing control of the environment by life. It is a
test that may hold for the lowliest organism as well as for man.
We must not demand of progress that it should be continuous or
universal. Obviously there are retrogressions, just as there are periods
of failure, fatigue, and rest in a developing individual; if the present
stage is an advance in control of the environment, progress is real.
"VVe may presume that at almost any time in history some nations
were progressing and some were declining, as Russia progresses and
England loses ground today. The same nation may be progressing in
one field of human activity and retrogressing in another, as America
is now progressing in technology and receding in the graphic arts. If
we find that the type of genius prevalent in young countries like
America and Australia tends to the practical, inventive, scientific,
executive kinds rather than to the painter of pictures or poems, the
carver of statues or words, we must understand that each age and
place needs and elicits some types of ability rather than others in its
pursuit of environmental control. We should not compare the work
of one land and time with the winnowed best of all the collected
past. Our problem is whether the average man has increased his abil
ity to control the conditions of his life.
If we take a long-range view and compare our modern existence,
precarious, chaotic, and murderous as it is, with the ignorance, super
stition, violence, and diseases of primitive peoples, we do not come
off quite forlorn. The lowliest strata in civilized states may still differ
only slightly from barbarians, but above those levels thousands, mil
lions have reached mental and moral levels rarely found among prim
itive men. Under the complex strains of city life we sometimes take
imaginative refuge in the supposed simplicity of pre-civilized ways;
but in our less romantic moments we know that this is a flight reao

CHAP. XIII) IS PROGRESS REAL? 99
tion from our actual tasks, and that the idolizing of savages, like
many other young moods, is an impatient expression of adolescent
maladaptation, of conscious ability not yet matured and comfortably
placed. The "friendly and flowing savage" would be delightful but
for his scalpel, his insects, and his dirt. A study of surviving primitive
tribes reveals their high rate of infantile mortality, their short tenure
of life, their lesser stamina and speed, their greater susceptibility to
disease. 77 If the prolongation of life indicates better control of the
environment, then the tables of mortality proclaim the advance of
man, for longevity in European and American whites has tripled in
the last three centuries. Some time ago a convention of morticians
discussed the danger threatening their industry from the increasing
tardiness of men in keeping their rendezvous with death. 78 But if un
dertakers are miserable progress is real.
In the debate between ancients and moderns it is not at all clear
that the ancients carry off the prize. Shall we count it a trivial
achievement that famine has been eliminated in modern states, and
that one country can now grow enough food to overfeed itself and
yet send hundreds of millions of bushels of wheat to nations in need?
Are we ready to scuttle the science that has so diminished supersti
tion, obscurantism, and religious intolerance, or the technology that
has spread food, home ownership, comfort, education, and leisure
beyond any precedent? Would we really prefer the Athenian agora
or the Roman comitia to the British Parliament or the United
States Congress, or be content under a narrow franchise like At
tica's, or the selection of rulers by a praetorian guard? Would we
rather have lived under the laws of the Athenian Republic or the
Roman Empire than under constitutions that give us habeas corpus,
trial by jury, religious and intellectual freedom, and the emancipa
tion of women? Are our morals, lax though they are, worse than
those of the ambisexual Alcibiades, or has any American President

100 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XIII
imitated Pericles, who lived with a learned courtesan? Are we

ashamed of our great universities, our many publishing houses, our
bountiful public libraries? There were great dramatists in Athens,
but was any greater than Shakespeare, and was Aristophanes as pro
found and humane as Moliere? Was the oratory of Demosthenes,
Isocrates, and Aeschines superior to that of Chatham, Burke, and
Sheridan? Shall we place Gibbon below Herodotus or Thucydides?
Is there anything in ancient prose fiction comparable to the scope
and depth of the modern novel? We may grant the superiority of the
ancients in art, though some of us might still prefer Notre Dame de
Paris to the Parthenon. If the Founding Fathers of the United States
could return to America, or Fox and Bentham to England, or Vol
taire and Diderot to France, would they not reproach us as ingrates
for our blindness to our good fortune in living today and not yester
day-not even under Pericles or Augustus?
We should not be greatly disturbed by the probability that our
civilization will die like any other. As Frederick asked his retreating
troops at Kolin, "\Vould you live forever?" 79 Perhaps it is desirable
that life should take fresh forms, that new civilizations and centers
should have their turn. Meanwhile the effort to meet the challenge of
the rising East may reinvigorate the West.
We have said that a great civilization does not entirely die-non
omnis moritur. Some precious achievements have survived all the vi
cissitudes of rising and falling states: the making of fire and light, of
the wheel and other basic tools; language, writing, art, and song;
agriculture, the family, and parental care; social organization, moral
ity, and charity; and the use of teaching to transmit the lore of the
family and the race. These are the elements of civilization, and they
have been tenaciously maintained through the perilous passage from
one civilization to the next. They are the connective tissue of human
history.

CHAP. XIII) IS PROGRESS REAL? IOI
If education is the transmission of civilization, we are unquestion

ably progressing. Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and
earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be in
terrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be
savages again. So our finest contemporary achievement is our un
precedented expenditure of wealth and toil in the provision of higher
education for all. Once colleges were luxuries, designed for the male
half of the leisure class; today universities are so numerous that he
who runs may become a Ph.D. We may not have excelled the se
lected geniuses of antiquity, but we have raised the level and average
of knowledge beyond any age in history.
None but a child will complain that our teachers have not yet
eradicated the errors and superstitions of ten thousand years. The
great experiment has just begun, and it may yet be defeated by the
high birth rate of unwilling or indoctrinated ignorance. But what
would be the full fruitage of instruction if every child should be
schooled till at least his twentieth year, and should find free access to
the universities, libraries, and museums that harbor and offer the in
tellectual and artistic treasures of the race? Consider education not as
the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely
the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the
world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and
aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the
enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and en
joyment of life.
The heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than
ever before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the
Greek flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo's, for it
includes him and the Italian Renaissance; richer than Voltaire's, for
it embraces all the French Enlightenment and its ecumenical dissemi
nation. If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are

102 THE LESSONS OF HISTORY (CHAP. XIII
born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but
because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that
pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the
ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in
proportion as he receives it.
History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heri
tage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission,
and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning
reminder of man's follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging re
membrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing
chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of
the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists,
poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak,
teach and carve and sing. The historian will not mourn because he
can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts
into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our
lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is
fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his
civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final
breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that
it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.


27
WHY DID DEMOCRACY SPREAD?
The Third Wave of democratization; theories of why democratic waves occur; how democracy is
rooted in the interests of specific social groups; social mobilization as the link between economic
change and democracy; political parties as key agents in the struggle over democracy
Japan, China, and other societies in East Asia were heirs to a long tradition of
government and could presuppose the existence of a strong state as they began to
industrialize in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior to this point, they
were highly unequal agrarian societies in which a small elite exercised a
monopoly of power over a large mass of largely unorganized peasants. I
suggested that the state-society balance began to change with the onset of rapid
economic growth, and that the authoritarian system in contemporary China will
face significant challenges as new social groups are mobilized and begin to
demand a share of political power. Will this lead to the eventual appearance of
formal democratic accountability in China? We have no way of predicting such
an outcome. What we can do is to try to understand the process of
democratization in other parts of the world and what implications it may hold for
the future.
Between 1970 and 2010, the number of democracies around the world
increased from about 35 to nearly 120, or some 60 percent of the world’s
countries, in what Samuel Huntington called the Third Wave of democratization.
According to him, the first long wave began in the 1820s and continued through
the end of the nineteenth century, while the second short wave happened in the
immediate aftermath of World War II. The Third Wave began with the
democratic transitions in Spain and Portugal in the early 1970s and continued
through the end of military rule in Greece and Turkey, followed by a series of
Latin American countries including Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile;
then it moved to Asia with the democratization of the Philippines, South Korea,

and Taiwan; and culminated in the collapse of communism and the transition to
democracy in Eastern Europe and some of the successor states of the former
Soviet Union. Democracy expert Larry Diamond has argued that there has been
a recession of the Third Wave in the 2000s. While the outbreak of the Arab
Spring in early 2011 suggested to some observers the start of a Fourth Wave,
setbacks in Egypt, Libya, and Syria have made this a less compelling argument.1
Why did these waves of democratization occur? Why did they occur in some
regions and societies and not others? Why were some waves successful in
establishing relatively stable democracies while others were rolled back? And
why did democracy become a global phenomenon only during the twentieth
century and not in the roughly four hundred prior centuries of human history?
One answer to the question of why democracy spread has been put forward in
a number of different variants: democracy has taken hold as the result of the
power of the underlying idea of democracy. This was stated forcefully by Alexis
de Tocqueville in his introduction to Democracy in America. He noted that the
idea of human equality that underlies modern democracy had been gaining
ground for the preceding eight hundred years, and it had acquired an unstoppable
momentum that aroused in him a “kind of religious dread.” He regarded its
progress as a providential fact.2 Other authors have agreed that ideas were
critical and have traced them to specific historical and cultural roots, either in
ancient Athens or in Christianity. Both Hegel and Nietzsche understood modern
political democracy to be a secularized version of the Christian doctrine of the
universal equality of human dignity. Hegel in particular saw developments in the
material world such as the French Revolution and the emergence of the principle
of equal recognition as the working out of the inner logic of human rationality.
During the Third Wave itself, as well as during the more recent Arab Spring,
ideas clearly propagated rapidly across international borders via radio,
television, the Internet, and flows of activists bringing news of political
upheavals elsewhere. The wave of democratic transitions occurring in sub-
Saharan Africa during the early 1990s was clearly inspired by the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the dramatic developments taking place in Eastern Europe
shortly before.
In terms of the framework built around the six dimensions of development
laid out in chapter 2, theories focusing on ideas or cultural values would posit a
causal relationship looking something like Figure 19.

FIGURE 19. Ideas and Democracy
But while ideas are indeed powerful and can explain much about political
institutions, this kind of explanation begs as many questions as it settles. Why,
for instance, do the ideas of human equality or democracy take off in some
periods and not in others? The idea of democracy has been around at least since
ancient Athens, and yet it did not become institutionalized anywhere until the
end of the eighteenth century. Tocqueville does not explain why the idea of
human equality became progressively more powerful, except to suggest that it
was an act of God. Democracy did not arise in all parts of the world, nor has it
gained traction equally across the globe. This has led to the assertion, made by
parties as diverse as Samuel Huntington, the contemporary Chinese government,
and a variety of Islamists, that liberal democracy does not represent a universal
trend but is something culturally specific to Western civilization. If this is true, it
still begs the question of why this particular idea arose in the West and not
elsewhere.
An alternative school of thought understands democracy not as the expression
of an idea or a set of cultural values but as the by-product of deep structural
forces within societies. Social scientists have long noted that there is a
correlation between high levels of economic development and stable democracy:
most of the world’s rich industrialized countries today are democracies, whereas
most remaining authoritarian states are much less developed. One well-known
study shows that while countries may transition from authoritarian to democratic
government at any level of development, they are much more likely to remain
democracies if they rise above a certain threshold of per capita income. This
suggests prima facie that there may be something in the process of economic
development that makes democracy more likely.3
But what is the connection between economic development and democracy?

MARX’S INSIGHT
Marx’s framework can be summarized as follows. Out of the old feudal order,
the first new social class to be mobilized is the bourgeoisie, townsmen who were
regarded contemptuously by the old landowners but who accumulated capital
and used new technologies to bring about the Industrial Revolution. This
revolution in turn mobilized a second new class, the proletariat, whose surplus
labor the bourgeoisie unjustly appropriated. Each of these three classes wanted a
different political outcome: the traditional landowning class wanted to preserve
the old authoritarian order; the bourgeoisie wanted a liberal (i.e., rule of law)
regime protecting their property rights that might or might not include formal
electoral democracy (they were always more interested in the rule of law than in
democracy); and the proletariat, once it achieved consciousness of itself as a
class, wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat, which would in turn socialize the
means of production, abolish private property, and redistribute wealth. The
working class might support electoral democracy in the form of universal
suffrage, but this was a means to the end of control over the means of
production, not an end in itself.
One of the most important scholars working in a post-Marxist tradition was
Barrington Moore, whose 1966 book Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy has already been noted in connection with Japan (see chapter 23
above). This complex book presented a series of historical case studies,
including Britain, Germany, Japan, China, Russia, and India, and tried to explain
why democracy emerged in some countries and not in others. He is probably
best remembered for his blunt observation: “No bourgeoisie, no democracy.” By
this he did not mean that the rise of the bourgeoisie inevitably produced
democracy. In Germany, for example, the industrial bourgeoisie allied itself with
the autocratic Junker landowning aristocracy in the famous marriage of “iron
and rye” that upheld Bismarckian authoritarianism, and later played some role in
the rise of Hitler. Rather, Moore argued that democracy could emerge if a rapidly
enlarging bourgeoisie succeeded in displacing the older order of landowners and
peasants. This happened in England, he noted, as an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie
in the countryside succeeded in commercializing agriculture, driving peasants
off the land, and using the proceeds to fund the Industrial Revolution. This cruel
process had the effect of weakening the power of the old landed aristocracy
while producing a modern working class.
Moore also paid particular attention to the form of agricultural production in

a way that Marx did not. Marx largely ignored the peasantry, assuming that it
would be eliminated by capitalist industrialization as it had been in England.
However, revolutions broke out in Russia and China, where the vast majority of
the population were peasants. Lenin and Mao came to power on the backs of
peasants, despite the fact that Marx believed they were a class destined
ultimately to disappear. Moore, taking these cases into account, argued that
democratization faced special obstacles under conditions of what he called
“labor-repressive” agriculture, in which peasants were tied to the land in large,
concentrated estates. The result was the survival of an authoritarian landowning
class, which in turn spawned worker-peasant revolutionary movements. Between
these two extremes, the prospect of a middle-class democracy was poor. We
have already seen this scenario play out in several Latin American countries
noted above.
Barrington Moore’s book has spawned a vast literature that contests many of
the points he made, but particularly his assertion that the bourgeoisie or middle
classes were critical to the emergence of democracy.4 Without going into the
details of the scholarly controversy, it is clear that his hypothesis would have to
be modified in certain important ways. For example, the bourgeoisie is far from
being a unified group. It includes large industrialists like the Thyssens and
Rockefellers as well as small shopkeepers and urban professionals that the
Marxists frequently referred to contemptuously as “petty bourgeois.” The
interests of these different segments varied according to circumstance; in many
cases, important middle-class groups did not invariably support democracy.5
And though the working class could be recruited into radical antidemocratic
Communist or agrarian movements, many working-class organizations in fact
lined up solidly in support of democratic voting rights and rule of law.
It is important to note that the two components of liberal democracy—liberal
rule of law and mass political participation—are separable political goals that
initially tended to be favored by different social groups. Thus the middle-class
authors of the French Revolution were not, as many historians have pointed out,
committed democrats in the sense that they wanted immediate expansion of the
franchise to peasants and workers. The Rights of Man were conceived as legal
guarantees that would protect the property and personal freedoms of the
bourgeoisie, limiting the power of the state but not necessarily empowering the
mass of French citizens. Similarly, the Whigs, who forced the constitutional
settlement on the English king during the Glorious Revolution in the previous
century, were largely wealthy taxpayers that included part of the aristocracy, the

gentry, and the upper middle classes. Their ranks were joined in the succeeding
two centuries by the growing numbers of commercial and industrial bourgeoisie,
as well as by middle-class lawyers, doctors, civil servants, teachers, and other
professionals set off from the working classes by their education and property
ownership. These groups constituted the base of support for the British Liberal
Party during the nineteenth century. The main interest of the Liberals tended to
be rule of law much more than democracy—that is, legal protection for private
property and individual rights, as well as policies such as free trade, meritocratic
civil service reform, and public education that would make possible upward
mobility.
Over time, however, the liberal and the democratic agendas began to
converge, and democracy became a middle-class goal. Rule of law and
democratic accountability are, after all, alternative means of constraining power,
and in practice are often mutually supportive. Protection of property rights
against arbitrary state predation requires political power, which in turn can be
achieved through expansion of the franchise. Similarly, citizens demanding the
right to vote can be protected by a rule of law that restricts the government’s
ability to repress them. The right to vote came to be seen as just another
protected legal right. Liberal democracy—a political system embodying both
rule of law and universal suffrage—thus evolved into a single package desired
by both middle-class groups and a significant part of the working class.
Barrington Moore was not himself a Marxist in the sense of wanting to see
the victory of communism around the world. He saw liberal democracy as a
desirable outcome while appreciating the powerful social forces that often made
it unattainable. In this spirit, the Marxist analytical framework as modified by
Moore remains extremely useful as a means of understanding how and why
democracy spreads. The key insight is that democracy is desired most strongly
by one specific social group in society: the middle class. If we are to understand
the likelihood of democracy emerging, we need to evaluate the strength of the
middle class relative to other social groups that prefer other forms of
government, such as the old landed oligarchy who are inclined to support
authoritarian systems, or radicalized groups of peasants or urban poor who are
focused on economic redistribution. Modern democracy has a social basis, and if
we don’t pay attention to it, we will not be able to properly evaluate the
prospects of democratic transitions.
We can summarize the major social actors whose relative strength and
interactions determine the likelihood that democracy will emerge in a given

society. These were the dominant groups that existed in Europe as the continent
democratized during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they are also
groups that exist in many contemporary developing countries.
1. The middle classes, defined in occupational and educational terms rather

than by level of income. They tended to support the liberal part of liberal
democracy. That is, they wanted legal rules that protected their rights and
particularly their property from predatory government. They may or may
not have been supporters of democracy, understood as universal political
participation, and they were even more ambivalent about if not overtly
opposed to economic redistribution that might affect their own property
and income. Middle-class groups were the primary leaders of the
democratic transitions that took place in Denmark, Greece, France,
Argentina, Portugal, and Spain in the nineteenth century, and were
important parts of the coalitions that pressed for full democratization in
Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Britain in the
early twentieth.6
2. The working classes—Marx’s famous industrial proletariat—were
conversely more interested in the democratic part of liberal democracy,
meaning their own right to participate politically. They joined forces with
middle-class groups to press for full expansion of the franchise in
Denmark, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, and
Britain.7 However, they were more interested in economic redistribution
than the middle classes and often more focused on redistribution than
liberal guarantees of property rights. For this reason significant parts of the
working class around the world were willing to support nondemocratic
anarchosyndicalist parties in the nineteenth century (as in Southern Europe
or much of Latin America), or Communist or Fascist parties in the
twentieth, parties that promised redistribution at the expense of liberal
individual rights.
3. Large landowners, and particularly those making use of repressive labor
(slavery, serfdom, or other nonmarket conditions of labor), have almost
everywhere been authoritarian opponents of democracy. One of the most
enduring of Barrington Moore’s insights is the need to break the power of
this particular social group by one means or another before full democracy
can flourish.8
4. The peasantry had complicated and sometimes inconsistent political

aspirations. In many societies they were an extremely conservative group,
embracing traditional social values and willing to live in subordinate
positions as clients of the landowning class. One of the earliest
counterrevolutionary movements was the peasant uprising of the Vendée
in 1793 that opposed the revolutionary government in Paris. As we saw in
the Greek and Italian cases, they could be mobilized by conservative
parties using clientelistic methods. Under the right circumstances,
however, they could be radicalized to join forces with the working classes
as supporters of revolution. They became the foot soldiers of the
Bolshevik, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions.
These four groups constituted the major social actors whose interactions
determined the course of political development and democratic transition in the
nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period, virtually all of the world’s
most advanced countries were dominated by the last two of these groups, a
landowning oligarchy and the peasantry. Increasing industrialization induced
peasants to leave the countryside and enter the working class, and by the
beginning of the twentieth century they were the largest social group. Under the
impact of expanding trade, the number of middle-class individuals began to
swell, first in Britain and the United States, then in France and Belgium, and by
the late nineteenth century in Germany, Japan, and other “late developers.” This
then set the stage for the major social and political confrontations of the early
twentieth century.
THE CENTRALITY OF POLITICAL PARTIES
Useful as it is, one of the weaknesses of Marx’s analytical framework is his use
of “class” as a key determining variable. Marx sometimes talks as if social
classes—the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, feudalists—were clearly defined
political actors capable of purposive rational decision making. In reality, social
classes are intellectual abstractions, useful analytically but incapable of
producing political action unless they are embodied in specific organizations.
Newly mobilized social groups can participate politically in a wide variety of
ways: through strikes and demonstrations, by use of the media, or today, through
channels like Facebook and Twitter. Citizens can organize civil society groups to
press for particular causes, or for mutual support. But if participation is to be

enduring, it needs to be institutionalized, which for the past two centuries has
meant the formation of political parties.
Thus the four groups listed above did not spring into the world as cohesive
political actors like Athena from the head of Zeus. They had to be politically
mobilized and represented by political parties. It is for this reason that political
parties have been considered necessary to the success of any democracy, despite
the fact that they were unanticipated by many early democratic theorists.
Conservative parties like the Tory Party in Britain or the German Imperial Party
started out as elite political factions that only later were forced to organize
themselves as mass parties that could contest elections. The middle classes were
represented by various liberal parties, like the Liberals in Britain or the Progress
Party, the Left Liberals, or the National Liberals in Germany. The working class
was mobilized under the banner of Socialist parties like the British Labour Party
and the German Social Democratic Party, or, by the early twentieth century, the
various Communist parties that had begun to appear on the fringes of the
political landscape in virtually all industrializing societies. The peasants were the
least well-organized social group. In Britain, the United States, Denmark, and
Sweden, they had largely disappeared by the late nineteenth century because
they had been converted into independent family farmers, or else simply driven
off the land. In Greece and Italy, peasants were actually represented by
conservative parties that used patronage to control them; in Bulgaria, they
succeeded in forming their own party.
A central problem with any simple class-based analysis of democratization is
that there were a number of cross-cutting issues that united people across class
lines and blurred the class profiles of political parties. Among the most
important were ethnicity, religion, and foreign policy. Thus the German
Reichstag in the late nineteenth century contained parties representing the Polish
and Danish minorities, as well as the Centre Party, which stood for Catholic
interests and was itself divided into left and right wings. Issues like imperial
policy and the building of a navy were conservative causes that drew working-
class support. In Britain, there were sharp divisions over Irish Home Rule and
empire that were often as important as class considerations in determining
election outcomes. In the contemporary Middle East, Islamist parties tend to
have a social base in the lower classes and in rural areas, but their overt message
is based on religion rather than class.
Thus, while political parties may try to represent the interests of particular
social classes, they are very often also autonomous political actors that can get

power by mobilizing voters from different classes by shifting their agendas from
economic ones to identity politics, religion, or foreign policy. They do not
actually have to represent the true interests of the social classes that support
them. At one extreme, the Communist Parties in Russia and China ended up
being among the greatest oppressors of workers and peasants in human history.
In the United States, the Republican Party, traditionally the bastion of business
interests, gets substantial support from working-class voters who support it on
cultural rather than economic grounds.
Like state bureaucracies, political parties are not simply robotic arms
controlled by underlying social classes. Rather, they can exercise a great deal of
choice in how they represent their constituents. Political parties are created by
political entrepreneurs who organize followings around particular ideas and who
then go on to organize real-world political machines. Successful Communist
parties required the organizational genius of leaders like Vladimir Lenin to come
to power. Conservative parties were animated by ideas about tradition, religion,
monarchy, and stability. As their underlying social bases went into decline and
they were forced to compete for mass electorates, some, like the British
Conservatives, were able to change their agendas to make themselves appealing
to middle- and working-class electorates. Others, like the Italian Christian
Democrats, survived and prospered through their ability to organize vast
clientelistic networks. Those conservative parties that failed to adapt to these
new conditions of electoral politics were tempted to resort to nondemocratic
methods for preserving their power, like the Argentine coup of 1930 (see chapter
18 above). Clientelistic party organization often went hand in hand with a
personalistic political style, in which supporters were rallied around particular
charismatic individuals like Juan and Eva Perón rather than around a coherent
program. Organizational capacity was thus not something that could be readily
predicted simply by looking at the strength of different social classes. It
depended on historically contingent factors like leadership, personality, and
ideas.
ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOCIAL MOBILIZATION, AND DEMOCRACY
Why did democracy spread, and why might it spread farther in the future?
Democratic institutions are driven by multiple causes, but one of the most
important centers on economic change. Economic growth is linked to democracy
in a multistage process, as illustrated in Figure 21. Economic growth engenders

social mobilization via the spreading division of labor, and social mobilization in
turn produces demands for both rule of law and greater democracy. The
traditional elites that dominated the old agrarian order frequently try to block
entry of the newer groups into the system. A stable democratic system will
emerge only if these newly mobilized groups are successfully incorporated into
the system and allowed to participate politically. Conversely, instability and
disorder will occur if those groups do not have institutionalized channels of
participation.
In this context, ideas can still be very important, but they are related to
changes in the other dimensions of development. For example, the idea of the
universal equality of human dignity has been around for centuries, but in static
agrarian societies it never gained much traction because such societies had an
extremely low degree of social mobility. Peasants periodically revolted and
challenged the political status quo. This could be sparked by some outrageous
violation of their rights, or out of sheer hunger and desperation. But while
individual leaders of such revolts might aspire to join the oligarchy, it never
occurred to them to displace the class-bound system as such. Hence they never
became true revolutionaries. The idea of social equality acquired a broad
galvanizing power only when in parts of Europe during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries an expanding capitalist economic system started reordering
the social system. Modern capitalism both required and produced social
mobility, and as a consequence demands for equality of access and opportunity
expanded. There are thus multiple lines of causality linking social mobilization
to democracy and the rule of law. Ideas were important and had their own
autonomy—neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx could be understood as a mere
spokesman for the social class out of which he sprang—but receptivity to ideas
was shaped by social context and deep economic changes.

FIGURE 21. Economic Development and Democracy
Democracy emerged in Europe in gradual stages over a 150-year period, as a

result of struggles among the middle classes, working class, old oligarchy, and
peasantry, all being shaped in turn by underlying changes in the economy and
society. The Marx-Moore framework, with a few emendations, remains basically
sound. It is this story that I will flesh out in the following chapter.

28
THE LONG ROAD TO DEMOCRACY
How European democracy advanced in the nineteenth century as societies changed; arguments
against democracy before its triumph; how conservative parties often determined the nature of
democratic advance
I told the story in Volume 1 of the rise of accountable government in England

and the United States. Accountability was the result of what seems in retrospect
to be the almost accidental survival of a feudal institution, the medieval estate or
parliament, into the modern era. In the Middle Ages, taxing authority was vested
in these estates, which represented the oligarchic layer of property owners in the
society. In France, Spain, Sweden, Prussia, and Russia, the monarchy succeeded
from the late sixteenth century on in undermining the power of the estates and
consolidating absolutist rule. In Poland and Hungary, by contrast, the estates
were victorious over the monarchy and created a weak decentralized political
system that was soon militarily overwhelmed by foreign conquerors. Only in
England was the power of the Parliament evenly matched against that of the
monarchy. The former succeeded in fighting the latter to a standstill in the course
of the seventeenth century, an impasse that eventually resulted in the
constitutional settlement of 1688–1689, the Glorious Revolution.
Accountable government is not simply a matter of opposition groups
overwhelming a government and forcing it to do their bidding. Throughout
human history, out-groups have fought in-groups, and once they succeeded in
displacing the power holder became the new oppressive ingroup. Accountable
government, by contrast, means formal recognition of the principle of
accountability to a broader public and the legitimacy of opposition. This is
where ideas came to play a critical role. John Locke explained that the authority
of all governments lay not in divine right but in their ability to protect the
individual rights of their citizens. Governments are potentially the prime

violators of those rights. He further argued that “no government can have a right
to obedience from a people who have not freely consented to it”; what we today
call legitimacy therefore flowed from the ability of a people to “choose their
government and governors.” “No taxation without representation” and “consent
of the governed” were the animating principles of the Glorious Revolution and
of the American Revolution that took place less than a century later. The shift in
understanding from the “rights of Englishmen” (that is, traditional feudal rights)
to “natural rights” (universal rights held by all human beings) meant that these
new revolutions would never simply be about the displacement of one elite
group by another.
But even though the Glorious Revolution established the principle of
parliamentary accountability, England was still very far from anything like true
democracy at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Those sitting in
Parliament were elected by a small, well-to-do part of the country, no more than
3 percent of the whole population as late as 1830. So the story of the arrival of
democracy, as opposed to accountability, takes place in the centuries following
the settlement of 1689.
Since the rule of law and democratic accountability can be conceived of as
alternative means of constraining the government, it is not surprising that the
two have been closely associated with one another historically and promoted in
common. During the English Civil War, one of the biggest grievances of the
parliamentary side against the king was the fact that he was trampling on the
Common Law. The early Stuarts had prosecuted opponents through bodies of
questionable legality like the King’s Court of the Star Chamber. The
parliamentary demands were that the monarchy be accountable to them on
matters of taxation and that it act under the law. It is adherence to the rule of law
that guarantees that an out-group that succeeds in displacing an in-group will not
use its newfound access to power as a means of prosecuting its opponents in
revenge.
Though the two components of liberal democracy that constrain the state—
the liberal rule of law part and the democratic accountability part—are often
associated, they remain conceptually separable. As noted in the last chapter, they
tend to be championed by different social groups. This means that liberal
democracy seldom arrived in a neat package but was introduced sequentially
over time. It also makes the dating of the onset of democracy very difficult.
When, for example, did the United States become a liberal democracy? Rule of
law arrived much earlier than democracy, with introduction of the Common Law

into the colonies well before the revolution and the Constitutional Convention.
But equal access to the law still took centuries to implement. Though most
Americans assume democracy arrived with the adoption of the Constitution in
the late eighteenth century, the franchise was severely limited in 1787 and was
progressively opened up to white men without property, African Americans, and
women in a slow process that wasn’t completed until ratification of the
Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Indeed, various constraints on voting by blacks
in the South meant that full legal enfranchisement had to wait until passage of
the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
If we apply these different criteria of liberal democracy backward in time to
the nineteenth century, we see that the democratization of Europe and other
countries in the First Wave was an extremely protracted process. Table 6
presents the dates on which different countries achieved various milestones with
regard to expansion of the franchise, and indicates both the length of time
required to get to universal suffrage and the variance across different countries.
Besides limiting the franchise, authoritarian governments in nineteenth-century
Europe did many other things to check democracy. Prussia, for example, adopted
universal male suffrage in 1849, but under a three-tier voting system and an open
ballot that wasn’t abolished until 1918. Some countries like Britain, Italy, and
Denmark had unelected upper houses that could veto or otherwise alter
legislation. Many countries imposed restrictions on political organization,
particularly on the part of new working-class groups operating under socialist or
communist banners. Democratization in this period was not, moreover, a one-
way process; some countries like France granted rights to their citizens, only to
take them away with the return to power of authoritarian regimes, in a recurring
cycle.
THE FRANCHISE
The European route to democracy unfolded in stages, punctuated by long periods

of stasis or active regression. The simplest reason for this circuitous route is that
Europe was not socially ready for democracy until the final third of the
nineteenth century.
TABLE 6. Expansion of the Franchise in Selected Countries1

As noted in the preface, while the French Revolution brought the Code
Napoléon to much of Europe and secured a modern administrative state in
France itself, it did not establish democracy. Napoleon’s defeat ushered in a
prolonged period of authoritarian reversion under the aegis of the Austrian-
Prussian-Russian Holy Alliance, in which conservative monarchical regimes
tried to turn back the clock to the period before 1789. There was a gradient of
absolutism stretching from west to east. Republican government existed only in
some Swiss cantons and German city-states. France, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Norway, and some of the other German states (as well as, of course, Britain) had
constitutional monarchies in which the king’s formal powers were limited by
law. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, Italy, and Russia, monarchs faced
far fewer checks on their power, though most ruled through bureaucracies that

were grounded in some form of civil law.2
The second great surge toward democracy occurred with the Revolutions of
1848, raising hopes that were just as quickly dashed. In the words of historian
Eric Hobsbawm, “1848 appears as the one revolution in the modern history of
Europe which combines the greatest promise, the widest scope, and the most
immediate initial success, with the most unqualified and rapid failure.”3 The
“Springtime of Peoples,” to which the Arab Spring has been compared, affected
virtually every country in the core of Europe. It started in France with the
downfall of the July Monarchy and proclamation of a Second Republic in
February, and then spread to Bavaria, Prussia, Austria, Hungary, and Italy the
following month. The only countries not destabilized were at the periphery of
the continent: Sweden, Britain, Greece, Spain, and Russia. The revolutions were
then rapidly suppressed, beginning with the Habsburg recovery in May and
continuing through the rest of the continent by the end of the year. The brisk
spread of revolutionary ideas demonstrates that the “contagion effect” of
democratic awakenings was not the by-product of the Internet and social media
but could occur in an age of newspapers as well.4
Both the outbreak of these revolutions as well as their ultimate failure
reflected the incomplete nature of the social transformations that were occurring
in Europe. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the greater part of Europe
was still agrarian, with landowners and peasants as the major actors. Only in
Britain and the Netherlands were there middle-class groups of any significant
size or political weight. But by the middle of the century, a small commercial
and industrial bourgeoisie had emerged virtually everywhere, and with the
spread of education and literacy, newspapers and public discussions became
much more common. The decade of the 1840s saw the organization of what
today we would call “civil society” throughout continental Europe: voluntary
private associations, often organized around banqueting or public festivals, in
which like-minded people could gather, exchange views, and express opinions
critical of governments. (Such organizations had existed in Britain at a much
earlier point.) Political parties, however, were in most places illegal. In the more
repressive territories, activists had to organize secret societies, like the Young
Italy of Giuseppe Mazzini. It was these middle-class groups, legal and illegal,
that would spearhead the Revolutions of 1848.5
The social transformation was at this point very incomplete, however; even in
the most economically advanced European societies, the middle class still
constituted a minority of the population. These middle classes were themselves

split between those who wanted strong legal protections for their persons and
property rights, and those interested in broader democratic participation. The
majority of European populations remained peasants, artisans and tradesmen,
and an incipient working class that was at this point largely unorganized. The
European situation was thus comparable to that of emerging market countries
like Thailand and China today. The conservatives in 1848 were able to break the
revolutionary momentum by splitting the ranks of the middle class through
appeals to nationalism, and by playing on its fears of disorder.
The decades immediately following the restoration of the conservative order
post-1848 would prove to be the most economically and socially transformative
in European history, as they were in the history of the United States. The more
advanced countries—Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands—
went from being majority agrarian societies to urban-industrial ones on the eve
of World War I. This led to an enormous change in social classes and created the
basis for a new mass democratic politics.
Hobsbawm’s judgment about the completeness of the failure of the
Revolutions of 1848 is therefore too severe. The outbreak of revolution and fear
that it might recur lay in the back of the minds of all authoritarian leaders in the
second half of the nineteenth century, and set an agenda for political changes that
would unfold in the succeeding two generations. Prussia, for example, put in
place a universal franchise between 1847 and 1867, albeit with an open ballot
and tiered voting. The newly unified Germany after 1871 adopted a formal
constitution that for the first time created a role for an elected Reichstag. The
legalization of political parties provided an opening for the Social Democratic
Party to organize; despite the arch-conservative Chancellor Bismarck’s attempts
to suppress it, the Social Democrats became the largest group within the
Reichstag by the eve of World War I. Bismarck implemented Europe’s first
social security and health insurance systems in the 1880s in an effort to steal the
thunder of the new working-class parties.
Similarly in France, Louis Napoleon, who came to power via a coup in 1851
and declared himself the Emperor Napoleon III, nonetheless felt he had to
legitimate his rule by staging a plebiscite (having been once elected president of
the republic that emerged in the wake of the 1848 revolution). The French had
gotten used to the idea of voting, even if under highly managed conditions. The
Second Empire was, moreover, a liberal one in which diverse political views
could be openly expressed. The economic expansion that took place under it
paved the way for the more genuinely democratic Third Republic that was

declared after defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. Many
of the moves toward more liberal societies and greater democracy were thus the
work of conservative leaders who lived through 1848 and were conscious of the
fact that they faced societies mobilized in ways they had not been earlier in the
century.
The middle-class supporters of constitutional government at midcentury
would turn out to be inconsistent democrats, however, because the democratic
impulse was hijacked, in many countries, by nationalism. The German liberals
sitting in the Frankfurt and Berlin parliaments were often more interested in the
creation of a united Germany than they were in the democratization of the
existing German states. As elites, they were willing to let themselves “represent”
the nation without actually wanting to give their fellow citizens the right to vote.
Many of them ended up supporting Bismarck and his authoritarian Reich when
he proved to be the one individual capable of creating a united Germany. As
leaders and beneficiaries of German capitalism, they did not hesitate to abandon
economic liberalism when the state offered tariff protections to their industries.
Similarly, many of the liberals in the component territories of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire were more interested in securing their own privileges as
national elites than in expansion of the franchise. In Britain, opposition to Irish
Home Rule and support for the empire allowed the conservatives to attract
support not just from the middle class but also from the working class in the late
nineteenth century. This would not be the last time that nationalism would trump
class interest in Europe.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST DEMOCRACY
Resistance to the spread of democracy lay in the realm of ideas as well as in the
material interests of Europe’s existing elites. In the nineteenth century, many
serious intellectuals were willing to make thoughtful arguments against a
universal franchise, or the principle of one man, one vote. It is worth reviewing
some of those arguments, since a number of them remain salient even if few
people are willing to articulate them openly today.
One of the most sustained critiques of democracy was provided by the
philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty has been a foundational text for
liberals since its publication in 1859. In Thoughts on Parliamentary
Government, published in 1861 before the Second Reform Act, Mill made
several arguments against a universal and equal franchise. He began with the

classic Whig argument that “the assembly which votes the taxes, either general
or local, should be elected exclusively by those who pay something towards the
taxes imposed.”6 The idea that only taxpayers should vote was the flip side of
the principle “no taxation without representation” that was the motto of both the
English and American Revolutions. Mill therefore believed it was better to
impose direct rather than indirect taxes, since that would remind citizens of their
obligations to be vigilant about how the government spent their money. This
implied further that the “receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory
disqualification for the franchise.” In other words, people on welfare should not
have the right to vote, since they were essentially freeloading off of taxpayers.
Mill’s second argument against an equal franchise had to do with the
qualifications and sense of responsibility of voters. He did not contest the
principle of universal franchise, since “the possession and the exercise of
political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments
both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind.” He did,
however, contest one man, one vote. In an argument that sounds particularly
foreign to contemporary ears, he noted that “if it is asserted that all persons
ought to be equal in every description of right recognised by society, I answer,
not until all are equal in worth as human beings.”7 This led to a conclusion that
different classes of people should have different numbers of votes based on their
level of education: an unskilled laborer, one vote; a foreman, three; and a lawyer,
physician, or clergyman, five or six. He noted that Louis Napoleon had just been
elected president of France by millions of “peasants who could neither read nor
write, and whose knowledge of public men, even by name, was limited to oral
tradition.”8 Very similar arguments would be used by whites in the American
South to restrict or take away voting rights from African Americans in the
decades following the Civil War as Jim Crow laws spread.
Other thinkers made the argument that only elites were capable of objective
guardianship of the public interest and should therefore be trusted to represent
those who did not have the right to vote. Back in the eighteenth century, for
example, Edmund Burke suggested that members of the House of Commons
elected from rotten boroughs or otherwise unequal franchises did not enjoy
better roads, prisons, or police than those who were underrepresented, since that
privileged class of people were able to “stand clearer of local interests, passions,
prejudices and cabals, than the others” and therefore to produce “a more general
view.”9 The working classes in themselves were not qualified to rule: “The
occupation of a hairdresser, or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter

of honor to any person … The state suffers oppression if such as they … are
permitted to rule.”10
This perspective was taken up by Walter Bagehot’s classic work The English
Constitution, published in 1866 just before the introduction of the Second
Reform Bill, in which he asserted: “I do not consider the exclusion of the
working classes from effectual representation a defect in this aspect of our
parliamentary representation. The working classes contribute almost nothing to
our corporate public opinion, and therefore, the fact of their want of influence in
Parliament does not impair the coincidence of Parliament with public opinion.
They are left out in the representation, and also in the thing represented.”11 What
Bagehot called the “dignified” parts of the government—the monarchy and the
House of Lords—actually attracted considerable public support and therefore
sufficed as a basis for legitimacy in the absence of the active participation of the
working classes and poor in government.12
A different sort of argument was made against democracy by a series of
conservative Italian thinkers, who asserted that it was pointless to open up the
franchise since true democracy was impossible to achieve. This view was first
articulated by Gaetano Mosca, who stated that the different regime types—
monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—made little difference to actual life because
all were in the end controlled by elites. The “political class” maintains itself in
power under a wide variety of institutions and will simply use democratic ones
to do the same. Even “Communist and collectivist societies would beyond any
doubt be managed by officials.” The economist Vilfredo Pareto (familiar to
economics students as the inventor of the Pareto optimum) made a similar case
for continuing elite domination regardless of the type of regime. Based on his
statistical studies of income distribution, he formulated a “Pareto’s law,” which
argued that 80 percent of wealth was held by 20 percent of the population across
time and space. Since this was akin to a natural law, efforts to remedy it through
political measures like expansion of the franchise or income redistribution were
pointless.13
These conservative Italian thinkers were making a variant of the argument put
forward by Marx himself, namely, that the advent of formal democracy and an
expanded franchise would not improve the lives of the mass of the population
but would simply preserve elite dominance in a different form. Mosca and Pareto
believed that different institutions would not change this situation, and therefore
they argued in favor of a continuation of the status quo. Marx believed, of
course, that a solution existed in the form of a proletarian revolution. His

followers would go on to try to engineer a truly egalitarian society following the
Bolshevik and other Communist Revolutions of the twentieth century. In one
sense, the Italians were proved right: communism did not eliminate the
distinction between rulers and ruled, or end oppression by elites; it merely
changed the identity of those in charge.
The fact that the Communist solution to the problem that Marx, Mosca, and
Pareto identified—continued elite dominance despite the advent of formal
democracy—ended in failure does not mean that the original critique was
entirely wrong. Democratic procedures like regular elections and press freedoms
do not guarantee that the people will be adequately represented. (I will return to
this problem in chapter 31 and in Part IV below.)
The argument that uneducated people could not exercise the franchise
responsibly was vulnerable to the spread of mass public education, which most
European societies began to implement toward the end of the nineteenth century.
The same was not true for novel antidemocratic arguments based on biology.
After publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, a school
of “scientific” racism sprang up to explain and justify not just the ongoing
colonial conquest of non-European peoples but also the failure to grant equal
rights to blacks, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. Women as well were held to
be insufficiently rational to be granted the vote, and in any event destined by
their biology to be unqualified for male workplace occupations.14
It is important to note that all of these nineteenth-century antidemocratic
arguments accepted many of the modern conceptual foundations underpinning
democracy. They granted the notion that governments should be accountable to
citizens, and that all citizens capable of exercising good political judgment ought
to have the right to political participation. Where they differed from
contemporary norms was in their assessment of the ability of different classes of
individuals—the poor or propertyless, the uneducated, blacks and other racial
and ethnic minorities, women—to responsibly exercise political power. This
meant that they were vulnerable to certain empirical facts: when society did not
disintegrate as a result of extending the franchise to workers or to women, or
when poor people or blacks could be educated and rise socially, it became much
harder to maintain principled arguments in favor of their continuing political
exclusion.
Very few contemporary politicians would dare to make overt arguments in
favor of franchise restrictions, or for qualifying voters on the basis of education
or income. This is particularly true in a country like the United States where

franchise restrictions have corresponded to racial hierarchy.
But echoes of virtually all of these nineteenth-century conservative arguments
remain in contemporary political discourse. It is common, for example, for elites
to complain about democratic voters choosing “populist” policies. From their
perspective, democratic electorates do not always choose well: they may choose
short-term demands over long-term sustainability; they often vote on the basis of
personality rather than policies; they sometimes vote for clientelistic reasons;
they may want to redistribute income in ways that will kill incentives and
growth. In the end, these fears do not amount to a convincing argument for
systematic franchise restriction. As in the nineteenth century, elites are often
good at dressing up their own narrow self-interest as universal truths.
But voters in democracies don’t get things right all the time either, especially
in the short term. Moreover, it is not clear that the solution to contemporary
governance problems lies in ever-higher levels of popular participation. As
political scientist Bruce Cain argues, most voters simply do not have the time,
energy, or expertise to devote to the careful study of complex public policy
issues. When higher levels of democratic participation are encouraged by putting
more issues before voters through mechanisms like public referenda, the result is
often not the accurate representation of popular will but the domination of the
public space by the best-organized and most richly resourced interest groups.15
The creation of merit-based bureaucracies, ultimately accountable to the public
but protected in many ways from the vagaries of democratic politics, is one
expression of the concerns raised in these now-forgotten arguments against the
spread of democracy.
CONSERVATIVES IN CHARGE
Both classical Marxists and contemporary economists have reduced the struggle
for democracy to a fight between the rich and the poor, in which the poor
organize and threaten the rich with the objective of redistributing wealth and
income to themselves. Democracy emerges when the threat is severe enough that
the rich make concessions with regard to political rights and outright
redistribution.16 The middle classes can make alliances in either direction, but
more often than not they are bought off by the rich to support at most very
limited democracy. Any arguments regarding justice or legitimacy are merely
“superstructure” masking hard economic self-interests. In the Marxist version of

this story, the rich never concede enough to bring about true democracy; this
happens only after a violent seizure of power by the poor. A statistical study by
Adam Przeworski shows that most franchise extensions were in fact undertaken
in response to popular mobilizations, and that democracy was therefore
conquered rather than granted.17
But conservative social groups can interpret their self-interest in a variety of
different ways, some of which are much more conducive than others to
nonviolent transitions to democracy. The reason why liberal democracy was
peacefully consolidated in Britain by the third decade of the twentieth century
when compared to places like Germany and Argentina (not to speak of Russia
and China) had much to do with the tactical behavior of the British Conservative
Party. The Conservatives at the beginning of the nineteenth century were the
party of the old landed elite, comparable to the parties representing the Junkers
in Prussia or the large estate owners in Argentina. But instead of trying to resist
spreading social and political mobilization through violence or authoritarian rule,
the British Conservatives reinterpreted their own self-interest in ways that
permitted preservation of their political power while allowing expansion of the
franchise.
Britain was one of the slower European countries to fully democratize.
Franchise expansion stretched out over three major reform bills in 1832, 1867,
and 1884. As noted in Table 6, universal adult male suffrage did not arrive until
1918 and female suffrage took until 1929.18 The 1832 Reform Act could indeed
be seen as a worried conservative response to threats and agitation coming from
below as a result of economic change. But the 1867 and 1884 Acts, which
genuinely democratized Britain, were the work of a Conservative prime minister,
Benjamin Disraeli, and a Liberal one, William Gladstone, who were operating
not under the threat of imminent revolution but under a rather different political
calculus.
Virtually all contemporary observers were agreed that the “Great” Reform
Act of 1867 was not driven by grassroots agitation. There was a sense on the part
of the elites that “silent changes were taking place in the minds of members of
the working classes, not unlike movements of the earth’s crust,” and there was a
general expectation that the 1832 reform would be followed by subsequent
political initiatives. It was not the Liberals led by Gladstone who brought about
this shift, but his Conservative archrival Disraeli who introduced a radical
reform bill that led to an immediate doubling of the franchise.19
Disraeli’s motives have been debated ever since. Many of his fellow

Conservatives denounced him as a traitor to their class interests, or at best an
opportunist who in the heat of a political struggle broke with principle. Historian
Gertrude Himmelfarb has argued, however, that Disraeli’s actions sprang from a
different kind of principle, a belief that the Tories were a national party
representing a natural order in which the aristocracy and the working class were
allies. The Tory creed had an impetus toward democracy because of “the belief
that the lower classes were not only naturally conservative in temperament but
also Conservative in politics.”20 In other words, the views expressed by Burke in
the previous century that the conservative oligarchy could “represent” the
interests of the whole nation were not just an ideological smokescreen hiding
class interest; it was a view that people of Burke’s social class genuinely
believed.
And it was not just the wealthy Tories who believed it. After accepting a
second expansion of the franchise in 1884, the Conservatives went on to
dominate British electoral politics for much of the next generation. Disraeli was
right: many working-class and poor rural constituents voted for the Tories in
subsequent elections, despite their class interests. (This is a phenomenon familiar
to Americans in the early twenty-first century, where many working-class voters
prefer Republican candidates despite the toll that Republican economic policies
like free trade and de-unionization have taken on their incomes.) The
Conservatives represented a set of values revolving around church, tradition,
monarchy, and British national identity that had appeal for working-class voters,
and were able later to shift the agenda to other issues like foreign policy. This
allowed the Tories to change their social base: it was no longer the party of large
landowners but of a rising urban middle class. On certain issues (for example,
protection of property rights) these voters sided with the old oligarchy, but on
others the new middle-class electorate accepted arguments being put forth for an
expanded franchise. These trends combined with a great penchant for political
organization to make the Conservatives a winning party.21
The British pattern of democratization being initiated by elite parties rather
than pushed from below by grassroots mobilization was not unique. Political
scientist Ruth Collier notes that the kind of top-down process she labels
“electoral support mobilization” drove the “ins” to enfranchise the “outs” in
Switzerland, Chile, Norway, Italy, and Uruguay, as well as in Britain. These
cases illustrate the way institutional arrangements can become self-reinforcing:
once the principle of electoral politics is established under a limited franchise,
incumbent parties can attempt to stay in power by seeking new voters, shifting to

new issues, and reaching out across class lines.22
Some elite groups, of course, chose not to play by democratic rules, but
turned to the army or nondemocratic forms of mobilization to protect their
interests. This is what happened in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s,
Argentina in 1930, and many other Latin American countries in the wake of the
Cuban Revolution in 1959. Which path they chose to take depended on any
number of factors: whether Conservatives believed they could retain control of a
democratic opening; how united they were; how united and therefore threatening
the democratic forces were; and what elites in other countries had done. The
newer industrial middle class tended to be more open to change than the old
landed oligarchy, not just because its capital was more mobile but also because it
was more urbanized, better educated, and more likely to rub shoulders with other
cultural and international elites bearing more progressive ideas. Ideas and norms
shaped material interests: the British landed upper classes were far more ready to
let their daughters marry wealthy up-and-coming commoners than were their
Prussian Junker counterparts, and much more willing to be persuaded by
Whiggish notions that the spread of education and literacy would make it safe to
permit their working-class countrymen the right to vote.23
Unfortunately, the story of democratization in most of Europe did not end
with gradual and peaceful franchise extensions. For Europe as a whole, the
national question took precedence over the class question as the continent was
engulfed in two world wars. The solidarity of the Second Socialist International
was undermined as the working classes in Germany, Austria, Britain, France,
and Russia lined up behind their respective governments in August 1914. In
many countries, including Britain, full adult male suffrage had to await the end
of the Great War in 1918 when the sacrifices of the working classes in the
trenches made it morally impossible to deny them the vote. The defeat of
Germany and Austria in the war led to the abdication of the German emperor
and the creation of the Weimar Republic, and the dissolution of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire.
But while the political structures of the old authoritarian order were
dismantled, the social bases of the political right in Central and Eastern Europe
were not eliminated. The old landed oligarchies continued to exercise power
behind the scenes through their influence over the civilian bureaucracy and the
army. The middle classes, whose savings and security were destroyed in the
postwar inflation and economic turmoil, were ripe for recruitment into the new
Fascist parties that sprang up in the 1920s. The working classes, for their part,

had been radicalized by the war and by the recent example of the Bolshevik
Revolution, and were recruited into new Communist parties with little
commitment to liberal democracy. The ensuing polarization hollowed out the
political center in Germany, Austria, and Italy, facilitated the rise of Hitler and
Mussolini, and paved the way for World War II. It was not until the second half
of the twentieth century that stable liberal democracy finally spread throughout
Western Europe, and not until the collapse of communism in 1989–1991 that it
was extended into Eastern Europe as well. The European road to democracy was
long indeed.

29
FROM 1848 TO THE ARAB SPRING
Origins of the Arab Spring; differences and similarities between the contemporary Middle East and
nineteenth-century Europe; religion and nationalism as alternative routes to political mobilization
The Arab Spring began in January 2011 with the self-immolation of a Tunisian
street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, which brought down the dictatorship
of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and triggered a cascade of uprisings that spread to
Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria, and threatened the stability of every
regime in the region. Bouazizi, according to press reports, had his produce cart
confiscated on several occasions by the police; when he went to protest, he was
slapped and insulted by police officials. Denied recognition of his basic dignity,
he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire, eventually dying of his
burns two weeks later. His story, broadcast around the Arab world, evoked
sympathy and outrage, and proved to be the trigger for a major political
revolution.
Some observers had believed that Muslim or Arab countries faced special
obstacles to democratization absent in other regions of the world, since it was the
one region largely unaffected by the Third Wave of democratization. Either
Islam or Arab culture was held somehow responsible for resistance to liberal
democracy. Any simple arguments that the Arabs were exceptional and would
passively accept dictatorship ended with the events of early 2011.1
Predictions that Arab societies will not be able to sustain liberal democracy
may prove correct in the longer run. Four years into the Arab Spring, it does not
appear that this form of government is likely to emerge anytime soon in
countries affected by it, with the possible exception of the country in which it
began, Tunisia. In Egypt, the formerly banned Muslim Brotherhood was elected
and dominated the new parliament and presidency for a year, until the military
pushed its president, Mohamed Morsi, out of power in the summer of 2013. The

Egyptian state then launched a bloody crackdown against not only Islamist
groups but against liberal critics as well. The Tahrir Square uprising was not a
revolution that displaced the military-led state; it only pushed it into a tactical
retreat. Libya remains chaotic in the wake of the military struggle against
Muammar Qaddafi, with the central government unable to disarm the country’s
many militias. Peaceful protests against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad were ruthlessly
crushed, and the country descended into a prolonged civil war that has pitted
radical Islamist fighters against the Ba’athist dictatorship. In Bahrain and the
other Arab Gulf states, protests were violently repressed and the traditional
monarchies remain in power. Throughout the region, violence and instability
have helped the fortunes of jihadist groups that are overtly antidemocratic.
These unfavorable outcomes have led many observers in the West to decry
the phenomenon of the Arab Spring as a whole. Some are speaking from a
perspective of simple national self-interest: the United States, Israel, and other
countries had developed mutually beneficial relationships with the old
dictatorships in the Arab world, and are now facing instability and uncertainty
within the region. But others make a broader argument that the Arab Spring does
not represent a democratic wave but rather the self-assertion of political Islam,
and will result at best in illiberal democracy or at worst in the spread of radical
Islam and continuing chaos.2
It is of course impossible to predict the long-term consequences of the Arab
Spring. However, those observers who criticize the chaotic results of this
upheaval and argue that they cannot lead to a good democratic outcome in the
long run often fail to remember what a long, chaotic, and violent process the
democratization of Europe was. A stable, well-functioning liberal democracy
involves the interaction of a number of different institutions: not just elections
for a president or legislature but also well-organized political parties, an
independent court system, an effective state bureaucracy, and a free and vigilant
media. In addition, there are a number of cultural conditions necessary:
politicians and voters cannot have a winner-take-all attitude toward their
opponents, they must respect rules more than individuals, and they must share a
collective sense of identity and nationhood.
Bringing down dictators like Ben Ali or Mubarak eliminates only one source
of authoritarian power. Putting the other institutions in place is not a process that
happens overnight. The American architects of the 2003 Iraq invasion expected
that democracy would appear spontaneously in the wake of their removal of
Saddam Hussein. They discovered to their dismay that they had to preside over a

chaotic and violent society from which institutions were largely absent.
What lessons do earlier democratic transitions hold for the future of the Arab
Spring? There are many obvious differences between the Middle East and
regions like Eastern Europe and Latin America, beginning with culture and the
impact of Islam. Indeed, nineteenth-century Europe may constitute a better
precedent for political change in the Arab world than the democratic transitions
of the Third Wave that took place from the 1970s on. In the late-twentieth-
century transitions in Latin America and Eastern Europe, we are dealing mostly
with countries that already had had some experience with democracy. Those
early democratic periods, some of which had lasted for decades, were interrupted
by military takeovers in Latin America and by foreign occupation in Eastern
Europe. Democratization was therefore in some sense the restoration of an older
political order that had roots in the national experience of each country. In Latin
America especially, there were already well-established democratic political
parties that regenerated themselves rather quickly once an opening occurred. In
Eastern Europe, the countries of Western Europe and the European Union
constituted nearby and powerful examples of successful democracy that could
offer substantial assistance and incentives to democratize.
By contrast, the Arab world today and Europe in the nineteenth century had
no prior experience of democracy. While there is today a large international
community providing both political models and concrete democracy assistance,
it is largely based in the United States and other Western countries, and therefore
suspect by many in the Arab world. This differs markedly from the open
embrace of the European Union, NATO, and other Western institutions by
Eastern European countries newly liberated from Soviet domination.
While both the contemporary Middle East and nineteenth-century Europe had
no direct experience with democracy, there are also important differences
between the regions, beginning with political Islam. Religion played a major role
in nineteenth-century Europe as well: the German Centre Party and the Christian
Democratic parties in France and Italy were organized to defend religious as
opposed to class interests. But still, class and nation tended to be more important
sources of identity than religion in Europe, while the reverse is more often the
case in the Middle East today. (This was not always so; from the 1950s to the
1970s Arab politics was dominated more by secular nationalists than by
Islamists, with a sprinkling of left-wing Socialist and Communist parties.)
Conservative forces have a different character as well. Of today’s Muslim
countries, only Pakistan has a social structure of large landowners dominating

masses of peasants, as most European countries did in the early nineteenth
century. Conservatives in most Muslim and Arab countries are recruited from
tribal elites, traditional monarchical families and their clients, military officers,
crony capitalists surrounding the old authoritarian regimes, and Islamists.
Europe’s conservatives did not have external sources of support, except for the
help they rendered each other. Middle Eastern conservatives, by contrast, have
gotten substantial external assistance from the United States and other Western
countries over the years, and from the bonanza represented by oil and gas in the
Persian Gulf. The working classes throughout the region are much less powerful
than they were in nineteenth-century Europe, since much of the region, similar to
Greece and southern Italy, has experienced “modernization without
development.” Trade unions exist in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world,
and although they played important roles in the initial fight against the
authoritarian regime, they do not represent massive and growing segments of the
population in the way they did in nineteenth-century Britain or Germany.
Nonetheless, there are a number of similarities between the Arab world and
Europe a century ago. In the first place, the democratization process was rooted
in social mobilization driven by underlying socioeconomic change. As
industrialization progressed in nineteenth-century Europe, it created an
expanding middle class and a proletariat. Masses of former peasants left the
countryside for cities, where they were available to recruitment by new political
parties and susceptible to appeals based on identity politics.
Something similar has been going on in the Middle East since the later
decades of the twentieth century. The region is urbanizing rapidly, growing from
30 to over 50 percent of the population between 1970 and 2010.3 The Human
Development indices compiled by the United Nations (a composite of indicators
of health, education, and income) increased by 28 percent in Egypt and 30
percent in Tunisia between 1990 and 2010. The numbers of college graduates
increased at an even faster rate, and in both countries the latter complained about
the lack of jobs commensurate with their levels of education. It was these groups
that were the most savvy about using the Internet and social media to spread
images of repression and organize demonstrations against the regime.
Samuel Huntington argued in Political Order in Changing Societies that the
middle classes are critical to political change. Revolutions, he noted, are never
organized by the poorest of the poor, because they have neither the resources nor
the education to organize effectively. The middle classes, by contrast, are the
group most likely to have experienced rapid increases in their social status and

therefore face the sharpest disappointment if their subsequent mobility is
blocked. It is the gap between their expectations and reality that creates political
instability.
In both the Arab world and in the European Revolutions of 1848, the middle
classes were the key actors in organizing the revolution and pressing for political
change. The Tunisian uprisings against Ben Ali and the Tahrir Square
demonstrations against Mubarak were led by urban, middle-class individuals
who felt that their chances for social and economic advancement were being
thwarted by the authoritarian regime. (The upheavals in Libya and Yemen were
more complicated; the middle classes there were less numerous and complex
tribal rivalries also were at work. There was a somewhat larger middle class in
Syria, but sectarian identity quickly overwhelmed class or economic grievance.)
A new middle class was not the only product of urbanization, however. In
many respects, the rise of political Islam in the Middle East can more
appropriately be seen as a form of identity politics than as a matter of revived
religiosity per se, and as such has displaced class as a rallying cry for the
mobilization of political outsiders. That is, the Middle East experienced the same
kind of shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from traditional villages to
modern cities, that Europe experienced in the late nineteenth century, with all of
the anomie and identity confusion that such a shift entails. For a generation after
independence from colonialism, secular nationalism worked as a source of
identity, but it was discredited by the late 1970s by its failure to produce
consistent and shared economic growth, and by its political failure in dealing
with issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The vacuum was filled by
religion, which became a clear source of identity to recently urbanized rural folk
who now had access to satellite television and the Internet. One of the reasons
for the strength of political Islam today is that it can speak to issues of identity,
religion, and social class simultaneously.
Social class remains important in the contemporary Middle East under the
veneer of religious politics. The supporters of Western-style liberal democracy
tend to be largely drawn from the educated, urban middle classes, while the
Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia
tend to recruit from rural areas or from poor and marginalized communities
within urban areas. As banned parties under the old authoritarian regime, these
organizations turned to the direct provision of social services to the poor and
therefore were in a good position to mobilize these populations when a
democratic political space opened up. The same is true of Islamic conservatives

in Iran, who tend to recruit from the poor and less educated layers of society.
The European experience in 1848 indicates, however, that the initial toppling
of an authoritarian regime and the organization of democratic elections is only
the beginning of a much longer process of political development. Democracy is
built around the institutionalization of mass participation in an agreed political
process, which requires in the first instance well-organized political parties. The
middle-class liberals who lead the revolution have to go on to organize
themselves to be able to contest elections, and they have to be able to form
coalitions with other groups. The liberal revolutionaries of 1848 failed to do
either in the short period they had before they were overwhelmed by the military
countermoves of the authoritarian establishment. The middle-class groups that
led the Arab revolutions had similar problems in organizing themselves on a
long-term basis to contest elections in the first couple of years after the uprising,
being internally divided and centered on individual leaders rather than mass
political followings. Now they face a revitalized military government that will
actively restrict their ability to organize.
In Europe, the middle-class groups that led the push for democracy were
seldom able to bring it about on their own. All required cross-class coalitions of
various sorts. In Denmark, the middle-class groups aligned with the peasantry
(or, more properly, farmers, since the old peasantry had largely disappeared by
this point) to demand an end to absolutism in 1848; in 1915, they aligned with
the working class to demand universal suffrage. In Germany, the middle classes
aligned with working-class parties in support of the Weimar Republic, as they
did in Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands. And in Switzerland, Britain, and
Italy, they aligned with conservative parties to expand the franchise.
As noted in chapter 28, however, middle-class groups do not inevitably end
up supporting liberal democracy. They can align with conservative forces not to
extend democracy but to restrict it from popular forces that threaten their
interests. This was the strategy followed by many middle-class groups in Latin
America during the dictatorships of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, and in Turkey up
through the end of the 1990s. This pattern repeated itself in Egypt in 2013,
where many former liberals became so disgusted with Islamist President Morsi
who had been elected the previous year that they supported the military coup
removing him from power.
In nineteenth-century Europe, popular mobilization for democracy got
hijacked by nationalism. This phenomenon first manifested itself during the
French Revolution, when calls for the Rights of Man quickly evolved into the

militant assertion of the rights of the French nation. It was evident in Germany in
the 1870s, when many of the liberals of the 1840s and ’50s became fervent
supporters of Bismarck and his forceful unification of the German nation. And it
appeared in August 1914, when rank-and-file members of working-class parties
that had been charter members of the Second Socialist International lined up
behind their national governments and plunged into war.
There is an obvious cultural factor that has gravely complicated the
possibility of democracy in the Middle East—Islam. A large number of Muslim-
majority societies have had to contend with militant and antidemocratic Islamist
groups; there was no equivalent threat to the Third Wave democratic transitions
in Eastern Europe or Latin America. A number of observers have suggested that
Islam itself constitutes an insuperable obstacle to the emergence of democracy,
since it has never accepted the principle of the separation of church and state,
and harbors a long tradition of violent religious militancy. Islamist organizations
like Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that have played
by democratic rules are often accused of using democracy instrumentally to gain
power; their real agenda remains creation of illiberal theocratic states. The rise of
these groups has then provoked conservative authoritarian governments to crack
down on them, leading to politics that is polarized between two nondemocratic
alternatives.
Whether political Islam will remain a permanent obstacle preventing the
emergence of liberal democracy in Muslim majority countries is not so obvious,
any more than an assertion that nationalism makes democracy impossible in
Europe. Political Islam has waxed and waned over the decades, and in the
twentieth century it often took a backseat to other movements based on secular
nationalism or liberal authoritarianism. All large, complex cultural systems can
be and have been interpreted in a variety of ways over time. Although there is an
egalitarian doctrine at the heart of Christianity (as there is in Islam), Christian
churches aligned themselves with authoritarian rulers and justified illiberal
orders over the centuries. Part of the story of the Third Wave of democratizations
in Europe and Latin America has to do with the reinterpretation of Catholic
doctrine after Vatican II in the 1960s to make it compatible with modern
democracy.4
So too with radical Islam. It seems likely that its current expansion is due
more to the social conditions of contemporary Middle Eastern societies than to
the intrinsic nature of the religion. Indeed, the spread of political Islam can be
seen as a form of identity politics very comparable to its nationalist variant in

Europe. This was an argument first made by Ernest Gellner, whose theory of the
origins of nationalism was noted back in chapter 12. Gellner, it will be recalled,
argued that nationalism is a response to the identity dislocation that occurs as
societies modernize and transition from Gesellschaft—the small village—to
Gemeinschaft—the large city. It occurs primarily in modernizing countries,
where the narrow old forms of identity based on kinship and locality disappear
and are replaced by more universalist doctrines linking individuals to broader
cultural movements. He argued that the rise of modern Islamism responded to
very similar imperatives in the Middle East, where religion plays the role that
nation played in Europe. To the confused former peasant now living in Cairo or
Karachi, or to a second-generation Muslim immigrant in Europe, a figure like
Osama bin Laden can provide a convincing answer to the question “Who am I?”
The rise of political Islam in the last part of the twentieth century does not
therefore reflect the return of an eternally unchanging Islam, as both the
proponents of radical Islam and their critics maintain, but rather is a response
precisely to the half-modernized state in which much of the Middle East finds
itself.
So just as the nineteenth-century European impulse toward democracy got
diverted into nationalism, so the Middle Eastern popular mobilization risks being
hijacked by religion.5
The Third Wave transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America are thus
misleading precedents for the Arab Spring. It is really Europe’s long and tortured
journey from autocracy through nationalism to democracy that provides the
better model. This line of analysis does not offer comfort to those hoping for the
emergence of liberal democracy anytime soon in the Arab world. We can only
hope that such a transition, if it eventually occurs, will not take anywhere as long
as it did in Europe. Europe in the nineteenth century had no prior experience of
democracy and therefore no clear institutional models to follow. The same is not
the case in the contemporary Middle East. Regimes that balance strong states
with legal and democratic constraints on power have become a normative
standard around the world. Getting there, however, depends on the creation of a
complex set of interlocking institutions, which in turn are facilitated by changes
in the nature of underlying economic and social conditions. The social basis for
stable democracy did not exist in the Europe of 1848, and it may not yet exist in
many parts of the Middle East today.

30
THE MIDDLE CLASS AND DEMOCRACY’S
FUTURE
How the working class became the middle class in the developed world and upset Marx’s predictions;
technology, globalization, and the future of middle-class societies; some reflections on the role of
violence in bringing about modern democracy
According to Karl Marx, modern capitalism was headed for an ultimate crisis of
what he called “overproduction.” Capitalist use of technology would extract
surpluses from the labor of the proletariat, leading to greater concentrations of
wealth and the progressive immiseration of workers. The bourgeoisie who ran
this system could not, despite their wealth, consume everything that it produced,
while the proletariat whose labor made it possible were too poor to buy its
products. Ever-increasing levels of inequality would lead to a shortfall in
demand, and the system would come crashing down upon itself. The only way
out of this crisis, according to Marx, was a revolution that would give political
power to the proletariat and redistribute the fruits of the capitalist system.1
Marx’s scenario seemed quite plausible through the middle decades of the
nineteenth century in all industrializing countries. Working conditions in new
factory towns were appalling, and huge new agglomerations of impoverished
workers appeared out of nowhere. Rules concerning working hours, safety, child
labor, and the like were either nonexistent or poorly enforced. European
conditions were, in other words, very similar to those found in the early twenty-
first century in parts of China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and other developing
countries.
But a number of unexpected developments occurred on the way to the
proletarian revolution. First was the fact that labor incomes began to rise. Early
gains were the result of extensive economic growth as new workers were
mobilized out of the agrarian population, but that process reached natural limits

and the price of labor relative to capital began to increase. This dynamic is
happening today in China, as the cost of labor has risen rapidly in the first
decades of the twenty-first century.
Second, many countries, beginning with the United States, began to put into
place universal public education systems as well as increasing investments in
higher education. This was not simply a matter of public generosity: new
industries required engineers, accountants, lawyers, clerical staff, and hourly
workers with basic literacy and numeracy skills. Higher labor costs could easily
be justified if they were matched by enhanced productivity, which was in turn
the result of better technology and increasing human capital.
Third, the spread of the franchise described in the previous chapter led to
expansion of the political power of the working classes. This happened through
the struggles to legalize and expand trade unions, and in the rise of political
parties associated with them like the British Labour Party and the German Social
Democratic Party. The nature of conservative parties began to change as well:
instead of representing wealthy landowners, they shifted their base of support to
the new middle-class elites. The working classes’ newfound political power was
then used to implement social legislation regulating working conditions, which
led to agitation for broader welfare state policies like pensions and publicly
provided health care.
Fourth, by the middle decades of the twentieth century, the working class
simply stopped growing, both in absolute numbers and as a share of the
workforce. Indeed, the relative size of Marx’s proletariat shrank as workers saw
substantial increases in their standards of living that allowed them to move into
the middle class. They now owned property and had better educations, and were
therefore more likely to vote for political parties that could protect their
privileges rather than ones pushing to overturn the status quo.
Fifth, a new class of poor and underprivileged people emerged below the
industrial working class, often consisting of recent immigrants, racial and ethnic
minorities, and other marginalized people. These groups worked in lower-paying
service jobs or remained unemployed and dependent on government benefits.
Workers in manufacturing industries who were represented by trade unions
became a kind of aristocracy within the labor force. The vast majority of workers
had no such representation; in countries where benefits like pensions were tied to
regular jobs, they entered the informal sector. Such individuals had few legally
defined rights and often did not possess legal title to the land or houses they
occupied. Throughout Latin America and many other parts of the developing

world, the informal sector constitutes perhaps 60 to 70 percent of the entire labor
force. Unlike the industrial working class, this group of “new poor” has been
notoriously hard to organize for political action. Rather than living in large
barracks in factory towns, they live scattered across the country and are often
self-employed entrepreneurs.
Finally, the political Left throughout the world lost its focus on economic and
class issues, and became fragmented as the result of the spread of identity
politics. I have noted already how working-class solidarity was undermined by
nationalism at the time of World War I. But the rise of new forms of identity in
the developed world by the middle of the twentieth century around black
empowerment, feminism, environmentalism, immigrant and indigenous rights,
and gay rights created a whole new set of causes that cut across class lines. The
leadership of many of these movements came out of the economic elites, and
their cultural preferences often stood at cross-purposes to those of the working-
class electorate that had once been the bulwark of progressive politics.
The displacement of class politics by identity politics has been very confusing
to older Marxists, who for many years clung to the old industrial working class
as their preferred category of the underprivileged. They tried to explain this shift
in terms of what Ernest Gellner labeled the “Wrong Address Theory”: “Just as
extreme Shi’ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering
the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically
like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible
boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible
postal error was delivered to nations.” Gellner went on to argue that in the
contemporary Middle East, the same letter was now being delivered to religions
rather than nations. But the underlying sociological dynamic was the same.2
The first four of these six developments unanticipated by Karl Marx all center
around a single phenomenon, which was the conversion of the working class
into a broad middle class. At the conclusion of the tumultuous first half of the
twentieth century, the developed democracies of Europe and North America
finally found themselves in a happy position. Their politics was no longer
sharply polarized between a rich oligarchy and a large working class or peasant
majority, who engaged in a zero-sum struggle over the distribution of resources.
The old oligarchies in many developed countries had either evolved into more
entrepreneurial capitalist elites or had been physically eliminated through
revolution and war. The working classes through unionization and political
struggle won greater privileges for themselves and became middle class in

political outlook. Fascism discredited the extreme Right, and the emerging cold
war and threat from Stalinist Russia discredited the Communist Left. This left
politics to be played out among center-Right and center-Left parties that largely
agreed on a liberal democratic framework. The median voter—a favorite concept
of political scientists—was no longer a poor person demanding systemic changes
to the social order but a middle-class individual with a stake in the existing
system.
Other regions were not so lucky. Latin America had a legacy of high levels of
inequality, and in many countries the old landowning oligarchies had not been
eliminated through the political struggles that consumed Europe. The benefits of
economic growth were shared by the organized working classes but not by the
mass of workers in the informal sector, and as a result a highly polarized politics
emerged reminiscent of nineteenth-century continental Europe. The persistence
of radical, antisystemic groups—the Communist parties led by Cuba, the
Tupamaros in Uruguay, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador,
and most recently the Bolivarian movement of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela—was
a symptom of this fundamental class conflict.
From the days of Aristotle, thinkers have believed that stable democracy
would have to rest on a broad middle class; societies with extremes of wealth
and poverty are susceptible to oligarchic domination or to populist revolution.
Karl Marx believed that the middle classes would always remain a small and
privileged minority in modern societies. Yet by the second half of the twentieth
century, the middle class constituted the vast majority of the population of most
advanced societies, thereby undercutting the appeal of Marxism.
The emergence of middle-class societies also increased the legitimacy of
liberal democracy as a political system. In chapter 28 I noted the critique of
liberal democracy made by writers as varied as Mosca, Pareto, and Marx that its
advent was in the end a fraud, masking the continued rule by elites. But the
value of formal democracy and an expanded franchise became evident in the
twentieth century. Democratic majorities in Europe and North America used the
ballot box to choose policies beneficial to themselves, regulating big business
and putting into place redistributive welfare state provisions.
WHO IS MIDDLE CLASS?
Before proceeding to analyze further the political consequences of the rise of the
middle classes, it is necessary to step back and define what the middle class is.

There is a difference in the way that economists and sociologists think about it.
The former tend to define middle class in income terms. A typical way is simply
to choose some band like the middle three quintiles of the income distribution, or
to count those individuals who fall within 0.5 to 1.5 times the median income.
This makes the definition of middle class dependent on a society’s average
wealth and thus incomparable cross-nationally; being middle class in Brazil
means a much lower consumption level than in the United States. To avoid this
problem, some economists choose an absolute level of consumption, ranging
from a low of US$5 a day, or $1,800 in parity purchasing power per year, up to a
range of $6,000–$31,000 annual income in 2010 U.S. dollars. This fixes one
problem but creates another, since an individual’s perception of class status is
often relative rather than absolute. As Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of
Nations, a pauper in eighteenth-century England might have lived like a king in
Africa.
Sociologists, in a tradition beginning with Karl Marx, tend not to look at
measures of income but instead at how one’s income is earned—occupational
status, level of education, and assets. For the purpose of understanding the
political implications of a growing middle class, the sociological approach is
vastly preferable. Simple measures of income or consumption, whether relative
or absolute, may tell you something about the consumption habits of the person
in question but relatively little concerning his or her political inclinations.
Huntington’s theory of the destabilizing impact of the gap between expectations
and reality is much more closely tied to social and occupational status than to
any absolute level of income. A poor person of low social status and education
who briefly rises out of poverty and then sinks back is likely to be more
preoccupied with day-to-day survival than with political activism. A middle-
class person, by contrast—someone, say, with a university education who cannot
find an appropriate job and “sinks” to a social level he or she regards as beneath
his or her dignity—is far more challenging politically.
Thus, from a political standpoint, the important marker of middle-class status
would be occupation, level of education, and ownership of assets (a house or an
apartment, or consumer durables) that could be threatened by the government.
Marx’s original definition of “bourgeoisie” referred to ownership of the means of
production. One of the characteristics of the modern world is that this form of
property has become vastly democratized through stock ownership and pension
plans. Even if one does not possess large amounts of capital, working in a
managerial capacity or profession often grants one a very different kind of social

status and outlook from a wage earner or low-skilled worker.
A strong middle class with some assets and education is more likely to
believe in the need for both property rights and democratic accountability. One
wants to protect the value of one’s property from rapacious and/or incompetent
governments, and is more likely to have time to participate in politics (or to
demand the right to participate) because higher income provides a better margin
for family survival. A number of cross-national studies have shown that middle-
class people have different political values from the poor: they value democracy
more, want more individual freedom, are more tolerant of alternative lifestyles,
etc. Political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who has overseen the massive World
Values Survey that seeks to measure value change around the world, has argued
that economic modernization and middle-class status produce what he calls
“post-material” values in which democracy, equality, and identity issues become
much more prominent than older issues of economic distribution. William
Easterly has linked what he labels a “middle class consensus” to higher
economic growth, education, health, stability, and other positive outcomes.
Economically, the middle class is theorized to have “bourgeois” values of self-
discipline, hard work, and a longer-term perspective that encourages savings and
investment.3
From the earlier discussion of Europe in the nineteenth century, however, it
should be clear that the middle classes are not inevitably supporters of
democracy. This tends to be particularly true when the middle classes still
constitute a minority of the population. Under these circumstances, opening up a
country to universal political participation may lead to large and potentially
unsustainable demands for redistribution. In this case, the middle classes may
choose to align themselves with authoritarian rulers who promise stability and
property rights protection.
Such is arguably the case in contemporary Thailand and China. The Thai
political system went from an authoritarian military regime to a reasonably open
democracy between 1992 and 1997, preparing the way for the rise of the populist
politician Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin, one of the country’s richest
businessmen, organized a mass political party based on government programs to
provide debt relief and health care to rural Thais. The middle classes, who had
strongly supported the democratic opening in the early 1990s, turned against
Thaksin and supported a military coup that forced him from power in 2006. He
was charged with corruption and abuse of power, and has had to exercise power
from exile since then. The country subsequently became sharply polarized

between Thaksin’s Red Shirt supporters and middle-class Yellow Shirt
adherents, and saw an elected government pushed out of power by the military in
2014.4
A similar dynamic may exist in China. The size of the Chinese middle class
in 2014 depends obviously on definition but is estimated to be perhaps 300–400
million people out of a population of 1.3 billion. These new middle classes are
often the source of resistance to the authoritarian government; they are the ones
who are on Sina Weibo (the Chinese Twitter equivalent) and who are likely to
publicize or criticize government wrongdoing. Survey data from sources like
AsiaBarometer suggest that there is widespread support for democracy in China,
but when asked about the specific content of democracy, many respondents
associate it either with greater personal freedom or with a government
responsive to their needs. Many believe that the current Chinese government is
already providing them with these things and do not oppose the system as a
whole. Middle-class Chinese are less likely to express support for a short-term
transition to multiparty democracy under universal suffrage, although it is very
difficult to get accurate polling data on this subject.
The Thai and Chinese cases, as well as the nineteenth-century European ones,
suggest that the size of the middle class relative to the rest of the society is one
important variable in determining how it will behave politically. When the
middle class constitutes only 20–30 percent of the population, it may side with
antidemocratic forces because it fears the intentions of the large mass of poor
people below it and the populist policies they may pursue. But when the middle
class becomes the largest group in the society, the danger is reduced. Indeed, the
middle class may at that point be able to vote itself various welfare-state benefits
and profit from democracy. This may help to explain why democracy becomes
more stable at higher levels of per capita income, since the size of the middle
class relative to the poor usually increases with greater wealth. Middle-class
societies, as opposed to societies with a middle class, are the bedrock of
democracy.
Such societies appeared in Europe by the early decades after World War II,
and they have been gradually spreading to other parts of the world ever since.
The Third Wave of democratization was not “caused” by the rise of the middle
class, since many democratic transitions occurred in countries—like those in
sub-Saharan Africa—that did not have appreciable middle classes at the time.
Contagion, imitation, and the failures of incumbent authoritarian regimes were
all significant factors triggering democratic transitions. But the ability to

consolidate a stable liberal democracy is greater in countries that have large and
broad middle classes, in contrast to ones in which a relatively small middle class
is sandwiched between a rich elite and a mass of poor people. Spain, the country
that kicked off the Third Wave, had been transformed from a backward agrarian
society at the time of the civil war in the 1930s to a much more modern one by
the early 1970s. Surrounded by examples of successful democracies in the
European Union, it was much easier to contemplate a democratic transition then
than it had been a generation earlier.
This suggests that the prospects for democracy globally remain good, despite
the setbacks that occurred during the early twenty-first century. A Goldman
Sachs report projects that spending on the part of the world’s middle three
income quintiles will rise from the current 31 percent of total income to 57
percent in 2050.5 A report by the European Union Institute for Security Studies
projects that the numbers of middle class people will grow from 1.8 billion in
2009 to 3.2 billion in 2020, and 4.9 billion in 2030 (out of a projected global
population of 8.3 billion).6 The bulk of this growth is slated to occur in Asia,
particularly China and India, but all regions of the world will participate in this
trend.
Economic growth by itself is not sufficient to create democratic stability if it
is not broadly shared. One of the greatest threats to China’s social stability today
is its rapid increase in income inequality since the mid-1990s, which by 2012
had reached Latin American levels.7 Latin America itself had reached middle-
income status well before East Asia but continued to be plagued by high levels
of inequality and the populist policies that flowed from it. One of the most
promising developments for the region, however, has been the notable fall in
income inequality in the decade of the 2000s, as documented by economists Luis
Felipe López-Calva and Nora Lustig.8 There have been significant gains to the
Latin American middle class. In 2002, 44 percent of the region’s population was
classified as poor; this had fallen to 32 percent by 2010 according to the UN
Economic Commission for Latin America.9 The cause of the decline in
inequality is not entirely understood, but a certain portion of it is attributable to
social policies like conditional cash transfer programs that have deliberately
distributed benefits to the poor.
THE MIDDLE CLASS AND CLIENTELISM

The arrival of a large middle class may also have important effects on the
practice of clientelism and the forms of political corruption associated with it. I
argued earlier that clientelism is an early form of democracy: in societies with
masses of poor and poorly educated voters, the easiest form of electoral
mobilization is often the provision of individual benefits such as public-sector
jobs, handouts, or political favors. This suggests that clientelism will start to
decline as voters become wealthier. Not only does it cost more for politicians to
bribe them, but the voters see their interests tied up with broader public policies
rather than individual benefits.
Civil service reform, where it has taken place, has typically come on the back
of a rising middle class. We saw in chapter 8 how the Northcote-Trevelyan
reforms in Britain served the interests of the new British middle classes who
found themselves excluded from the old aristocratic patronage networks. A
middle class created by capitalist growth is almost by definition a supporter of
meritocracy. Similarly, in the United States the civil service reform movement
during the Progressive Era was driven by middle-class groups who stood outside
the existing patronage system. These educated, often Protestant businessmen,
lawyers, and academics looked down on the machine politicians who mobilized
masses of immigrant voters in the country’s growing cities. Merchants and
industrialists, moreover, needed a competent civil service to provide the
increasingly complex services expected from the government. Contemporary
anticorruption movements in China, India, and Brazil all recruit heavily from the
middle classes.
As in the case of democracy, however, the simple emergence of a middle
class does not mean that this group will automatically support clean government
and an end to clientelistic politics. New social actors are perfectly capable of
being recruited into existing patronage networks and profiting from it. In the
United States, the railroads—exemplars of technological modernity during the
nineteenth century—quickly learned how to buy politicians and manipulate the
patronage system to their own benefit. Many legislatures in western states were
said to be owned lock, stock, and barrel by railroad interests. Indeed, the
railroads’ ability to play this political game is the reason that older agrarian
groups like midwestern farmers were eager to join the Progressive coalition in
support of civil service reform.
Thus as economic growth occurs, there is something of a race between
different interests to recruit the new middle classes to their cause. The old
patronage politicians are perfectly happy to extend their largesse to middle-class

supporters. As in a democracy, their willingness to support the reformist side in
this struggle will depend on their numbers, their sense of economic security, and
their social status. If they feel excluded and unrecognized by those above them,
as in Britain, or by those below them (who nonetheless held political power), as
in America, they are much more likely to turn their indignation to reform or
overthrow of the existing clientelistic system.
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
The existence of a broad middle class is neither a sufficient nor a necessary

condition to bring about liberal democracy. But it is extremely helpful in
sustaining it. Karl Marx’s Communist utopia did not materialize in the developed
world because his global proletariat turned into a global middle class. In the
developing world, new middle classes have enhanced democracy in Indonesia,
Turkey, and Brazil, and promise to upset the authoritarian order in China. But
what happens to liberal democracy if the middle class reverses course and starts
to shrink?
There is unfortunately a lot of evidence that this process may have begun to
unfold in the developed world, where income inequality has increased massively
since the 1980s. This is most notable in the United States, where the top 1
percent of families took home 9 percent of GDP in 1970 and 23.5 percent in
2007. The fact that so much of the economic growth in this period went to a
relatively small number of people at the top of the distribution is the flip side of
the phenomenon of the stagnation of middle-class incomes since the 1970s.10
In the United States and other countries, this stagnation was hidden from
view by other factors. The same period saw the entry of large numbers of women
into the workforce, increasing household income at the same time that many
middle-class men found their paychecks getting smaller in real terms. In
addition, politicians across the world saw cheap, subsidized credit as an
acceptable substitute for outright income redistribution, leading to government-
backed housing booms. The financial crisis of 2008–2009 was one consequence
of this trend.11
There are a number of sources of this growing inequality, only some of which
are subject to control through public policies. One villain most commonly cited
is globalization—the fact that lower transportation and communications costs
have effectively added hundreds of millions of low-skill workers to the global

labor market, driving down wages for comparable skills in developed countries.
With rising labor costs in China and other emerging-market countries, a
certain amount of manufacturing has started to return to the United States and
other developed countries. But this has happened in part only because labor costs
as a proportion of total manufacturing costs have gotten much smaller due to
increases in automation. This means that renewed onshore production will not be
likely to replace the huge numbers of middle-class jobs that were lost in the
initial process of deindustrialization.
This points to the much more important long-term factor of technological
advance, which in a sense is the underlying facilitator of globalization. There has
been a constant substitution of technology for human labor over the decades,
which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought huge benefits not
just to elites but also to the broad mass of people in industrializing countries.
The major technological innovations of this period created large numbers of jobs
for low-skill workers in a succession of industries—coal and steel, chemicals,
manufacturing, and construction. The Luddites, who opposed technological
change, proved very wrong, insofar as new, higher-paying opportunities for work
opened up to replace the ones they lost. Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly
line for producing automobiles in his Highland Park, Michigan, facility actually
lowered the average skill levels required to build an automobile, breaking apart
the complex operations of the earlier carriage craft industry into simple,
repeatable steps that a person with a fifth-grade education could accomplish.
This was the economic order that supported the rise of a broad middle class and
the democratic politics that rested on it.
The more recent advances in information and communications technology
have had very different social effects, however. Automation has eliminated a
large number of low-skill assembly-line jobs, and with each passing year smart
machines move up the skill ladder to take away more occupations formerly
performed by middle-class workers.12 Indeed, it is impossible to separate
technology from globalization: without high-speed broadband communications
and falling transportation costs, it would not be possible to outsource customer
support and back-office operations from the United States and Europe to India
and the Philippines, or to produce iPhones in Shenzhen. The lower-skill jobs that
are being destroyed in this process are being replaced, as in earlier periods, by
newer, higher-paying ones. But the skill requirements, and the numbers of such
jobs, are very different from Henry Ford’s time.
There has always been inequality as a result of natural differences in talent

and character. But today’s technological world vastly magnifies those
differences. In a nineteenth-century agrarian society, people with strong math
skills didn’t have many opportunities to capitalize on their talent. Today, they
can become financial wizards, geneticists, or software engineers, and take home
ever-larger proportions of national wealth.
In addition, modern technology has created what Robert Frank and Philip
Cook call a “winner-take-all” society, in which a disproportionate and growing
share of income is taken home by the very top members of any field, whether
CEOs, doctors, academics, musicians, entertainers, or athletes. In the days when
the markets for such skills and services were localized due to the high costs of
communications and transportation, there were plenty of openings for people
farther down the hierarchy because mass audiences did not have access to the
best of the best. But today, anyone can attend a performance by the Metropolitan
Opera or the Royal Ballet live on a high-definition screen, which many would
watch in preference to a third- or fourth-tier local company.13
MALTHUS REVISITED
Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population had the bad luck to be
published in 1798, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, just as a technological
tsunami was gathering force. His prediction that human population growth
would outstrip increases in productivity proved very wrong in the two centuries
that followed, and human societies succeeded in enriching themselves on a per
capita basis to a historically unprecedented degree. Malthusian economics has
ever since been derided, along with the Luddites, as backward looking and
ignorant of the nature of modern technology.14
However, Malthus did not specify the time period over which population
growth would outstrip productivity. The developed world has been on a high-
productivity trajectory for only a little over two hundred of the fifty thousand or
so years that the human species has existed in its current form. We assume today
that revolutionary new technologies equivalent to steam power and the internal
combustion engine will continue to appear into the future. But the laws of
physics do not guarantee such a result. It is entirely possible that the first 150
years of the Industrial Revolution captured what Tyler Cowen calls the “low-
hanging fruit” of productivity advance, and that while future innovations will
continue, the rate at which they improve human welfare will fall. Indeed, a

number of laws of physics suggest that there might be hard limits on the carrying
capacity of the planet to sustain growing populations at high standards of living.
Moreover, even if technological innovation continues to occur at a high rate,
there is no guarantee that it will provide large numbers of jobs for middle-class
people in the manner of the early-twentieth-century assembly line. The new
employment and rewards go to the creators of the machines and those who
figure out how to employ them, who are almost always better educated than
those whose jobs are lost.
Indeed, many foreseeable future innovations will actually make the
productivity situation worse because they are in the area of biomedicine. Many
economists and politicians assume that any new technology that extends human
life spans or cures disease is an unqualifiedly good thing. And it is true that the
longer life spans that citizens of developed countries have come to enjoy have
been of economic benefit. But many biomedical technologies have succeeded in
extending life spans at the expense of quality of life and sharply increased
dependency on caregivers. In all developed countries, the costs of end-of-life
care have accelerated faster than the overall rate of economic growth, and they
are on their way to becoming the single largest component of government
spending. Death and generational turnover are classic cases of outcomes that are
bad for individuals but good for society as a whole. There are many reasons to
think that societies will be worse off in the aggregate if life spans are extended
another ten or twenty years on average, beginning with the fact that generational
turnover is critical to social change and adaptation, both of which will occur at a
slower pace as average life expectancies increase.15
There is no way of predicting the nature of future technological change—
either its overall rate, its effects on middle-class employment, or its other social
consequences. However, if technological change fails to produce broadly shared
economic benefits, or if its overall rate slows, modern societies risk being cast
back into a Malthusian world that will have big implications for the viability of
democracy. In a shared-growth world, the inevitable inequalities that accompany
capitalism are politically tolerable because everyone is ultimately benefiting. In a
Malthusian world, individuals are in a zero-sum relationship—one person’s gain
inevitably means another person’s loss. Under these circumstances, predation
becomes as viable a strategy for self-enrichment as investment in productive
economic activities—the situation that human societies were in for most of their
history prior to the Industrial Revolution.

ADJUSTMENT
In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi argued that there was a “double
movement” in which capitalist economies continually produced disruptive
change and societies struggled to adjust to that change. Governments frequently
had to be involved in the adjustment process since private markets and
individuals on their own could not always cope with the consequences of
technological change.16 Public policy must therefore be factored into the fate of
middle-class societies.
Across the developed world, there has been a range of responses to the
challenges of globalization and technological change. At one end of the
spectrum are the United States and Britain, where governments provided
minimal adjustment help to communities facing deindustrialization beyond
short-term unemployment insurance. Indeed, both public authorities and pundits
in academia and journalism have often embraced the shift to a postindustrial
world. Public policy supported deregulation and privatization at home and
pushed for free trade and open investment abroad. Particularly in the United
States, politicians intervened to weaken the power of trade unions and to
otherwise increase the flexibility of labor markets. Individuals were advised to
embrace disruptive change and were told that they would find better
opportunities as knowledge workers doing creative and interesting things in the
new economy.
France and Italy stood at the other end of this spectrum, seeking to protect
middle-class jobs by imposing onerous rules on companies attempting to lay off
workers. By not recognizing the need for adjustment in work rules and labor
conditions, they stopped job loss in the short run while losing competitiveness to
other countries in the long run. Like the United States, they tend to have highly
adversarial management-labor relations, but while the owners of capital usually
come out on top in the Anglo-Saxon world, labor has done much better
protecting its privileges in Latin Europe.
The countries that came through the 2008–2009 crisis the most successfully
were those like Germany and the Scandinavian nations that steered a middle
course between the laissez-faire approach of the United States and Britain, and
the rigid regulatory systems of France and Italy. Their corporatist labor-
management systems have created sufficient trust that unions were willing to
grant companies more flexibility in layoffs, in return for higher benefits and job
retraining.

The future of democracy in developed countries will depend on their ability
to deal with the problem of a disappearing middle class. In the wake of the
financial crisis there has been a rise of new populist groups from the Tea Party in
the United States to various anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties in Europe. What
unites all of them is the belief that elites in their countries have betrayed them.
And in many ways they are correct: the elites who set the intellectual and
cultural climate in the developed world have been largely buffered from the
effects of middle-class decline. There has been a vacuum in new approaches to
the problem, approaches that don’t involve simply returning to the welfare state
solutions of the past.
The proper approach to the problem of middle-class decline is not necessarily
the present German system or any other specific set of measures. The only real
long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in pushing the
vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills. The ability to
help citizens flexibly adjust to the changing conditions of work requires state and
private institutions that are similarly flexible. Yet one of the characteristics of
modern developed democracies is that they have accumulated many rigidities
over time that make institutional adaptation increasingly difficult. In fact, all
political systems—past and present—are liable to decay. The fact that a system
once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will
remain one in perpetuity.
It is to the problem of political decay that we will turn in the final part of this
book.

3
LIBERTY
Big Data is watching you
The liberal story cherishes human liberty as its number one value. It argues that
all authority ultimately stems from the free will of individual humans, as it is
expressed in their feelings, desires and choices. In politics, liberalism believes
that the voter knows best. It therefore upholds democratic elections. In
economics, liberalism maintains that the customer is always right. It therefore
hails free-market principles. In personal matters, liberalism encourages people to
listen to themselves, be true to themselves, and follow their hearts – as long as
they do not infringe on the liberties of others. This personal freedom is enshrined
in human rights.
In Western political discourse the term ‘liberal’ is sometimes used today in a
much narrower partisan sense, to denote those who support specific causes like
gay marriage, gun control and abortion. Yet most so-called conservatives also
embrace the broad liberal world view. Especially in the United States, both
Republicans and Democrats should occasionally take a break from their heated
quarrels to remind themselves that they all agree on fundamentals such as free
elections, an independent judiciary, and human rights.
In particular, it is vital to remember that right-wing heroes such as Ronald
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were great champions not only of economic
freedoms but also of individual liberties. In a famous interview in 1987,
Thatcher said that ‘There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry
of men and women … and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much
each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.’ 1
Thatcher’s heirs in the Conservative Party fully agree with the Labour Party
that political authority comes from the feelings, choices and free will of
individual voters. Thus when Britain needed to decide whether it should leave
the EU, Prime Minister David Cameron didn’t ask Queen Elizabeth II, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Oxford and Cambridge dons to resolve the
issue. He didn’t even ask the Members of Parliament. Rather, he held a

referendum in which each and every Briton was asked: ‘What do you feel about
it?’
You might object that people were asked ‘What do you think?’ rather than
‘What do you feel?’, but this is a common misperception. Referendums and
elections are always about human feelings, not about human rationality. If
democracy were a matter of rational decision-making, there would be absolutely
no reason to give all people equal voting rights – or perhaps any voting rights.
There is ample evidence that some people are far more knowledgeable and
rational than others, certainly when it comes to specific economic and political
questions. In the wake of the Brexit vote, eminent biologist Richard Dawkins
2
protested that the vast majority of the British public – including himself – should
never have been asked to vote in the referendum, because they lacked the
necessary background in economics and political science. ‘You might as well
call a nationwide plebiscite to decide whether Einstein got his algebra right, or
let passengers vote on which runway the pilot should land.’ 3
However, for better or worse, elections and referendums are not about what
we think. They are about what we feel. And when it comes to feelings, Einstein
and Dawkins are no better than anyone else. Democracy assumes that human
feelings reflect a mysterious and profound ‘free will’, that this ‘free will’ is the
ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than
others, all humans are equally free. Like Einstein and Dawkins, an illiterate maid
also has free will, hence on election day her feelings – represented by her vote –
count just as much as anybody else’s.
Feelings guide not just the voters, but also the leaders. In the 2016 Brexit
referendum the Leave campaign was headed together by Boris Johnson and
Michael Gove. After David Cameron resigned, Gove initially supported Johnson
for the premiership, but at the very last minute Gove declared Johnson unfit for
the position and announced his own intention to run for the job. Gove’s action,
which destroyed Johnson’s chances, was described as a Machiavellian political
assassination. But Gove defended his conduct by appealing to his feelings,
4
explaining that ‘In every step in my political life I have asked myself one
question: “What is the right thing to do? What does your heart tell you?”’ That’s 5
why, according to Gove, he has fought so hard for Brexit, and that’s why he felt
compelled to backstab his erstwhile ally Boris Johnson and bid for the alpha-dog
position himself – because his heart told him to do it.
This reliance on the heart might prove to be the Achilles heel of liberal
democracy. For once somebody (whether in Beijing or in San Francisco) gains
the technological ability to hack and manipulate the human heart, democratic
politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.

Listen to the algorithm
The liberal belief in the feelings and free choices of individuals is neither natural
nor very ancient. For thousands of years people believed that authority came
from divine laws rather than from the human heart, and that we should therefore
sanctify the word of God rather than human liberty. Only in the last few
centuries did the source of authority shift from celestial deities to flesh-and-
blood humans.
Soon authority might shift again – from humans to algorithms. Just as divine
authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was
justified by the liberal story, so the coming technological revolution might
establish the authority of Big Data algorithms, while undermining the very idea
of individual freedom.
As we mentioned in the previous chapter, scientific insights into the way our
brains and bodies work suggest that our feelings are not some uniquely human
spiritual quality, and they do not reflect any kind of ‘free will’. Rather, feelings
are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to quickly
calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings aren’t based on
intuition, inspiration or freedom – they are based on calculation.
When a monkey, mouse or human sees a snake, fear arises because millions of
neurons in the brain swiftly calculate the relevant data and conclude that the
probability of death is high. Feelings of sexual attraction arise when other
biochemical algorithms calculate that a nearby individual offers a high
probability of successful mating, social bonding, or some other coveted goal.
Moral feelings such as outrage, guilt or forgiveness derive from neural
mechanisms that evolved to enable group cooperation. All these biochemical
algorithms were honed through millions of years of evolution. If the feelings of
some ancient ancestor made a mistake, the genes shaping these feelings did not
pass on to the next generation. Feelings are thus not the opposite of rationality –
they embody evolutionary rationality.
We usually fail to realise that feelings are in fact calculations, because the
rapid process of calculation occurs far below our threshold of awareness. We
don’t feel the millions of neurons in the brain computing probabilities of survival
and reproduction, so we erroneously believe that our fear of snakes, our choice
of sexual mates, or our opinions about the European Union are the result of some
mysterious ‘free will’.
Nevertheless, though liberalism is wrong to think that our feelings reflect a
free will, up until today relying on feelings still made good practical sense. For

although there was nothing magical or free about our feelings, they were the best
method in the universe for deciding what to study, who to marry, and which
party to vote for. And no outside system could hope to understand my feelings
better than me. Even if the Spanish Inquisition or the Soviet KGB spied on me
every minute of every day, they lacked the biological knowledge and the
computing power necessary to hack the biochemical processes shaping my
desires and choices. For all practical purposes, it was reasonable to argue that I
have free will, because my will was shaped mainly by the interplay of inner
forces, which nobody outside could see. I could enjoy the illusion that I control
my secret inner arena, while outsiders could never really understand what is
happening inside me and how I make decisions.
Accordingly, liberalism was correct in counselling people to follow their heart
rather than the dictates of some priest or party apparatchik. However, soon
computer algorithms could give you better counsel than human feelings. As the
Spanish Inquisition and the KGB give way to Google and Baidu, ‘free will’ will
likely be exposed as a myth, and liberalism might lose its practical advantages.
For we are now at the confluence of two immense revolutions. On the one
hand biologists are deciphering the mysteries of the human body, and in
particular, of the brain and of human feelings. At the same time computer
scientists are giving us unprecedented data-processing power. When the biotech
revolution merges with the infotech revolution, it will produce Big Data
algorithms that can monitor and understand my feelings much better than I can,
and then authority will probably shift from humans to computers. My illusion of
free will is likely to disintegrate as I daily encounter institutions, corporations
and government agencies that understand and manipulate what was hitherto my
inaccessible inner realm.
This is already happening in the field of medicine. The most important
medical decisions in our life rely not on our feelings of illness or wellness, or
even on the informed predictions of our doctor – but on the calculations of
computers which understand our bodies much better than we do. Within a few
decades, Big Data algorithms informed by a constant stream of biometric data
could monitor our health 24/7. They could detect the very beginning of
influenza, cancer or Alzheimer’s disease, long before we feel anything is wrong
with us. They could then recommend appropriate treatments, diets and daily
regimens, custom-built for our unique physique, DNA and personality.
People will enjoy the best healthcare in history, but for precisely this reason
they will probably be sick all the time. There is always something wrong
somewhere in the body. There is always something that can be improved. In the
past, you felt perfectly healthy as long as you didn’t sense pain or you didn’t

suffer from an apparent disability such as limping. But by 2050, thanks to
biometric sensors and Big Data algorithms, diseases may be diagnosed and
treated long before they lead to pain or disability. As a result, you will always
find yourself suffering from some ‘medical condition’ and following this or that
algorithmic recommendation. If you refuse, perhaps your medical insurance
would become invalid, or your boss would fire you – why should they pay the
price of your obstinacy?
It is one thing to continue smoking despite general statistics that connect
smoking with lung cancer. It is a very different thing to continue smoking
despite a concrete warning from a biometric sensor that has just detected
seventeen cancerous cells in your upper left lung. And if you are willing to defy
the sensor, what will you do when the sensor forwards the warning to your
insurance agency, your manager, and your mother?
Who will have the time and energy to deal with all these illnesses? In all
likelihood, we could just instruct our health algorithm to deal with most of these
problems as it sees fit. At most, it will send periodic updates to our smartphones,
telling us that ‘seventeen cancerous cells were detected and destroyed’.
Hypochondriacs might dutifully read these updates, but most of us will ignore
them just as we ignore those annoying anti-virus notices on our computers.
The drama of decision-making
What is already beginning to happen in medicine is likely to occur in more and

more fields. The key invention is the biometric sensor, which people can wear on
or inside their bodies, and which converts biological processes into electronic
information that computers can store and analyse. Given enough biometric data
and enough computing power, external data-processing systems can hack all
your desires, decisions and opinions. They can know exactly who you are.
Most people don’t know themselves very well. When I was twenty-one, I
finally realised that I was gay, after several years of living in denial. That’s
hardly exceptional. Many gay men spend their entire teenage years unsure about
their sexuality. Now imagine the situation in 2050, when an algorithm can tell
any teenager exactly where he is on the gay/straight spectrum (and even how
malleable that position is). Perhaps the algorithm shows you pictures or videos
of attractive men and women, tracks your eye movements, blood pressure and
brain activity, and within five minutes ejects a number on the Kinsey scale. It
6
could have saved me years of frustration. Perhaps you personally wouldn’t want

to take such a test, but then maybe you find yourself with a group of friends at
Michelle’s boring birthday party, and somebody suggests you all take turns
checking yourself on this cool new algorithm (with everybody standing around
to watch the results – and comment on them). Would you just walk away?
Even if you do, and even if you keep hiding from yourself and your
classmates, you won’t be able to hide from Amazon, Alibaba or the secret
police. As you surf the Web, watch YouTube or read your social media feed, the
algorithms will discreetly monitor you, analyse you, and tell Coca-Cola that if it
wants to sell you some fizzy drink, it had better use the advertisement with the
shirtless guy rather than the shirtless girl. You won’t even know. But they will
know, and such information will be worth billions.
Then again, maybe it will all be out in the open, and people will gladly share
their information in order to get better recommendations – and eventually in
order to get the algorithm to make decisions for them. It starts with simple
things, like deciding which movie to watch. As you sit down with a group of
friends to spend a cozy evening in front of the TV, you first have to choose what
to see. Fifty years ago you had no choice, but today – with the rise of view-on-
demand services – there are thousands of titles available. Reaching an agreement
can be quite difficult, because while you personally like science-fiction thrillers,
Jack prefers romantic comedies, and Jill votes for artsy French films. You may
well end up compromising on some mediocre B-movie that disappoints all of
you.
An algorithm might help. You can tell it which previous movies each of you
really liked, and based on its massive statistical database, the algorithm can then
find the perfect match for the group. Unfortunately, such a crude algorithm is
easily misled, particularly because self-reporting is a notoriously unreliable
gauge for people’s true preferences. It often happens that we hear lots of people
praise some movie as a masterpiece, feel compelled to watch it, and even though
we fall asleep midway through, we don’t want to look like philistines, so we tell
everyone it was an amazing experience. 7
Such problems, however, can be solved if we just allow the algorithm to

collect real-time data on us as we actually watch movies, instead of relying on
our own dubious self-reports. For starters, the algorithm can monitor which
movies we completed, and which we stopped watching halfway through. Even if
we tell the whole world that Gone With the Wind is the best movie ever made,
the algorithm will know we never made it past the first half-hour, and we never
really saw Atlanta burning.
Yet the algorithm can go much deeper than that. Engineers are currently
developing software that can detect human emotions based on the movements of

our eyes and facial muscles. Add a good camera to the television, and such
8
software will know which scenes made us laugh, which scenes made us sad, and
which scenes bored us. Next, connect the algorithm to biometric sensors, and the
algorithm will know how each frame has influenced our heart rate, our blood
pressure, and our brain activity. As we watch, say, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the
algorithm may note that the rape scene caused us an almost imperceptible tinge
of sexual arousal, that when Vincent accidentally shot Marvin in the face it made
us laugh guiltily, and that we didn’t get the joke about the Big Kahuna Burger –
but we laughed anyway, so as not to look stupid. When you force yourself to
laugh, you use different brain circuits and muscles than when you laugh because
something is really funny. Humans cannot usually detect the difference. But a
biometric sensor could. 9
The word television comes from Greek ‘tele’, which means ‘far’, and Latin
‘visio’, sight. It was originally conceived as a device that allows us to see from
afar. But soon, it might allow us to be seen from afar. As George Orwell
envisioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the television will watch us while we are
watching it. After we’ve finished watching Tarantino’s entire filmography, we
may have forgotten most of it. But Netflix, or Amazon, or whoever owns the TV
algorithm, will know our personality type, and how to press our emotional
buttons. Such data could enable Netflix and Amazon to choose movies for us
with uncanny precision, but it could also enable them to make for us the most
important decisions in life – such as what to study, where to work, and who to
marry.
Of course Amazon won’t be correct all the time. That’s impossible.
Algorithms will repeatedly make mistakes due to insufficient data, faulty
programming, muddled goal definitions and the chaotic nature of life. But10
Amazon won’t have to be perfect. It will just need to be better on average than
us humans. And that is not so difficult, because most people don’t know
themselves very well, and most people often make terrible mistakes in the most
important decisions of their lives. Even more than algorithms, humans suffer
from insufficient data, from faulty programming (genetic and cultural), from
muddled definitions, and from the chaos of life.
You may well list the many problems that beset algorithms, and conclude that
people will never trust them. But this is a bit like cataloguing all the drawbacks
of democracy and concluding that no sane person would ever choose to support
such a system. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst
political system in the world, except for all the others. Rightly or wrongly,
people might reach the same conclusions about Big Data algorithms: they have
lots of hitches, but we have no better alternative.

As scientists gain a deeper understanding of the way humans make decisions,
the temptation to rely on algorithms is likely to increase. Hacking human
decision-making will not only make Big Data algorithms more reliable, it will
simultaneously make human feelings less reliable. As governments and
corporations succeed in hacking the human operating system, we will be
exposed to a barrage of precision-guided manipulation, advertisement and
propaganda. It might become so easy to manipulate our opinions and emotions
that we will be forced to rely on algorithms in the same way that a pilot suffering
an attack of vertigo must ignore what his own senses are telling him and put all
his trust in the machinery.
In some countries and in some situations, people might not be given any
choice, and they will be forced to obey the decisions of Big Data algorithms. Yet
even in allegedly free societies, algorithms might gain authority because we will
learn from experience to trust them on more and more issues, and will gradually
lose our ability to make decisions for ourselves. Just think of the way that within
a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust the Google search
algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: searching for relevant and
trustworthy information. We no longer search for information. Instead, we
google. And as we increasingly rely on Google for answers, so our ability to
search for information by ourselves diminishes. Already today, ‘truth’ is defined
by the top results of the Google search. 11
This has also been happening with physical abilities, such as navigating space.
People ask Google to guide them around. When they reach an intersection, their
gut feeling might tell them ‘turn left’, but Google Maps says ‘turn right’. At first
they listen to their gut feeling, turn left, get stuck in a traffic jam, and miss an
important meeting. Next time they listen to Google, turn right, and make it on
time. They learn from experience to trust Google. Within a year or two, they
blindly rely on whatever Google Maps tells them, and if the smartphone fails,
they are completely clueless. In March 2012 three Japanese tourists in Australia
decided to take a day trip to a small offshore island, and drove their car straight
into the Pacific Ocean. The driver, twenty-one-year-old Yuzu Nuda, later said
that she just followed the instructions of the GPS and ‘it told us we could drive
down there. It kept saying it would navigate us to a road. We got stuck.’ In
12
several similar incidents people drove into a lake, or fell off a demolished bridge,
by apparently following GPS instructions. The ability to navigate is like a
13
muscle – use it or lose it. The same is true for the ability to choose spouses or
14
professions.
Every year millions of youngsters need to decide what to study at university.
This is a very important and very difficult decision. You are under pressure from

your parents, your friends and your teachers, who have different interests and
opinions. You also have your own fears and fantasies to deal with. Your
judgement is clouded and manipulated by Hollywood blockbusters, trashy
novels, and sophisticated advertising campaigns. It is particularly difficult to
make a wise decision because you do not really know what it takes to succeed in
different professions, and you don’t necessarily have a realistic image of your
own strengths and weaknesses. What does it take to succeed as a lawyer? How
do I perform under pressure? Am I a good team-worker?
One student might start law school because she has an inaccurate image of her
own skills, and an even more distorted view of what being a lawyer actually
involves (you don’t get to give dramatic speeches and shout ‘Objection, Your
Honour!’ all day). Meanwhile her friend decides to fulfil a childhood dream and
study professional ballet dancing, even though she doesn’t have the necessary
bone structure or discipline. Years later, both deeply regret their choices. In the
future we could rely on Google to make such decisions for us. Google could tell
me that I would be wasting my time in law school or in ballet school – but that I
might make an excellent (and very happy) psychologist or plumber. 15
Once AI makes better decisions than us about careers and perhaps even
relationships, our concept of humanity and of life will have to change. Humans
are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision-making. Liberal
democracy and free-market capitalism see the individual as an autonomous agent
constantly making choices about the world. Works of art – be they Shakespeare
plays, Jane Austen novels, or tacky Hollywood comedies – usually revolve
around the hero having to make some particularly crucial decision. To be or not
to be? To listen to my wife and kill King Duncan, or listen to my conscience and
spare him? To marry Mr Collins or Mr Darcy? Christian and Muslim theology
similarly focus on the drama of decision-making, arguing that everlasting
salvation or damnation depends on making the right choice.
What will happen to this view of life as we increasingly rely on AI to make
decisions for us? At present we trust Netflix to recommend movies, and Google
Maps to choose whether to turn right or left. But once we begin to count on AI to
decide what to study, where to work, and who to marry, human life will cease to
be a drama of decision-making. Democratic elections and free markets will make
little sense. So would most religions and works of art. Imagine Anna Karenina
taking out her smartphone and asking the Facebook algorithm whether she
should stay married to Karenin or elope with the dashing Count Vronsky. Or
imagine your favourite Shakespeare play with all the crucial decisions taken by
the Google algorithm. Hamlet and Macbeth will have much more comfortable

lives, but what kind of life will it be exactly? Do we have models for making
sense of such a life?
As authority shifts from humans to algorithms, we may no longer see the
world as the playground of autonomous individuals struggling to make the right
choices. Instead, we might perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see
organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms, and believe that
humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing
system – and then merge into it. Already today we are becoming tiny chips
inside a giant data-processing system that nobody really understands. Every day
I absorb countless data bits through emails, tweets and articles; process the data;
and transmit back new bits through more emails, tweets and articles. I don’t
really know where I fit into the great scheme of things, and how my bits of data
connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers. I
don’t have time to find out, because I am too busy answering all these emails.
The philosophical car
People might object that algorithms could never make important decisions for
us, because important decisions usually involve an ethical dimension, and
algorithms don’t understand ethics. Yet there is no reason to assume that
algorithms won’t be able to outperform the average human even in ethics.
Already today, as devices like smartphones and autonomous vehicles undertake
decisions that used to be a human monopoly, they start to grapple with the same
kind of ethical problems that have bedevilled humans for millennia.
For example, suppose two kids chasing a ball jump right in front of a self-
driving car. Based on its lightning calculations, the algorithm driving the car
concludes that the only way to avoid hitting the two kids is to swerve into the
opposite lane, and risk colliding with an oncoming truck. The algorithm
calculates that in such a case there is a 70 per cent chance that the owner of the
car – who is fast asleep in the back seat – would be killed. What should the
algorithm do? 16
Philosophers have been arguing about such ‘trolley problems’ for millennia
(they are called ‘trolley problems’ because the textbook examples in modern
philosophical debates refer to a runaway trolley car racing down a railway track,
rather than to a self-driving car). Up till now, these arguments have had
17
embarrassingly little impact on actual behaviour, because in times of crisis

humans all too often forget about their philosophical views and follow their
emotions and gut instincts instead.
One of the nastiest experiments in the history of the social sciences was
conducted in December 1970 on a group of students at the Princeton Theological
Seminary, who were training to become ministers in the Presbyterian Church.
Each student was asked to hurry to a distant lecture hall, and there give a talk on
the Good Samaritan parable, which tells how a Jew travelling from Jerusalem to
Jericho was robbed and beaten by criminals, who then left him to die by the side
of the road. After some time a priest and a Levite passed nearby, but both
ignored the man. In contrast, a Samaritan – a member of a sect much despised by
the Jews – stopped when he saw the victim, took care of him, and saved his life.
The moral of the parable is that people’s merit should be judged by their actual
behaviour, rather than by their religious affiliaton.
The eager young seminarians rushed to the lecture hall, contemplating on the
way how best to explain the moral of the Good Samaritan parable. But the
experimenters planted in their path a shabbily dressed person, who was sitting
slumped in a doorway with his head down and his eyes closed. As each
unsuspecting seminarian was hurrying past, the ‘victim’ coughed and groaned
pitifully. Most seminarians did not even stop to enquire what was wrong with the
man, let alone offer any help. The emotional stress created by the need to hurry
to the lecture hall trumped their moral obligation to help strangers in distress. 18
Human emotions trump philosophical theories in countless other situations.

This makes the ethical and philosophical history of the world a rather depressing
tale of wonderful ideals and less than ideal behaviour. How many Christians
actually turn the other cheek, how many Buddhists actually rise above egoistic
obsessions, and how many Jews actually love their neighbours as themselves?
That’s just the way natural selection has shaped Homo sapiens. Like all
mammals, Homo sapiens uses emotions to quickly make life and death
decisions. We have inherited our anger, our fear and our lust from millions of
ancestors, all of whom passed the most rigorous quality control tests of natural
selection.
Unfortunately, what was good for survival and reproduction in the African
savannah a million years ago does not necessarily make for responsible
behaviour on twenty-first-century motorways. Distracted, angry and anxious
human drivers kill more than a million people in traffic accidents every year. We
can send all our philosophers, prophets and priests to preach ethics to these
drivers – but on the road, mammalian emotions and savannah instincts will still
take over. Consequently, seminarians in a rush will ignore people in distress, and
drivers in a crisis will run over hapless pedestrians.

This disjunction between the seminary and the road is one of the biggest
practical problems in ethics. Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls
can sit in some cosy university hall and discuss theoretical problems in ethics for
days – but would their conclusions actually be implemented by stressed-out
drivers caught in a split-second emergency? Perhaps Michael Schumacher – the
Formula One champion who is sometimes hailed as the best driver in history –
had the ability to think about philosophy while racing a car; but most of us aren’t
Schumacher.
Computer algorithms, however, have not been shaped by natural selection,
and they have neither emotions nor gut instincts. Hence in moments of crisis
they could follow ethical guidelines much better than humans – provided we find
a way to code ethics in precise numbers and statistics. If we teach Kant, Mill and
Rawls to write code, they can carefully program the self-driving car in their cosy
laboratory, and be certain that the car will follow their commandments on the
highway. In effect, every car will be driven by Michael Schumacher and
Immanuel Kant rolled into one.
Thus if you program a self-driving car to stop and help strangers in distress, it
will do so come hell or high water (unless, of course, you insert an exception
clause for infernal or high-water scenarios). Similarly, if your self-driving car is
programmed to swerve to the opposite lane in order to save the two kids in its
path, you can bet your life this is exactly what it will do. Which means that when
designing their self-driving car, Toyota or Tesla will be transforming a
theoretical problem in the philosophy of ethics into a practical problem of
engineering.
Granted, the philosophical algorithms will never be perfect. Mistakes will still
happen, resulting in injuries, deaths and extremely complicated lawsuits. (For
the first time in history, you might be able to sue a philosopher for the
unfortunate results of his or her theories, because for the first time in history you
could prove a direct causal link between philosophical ideas and real-life
events.) However, in order to take over from human drivers, the algorithms
won’t have to be perfect. They will just have to be better than the humans. Given
that human drivers kill more than a million people each year, that isn’t such a tall
order. When all is said and done, would you rather the car next to you was driven
by a drunk teenager, or by the Schumacher–Kant team? 19
The same logic is true not just of driving, but of many other situations. Take
for example job applications. In the twenty-first century, the decision whether to
hire somebody for a job will increasingly be made by algorithms. We cannot rely
on the machine to set the relevant ethical standards – humans will still need to do
that. But once we decide on an ethical standard in the job market – that it is

wrong to discriminate against black people or against women, for example – we
can rely on machines to implement and maintain this standard better than
humans. 20
A human manager may know and even agree that it is unethical to

discriminate against black people and women, but then, when a black woman
applies for a job, the manager subconsciously discriminates against her, and
decides not to hire her. If we allow a computer to evaluate job applications, and
program the computer to completely ignore race and gender, we can be certain
that the computer will indeed ignore these factors, because computers don’t have
a subconscious. Of course, it won’t be easy to write code for evaluating job
applications, and there is always a danger that the engineers will somehow
program their own subconscious biases into the software. Yet once we discover
21
such mistakes, it would probably be far easier to debug the software than to rid
humans of their racist and misogynist biases.
We saw that the rise of artificial intelligence might push most humans out of
the job market – including drivers and traffic police (when rowdy humans are
replaced by obedient algorithms, traffic police will be redundant). However,
there might be some new openings for philosophers, because their skills –
hitherto devoid of much market value – will suddenly be in very high demand.
So if you want to study something that will guarantee a good job in the future,
maybe philosophy is not such a bad gamble.
Of course, philosophers seldom agree on the right course of action. Few
‘trolley problems’ have been solved to the satisfaction of all philosophers, and
consequentialist thinkers such as John Stuart Mill (who judge actions by
consequences) hold quite different opinions to deontologists such as Immanuel
Kant (who judge actions by absolute rules). Would Tesla have to actually take a
stance on such knotty matters in order to produce a car?
Well, maybe Tesla will just leave it to the market. Tesla will produce two
models of the self-driving car: the Tesla Altruist and the Tesla Egoist. In an
emergency, the Altruist sacrifices its owner to the greater good, whereas the
Egoist does everything in its power to save its owner, even if it means killing the
two kids. Customers will then be able to buy the car that best fits their favourite
philosophical view. If more people buy the Tesla Egoist, you won’t be able to
blame Tesla for that. After all, the customer is always right.
This is not a joke. In a pioneering 2015 study people were presented with a
hypothetical scenario of a self-driving car about to run over several pedestrians.
Most said that in such a case the car should save the pedestrians even at the price
of killing its owner. When they were then asked whether they personally would

buy a car programmed to sacrifice its owner for the greater good, most said no.
For themselves, they would prefer the Tesla Egoist. 22
Imagine the situation: you have bought a new car, but before you can start
using it, you must open the settings menu and tick one of several boxes. In case
of an accident, do you want the car to sacrifice your life – or to kill the family in
the other vehicle? Is this a choice you even want to make? Just think of the
arguments you are going to have with your husband about which box to tick.
So maybe the state should intervene to regulate the market, and lay down an
ethical code binding all self-driving cars? Some lawmakers will doubtless be
thrilled by the opportunity to finally make laws that are always followed to the
letter. Other lawmakers may be alarmed by such unprecedented and totalitarian
responsibility. After all, throughout history the limitations of law enforcement
provided a welcome check on the biases, mistakes and excesses of lawmakers. It
was an extremely lucky thing that laws against homosexuality and against
blasphemy were only partially enforced. Do we really want a system in which
the decisions of fallible politicians become as inexorable as gravity?
Digital dictatorships
AI often frightens people because they don’t trust the AI to remain obedient. We
have seen too many science-fiction movies about robots rebelling against their
human masters, running amok in the streets and slaughtering everyone. Yet the
real problem with robots is exactly the opposite. We should fear them because
they will probably always obey their masters and never rebel.
There is nothing wrong with blind obedience, of course, as long as the robots
happen to serve benign masters. Even in warfare, reliance on killer robots could
ensure that for the first time in history, the laws of war would actually be obeyed
on the battlefield. Human soldiers are sometimes driven by their emotions to
murder, pillage and rape in violation of the laws of war. We usually associate
emotions with compassion, love and empathy, but in wartime, the emotions that
take control are all too often fear, hatred and cruelty. Since robots have no
emotions, they could be trusted to always adhere to the dry letter of the military
code, and never be swayed by personal fears and hatreds. 23
On 16 March 1968 a company of American soldiers went berserk in the South

Vietnamese village of My Lai, and massacred about 400 civilians. This war
crime resulted from the local initiative of men who had been involved in jungle
guerrilla warfare for several months. It did not serve any strategic purpose, and

contravened both the legal code and the military policy of the USA. It was the
fault of human emotions. If the USA had deployed killer robots in Vietnam, the
24
massacre of My Lai would never have occurred.

Nevertheless, before we rush to develop and deploy killer robots, we need to
remind ourselves that the robots always reflect and amplify the qualities of their
code. If the code is restrained and benign – the robots will probably be a huge
improvement over the average human soldier. Yet if the code is ruthless and
cruel – the results will be catastrophic. The real problem with robots is not their
own artificial intelligence, but rather the natural stupidity and cruelty of their
human masters.
In July 1995 Bosnian Serb troops massacred more than 8,000 Muslim
Bosniaks around the town of Srebrenica. Unlike the haphazard My Lai massacre,
the Srebrenica killings were a protracted and well-organised operation that
reflected Bosnian Serb policy to ‘ethnically cleanse’ Bosnia of Muslims. If the 25
Bosnian Serbs had had killer robots in 1995, it would likely have made the
atrocity worse rather than better. Not one robot would have had a moment’s
hesitation carrying out whatever orders it received, and would not have spared
the life of a single Muslim child out of feelings of compassion, disgust, or mere
lethargy.
A ruthless dictator armed with such killer robots will never have to fear that
his soldiers will turn against him, no matter how heartless and crazy his orders.
A robot army would probably have strangled the French Revolution in its cradle
in 1789, and if in 2011 Hosni Mubarak had had a contingent of killer robots he
could have unleashed them on the populace without fear of defection. Similarly,
an imperialist government relying on a robot army could wage unpopular wars
without any concern that its robots might lose their motivation, or that their
families might stage protests. If the USA had had killer robots in the Vietnam
War, the My Lai massacre might have been prevented, but the war itself could
have dragged on for many more years, because the American government would
have had fewer worries about demoralised soldiers, massive anti-war
demonstrations, or a movement of ‘veteran robots against the war’ (some
American citizens might still have objected to the war, but without the fear of
being drafted themselves, the memory of personally committing atrocities, or the
painful loss of a dear relative, the protesters would probably have been both less
numerous and less committed). 26
These kinds of problems are far less relevant to autonomous civilian vehicles,
because no car manufacturer will maliciously program its vehicles to target and
kill people. Yet autonomous weapon systems are a catastrophe waiting to

happen, because too many governments tend to be ethically corrupt, if not
downright evil.
The danger is not restricted to killing machines. Surveillance systems could be
equally risky. In the hands of a benign government, powerful surveillance
algorithms can be the best thing that ever happened to humankind. Yet the same
Big Data algorithms might also empower a future Big Brother, so that we might
end up with an Orwellian surveillance regime in which all individuals are
monitored all the time. 27
Indeed, we might end up with something that even Orwell could barely
imagine: a total surveillance regime that follows not just all our external
activities and utterances, but can even go under our skin to observe our inner
experiences. Consider for example what the Kim regime in North Korea might
do with the new technology. In the future, each North Korean citizen might be
required to wear a biometric bracelet that monitors everything you do and say –
as well as your blood pressure and brain activity. By using our growing
understanding of the human brain, and using the immense powers of machine
learning, the North Korean regime might be able for the first time in history to
gauge what each and every citizen is thinking each and every moment. If you
look at a picture of Kim Jong-un and the biometric sensors pick up the telltale
signs of anger (higher blood pressure, increased activity in the amygdala) –
you’ll be in the Gulag tomorrow morning.
Granted, due to its isolation the North Korean regime might have difficulty
developing the required technology by itself. However, the technology might be
pioneered in more tech-savvy nations, and copied or bought by the North
Koreans and other backward dictatorships. Both China and Russia are constantly
improving their surveillance tools, as are a number of democratic countries,
ranging from the USA to my home country of Israel. Nicknamed ‘the start-up
nation’, Israel has an extremely vibrant hi-tech sector, and a cutting-edge cyber-
security industry. At the same time it is also locked into a deadly conflict with
the Palestinians, and at least some of its leaders, generals and citizens might well
be happy to create a total surveillance regime in the West Bank as soon as they
have the necessary technology.
Already today whenever Palestinians make a phone call, post something on
Facebook or travel from one city to another they are likely to be monitored by
Israeli microphones, cameras, drones or spy software. The gathered data is then
analysed with the aid of Big Data algorithms. This helps the Israeli security
forces to pinpoint and neutralise potential threats without having to place too
many boots on the ground. The Palestinians may administer some towns and
villages in the West Bank, but the Israelis control the sky, the airwaves and

cyberspace. It therefore takes surprisingly few Israeli soldiers to effectively
control about 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank. 28
In one tragicomic incident in October 2017, a Palestinian labourer posted to

his private Facebook account a picture of himself in his workplace, alongside a
bulldozer. Adjacent to the image he wrote ‘Good morning!’ An automatic
algorithm made a small error when transliterating the Arabic letters. Instead of
‘Ysabechhum!’ (which means ‘Good morning!’), the algorithm identified the
letters as ‘Ydbachhum!’ (which means ‘Kill them!’). Suspecting that the man
might be a terrorist intending to use a bulldozer to run people over, Israeli
security forces swiftly arrested him. He was released after they realised that the
algorithm made a mistake. But the offending Facebook post was nevertheless
taken down. You can never be too careful. What Palestinians are experiencing
29
today in the West Bank might be just a primitive preview to what billions will
eventually experience all over the planet.
In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships
because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the
power to process information and make decisions among many people and
institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one
place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too
much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all
the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the
reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States,
and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.
However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI
makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed,
AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems,
because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If
you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database,
disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if
you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial
information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government
orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical
data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics
and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The
main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to
concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive
advantage in the twenty-first century.
As algorithms come to know us so well, authoritarian governments could gain
absolute control over their citizens, even more so than in Nazi Germany, and

resistance to such regimes might be utterly impossible. Not only will the regime
know exactly how you feel – it could make you feel whatever it wants. The
dictator might not be able to provide citizens with healthcare or equality, but he
could make them love him and hate his opponents. Democracy in its present
form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will
successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form, or humans will come to live
in ‘digital dictatorships’.
This will not be a return to the days of Hitler and Stalin. Digital dictatorships
will be as different from Nazi Germany as Nazi Germany was different from
ancien régime France. Louis XIV was a centralising autocrat, but he did not have
the technology to build a modern totalitarian state. He suffered no opposition to
his rule, yet in the absence of radios, telephones and trains, he had little control
over the day-to-day lives of peasants in remote Breton villages, or even of
townspeople in the heart of Paris. He had neither the will nor the ability to
establish a mass party, a countrywide youth movement, or a national education
system. It was the new technologies of the twentieth century that gave Hitler
30
both the motivation and the power to do such things. We cannot predict what
will be the motivations and powers of digital dictatorships in 2084, but it is very
unlikely that they will just copy Hitler and Stalin. Those gearing themselves up
to refight the battles of the 1930s might be caught off their guard by an attack
from a totally different direction.
Even if democracy manages to adapt and survive, people might become the
victims of new kinds of oppression and discrimination. Already today more and
more banks, corporations and institutions are using algorithms to analyse data
and make decisions about us. When you apply to your bank for a loan, it is likely
that your application is processed by an algorithm rather than by a human. The
algorithm analyses lots of data about you and statistics about millions of other
people, and decides whether you are reliable enough to give you a loan. Often,
the algorithm does a better job than a human banker. But the problem is that if
the algorithm discriminates against some people unjustly, it is difficult to know
that. If the bank refuses to give you a loan, and you ask ‘Why?’, the bank replies
‘The algorithm said no.’ You ask ‘Why did the algorithm say no? What’s wrong
with me?’, and the bank replies ‘We don’t know. No human understands this
algorithm, because it is based on advanced machine learning. But we trust our
algorithm, so we won’t give you a loan.’ 31
When discrimination is directed against entire groups, such as women or black

people, these groups can organise and protest against their collective
discrimination. But now an algorithm might discriminate against you personally,
and you have no idea why. Maybe the algorithm found something in your DNA,

your personal history or your Facebook account that it does not like. The
algorithm discriminates against you not because you are a woman, or an African
American – but because you are you. There is something specific about you that
the algorithm does not like. You don’t know what it is, and even if you knew,
you cannot organise with other people to protest, because there are no other
people suffering the exact same prejudice. It is just you. Instead of just collective
discrimination, in the twenty-first century we might face a growing problem of
individual discrimination. 32
At the highest levels of authority, we will probably retain human figureheads,

who will give us the illusion that the algorithms are only advisors, and that
ultimate authority is still in human hands. We will not appoint an AI to be the
chancellor of Germany or the CEO of Google. However, the decisions taken by
the chancellor and the CEO will be shaped by AI. The chancellor could still
choose between several different options, but all these options will be the
outcome of Big Data analysis, and they will reflect the way AI views the world
more than the way humans view it.
To take an analogous example, today politicians all over the world can choose
between several different economic policies, but in almost all cases the various
policies on offer reflect a capitalist outlook on economics. The politicians have
an illusion of choice, but the really important decisions have already been made
much earlier by the economists, bankers and business people who shaped the
different options in the menu. Within a couple of decades, politicians might find
themselves choosing from a menu written by AI.
Artificial intelligence and natural stupidity
One piece of good news is that at least in the next few decades, we won’t have to
deal with the full-blown science-fiction nightmare of AI gaining consciousness
and deciding to enslave or wipe out humanity. We will increasingly rely on
algorithms to make decisions for us, but it is unlikely that the algorithms will
start to consciously manipulate us. They won’t have any consciousness.
Science fiction tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness, and assume
that in order to match or surpass human intelligence, computers will have to
develop consciousness. The basic plot of almost all movies and novels about AI
revolves around the magical moment when a computer or a robot gains
consciousness. Once that happens, either the human hero falls in love with the

robot, or the robot tries to kill all the humans, or both things happen
simultaneously.
But in reality, there is no reason to assume that artificial intelligence will gain
consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things.
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel
things such as pain, joy, love and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in
humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness.
Mammals solve most problems by feeling things. Computers, however, solve
problems in a very different way.
There are simply several different paths leading to high intelligence, and only
some of these paths involve gaining consciousness. Just as airplanes fly faster
than birds without ever developing feathers, so computers may come to solve
problems much better than mammals without ever developing feelings. True, AI
will have to analyse human feelings accurately in order to treat human illnesses,
identify human terrorists, recommend human mates and navigate a street full of
human pedestrians. But it could do so without having any feelings of its own. An
algorithm does not need to feel joy, anger or fear in order to recognise the
different biochemical patterns of joyful, angry or frightened apes.
Of course, it is not absolutely impossible that AI will develop feelings of its
own. We still don’t know enough about consciousness to be sure. In general,
there are three possibilities we need to consider:
1. Consciousness is somehow linked to organic biochemistry in such a

way that it will never be possible to create consciousness in non-
organic systems.
2. Consciousness is not linked to organic biochemistry, but it is linked to
intelligence in such a way that computers could develop
consciousness, and computers will have to develop consciousness if
they are to pass a certain threshold of intelligence.
3. There are no essential links between consciousness and either organic
biochemistry or high intelligence. Hence computers might develop
consciousness – but not necessarily. They could become super-
intelligent while still having zero consciousness.
At our present state of knowledge, we cannot rule out any of these options.
Yet precisely because we know so little about consciousness, it seems unlikely
that we could program conscious computers any time soon. Hence despite the
immense power of artificial intelligence, for the foreseeable future its usage will
continue to depend to some extent on human consciousness.

The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in
developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of
computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans. We are
unlikely to face a robot rebellion in the coming decades, but we might have to
deal with hordes of bots who know how to press our emotional buttons better
than our mother, and use this uncanny ability to try and sell us something – be it
a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots could identify our deepest
fears, hatreds and cravings, and use these inner leverages against us. We have
already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across
the world, when hackers have learned how to manipulate individual voters by
analysing data about them and exploiting their existing prejudices. While33
science-fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in

reality we might be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.
To avoid such outcomes, for every dollar and every minute we invest in
improving artificial intelligence, it would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute
in advancing human consciousness. Unfortunately, at present we are not doing
much to research and develop human consciousness. We are researching and
developing human abilities mainly according to the immediate needs of the
economic and political system, rather than according to our own long-term needs
as conscious beings. My boss wants me to answer emails as quickly as possible,
but he has little interest in my ability to taste and appreciate the food I am eating.
Consequently, I check my emails even during meals, while losing the ability to
pay attention to my own sensations. The economic system pressures me to
expand and diversify my investment portfolio, but it gives me zero incentives to
expand and diversify my compassion. So I strive to understand the mysteries of
the stock exchange, while making far less effort to understand the deep causes of
suffering.
In this, humans are similar to other domesticated animals. We have bred
docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk, but are otherwise far
inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious and less
resourceful. We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts
34
of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing

mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximise the human potential. Indeed
we have no idea what the full human potential is, because we know so little
about the human mind. And yet we hardly invest much in exploring the human
mind, and instead focus on increasing the speed of our Internet connections and
the efficiency of our Big Data algorithms. If we are not careful, we will end up
with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on
themselves and on the world.

Digital dictatorships are not the only danger awaiting us. Alongside liberty,
the liberal order has also set great store by the value of equality. Liberalism
always cherished political equality, and it gradually came to realise that
economic equality is almost as important. For without a social safety net and a
modicum of economic equality, liberty is meaningless. But just as Big Data
algorithms might extinguish liberty, they might simultaneously create the most
unequal societies that ever existed. All wealth and power might be concentrated
in the hands of a tiny elite, while most people will suffer not from exploitation,
but from something far worse – irrelevance.

4
EQUALITY
Those who own the data own the future
In the last few decades, people all over the world were told that humankind is on
the path to equality, and that globalisation and new technologies will help us get
there sooner. In reality, the twenty-first century might create the most unequal
societies in history. Though globalisation and the Internet bridge the gap
between countries, they threaten to enlarge the rift between classes, and just as
humankind seems about to achieve global unification, the species itself might
divide into different biological castes.
Inequality goes back to the Stone Age. Thirty thousand years ago, hunter-
gatherer bands buried some members in sumptuous graves replete with
thousands of ivory beads, bracelets, jewels and art objects, while other members
had to settle for a bare hole in the ground. Nevertheless, ancient hunter-gatherer
bands were still more egalitarian than any subsequent human society, because
they had very little property. Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.
Following the Agricultural Revolution, property multiplied and with it
inequality. As humans gained ownership of land, animals, plants and tools, rigid
hierarchical societies emerged, in which small elites monopolised most wealth
and power for generation after generation. Humans came to accept this
arrangement as natural and even divinely ordained. Hierarchy was not just the
norm, but also the ideal. How can there be order without a clear hierarchy
between aristocrats and commoners, between men and women, or between
parents and children? Priests, philosophers and poets all over the world patiently
explained that just as in the human body not all members are equal – the feet
must obey the head – so also in human society equality will bring nothing but
chaos.
In the late modern era, however, equality became an ideal in almost all human
societies. It was partly due to the rise of the new ideologies of communism and
liberalism. But it was also due to the Industrial Revolution, which made the
masses more important than ever before. Industrial economies relied on masses
of common workers, while industrial armies relied on masses of common

soldiers. Governments in both democracies and dictatorships invested heavily in
the health, education and welfare of the masses, because they needed millions of
healthy labourers to operate the production lines and millions of loyal soldiers to
fight in the trenches.
Consequently, the history of the twentieth century revolved to a large extent
around the reduction of inequality between classes, races and genders. Though
the world of the year 2000 still had its share of hierarchies, it was nevertheless a
far more equal place than the world of 1900. In the first years of the twenty-first
century people expected that the egalitarian process would continue and even
accelerate. In particular, they hoped that globalisation would spread economic
prosperity throughout the world, and that as a result people in India and Egypt
will come to enjoy the same opportunities and privileges as people in Finland
and Canada. An entire generation grew up on this promise.
Now it seems that this promise might not be fulfilled. Globalisation has
certainly benefited large segments of humanity, but there are signs of growing
inequality both between and within societies. Some groups increasingly
monopolise the fruits of globalisation, while billions are left behind. Already
today, the richest 1 per cent owns half the world’s wealth. Even more alarmingly,
the richest hundred people together own more than the poorest 4 billion. 1
This could get far worse. As explained in earlier chapters, the rise of AI might
eliminate the economic value and political power of most humans. At the same
time, improvements in biotechnology might make it possible to translate
economic inequality into biological inequality. The super-rich will finally have
something really worthwhile to do with their stupendous wealth. While hitherto
they could buy little more than status symbols, soon they might be able to buy
life itself. If new treatments for extending life and for upgrading physical and
cognitive abilities prove to be expensive, humankind might split into biological
castes.
Throughout history the rich and the aristocracy always imagined that they had
superior skills to everybody else, which is why they were in control. As far as
we can tell, this wasn’t true. The average duke wasn’t more talented than the
average peasant – he owed his superiority only to unjust legal and economic
discrimination. However, by 2100 the rich might really be more talented, more
creative and more intelligent than the slum-dwellers. Once a real gap in ability
opens between the rich and the poor, it will become almost impossible to close it.
If the rich use their superior abilities to enrich themselves further, and if more
money can buy them enhanced bodies and brains, with time the gap will only
widen. By 2100, the richest 1 per cent might own not merely most of the world’s
wealth, but also most of the world’s beauty, creativity and health.

The two processes together – bioengineering coupled with the rise of AI –
might therefore result in the separation of humankind into a small class of
superhumans and a massive underclass of useless Homo sapiens. To make an
already ominous situation even worse, as the masses lose their economic
importance and political power, the state might lose at least some of the
incentive to invest in their health, education and welfare. It’s very dangerous to
be redundant. The future of the masses will then depend on the goodwill of a
small elite. Maybe there is goodwill for a few decades. But in a time of crisis –
like climate catastrophe – it would be very tempting and easy to toss the
superfluous people overboard.
In countries such as France and New Zealand, with a long tradition of liberal
beliefs and welfare-state practices, perhaps the elite will go on taking care of the
masses even when it doesn’t need them. In the more capitalist USA, however,
the elite might use the first opportunity to dismantle what’s left of the American
welfare state. An even bigger problem looms in large developing countries like
India, China, South Africa and Brazil. There, once common people lose their
economic value, inequality might skyrocket.
Consequently, instead of globalisation resulting in global unity, it might
actually result in ‘speciation’: the divergence of humankind into different
biological castes or even different species. Globalisation will unite the world
horizontally by erasing national borders, but it will simultaneously divide
humanity vertically. Ruling oligarchies in countries as diverse as the United
States and Russia might merge and make common cause against the mass of
ordinary Sapiens. From this perspective, current populist resentment of ‘the
elites’ is well founded. If we are not careful, the grandchildren of Silicon Valley
tycoons and Moscow billionaires might become a superior species to the
grandchildren of Appalachian hillbillies and Siberian villagers.
In the long run, such a scenario might even de-globalise the world, as the
upper caste congregates inside a self-proclaimed ‘civilisation’ and builds walls
and moats to separate it from the hordes of ‘barbarians’ outside. In the twentieth
century, industrial civilisation depended on the ‘barbarians’ for cheap labour, raw
materials and markets. Therefore it conquered and absorbed them. But in the
twenty-first century, a post-industrial civilisation relying on AI, bioengineering
and nanotechnology might be far more self-contained and self-sustaining. Not
just entire classes, but entire countries and continents might become irrelevant.
Fortifications guarded by drones and robots might separate the self-proclaimed
civilised zone, where cyborgs fight one another with logic bombs, from the
barbarian lands where feral humans fight one another with machetes and
Kalashnikovs.

Throughout this book, I often use the first person plural to speak about the
future of humankind. I talk about what ‘we’ need to do about ‘our’ problems. But
maybe there are no ‘we’. Maybe one of ‘our’ biggest problems is that different
human groups have completely different futures. Maybe in some parts of the
world you should teach your kids to write computer code, while in others you
had better teach them to draw fast and shoot straight.
Who owns the data?
If we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a
small elite, the key is to regulate the ownership of data. In ancient times land
was the most important asset in the world, politics was a struggle to control land,
and if too much land became concentrated in too few hands – society split into
aristocrats and commoners. In the modern era machines and factories became
more important than land, and political struggles focused on controlling these
vital means of production. If too many of the machines became concentrated in
too few hands – society split into capitalists and proletarians. In the twenty-first
century, however, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most
important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data
becomes concentrated in too few hands – humankind will split into different
species.
The race to obtain the data is already on, headed by data-giants such as
Google, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these giants seem to have
adopted the business model of ‘attention merchants’. They capture our attention
2
by providing us with free information, services and entertainment, and they then
resell our attention to advertisers. Yet the data-giants probably aim far higher
than any previous attention merchant. Their true business isn’t to sell
advertisements at all. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to
accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which is worth more than any
advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers – we are their product.
In the medium term, this data hoard opens a path to a radically different
business model whose first victim will be the advertising industry itself. The
new model is based on transferring authority from humans to algorithms,
including the authority to choose and buy things. Once algorithms choose and
buy things for us, the traditional advertising industry will go bust. Consider
Google. Google wants to reach a point where we can ask it anything, and get the
best answer in the world. What will happen once we can ask Google, ‘Hi

Google, based on everything you know about cars, and based on everything you
know about me (including my needs, my habits, my views on global warming,
and even my opinions about Middle Eastern politics) – what is the best car for
me?’ If Google can give us a good answer to that, and if we learn by experience
to trust Google’s wisdom instead of our own easily manipulated feelings, what
could possibly be the use of car advertisements? 3
In the longer term, by bringing together enough data and enough computing
power, the data-giants could hack the deepest secrets of life, and then use this
knowledge not just to make choices for us or manipulate us, but also to re-
engineer organic life and to create inorganic life forms. Selling advertisements
may be necessary to sustain the giants in the short term, but they often evaluate
apps, products and companies according to the data they harvest rather than
according to the money they generate. A popular app may lack a business model
and may even lose money in the short term, but as long as it sucks data, it could
be worth billions. Even if you don’t know how to cash in on the data today, it is
4
worth having it because it might hold the key to controlling and shaping life in
the future. I don’t know for certain that the data-giants explicitly think about it in
such terms, but their actions indicate that they value the accumulation of data
more than mere dollars and cents.
Ordinary humans will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present,
people are happy to give away their most valuable asset – their personal data – in
exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It is a bit like African and
Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European
imperialists in exchange for colourful beads and cheap trinkets. If, later on,
ordinary people decide to try and block the flow of data, they might find it
increasingly difficult, especially as they might come to rely on the network for
all their decisions, and even for their healthcare and physical survival.
Humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be
able to survive at all if they are disconnected from the network. They will be
connected from the womb, and if later in life you choose to disconnect,
insurance agencies might refuse to insure you, employers might refuse to employ
you, and healthcare services might refuse to take care of you. In the big battle
between health and privacy, health is likely to win hands down.
As more and more data flows from your body and brain to the smart machines
via the biometric sensors, it will become easy for corporations and government
agencies to know you, manipulate you, and make decisions on your behalf. Even
more importantly, they could decipher the deep mechanisms of all bodies and
brains, and thereby gain the power to engineer life. If we want to prevent a small
elite from monopolising such godlike powers, and if we want to prevent

humankind from splitting into biological castes, the key question is: who owns
the data? Does the data about my DNA, my brain and my life belong to me, to
the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?
Mandating governments to nationalise the data will probably curb the power
of big corporations, but it may also result in creepy digital dictatorships.
Politicians are a bit like musicians, and the instrument they play on is the human
emotional and biochemical system. They give a speech – and there is a wave of
fear in the country. They tweet – and there is an explosion of hatred. I don’t
think we should give these musicians a more sophisticated instrument to play on.
Once politicians can press our emotional buttons directly, generating anxiety,
hatred, joy and boredom at will, politics will become a mere emotional circus.
As much as we should fear the power of big corporations, history suggests that
we are not necessarily better off in the hands of over-mighty governments. As of
March 2018, I would prefer to give my data to Mark Zuckerberg than to
Vladimir Putin (though the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that perhaps
there isn’t much of a choice here, as any data entrusted to Zuckerberg may well
find its way to Putin).
Private ownership of one’s own data may sound more attractive than either of
these options, but it is unclear what it actually means. We have had thousands of
years of experience in regulating the ownership of land. We know how to build a
fence around a field, place a guard at the gate, and control who can go in. Over
the past two centuries we have become extremely sophisticated in regulating the
ownership of industry – thus today I can own a piece of General Motors and a bit
of Toyota by buying their shares. But we don’t have much experience in
regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task,
because unlike land and machines, data is everywhere and nowhere at the same
time, it can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of it as
you want.
So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers and even
poets to turn their attention to this conundrum: how do you regulate the
ownership of data? This may well be the most important political question of our
era. If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might
collapse. People are already sensing the coming cataclysm. Perhaps this is why
citizens all over the world are losing faith in the liberal story, which just a decade
ago seemed irresistible.
How, then, do we go forward from here, and how do we cope with the
immense challenges of the biotech and infotech revolutions? Perhaps the very
same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place
could engineer some technological solution? For example, might networked

algorithms form the scaffolding for a global human community that could
collectively own all the data and oversee the future development of life? As
global inequality rises and social tensions increase around the world, perhaps
Mark Zuckerberg could call upon his 2 billion friends to join forces and do
something together?

6
CIVILISATION
There is just one civilisation in the world
While Mark Zuckerberg dreams of uniting humankind online, recent events in

the offline world seem to breathe fresh life into the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis.
Many pundits, politicians and ordinary citizens believe that the Syrian civil war,
the rise of the Islamic State, the Brexit mayhem and the instability of the
European Union all result from a clash between ‘Western Civilisation’ and
‘Islamic Civilisation’. Western attempts to impose democracy and human rights
on Muslim nations resulted in a violent Islamic backlash, and a wave of Muslim
immigration coupled with Islamic terrorist attacks caused European voters to
abandon multicultural dreams in favour of xenophobic local identities.
According to this thesis, humankind has always been divided into diverse
civilisations whose members view the world in irreconcilable ways. These
incompatible world views make conflicts between civilisations inevitable. Just as
in nature different species fight for survival according to the remorseless laws of
natural selection, so throughout history civilisations have repeatedly clashed and
only the fittest have survived to tell the tale. Those who overlook this grim fact –
be they liberal politicians or head-in-the-clouds engineers – do so at their peril. 1
The ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis has far-reaching political implications. Its

supporters contend that any attempt to reconcile ‘the West’ with ‘the Muslim
world’ is doomed to failure. Muslim countries will never adopt Western values,
and Western countries could never successfully absorb Muslim minorities.
Accordingly, the USA should not admit immigrants from Syria or Iraq, and the
European Union should renounce its multicultural fallacy in favour of an
unabashed Western identity. In the long run, only one civilisation can survive the
unforgiving tests of natural selection, and if the bureaucrats in Brussels refuse to
save the West from the Islamic peril, then Britain, Denmark or France had better
go it alone.
Though widely held, this thesis is misleading. Islamic fundamentalism may
indeed pose a radical challenge, but the ‘civilisation’ it challenges is a global
civilisation rather than a uniquely Western phenomenon. Not for nothing has the

Islamic State managed to unite against it Iran and the United States. And even
Islamic fundamentalists, for all their medieval fantasies, are grounded in
contemporary global culture far more than in seventh-century Arabia. They are
catering to the fears and hopes of alienated modern youth rather than to those of
medieval peasants and merchants. As Pankaj Mishra and Christopher de
Bellaigue have convincingly argued, radical Islamists have been influenced by
Marx and Foucault as much as by Muhammad, and they inherit the legacy of
nineteenth-century European anarchists as much as of the Umayyad and Abbasid
caliphs. It is therefore more accurate to see even the Islamic State as an errant
2
offshoot of the global culture we all share, rather than as a branch of some
mysterious alien tree.
More importantly, the analogy between history and biology that underpins the
‘clash of civilisations’ thesis is false. Human groups – all the way from small
tribes to huge civilisations – are fundamentally different from animal species,
and historical conflicts greatly differ from natural selection processes. Animal
species have objective identities that endure for thousands upon thousands of
generations. Whether you are a chimpanzee or a gorilla depends on your genes
rather than your beliefs, and different genes dictate distinct social behaviours.
Chimpanzees live in mixed groups of males and females. They compete for
power by building coalitions of supporters from among both sexes. Amid
gorillas, in contrast, a single dominant male establishes a harem of females, and
usually expels any adult male that might challenge his position. Chimpanzees
cannot adopt gorilla-like social arrangements; gorillas cannot start organising
themselves like chimpanzees; and as far as we know exactly the same social
systems have characterised chimpanzees and gorillas not only in recent decades,
but for hundreds of thousands of years.
You find nothing like that among humans. Yes, human groups may have
distinct social systems, but these are not genetically determined, and they seldom
endure for more than a few centuries. Think of twentieth-century Germans, for
example. In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six
very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the
Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany),
the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic
reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of
beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes
them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II
to Angela Merkel? And if you do come up with something, was it also there
1,000 years ago, or 5,000 years ago?

The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that
it draws inspiration ‘from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of
Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and
inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the
rule of law’. This may easily give one the impression that European civilisation
3
is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality and freedom.

Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian
democracy to the present-day EU, celebrating 2,500 years of European freedom
and democracy. This is reminiscent of the proverbial blind man who takes hold
of an elephant’s tail and concludes that an elephant is a kind of brush. Yes,
democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were
never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a half-
hearted experiment that survived for barely 200 years in a small corner of the
Balkans. If European civilisation for the past twenty-five centuries has been
defined by democracy and human rights, what are we to make of Sparta and
Julius Caesar, of the Crusaders and the conquistadores, of the Inquisition and the
slave trade, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, of Hitler and Stalin? Were they all
intruders from some foreign civilisation?
In truth, European civilisation is anything Europeans make of it, just as
Christianity is anything Christians make of it, Islam is anything Muslims make
of it, and Judaism is anything Jews make of it. And they have made of it
remarkably different things over the centuries. Human groups are defined more
by the changes they undergo than by any continuity, but they nevertheless
manage to create for themselves ancient identities thanks to their storytelling
skills. No matter what revolutions they experience, they can usually weave old
and new into a single yarn.
Even an individual may knit revolutionary personal changes into a coherent
and powerful life story: ‘I am that person who was once a socialist, but then
became a capitalist; I was born in France, and now live in the USA; I was
married, and then got divorced; I had cancer, and then got well again.’ Similarly
a human group such as the Germans may come to define itself by the very
changes it underwent: ‘Once we were Nazis, but we have learnt our lesson, and
now we are peaceful democrats.’ You don’t need to look for some unique
German essence that manifested itself first in Wilhelm II, then in Hitler, and
finally in Merkel. These radical transformations are precisely what define
German identity. To be German in 2018 means to grapple with the difficult
legacy of Nazism while upholding liberal and democratic values. Who knows
what it will mean in 2050.

People often refuse to see these changes, especially when it comes to core
political and religious values. We insist that our values are a precious legacy
from ancient ancestors. Yet the only thing that allows us to say this, is that our
ancestors are long dead, and cannot speak for themselves. Consider, for example,
Jewish attitudes towards women. Nowadays ultra-Orthodox Jews ban images of
women from the public sphere. Billboards and advertisements aimed at ultra-
Orthodox Jews usually depict only men and boys – never women and girls. 4
In 2011, a scandal erupted when the ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn paper Di

Tzeitung published a photo of American officials watching the raid on Osama
bin-Laden’s compound but digitally erased all women from the photo, including
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The paper explained it was forced to do so by
Jewish ‘laws of modesty’. A similar scandal erupted when HaMevaser paper
expunged Angela Merkel from a photo of a demonstration against the Charlie
Hebdo massacre, lest her image arouse any lustful thoughts in the minds of
devout readers. The publisher of a third ultra-Orthodox newspaper, Hamodia,
defended this policy by explaining that ‘We are backed by thousands of years of
Jewish tradition.’ 5
Nowhere is the ban on seeing women stricter than in the synagogue. In

Orthodox synagogues women are carefully segregated from the men, and must
confine themselves to a restricted zone where they are hidden behind a curtain,
so that no men will accidentally see the shape of a woman as he says his prayers
or reads scriptures. Yet if all this is backed by thousands of years of Jewish
tradition and immutable divine laws, how to explain the fact that when
archaeologists excavated ancient synagogues in Israel from the time of the
Mishnah and Talmud, they found no sign of gender segregation, and instead
uncovered beautiful floor mosaics and wall paintings depicting women, some of
them rather scantily dressed? The rabbis who wrote the Mishnah and Talmud
regularly prayed and studied in these synagogues, but present-day Orthodox
Jews would consider them blasphemous desecrations of ancient traditions. 6
Similar distortions of ancient traditions characterise all religions. The Islamic

State has boasted that it has reverted to the pure and original version of Islam,
but in truth, their take on Islam is brand new. Yes, they quote many venerable
texts, but they exercise a lot of discretion in choosing which texts to quote and
which to ignore, and in how to interpret them. Indeed, their do-it-yourself
attitude to interpreting the holy texts is itself very modern. Traditionally,
interpretation was the monopoly of the learned ulama – scholars who studied
Muslim law and theology in reputable institutions such as Cairo’s Al-Azhar. Few
of the Islamic State’s leaders have had such credentials, and most respected
ulama have dismissed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his ilk as ignorant criminals. 7

That does not mean that the Islamic State has been ‘un-Islamic’ or ‘anti-
Islamic’, as some people argue. It is particularly ironic when Christian leaders
such as Barack Obama have the temerity to tell self-professing Muslims such as
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi what it means to be Muslim. The heated argument about
8
the true essence of Islam is simply pointless. Islam has no fixed DNA. Islam is
whatever Muslims make of it. 9
Germans and gorillas
There is an even deeper difference distinguishing human groups from animal

species. Species often split, but they never merge. About 7 million years ago
chimpanzees and gorillas had common ancestors. This single ancestral species
split into two populations that eventually went their separate evolutionary ways.
Once this happened, there was no going back. Since individuals belonging to
different species cannot produce fertile offspring together, species can never
merge. Gorillas cannot merge with chimpanzees, giraffes cannot merge with
elephants, and dogs cannot merge with cats.
Human tribes, in contrast, tend to coalesce over time into larger and larger
groups. Modern Germans were created from the merger of Saxons, Prussians,
Swabians and Bavarians, who not so long ago wasted little love on one another.
Otto von Bismarck allegedly remarked (having read Darwin’s On the Origin of
Species) that the Bavarian is the missing link between the Austrian and the
human. The French were created from the merger of Franks, Normans, Bretons,
10
Gascons and Provençals. Meanwhile across the Channel, English, Scots, Welsh
and Irish were gradually welded together (willingly or not) to form Britons. In
the not too distant future, Germans, French and Britons might yet merge into
Europeans.
Mergers don’t always last, as people in London, Edinburgh and Brussels are
keenly aware these days. Brexit may well initiate the simultaneous unravelling
of both the UK and the EU. But in the long run, history’s direction is clear-cut.
Ten thousand years ago humankind was divided into countless isolated tribes.
With each passing millennium, these fused into larger and larger groups, creating
fewer and fewer distinct civilisations. In recent generations the few remaining
civilisations have been blending into a single global civilisation. Political, ethnic,
cultural and economic divisions endure, but they do not undermine the
fundamental unity. Indeed, some divisions are made possible only by an
overarching common structure. In the economy, for example, division of labour

cannot succeed unless everyone shares a single market. One country cannot
specialise in producing cars or oil unless it can buy food from other countries
that grow wheat and rice.
The process of human unification has taken two distinct forms: establishing
links between distinct groups, and homogenising practices across groups. Links
may be formed even between groups that continue to behave very differently.
Indeed, links may form even between sworn enemies. War itself can generate
some of the strongest of all human bonds. Historians often argue that
globalisation reached a first peak in 1913, then went into a long decline during
the era of the world wars and the Cold War, and recuperated only after 1989.11
This may be true of economic globalisation, but it ignores the different but
equally important dynamic of military globalisation. War spreads ideas,
technologies and people far more quickly than commerce. In 1918 the United
States was more closely linked to Europe than in 1913, the two then drifted apart
in the interwar years, only to have their fates meshed together inextricably by the
Second World War and the Cold War.
War also makes people far more interested in one another. Never had the US
been more closely in touch with Russia than during the Cold War, when every
cough in a Moscow corridor sent people scrambling up and down Washington
staircases. People care far more about their enemies than about their trade
partners. For every American film about Taiwan, there are probably fifty about
Vietnam.
The Medieval Olympics
The world of the early twenty-first century has gone way beyond forming links
between different groups. People across the globe are not only in touch with one
another, they increasingly share identical beliefs and practices. A thousand years
ago, planet Earth provided fertile ground to dozens of different political models.
In Europe you could find feudal principalities vying with independent city states
and minuscule theocracies. The Muslim world had its caliphate, claiming
universal sovereignty, but also experimented with kingdoms, sultanates and
emirates. The Chinese empires believed themselves to be the sole legitimate
political entity, while to the north and west tribal confederacies fought each other
with glee. India and South East Asia contained a kaleidoscope of regimes,
whereas polities in America, Africa and Australasia ranged from tiny hunter-
gatherer bands to sprawling empires. No wonder that even neighbouring human

groups had trouble agreeing on common diplomatic procedures, not to mention
international laws. Each society had its own political paradigm, and found it
difficult to understand and respect alien political concepts.
Today, in contrast, a single political paradigm is accepted everywhere. The
planet is divided between about 200 sovereign states, which generally agree on
the same diplomatic protocols and on common international laws. Sweden,
Nigeria, Thailand and Brazil are all marked on our atlases as the same kind of
colourful shapes; they are all members of the UN; and despite myriad
differences they are all recognised as sovereign states enjoying similar rights and
privileges. Indeed, they share many more political ideas and practices, including
at least a token belief in representative bodies, political parties, universal
suffrage and human rights. There are parliaments in Tehran, Moscow, Cape
Town and New Delhi as well as in London and Paris. When Israelis and
Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians, Kurds and Turks compete for the favours
of global public opinion, they all use the same discourse of human rights, state
sovereignty and international law.
The world may be peppered with various types of ‘failed states’, but it knows
only one paradigm for a successful state. Global politics thus follows the Anna
Karenina principle: successful states are all alike, but every failed state fails in
its own way, by missing this or that ingredient of the dominant political package.
The Islamic State has recently stood out in its complete rejection of this package,
and in its attempt to establish an entirely different kind of political entity – a
universal caliphate. But precisely for this reason it has failed. Numerous
guerrilla forces and terror organisations have managed to establish new countries
or to conquer existing ones. But they have always done so by accepting the
fundamental principles of the global political order. Even the Taliban sought
international recognition as the legitimate government of the sovereign country
of Afghanistan. No group rejecting the principles of global politics has so far
gained any lasting control of any significant territory.
The strength of the global political paradigm can perhaps best be appreciated
by considering not hardcore political questions of war and diplomacy, but rather
something like the 2016 Rio Olympics. Take a moment to reflect on the way the
Games were organised. The 11,000 athletes were grouped into delegations by
nationality rather than by religion, class or language. There was no Buddhist
delegation, proletarian delegation, or English-speaking delegation. Except in a
handful of cases – most notably Taiwan and Palestine – determining the athletes’
nationality was a straightforward affair.
At the opening ceremony on 5 August 2016 the athletes marched in groups,
each group waving its national flag. Whenever Michael Phelps won another gold

medal, the Stars and Stripes was raised to the sound of the ‘Star-Spangled
Banner’. When Emilie Andéol won the gold medal in judo, the French tricolour
was hoisted and the ‘Marseillaise’ was played.
Conveniently enough, each country in the world has an anthem that conforms
to the same universal model. Almost all anthems are orchestral pieces of a few
minutes in length, rather than a twenty-minute chant that may only be performed
by a special caste of hereditary priests. Even countries such as Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan and Congo have adopted Western musical conventions for their
anthems. Most of them sound like something composed by Beethoven on a
rather mediocre day. (You can spend an evening with friends playing the various
anthems on YouTube and trying to guess which is which.) Even the lyrics are
almost the same throughout the world, indicating common conceptions of
politics and group loyalty. For example, to which nation do you think the
following anthem belongs? (I changed only the country’s name into the generic
‘My country’):
My country, my homeland,
The land where I have shed my blood,
It is there I stand,
To be my motherland’s guard.
My country, my nation,
My people and my homeland,
Let us proclaim
‘My country unite!’
Long live my land, long live my state,
My nation, my homeland, in its entirety.
Build its soul, awaken its body,
For my great country!
My great country, independent and free
My home and my country which I love.
My great country, independent and free,
Long live my great country!
The answer is Indonesia. But would you have been surprised if I told you that
the answer was actually Poland, Nigeria or Brazil?
National flags display the same dreary conformity. With a single exception, all
flags are rectangular pieces of cloth marked by an extremely limited repertoire of
colours, stripes and geometrical shapes. Nepal is the odd country out, with a flag
consisting of two triangles. (But it has never won an Olympic medal.) The

Indonesian flag consists of a red stripe above a white stripe. The Polish flag
displays a white stripe above a red stripe. The flag of Monaco is identical to that
of Indonesia. A colour-blind person could hardly tell the difference between the
flags of Belgium, Chad, Ivory Coast, France, Guinea, Ireland, Italy, Mali and
Romania – they all have three vertical stripes of various colours.
Some of these countries have been engaged in bitter war with one another, but
during the tumultuous twentieth century only three Games were cancelled due to
war (in 1916, 1940 and 1944). In 1980 the USA and some of its allies boycotted
the Moscow Olympics, in 1984 the Soviet bloc boycotted the Los Angeles
Games, and on several other occasions the Olympics found themselves at the
centre of a political storm (most notably in 1936, when Nazi Berlin hosted the
Games, and in 1972, when Palestinian terrorists massacred the Israeli delegation
to the Munich Olympics). Yet on the whole, political controversies have not
derailed the Olympic project.
Now let’s go back 1,000 years. Suppose you wanted to hold the Medieval
Olympic Games in Rio in 1016. Forget for a moment that Rio was then a small
village of Tupi Indians, and that Asians, Africans and Europeans were not even
12
aware of America’s existence. Forget the logistical problems of bringing all the
world’s top athletes to Rio in the absence of airplanes. Forget too that few sports
were shared throughout the world, and even if all humans could run, not
everybody could agree on the same rules for a running competition. Just ask
yourself how to group the competing delegations. Today’s International Olympic
Committee spends countless hours discussing the Taiwan question and the
Palestine question. Multiply this by 10,000 to estimate the number of hours you
would have to spend on the politics of the Medieval Olympics.
For starters, in 1016 the Chinese Song Empire recognised no political entity
on earth as its equal. It would therefore be an unthinkable humiliation to give its
Olympic delegation the same status as that granted to the delegations of the
Korean kingdom of Koryo or of the Vietnamese kingdom of Dai Co Viet – not to
mention the delegations of primitive barbarians from across the seas.
The caliph in Baghdad also claimed universal hegemony, and most Sunni
Muslims recognised him as their supreme leader. In practical terms, however, the
caliph barely ruled the city of Baghdad. So would all Sunni athletes be part of a
single caliphate delegation, or would they be separated into dozens of
delegations from the numerous emirates and sultanates of the Sunni world? But
why stop with the emirates and sultanates? The Arabian Desert was teaming
with free Bedouin tribes, who recognised no overlord save Allah. Would each be
entitled to send an independent delegation to compete in archery or camel
racing? Europe would give you any number of similar headaches. Would an

athlete from the Norman town of Ivry compete under the banner of the local
Count of Ivry, of his lord the Duke of Normandy, or perhaps of the feeble King
of France?
Many of these political entities appeared and disappeared within a matter of
years. As you made your preparations for the 1016 Olympics, you could not
know in advance which delegations would show up, because nobody could be
sure which political entities would still exist next year. If the kingdom of
England had sent a delegation to the 1016 Olympics, by the time the athletes
came home with their medals they would have discovered that the Danes had
just captured London, and that England was being absorbed into the North Sea
Empire of King Cnut the Great, together with Denmark, Norway and parts of
Sweden. Within another twenty years, that empire disintegrated, but thirty years
later England was conquered again, by the Duke of Normandy.
Needless to say, the vast majority of these ephemeral political entities had
neither anthem to play nor flag to hoist. Political symbols were of great
importance, of course, but the symbolic language of European politics was very
different from the symbolic languages of Indonesian, Chinese or Tupi politics.
Agreeing on a common protocol to mark victory would have been well-nigh
impossible.
So when you watch the Tokyo Games in 2020, remember that this seeming
competition between nations actually represents an astonishing global
agreement. For all the national pride people feel when their delegation wins a
gold medal and their flag is raised, there is far greater reason to feel pride that
humankind is capable of organising such an event.
One dollar to rule them all
In premodern times humans have experimented not only with diverse political
systems, but also with a mind-boggling variety of economic models. Russian
boyars, Hindu maharajas, Chinese mandarins and Amerindian tribal chiefs had
very different ideas about money, trade, taxation and employment. Nowadays, in
contrast, almost everybody believes in slightly different variations on the same
capitalist theme, and we are all cogs within a single global production line.
Whether you live in Congo or Mongolia, in New Zealand or Bolivia, your daily
routines and economic fortunes depend on the same economic theories, the same
corporations and banks, and the same currents of capital. If the finance ministers

of Israel and Iran were to meet for lunch, they would have a common economic
language, and could easily understand and sympathise with each other’s woes.
When the Islamic State conquered large parts of Syria and Iraq, it murdered
tens of thousands of people, demolished archaeological sites, toppled statues,
and systematically destroyed the symbols of previous regimes and of Western
cultural influence. But when its fighters entered the local banks and found there
13
stashes of American dollars covered with the faces of American presidents and
with slogans in English praising American political and religious ideals – they
did not burn these symbols of American imperialism. For the dollar bill is
universally venerated across all political and religious divides. Though it has no
intrinsic value – you cannot eat or drink a dollar bill – trust in the dollar and in
the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic
fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords and North Korean tyrants.
Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it
comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a
thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the
resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry, and that in
order to regain your health, you should donate something to the church, make a
pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness.
Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you,
and that she could cast the demon out using song, dance and the blood of a black
cockerel.
In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain
that your four bodily humours were out of balance, and you should harmonise
them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts
would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily
elements known as doshas, and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages and
yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors,
Amerindian medicine men – every empire, kingdom and tribe had its own
traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and
the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals,
concoctions and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others
were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European,
Chinese, African and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a
third of children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy
was far below fifty. 14
Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live.
In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking
hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same

scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical
protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then
dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug
companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian,
Japanese, Iranian and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the
human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and
Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to
Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services
there. Presumably, even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is
15
made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill
bacteria.
And what makes up these cells and bacteria? Indeed, what makes up the entire
world? A thousand years ago every culture had its own story about the universe,
and about the fundamental ingredients of the cosmic soup. Today, learned people
throughout the world believe exactly the same things about matter, energy, time
and space. Take for example the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programmes.
The whole problem is that the Iranians and North Koreans have exactly the same
view of physics as the Israelis and Americans. If the Iranians and North Koreans
believed that E = mc⁴, Israel and the USA would not care an iota about their
nuclear programmes.
People still have different religions and national identities. But when it comes
to the practical stuff – how to build a state, an economy, a hospital, or a bomb –
almost all of us belong to the same civilisation. There are disagreements, no
doubt, but then all civilisations have their internal disputes. Indeed, they are
defined by these disputes. When trying to outline their identity, people often
make a grocery list of common traits. That’s a mistake. They would fare much
better if they made a list of common conflicts and dilemmas. For example, in
1618 Europe didn’t have a single religious identity – it was defined by religious
conflict. To be a European in 1618 meant to obsess about tiny doctrinal
differences between Catholics and Protestants or between Calvinists and
Lutherans, and to be willing to kill and be killed because of these differences. If
a human being in 1618 did not care about these conflicts, that person was
perhaps a Turk or a Hindu, but definitely not a European.
Similarly in 1940 Britain and Germany had very different political values, yet
they were both part and parcel of ‘European Civilisation’. Hitler wasn’t less
European than Churchill. Rather, the very struggle between them defined what it
meant to be European at that particular juncture in history. In contrast, a !Kung
hunter-gatherer in 1940 wasn’t European because the internal European clash
about race and empire would have made little sense to him.

The people we fight most often are our own family members. Identity is
defined by conflicts and dilemmas more than by agreements. What does it mean
to be European in 2018? It doesn’t mean to have white skin, to believe in Jesus
Christ, or to uphold liberty. Rather, it means to argue vehemently about
immigration, about the EU, and about the limits of capitalism. It also means to
obsessively ask yourself ‘what defines my identity?’ and to worry about an
ageing population, about rampant consumerism and about global warming. In
their conflicts and dilemmas, twenty-first-century Europeans are different from
their ancestors in 1618 and 1940, but are increasingly similar to their Chinese
and Indian trade partners.
Whatever changes await us in the future, they are likely to involve a fraternal
struggle within a single civilisation rather than a clash between alien
civilisations. The big challenges of the twenty-first century will be global in
nature. What will happen when climate change triggers ecological catastrophes?
What will happen when computers outperform humans in more and more tasks,
and replace them in an increasing number of jobs? What will happen when
biotechnology enables us to upgrade humans and extend lifespans? No doubt, we
will have huge arguments and bitter conflicts over these questions. But these
arguments and conflicts are unlikely to isolate us from one another. Just the
opposite. They will make us ever more interdependent. Though humankind is
very far from constituting a harmonious community, we are all members of a
single rowdy global civilisation.
How, then, to explain the nationalistic wave sweeping over much of the
world? Perhaps in our enthusiasm for globalisation, we have been too quick to
dismiss the good old nations? Might a return to traditional nationalism be the
solution to our desperate global crises? If globalisation brings with it so many
problems – why not just abandon it?

7
NATIONALISM
Global problems need global answers
Given that the whole of humankind now constitutes a single civilisation, with all
people sharing common challenges and opportunities, why do Britons,
Americans, Russians and numerous other groups turn towards nationalistic
isolation? Does a return to nationalism offer real solutions to the unprecedented
problems of our global world, or is it an escapist indulgence that may doom
humankind and the entire biosphere to disaster?
In order to answer this question, we should first dispel a widespread myth.
Contrary to common wisdom, nationalism is not a natural and eternal part of the
human psyche, and it is not rooted in human biology. True, humans are social
animals through and through, with group loyalty imprinted in their genes.
However, for hundreds of thousands of years Homo sapiens and its hominid
ancestors lived in small intimate communities numbering no more than a few
dozen people. Humans easily develop loyalty to small intimate groups such as a
tribe, an infantry company or a family business, but it is hardly natural for
humans to be loyal to millions of utter strangers. Such mass loyalties have
appeared only in the last few thousand years – yesterday morning, in
evolutionary terms – and they require immense efforts of social construction.
People went to the trouble of constructing national collectives because they
confronted challenges that could not be solved by any single tribe. Take, for
example, the ancient tribes that lived along the Nile River thousands of years
ago. The river was their lifeblood. It watered their fields and carried their
commerce. But it was an unpredictable ally. Too little rain – and people starved
to death; too much rain – and the river overflowed its banks and destroyed entire
villages. No tribe could solve this problem by itself, because each tribe
commanded only a small section of the river and could mobilise no more than a
few hundred labourers. Only a common effort to build huge dams and dig
hundreds of kilometres of canals could hope to restrain and harness the mighty
river. This was one of the reasons why the tribes gradually coalesced into a
single nation that had the power to build dams and canals, regulate the flow of

the river, build grain reserves for lean years, and establish a countrywide system
of transport and communication.
Despite such advantages, transforming tribes and clans into a single nation
was never easy, either in ancient times or today. To realise how difficult it is to
identify with such a nation, you just need to ask yourself ‘Do I know these
people?’ I can name my two sisters and eleven cousins and spend a whole day
talking about their personalities, quirks and relationships. I cannot name the 8
million people who share my Israeli citizenship, I have never met most of them,
and I am very unlikely ever to meet them in the future. My ability to
nevertheless feel loyal to this nebulous mass is not a legacy from my hunter-
gatherer ancestors, but a miracle of recent history. A Martian biologist familiar
only with the anatomy and evolution of Homo sapiens could never guess that
these apes are capable of developing communal bonds with millions of strangers.
In order to convince me to be loyal to ‘Israel’ and its 8 million inhabitants, the
Zionist movement and the Israeli state had to create a mammoth apparatus of
education, propaganda and flag waving, as well as national systems of security,
health and welfare.
That does not mean there is anything wrong with national bonds. Huge
systems cannot function without mass loyalties, and expanding the circle of
human empathy certainly has its merits. The milder forms of patriotism have
been among the most benevolent of human creations. Believing that my nation is
unique, that it deserves my allegiance, and that I have special obligations
towards its members inspires me to care about others and make sacrifices on
their behalf. It is a dangerous mistake to imagine that without nationalism we
would all be living in a liberal paradise. More likely, we would be living in tribal
chaos. Peaceful, prosperous and liberal countries such as Sweden, Germany and
Switzerland all enjoy a strong sense of nationalism. The list of countries lacking
robust national bonds includes Afghanistan, Somalia, Congo and most other
failed states.1
The problem starts when benign patriotism morphs into chauvinistic ultra-
nationalism. Instead of believing that my nation is unique – which is true of all
nations – I might begin feeling that my nation is supreme, that I owe it my entire
loyalty, and that I have no significant obligations to anyone else. This is fertile
ground for violent conflicts. For generations the most basic criticism of
nationalism was that it led to war. Yet the link between nationalism and violence
hardly curbed nationalist excesses, particularly as each nation justified its own
military expansion by the need to protect itself against the machinations of its
neighbours. As long as the nation provided most of its citizens with
unprecedented levels of security and prosperity, they were willing to pay the

price in blood. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century the
nationalist deal still looked very attractive. Though nationalism was leading to
horrendous conflicts on an unprecedented scale, modern nation states also built
massive systems of healthcare, education and welfare. National health services
made Passchendaele and Verdun seem worthwhile.
Everything changed in 1945. The invention of nuclear weapons sharply tilted
the balance of the nationalist deal. After Hiroshima people no longer feared that
nationalism would lead to mere war – they began fearing it would lead to
nuclear war. Total annihilation has a way of sharpening people’s minds, and
thanks in no small measure to the atom bomb, the impossible happened and the
nationalist genie was squeezed at least halfway back into its bottle. Just as the
ancient villagers of the Nile Basin redirected some of their loyalty from local
clans to a much bigger kingdom that was able to restrain the dangerous river, so
in the nuclear age a global community gradually developed over and above the
various nations, because only such a community could restrain the nuclear
demon.
In the 1964 US presidential campaign, Lyndon B. Johnson aired the famous
Daisy advertisement, one of the most successful pieces of propaganda in the
annals of television. The advertisement opens with a little girl picking and
counting the petals of a daisy, but when she reaches ten, a metallic male voice
takes over, counting back from ten to zero as in a missile countdown. Upon
reaching zero, the bright flash of a nuclear explosion fills the screen, and
candidate Johnson addresses the American public and says: ‘These are the
stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the
dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.’ We tend to associate the
2
‘make love, not war’ slogan with the late 1960s counterculture, but in fact,
already in 1964 it was accepted wisdom even among hard-nosed politicians such
as Johnson.
Consequently, during the Cold War nationalism took a back seat to a more
global approach to international politics, and when the Cold War ended,
globalisation seemed to be the irresistible wave of the future. It was expected
that humankind would leave nationalistic politics completely behind, as a relic of
more primitive times that might appeal at most to the ill-informed inhabitants of
a few underdeveloped countries. Events in recent years proved, however, that
nationalism still has a powerful hold even on the citizens of Europe and the
USA, not to mention Russia, India and China. Alienated by the impersonal
forces of global capitalism, and fearing for the fate of national systems of health,
education and welfare, people all over the world seek reassurance and meaning
in the bosom of the nation.

Yet the question raised by Johnson in the Daisy advertisement is even more
pertinent today than it was in 1964. Will we make a world in which all humans
can live together, or will we all go into the dark? Do Donald Trump, Theresa
May, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and their colleagues save the world by
fanning our national sentiments, or is the current nationalist spate a form of
escapism from the intractable global problems we face?
The nuclear challenge
Let’s start with humankind’s familiar nemesis: nuclear war. When the Daisy
advertisement aired in 1964, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear
annihilation was a palpable threat. Pundits and laypeople alike feared that
humankind did not have the wisdom to avert destruction, and that it was only a
matter of time before the Cold War turned scorching hot. In fact, humankind
successfully rose to the nuclear challenge. Americans, Soviets, Europeans and
Chinese changed the way geopolitics has been conducted for millennia, so that
the Cold War ended with little bloodshed, and a new internationalist world order
fostered an era of unprecedented peace. Not only was nuclear war averted, but
war of all kinds declined. Since 1945 surprisingly few borders have been
redrawn through naked aggression, and most countries have ceased using war as
a standard political tool. In 2016, despite wars in Syria, Ukraine and several
other hot spots, fewer people died from human violence than from obesity, from
car accidents, or from suicide. This may well have been the greatest political
3
and moral achievement of our times.

Unfortunately, by now we are so used to this achievement, that we take it for
granted. This is partly why people allow themselves to play with fire. Russia and
the USA have recently embarked on a new nuclear arms race, developing novel
doomsday machines that threaten to undo the hard-won gains of the last decades
and bring us back to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Meanwhile the public
4
have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (as suggested in Dr
Strangelove), or have just forgotten about its existence.
Thus the Brexit debate in Britain – a major nuclear power – revolved mainly
around questions of economics and immigration, while the vital contribution of
the EU to European and global peace has largely been ignored. After centuries of
terrible bloodshed, French, Germans, Italians and Britons have finally built a
mechanism that ensures continental harmony – only to have the British public
throw a spanner into the miracle machine.

It was extremely difficult to construct the internationalist regime that
prevented nuclear war and safeguarded global peace. No doubt we need to adapt
this regime to the changing conditions of the world, for example by relying less
on the USA and giving a greater role to non-Western powers such as China and
India. But abandoning this regime altogether and reverting to nationalist power
5
politics would be an irresponsible gamble. True, in the nineteenth century

countries played the nationalist game without destroying human civilisation. But
that was in the pre-Hiroshima era. Since then, nuclear weapons have raised the
stakes and changed the fundamental nature of war and politics. As long as
humans know how to enrich uranium and plutonium, their survival depends on
privileging the prevention of nuclear war over the interests of any particular
nation. Zealous nationalists who cry ‘Our country first!’ should ask themselves
whether their country by itself, without a robust system of international
cooperation, can protect the world – or even itself – from nuclear destruction.
The ecological challenge
On top of nuclear war, in the coming decades humankind will face a new
existential threat that hardly registered on the political radars in 1964: ecological
collapse. Humans are destabilising the global biosphere on multiple fronts. We
are taking more and more resources out of the environment, while pumping back
into it enormous quantities of waste and poison, thereby changing the
composition of the soil, the water and the atmosphere.
We are hardly even aware of the myriad ways in which we disrupt the delicate
ecological balance that has been shaped over millions of years. Consider, for
example, the use of phosphorus as a fertiliser. In small quantities it is an essential
nutrient for the growth of plants. But in excessive amounts it becomes toxic.
Modern industrial farming is based on artificially fertilising the fields with
plenty of phosphorus, but the high-phosphorus run-off from the farms
subsequently poisons rivers, lakes and oceans, with a devastating impact on
marine life. A farmer growing corn in Iowa might thus inadvertently kill fish in
the Gulf of Mexico.
As a result of such activities, habitats are degraded, animals and plants are
becoming extinct, and entire ecosystems such as the Australian Great Barrier
Reef and the Amazon rainforest might be destroyed. For thousands of years
Homo sapiens behaved as an ecological serial killer; now it is morphing into an
ecological mass murderer. If we continue with our present course it will cause

not just the annihilation of a large percentage of all life forms, but it might also
sap the foundations of human civilisation. 6
Most threatening of all is the prospect of climate change. Humans have been
around for hundreds of thousands of years, and have survived numerous ice ages
and warm spells. However, agriculture, cities and complex societies have existed
for no more than 10,000 years. During this period, known as the Holocene,
Earth’s climate has been relatively stable. Any deviation from Holocene
standards will present human societies with enormous challenges they never
encountered before. It will be like conducting an open-ended experiment on
billions of human guinea pigs. Even if human civilisation eventually adapts to
the new conditions, who knows how many victims might perish in the process of
adaptation.
This terrifying experiment has already been set in motion. Unlike nuclear war
– which is a future potential – climate change is a present reality. There is a
scientific consensus that human activities, in particular the emission of
greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, are causing the earth’s climate to
change at a frightening rate. Nobody knows exactly how much carbon dioxide
7
we can continue to pump into the atmosphere without triggering an irreversible

cataclysm. But our best scientific estimates indicate that unless we dramatically
cut the emission of greenhouse gasses in the next twenty years, average global
temperatures will increase by more than 2°C, resulting in expanding deserts,
8
disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more frequent extreme weather events
such as hurricanes and typhoons. These changes in turn will disrupt agricultural
production, inundate cities, make much of the world uninhabitable, and send
hundreds of millions of refugees in search of new homes. 9
Moreover, we are rapidly approaching a number of tipping points, beyond

which even a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to
reverse the trend and avoid a worldwide tragedy. For example, as global
warming melts the polar ice sheets, less sunlight is reflected back from planet
Earth to outer space. This means that the planet absorbs more heat, temperatures
rise even higher, and the ice melts even faster. Once this feedback loop crosses a
critical threshold it will gather an irresistible momentum, and all the ice in the
polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil and gas. Hence it is
not enough that we recognise the danger we face. It is critical that we actually do
something about it now.
Unfortunately, as of 2018, instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the
global emission rate is still increasing. Humanity has very little time left to wean
itself from fossil fuels. We need to enter rehab today. Not next year or next
month, but today. ‘Hello, I am Homo sapiens, and I am a fossil-fuel addict.’

Where does nationalism fit into this alarming picture? Is there a nationalist
answer to the ecological menace? Can any nation, however powerful, stop global
warming by itself? Individual countries can certainly adopt a variety of green
policies, many of which make good economic as well as environmental sense.
Governments can tax carbon emissions, add the cost of externalities to the price
of oil and gas, adopt stronger environmental regulations, cut subsidies to
polluting industries, and incentivise the switch to renewable energy. They can
also invest more money in researching and developing revolutionary eco-
friendly technologies, in a kind of ecological Manhattan Project. The internal
combustion engine is to be thanked for many of the advancements of the last 150
years, but if we are to keep a stable physical and economic environment it must
now be retired and substituted by new technologies that do not burn fossil fuels. 10
Technological breakthroughs can be helpful in many other fields besides

energy. Consider, for example, the potential of developing ‘clean meat’. At
present the meat industry not only inflicts untold misery on billions of sentient
beings, but it is also one of the chief causes of global warming, one of the main
consumers of antibiotics and poison, and one of the foremost polluters of air,
land and water. According to a 2013 report by the Institution of Mechanical
Engineers, it takes about 15,000 litres of fresh water to produce one kilogram of
beef, compared to 287 litres needed to produce a kilogram of potatoes. 11
The pressure on the environment is likely to get worse as rising prosperity in

countries such as China and Brazil allows hundreds of millions of additional
people to switch from eating potatoes to eating beef on a regular basis. It would
be difficult to convince the Chinese and the Brazilians – not to mention the
Americans and the Germans – to stop eating steaks, hamburgers and sausages.
But what if engineers could find a way to grow meat from cells? If you want a
hamburger, just grow a hamburger, instead of raising and slaughtering an entire
cow (and transporting the carcass thousands of kilometres).
This might sound like science fiction, but the world’s first clean hamburger
was grown from cells – and then eaten – in 2013. It cost $330,000. Four years of
research and development brought the price down to $11 per unit, and within
another decade industrially produced clean meat is expected to be cheaper than
slaughtered meat. This technological development could save billions of animals
from a life of abject misery, could help feed billions of malnourished humans,
and could simultaneously help to prevent ecological meltdown. 12
Hence there are many things that governments, corporations and individuals
can do to avoid climate change. But to be effective, they must be done on a
global level. When it comes to climate, countries are just not sovereign. They are
at the mercy of actions taken by people on the other side of the planet. The

Republic of Kiribati – an islands nation in the Pacific Ocean – could reduce its
greenhouse gas emissions to zero and nevertheless be submerged under the
rising waves if other countries don’t follow suit. Chad could put a solar panel on
every roof in the country and yet become a barren desert due to the irresponsible
environmental policies of distant foreigners. Even powerful nations such as
China and Japan are not ecologically sovereign. To protect Shanghai, Hong
Kong and Tokyo from destructive floods and typhoons, the Chinese and
Japanese will have to convince the Russian and American governments to
abandon their ‘business as usual’ approach.
Nationalist isolationism is probably even more dangerous in the context of
climate change than of nuclear war. An all-out nuclear war threatens to destroy
all nations, so all nations have an equal stake in preventing it. Global warming,
in contrast, will probably have a different impact on different nations. Some
countries, most notably Russia, might actually benefit from it. Russia has
relatively few coastline assets, hence it is far less worried than China or Kiribati
about rising sea levels. And whereas higher temperatures are likely to turn Chad
into a desert, they might simultaneously turn Siberia into the breadbasket of the
world. Moreover, as the ice melts in the far north, the Russian-dominated Arctic
sea lanes might become the artery of global commerce, and Kamchatka might
replace Singapore as the crossroads of the world. 13
Similarly, replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources is likely to

appeal to some countries more than to others. China, Japan and South Korea
depend on importing huge quantities of oil and gas. They will be delighted to be
free of that burden. Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia depend on exporting oil and
gas. Their economies will collapse if oil and gas suddenly give way to solar and
wind.
Consequently, while some nations such as China, Japan and Kiribati are likely
to push hard for reducing global carbon emissions as soon as possible, other
nations such as Russia and Iran might be far less enthusiastic. Even in countries
that stand to lose much from global warming, such as the USA, nationalists
might be too short-sighted and self-absorbed to appreciate the danger. A small
but telling example was given in January 2018, when the United States imposed
a 30 per cent tariff on foreign-made solar panels and solar equipment, preferring
to support American solar producers even at a cost of slowing the switch to
renewable energy. 14
An atom bomb is such an obvious and immediate threat that nobody can
ignore it. Global warming, in contrast, is a more vague and protracted menace.
Hence whenever long-term environmental considerations demand some painful
short-term sacrifice, nationalists might be tempted to put immediate national

interests first, and reassure themselves that they can worry about the
environment later, or just leave it to people elsewhere. Alternatively, they may
simply deny the problem. It isn’t a coincidence that scepticism about climate
change tends to be the preserve of the nationalist right. You rarely see left-wing
socialists tweet that ‘climate change is a Chinese hoax’. Since there is no
national answer to the problem of global warming, some nationalist politicians
prefer to believe the problem does not exist. 15
The technological challenge
The same dynamics are likely to spoil any nationalist antidote to the third
existential threat of the twenty-first century: technological disruption. As we saw
in earlier chapters, the merger of infotech and biotech opens the door to a
cornucopia of doomsday scenarios, ranging from digital dictatorships to the
creation of a global useless class.
What is the nationalist answer to these menaces?
There is no nationalist answer. As in the case of climate change, so also with
technological disruption, the nation state is simply the wrong framework to
address the threat. Since research and development are not the monopoly of any
one country, even a superpower like the USA cannot restrict them by itself. If the
US government forbids genetically engineering human embryos, this doesn’t
prevent Chinese scientists from doing so. And if the resulting developments
confer on China some crucial economic or military advantage, the USA will be
tempted to break its own ban. Particularly in a xenophobic dog-eat-dog world, if
even a single country chooses to pursue a high-risk, high-gain technological
path, other countries will be forced to do the same, because nobody can afford to
remain behind. In order to avoid such a race to the bottom, humankind will
probably need some kind of global identity and loyalty.
Moreover, whereas nuclear war and climate change threaten only the physical
survival of humankind, disruptive technologies might change the very nature of
humanity, and are therefore entangled with humans’ deepest ethical and religious
beliefs. While everyone agrees that we should avoid nuclear war and ecological
meltdown, people have widely different opinions about using bioengineering and
AI to upgrade humans and to create new life forms. If humankind fails to devise
and administer globally accepted ethical guidelines, it will be open season for Dr
Frankenstein.

When it comes to formulating such ethical guidelines, nationalism suffers
above all from a failure of the imagination. Nationalists think in terms of
territorial conflicts lasting centuries, while the technological revolutions of the
twenty-first century should really be understood in cosmic terms. After 4 billion
years of organic life evolving by natural selection, science is ushering in the era
of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design.
In the process, Homo sapiens itself will likely disappear. Today we are still
apes of the hominid family. We still share with Neanderthals and chimpanzees
most of our bodily structures, physical abilities and mental faculties. Not only
are our hands, eyes and brains distinctly hominid, but so are our lust, our love,
anger and social bonds. Within a century or two, the combination of
biotechnology and AI might result in bodily, physical and mental traits that
completely break free of the hominid mould. Some believe that consciousness
might even be severed from any organic structure, and could surf cyberspace
free of all biological and physical constraints. On the other hand, we might
witness the complete decoupling of intelligence from consciousness, and the
development of AI might result in a world dominated by super-intelligent but
completely non-conscious entities.
What has Israeli, Russian or French nationalism got to say about this? In order
to make wise choices about the future of life we need to go way beyond the
nationalist viewpoint and look at things from a global or even a cosmic
perspective.
Spaceship Earth
Each of these three problems – nuclear war, ecological collapse and

technological disruption – is enough to threaten the future of human civilisation.
But taken together, they add up to an unprecedented existential crisis, especially
because they are likely to reinforce and compound one another.
For example, although the ecological crisis threatens the survival of human
civilisation as we have known it, it is unlikely to stop the development of AI and
bioengineering. If you are counting on rising oceans, dwindling food supplies
and mass migrations to divert our attention from algorithms and genes, think
again. As the ecological crisis deepens, the development of high-risk, high-gain
technologies will probably only accelerate.
Indeed, climate change may well come to perform the same function as the
two world wars. Between 1914 and 1918, and again between 1939 and 1945, the

pace of technological development skyrocketed, because nations engaged in total
war threw caution and economy to the wind, and invested immense resources in
all kinds of audacious and fantastic projects. Many of these projects failed, but
some produced tanks, radar, poison gas, supersonic jets, intercontinental missiles
and nuclear bombs. Similarly, nations facing a climate cataclysm might be
tempted to invest their hopes in desperate technological gambles. Humankind
has a lot of justifiable concerns about AI and bioengineering, but in times of
crisis people do risky things. Whatever you think about regulating disruptive
technologies, ask yourself whether these regulations are likely to hold even if
climate change causes global food shortages, floods cities all over the world, and
sends hundreds of millions of refugees across borders.
In turn, technological disruptions might increase the danger of apocalyptic
wars, not just by increasing global tensions, but also by destabilising the nuclear
balance of power. Since the 1950s, superpowers avoided conflicts with one
another because they all knew that war meant mutually assured destruction. But
as new kinds of offensive and defensive weapons appear, a rising technological
superpower might conclude that it can destroy its enemies with impunity.
Conversely, a declining power might fear that its traditional nuclear weapons
might soon become obsolete, and that it had better use them before it loses them.
Traditionally, nuclear confrontations resembled a hyper-rational chess game.
What would happen when players could use cyberattacks to wrest control of a
rival’s pieces, when anonymous third parties could move a pawn without anyone
knowing who is making the move – or when AlphaZero graduates from ordinary
chess to nuclear chess?
Just as the different challenges are likely to compound one another, so also the
goodwill necessary to confront one challenge may be sapped away by problems
on another front. Countries locked in armed competition are unlikely to agree on
restricting the development of AI, and countries striving to outstrip the
technological achievements of their rivals will find it very difficult to agree on a
common plan to stop climate change. As long as the world remains divided into
rival nations, it will be very hard to simultaneously overcome all three
challenges – and failure on even a single front might prove catastrophic.
To conclude, the nationalist wave sweeping over the world cannot turn the
clock back to 1939 or 1914. Technology has changed everything by creating a
set of global existential threats that no nation can solve on its own. A common
enemy is the best catalyst for forging a common identity, and humankind now
has at least three such enemies – nuclear war, climate change and technological
disruption. If despite these common threats humans choose to privilege their

particular national loyalties above everything else, the results may be far worse
than in 1914 and 1939.
A much better path is the one outlined in the European Union’s Constitution,
which says that ‘while remaining proud of their own national identities and
history, the peoples of Europe are determined to transcend their former divisions
and, united ever more closely, to forge a common destiny’. That does not mean
16
abolishing all national identities, abandoning all local traditions, and turning
humanity into homogeneous grey goo. Nor does it mean vilifying all expressions
of patriotism. Indeed, by providing a continental military and economic
protective shell, the European Union arguably fostered local patriotism in places
such as Flanders, Lombardy, Catalonia and Scotland. The idea of establishing an
independent Scotland or Catalonia looks more attractive when you don’t have to
fear a German invasion and when you can count on a common European front
against global warming and global corporations.
European nationalists are therefore taking it easy. For all the talk of the return
of the nation, few Europeans are actually willing to kill and be killed for it.
When the Scots sought to break away from London’s grip in the days of William
Wallace and Robert Bruce, they had to raise an army to do so. In contrast, not a
single person was killed during the 2014 Scottish referendum, and if next time
Scots vote for independence, it is highly unlikely that they will have to restage
the Battle of Bannockburn. The Catalan attempt to break away from Spain has
resulted in considerably more violence, but it too falls far short of the carnage
Barcelona experienced in 1939 or in 1714.
The rest of the world can hopefully learn from the European example. Even
on a united planet there will be plenty of room for the kind of patriotism that
celebrates the uniqueness of my nation and stresses my special obligations
towards it. Yet if we want to survive and flourish, humankind has little choice
but to complement such local loyalties with substantial obligations towards a
global community. A person can and should be loyal simultaneously to her
family, her neighbourhood, her profession and her nation – why not add
humankind and planet Earth to that list? True, when you have multiple loyalties,
conflicts are sometimes inevitable. But then who said life was simple? Deal with
it.
In previous centuries national identities were forged because humans faced
problems and opportunities that were far beyond the scope of local tribes, and
that only countrywide cooperation could hope to handle. In the twenty-first
century, nations find themselves in the same situation as the old tribes: they are
no longer the right framework to manage the most important challenges of the
age. We need a new global identity because national institutions are incapable of

handling a set of unprecedented global predicaments. We now have a global
ecology, a global economy and a global science – but we are still stuck with only
national politics. This mismatch prevents the political system from effectively
countering our main problems. To have effective politics, we must either de-
globalise the ecology, the economy and the march of science – or we must
globalise our politics. Since it is impossible to de-globalise the ecology and the
march of science, and since the cost of de-globalising the economy would
probably be prohibitive, the only real solution is to globalise politics. This does
not mean establishing a global government – a doubtful and unrealistic vision.
Rather, to globalise politics means that political dynamics within countries and
even cities should give far more weight to global problems and interests.
Nationalist sentiments are unlikely to be of much help in that. Perhaps, then,
we can rely on the universal religious traditions of humankind to help us unite
the world? Hundreds of years ago, religions such as Christianity and Islam
already thought in global rather than local terms, and they were always keenly
interested in the big questions of life rather than just in the political struggles of
this or that nation. But are traditional religions still relevant? Do they retain the
power to shape the world, or are they just inert relics from our past, tossed here
and there by the mighty forces of modern states, economies and technologies?

9
IMMIGRATION
Some cultures might be better than others
Though globalisation has greatly reduced cultural differences across the planet, it
has simultaneously made it far easier to encounter strangers and become upset
by their oddities. The difference between Anglo-Saxon England and the Indian
Pala Empire was far greater than the difference between modern Britain and
modern India – but British Airways didn’t offer direct flights between Delhi and
London in the days of King Alfred the Great.
As more and more humans cross more and more borders in search of jobs,
security and a better future, the need to confront, assimilate or expel strangers
strains political systems and collective identities that were shaped in less fluid
times. Nowhere is the problem more poignant than in Europe. The European
Union was built on the promise to transcend the cultural differences between
French, Germans, Spanish and Greeks. It might collapse due to its inability to
contain the cultural differences between Europeans and migrants from Africa
and the Middle East. Ironically, it has been Europe’s very success in building a
prosperous multicultural system that drew so many migrants in the first place.
Syrians want to emigrate to Germany rather than to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia or
Japan not because Germany is closer or wealthier than all the other potential
destinations – but because Germany has a far better record of welcoming and
absorbing immigrants.
The growing wave of refugees and immigrants produces mixed reactions
among Europeans, and sparks bitter discussions about Europe’s identity and
future. Some Europeans demand that Europe slam its gates shut: are they
betraying Europe’s multicultural and tolerant ideals, or are they just taking
sensible steps to prevent disaster? Others call for opening the gates wider: are
they faithful to the core European values, or are they guilty of saddling the
European project with impossible expectations? This discussion about
immigration often degenerates into a shouting match in which neither side hears
the other. To clarify matters, it would perhaps be helpful to view immigration as
a deal with three basic conditions or terms:

Term 1: The host country allows the immigrants in.
Term 2: In return, the immigrants must embrace at least the core norms and
values of the host country, even if that means giving up some of their
traditional norms and values.
Term 3: If the immigrants assimilate to a sufficient degree, over time they
become equal and full members of the host country. ‘They’ become ‘us’.
These three terms give rise to three distinct debates about the exact meaning
of each term. A fourth debate concerns the fulfilment of the terms. When people
argue about immigration, they often confuse the four debates, so that nobody
understands what the argument is really about. It is therefore best to look at each
of these debates separately.
Debate 1: The first clause of the immigration deal says simply that the host
country allows immigrants in. But should this be understood as a duty or a
favour? Is the host country obliged to open its gates to everybody, or does it have
the right to pick and choose, and even to halt immigration altogether? Pro-
immigrationists seem to think that countries have a moral duty to accept not just
refugees, but also people from poverty-stricken lands who seek jobs and a better
future. Especially in a globalised world, all humans have moral obligations
towards all other humans, and those shirking these obligations are egoists or
even racists.
In addition, many pro-immigrationists stress that it is impossible to
completely stop immigration, and no matter how many walls and fences we
build, desperate people will always find a way through. So it is better to legalise
immigration and deal with it openly, than to create a vast underworld of human
trafficking, illegal workers and paperless children.
Anti-immigrationists reply that if you use sufficient force, you can completely
stop immigration, and except perhaps in the case of refugees fleeing brutal
persecution in a neighbouring country, you are never obliged to open your door.
Turkey may have a moral duty to allow desperate Syrian refugees to cross its
border. But if these refugees then try to move on to Sweden, the Swedes are not
bound to accept them. As for migrants who seek jobs and welfare, it is totally up
to the host country whether it wants them in or not, and under what conditions.
Anti-immigrationists stress that one of the most basic rights of every human
collective is to defend itself against invasion, whether in the form of armies or
migrants. The Swedes have worked very hard and made numerous sacrifices in
order to build a prosperous liberal democracy, and if the Syrians have failed to
do the same, this is not the Swedes’ fault. If Swedish voters don’t want more
Syrian immigrants in – for whatever reason – it is their right to refuse them

entry. And if they do accept some immigrants, it should be absolutely clear that
this is a favour Sweden extends rather than an obligation it fulfils. Which means
that immigrants who are allowed into Sweden should feel extremely grateful for
whatever they get, instead of coming with a list of demands as if they own the
place.
Moreover, say the anti-immigrationists, a country can have whatever
immigration policy it wants, screening immigrants not just for their criminal
records or professional talents, but even for things like religion. If a country like
Israel wants to allow in only Jews, and a country like Poland agrees to absorb
Middle Eastern refugees on condition that they are Christians, this may seem
distasteful, but it is perfectly within the rights of the Israeli or Polish voters.
What complicates matters is that in many cases people want to have their cake
and eat it. Numerous countries turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, or even
accept foreign workers on a temporary basis, because they want to benefit from
the foreigners’ energy, talents and cheap labour. However, the countries then
refuse to legalise the status of these people, saying that they don’t want
immigration. In the long run, this could create hierarchical societies in which an
upper class of full citizens exploits an underclass of powerless foreigners, as
happens today in Qatar and several other Gulf States.
As long as this debate isn’t settled, it is extremely difficult to answer all
subsequent questions about immigration. Since pro-immigrationists think that
people have a right to immigrate to another land if they so wish, and host
countries have a duty to absorb them, they react with moral outrage when
people’s right to immigrate is violated, and when countries fail to perform their
duty of absorption. Anti-immigrationists are astounded by such views. They see
immigration as a privilege, and absorption as a favour. Why accuse people of
being racists or fascists just because they refuse entry into their own country?
Of course, even if allowing immigrants in constitutes a favour rather than a
duty, once the immigrants settle down the host country gradually incurs
numerous duties towards them and their descendants. Thus you cannot justify
anti-Semitism in the USA today by arguing that ‘we did your great-grandmother
a favour by letting her into this country in 1910, so we can now treat you any
way we like’.
Debate 2: The second clause of the immigration deal says that if they are
allowed in, the immigrants have an obligation to assimilate into the local culture.
But how far should assimilation go? If immigrants move from a patriarchal
society to a liberal society, must they become feminist? If they come from a
deeply religious society, need they adopt a secular world view? Should they

abandon their traditional dress codes and food taboos? Anti-immigrationists tend
to place the bar high, whereas pro-immigrationists place it much lower.
Pro-immigrationists argue that Europe itself is extremely diverse, and its
native populations have a wide spectrum of opinions, habits and values. This is
exactly what makes Europe vibrant and strong. Why should immigrants be
forced to adhere to some imaginary European identity that few Europeans
actually live up to? Do you want to force Muslim immigrants to the UK to
become Christian, when many British citizens hardly ever go to church? Do you
want to demand that immigrants from the Punjab give up their curry and masala
in favour of fish and chips and Yorkshire pudding? If Europe has any real core
values, then these are the liberal values of tolerance and freedom, which imply
that Europeans should show tolerance towards the immigrants too, and allow
them as much freedom as possible to follow their own traditions, provided these
do not harm the freedoms and rights of other people.
Anti-immigrationists agree that tolerance and freedom are the most important
European values, and accuse many immigrant groups – especially from Muslim
countries – of intolerance, misogyny, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Precisely
because Europe cherishes tolerance, it cannot allow too many intolerant people
in. While a tolerant society can manage small illiberal minorities, if the number
of such extremists exceeds a certain threshold, the whole nature of society
changes. If Europe allows in too many immigrants from the Middle East, it will
end up looking like the Middle East.
Other anti-immigrationists go much further. They point out that a national
community is far more than a collection of people who tolerate each other.
Therefore it is not enough that immigrants adhere to European standards of
tolerance. They must also adopt many of the unique characteristics of British,
German or Swedish culture, whatever these may be. By allowing them in, the
local culture is taking upon itself a big risk and a huge expense. There is no
reason it should destroy itself as well. It offers eventual full equality so it
demands full assimilation. If the immigrants have an issue with certain quirks of
British, German or Swedish culture, they are welcome to go elsewhere.
The two key issues of this debate are the disagreement about immigrant
intolerance and the disagreement about European identity. If immigrants are
indeed guilty of incurable intolerance, many liberal Europeans who currently
favour immigration will sooner or later come round to oppose it bitterly.
Conversely, if most immigrants prove to be liberal and broad-minded in their
attitude to religion, gender and politics, this will disarm some of the most
effective arguments against immigration.

This will still leave open, however, the question of Europe’s unique national
identities. Tolerance is a universal value. Are there any unique French norms and
values that should be accepted by anyone immigrating to France, and are there
unique Danish norms and values that immigrants to Denmark must embrace? As
long as Europeans are bitterly divided about this question, they can hardly have a
clear policy about immigration. Conversely, once Europeans know who they are,
500 million Europeans should have no difficulty absorbing a million refugees –
or turning them away.
Debate 3: The third clause of the immigration deal says that if immigrants
indeed make a sincere effort to assimilate – and in particular to adopt the value
of tolerance – the host country is duty-bound to treat them as first-class citizens.
But exactly how much time needs to pass before the immigrants become full
members of society? Should first-generation immigrants from Algeria feel
aggrieved if they are still not seen as fully French after twenty years in the
country? How about third-generation immigrants whose grandparents came to
France in the 1970s?
Pro-immigrationists tend to demand a speedy acceptance, whereas anti-
immigrationists want a much longer probation period. For pro-immigrationists,
if third-generation immigrants are not seen and treated as equal citizens, this
means that the host country is not fulfilling its obligations, and if this results in
tensions, hostility and even violence – the host country has nobody to blame but
its own bigotry. For anti-immigrationists, these inflated expectations are a large
part of the problem. The immigrants should be patient. If your grandparents
arrived here just forty years ago, and you now riot in the streets because you
think you are not treated as a native, then you have failed the test.
The root issue of this debate concerns the gap between personal timescale and
collective timescale. From the viewpoint of human collectives, forty years is a
short time. It is hard to expect society to fully absorb foreign groups within a few
decades. Past civilisations that assimilated foreigners and made them equal
citizens – such as Imperial Rome, the Muslim caliphate, the Chinese empires and
the United States – all took centuries rather than decades to accomplish the
transformation.
From a personal viewpoint, however, forty years can be an eternity. For a
teenager born in France twenty years after her grandparents immigrated there,
the journey from Algiers to Marseilles is ancient history. She was born here, all
her friends have been born here, she speaks French rather than Arabic, and she
has never even been to Algeria. France is the only home she has ever known.
And now people say to her it’s not her home, and that she should go ‘back’ to a
place she never inhabited?

It’s as if you take a seed of a eucalyptus tree from Australia, and plant it in
France. From an ecological perspective, eucalyptus trees are an invading species,
and it will take generations before botanists reclassify them as native European
plants. Yet from the viewpoint of the individual tree, it is French. If you don’t
water it with French water, it will wither. If you try to uproot it, you will
discover it has struck its roots deep in the French soil, just like the local oaks and
pines.
Debate 4: On top of all these disagreements regarding the exact definition of
the immigration deal, the ultimate question is whether the deal is actually
working. Are both sides living up to their obligations?
Anti-immigrationists tend to argue that the immigrants are not fulfilling term
No. 2. They are not making a sincere effort to assimilate, and too many of them
stick to intolerant and bigoted world views. Hence the host country has no
reason to fulfil term No. 3 (to treat them as first-class citizens), and has every
reason to reconsider term No. 1 (to allow them in). If people from a particular
culture have consistently proved themselves unwilling to live up to the
immigration deal, why allow more of them in, and create an even bigger
problem?
Pro-immigrationists reply that it is the host country that fails to fulfil its side
of the deal. Despite the honest efforts of the vast majority of immigrants to
assimilate, the hosts are making it difficult for them to do so, and worse still,
those immigrants who successfully assimilate are still treated as second-class
citizens even in the second and third generations. It is of course possible that
both sides are not living up to their commitments, thereby fuelling each other’s
suspicions and resentments in an increasingly vicious circle.
This fourth debate cannot be resolved before clarifying the exact definition of
the three terms. As long as we don’t know whether absorption is a duty or a
favour; what level of assimilation is required from immigrants; and how quickly
host countries should treat them as equal citizens – we cannot judge whether the
two sides are fulfilling their obligations. An additional problem concerns
accounting. When evaluating the immigration deal, both sides give far more
weight to violations than to compliance. If a million immigrants are law-abiding
citizens, but one hundred join terrorist groups and attack the host country, does it
mean that on the whole the immigrants are complying with the terms of the deal,
or violating it? If a third-generation immigrant walks down the street a thousand
times without being molested, but once in a while some racist shouts abuse at
her, does it mean that the native population is accepting or rejecting immigrants?
Yet underneath all these debates lurks a far more fundamental question, which
concerns our understanding of human culture. Do we enter the immigration

debate with the assumption that all cultures are inherently equal, or do we think
that some cultures might well be superior to others? When Germans argue over
the absorption of a million Syrian refugees, can they ever be justified in thinking
that German culture is in some way better than Syrian culture?
From racism to culturism
A century ago Europeans took it for granted that some races – most notably the
white race – were inherently superior to others. After 1945 such views
increasingly became anathema. Racism was seen as not only morally abysmal,
but also as scientifically bankrupt. Life scientists, and in particular geneticists,
have produced very strong scientific evidence that the biological differences
between Europeans, Africans, Chinese and Native Americans are negligible.
At the same time, however, anthropologists, sociologists, historians,
behavioural economists and even brain scientists have accumulated a wealth of
data for the existence of significant differences between human cultures. Indeed,
if all human cultures were essentially the same, why would we even need
anthropologists and historians? Why invest resources in studying trivial
differences? At the very least, we should stop financing all those expensive field
excursions to the South Pacific and the Kalahari Desert, and be content with
studying people in Oxford or Boston. If cultural differences are insignificant,
then whatever we discover about Harvard undergraduates should be true of
Kalahari hunter-gatherers too.
Upon reflection, most people concede the existence of at least some
significant differences between human cultures, in things ranging from sexual
mores to political habits. How then should we treat these differences? Cultural
relativists argue that difference doesn’t imply hierarchy, and we should never
prefer one culture over another. Humans may think and behave in various ways,
but we should celebrate this diversity, and give equal value to all beliefs and
practices. Unfortunately, such broad-minded attitudes cannot stand the test of
reality. Human diversity may be great when it comes to cuisine and poetry, but
few would see witch-burning, infanticide or slavery as fascinating human
idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global
capitalism and coca-colonialism.
Or consider the way different cultures relate to strangers, immigrants and
refugees. Not all cultures are characterised by exactly the same level of
acceptance. German culture in the early twenty-first century is more tolerant of

strangers and more welcoming of immigrants than Saudi culture. It is far easier
for a Muslim to emigrate to Germany than it is for a Christian to emigrate to
Saudi Arabia. Indeed, even for a Muslim refugee from Syria it is probably easier
to emigrate to Germany than to Saudi Arabia, and since 2011 Germany has taken
in many more Syrian refugees than has Saudi Arabia. Similarly, the weight of
1
evidence suggests that the culture of California in the early twenty-first century
is more immigrant-friendly than the culture of Japan. Hence if you think that it is
good to tolerate strangers and welcome immigrants, shouldn’t you also think that
at least in this regard, German culture is superior to Saudi culture, and
Californian culture is better than Japanese culture?
Moreover, even when two cultural norms are equally valid in theory, in the
practical context of immigration it might still be justified to judge the host
culture as better. Norms and values that are appropriate in one country just don’t
work well under different circumstances. Let’s look closely at a concrete
example. In order not to fall prey to well-established prejudices, let’s imagine
two fictional countries: Coldia and Warmland. The two countries have many
cultural differences, among which is their attitude to human relations and
interpersonal conflict. Coldians are educated from infancy that if you get into
conflict with somebody at school, at work, or even in your family, the best thing
is to repress it. You should avoid shouting, expressing rage, or confronting the
other person – angry outbursts just make things worse. It’s better to work with
your own feelings, while allowing things to cool down. In the meantime, limit
your contact with the person in question, and if contact is unavoidable, be terse
but polite, and avoid sensitive issues.
Warmlanders, by contrast, are educated from infancy to externalise conflicts.
If you find yourself in conflict, don’t let it simmer and don’t repress anything.
Use the first opportunity to vent your emotions openly. It is OK to get angry, to
shout, and to tell the other person exactly how you feel. This is the only way to
work things through together, in an honest and direct way. One day of shouting
can resolve a conflict that may otherwise fester for years, and though head-on
confrontation is never pleasant, you will all feel much better afterwards.
Both these methods have their pros and cons, and it is hard to say that one is
always better than the other. What might happen, though, when a Warmlander
emigrates to Coldia, and gets a job in a Coldian firm?
Whenever a conflict arises with a co-worker, the Warmlander bangs on the
table and yells at the top of his voice, expecting that this will focus attention on
the problem and help to resolve it quickly. Several years later a senior position
falls vacant. Though the Warmlander has all the necessary qualifications, the
boss prefers to give the promotion to a Coldian employee. When asked about it,

she explains: ‘Yes, the Warmlander has many talents, but he also has a serious
problem with human relations. He is hot-tempered, creates unnecessary tensions
around him, and disturbs our corporate culture.’ The same fate befalls other
Warmlander immigrants to Coldia. Most of them remain in junior positions, or
fail to find any job at all, because managers presuppose that if they are
Warmlanders, they would probably be hot-tempered and problematic employees.
Since the Warmlanders never reach senior positions, it is difficult for them to
change the Coldian corporate culture.
Much the same thing happens to Coldians who emigrate to Warmland. A
Coldian starting to work in a Warmland firm quickly acquires the reputation of a
snob or a cold fish, and makes few if any friends. People think that he is
insincere, or that he lacks basic human-relation skills. He never advances to
senior positions, and he therefore never gets the opportunity to change the
corporate culture. Warmland managers conclude that most Coldians are
unfriendly or shy, and prefer not to hire them to positions that require contact
with customers or close cooperation with other employees.
Both these cases may seem to smack of racism. But in fact, they are not racist.
They are ‘culturist’. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against
traditional racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted. Traditional
racism is waning, but the world is now full of ‘culturists’.
Traditional racism was firmly grounded in biological theories. In the 1890s or
1930s it was widely believed in countries such as Britain, Australia and the USA
that some heritable biological trait makes Africans and Chinese people innately
less intelligent, less enterprising and less moral than Europeans. The problem
was in their blood. Such views enjoyed political respectability as well as
widespread scientific backing. Today, in contrast, while many individuals still
make such racist assertions, they have lost all their scientific backing and most
of their political respectability – unless they are rephrased in cultural terms.
Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard
genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from
dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.
In the USA, for instance, some parties and leaders openly support
discriminatory policies and often make denigrating remarks about African
Americans, Latinos and Muslims – but they will rarely if ever say that there is
something wrong with their DNA. The problem is alleged to be with their
culture. Thus when President Trump described Haiti, El Salvador and some parts
of Africa as ‘shithole countries’, he was apparently offering the public a
reflection on the culture of these places rather than on their genetic make-up. On 2
another occasion Trump said about Mexican immigrants to the USA that ‘When

Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re sending people
that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing
drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good
people.’ This is a very offensive claim to make, but it is a sociologically rather
than a biologically offensive claim. Trump doesn’t imply that Mexican blood is a
bar to goodness – only that good Mexicans tend to stay south of the Rio Grande. 3
The human body – the Latino body, the African body, the Chinese body – still
stands at the centre of the debate. Skin colour matters a lot. Walking down a
New York street with lots of melanin pigment in your skin means that wherever
you are heading, the police might view you with extra suspicion. But the likes of
both President Trump and President Obama will explain the significance of skin
colour in cultural and historical terms. The police view your skin colour with
suspicion not for any biological reason, but rather because of history.
Presumably, the Obama camp will explain that police prejudice is an unfortunate
legacy of historical crimes such as slavery, while the Trump camp will explain
that black criminality is an unfortunate legacy of historical errors committed by
white liberals and black communities. In any case, even if you are actually a
tourist from Delhi who knows nothing about American history, you will have to
deal with the consequences of that history.
The shift from biology to culture is not just a meaningless change of jargon. It
is a profound shift with far-reaching practical consequences, some good, some
bad. For starters, culture is more malleable than biology. This means, on the one
hand, that present-day culturists might be more tolerant than traditional racists –
if only the ‘others’ adopt our culture, we will accept them as our equals. On the
other hand, it could result in far stronger pressures on the ‘others’ to assimilate,
and in far harsher criticism of their failure to do so.
You can hardly blame a dark-skinned person for not whitening his skin, but
people can and do accuse Africans or Muslims of failing to adopt the norms and
values of Western culture. Which is not to say that such accusations are
necessarily justified. In many cases, there is little reason to adopt the dominant
culture, and in many other cases, it is an all but impossible mission. African
Americans from a poverty-stricken slum who honestly try to fit into the
hegemonic American culture might first find their way blocked by institutional
discrimination – only to be accused later on that they did not make sufficient
effort, and so have nobody but themselves to blame for their troubles.
A second key difference between talking about biology and talking about
culture is that unlike traditional racist bigotry, culturist arguments might
occasionally make good sense, as in the case of Warmland and Coldia.
Warmlanders and Coldians really have different cultures, characterised by

different styles of human relations. Since human relations are crucial to many
jobs, is it unethical for a Warmlander firm to penalise Coldians for behaving in
accordance with their cultural legacy?
Anthropologists, sociologists and historians feel extremely uneasy about this
issue. On the one hand, it all sounds dangerously close to racism. On the other
hand, culturism has a much firmer scientific basis than racism, and particularly
scholars in the humanities and social sciences cannot deny the existence and
importance of cultural differences.
Of course, even if we accept the validity of some culturist claims, we do not
have to accept all of them. Many culturist claims suffer from three common
flaws. First, culturists often confuse local superiority with objective superiority.
Thus in the local context of Warmland, the Warmland method of conflict
resolution may well be superior to the Coldian method, in which case a
Warmland firm operating in Warmland has a good reason to discriminate against
introverted employees (which will disproportionally penalise Coldian
immigrants). However, that does not mean that the Warmland method is
objectively superior. The Warmlanders could perhaps learn a thing or two from
the Coldians, and if circumstances change – e.g. the Warmland firm goes global
and opens branches in many different countries – diversity could suddenly
become an asset.
Second, when you clearly define a yardstick, a time, and a place, culturist
claims may well be empirically sound. But all too often people adopt very
general culturist claims, which make little sense. Thus saying that ‘Coldian
culture is less tolerant of public angry outbursts than Warmland culture’ is a
reasonable claim, but it is far less reasonable to say that ‘Muslim culture is very
intolerant’. The latter claim is just far too hazy. What do we mean by
‘intolerant’? Intolerant of whom, or what? A culture can be intolerant towards
religious minorities and unusual political views, while simultaneously being very
tolerant towards obese people or the elderly. And what do we mean by ‘Muslim
culture’? Are we talking about the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century?
The Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century? Pakistan in the early twenty-first
century? Finally, what is the benchmark? If we care about tolerance towards
religious minorities, and compare the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century
with western Europe in the sixteenth century, we would conclude that Muslim
culture is extremely tolerant. If we compare Afghanistan under the Taliban to
contemporary Denmark, we would reach a very different conclusion.
Yet the worst problem with culturist claims is that despite their statistical
nature they are all too often used to prejudge individuals. When a Warmlander
native and a Coldian immigrant apply for the same position in a Warmlander

firm, the manager may prefer to hire the Warmlander because ‘Coldians are
frosty and unsociable’. Even if statistically this is true, maybe this particular
Coldian is actually far more warm and outgoing than this particular
Warmlander? While culture is important, people are also shaped by their genes
and their unique personal history. Individuals often defy statistical stereotypes. It
makes sense for a firm to prefer sociable to stony employees, but it does not
make sense to prefer Warmlanders to Coldians.
All this, however, modifies particular culturist claims without discrediting
culturism as a whole. Unlike racism, which is an unscientific prejudice, culturist
arguments may sometimes be quite sound. If we look at statistics and discover
that Warmlander firms have few Coldians in senior positions, this may result not
from racist discrimination, but from good judgement. Should Coldian
immigrants feel resentment at this situation, and claim that Warmland is
reneging on the immigration deal? Should we force Warmlander firms to hire
more Coldian managers through ‘affirmative action’ laws, in the hope of cooling
down Warmland’s hot-tempered business culture? Or perhaps the fault lies with
Coldian immigrants failing to assimilate into the local culture, and we should
therefore make a greater and more forceful effort to inculcate in Coldian children
Warmlander norms and values?
Coming back from the realm of fiction to the realm of facts, we see that the
European debate about immigration is far from being a clear-cut battle between
good and evil. It would be wrong to tar all anti-immigrationists as ‘fascists’, just
as it would be wrong to depict all pro-immigrationists as committed to ‘cultural
suicide’. Therefore, the debate about immigration should not be conducted as an
uncompromising struggle about some non-negotiable moral imperative. It is a
discussion between two legitimate political positions, which should be decided
through standard democratic procedures.
At present, it is far from clear whether Europe can find a middle path that
would enable it to keep its gates open to strangers without being destabilised by
people who don’t share its values. If Europe succeeds in finding such a path,
perhaps its formula could be copied on the global level. If the European project
fails, however, it would indicate that belief in the liberal values of freedom and
tolerance is not enough to resolve the cultural conflicts of the world and to unite
humankind in the face of nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological
disruption. If Greeks and Germans cannot agree on a common destiny, and if
500 million affluent Europeans cannot absorb a few million impoverished
refugees, what chances do humans have of overcoming the far deeper conflicts
that beset our global civilisation?

One thing that might help Europe and the world as a whole to integrate better
and to keep borders and minds open, is to downplay the hysteria regarding
terrorism. It would be extremely unfortunate if the European experiment in
freedom and tolerance unravelled because of an overblown fear of terrorists.
That would not only realise the terrorists’ own goals, but would also give this
handful of fanatics far too great a say about the future of humankind. Terrorism
is the weapon of a marginal and weak segment of humanity. How did it come to
dominate global politics?

10
TERRORISM
Don’t panic
Terrorists are masters of mind control. They kill very few people, but
nevertheless manage to terrify billions and shake huge political structures such
as the European Union or the United States. Since 11 September 2001, every
year terrorists have killed about fifty people in the European Union, about ten
people in the USA, about seven people in China, and up to 25,000 people
globally (mostly in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria). In contrast,
1
each year traffic accidents kill about 80,000 Europeans, 40,000 Americans,
270,000 Chinese, and 1.25 million people altogether. Diabetes and high sugar
2
levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually, while air pollution kills about 7
million people. So why do we fear terrorism more than sugar, and why do
3
governments lose elections because of sporadic terror attacks but not because of
chronic air pollution?
As the literal meaning of the word indicates, terrorism is a military strategy
that hopes to change the political situation by spreading fear rather than by
causing material damage. This strategy is almost always adopted by very weak
parties who cannot inflict much material damage on their enemies. Of course
every military action spreads fear. But in conventional warfare, fear is just a by-
product of the material losses, and is usually proportional to the force inflicting
the losses. In terrorism, fear is the main story, and there is an astounding
disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they
manage to inspire.
It is not always easy to change the political situation through violence. On the
first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, 19,000 British soldiers were
killed and another 40,000 wounded. By the time the battle ended in November,
both sides together suffered more than a million casualties, including 300,000
dead. Yet this horrific carnage hardly altered the political balance of power in
4
Europe. It took another two years and millions of additional casualties for
something to finally snap.

Compared to the Somme offensive, terrorism is a puny matter. The Paris
attacks of November 2015 killed 130 people, the Brussels bombings of March
2016 killed thirty-two people, and the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017
killed twenty-two people. In 2002, at the height of the Palestinian terror
campaign against Israel, when buses and restaurants were bombed on a daily
basis, the yearly toll reached 451 dead Israelis. In the same year, 542 Israelis
5
were killed in car accidents. A few terrorist attacks, such as the bombing of Pan
6
Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, kill hundreds. The 9/11 attacks set a new
7
record, killing almost 3,000 people. Yet even this is dwarfed by the price of
8
conventional warfare. If you add all the people killed and wounded in Europe by
terrorist attacks since 1945 – including victims of nationalist, religious, leftist
and rightist groups alike – the total will still fall far short of the casualties in any
number of obscure First World War battles, such as the third Battle of the Aisne
(250,000 casualties) or the tenth Battle of the Isonzo (225,000). 9
How, then, can terrorists hope to achieve much? Following an act of terrorism,
the enemy continues to have the same number of soldiers, tanks and ships as
before. The enemy’s communication network, roads and railways are largely
intact. His factories, ports and bases are hardly touched. However, the terrorists
hope that even though they can barely dent the enemy’s material power, fear and
confusion will cause the enemy to misuse his intact strength and overreact.
Terrorists calculate that when the enraged enemy uses his massive power against
them, he will raise a much more violent military and political storm than the
terrorists themselves could ever create. During every storm, many unforeseen
things happen. Mistakes are made, atrocities are committed, public opinion
wavers, neutrals change their stance, and the balance of power shifts.
Hence terrorists resemble a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so
weak that it cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china
shop? It finds a bull, gets inside its ear, and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild
with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened after
9/11, as Islamic fundamentalists incited the American bull to destroy the Middle
Eastern china shop. Now they flourish in the wreckage. And there is no shortage
of short-tempered bulls in the world.
Reshuffling the cards
Terrorism is a very unattractive military strategy, because it leaves all the

important decisions in the hands of the enemy. Since all the options the enemy

had prior to a terrorist attack are at his disposal afterwards as well, he is
completely free to choose among them. Armies normally try to avoid such a
situation at all costs. When they attack, they don’t want to stage a frightening
spectacle that would anger the enemy and provoke him to hit back. Rather, they
seek to inflict significant material damage on the enemy and reduce his ability to
retaliate. In particular, they seek to eliminate his most dangerous weapons and
options.
That is, for example, what Japan did in December 1941 when it launched a
surprise attack on the USA and sank the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. This
wasn’t terrorism. It was war. The Japanese could not be certain how the
Americans would retaliate after the attack, except about one thing: no matter
what the Americans decided to do, they would not be able to send a fleet to the
Philippines or Hong Kong in 1942.
Provoking the enemy to action without eliminating any of his weapons or
options is an act of desperation, taken only when there is no other option.
Whenever it is possible to inflict serious material damage, nobody gives that up
in favour of mere terrorism. If in December 1941 the Japanese torpedoed a
civilian passenger ship in order to provoke the USA, while leaving the Pacific
Fleet in Pearl Harbor intact, this would have been madness.
But the terrorists have little choice. They are so weak that they cannot wage
war. So they opt instead to produce a theatrical spectacle that will hopefully
provoke the enemy and cause him to overreact. Terrorists stage a terrifying
spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and turns it against us. By
killing a handful of people the terrorists cause millions to fear for their lives. In
order to calm these fears, governments react to the theatre of terror with a show
of security, orchestrating immense displays of force, such as the persecution of
entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this
overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the
terrorists themselves.
Terrorists don’t think like army generals. Instead, they think like theatre
producers. The public memory of the 9/11 attacks testifies that everyone
understands this intuitively. If you ask people what happened on 9/11, they are
likely to say that al-Qaeda knocked down the twin towers of the World Trade
Center. Yet the attack involved not merely the towers, but two other actions, in
particular a successful attack on the Pentagon. How come few people remember
that?
If the 9/11 operation was a conventional military campaign, the Pentagon
attack should have received most of the attention. In this attack al-Qaeda
managed to destroy part of the enemy’s central headquarters, killing and

wounding senior commanders and analysts. Why is it that public memory gives
far more importance to the destruction of two civilian buildings, and the killing
of brokers, accountants and clerks?
It is because the Pentagon is a relatively flat and unassuming building,
whereas the World Trade Center was a tall phallic totem whose collapse made an
immense audiovisual effect. Nobody who saw the images of its collapse could
ever forget them. Because we intuitively understand that terrorism is theatre, we
judge it by its emotional rather than material impact.
Like terrorists, those combating terrorism should also think more like theatre
producers and less like army generals. Above all, if we want to combat terrorism
effectively we must realise that nothing the terrorists do can defeat us. We are
the only ones who can defeat ourselves, if we overreact in a misguided way to
the terrorist provocations.
Terrorists undertake an impossible mission: to change the political balance of
power through violence, despite having no army. To achieve their aim, terrorists
present the state with an impossible challenge of their own: to prove that it can
protect all its citizens from political violence, anywhere, any time. The terrorists
hope that when the state tries to fulfil this impossible mission, it will reshuffle
the political cards, and hand them some unforeseen ace.
True, when the state rises to the challenge, it usually succeeds in crushing the
terrorists. Hundreds of terrorist organisations were wiped out over the last few
decades by various states. In 2002–4 Israel proved that even the most ferocious
terror campaigns can be suppressed by brute force. Terrorists know full well
10
that the chances in such a confrontation are against them. But since they are very
weak, and have no other military option, they have nothing to lose and much to
gain. Once in a while the political storm created by counter-terrorist campaigns
does benefit the terrorists, which is why the gamble makes sense. A terrorist is
like a gambler holding a particularly bad hand, who tries to convince his rivals to
reshuffle the cards. He cannot lose anything, and he may win everything.
A small coin in a big empty jar
Why should the state agree to reshuffle the cards? Since the material damage
caused by terrorism is negligible, the state could theoretically do nothing about
it, or take strong but discreet measures far from the cameras and microphones.
Indeed, states often do exactly that. But every now and then states lose their

tempers, and react far too forcefully and publicly, thus playing into the hands of
the terrorists. Why are states so sensitive to terrorist provocations?
States find it difficult to withstand these provocations because the legitimacy
of the modern state is based on its promise to keep the public sphere free of
political violence. A regime can withstand terrible catastrophes, and even ignore
them, provided its legitimacy is not based on preventing them. On the other
hand, a regime may collapse due to a minor problem, if it is seen as undermining
its legitimacy. In the fourteenth century the Black Death killed between a quarter
and a half of European populations, yet no king lost his throne as a result, and no
king made much of an effort to overcome the plague. Nobody back then thought
that preventing plagues was part of a king’s job. On the other hand, rulers who
allowed religious heresy to spread in their dominions risked losing their crowns,
and even their heads.
Today, a government may take a softer approach to domestic and sexual
violence than to terrorism, because despite the impact of movements such as
#MeToo, rape does not undermine the government’s legitimacy. In France, for
example, more than 10,000 rape cases are reported to the authorities each year,
with probably tens of thousands of additional cases left unreported. Rapists and
11
abusive husbands, however, are not perceived as an existential threat to the

French state, because historically the state did not build itself on the promise to
eliminate sexual violence. In contrast, the much rarer cases of terrorism are
viewed as a deadly threat to the French Republic, because over the last few
centuries modern Western states have gradually established their legitimacy on
the explicit promise to tolerate no political violence within their borders.
Back in the Middle Ages, the public sphere was full of political violence.
Indeed, the ability to use violence was the entry ticket to the political game, and
whoever lacked this ability had no political voice. Numerous noble families
retained armed forces, as did towns, guilds, churches and monasteries. When a
former abbot died and a dispute arose about the succession, the rival factions –
comprising monks, local strongmen and concerned neighbours – often used
armed force to decide the issue.
Terrorism had no place in such a world. Anybody who was not strong enough
to cause substantial material damage was of no consequence. If in 1150 a few
Muslim fanatics murdered a handful of civilians in Jerusalem, demanding that
the Crusaders leave the Holy Land, the reaction would have been ridicule more
than terror. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you should have at least gained
control of a fortified castle or two. Terrorism did not bother our medieval
ancestors, because they had much bigger problems to deal with.

During the modern era, centralised states gradually reduced the level of
political violence within their territories, and in the last few decades Western
countries managed to eradicate it almost entirely. The citizens of France, Britain
or the USA can struggle for control of towns, corporations, organisations and
even of the government itself, without any need of an armed force. Command of
trillions of dollars, millions of soldiers, and thousands of ships, airplanes and
nuclear missiles pass from one group of politicians to another without a single
shot being fired. People quickly got used to this, and consider it their natural
right. Consequently, even sporadic acts of political violence that kill a few dozen
people are seen as a deadly threat to the legitimacy and even survival of the
state. A small coin in a big empty jar makes a lot of noise.
This is what makes the theatre of terrorism so successful. The state has created
a huge space empty of political violence, which now acts as a sounding board,
amplifying the impact of any armed attack, however small. The less political
violence in a particular state, the greater the public shock at an act of terrorism.
Killing a few people in Belgium draws far more attention than killing hundreds
in Nigeria or Iraq. Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in
preventing political violence makes them particularly vulnerable to terrorism.
The state has stressed many times that it will not tolerate political violence
within its borders. The citizens, for their part, have become used to zero political
violence. Hence the theatre of terror generates visceral fears of anarchy, making
people feel as if the social order is about to collapse. After centuries of bloody
struggles we have crawled out of the black hole of violence, but we sense that
the black hole is still there, patiently waiting to swallow us again. A few
gruesome atrocities – and we imagine that we are falling back in.
In order to assuage these fears, the state is driven to respond to the theatre of
terror with its own theatre of security. The most efficient answer to terrorism
might be good intelligence and clandestine action against the financial networks
that feed terrorism. But this is not something citizens can watch on television.
The citizens have seen the terrorist drama of the World Trade Center collapsing.
The state feels compelled to stage an equally spectacular counter-drama, with
even more fire and smoke. So instead of acting quietly and efficiently, the state
unleashes a mighty storm, which not infrequently fulfils the terrorists’ most
cherished dreams.
How then should the state deal with terrorism? A successful counter-terrorism
struggle should be conducted on three fronts. First, governments should focus on
clandestine actions against the terror networks. Second, the media should keep
things in perspective and avoid hysteria. The theatre of terror cannot succeed
without publicity. Unfortunately, the media all too often provides this publicity

for free. It obsessively reports terror attacks and greatly inflates their danger,
because reports on terrorism sell newspapers much better than reports on
diabetes or air pollution.
The third front is the imagination of each and every one of us. Terrorists hold
our imagination captive, and use it against us. Again and again we rehearse the
terrorist attack on the stage of our mind – remembering 9/11 or the latest suicide
bombings. The terrorists kill a hundred people – and cause 100 million to
imagine that there is a murderer lurking behind every tree. It is the responsibility
of every citizen to liberate his or her imagination from the terrorists, and to
remind ourselves of the true dimensions of this threat. It is our own inner terror
that prompts the media to obsess about terrorism, and the government to
overreact.
The success or failure of terrorism thus depends on us. If we allow our
imagination to be captured by the terrorists, and then overreact to our own fears
– terrorism will succeed. If we free our imagination from the terrorists, and react
in a balanced and cool way – terrorism will fail.
Terrorism goes nuclear
The preceding analysis holds true of terrorism as we have known it in the last
two centuries, and as it currently manifests itself on the streets of New York,
London, Paris and Tel Aviv. However, if terrorists acquire weapons of mass
destruction, the nature not just of terrorism, but of the state and of global
politics, will change dramatically. If tiny organisations representing a handful of
fanatics could destroy entire cities and kill millions, there would no longer be a
public sphere free of political violence.
Hence while present-day terrorism is mostly theatre, future nuclear terrorism,
cyberterrorism or bioterrorism would pose a much more serious threat, and
would demand far more drastic reaction from governments. Precisely because of
that, we should be very careful to differentiate such hypothetical future scenarios
from the actual terrorist attacks we have so far witnessed. Fear that terrorists
might one day get their hands on a nuclear bomb and destroy New York or
London does not justify a hysterical overreaction to a terrorist who kills a dozen
passersby with an automatic rifle or a runaway truck. States should be even more
careful not to start persecuting all dissident groups on the grounds that they
might one day try to obtain nuclear weapons, or that they might hack our self-
driving cars and turn them into a fleet of killer robots.

Likewise, though governments must certainly monitor radical groups and take
action to prevent them from gaining control of weapons of mass destruction,
they need to balance the fear of nuclear terrorism against other threatening
scenarios. In the last two decades the United States wasted trillions of dollars
and much political capital on its War on Terror. George W. Bush, Tony Blair,
Barack Obama and their administrations can argue with some justification that
by hounding terrorists they forced them to think more about survival than about
acquiring nuclear bombs. They might thereby have saved the world from a
nuclear 9/11. Since this is a counterfactual claim – ‘if we hadn’t launched the
War on Terror, al-Qaeda would have acquired nuclear weapons’ – it is difficult to
judge whether it is true or not.
We can be certain, however, that in pursuing the War on Terror the Americans
and their allies not only caused immense destruction across the globe, but also
incurred what economists call ‘opportunity costs’. The money, time and political
capital invested in fighting terrorism were not invested in fighting global
warming, AIDS and poverty; in bringing peace and prosperity to sub-Saharan
Africa; or in forging better ties with Russia and China. If New York or London
eventually sink under the rising Atlantic Ocean, or if tensions with Russia erupt
into open warfare, people might well accuse Bush, Blair and Obama of focusing
on the wrong front.
It is hard to set priorities in real time, while it is all too easy to second-guess
priorities with hindsight. We accuse leaders of failing to prevent the catastrophes
that happened, while remaining blissfully unaware of the disasters that never
materialised. Thus people look back at the Clinton administration in the 1990s,
and accuse it of neglecting the al-Qaeda threat. But in the 1990s few people
imagined that Islamic terrorists might ignite a global conflict by plunging
passenger airliners into New York skyscrapers. In contrast, many feared that
Russia might collapse entirely and lose control not just of its vast territory, but
also of thousands of nuclear and biological bombs. An additional concern was
that the bloody wars in the former Yugoslavia might spread to other parts of
eastern Europe, resulting in conflicts between Hungary and Romania, between
Bulgaria and Turkey, or between Poland and Ukraine.
Many felt even more uneasy about the reunification of Germany. Just four and
a half decades after the fall of the Third Reich, lots of people still harboured
visceral fears of German power. Free of the Soviet menace, won’t Germany
become a superpower dominating the European continent? And what about
China? Alarmed by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, China might abandon its
reforms, return to hardline Maoist policies, and end up as a larger version of
North Korea.

Today we can ridicule these scary scenarios, because we know they didn’t
materialise. The situation in Russia stabilised, most of eastern Europe was
peacefully absorbed into the EU, reunified Germany is hailed today as the leader
of the free world, and China has become the economic engine of the entire
globe. All this was achieved, at least in part, thanks to constructive US and EU
policies. Would it have been wiser if the USA and the EU had focused in the
1990s on Islamic extremists rather than on the situation in the former Soviet bloc
or in China?
We just cannot prepare for every eventuality. Accordingly, while we must
surely prevent nuclear terrorism, this cannot be the number-one item on
humanity’s agenda. And we certainly shouldn’t use the theoretical threat of
nuclear terrorism as a justification for overreaction to run-of-the-mill terrorism.
These are different problems that demand different solutions.
If despite our efforts terrorist groups eventually do lay their hands on weapons
of mass destruction, it is hard to know how political struggles will be conducted,
but they will be very different from the terror and counter-terror campaigns of
the early twenty-first century. If in 2050 the world is full of nuclear terrorists and
bioterrorists, their victims will look back at the world of 2018 with longing
tinged with disbelief: how could people who lived such secure lives nevertheless
have felt so threatened?
Of course, our current sense of danger is fuelled not just by terrorism. Lots of
pundits and laypeople fear that the Third World War is just around the corner, as
if we have seen this movie before, a century ago. As in 1914, in 2018 rising
tensions between the great powers coupled with intractable global problems
seem to be dragging us towards a global war. Is this anxiety more justified than
our overblown fear of terrorism?

11
WAR
Never underestimate human stupidity
The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history. Whereas
in early agricultural societies human violence caused up to 15 per cent of all
human deaths, and in the twentieth century it caused 5 per cent, today it is
responsible for only 1 per cent. Yet since the global financial crisis of 2008 the
1
international situation is rapidly deteriorating, warmongering is back in vogue,

and military expenditure is ballooning. Both laypeople and experts fear that just
2
as in 1914 the murder of an Austrian archduke sparked the First World War, so
in 2018 some incident in the Syrian desert or an unwise move in the Korean
peninsula might ignite a global conflict.
Given the growing tensions in the world, and the personalities of leaders in
Washington, Pyongyang and several other places, there is definitely cause for
concern. Yet there are several key differences between 2018 and 1914. In
particular, in 1914 war had great appeal to elites across the world because they
had many concrete examples of how successful wars contributed to economic
prosperity and political power. In contrast, in 2018 successful wars seem to be an
endangered species.
From the days of the Assyrians and the Qin, great empires were usually built
through violent conquest. In 1914 too, all the major powers owed their status to
successful wars. For instance, Imperial Japan became a regional power thanks to
its victories over China and Russia; Germany became Europe’s top dog after its
triumphs over Austria-Hungary and France; and Britain created the world’s
largest and most prosperous empire through a series of splendid little wars all
over the planet. Thus in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, losing a mere
fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir. Whereas in our days
3
occupying a Muslim country is the stuff of Western nightmares, following Tel el-
Kebir the British faced little armed resistance, and for more than six decades
controlled the Nile Valley and the vital Suez Canal. Other European powers
emulated the British, and whenever governments in Paris, Rome or Brussels

contemplated putting boots on the ground in Vietnam, Libya or Congo, their
only fear was that somebody else might get there first.
Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather
than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered
California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas,
Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US
annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which
added 2.3 million square kilometres to the United States (more than the
combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). It was the bargain
4
of the millennium.
In 1914 the elites in Washington, London and Berlin knew exactly what a
successful war looked like, and how much could be gained from it. In contrast,
in 2018 global elites have good reason to suspect that this type of war might
have become extinct. Though some Third World dictators and non-state actors
still manage to flourish through war, it seems that major powers no longer know
how to do so.
The greatest victory in living memory – of the United States over the Soviet
Union – was achieved without any major military confrontation. The United
States then got a fleeting taste of old-fashioned military glory in the First Gulf
War, but this only tempted it to waste trillions on humiliating military fiascos in
Iraq and Afghanistan. China, the rising power of the early twenty-first century,
has assiduously avoided all armed conflicts since its failed invasion of Vietnam
in 1979, and it owes its ascent strictly to economic factors. In this it has
emulated not the Japanese, German and Italian empires of the pre-1914 era, but
rather the Japanese, German and Italian economic miracles of the post-1945 era.
In all these cases economic prosperity and geopolitical clout were achieved
without firing a shot.
Even in the Middle East – the fighting ring of the world – regional powers
don’t know how to wage successful wars. Iran gained nothing from the long
bloodbath of the Iran–Iraq War, and subsequently avoided all direct military
confrontations. The Iranians finance and arm local movements from Iraq to
Yemen, and have sent their Revolutionary Guards to help their allies in Syria and
Lebanon, but so far they have been careful not to invade any country. Iran has
recently become the regional hegemon not by dint of any brilliant battlefield
victory, but rather by default. Its two main enemies – the USA and Iraq – got
embroiled in a war that destroyed both Iraq and the American appetite for
Middle Eastern quagmires, thereby leaving Iran to enjoy the spoils.
Much the same can be said of Israel. Its last successful war was waged in
1967. Since then Israel prospered despite its many wars, not thanks to them.

Most of its occupied territories saddle it with heavy economic burdens and
crippling political liabilities. Much like Iran, Israel has lately improved its
geopolitical position not by waging successful wars, but by avoiding military
adventures. While war has ravaged Israel’s erstwhile enemies in Iraq, Syria and
Libya, Israel has remained aloof. Not getting sucked into the Syrian civil war has
arguably been Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement (as of March 2018). If
it wanted to, the Israel Defense Forces could have seized Damascus within a
week, but what would Israel have gained from that? It would be even easier for
the IDF to conquer Gaza and topple the Hamas regime, but Israel has repeatedly
declined to do so. For all its military prowess and for all the hawkish rhetoric of
Israeli politicians, Israel knows there is little to be won from war. Like the USA,
China, Germany, Japan and Iran, Israel seems to understand that in the twenty-
first century the most successful strategy is to sit on the fence and let others do
the fighting for you.
The view from the Kremlin
So far the only successful invasion mounted by a major power in the twenty-first
century has been the Russian conquest of Crimea. In February 2014 Russian
forces invaded neighbouring Ukraine and occupied the Crimean peninsula,
which was subsequently annexed to Russia. With hardly any fighting, Russia
gained strategically vital territory, struck fear into its neighbours, and re-
established itself as a world power. However, the conquest succeeded thanks to
an extraordinary set of circumstances. Neither the Ukrainian army nor the local
population showed much resistance to the Russians, while other powers
refrained from directly intervening in the crisis. These circumstances will be
hard to reproduce elsewhere around the world. If the precondition for a
successful war is the absence of enemies willing to resist the aggressor, it
seriously limits the available opportunities.
Indeed, when Russia sought to reproduce its Crimean success in other parts of
Ukraine, it encountered substantially stiffer opposition, and the war in eastern
Ukraine bogged down into unproductive stalemate. Even worse (from Moscow’s
perspective), the war has stoked anti-Russian feelings in Ukraine and turned that
country from an ally into a sworn enemy. Just as success in the First Gulf War
tempted the USA to overreach itself in Iraq, success in Crimea may have
tempted Russia to overreach itself in Ukraine.

Taken together, Russia’s wars in the Caucasus and Ukraine in the early
twenty-first century can hardly be described as very successful. Though they
have boosted Russia’s prestige as a great power, they have also increased distrust
and animosity towards Russia, and in economic terms they have been a losing
enterprise. Tourist resorts in Crimea and decrepit Soviet-era factories in Luhansk
and Donetsk hardly balance the price of financing the war, and they certainly do
not offset the costs of capital flight and international sanctions. To realise the
limitations of the Russian policy, one just needs to compare the immense
economic progress of peaceful China in the last twenty years to the economic
stagnation of ‘victorious’ Russia during the same period. 5
The brave talk from Moscow notwithstanding, the Russian elite itself is
probably well aware of the real costs and benefits of its military adventures,
which is why it has so far been very careful not to escalate them. Russia has
been following the playground-bully principle: ‘pick on the weakest kid, and
don’t beat him up too much, lest the teacher intervenes’. If Putin had conducted
his wars in the spirit of Stalin, Peter the Great or Genghis Khan, then Russian
tanks would have long ago made a dash for Tbilisi and Kyiv, if not for Warsaw
and Berlin. But Putin is neither Genghis nor Stalin. He seems to know better
than anyone else that military power cannot go far in the twenty-first century,
and that waging a successful war means waging a limited war. Even in Syria,
despite the ruthlessness of Russian aerial bombardments, Putin has been careful
to minimise the Russian footprint, to let others do all the serious fighting, and to
prevent the war from spilling over into neighbouring countries.
Indeed, from Russia’s perspective, all its supposedly aggressive moves in
recent years were not the opening gambits of a new global war, but rather an
attempt to shore up exposed defences. Russians can justifiably point out that
after their peaceful retreats in the late 1980s and early 1990s they were treated
like a defeated enemy. The USA and NATO took advantage of Russian
weakness, and despite promises to the contrary, expanded NATO to eastern
Europe and even to some former Soviet republics. The West went on to ignore
Russian interests in the Middle East, invaded Serbia and Iraq on doubtful
pretexts, and generally made it very clear to Russia that it can count only on its
own military power to protect its sphere of influence from Western incursions.
From this perspective, recent Russian military moves can be blamed on Bill
Clinton and George W. Bush as much as on Vladimir Putin.
Of course, Russian military actions in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria may yet
turn out to be the opening salvoes of a far bolder imperial drive. Even if so far
Putin has not harboured serious plans for global conquests, success might fan his
ambitions. However, it would also be well to remember that Putin’s Russia is far

weaker than Stalin’s USSR, and unless it is joined by other countries such as
China, it cannot support a new Cold War, let alone a full-blown world war.
Russia has a population of 150 million people and a GDP of $4 trillion. In both
population and production it is dwarfed by the USA (325 million people and $19
trillion) and the European Union (500 million people and $21 trillion). Together,
6
the USA and EU have five times more people than Russia, and ten times more
dollars.
Recent technological developments have made this gap even bigger than it
seems. The USSR reached its zenith in the mid twentieth century, when heavy
industry was the locomotive of the global economy, and the Soviet centralised
system excelled in the mass production of tractors, trucks, tanks and
intercontinental missiles. Today, information technology and biotechnology are
more important than heavy industry, but Russia excels in neither. Though it has
impressive cyberwarfare capabilities, it lacks a civilian IT sector, and its
economy relies overwhelmingly on natural resources, particularly oil and gas.
This may be good enough to enrich a few oligarchs and keep Putin in power, but
it is not enough to win a digital or biotechnological arms race.
Even more importantly, Putin’s Russia lacks a universal ideology. During the
Cold War the USSR relied on the global appeal of communism as much as on
the global reach of the Red Army. Putinism, in contrast, has little to offer
Cubans, Vietnamese or French intellectuals. Authoritarian nationalism may
indeed be spreading in the world, but by its very nature it is not conducive to the
establishment of cohesive international blocs. Whereas Polish communism and
Russian communism were both committed, at least in theory, to the universal
interests of an international working class, Polish nationalism and Russian
nationalism are by definition committed to opposing interests. As Putin’s rise
sparks an upsurge of Polish nationalism, this will only make Poland more anti-
Russian than before.
Though Russia has embarked on a global campaign of disinformation and
subversion that aims to break up NATO and the EU, it does not seem likely that
it is about to embark on a global campaign of physical conquest. One can hope –
with some justification – that the takeover of Crimea and the Russian incursions
in Georgia and eastern Ukraine will remain isolated examples rather than
harbingers of a new era of war.
The lost art of winning wars

Why is it so difficult for major powers to wage successful wars in the twenty-
first century? One reason is the change in the nature of the economy. In the past,
economic assets were mostly material, so it was relatively straightforward to
enrich yourself by conquest. If you defeated your enemies on the battlefield, you
could cash in by looting their cities, selling their civilians in the slave markets,
and occupying valuable wheat fields and gold mines. Romans prospered by
selling captive Greeks and Gauls, and nineteenth-century Americans thrived by
occupying the gold mines of California and the cattle ranches of Texas.
Yet in the twenty-first century only puny profits can be made that way. Today
the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather
than wheat fields, gold mines or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer
knowledge through war. An organisation such as the Islamic State may still
flourish by looting cities and oil wells in the Middle East – they seized more
than $500 million from Iraqi banks and in 2015 made an additional $500 million
from selling oil – but for a major power such as China or the USA, these are
7
trifling sums. With an annual GDP of more than $20 trillion, China is unlikely to
start a war for a paltry billion. As for spending trillions of dollars on a war
against the USA, how could China repay these expenses and balance all the war
damages and lost trade opportunities? Would the victorious People’s Liberation
Army loot the riches of Silicon Valley? True, corporations such as Apple,
Facebook and Google are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but you cannot
seize these fortunes by force. There are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley.
A successful war could theoretically still bring huge profits by enabling the
victor to rearrange the global trade system in its favour, as Britain did after its
victory over Napoleon and as the USA did after its victory over Hitler. However,
changes in military technology make it difficult to repeat this feat in the twenty-
first century. The atom bomb has turned victory in a world war into collective
suicide. It is no coincidence that ever since Hiroshima, superpowers never
fought one another directly, and engaged only in what (for them) were low-stake
conflicts, in which the temptation to use nuclear weapons to avert defeat was
small. Indeed, even attacking a second-rate nuclear power such as North Korea
is an extremely unattractive proposition. It is scary to think what the Kim family
might do if it faces military defeat.
Cyberwarfare makes things even worse for would-be imperialists. In the good
old days of Queen Victoria and the Maxim gun, the British army could massacre
the fuzzy-wuzzies in some far-off desert without endangering the peace of
Manchester and Birmingham. Even in the days of George W. Bush, the USA
could wreak havoc in Baghdad and Fallujah while the Iraqis had no means of
retaliating against San Francisco or Chicago. But if the USA now attacks a

country possessing even moderate cyberwarfare capabilities, the war could be
brought to California or Illinois within minutes. Malwares and logic bombs
could stop air traffic in Dallas, cause trains to collide in Philadelphia, and bring
down the electric grid in Michigan.
In the great age of conquerors warfare was a low-damage, high-profit affair.
At the Battle of Hastings in 1066 William the Conqueror gained the whole of
England in a single day for the cost of a few thousand dead. Nuclear weapons
and cyberwarfare, by contrast, are high-damage, low-profit technologies. You
could use such tools to destroy entire countries, but not to build profitable
empires.
In a world filling up with sabre-rattling and bad vibes, perhaps our best
guarantee of peace is that major powers aren’t familiar with recent examples of
successful wars. While Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar would invade a foreign
country at the drop of a hat, present-day nationalist leaders such as Erdogan,
Modi and Netanyahu talk loud but are very careful about actually launching
wars. Of course, if somebody does find a formula to wage successful wars under
twenty-first-century conditions, the gates of hell might open with a rush. This is
what makes the Russian success in Crimea a particularly frightening omen. Let’s
hope it remains an exception.
The march of folly
Alas, even if wars remain an unprofitable business in the twenty-first century,

that would not give us an absolute guarantee of peace. We should never
underestimate human stupidity. Both on the personal and on the collective level,
humans are prone to engage in self-destructive activities.
In 1939 war was probably a counterproductive move for the Axis powers –
yet it did not save the world. One of the astounding things about the Second
World War is that following the war the defeated powers prospered as never
before. Twenty years after the complete annihilation of their armies and the utter
collapse of their empires, Germans, Italians and Japanese were enjoying
unprecedented levels of affluence. Why, then, did they go to war in the first
place? Why did they inflict unnecessary death and destruction on countless
millions? It was all just a stupid miscalculation. In the 1930s Japanese generals,
admirals, economists and journalists concurred that without control of Korea,
Manchuria and the Chinese coast, Japan was doomed to economic stagnation. 8

They were all wrong. In fact, the famed Japanese economic miracle began only
after Japan lost all its mainland conquests.
Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often
discount it. Politicians, generals and scholars treat the world as a great chess
game, where every move follows careful rational calculations. This is correct up
to a point. Few leaders in history have been mad in the narrow sense of the word,
moving pawns and knights at random. General Tojo, Saddam Hussein and Kim
Jong-il had rational reasons for every move they played. The problem is that the
world is far more complicated than a chessboard, and human rationality is not up
to the task of really understanding it. Hence even rational leaders frequently end
up doing very stupid things.
So how much should we fear a world war? It is best to avoid two extremes.
On the one hand, war is definitely not inevitable. The peaceful termination of the
Cold War proves that when humans make the right decisions, even superpower
conflicts can be resolved peacefully. Moreover, it is exceedingly dangerous to
assume that a new world war is inevitable. That would be a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Once countries assume that war is inevitable, they beef up their
armies, embark on spiralling arms races, refuse to compromise in any conflict,
and suspect that goodwill gestures are just traps. That guarantees the eruption of
war.
On the other hand, it would be naïve to assume that war is impossible. Even if
war is catastrophic for everyone, no god and no law of nature protects us from
human stupidity.
One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National,
religious and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my
nation, my religion and my culture are the most important in the world – hence
my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as
a whole. How can we make nations, religions and cultures a bit more realistic
and modest about their true place in the world?

14
SECULARISM
Acknowledge your shadow
What does it mean to be secular? Secularism is sometimes defined as the

negation of religion, and secular people are therefore characterised by what they
don’t believe and do. According to this definition, secular people do not believe
in any gods or angels, do not go to churches and temples, and do not perform
rites and rituals. As such, the secular world appears to be hollow, nihilistic and
amoral – an empty box waiting to be filled with something.
Few people would adopt such a negative identity. Self-professing secularists
view secularism in a very different way. For them, secularism is a very positive
and active world view, which is defined by a coherent code of values rather than
by opposition to this or that religion. Indeed, many of the secular values are
shared by various religious traditions. Unlike some sects that insist they have a
monopoly over all wisdom and goodness, one of the chief characteristics of
secular people is that they claim no such monopoly. They don’t think that
morality and wisdom came down from heaven in one particular place and time.
Rather, morality and wisdom are the natural legacy of all humans. So it is only to
be expected that at least some values would pop up in human societies all over
the world, and would be common to Muslims, Christians, Hindus and atheists.
Religious leaders often present their followers with a stark either/or choice –
either you are Muslim, or you are not. And if you are Muslim, you should reject
all other doctrines. In contrast, secular people are comfortable with multiple
hybrid identities. As far as secularism is concerned, you can go on calling
yourself a Muslim and continuing to pray to Allah, eat halal food and make the
haj to Mecca – yet also be a good member of secular society, provided you
adhere to the secular ethical code. This ethical code – which is indeed accepted
by millions of Muslims, Christians and Hindus as well as by atheists – enshrines
the values of truth, compassion, equality, freedom, courage and responsibility. It
forms the foundation of modern scientific and democratic institutions.
Like all ethical codes, the secular code is an ideal to aspire to rather than a
social reality. Just as Christian societies and Christian institutions often deviate

from the Christian ideal, so too secular societies and institutions often fall far
short of the secular ideal. Medieval France was a self-proclaimed Christian
kingdom, but it dabbled in all kinds of not-very-Christian activities (just ask the
downtrodden peasantry). Modern France is a self-proclaimed secular state, but
from the days of Robespierre onwards it took some troubling liberties with the
very definition of liberty (just ask women). That does not mean that secular
people – in France or elsewhere – lack a moral compass or an ethical
commitment. It just means that it is not easy to live up to an ideal.
The secular ideal
What then is the secular ideal? The most important secular commitment is to the
truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith.
Seculars strive not to confuse truth with belief. If you have a very strong belief
in some story, that may tell us a lot of interesting things about your psychology,
about your childhood, and about your brain structure – but it does not prove that
the story is true. (Often, strong beliefs are needed precisely when the story isn’t
true.)
In addition, seculars do not sanctify any group, any person or any book as if it
and it alone has sole custody of the truth. Instead, secular people sanctify the
truth wherever it may reveal itself – in ancient fossilised bones, in images of far-
off galaxies, in tables of statistical data, or in the writings of various human
traditions. This commitment to the truth underlies modern science, which has
enabled humankind to split the atom, decipher the genome, track the evolution of
life, and understand the history of humanity itself.
The other chief commitment of secular people is to compassion. Secular
ethics relies not on obeying the edicts of this or that god, but rather on a deep
appreciation of suffering. For example, secular people abstain from murder not
because some ancient book forbids it, but because killing inflicts immense
suffering on sentient beings. There is something deeply troubling and dangerous
about people who avoid killing just because ‘God says so’. Such people are
motivated by obedience rather than compassion, and what will they do if they
come to believe that their god commands them to kill heretics, witches,
adulterers or foreigners?
Of course, in the absence of absolute divine commandments, secular ethics
often faces difficult dilemmas. What happens when the same action hurts one
person but helps another? Is it ethical to levy high taxes on the rich in order to

help the poor? To wage a bloody war in order to remove a brutal dictator? To
allow an unlimited number of refugees into our country? When secular people
encounter such dilemmas, they do not ask ‘What does God command?’ Rather,
they weigh carefully the feelings of all concerned parties, examine a wide range
of observations and possibilities, and search for a middle path that will cause as
little harm as possible.
Consider, for example, attitudes to sexuality. How do secular people decide
whether to endorse or oppose rape, homosexuality, bestiality and incest? By
examining feelings. Rape is obviously unethical, not because it breaks some
divine commandment, but because it hurts people. In contrast, a loving
relationship between two men harms no one, so there is no reason to forbid it.
What then about bestiality? I have participated in numerous private and public
debates about gay marriage, and all too often some wise guy asks ‘If marriage
between two men is OK, why not allow marriage between a man and a goat?’
From a secular perspective the answer is obvious. Healthy relationships require
emotional, intellectual and even spiritual depth. A marriage lacking such depth
will make you frustrated, lonely and psychologically stunted. Whereas two men
can certainly satisfy the emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs of one
another, a relationship with a goat cannot. Hence if you see marriage as an
institution aimed at promoting human well-being – as secular people do – you
would not dream of even raising such a bizarre question. Only people who see
marriage as some kind of miraculous ritual might do so.
So how about relations between a father and his daughter? Both are humans,
so what’s wrong with that? Well, numerous psychological studies have
demonstrated that such relations inflict immense and usually irreparable harm on
the child. In addition, they reflect and intensify destructive tendencies in the
parent. Evolution has shaped the Sapiens psyche in such a way that romantic
bonds just don’t mix well with parental bonds. Therefore you don’t need God or
the Bible to oppose incest – you just need to read the relevant psychological
studies.1
This is the deep reason why secular people cherish scientific truth. Not in
order to satisfy their curiosity, but in order to know how best to reduce the
suffering in the world. Without the guidance of scientific studies, our
compassion is often blind.
The twin commitments to truth and compassion result also in a commitment to
equality. Though opinions differ regarding questions of economic and political
equality, secular people are fundamentally suspicious of all a priori hierarchies.
Suffering is suffering, no matter who experiences it; and knowledge is
knowledge, no matter who discovers it. Privileging the experiences or the

discoveries of a particular nation, class or gender is likely to make us both
callous and ignorant. Secular people are certainly proud of the uniqueness of
their particular nation, country and culture – but they don’t confuse ‘uniqueness’
with ‘superiority’. Hence though secular people acknowledge their special duties
towards their nation and their country, they don’t think these duties are
exclusive, and they simultaneously acknowledge their duties towards humanity
as a whole.
We cannot search for the truth and for the way out of suffering without the
freedom to think, investigate, and experiment. Secular people cherish freedom,
and refrain from investing supreme authority in any text, institution or leader as
the ultimate judge of what’s true and what’s right. Humans should always retain
the freedom to doubt, to check again, to hear a second opinion, to try a different
path. Secular people admire Galileo Galilei who dared to question whether the
earth really sits motionless at the centre of the universe; they admire the masses
of common people who stormed the Bastille in 1789 and brought down the
despotic regime of Louis XVI; and they admire Rosa Parks who had the courage
to sit down on a bus seat reserved for white passengers only.
It takes a lot of courage to fight biases and oppressive regimes, but it takes
even greater courage to admit ignorance and venture into the unknown. Secular
education teaches us that if we don’t know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of
acknowledging our ignorance and looking for new evidence. Even if we think
we know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of doubting our opinions and
checking ourselves again. Many people are afraid of the unknown, and want
clear-cut answers for every question. Fear of the unknown can paralyse us more
than any tyrant. People throughout history worried that unless we put all our
faith in some set of absolute answers, human society will crumble. In fact,
modern history has demonstrated that a society of courageous people willing to
admit ignorance and raise difficult questions is usually not just more prosperous
but also more peaceful than societies in which everyone must unquestioningly
accept a single answer. People afraid of losing their truth tend to be more violent
than people who are used to looking at the world from several different
viewpoints. Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than
answers you cannot question.
Finally, secular people cherish responsibility. They don’t believe in any
higher power that takes care of the world, punishes the wicked, rewards the just,
and protects us from famine, plague or war. We flesh-and-blood mortals must
take full responsibility for whatever we do – or don’t do. If the world is full of
misery, it is our duty to find solutions. Secular people take pride in the immense
achievements of modern societies, such as curing epidemics, feeding the hungry,

and bringing peace to large parts of the world. We need not credit any divine
protector with these achievements – they resulted from humans developing their
own knowledge and compassion. Yet for exactly the same reason, we need to
take full responsibility for the crimes and failings of modernity, from genocides
to ecological degradation. Instead of praying for miracles, we need to ask what
we can do to help.
These are the chief values of the secular world. As noted earlier, none of these
values is exclusively secular. Jews also value the truth, Christians value
compassion, Muslims value equality, Hindus value responsibility, and so forth.
Secular societies and institutions are happy to acknowledge these links and to
embrace religious Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus, provided that when the
secular code collides with religious doctrine, the latter gives way. For example,
to be accepted into secular society, Orthodox Jews are expected to treat non-Jews
as their equals, Christians should avoid burning heretics at the stake, Muslims
must respect freedom of expression, and Hindus ought to relinquish caste-based
discrimination.
In contrast, there is no expectation that religious people should deny God or
abandon traditional rites and rituals. The secular world judges people on the
basis of their behaviour rather than of their favourite clothes and ceremonies. A
person can follow the most bizarre sectarian dress code and practise the strangest
of religious ceremonies, yet act out of a deep commitment to the core secular
values. There are plenty of Jewish scientists, Christian environmentalists,
Muslim feminists and Hindu human-rights activists. If they are loyal to scientific
truth, to compassion, to equality and to freedom, they are full members of the
secular world, and there is absolutely no reason to demand that they take off
their yarmulkes, crosses, hijabs or tilakas.
For similar reasons, secular education does not mean a negative indoctrination
that teaches kids not to believe in God and not to take part in any religious
ceremonies. Rather, secular education teaches children to distinguish truth from
belief; to develop their compassion for all suffering beings; to appreciate the
wisdom and experiences of all the earth’s denizens; to think freely without
fearing the unknown; and to take responsibility for their actions and for the
world as a whole.
Was Stalin secular?

It is therefore groundless to criticise secularism for lacking ethical commitments
or social responsibilities. In fact, the main problem with secularism is just the
opposite. It probably sets the ethical bar too high. Most people just cannot live
up to such a demanding code, and large societies cannot be run on the basis of
the open-ended quest for truth and compassion. Especially in times of
emergency – such as war or economic crisis – societies must act promptly and
forcefully, even if they are not sure what is the truth and what is the most
compassionate thing to do. They need clear guidelines, catchy slogans and
inspiring battle cries. Since it is difficult to send soldiers into battle or impose
radical economic reforms in the name of doubtful conjectures, secular
movements repeatedly mutate into dogmatic creeds.
For example, Karl Marx began by claiming that all religions were oppressive
frauds, and he encouraged his followers to investigate for themselves the true
nature of the global order. In the following decades the pressures of revolution
and war hardened Marxism, and by the time of Stalin the official line of the
Soviet Communist Party said that the global order was too complicated for
ordinary people to understand, hence it was best always to trust the wisdom of
the party and do whatever it told you to do, even when it orchestrated the
imprisonment and extermination of tens of millions of innocent people. It may
look ugly, but as party ideologues never got tired of explaining, revolution isn’t a
picnic, and if you want an omelette you need to break a few eggs.
Whether one should view Stalin as a secular leader is therefore a matter of
how we define secularism. If we use the minimalist negative definition –
‘secular people don’t believe in God’ – then Stalin was definitely secular. If we
use a positive definition – ‘secular people reject all unscientific dogmas and are
committed to truth, compassion and freedom’ – then Marx was a secular
luminary, but Stalin was anything but. He was the prophet of the godless but
extremely dogmatic religion of Stalinism.
Stalinism is not an isolated example. On the other side of the political
spectrum, capitalism too began as a very open-minded scientific theory, but
gradually solidified into a dogma. Many capitalists keep repeating the mantra of
free markets and economic growth, irrespective of realities on the ground. No
matter what awful consequences occasionally result from modernisation,
industrialisation or privatisation, capitalist true-believers dismiss them as mere
‘growing pains’, and promise that everything will be made good through a bit
more growth.
Middle-of-the-road liberal democrats have been more loyal to the secular
pursuit of truth and compassion, but even they sometimes abandon it in favour of
comforting dogmas. Thus when confronted by the mess of brutal dictatorships

and failed states, liberals often put their unquestioning faith in the awesome
ritual of general elections. They fight wars and spend billions in places such as
Iraq, Afghanistan and the Congo in the firm belief that holding general elections
will magically turn these places into sunnier versions of Denmark. This despite
repeated failures, and despite the fact that even in places with an established
tradition of general elections these rituals occasionally bring to power
authoritarian populists, and result in nothing grander than majority dictatorships.
If you try to question the alleged wisdom of general elections, you won’t be sent
to the gulag, but you are likely to get a very cold shower of dogmatic abuse.
Of course, not all dogmas are equally harmful. Just as some religious beliefs
have benefited humanity, so also have some secular dogmas. This is particularly
true of the doctrine of human rights. The only place rights exist is in the stories
humans invent and tell one another. These stories were enshrined as a self-
evident dogma during the struggle against religious bigotry and autocratic
governments. Though it isn’t true that humans have a natural right to life or
liberty, belief in this story curbed the power of authoritarian regimes, protected
minorities from harm, and safeguarded billions from the worst consequences of
poverty and violence. It thereby contributed to the happiness and welfare of
humanity probably more than any other doctrine in history.
Yet it is still a dogma. Thus article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of
Human Rights says that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and
expression’. If we understand this is a political demand (‘everyone should have
the right to freedom of opinion’), this is perfectly sensible. But if we believe that
each and every Sapiens is naturally endowed with a ‘right to freedom of
opinion’, and that censorship therefore violates some law of nature, we miss the
truth about humanity. As long as you define yourself as ‘an individual
possessing inalienable natural rights’, you will not know who you really are, and
you will not understand the historical forces that shaped your society and your
own mind (including your belief in ‘natural rights’).
Such ignorance perhaps mattered little in the twentieth century, when people
were busy fighting Hitler and Stalin. But it might become fatal in the twenty-first
century, because biotechnology and artificial intelligence now seek to change the
very meaning of humanity. If we are committed to the right to life, does that
imply we should use biotechnology to overcome death? If we are committed to
the right to liberty, should we empower algorithms that decipher and fulfil our
hidden desires? If all humans enjoy equal human rights, do superhumans enjoy
super-rights? Secular people will find it difficult to engage with such questions
as long as they are committed to a dogmatic belief in ‘human rights’.

The dogma of human rights was shaped in previous centuries as a weapon
against the Inquisition, the ancien régime, the Nazis and the KKK. It is hardly
equipped to deal with superhumans, cyborgs and super-intelligent computers.
While human rights movements have developed a very impressive arsenal of
arguments and defences against religious biases and human tyrants, this arsenal
hardly protects us against consumerist excesses and technological utopias.
Acknowledging the shadow
Secularism should not be equated with Stalinist dogmatism or with the bitter
fruits of Western imperialism and runaway industrialisation. Yet it cannot shirk
all responsibility for them, either. Secular movements and scientific institutions
have mesmerised billions with promises to perfect humanity and to utilise the
bounty of planet Earth for the benefit of our species. Such promises resulted not
just in overcoming plagues and famines, but also in gulags and melting ice caps.
You might well argue that this is all the fault of people misunderstanding and
distorting the core secular ideals and the true facts of science. And you are
absolutely right. But that is a common problem for all influential movements.
For example, Christianity has been responsible for great crimes such as the
Inquisition, the Crusades, the oppression of native cultures across the world, and
the disempowerment of women. A Christian might take offence at this and retort
that all these crimes resulted from a complete misunderstanding of Christianity.
Jesus preached only love, and the Inquisition was based on a horrific distortion
of his teachings. We can sympathise with this claim, but it would be a mistake to
let Christianity off the hook so easily. Christians appalled by the Inquisition and
by the Crusades cannot just wash their hands of these atrocities – they should
rather ask themselves some very tough questions. How exactly did their ‘religion
of love’ allow itself to be distorted in such a way, and not once, but numerous
times? Protestants who try to blame it all on Catholic fanaticism are advised to
read a book about the behaviour of Protestant colonists in Ireland or in North
America. Similarly, Marxists should ask themselves what it was about the
teachings of Marx that paved the way to the Gulag, scientists should consider
how the scientific project lent itself so easily to destabilising the global
ecosystem, and geneticists in particular should take warning from the way the
Nazis hijacked Darwinian theories.
Every religion, ideology and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed
you follow you should acknowledge your shadow and avoid the naïve

reassurance that ‘it cannot happen to us’. Secular science has at least one big
advantage over most traditional religions, namely that it is not terrified of its
shadow, and it is in principle willing to admit its mistakes and blind spots. If you
believe in an absolute truth revealed by a transcendent power, you cannot allow
yourself to admit any error – for that would nullify your whole story. But if you
believe in a quest for truth by fallible humans, admitting blunders is an inherent
part of the game.
This is also why undogmatic secular movements tend to make relatively
modest promises. Aware of their imperfections, they hope to effect small
incremental changes, raising the minimum wage by a few dollars or reducing
child mortality by a few percentage points. It is the mark of dogmatic ideologies
that due to their excessive self-confidence they routinely vow the impossible.
Their leaders speak all too freely about ‘eternity’, ‘purity’ and ‘redemption’, as if
by enacting some law, building some temple, or conquering some piece of
territory they could save the entire world in one grand gesture.
As we come to make the most important decisions in the history of life, I
personally would trust more in those who admit ignorance than in those who
claim infallibility. If you want your religion, ideology or world view to lead the
world, my first question to you is: ‘What was the biggest mistake your religion,
ideology or world view committed? What did it get wrong?’ If you cannot come
up with something serious, I for one would not trust you.

15
IGNORANCE
You know less than you think
The preceding chapters surveyed some of the most important problems and
developments of the present era, from the overhyped threat of terrorism to the
underappreciated threat of technological disruption. If you are left with the
nagging feeling that this is too much, and that you cannot process it all, you are
absolutely right. No person can.
In the last few centuries, liberal thought developed immense trust in the
rational individual. It depicted individual humans as independent rational agents,
and has made these mythical creatures the basis of modern society. Democracy is
founded on the idea that the voter knows best, free-market capitalism believes
that the customer is always right, and liberal education teaches students to think
for themselves.
It is a mistake, however, to put so much trust in the rational individual. Post-
colonial and feminist thinkers have pointed out that this ‘rational individual’ may
well be a chauvinistic Western fantasy, glorifying the autonomy and power of
upper-class white men. As noted earlier, behavioural economists and
evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are
based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than on rational
analysis, and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for
dealing with life in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate in the Silicon
Age.
Not only rationality, but individuality too is a myth. Humans rarely think for
themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it
also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict, or cure a disease. No
individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb, or an
aircraft. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us
into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality, but our
unparalleled ability to think together in large groups. 1
Individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history
progressed, they came to know less and less. A hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age

knew how to make her own clothes, how to start a fire, how to hunt rabbits and
how to escape lions. We think we know far more today, but as individuals, we
actually know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our
needs. In one humbling experiment, people were asked to evaluate how well
they understood the workings of an ordinary zip. Most people confidently
replied that they understood them very well – after all, they use zips all the time.
They were then asked to describe in as much detail as possible all the steps
involved in the zip’s operation. Most had no idea. This is what Steven Sloman
2
and Philip Fernbach have termed ‘the knowledge illusion’. We think we know a
lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in
the minds of others as if it were our own.
This is not necessarily bad. Our reliance on groupthink has made us masters of
the world, and the knowledge illusion enables us to go through life without being
caught in an impossible effort to understand everything ourselves. From an
evolutionary perspective, trusting in the knowledge of others has worked
extremely well for Homo sapiens.
Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause
trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is
becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they
are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about
meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change
and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about
what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these
countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock
themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming
newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. 3
Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve

matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and
pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global
warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such
hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most
of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual
rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding
people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire.
Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel
stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth
of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data. 4
The power of groupthink is so pervasive that it is difficult to break its hold

even when its views seem to be rather arbitrary. Thus in the USA, right-wing

conservatives tend to care far less about things like pollution and endangered
species than left-wing progressives, which is why Louisiana has much weaker
environmental regulations than Massachusetts. We are used to this situation, so
we take it for granted, but it is really quite surprising. One would have thought
that conservatives would care far more about the conservation of the old
ecological order, and about protecting their ancestral lands, forests and rivers. In
contrast, progressives could be expected to be far more open to radical changes
to the countryside, especially if the aim is to speed up progress and increase the
human standard of living. However, once the party line has been set on these
issues by various historical quirks, it has become second nature for conservatives
to dismiss concerns about polluted rivers and disappearing birds, while left-wing
progressives tend to fear any disruption to the old ecological order. 5
Even scientists are not immune to the power of groupthink. Thus scientists
who believe that facts can change public opinion may themselves be the victims
of scientific groupthink. The scientific community believes in the efficacy of
facts, hence those loyal to that community continue to believe that they can win
public debates by throwing the right facts around, despite much empirical
evidence to the contrary.
Similarly, the liberal belief in individual rationality may itself be the product
of liberal groupthink. In one of the climactic moments of Monty Python’s Life of
Brian, a huge crowd of starry-eyed followers mistakes Brian for the Messiah.
Brian tells his disciples that ‘You don’t need to follow me, you don’t need to
follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!
You’re all different!’ The enthusiastic crowd then chants in unison ‘Yes! We’re
all individuals! Yes, we are all different!’ Monty Python were parodying the
counterculture orthodoxy of the 1960s, but the point may be true of the belief in
rational individualism in general. Modern democracies are full of crowds
shouting in unison, ‘Yes, the voter knows best! Yes, the customer is always
right!’
The black hole of power
The problem of groupthink and individual ignorance besets not just ordinary
voters and customers, but also presidents and CEOs. They may have at their
disposal plenty of advisors and vast intelligence agencies, but this does not
necessarily make things better. It is extremely hard to discover the truth when
you are ruling the world. You are just far too busy. Most political chiefs and

business moguls are forever on the run. Yet if you want to go deeply into any
subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of
wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, to explore dead
ends, to make space for doubts and boredom, and to allow little seeds of insight
to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time – you will never
find the truth.
Worse still, great power inevitably distorts the truth. Power is all about
changing reality rather than seeing it for what it is. When you have a hammer in
your hand, everything looks like a nail; and when you have great power in your
hand, everything looks like an invitation to meddle. Even if you somehow
overcome this urge, the people surrounding you will never forget the giant
hammer you are holding. Anybody who talks with you will have a conscious or
unconscious agenda, and therefore you can never have full faith in what they say.
No sultan can ever trust his courtiers and underlings to tell him the truth.
Great power thus acts like a black hole that warps the very space around it.
The closer you get, the more twisted everything becomes. Each word is made
extra heavy upon entering your orbit, and each person you see tries to flatter you,
appease you, or get something from you. They know you cannot spare them
more than a minute a two, and they are fearful of saying something improper or
muddled, so they end up saying either empty slogans or the greatest clichés of
all.
A couple of years ago I was invited to dinner with the Israeli prime minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu. Friends warned me not to go, but I couldn’t resist the
temptation. I thought I might finally hear some big secrets that are divulged only
to important ears behind closed doors. What a disappointment it was! There
were about thirty people there, and everyone tried to get the Great Man’s
attention, impress him with their wit, curry favour, or get something out of him.
If anyone there knew any big secrets, they did an extremely good job of keeping
them to themselves. This was hardly Netanyahu’s fault, or indeed anybody’s
fault. It was the fault of the gravitational pull of power.
If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power, and allow
yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery.
Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the centre, because the centre is
built on existing knowledge. The guardians of the old order usually determine
who gets to reach the centres of power, and they tend to filter out the carriers of
disturbing unconventional ideas. Of course they filter out an incredible amount
of rubbish too. Not being invited to the Davos World Economic Forum is hardly
a guarantee of wisdom. That’s why you need to waste so much time on the
periphery – they may contain some brilliant revolutionary insights, but they are

mostly full of uninformed guesses, debunked models, superstitious dogmas and
ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Leaders are thus trapped in a double bind. If they stay in the centre of power,
they will have an extremely distorted vision of the world. If they venture to the
margins, they will waste too much of their precious time. And the problem will
only get worse. In the coming decades, the world will become even more
complex than it is today. Individual humans – whether pawns or kings – will
consequently know even less about the technological gadgets, the economic
currents, and the political dynamics that shape the world. As Socrates observed
more than 2,000 years ago, the best we can do under such conditions is to
acknowledge our own individual ignorance.
But what then about morality and justice? If we cannot understand the world,
how can we hope to tell the difference between right and wrong, justice and
injustice?

19
EDUCATION
Change is the only constant
Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are

crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. How can we
prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented
transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be thirty-
something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and
might even be an active citizen of the twenty-second century. What should we
teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the world of
2050 or of the twenty-second century? What kind of skills will he or she need in
order to get a job, understand what is happening around them, and navigate the
maze of life?
Unfortunately, since nobody knows how the world will look in 2050 – not to
mention 2100 – we don’t know the answer to these questions. Of course, humans
could never predict the future with accuracy. But today it is more difficult than
ever before, because once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and
minds, we can no longer be certain about anything – including things that
previously seemed fixed and eternal.
A thousand years ago, in 1018, there were many things people didn’t know
about the future, but they were nevertheless convinced that the basic features of
human society were not going to change. If you lived in China in 1018, you
knew that by 1050 the Song Empire might collapse, the Khitans might invade
from the north, and plagues might kill millions. However, it was clear to you that
even in 1050 most people would still work as farmers and weavers, rulers would
still rely on humans to staff their armies and bureaucracies, men would still
dominate women, life expectancy would still be about forty, and the human body
would be exactly the same. Hence in 1018, poor Chinese parents taught their
children how to plant rice or weave silk, and wealthier parents taught their boys
how to read the Confucian classics, write calligraphy, or fight on horseback –
and taught their girls to be modest and obedient housewives. It was obvious
these skills would still be needed in 1050.

In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will
look in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know
how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what gender
relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than today,
and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution thanks to
bioengineering and direct brain–computer interfaces. Much of what kids learn
today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.
At present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past this
made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of
existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you lived, say, in a
small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for you to know much
about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily newspapers or
public libraries. Even if you were literate and had access to a private library,
1
there was not much to read other than novels and religious tracts. The Spanish
Empire heavily censored all texts printed locally, and allowed only a dribble of
vetted publications to be imported from outside. Much the same was true if you
2
lived in some provincial town in Russia, India, Turkey or China. When modern
schools came along, teaching every child to read and write and imparting the
basic facts of geography, history and biology, they represented an immense
improvement.
In contrast, in the twenty-first century we are flooded by enormous amounts
of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it. Instead, they are busy
spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies. If you live in some
provincial Mexican town and you have a smartphone, you can spend many
lifetimes just reading Wikipedia, watching TED talks, and taking free online
courses. No government can hope to conceal all the information it doesn’t like.
On the other hand, it is alarmingly easy to inundate the public with conflicting
reports and red herrings. People all over the world are but a click away from the
latest accounts of the bombardment of Aleppo or of melting ice caps in the
Arctic, but there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what
to believe. Besides, countless other things are just a click away, making it
difficult to focus, and when politics or science look too complicated it is
tempting to switch to some funny cat videos, celebrity gossip, or porn.
In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more
information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the
ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is
important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of
information into a broad picture of the world.

In truth, this has been the ideal of Western liberal education for centuries, but
up till now even many Western schools have been rather slack in fulfilling it.
Teachers allowed themselves to focus on shoving data while encouraging pupils
‘to think for themselves’. Due to their fear of authoritarianism, liberal schools
had a particular horror of grand narratives. They assumed that as long as we give
students lots of data and a modicum of freedom, the students will create their
own picture of the world, and even if this generation fails to synthesise all the
data into a coherent and meaningful story of the world, there will be plenty of
time to construct a good synthesis in the future. We have now run out of time.
The decisions we will take in the next few decades will shape the future of life
itself, and we can take these decisions based only on our present world view. If
this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will
be decided at random.
The heat is on
Besides information, most schools also focus too much on providing pupils with
a set of predetermined skills such as solving differential equations, writing
computer code in C++, identifying chemicals in a test tube, or conversing in
Chinese. Yet since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look
in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might
invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to speak Chinese,
only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a
new Google Translate app enables you to conduct a conversation in almost
flawless Mandarin, Cantonese or Hakka, even though you only know how to say
‘Ni hao.’
So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools
should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication,
collaboration and creativity. More broadly, schools should downplay technical
3
skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the
ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental
balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you
will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need
to reinvent yourself again and again.
For as the pace of change increases, not just the economy, but the very
meaning of ‘being human’ is likely to mutate. Already in 1848 the Communist
Manifesto declared that ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Marx and Engels,

however, were thinking mainly about social and economic structures. By 2048,
physical and cognitive structures will also melt into air, or into a cloud of data
bits.
In 1848 millions of people were losing their jobs on village farms, and were
going to the big cities to work in factories. But upon reaching the big city, they
were unlikely to change their gender or to add a sixth sense. And if they found a
job in some textile factory, they could expect to remain in that profession for the
rest of their working lives.
By 2048, people might have to cope with migrations to cyberspace, with fluid
gender identities, and with new sensory experiences generated by computer
implants. If they find both work and meaning in designing up-to-the-minute
fashions for a 3-D virtual reality game, within a decade not just this particular
profession, but all jobs demanding this level of artistic creation might be taken
over by AI. So at twenty-five you introduce yourself on a dating site as ‘a
twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a
fashion shop’. At thirty-five you say you are ‘a gender-non-specific person
undergoing age-adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the
NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion
designer has gone before’. At forty-five both dating and self-definitions are so
passé. You just wait for an algorithm to find (or create) the perfect match for
you. As for drawing meaning from the art of fashion design, you are so
irrevocably outclassed by the algorithms, that looking at your crowning
achievements from the previous decade fills you with embarrassment rather than
pride. And at forty-five you still have many decades of radical change ahead of
you.
Please don’t take this scenario literally. Nobody can really predict the specific
changes we will witness. Any particular scenario is likely to be far from the
truth. If somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and
it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes
to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it doesn’t sound like science
fiction – it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics, but change itself
is the only certainty.
Such profound change may well transform the basic structure of life, making
discontinuity its most salient feature. From time immemorial life was divided
into two complementary parts: a period of learning followed by a period of
working. In the first part of life you accumulated information, developed skills,
constructed a world view, and built a stable identity. Even if at fifteen you spent
most of your day working in the family’s rice field (rather than in a formal
school), the most important thing you were doing was learning: how to cultivate

rice, how to conduct negotiations with the greedy rice merchants from the big
city, and how to resolve conflicts over land and water with the other villagers. In
the second part of life you relied on your accumulated skills to navigate the
world, earn a living, and contribute to society. Of course even at fifty you
continued to learn new things about rice, about merchants, and about conflicts,
but these were just small tweaks to well-honed abilities.
By the middle of the twenty-first century, accelerating change plus longer
lifespans will make this traditional model obsolete. Life will come apart at the
seams, and there will be less and less continuity between different periods of life.
‘Who am I?’ will be a more urgent and complicated question than ever before. 4
This is likely to involve immense levels of stress. For change is almost always
stressful, and after a certain age most people just don’t like to change. When you
are fifteen, your entire life is change. Your body is growing, your mind is
developing, your relationships are deepening. Everything is in flux, and
everything is new. You are busy inventing yourself. Most teenagers find it
frightening, but at the same time, it is also exciting. New vistas are opening
before you, and you have an entire world to conquer.
By the time you are fifty, you don’t want change, and most people have given
up on conquering the world. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. You much
prefer stability. You have invested so much in your skills, your career, your
identity and your world view that you don’t want to start all over again. The
harder you’ve worked on building something, the more difficult it is to let go of
it and make room for something new. You might still cherish new experiences
and minor adjustments, but most people in their fifties aren’t ready to overhaul
the deep structures of their identity and personality.
There are neurological reasons for this. Though the adult brain is more
flexible and volatile than was once thought, it is still less malleable than the
teenage brain. Reconnecting neurons and rewiring synapses is damned hard
work. But in the twenty-first century, you can hardly afford stability. If you try
5
to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind
as the world flies by you with a whooooosh. Given that life expectancy is likely
to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless
fossil. To stay relevant – not just economically, but above all socially – you will
need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young
age like fifty.
As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the
past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides.
Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal
with things nobody ever encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines,

engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate your emotions with uncanny
precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms, and the need to change your
profession every decade. What is the right thing to do when confronting a
completely unprecedented situation? How should you act when you are flooded
by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you can
absorb and analyse it all? How to live in a world where profound uncertainty is
not a bug, but a feature?
To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental
flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly
let go of some of what you know best, and feel at home with the unknown.
Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental
balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the
causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or
listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility
that the twenty-first century demands, for they themselves are the product of the
old educational system.
The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of
education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into
many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the
sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who
were all born the same year as you. Every hour some grown-up walks in, and
starts talking. They are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells
you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a
third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost
everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so
far we haven’t created a viable alternative. Certainly not a scaleable alternative
that can be implemented in rural Mexico rather than just in upmarket California
suburbs.
Hacking humans
So the best advice I could give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school

somewhere in Mexico, India or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much.
Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world. In the past, it
was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because they knew the world quite
well, and the world changed slowly. But the twenty-first century is going to be

different. Due to the growing pace of change you can never be certain whether
what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.
So on what can you rely instead? Perhaps on technology? That’s an even
riskier gamble. Technology can help you a lot, but if technology gains too much
power over your life, you might become a hostage to its agenda. Thousands of
years ago humans invented agriculture, but this technology enriched just a tiny
elite, while enslaving the majority of humans. Most people found themselves
working from sunrise till sunset plucking weeds, carrying water-buckets and
harvesting corn under a blazing sun. It can happen to you too.
Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help
you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for
technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life. Especially
as technology gets better at understanding humans, you might increasingly find
yourself serving it, instead of it serving you. Have you seen those zombies who
roam the streets with their faces glued to their smartphones? Do you think they
control the technology, or does the technology control them?
Should you rely on yourself, then? That sounds great on Sesame Street or in
an old-fashioned Disney film, but in real life it doesn’t work so well. Even
Disney is coming to realise it. Just like Riley Andersen, most people hardly
know themselves, and when they try to ‘listen to themselves’ they easily become
prey to external manipulations. The voice we hear inside our heads was never
trustworthy, because it always reflected state propaganda, ideological
brainwashing and commercial advertisement, not to mention biochemical bugs.
As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will become easier to
manipulate people’s deepest emotions and desires, and it will become more
dangerous than ever to just follow your heart. When Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu
or the government knows how to pull the strings of your heart and press the
buttons of your brain, could you still tell the difference between your self and
their marketing experts?
To succeed in such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard on getting
to know your operating system better. To know what you are, and what you want
from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For
thousands of years philosophers and prophets have urged people to know
themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the twenty-first
century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious
competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu and the government are all racing to
hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account –
they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might

have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that’s hardly
half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.
The algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching where you go,
what you buy, who you meet. Soon they will monitor all your steps, all your
breaths, all your heartbeats. They are relying on Big Data and machine learning
to get to know you better and better. And once these algorithms know you better
than you know yourself, they could control and manipulate you, and you won’t
be able to do much about it. You will live in the matrix, or in The Truman Show.
In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand
what’s happening within you better than you understand it, authority will shift to
them.
Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceding all authority to the algorithms
and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest of the world. If so, just
relax and enjoy the ride. You don’t need to do anything about it. The algorithms
will take care of everything. If, however, you want to retain some control of your
personal existence and of the future of life, you have to run faster than the
algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself
before they do. To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your
illusions behind. They are very heavy.

CHAPTER 9
INEQUALITY
B ut is it all going to the rich?” That’s a natural question to ask in developed

countries in the second decade of the 21st century, when economic
inequality has become an obsession. Pope Francis called it “the root of
social evil”; Barack Obama, “the defining challenge of our time.” Between 2009
and 2016, the proportion of articles in the New York Times containing the word
inequality soared tenfold, reaching 1 in 73.1 The new conventional wisdom is
that the richest one percent have skimmed off all the economic growth of recent
decades, and everyone else is treading water or slowly sinking. If so, the
explosion of wealth documented in the previous chapter would no longer be
worth celebrating, since it would have ceased contributing to overall human
welfare.
Economic inequality has long been a signature issue of the left, and it rose in
prominence after the Great Recession began in 2007. It ignited the Occupy Wall
Street movement in 2011 and the presidential candidacy of the self-described
socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016, who proclaimed that “a nation will not survive
morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so
little.”2 But in that year the revolution devoured its children and propelled the
candidacy of Donald Trump, who claimed that the United States had become “a
third-world country” and blamed the declining fortunes of the working class not
on Wall Street and the one percent but on immigration and foreign trade. The left
and right ends of the political spectrum, incensed by economic inequality for
their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared
cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American
president in recent times.
Has rising inequality really immiserated the majority of citizens? Economic
inequality undoubtedly has increased in most Western countries since its low

point around 1980, particularly in the United States and other English-speaking
countries, and especially in the contrast between the very richest and everyone
else.3 Economic inequality is usually measured by the Gini coefficient, a number
that can vary between 0, when everyone has the same as everyone else, and 1,
when one person has everything and everyone else has nothing. (Gini values
generally range from .25 for the most egalitarian income distributions, such as in
Scandinavia after taxes and benefits, to .7 for a highly unequal distribution such
as the one in South Africa.) In the United States, the Gini index for market
income (before taxes and benefits) rose from .44 in 1984 to .51 in 2012.
Inequality can also be measured by the proportion of total income that is earned
by a given fraction (quantile) of the population. In the United States, the share of
income going to the richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18
percent in 2015, while the share going to the richest tenth of one percent grew
from 2 percent to 8 percent.4
There’s no question that some of the phenomena falling under the inequality
rubric (there are many) are serious and must be addressed, if only to defuse the
destructive agendas they have incited, such as abandoning market economies,
technological progress, and foreign trade. Inequality is devilishly complicated to
analyze (in a population of one million, there are 999,999 ways in which they
can be unequal), and the subject has filled many books. I need a chapter on the
topic because so many people have been swept up in the dystopian rhetoric and
see inequality as a sign that modernity has failed to improve the human
condition. As we will see, this is wrong, and for many reasons.
The starting point for understanding inequality in the context of human progress
is to recognize that income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-
being. It is not like health, prosperity, knowledge, safety, peace, and the other
areas of progress I examine in these chapters. The reason is captured in an old
joke from the Soviet Union. Igor and Boris are dirt-poor peasants, barely
scratching enough crops from their small plots of land to feed their families. The
only difference between them is that Boris owns a scrawny goat. One day a fairy
appears to Igor and grants him a wish. Igor says, “I wish that Boris’s goat should
die.”
The point of the joke, of course, is that the two peasants have become more
equal but that neither is better off, aside from Igor’s indulging his spiteful envy.
The point is made with greater nuance by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his

2015 book On Inequality.5 Frankfurt argues that inequality itself is not morally
objectionable; what is objectionable is poverty. If a person lives a long, healthy,
pleasurable, and stimulating life, then how much money the Joneses earn, how
big their house is, and how many cars they drive are morally irrelevant.
Frankfurt writes, “From the point of view of morality, it is not important
everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should
have enough.”6 Indeed, a narrow focus on economic inequality can be
destructive if it distracts us into killing Boris’s goat instead of figuring out how
Igor can get one.
The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump
fallacy—the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource, like an antelope
carcass, which has to be divvied up in zero-sum fashion, so that if some people
end up with more, others must have less. As we just saw, wealth is not like that:
since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially.7 That means that
when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too. Even experts repeat the
lump fallacy, presumably out of rhetorical zeal rather than conceptual confusion.
Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century
became a talisman in the uproar over inequality, wrote, “The poorer half of the
population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of
total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.”8 But total wealth today is vastly greater
than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far
richer, not “as poor.”
A more damaging consequence of the lump fallacy is the belief that if some
people get richer, they must have stolen more than their share from everyone
else. A famous illustration by the philosopher Robert Nozick, updated for the
21st century, shows why this is wrong.9 Among the world’s billionaires is J. K.
Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels, which have sold more than 400
million copies and have been adapted into a series of films seen by a similar
number of people.10 Suppose that a billion people have handed over $10 each for
the pleasure of a Harry Potter paperback or movie ticket, with a tenth of the
proceeds going to Rowling. She has become a billionaire, increasing inequality,
but she has made people better off, not worse off (which is not to say that every
rich person has made people better off). This doesn’t mean that Rowling’s
wealth is just deserts for her effort or skill, or a reward for the literacy and
happiness she added to the world; no committee ever judged that she deserved to
be that rich. Her wealth arose as a by-product of the voluntary decisions of
billions of book buyers and moviegoers.

To be sure, there may be reasons to worry about inequality itself, not just
poverty. Perhaps most people are like Igor and their happiness is determined by
how they compare with their fellow citizens rather than how well-off they are in
absolute terms. When the rich get too rich, everyone else feels poor, so
inequality lowers well-being even if everyone gets richer. This is an old idea in
social psychology, variously called the theory of social comparison, reference
groups, status anxiety, or relative deprivation.11 But the idea must be kept in
perspective. Imagine Seema, an illiterate woman in a poor country who is
village-bound, has lost half her children to disease, and will die at fifty, as do
most of the people she knows. Now imagine Sally, an educated person in a rich
country who has visited several cities and national parks, has seen her children
grow up, and will live to eighty, but is stuck in the lower middle class. It’s
conceivable that Sally, demoralized by the conspicuous wealth she will never
attain, is not particularly happy, and she might even be unhappier than Seema,
who is grateful for small mercies. Yet it would be mad to suppose that Sally is
not better off, and positively depraved to conclude that one may as well not try
to improve Seema’s life because it might improve her neighbors’ lives even more
and leave her no happier.12
In any case, the thought experiment is moot, because in real life Sally almost
certainly is happier. Contrary to an earlier belief that people are so mindful of
their richer compatriots that they keep resetting their internal happiness meter to
the baseline no matter how well they are doing, we will see in chapter 18 that
richer people and people in richer countries are (on average) happier than poorer
people and people in poorer countries.13
But even if people are happier when they and their countries get richer, might
they become more miserable if others around them are still richer than they are
—that is, as economic inequality increases? In their well-known book The Spirit
Level, the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett claim that
countries with greater income inequality also have higher rates of homicide,
imprisonment, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, physical and mental illness,
social distrust, obesity, and substance abuse.14 The economic inequality causes
the ills, they argue: unequal societies make people feel that they are pitted in a
winner-take-all competition for dominance, and the stress makes them sick and
self-destructive.
The Spirit Level theory has been called “the left’s new theory of everything,”
and it is as problematic as any other theory that leaps from a tangle of
correlations to a single-cause explanation. For one thing, it’s not obvious that

people are whipped into competitive anxiety by the existence of J. K. Rowling
and Sergey Brin as opposed to their own, local rivals for professional, romantic,
and social success. Worse, economically egalitarian countries like Sweden and
France differ from lopsided countries like Brazil and South Africa in many ways
other than their income distribution. The egalitarian countries are, among other
things, richer, better educated, better governed, and more culturally
homogeneous, so a raw correlation between inequality and happiness (or any
other social good) may show only that there are many reasons why it’s better to
live in Denmark than in Uganda. Wilkinson and Pickett’s sample was restricted
to developed countries, but even within that sample the correlations are
evanescent, coming and going with choices about which countries to include.15
Wealthy but unequal countries, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, are often
socially healthier than poorer but more equal countries, such as those of ex-
Communist Eastern Europe.
Most damagingly, the sociologists Jonathan Kelley and Mariah Evans have
snipped the causal link joining inequality to happiness in a study of two hundred
thousand people in sixty-eight societies over three decades.16 (We will examine
how happiness and life satisfaction are measured in chapter 18.) Kelley and
Evans held constant the major factors that are known to affect happiness,
including GDP per capita, age, sex, education, marital status, and religious
attendance, and found that the theory that inequality causes unhappiness “comes
to shipwreck on the rock of the facts.” In developing countries, inequality is not
dispiriting but heartening: people in the more unequal societies are happier. The
authors suggest that whatever envy, status anxiety, or relative deprivation people
may feel in poor, unequal countries is swamped by hope. Inequality is seen as a
harbinger of opportunity, a sign that education and other routes to upward
mobility might pay off for them and their children. Among developed countries
(other than formerly Communist ones), inequality made no difference one way
or another. (In formerly Communist countries, the effects were also equivocal:
inequality hurt the aging generation that grew up under communism, but helped
or made no difference to the younger generations.)
The fickle effects of inequality on well-being bring up another common
confusion in these discussions: the conflation of inequality with unfairness.
Many studies in psychology have shown that people, including young children,
prefer windfalls to be split evenly among participants, even if everyone ends up
with less overall. That led some psychologists to posit a syndrome called
inequity aversion: an apparent desire to spread the wealth. But in their recent

article “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” the psychologists Christina
Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom took another look at the studies and
found that people prefer unequal distributions, both among fellow participants in
the lab and among citizens in their country, as long as they sense that the
allocation is fair: that the bonuses go to harder workers, more generous helpers,
or even the lucky winners of an impartial lottery.17 “There is no evidence so far,”
the authors conclude, “that children or adults possess any general aversion to
inequality.” People are content with economic inequality as long as they feel that
the country is meritocratic, and they get angry when they feel it isn’t. Narratives
about the causes of inequality loom larger in people’s minds than the existence
of inequality. That creates an opening for politicians to rouse the rabble by
singling out cheaters who take more than their fair share: welfare queens,
immigrants, foreign countries, bankers, or the rich, sometimes identified with
ethnic minorities.18
In addition to effects on individual psychology, inequality has been linked to
several kinds of society-wide dysfunction, including economic stagnation,
financial instability, intergenerational immobility, and political influence-
peddling. These harms must be taken seriously, but here too the leap from
correlation to causation has been contested.19 Either way, I suspect that it’s less
effective to aim at the Gini index as a deeply buried root cause of many social
ills than to zero in on solutions to each problem: investment in research and
infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to
reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate
economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit
influence, and so on. The influence of money on politics is particularly
pernicious because it can distort every government policy, but it’s not the same
issue as income inequality. After all, in the absence of electoral reform the
richest donors can get the ear of politicians whether they earn 2 percent of
national income or 8 percent of it.20
Economic inequality, then, is not itself a dimension of human well-being, and
it should not be confused with unfairness or with poverty. Let’s now turn from
the moral significance of inequality to the question of why it has changed over
time.
The simplest narrative of the history of inequality is that it comes with

modernity. We must have begun in a state of original equality, because when

there is no wealth, everyone has equal shares of nothing, and then, when wealth
is created, some can have more of it than others. Inequality, in this story, started
at zero, and as wealth increased over time, inequality grew with it. But the story
is not quite right.
Hunter-gatherers are by all appearances highly egalitarian, a fact that inspired
Marx and Engels’s theory of “primitive communism.” But ethnographers point
out that the image of forager egalitarianism is misleading. For one thing, the
hunter-gatherer bands that are still around for us to study are not representative
of an ancestral way of life, because they have been pushed into marginal lands
and lead nomadic lives that make the accumulation of wealth impossible, if for
no other reason than that it would be a nuisance to carry around. But sedentary
hunter-gatherers, such as the natives of the Pacific Northwest, which is flush
with salmon, berries, and fur-bearing animals, were florid inegalitarians, and
developed a hereditary nobility who kept slaves, hoarded luxuries, and flaunted
their wealth in gaudy potlatches. Also, while nomadic hunter-gatherers share
meat, since hunting is largely a matter of luck and sharing a windfall insures
everyone against days in which they come home empty-handed, they are less
likely to share plant foods, since gathering is a matter of effort, and
indiscriminate sharing would allow free-riding.21 Some degree of inequality is
universal across societies, as is an awareness of inequality.22 A recent survey of
inequality in the forms of wealth that are possible for hunter-gatherers (houses,
boats, and hunting and foraging returns) found that they were “far from a state of
‘primitive communism’”: the Ginis averaged .33, close to the value for
disposable income in the United States in 2012.23
What happens when a society starts to generate substantial wealth? An
increase in absolute inequality (the difference between the richest and poorest) is
almost a mathematical necessity. In the absence of an Income Distribution
Authority that parcels out identical shares, some people are bound to take greater
advantage of the new opportunities than others, whether by luck, skill, or effort,
and they will reap disproportionate rewards.
An increase in relative inequality (measured by the Gini or income shares) is
not mathematically necessary, but it is highly likely. According to a famous
conjecture by the economist Simon Kuznets, as countries get richer they should
get less equal, because some people leave farming for higher-paying lines of
work while the rest stay in rural squalor. But eventually a rising tide lifts all the
boats. As more of the population gets swept into the modern economy, inequality

should decline, tracing out an inverted U. This hypothetical arc of inequality
over time is called the Kuznets curve.24
In the preceding chapter we saw hints of a Kuznets curve for inequality
between countries. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, European
countries made a Great Escape from universal poverty, leaving the other
countries behind. As Deaton observes, “A better world makes for a world of
differences; escapes make for inequality.”25 Then, as globalization proceeded and
wealth-generating know-how spread, poor countries started catching up in a
Great Convergence. We saw hints of a drop in global inequality in the blastoff of
GDP in Asian countries (figure 8-2), in the morphing of the world income
distribution from snail to two-humped camel to one-humped dromedary (figure
8-3), and in the plunging proportion (figure 8-4) and number (figure 8-5) of
people living in extreme poverty.
To confirm that these gains really constitute a decline in inequality—that
poor countries are getting richer faster than the rich countries are getting richer
—we need a single measure that combines them, an international Gini, which
treats each country like a person. Figure 9-1 shows that the international Gini
rose from a low of .16 in 1820, when all countries were poor, to a high of .56 in
1970, when some were rich, and then, as Kuznets predicted, it plateaued and
began to droop in the 1980s.26 But an international Gini is a bit misleading,
because it counts an improvement in the living standards of a billion Chinese as
equivalent to an improvement in the standards of, say, four million Panamanians.
Figure 9-1 also shows an international Gini calculated by the economist Branko
Milanović in which every country counts in proportion to its population, making
the human impact of the drop in inequality more apparent.

Figure 9-1: International inequality, 1820–2013
Sources: International inequality: OECD Clio Infra Project, Moatsos et al. 2014; data are for market
household income across countries. Population-weighted international inequality: Milanović 2012; data
for 2012 and 2013 provided by Branko Milanović, personal communication.
Still, an international Gini treats all the Chinese as if they earned the same
amount, all the Americans as if they earned the American average, and so on,
and as a result it underestimates inequality across the human race. A global Gini,
in which every person counts the same, regardless of country, is harder to
calculate, because it requires mixing the incomes from disparate countries into a
single bowl, but two estimates are shown in figure 9-2. The lines float at
different heights because they were calibrated in dollars adjusted for purchasing
parity in different years, but their slopes trace out a kind of Kuznets curve: after
the Industrial Revolution, global inequality rose steadily until around 1980, then
started to fall. The international and global Gini curves show that despite the
anxiety about rising inequality within Western countries, inequality in the world
is declining. That’s a circuitous way to state the progress, though: what’s
significant about the decline in inequality is that it’s a decline in poverty.

Figure 9-2: Global inequality, 1820–2011
Source: Milanović 2016, fig. 3.1. The left-hand curve shows 1990 international dollars of disposable
income per capita; the right-hand curve shows 2005 international dollars, and combines household surveys
of per capita disposable income and consumption.
The version of inequality that has generated the recent alarm is the inequality
within developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. The
long view of these countries is shown in figure 9-3. Until recently, both countries
traveled a Kuznets arc. Inequality rose during the Industrial Revolution and then
began to fall, first gradually in the late 19th century, then steeply in the middle
decades of the 20th. But then, starting around 1980, inequality bounced into a
decidedly un-Kuznetsian rise. Let’s examine each segment in turn.

Figure 9-3: Inequality, UK and US, 1688–2013
Source: Milanović 2016, fig. 2.1, disposable income per capita.
The rise and fall in inequality in the 19th century reflects Kuznets’s
expanding economy, which gradually pulls more people into urban, skilled, and
thus higher-paying occupations. But the 20th-century plunge—which has been
called the Great Leveling or the Great Compression—had more sudden causes.
The plunge overlaps the two world wars, and that is no coincidence: major wars
often level the income distribution.27 Wars destroy wealth-generating capital,
inflate away the assets of creditors, and induce the rich to put up with higher
taxes, which the government redistributes into the paychecks of soldiers and
munition workers, in turn increasing the demand for labor in the rest of the
economy.
Wars are just one kind of catastrophe that can generate equality by the logic
of Igor and Boris. The historian Walter Scheidel identifies “Four Horsemen of
Leveling”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse,
and lethal pandemics. In addition to obliterating wealth (and, in the communist
revolutions, the people who owned it), the four horsemen reduce inequality by
killing large numbers of workers, driving up the wages of those who survive.
Scheidel concludes, “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do

well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever brought
forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.”28
Scheidel’s warning applies to the long run of history. But modernity has
brought a more benign way to reduce inequality. As we have seen, a market
economy is the best poverty-reduction program we know of for an entire
country. It is ill-equipped, however, to provide for individuals within that
country who have nothing to exchange: the young, the old, the sick, the unlucky,
and others whose skills and labor are not valuable enough to others for them to
earn a decent living in return. (Another way of putting it is that a market
economy maximizes the average, but we also care about the variance and the
range.) As the circle of sympathy in a country expands to encompass the poor
(and as people want to insure themselves should they ever become poor), they
increasingly allocate a portion of their pooled resources—that is, government
funds—to alleviating that poverty. Those resources have to come from
somewhere. They may come from a corporate or sales tax, or a sovereign wealth
fund, but in most countries they largely come from a graduated income tax, in
which richer citizens pay at a higher rate because they don’t feel the loss as
sharply. The net result is “redistribution,” but that is something of a misnomer,
because the goal is to raise the bottom, not lower the top, even if in practice the
top is lowered.
Those who condemn modern capitalist societies for callousness toward the
poor are probably unaware of how little the pre-capitalist societies of the past
spent on poor relief. It’s not just that they had less to spend in absolute terms;
they spent a smaller proportion of their wealth. A much smaller proportion: from
the Renaissance through the early 20th century, European countries spent an
average of 1.5 percent of their GDP on poor relief, education, and other social
transfers. In many countries and periods, they spent nothing at all.29
In another example of progress, sometimes called the Egalitarian Revolution,
modern societies now devote a substantial chunk of their wealth to health,
education, pensions, and income support.30 Figure 9-4 shows that social
spending took off in the middle decades of the 20th century (in the United States,
with the New Deal in the 1930s; in other developed countries, with the rise of
the welfare state after World War II). Social spending now takes up a median of
22 percent of their GDP.31

Figure 9-4: Social spending, OECD countries, 1880–2016
Source: Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016b, based on data from Lindert 2004 and OECD
1985, 2014, 2017. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development includes thirty-five
democratic states with market economies.
The explosion in social spending has redefined the mission of government:

from warring and policing to also nurturing.32 Governments underwent this
transformation for several reasons. Social spending inoculates citizens against
the appeal of communism and fascism. Some of the benefits, like universal
education and public health, are public goods that accrue to everyone, not just
the direct beneficiaries. Many of the programs indemnify citizens against
misfortunes for which they can’t or won’t insure themselves (hence the
euphemism “social safety net”). And assistance to the needy assuages the
modern conscience, which cannot bear the thought of the Little Match Girl
freezing to death, Jean Valjean imprisoned for stealing bread to save his starving
sister, or the Joads burying Grampa by the side of Route 66.
Since there’s no point in everyone sending money to the government and
getting it right back (minus the bureaucracy’s cut), social spending is designed to
help people who have less money, with the bill footed by people who have more
money. This is the principle known as redistribution, the welfare state, social
democracy, or socialism (misleadingly, because free-market capitalism is
compatible with any amount of social spending). Whether or not the social

spending is designed to reduce inequality, that is one of its effects, and the rise in
social expenditures from the 1930s through the 1970s explains part of the
decline in the Gini.
Social spending demonstrates an uncanny aspect of progress that we’ll
encounter again in subsequent chapters.33 Though I am skittish about any notion
of historical inevitability, cosmic forces, or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds
of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic
force. As they proceed, certain factions oppose them hammer and tongs, but
resistance turns out to be futile. Social spending is an example. The United
States is famously resistant to anything smacking of redistribution. Yet it
allocates 19 percent of its GDP to social services, and despite the best efforts of
conservatives and libertarians the spending has continued to grow. The most
recent expansions are a prescription drug benefit introduced by George W. Bush
and the eponymous health insurance plan known as Obamacare introduced by
his successor.
Indeed, social spending in the United States is even higher than it appears,
because many Americans are forced to pay for health, retirement, and disability
benefits through their employers rather than the government. When this privately
administered social spending is added to the public portion, the United States
vaults from twenty-fourth into second place among the thirty-five OECD
countries, just behind France.34
For all their protestations against big government and high taxes, people like
social spending. Social Security has been called the third rail of American
politics, because if politicians touch it they die. According to legend, an irate
constituent at a town-hall meeting warned his representative, “Keep your
government hands off my Medicare” (referring to the government health
insurance program for seniors).35 No sooner did Obamacare pass than the
Republican Party made it a sacred cause to repeal it, but each of their assaults on
it after gaining control of the presidency in 2017 was beaten back by angry
citizens at town-hall meetings and legislators afraid of their ire. In Canada the
top two national pastimes (after hockey) are complaining about their health care
system and boasting about their health care system.
Developing countries today, like developed countries a century ago, stint on
social spending. Indonesia, for example, spends 2 percent of its GDP, India 2.5
percent, and China 7 percent. But as they get richer they become more
munificent, a phenomenon called Wagner’s Law.36 Between 1985 and 2012
Mexico quintupled its proportion of social spending, and Brazil’s now stands at

16 percent.37 Wagner’s Law appears to be not a cautionary tale about
overweening government and bureaucratic bloat but a manifestation of progress.
The economist Leandro Prados de la Escosura found a strong correlation
between the percentage of GDP that an OECD country allocated to social
transfers as it developed between 1880 and 2000 and its score on a composite
measure of prosperity, health, and education.38 And tellingly, the number of
libertarian paradises in the world—developed countries without substantial
social spending—is zero.39
The correlation between social spending and social well-being holds only up
to a point: the curve levels off starting at around 25 percent and may even drop
off at higher proportions. Social spending, like everything, has downsides. As
with all insurance, it can create a “moral hazard” in which the insured slack off
or take foolish risks, counting on the insurer to bail them out if they fail. And
since the premiums have to cover the payouts, if the actuaries get the numbers
wrong or the numbers change so that more money is taken out than put in, the
system can collapse. In reality social spending is never exactly like insurance but
is a combination of insurance, investment, and charity. Its success thus depends
on the degree to which the citizens of a country sense they are part of one
community, and that fellow feeling can be strained when the beneficiaries are
disproportionately immigrants or ethnic minorities.40 These tensions are inherent
to social spending and will always be politically contentious. Though there is no
“correct amount,” all developed states have decided that the benefits of social
transfers outweigh the costs and have settled on moderately large amounts,
cushioned by their massive wealth.
Let’s complete our tour of the history of inequality by turning to the final
segment in figure 9-3, the rise of inequality in wealthy nations that began around
1980. This is the development that inspired the claim that life has gotten worse
for everyone but the richest. The rebound defies the Kuznets curve, in which
inequality was supposed to have settled into a low equilibrium. Many
explanations have been proffered for this surprise.41 Wartime restrictions on
economic competition may have been sticky, outlasting World War II, but they
finally dissipated, freeing the rich to get richer from their investment income and
opening up an arena of dynamic economic competition with winner-take-all
payoffs. The ideological shift associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher slowed the movement toward greater social spending financed by taxes

on the rich while eroding social norms against extravagant salaries and
conspicuous wealth. As more people stayed single or got divorced, and at the
same time more power couples pooled two fat paychecks, the variance in income
from household to household was bound to increase, even if the paychecks had
stayed the same. A “second industrial revolution” driven by electronic
technologies replayed the Kuznets rise by creating a demand for highly skilled
professionals, who pulled away from the less educated at the same time that the
jobs requiring less education were eliminated by automation. Globalization
allowed workers in China, India, and elsewhere to underbid their American
competitors in a worldwide labor market, and the domestic companies that failed
to take advantage of these offshoring opportunities were outcompeted on price.
At the same time, the intellectual output of the most successful analysts,
entrepreneurs, investors, and creators was increasingly available to a gargantuan
worldwide market. The Pontiac worker is laid off, while J. K. Rowling becomes
a billionaire.
Milanović has combined the two inequality trends of the past thirty years—
declining inequality worldwide, increasing inequality within rich countries—into
a single graph which pleasingly takes the shape of an elephant (figure 9-5). This
“growth incidence curve” sorts the world’s population into twenty numerical
bins or quantiles, from poorest to richest, and plots how much each bin gained or
lost in real income per capita between 1988 (just before the fall of the Berlin
Wall) and 2008 (just before the Great Recession).

Figure 9-5: Income gains, 1988–2008
Source: Milanović 2016, fig. 1.3.
The cliché about globalization is that it creates winners and losers, and the
elephant curve displays them as peaks and valleys. It reveals that the winners
include most of humanity. The elephant’s bulk (its body and head), which
includes about seven-tenths of the world’s population, consists of the “emerging
global middle class,” mainly in Asia. Over this period they saw cumulative gains
of 40 to 60 percent in their real incomes. The nostrils at the tip of the trunk
consist of the world’s richest one percent, who also saw their incomes soar. The
rest of the trunk tip, which includes the next 4 percent down, didn’t do badly
either. Where the bend of the trunk hovers over the floor around the 85th
percentile we see globalization’s “losers”: the lower middle classes of the rich
world, who gained less than 10 percent. These are the focus of the new concern
about inequality: the “hollowed-out middle class,” the Trump supporters, the
people globalization left behind.
I couldn’t resist plotting the most recognizable elephant in Milanović’s herd,
because it serves as a vivid mnemonic for the effects of globalization (and it
rounds out a nice menagerie with the camel and dromedary in figure 8-3). But

the curve makes the world look more unequal than it really is, for two reasons.
One is that the financial crisis of 2008, which postdated the graph, had a
strangely equalizing effect on the world. The Great Recession, Milanović points
out, was really a recession in North Atlantic countries. The incomes of the
world’s richest one percent were trimmed, but the incomes of workers elsewhere
soared (in China, they doubled). Three years after the crisis we still see an
elephant, but it has lowered the tip of its trunk while arching its back twice as
high.42
The other elephant-distorter is a conceptual point that bedevils many
discussions of inequality. Whom are we talking about when we say “the bottom
fifth” or “the top one percent”? Most income distributions use what economists
call anonymous data: they track statistical ranges, not actual people.43 Suppose I
told you that the age of the median American declined from thirty in 1950 to
twenty-eight in 1970. If your first thought is “Wow, how did that guy get two
years younger?” then you have confused the two: the “median” is a rank, not a
person. Readers commit the same fallacy when they read that “the top one
percent in 2008” had incomes that were 50 percent higher than “the top one
percent in 1988” and conclude that a bunch of rich people got half again richer.
People move in and out of income brackets, shuffling the order, so we’re not
necessarily talking about the same individuals. The same is true for “the bottom
fifth” and every other statistical bin.
Nonanonymous or longitudinal data, which track people over time, are
unavailable in most countries, so Milanović did the next best thing and tracked
individual quantiles in particular countries, so that, say, poor Indians in 1988
were no longer being compared with poor Ghanaians in 2008.44 He still got an
elephantoid, but with a much higher tail and haunches, because the poorer
classes of so many countries rose out of extreme poverty. The pattern remains—
globalization helped the lower and middle classes of poor countries, and the
upper class of rich countries, much more than it helped the lower middle class of
rich countries—but the differences are less extreme.
Now that we have run through the history of inequality and seen the forces that
push it around, we can evaluate the claim that the growing inequality of the past
three decades means that the world is getting worse—that only the rich have
prospered, while everyone else is stagnating or suffering. The rich certainly have

prospered more than anyone else, perhaps more than they should have, but the
claim about everyone else is not accurate, for a number of reasons.
Most obviously, it’s false for the world as a whole: the majority of the human
race has become much better off. The two-humped camel has become a one-
humped dromedary; the elephant has a body the size of, well, an elephant;
extreme poverty has plummeted and may disappear; and both international and
global inequality coefficients are in decline. Now, it’s true that the world’s poor
have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and
if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was
worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have
to say that the tradeoff is worth it.
But even in the lower and lower middle classes of rich countries, moderate
income gains are not the same as a decline in living standards. Today’s
discussions of inequality often compare the present era unfavorably with a
golden age of well-paying, dignified, blue-collar jobs that have been made
obsolete by automation and globalization. This idyllic image is belied by
contemporary depictions of the harshness of working-class life in that era, both
in journalistic exposés (such as Michael Harrington’s 1962 The Other America)
and in realistic films (such as On the Waterfront, Blue Collar, Coal Miner’s
Daughter, and Norma Rae). The historian Stephanie Coontz, a debunker of
1950s nostalgia, puts some numbers to the depictions:
A full 25 percent of Americans, 40 to 50 million people, were poor in the

mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this
poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American
children were poor. Sixty percent of Americans over sixty-five had
incomes below $1,000 in 1958, considerably below the $3,000 to $10,000
level considered to represent middle-class status. A majority of elders also
lacked medical insurance. Only half the population had savings in 1959;
one-quarter of the population had no liquid assets at all. Even when we
consider only native-born, white families, one-third could not get by on
the income of the household head.45
How do we reconcile the obvious improvements in living standards in recent

decades with the conventional wisdom of economic stagnation? Economists
point to four ways in which inequality statistics can paint a misleading picture of

the way people live their lives, each depending on a distinction we have
examined.
The first is the difference between relative and absolute prosperity. Just as not
all children can be above average, it’s not a sign of stagnation if the proportion
of income earned by the bottom fifth does not increase over time. What’s
relevant to well-being is how much people earn, not how high they rank. A
recent study by the economist Stephen Rose divided the American population
into classes using fixed milestones rather than quantiles. “Poor” was defined as
an income of $0–$30,000 (in 2014 dollars) for a family of three, “lower middle
class” as $30,000–$50,000, and so on.46 The study found that in absolute terms,
Americans have been moving on up. Between 1979 and 2014, the percentage of
poor Americans dropped from 24 to 20, the percentage in the lower middle class
dropped from 24 to 17, and the percentage in the middle class shrank from 32 to
30. Where did they go? Many ended up in the upper middle class ($100,000–
$350,000), which grew from 13 to 30 percent of the population, and in the upper
class, which grew from 0.1 percent to 2 percent. The middle class is being
hollowed out in part because so many Americans are becoming affluent.
Inequality undoubtedly increased—the rich got richer faster than the poor and
middle class got richer—but everyone (on average) got richer.
The second confusion is the one between anonymous and longitudinal data.
If (say) the bottom fifth of the American population gained no ground in twenty
years, it does not mean that Joe the Plumber got the same paycheck in 1988 that
he did in 2008 (or one that’s a bit higher, owing to cost-of-living increases).
People earn more as they get older and gain experience, or switch from a lower-
paying job to a higher-paying one, so Joe may have moved from the bottom fifth
into, say, the middle fifth, while a younger man or woman or an immigrant took
his place at the bottom. The turnover is by no means small. A recent study using
longitudinal data showed that half of Americans will find themselves among the
top tenth of income earners for at least one year of their working lives, and that
one in nine will find themselves in the top one percent (though most don’t stay
there for long).47 This may be one of the reasons that economic opinions are
subject to the Optimism Gap (the “I’m OK, They’re Not” bias): a majority of
Americans believe that the standard of living of the middle class has declined in
recent years but that their own standard of living has improved.48
A third reason that rising inequality has not made the lower classes worse off
is that low incomes have been mitigated by social transfers. For all its
individualist ideology, the United States has a lot of redistribution. The income

tax is still graduated, and low incomes are buffered by a “hidden welfare state”
that includes unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps, and the Earned Income
Tax Credit, a kind of negative income tax in which the government boosts the
income of low earners. Put them together and America becomes far less unequal.
In 2013 the Gini index for American market income (before taxes and transfers)
was a high .53; for disposable income (after taxes and transfers) it was a
moderate .38.49 The United States has not gone as far as countries like Germany
and Finland, which start off with a similar market income distribution but level it
more aggressively, pushing their Ginis down into the high .2s and sidestepping
most of the post-1980s inequality rise. Whether or not the generous European
welfare state is sustainable over the long run and transplantable to the United
States, some kind of welfare state may be found in all developed countries, and it
reduces inequality even when it is hidden.50
These transfers have not just reduced income inequality (in itself a dubious
accomplishment) but boosted the incomes of the nonrich (a real one). An
analysis by the economist Gary Burtless has shown that between 1979 and 2010
the disposable incomes of the lowest four income quintiles grew by 49, 37, 36,
and 45 percent, respectively.51 And that was before the long-delayed recovery
from the Great Recession: between 2014 and 2016, median wages leapt to an all-
time high.52
Even more significant is what has happened at the bottom of the scale. Both
the left and the right have long expressed cynicism about antipoverty programs,
as in Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, “Some years ago, the federal government
declared war on poverty, and poverty won.” In reality, poverty is losing. The
sociologist Christopher Jencks has calculated that when the benefits from the
hidden welfare state are added up, and the cost of living is estimated in a way
that takes into account the improving quality and falling price of consumer
goods, the poverty rate has fallen in the past fifty years by more than three-
quarters, and in 2013 stood at 4.8 percent.53 Three other analyses have come to
the same conclusion; data from one of them, by the economists Bruce Meyer and
James Sullivan, are shown in the upper line in figure 9-6. The progress stagnated
around the time of the Great Recession, but it picked up in 2015 and 2016 (not
shown in the graph), when middle-class income reached a record high and the
poverty rate showed its largest drop since 1999.54 And in yet another unsung
accomplishment, the poorest of the poor—the unsheltered homeless—fell in
number between 2007 and 2015 by almost a third, despite the Great Recession.55

Figure 9-6: Poverty, US, 1960–2016
Sources: Meyer & Sullivan 2017. “Disposable income” refers to their “After-tax money income,” including
credits, adjusted for inflation using the bias-corrected CPI-U-RS, and representing a family with two adults
and two children. “Consumption” refers to data from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey on food,
housing, vehicles, appliances, furnishings, clothing, jewelry, insurance, and other expenses. “Poverty”
corresponds to the US Census definition for 1980, adjusted for inflation; anchoring the poverty line in other
years would result in different absolute numbers but the same trends. See Meyer & Sullivan 2011, 2012,
and 2016 for details.
The lower line in figure 9-6 highlights the fourth way in which inequality
measures understate the progress of the lower and middle classes in rich
countries.56 Income is just a means to an end: a way of paying for things that
people need, want, and like, or as economists gracelessly call it, consumption.
When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they
earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by ninety percent since
1960, from 30 percent of the population to just 3 percent. The two forces that
have famously increased inequality in income have at the same time decreased
inequality in what matters. The first, globalization, may produce winners and
losers in income, but in consumption it makes almost everyone a winner. Asian
factories, container ships, and efficient retailing bring goods to the masses that
were formerly luxuries for the rich. (In 2005 the economist Jason Furman

estimated that Walmart saved the typical American family $2,300 a year.)57 The
second force, technology, continually revolutionizes the meaning of income (as
we saw in the discussion of the paradox of value in chapter 8). A dollar today, no
matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life
than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn’t exist, like refrigeration,
electricity, toilets, vaccinations, telephones, contraception, and air travel, and it
transforms things that do exist, such as a party line patched by a switchboard
operator to a smartphone with unlimited talk time.
Together, technology and globalization have transformed what it means to be
a poor person, at least in developed countries. The old stereotype of poverty was
an emaciated pauper in rags. Today, the poor are likely to be as overweight as
their employers, and dressed in the same fleece, sneakers, and jeans. The poor
used to be called the have-nots. In 2011, more than 95 percent of American
households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a
refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.58 (A century and a half before, the
Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.) Almost half of
the households below the poverty line had a dishwasher, 60 percent had a
computer, around two-thirds had a washing machine and a clothes dryer, and
more than 80 percent had an air conditioner, a video recorder, and a cell phone.
In the golden age of economic equality in which I grew up, middle-class “haves”
had few or none of these things. As a result, the most precious resources of all—
time, freedom, and worthy experiences—are rising across the board, a topic we
will explore in chapter 17.
The rich have gotten richer, but their lives haven’t gotten that much better.
Warren Buffett may have more air conditioners than most people, or better ones,
but by historical standards the fact that a majority of poor Americans even have
an air conditioner is astonishing. When the Gini index is calculated over
consumption rather than income, it has remained shallow or flat.59 Inequality in
self-reported happiness in the American population has actually declined.60 And
though I find it distasteful, even grotesque, to celebrate declining Ginis for life,
health, and education (as if killing off the healthiest and keeping the smartest out
of school would be good for humanity), they have in fact declined for the right
reasons: the lives of the poor are improving more rapidly than the lives of the
rich.61

To acknowledge that the lives of the lower and middle classes of developed
countries have improved in recent decades is not to deny the formidable
problems facing 21st-century economies. Though disposable income has
increased, the pace of the increase is slow, and the resulting lack of consumer
demand may be dragging down the economy as a whole.62 The hardships faced
by one sector of the population—middle-aged, less-educated, non-urban white
Americans—are real and tragic, manifested in higher rates of drug overdose
(chapter 12) and suicide (chapter 18). Advances in robotics threaten to make
millions of additional jobs obsolete. Truck drivers, for example, make up the
most common occupation in a majority of states, and self-driving vehicles may
send them the way of scriveners, wheelwrights, and switchboard operators.
Education, a major driver of economic mobility, is not keeping up with the
demands of modern economies: tertiary education has soared in cost (defying the
inexpensification of almost every other good), and in poor American
neighborhoods, primary and secondary education are unconscionably
substandard. Many parts of the American tax system are regressive, and money
buys too much political influence. Perhaps most damaging, the impression that
the modern economy has left most people behind encourages Luddite and
beggar-thy-neighbor policies that would make everyone worse off.
Still, a narrow focus on income inequality and a nostalgia for the mid-20th-
century Great Compression are misplaced. The modern world can continue to
improve even if the Gini index or top income shares stay high, as they may well
do, because the forces that lifted them are not going away. Americans cannot be
forced to buy Pontiacs instead of Priuses. The Harry Potter books will not be
kept out of the hands of the world’s children just because they turn J. K. Rowling
into a billionaire. It makes little sense to make tens of millions of poor
Americans pay more for clothing to save tens of thousands of jobs in the apparel
industry.63 Nor does it make sense, in the long term, to have people do boring
and dangerous jobs that could be carried out more effectively by machines just to
give them remunerable work.64
Rather than tilting at inequality per se it may be more constructive to target
the specific problems lumped with it.65 An obvious priority is to boost the rate of
economic growth, since it would increase everyone’s slice of the pie and provide
more pie to redistribute.66 The trends of the past century, and a survey of the
world’s countries, point to governments playing an increasing role in both. They
are uniquely suited to invest in education, basic research, and infrastructure, to
underwrite health and retirement benefits (relieving American corporations of

their enervating mandate to provide social services), and to supplement incomes
to a level above their market price, which for millions of people may decline
even as overall wealth rises.67
The next step in the historic trend toward greater social spending may be a
universal basic income (or its close relative, a negative income tax). The idea has
been bruited for decades, and its day may be coming.68 Despite its socialist
aroma, the idea has been championed by economists (such as Milton Friedman),
politicians (such as Richard Nixon), and states (such as Alaska) that are
associated with the political right, and today analysts across the political
spectrum are toying with it. Though implementing a universal basic income is
far from easy (the numbers have to add up, and incentives for education, work,
and risk-taking have to be maintained), its promise cannot be ignored. It could
rationalize the kludgy patchwork of the hidden welfare state, and it could turn
the slow-motion disaster of robots replacing workers into a horn of plenty. Many
of the jobs that robots will take over are jobs that people don’t particularly enjoy,
and the dividend in productivity, safety, and leisure could be a boon to humanity
as long as it is widely shared. The specter of anomie and meaninglessness is
probably exaggerated (according to studies of regions that have experimented
with a guaranteed income), and it could be met with public jobs that markets
won’t support and robots can’t do, or with new opportunities in meaningful
volunteering and other forms of effective altruism.69 The net effect might be to
reduce inequality, but that would be a side effect of raising everyone’s standard
of living, particularly that of the economically vulnerable.
Income inequality, in sum, is not a counterexample to human progress, and we

are not living in a dystopia of falling incomes that has reversed the centuries-
long rise in prosperity. Nor does it call for smashing the robots, raising the
drawbridge, switching to socialism, or bringing back the 50s. Let me sum up my
complicated story on a complicated topic.
Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension
of human flourishing. In comparisons of well-being across countries, it pales in
importance next to overall wealth. An increase in inequality is not necessarily
bad: as societies escape from universal poverty, they are bound to become more
unequal, and the uneven surge may be repeated when a society discovers new
sources of wealth. Nor is a decrease in inequality always good: the most

effective levelers of economic disparities are epidemics, massive wars, violent
revolutions, and state collapse.
For all that, the long-term trend in history since the Enlightenment is for
everyone’s fortunes to rise. In addition to generating massive amounts of wealth,
modern societies have devoted an increasing proportion of that wealth to
benefiting the less well-off.
As globalization and technology have lifted billions out of poverty and
created a global middle class, international and global inequality have decreased,
at the same time that they enrich elites whose analytical, creative, or financial
impact has global reach. The fortunes of the lower classes in developed countries
have not improved nearly as much, but they have improved, often because their
members rise into the upper classes. The improvements are enhanced by social
spending, and by the falling cost and rising quality of the things people want. In
some ways the world has become less equal, but in more ways the world’s
people have become better off.

CHAPTER 10
THE ENVIRONMENT
B ut is progress sustainable? A common response to the good news about

our health, wealth, and sustenance is that it cannot continue. As we infest
the world with our teeming numbers, guzzle the earth’s bounty heedless
of its finitude, and foul our nests with pollution and waste, we are hastening an
environmental day of reckoning. If overpopulation, resource depletion, and
pollution don’t finish us off, then climate change will.
As in the chapter on inequality, I won’t pretend that all the trends are positive
or that the problems facing us are minor. But I will present a way of thinking
about these problems that differs from the lugubrious conventional wisdom and
offers a constructive alternative to the radicalism or fatalism it encourages. The
key idea is that environmental problems, like other problems, are solvable, given
the right knowledge.
To be sure, the very idea that there are environmental problems cannot be
taken for granted. From the vantage point of an individual, the Earth seems
infinite, and our effects on it inconsequential. From the vantage points of
science, the view is more troubling. The microscopic vantage point reveals
pollutants that insidiously poison us and the species we admire and depend on;
the macroscopic one reveals effects on ecosystems that may be imperceptible
one action at a time but add up to tragic despoliation. Beginning in the 1960s,
the environmental movement grew out of scientific knowledge (from ecology,
public health, and earth and atmospheric sciences) and a Romantic reverence for
nature. The movement made the health of the planet a permanent priority on
humanity’s agenda, and as we shall see, it deserves credit for substantial
achievements—another form of human progress.
Ironically, many voices in the traditional environmental movement refuse to
acknowledge that progress, or even that human progress is a worthy aspiration.

In this chapter I will present a newer conception of environmentalism which
shares the goal of protecting the air and water, species, and ecosystems but is
grounded in Enlightenment optimism rather than Romantic declinism.
Starting in the 1970s, the mainstream environmental movement latched onto a

quasi-religious ideology, greenism, which can be found in the manifestoes of
activists as diverse as Al Gore, the Unabomber, and Pope Francis.1 Green
ideology begins with an image of the Earth as a pristine ingénue which has been
defiled by human rapacity. As Francis put it in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’
(Praise be to you), “Our common home is like a sister with whom we share our
life . . . [who] now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her.”
The harm, according to this narrative, has been inexorably worsening: “The
earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of
filth.” The root cause is the Enlightenment commitment to reason, science, and
progress: “Scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the
progress of humanity and history,” wrote Francis. “The way to a better future lies
elsewhere,” namely in an appreciation of “the mysterious network of relations
between things” and (of course) “the treasure of Christian spiritual experience.”
Unless we repent our sins by degrowth, deindustrialization, and a rejection of the
false gods of science, technology, and progress, humanity will face a ghastly
reckoning in an environmental Judgment Day.
As with many apocalyptic movements, greenism is laced with misanthropy,
including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a
depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin,
pathogens, and cancer. For example, Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society wrote, “We need to radically and intelligently reduce
human populations to fewer than one billion. . . . Curing a body of cancer
requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the
human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.”2
Recently an alternative approach to environmental protection has been
championed by John Asafu-Adjaye, Jesse Ausubel, Andrew Balmford, Stewart
Brand, Ruth DeFries, Nancy Knowlton, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger,
and others. It has been called Ecomodernism, Ecopragmatism, Earth Optimism,
and the Blue-Green or Turquoise movement, though we can also think of it as
Enlightenment Environmentalism or Humanistic Environmentalism.3

Ecomodernism begins with the realization that some degree of pollution is an
inescapable consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. When people
use energy to create a zone of structure in their bodies and homes, they must
increase entropy elsewhere in the environment in the form of waste, pollution,
and other forms of disorder. The human species has always been ingenious at
doing this—that’s what differentiates us from other mammals—and it has never
lived in harmony with the environment. When native peoples first set foot in an
ecosystem, they typically hunted large animals to extinction, and often burned
and cleared vast swaths of forest.4 A dirty secret of the conservation movement
is that wilderness preserves are set up only after indigenous peoples have been
decimated or forcibly removed from them, including the national parks in the
United States and the Serengeti in East Africa.5 As the environmental historian
William Cronon writes, “wilderness” is not a pristine sanctuary; it is itself a
product of civilization.
When humans took up farming, they became more disruptive still. According
to the paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, the adoption of wet rice cultivation
in Asia some five thousand years ago may have released so much methane into
the atmosphere from rotting vegetation as to have changed the climate. “A good
case can be made,” he suggests, that “the people in the Iron Age and even the
late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape
than the average modern-day person.”6 And as Brand has pointed out (chapter
7), “natural farming” is a contradiction in terms. Whenever he hears the words
natural food, he is tempted to rail:
No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You

take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the
ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod,
flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then
you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants
incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow
specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic
idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to
take endless care of them!7
A second realization of the ecomodernist movement is that industrialization

has been good for humanity.8 It has fed billions, doubled life spans, slashed
extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end

slavery, emancipate women, and educate children (chapters 7, 15, and 17). It has
allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see
the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs in pollution and habitat loss
have to be weighed against these gifts. As the economist Robert Frank has put it,
there is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an
optimal amount of dirt in your house. Cleaner is better, but not at the expense of
everything else in life.
The third premise is that the tradeoff that pits human well-being against
environmental damage can be renegotiated by technology. How to enjoy more
calories, lumens, BTUs, bits, and miles with less pollution and land is itself a
technological problem, and one that the world is increasingly solving.
Economists speak of the environmental Kuznets curve, a counterpart to the U-
shaped arc for inequality as a function of economic growth. As countries first
develop, they prioritize growth over environmental purity. But as they get richer,
their thoughts turn to the environment.9 If people can afford electricity only at
the cost of some smog, they’ll live with the smog, but when they can afford both
electricity and clean air, they’ll spring for the clean air. This can happen all the
faster as technology makes cars and factories and power plants cleaner and thus
makes clean air more affordable.
Economic growth bends the environmental Kuznets curve by advances not
just in technology but in values. Some environmental concerns are entirely
practical: people complain about smog in their city, or green space getting paved
over. But other concerns are more spiritual. The fate of the black rhinoceros and
the well-being of our descendants in the year 2525 are significant moral
concerns, but worrying about them now is something of a luxury. As societies
get richer and people no longer think about putting food on the table or a roof
over their heads, their values climb a hierarchy of needs, and the scope of their
concern expands in space and time. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, using
data from the World Values Survey, have found that people with stronger
emancipative values—tolerance, equality, freedom of thought and speech—
which tend to go with affluence and education, are also more likely to recycle
and to pressure governments and businesses into protecting the environment.10
Ecopessimists commonly dismiss this entire way of thinking as the “faith that
technology will save us.” In fact it is a skepticism that the status quo will doom
us—that knowledge will be frozen in its current state and people will robotically

persist in their current behavior regardless of circumstances. Indeed, a naïve
faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that
never happened.
The first is the “population bomb,” which (as we saw in chapter 7) defused
itself. When countries get richer and better educated, they pass through what
demographers call the demographic transition.11 First, death rates decline as
nutrition and health improve. This does swell the population, but that is hardly
something to bewail: as Johan Norberg notes, it happens not because people in
poor countries start breeding like rabbits but because they stop dying like flies.
In any case, the increase is temporary: birth rates peak and then decline, for at
least two reasons. Parents no longer breed large broods as insurance against
some of their children dying, and women, when they become better educated,
marry later and delay having children. Figure 10-1 shows that the world
population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent
by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to
zero around 2070, when the population is projected to level off and then decline.
Fertility rates have fallen most noticeably in developed regions like Europe and
Japan, but they can suddenly collapse, often to demographers’ surprise, in other
parts of the world. Despite the widespread belief that Muslim societies are
resistant to the social changes that have transformed the West and will be
indefinitely rocked by youthquakes, Muslim countries have seen a 40 percent
decline in fertility over the past three decades, including a 70 percent drop in
Iran and 60 percent drops in Bangladesh and in seven Arab countries.12

Figure 10-1: Population and population growth, 1750–2015 and projected to 2100
Sources: Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016d. 1750–2015: United Nations Population
Division and History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), PBL Netherlands Environmental
Assessment Agency (undated). Post-2015 projections: International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis, Medium Projection (aggregate of country-specific estimates, taking education into account), Lutz,
Butz, & Samir 2014.
The other scare from the 1960s was that the world would run out of
resources. But resources just refuse to run out. The 1980s came and went
without the famines that were supposed to starve tens of millions of Americans
and billions of people worldwide. Then the year 1992 passed and, contrary to
projections from the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth and similar philippics,
the world did not exhaust its aluminum, copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin,
tungsten, or zinc. (In 1980 Paul Ehrlich famously bet the economist Julian
Simon that five of these metals would become scarcer and hence more expensive
by the end of the decade; he lost all five bets. Indeed, most metals and minerals
are cheaper today than they were in 1960.)13 From the 1970s to the early 2000s
newsmagazines periodically illustrated cover stories on the world’s oil supply
with a gas gauge pointing to Empty. In 2013 The Atlantic ran a cover story about
the fracking revolution entitled “We Will Never Run Out of Oil.”

And then there are rare earths like yttrium, scandium, europium, and
lanthanum, which you may remember from the periodic table in your chemistry
classroom or from the Tom Lehrer song “The Elements.” These metals are a
critical component of magnets, fluorescent lights, video screens, catalysts, lasers,
capacitors, optical glass, and other high-tech applications. When they started
running out, we were warned, there would be critical shortages, a collapse of the
technology industry, and perhaps war with China, the source of 95 percent of the
world’s supply. That’s what led to the Great Europium Crisis of the late 20th
century, when the world ran out of the critical ingredient in the red phosphor dots
in the cathode-ray tubes in color televisions and computer monitors and society
was divided between the haves, who hoarded the last working color TVs, and the
angry have-nots, who were forced to make do with black-and-white. What, you
never heard of it? Among the reasons there was no such crisis was that cathode-
ray tubes were superseded by liquid crystal displays made of common
elements.14 And the Rare Earths War? In reality, when China squeezed its
exports in 2010 (not because of shortages but as a geopolitical and mercantilist
weapon), other countries started extracting rare earths from their own mines,
recycling them from industrial waste, and re-engineering products so they no
longer needed them.15
When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come
true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from
certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw
in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages. The flaw has been
pointed out many times.16 Humanity does not suck resources from the earth like
a straw in a milkshake until a gurgle tells it that the container is empty. Instead,
as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises,
encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits, or find
cheaper and more plentiful substitutes.
Indeed, it’s a fallacy to think that people “need resources” in the first place.17
They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes,
displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs
with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for
manipulating the physical world to give them what they want. The human mind,
with its recursive combinatorial power, can explore an infinite space of ideas,
and is not limited by the quantity of any particular kind of stuff in the ground.
When one idea no longer works, another can take its place. This doesn’t defy the
laws of probability but obeys them. Why should the laws of nature have allowed

exactly one physically possible way of satisfying a human desire, no more and
no less?18
Admittedly, this way of thinking does not sit well with the ethic of
“sustainability.” In figure 10-2, the cartoonist Randall Munroe illustrates what’s
wrong with this vogue word and sacred value. The doctrine of sustainability
assumes that the current rate of use of a resource may be extrapolated into the
future until it rams into a ceiling. The implication is that we must switch to a
renewable resource that can be replenished at the rate we use it, indefinitely. In
reality, societies have always abandoned a resource for a better one long before
the old one was exhausted. It’s often said that the Stone Age did not end because
the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well. “Plenty of
wood and hay remained to be exploited when the world shifted to coal,” Ausubel
notes. “Coal abounded when oil rose. Oil abounds now as methane [natural gas]
rises.”19 As we will see, gas in turn may be replaced by energy sources still lower
in carbon well before the last cubic foot goes up in a blue flame.

Figure 10-2: Sustainability, 1955–2109
Source: Randall Munroe, XKCD, http://xkcd.com/1007/. Credit: Randall Munroe, xkcd.com.
The supply of food, too, has grown exponentially (as we saw in chapter 7),
even though no single method of growing it has ever been sustainable. In The
Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis, the
geographer Ruth DeFries describes the sequence as “ratchet-hatchet-pivot.”
People discover a way of growing more food, and the population ratchets
upward. The method fails to keep up with the demand or develops unpleasant
side effects, and the hatchet falls. People then pivot to a new method. At various
times, farmers have pivoted to slash-and-burn horticulture, night soil (a
euphemism for human feces), crop rotation, guano, saltpeter, ground-up bison
bones, chemical fertilizer, hybrid crops, pesticides, and the Green Revolution.20
Future pivots may include genetically modified organisms, hydroponics,
aeroponics, urban vertical farms, robotic harvesting, meat cultured in vitro,

artificial intelligence algorithms fed by GPS and biosensors, the recovery of
energy and fertilizer from sewage, aquaculture with fish that eat tofu instead of
other fish, and who knows what else—as long as people are allowed to indulge
their ingenuity.21 Though water is one resource that people will never pivot away
from, farmers could save massive amounts if they switched to Israeli-style
precision farming. And if the world develops abundant carbon-free energy
sources (a topic we will explore later), it could get what it needs by desalinating
seawater.22
Not only have the disasters prophesied by 1970s greenism failed to take place,
but improvements that it deemed impossible have taken place. As the world has
gotten richer and crested the environmental curve, nature has begun to rebound.23
Pope Francis’s “immense pile of filth” is the vision of someone who has woken
up thinking it’s 1965, the era of belching smokestacks, waterfalls of sewage,
rivers catching fire, and jokes about New Yorkers not liking to breathe air they
can’t see. Figure 10-3 shows that since 1970, when the Environmental Protection
Agency was established, the United States has slashed its emissions of five air
pollutants by almost two-thirds. Over the same period, the population grew by
more than 40 percent, and those people drove twice as many miles and became
two and a half times richer. Energy use has leveled off, and even carbon dioxide
emissions have turned a corner, a point to which we will return. The declines
don’t just reflect an offshoring of heavy industry to the developing world,
because the bulk of energy use and emissions comes from transportation,
heating, and electricity generation, which cannot be outsourced. Rather, they
mainly reflect gains in efficiency and emission control. These diverging curves
refute both the orthodox Green claim that only degrowth can curb pollution and
the orthodox right-wing claim that environmental protection must sabotage
economic growth and people’s standard of living.

Figure 10-3: Pollution, energy, and growth, US, 1970–2015
Sources: US Environmental Protection Agency 2016, based on the following sources. GDP: Bureau of
Economic Analysis. Vehicle miles traveled: Federal Highway Administration. Population: US Census
Bureau. Energy Consumption: US Department of Energy. CO2: US Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report.
Emissions (carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, particulate matter smaller than 10 micrometers, sulfur
dioxide, and volatile organic compounds): EPA, https://www.epa.gov/air-emissions-inventories/air-
pollutant-emissions-trends-data.
Many of the improvements can be seen with the naked eye. Cities are less
often shrouded in purple-brown haze, and London no longer has the fog—
actually coal smoke—that was immortalized in Impressionist paintings, gothic
novels, the Gershwin song, and the brand of raincoats. Urban waterways that had
been left for dead—including Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Boston Harbor,
Lake Erie, and the Hudson, Potomac, Chicago, Charles, Seine, Rhine, and
Thames rivers (the last described by Disraeli as “a Stygian pool reeking with
ineffable and intolerable horrors”)—have been recolonized by fish, birds, marine
mammals, and sometimes swimmers. Suburbanites are seeing wolves, foxes,
bears, bobcats, badgers, deer, ospreys, wild turkeys, and bald eagles. As
agriculture becomes more efficient (chapter 7), farmland returns to temperate
forest, as any hiker knows who has stumbled upon a stone wall incongruously
running through a New England woodland. Though tropical forests are still,
alarmingly, being cut down, between the middle of the 20th century and the turn

of the 21st the rate fell by two-thirds (figure 10-4).24 Deforestation of the world’s
largest tropical forest, the Amazon, peaked in 1995, and from 2004 to 2013 the
rate fell by four-fifths.25
The time-lagged decline of deforestation in the tropics is one sign that
environmental protection is spreading from developed countries to the rest of the
world. The world’s progress can be tracked in a report card called the
Environmental Performance Index, a composite of indicators of the quality of
air, water, forests, fisheries, farms, and natural habitats. Out of 180 countries that
have been tracked for a decade or more, all but two show an improvement.26 The
wealthier the country, on average, the cleaner its environment: the Nordic
countries were cleanest; Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and several sub-Saharan
African countries, the most compromised. Two of the deadliest forms of
pollution—contaminated drinking water and indoor cooking smoke—are
afflictions of poor countries.27 But as poor countries have gotten richer in recent
decades, they are escaping these blights: the proportion of the world’s population
that drinks tainted water has fallen by five-eighths, the proportion breathing
cooking smoke by a third.28 As Indira Gandhi said, “Poverty is the greatest
polluter.”29
Figure 10-4: Deforestation, 1700–2010

Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization 2012, p. 9.
The epitome of environmental insults is the oil spill from tanker ships, which
coats pristine beaches with toxic black sludge and fouls the plumage of seabirds
and the fur of otters and seals. The most notorious accidents, such as the breakup
of the Torrey Canyon in 1967 and the Exxon Valdez in 1989, linger in our
collective memory, and few people are aware that seaborne oil transport has
become vastly safer. Figure 10-5 shows that the annual number of oil spills has
fallen from more than a hundred in 1973 to just five in 2016 (and the number of
major spills fell from thirty-two in 1978 to one in 2016). The graph also shows
that even as less oil was spilled, more oil was shipped; the crossing curves
provide additional evidence that environmental protection is compatible with
economic growth. It’s no mystery that oil companies should want to reduce
tanker accidents, because their interests and those of the environment coincide:
oil spills are a public-relations disaster (especially when the name of the
company is emblazoned on a cracked-up ship), bring on huge fines, and of
course waste valuable oil. More interesting is the fact that the companies have
largely succeeded. Technologies follow a learning curve and become less
hazardous over time as the boffins design out the most dangerous vulnerabilities
(a point we’ll return to in chapter 12). But people remember the accidents and
are unaware of the incremental improvements. The improvements in different
technologies unfold on different timetables: in 2010, when seaborne oil spills
had fallen to an all-time low, the third-worst spill from stationary rigs took place.
The Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico led in turn to new
regulations for blowout preventers, well design, monitoring, and containment.30

Figure 10-5: Oil spills, 1970–2016
Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016r, based on data (updated) from the International Tanker Owners
Pollution Federation, http://www.itopf.com/knowledge-resources/data-statistics/statistics/. Oil spills include
all those that result in the loss of at least 7 metric tons of oil. Oil shipped consists of “total crude oil,
petroleum product, and gas loaded.”
In another advance, entire swaths of land and ocean have been protected from
human use altogether. Conservation experts are unanimous in their assessment
that the protected areas are still inadequate, but the momentum is impressive.
Figure 10-6 shows that the proportion of the Earth’s land set aside as national
parks, wildlife reserves, and other protected areas has grown from 8.2 percent in
1990 to 14.8 percent in 2014—an area double the size of the United States.
Marine conservation areas have grown as well, more than doubling during this
period and now protecting more than 12 percent of the world’s oceans.

Figure 10-6: Protected areas, 1990–2014
Source: World Bank 2016h and 2017, based on data from the United Nations Environment Programme and
the World Conservation Monitoring Centre, compiled by the World Resources Institute.
Thanks to habitat protection and targeted conservation efforts, many beloved

species have been pulled from the brink of extinction, including albatrosses,
condors, manatees, oryxes, pandas, rhinoceroses, Tasmanian devils, and tigers;
according to the ecologist Stuart Pimm, the overall rate of extinctions has been
reduced by 75 percent.31 Though many species remain in precarious straits, a
number of ecologists and paleontologists believe that the claim that humans are
causing a mass extinction like the Permian and Cretaceous is hyperbolic. As
Brand notes, “No end of specific wildlife problems remain to be solved, but
describing them too often as extinction crises has led to a general panic that
nature is extremely fragile or already hopelessly broken. That is not remotely the
case. Nature as a whole is exactly as robust as it ever was—maybe more so. . . .
Working with that robustness is how conservation’s goals get reached.”32
Other improvements are global in scope. The 1963 treaty banning
atmospheric nuclear testing eliminated the most terrifying form of pollution of
all, radioactive fallout, and proved that the world’s nations could agree on
measures to protect the planet even in the absence of a world government.
Global cooperation has dealt with several other challenges since. International

treaties on the reduction of sulfur emissions and other forms of “long-range
transboundary air pollution” signed in the 1980s and 1990s have helped to
eliminate the scare of acid rain.33 Thanks to the 1987 ban on chlorofluorocarbons
ratified by 197 countries, the ozone layer is expected to heal by the middle of the
21st century.34 These successes, as we will see, set the stage for the historic Paris
Agreement on climate change in 2015.
Like all demonstrations of progress, reports on the improving state of the

environment are often met with a combination of anger and illogic. The fact that
many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that
everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit
back and relax. For the cleaner environment we enjoy today we must thank the
arguments, activism, legislation, regulations, treaties, and technological
ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.35 We’ll need more
of each to sustain the progress we’ve made, prevent reversals (particularly under
the Trump presidency), and extend it to the wicked problems that still face us,
such as the health of the oceans and, as we shall see, atmospheric greenhouse
gases.
But for many reasons, it’s time to retire the morality play in which modern
humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the
apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and
return to an ascetic harmony with nature. Instead, we can treat environmental
protection as a problem to be solved: how can people live safe, comfortable, and
stimulating lives with the least possible pollution and loss of natural habitats?
Far from licensing complacency, our progress so far at solving this problem
emboldens us to strive for more. It also points to the forces that pushed this
progress along.
One key is to decouple productivity from resources: to get more human
benefit from less matter and energy. This puts a premium on density.36 As
agriculture becomes more intensive by growing crops that are bred or engineered
to produce more protein, calories, and fiber with less land, water, and fertilizer,
farmland is spared, and it can morph back to natural habitats. (Ecomodernists
point out that organic farming, which needs far more land to produce a kilogram
of food, is neither green nor sustainable.) As people move to cities, they not only
free up land in the countryside but need fewer resources for commuting,
building, and heating, because one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. As trees

are harvested from dense plantations, which have five to ten times the yield of
natural forests, forest land is spared, together with its feathered, furry, and scaly
inhabitants.
All these processes are helped along by another friend of the Earth,
dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. An
aluminum soda can used to weigh three ounces; today it weighs less than half an
ounce. Mobile phones don’t need miles of telephone poles and wires. The digital
revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world in front of
our eyes. The cubic yards of vinyl that used to be my music collection gave way
to cubic inches of compact discs and then to the nothingness of MP3s. The river
of newsprint flowing through my apartment has been stanched by an iPad. With
a terabyte of storage on my laptop I no longer buy paper by the ten-ream box.
And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the forty-
odd consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a
telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder,
radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps,
flashlight, fax, and compass—even a metronome, outdoor thermometer, and
spirit level.
Digital technology is also dematerializing the world by enabling the sharing
economy, so that cars, tools, and bedrooms needn’t be made in huge numbers
that sit around unused most of the time. The advertising analyst Rory Sutherland
has noted that dematerialization is also being helped along by changes in the
criteria of social status.37 The most expensive London real estate today would
have seemed impossibly cramped to wealthy Victorians, but the city center is
now more fashionable than the suburbs. Social media have encouraged younger
people to show off their experiences rather than their cars and wardrobes, and
hipsterization leads them to distinguish themselves by their tastes in beer, coffee,
and music. The era of the Beach Boys and American Graffiti is over: half of
American eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver’s license.38
The expression “Peak Oil,” which became popular after the energy crises of
the 1970s, refers to the year that the world would reach its maximum extraction
of petroleum. Ausubel notes that because of the demographic transition,
densification, and dematerialization, we may have reached Peak Children, Peak
Farmland, Peak Timber, Peak Paper, and Peak Car. Indeed, we may be reaching
Peak Stuff: of a hundred commodities Ausubel plotted, thirty-six have peaked in
absolute use in the United States, and another fifty-three may be poised to drop
(including water, nitrogen, and electricity), leaving only eleven that are still

growing. Britons, too, have reached Peak Stuff, having reduced their annual use
of material from 15.1 metric tons per person in 2001 to 10.3 metric tons in
2013.39
These remarkable trends required no coercion, legislation, or moralization;
they spontaneously unfolded as people made choices about how to live their
lives. The trends certainly don’t show that environmental legislation is
dispensable—by all accounts, environmental protection agencies, mandated
energy standards, endangered species protection, and national and international
clean air and water acts have had enormously beneficial effects.40 But they
suggest that the tide of modernity does not sweep humanity headlong toward
ever more unsustainable use of resources. Something in the nature of technology,
particularly information technology, works to decouple human flourishing from
the exploitation of physical stuff.
Just as we must not accept the narrative that humanity inexorably despoils every
part of the environment, we must not accept the narrative that every part of the
environment will rebound under our current practices. An enlightened
environmentalism must face the facts, hopeful or alarming, and one set of facts
is unquestionably alarming: the effect of greenhouse gases on the earth’s
climate.41
Whenever we burn wood, coal, oil, or gas, the carbon in the fuel is oxidized
to form carbon dioxide (CO2), which wafts into the atmosphere. Though some of
the CO2 dissolves in the ocean, chemically combines with rocks, or is taken up
by photosynthesizing plants, these natural sinks cannot keep up with the 38
billion tons we dump into the atmosphere each year. As gigatons of carbon laid
down during the Carboniferous Period have gone up in smoke, the concentration
of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen from about 270 parts per million before the
Industrial Revolution to more than 400 parts today. Since CO2, like the glass in a
greenhouse, traps heat radiating from the Earth’s surface, the global average
temperature has risen as well, by about .8° Celsius (1.4° Fahrenheit), and 2016
was the hottest year on record, with 2015 coming in second and 2014 coming in
third. The atmosphere has also been warmed by the clearing of carbon-eating
forests and by the release of methane (an even more potent greenhouse gas) from
leaky gas wells, melting permafrost, and the orifices at both ends of cattle. It
could become warmer still in a runaway feedback loop if white, heat-reflecting
snow and ice are replaced by dark, heat-absorbing land and water, if the melting

of permafrost accelerates, and if more water vapor (yet another greenhouse gas)
is sent into the air.
If the emission of greenhouse gases continues, the Earth’s average
temperature will rise to at least 1.5°C (2.7°F) above the preindustrial level by the
end of the 21st century, and perhaps to 4°C (7.2°F) above that level or more.
That will cause more frequent and more severe heat waves, more floods in wet
regions, more droughts in dry regions, heavier storms, more severe hurricanes,
lower crop yields in warm regions, the extinction of more species, the loss of
coral reefs (because the oceans will be both warmer and more acidic), and an
average rise in sea level of between 0.7 and 1.2 meters (2 and 4 feet) from both
the melting of land ice and the expansion of seawater. (Sea level has already
risen almost eight inches since 1870, and the rate of the rise appears to be
accelerating.) Low-lying areas would be flooded, island nations would disappear
beneath the waves, large stretches of farmland would no longer be arable, and
millions of people would be displaced. The effects could get still worse in the
22nd century and beyond, and in theory could trigger upheavals such as a
diversion of the Gulf Stream (which would turn Europe into Siberia) or a
collapse of Antarctic ice sheets. A rise of 2°C is considered the most that the
world could reasonably adapt to, and a rise of 4°C, in the words of a 2012 World
Bank report, “simply must not be allowed to occur.”42
To keep the rise to 2°C or less, the world would, at a minimum, have to
reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by half or more by the middle of the 21st
century and eliminate them altogether before the turn of the 22nd.43 The
challenge is daunting. Fossil fuels provide 86 percent of the world’s energy,
powering almost every car, truck, train, plane, ship, tractor, furnace, and factory
on the planet, together with most of its electricity plants.44 Humanity has never
faced a problem like it.
One response to the prospect of climate change is to deny that it is occurring
or that human activity is the cause. It’s completely appropriate, of course, to
challenge the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change on scientific grounds,
particularly given the extreme measures it calls for if it is true. The great virtue
of science is that a true hypothesis will, in the long run, withstand attempts to
falsify it. Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged
scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges—such as that
global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because
they were measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising but only
because the sun is getting hotter—have been refuted, and even many skeptics

have been convinced.45 A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406
authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the
hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed
literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].”46
Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily
underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious
campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet.47 In doing so
they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally
infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government
takeover of the economy. As someone who considers himself something of a
watchdog for politically correct dogma in academia, I can state that this is
nonsense: physical scientists have no such agenda, and the evidence speaks for
itself.48 (And it’s precisely because of challenges like this that scholars in all
fields have a duty to secure the credibility of the academy by not enforcing
political orthodoxies.)
To be sure, there are judicious climate change skeptics, sometimes called
lukewarmers, who accept the mainstream science but accentuate the positive.49
They favor the fringe of the envelope of possibilities with the slowest
temperature rise, note that the worst-case scenarios with runaway feedback are
hypothetical, point out that moderately higher temperatures and CO2 have
benefits in crop yields that should be traded off against their costs, and argue that
if countries are allowed to get as rich as possible (without growth-sapping
restrictions on fossil fuels) they will be better equipped to adapt to the climate
change that does occur. But as the economist William Nordhaus points out, this
is a rash gamble in what he calls the Climate Casino.50 If the status quo presents,
say, an even chance that the world will get significantly worse, and a 5 percent
chance that it will pass a tipping point and face a catastrophe, it would be
prudent to take preventive action even if the catastrophic outcome is not certain,
just as we buy fire extinguishers and insurance for our houses and don’t keep
open cans of gasoline in our garages. Since dealing with climate change will be a
multidecade effort, there’s plenty of time to back off if temperature, sea level,
and ocean acidity happily stop rising.
Another response to climate change, from the far left, seems designed to
vindicate the conspiracy theories of the far right. According to the “climate
justice” movement popularized by the journalist Naomi Klein in her 2014
bestseller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, we should not
treat the threat of climate change as a challenge to prevent climate change. No,

we should treat it as an opportunity to abolish free markets, restructure the global
economy, and remake our political system.51 In one of the more surreal episodes
in the history of environmental politics, Klein joined the infamous David and
Charles Koch, the billionaire oil industrialists and bankrollers of climate change
denial, in helping to defeat a 2016 Washington state ballot initiative that would
have implemented the country’s first carbon tax, the policy measure which
almost every analyst endorses as a prerequisite to dealing with climate change.52
Why? Because the measure was “right-wing friendly,” and it did not “make the
polluters pay, and put their immoral profits to work repairing the damage they
have knowingly created.” In a 2015 interview Klein even opposed analyzing
climate change quantitatively:
We’re not going to win this as bean counters. We can’t beat the bean
counters at their own game. We’re going to win this because this is an
issue of values, human rights, right and wrong. We just have this brief
period where we also have to have some nice stats that we can wield, but
we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that what actually moves people’s hearts
are the arguments based on the value of life.53
Blowing off quantitative analysis as “bean-counting” is not just anti-

intellectual but works against “values, human rights, right and wrong.” Someone
who values human life will favor the policies that have the greatest chance of
saving people from being displaced or starved while furnishing them with the
means to live healthy and fulfilled lives.54 In a universe governed by the laws of
nature rather than magic and deviltry, that requires “bean-counting.” Even when
it comes to the purely rhetorical challenge of “moving people’s hearts,” efficacy
matters: people are likelier to accept the fact of global warming when they are
told that the problem is solvable by innovations in policy and technology than
when they are given dire warnings about how awful it will be.55
Another common sentiment about how to prevent climate change is
expressed in this letter, of a kind I receive every now and again:
Dear Professor Pinker

We need to do something about global warming. Why don’t the Nobel
prize winning scientists sign a petition? Why don’t they tell the blunt truth,

that the politicians are pigs who don’t care how many people get killed in
floods and droughts?
Why don’t you and some friends start a movement on the Internet to
get people to sign a pledge that they will make real sacrifices to fight
global warming. Because that’s the problem. Nobody wants to make any
sacrifices. People should pledge to never fly in airplanes except in dire
emergencies, because airplanes burn so much fuel. People should pledge
to eat no meat on at least three days per week, because meat production
adds so much carbon to the atmosphere. People should pledge to buy no
jewelry, ever, because refining gold and silver is so energy-intensive. We
should abolish artistic pottery, because it burns so much carbon. The
potters in university art departments are just going to have to accept the
fact that we can’t go on like this.
Forgive the bean-counting, but even if everyone gave up their jewelry, it would
not make a scratch in the world’s emission of greenhouse gases, which are
dominated by heavy industry (29 percent), buildings (18 percent), transport (15
percent), land-use change (15 percent), and the energy needed to supply energy
(13 percent). (Livestock is responsible for 5.5 percent, mostly methane rather
than CO2, and aviation for 1.5 percent.)56 Of course my correspondent suggested
forgoing jewelry and pottery not because of the effect but because of the
sacrifice, and it’s no surprise that she singled out jewelry, the quintessential
luxury. I bring up her ingenuous suggestion to illustrate two psychological
impediments we face in dealing with climate change.
The first is cognitive. People have trouble thinking in scale: they don’t
differentiate among actions that would reduce CO2 emissions by thousands of
tons, millions of tons, and billions of tons.57 Nor do they distinguish among
level, rate, acceleration, and higher-order derivatives—between actions that
would affect the rate of increase in CO2 emissions, affect the rate of CO2
emissions, affect the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and affect global
temperatures (which will rise even if the level of CO2 remains constant). Only
the last of these matters, but if one doesn’t think in scale and in orders of change,
one can be satisfied with policies that accomplish nothing.
The other impediment is moralistic. As I mentioned in chapter 2, the human
moral sense is not particularly moral; it encourages dehumanization (“politicians
are pigs”) and punitive aggression (“make the polluters pay”). Also, by

conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can
sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice.58 In many cultures people flaunt their
righteousness with vows of fasting, chastity, self-abnegation, bonfires of the
vanities, and animal (or sometimes human) sacrifice. Even in modern societies—
according to studies I’ve done with the psychologists Jason Nemirow, Max
Krasnow, and Rhea Howard—people esteem others according to how much time
or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they
accomplish.59
Much of the public chatter about mitigating climate change involves
voluntary sacrifices like recycling, reducing food miles, unplugging chargers,
and so on. (I myself have posed for posters in several of these campaigns led by
Harvard students.)60 But however virtuous these displays may feel, they are a
distraction from the gargantuan challenge facing us. The problem is that carbon
emissions are a classic public goods game, also known as a Tragedy of the
Commons. People benefit from everyone else’s sacrifices and suffer from their
own, so everyone has an incentive to be a free rider and let everyone else make
the sacrifice, and everyone suffers. A standard remedy for public goods
dilemmas is a coercive authority that can punish free riders. But any government
with the totalitarian power to abolish artistic pottery is unlikely to restrict that
power to maximizing the common good. One can, alternatively, daydream that
moral suasion is potent enough to induce everyone to make the necessary
sacrifices. But while humans do have public sentiments, it’s unwise to let the
fate of the planet hinge on the hope that billions of people will simultaneously
volunteer to act against their interests. Most important, the sacrifice needed to
bring carbon emissions down by half and then to zero is far greater than forgoing
jewelry: it would require forgoing electricity, heating, cement, steel, paper,
travel, and affordable food and clothing.
Climate justice warriors, indulging the fantasy that the developing world will
do just that, advocate a regime of “sustainable development.” As Shellenberger
and Ted Nordhaus satirize it, that consists of “small co-ops in the Amazon forest
where peasant farmers and Indians would pick nuts and berries to sell to Ben and
Jerry’s for their ‘Rainforest Crunch’ flavor.”61 They would be allowed solar
panels that could light an LED or charge a cell phone, but nothing more.
Needless to say, the people who actually live in those countries have a different
idea. Escaping from poverty requires abundant energy. The proprietor of
HumanProgress, Marian Tupy, points out that in 1962 Botswana and Burundi
were equally destitute, with an annual per capita income of $70, and neither

emitted much CO2. By 2010, Botswanans earned $7,650 a year, 32 times as
much as the still-poor Burundians, and they emitted 89 times as much CO2.62
Faced with such facts, climate justice warriors reply that rather than
enriching poor nations, we should impoverish rich ones, switching back, for
example, to “labor-intensive agriculture” (to which an appropriate reply is: You
first). Shellenberger and Nordhaus note how far progressive politics has moved
from the days in which rural electrification and economic development were
among its signature projects: “In the name of democracy it now offers the global
poor not what they want—cheap electricity—but more of what they don’t want,
namely intermittent and expensive power.”63
Economic progress is an imperative in rich and poor countries alike precisely
because it will be needed to adapt to the climate change that does occur. Thanks
in good part to prosperity, humanity has been getting healthier (chapters 5 and
6), better fed (chapter 7), more peaceful (chapter 11), and better protected from
natural hazards and disasters (chapter 12). These advances have made humanity
more resilient to natural and human-made threats: disease outbreaks don’t
become pandemics, crop failures in one region are alleviated by surpluses in
another, local skirmishes are defused before they erupt into war, populations are
better protected against storms, floods, and droughts. Part of our response to
climate change must be to ensure that these gains in resilience continue to
outpace the threats that a warming planet will throw at it. Every year that
developing countries get richer, they will have more resources for building
seawalls and reservoirs, improving public health services, and moving people
away from rising seas. For that reason they must not be kept in energy poverty—
but neither does it make sense for them to raise incomes with massive coal
burning that will overwhelm everyone later with weather disasters.64
How, then, should we deal with climate change? Deal with it we must. I agree
with Pope Francis and the climate justice warriors that preventing climate
change is a moral issue because it has the potential to harm billions, particularly
the world’s poor. But morality is different from moralizing, and is often poorly
served by it. (The Pope’s encyclical backfired, decreasing concern about climate
change among the conservative Catholics who were aware of it.)65 It may be
satisfying to demonize the fossil fuel corporations that sell us the energy we
want, or to signal our virtue by making conspicuous sacrifices, but these
indulgences won’t prevent destructive climate change.

The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the
most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases. There is, to be sure, a
tragic view of modernity in which this is impossible: industrial society, powered
by flaming carbon, contains the fuel of its own destruction. But the tragic view is
incorrect. Ausubel notes that the modern world has been progressively
decarbonizing.
The hydrocarbons in the stuff we burn are composed of hydrogen and carbon,
which release energy as they combine with oxygen to form H2O and CO2. The
oldest hydrocarbon fuel, dry wood, has a ratio of combustible carbon atoms to
hydrogen atoms of about 10 to 1.66 The coal which replaced it during the
Industrial Revolution has an average carbon-to-hydrogen ratio of 2 to 1.67 A
petroleum fuel such as kerosene may have a ratio of 1 to 2. Natural gas is
composed mainly of methane, whose chemical formula is CH4, with a ratio of 1
to 4.68 So as the industrial world climbed an energy ladder from wood to coal to
oil to gas (the last transition accelerated in the 21st century by the abundance of
shale gas from fracking), the ratio of carbon to hydrogen in its energy source
steadily fell, and so did the amount of carbon that had to be burned to release a
unit of energy (from 30 kg of carbon per gigajoule in 1850 to about 15 today).69
Figure 10-7 shows that carbon emissions follow a Kuznets arc: when rich
countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom first industrialized,
they emitted more and more CO2 to produce a dollar of GDP, but they turned a
corner in the 1950s and since then have been emitting less and less. China and
India are following suit, cresting in the late 1970s and mid-1990s, respectively.
(China flew off the charts in the late 1950s because of Mao’s boneheaded
schemes like backyard iron smelters with copious emissions and zero economic
output.) Carbon intensity for the world as a whole has been declining for half a
century.70

Figure 10-7: Carbon intensity (CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP), 1820–2014
Source: Ritchie & Roser 2017, based on data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center,
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_coun.html. GDP is in 2011 international dollars; for the years before
1990, GDP comes from Maddison Project 2014.
Decarbonization is a natural consequence of people’s preferences. “Carbon

blackens miners’ lungs, endangers urban air, and threatens climate change,”
Ausubel explains. “Hydrogen is as innocent as an element can be, ending
combustion as water.”71 People want their energy dense and clean, and as they
move into cities, they accept only electricity and gas, delivered right to their
bedside and stovetop. Remarkably, this natural development has brought the
world to Peak Coal and maybe even Peak Carbon. As figure 10-8 shows, global
emissions plateaued from 2014 to 2015 and declined among the top three
emitters, namely China, the European Union, and the United States. (As we saw
for the United States in figure 10-3, carbon emissions plateaued while prosperity
rose: between 2014 and 2016, the Gross World Product grew by 3 percent
annually.)72 Some of the carbon was reduced by the growth of wind and solar
power, but most of it, particularly in the United States, was reduced by the
replacement of C137H97O9NS coal with CH4 gas.

Figure 10-8: CO2 emissions, 1960–2015
Sources: Our World in Data, Ritchie & Roser 2017 and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-
emissions-by-region, based on data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center,
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/CO2_Emission/, and Le Quéré et al. 2016. “International air & sea” refers to aviation
and sea transport; it corresponds to “Bunker fuels” in the original sources. “Other” refers to the difference
between estimated global CO2 emissions and the sum of the regional and national totals; it corresponds to
the “Statistical difference” component.
The long sweep of decarbonization shows that economic growth is not

synonymous with burning carbon. Some optimists believe that if the trend is
allowed to evolve into its next phase—from low-carbon natural gas to zero-
carbon nuclear energy, a process abbreviated as “N2N”—the climate will have a
soft landing. But only the sunniest believe this will happen by itself. Annual CO2
emissions may have leveled off for the time being at around 36 billion tons, but
that’s still a lot of CO2 added to the atmosphere every year, and there is no sign
of the precipitous plunge we would need to stave off the harmful outcomes.
Instead, decarbonization needs to be helped along with pushes from policy and
technology, an idea called deep decarbonization.73
It begins with carbon pricing: charging people and companies for the damage
they do when they dump their carbon into the atmosphere, either as a tax on
carbon or as a national cap with tradeable credits. Economists across the political
spectrum endorse carbon pricing because it combines the unique advantages of

governments and markets.74 No one owns the atmosphere, so people (and
companies) have no reason to stint on emissions that allow each of them to enjoy
their energy while harming everyone else, a perverse outcome that economists
call a negative externality (another name for the collective costs in a public
goods game, or the damage to the commons in the Tragedy of the Commons). A
carbon tax, which only governments can impose, “internalizes” the public costs,
forcing people to factor the harm into every carbon-emitting decision they make.
Having billions of people decide how best to conserve, given their values and the
information conveyed by prices, is bound to be more efficient and humane than
having government analysts try to divine the optimal mixture from their desks.
The potters don’t have to hide their kilns from the Carbon Police; they can do
their part in saving the planet by taking shorter showers, forgoing Sunday drives,
and switching from beef to eggplant. Parents don’t have to calculate whether
diaper services, with their trucks and laundries, emit more carbon than the
makers of disposable diapers; the difference will be folded into the prices, and
each company has an incentive to lower its emissions to compete with the other.
Inventors and entrepreneurs can take risks on carbon-free energy sources that
would compete against fossil fuels on a level playing field rather than the tilted
one we have now, in which the fossils get to spew their waste into the
atmosphere for free. Without carbon pricing, fossil fuels—which are uniquely
abundant, portable, and energy-dense—have too great an advantage over the
alternatives.
Carbon taxes, to be sure, hit the poor in a way that concerns the left, and they
transfer money from the private to the public sector in a way that annoys the
right. But these effects can be neutralized by adjusting sales, payroll, income,
and other taxes and transfers. (As Al Gore put it: Tax what you burn, not what
you earn.) And if the tax starts low and increases steeply and predictably over
time, people can factor the increase into their long-term purchases and
investments, and by favoring low-carbon technologies as they evolve, escape
most of the tax altogether.75
A second key to deep decarbonization brings up an inconvenient truth for the
traditional Green movement: nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and
scalable carbon-free energy source.76 Although renewable energy sources,
particularly solar and wind, have become drastically cheaper, and their share of
the world’s energy has more than tripled in the past five years, that share is still a
paltry 1.5 percent, and there are limits on how high it can go.77 The wind is often
becalmed, and the sun sets every night and may be clouded over. But people

need energy around the clock, rain or shine. Batteries that could store and release
large amounts of energy from renewables will help, but ones that could work on
the scale of cities are years away. Also, wind and solar sprawl over vast acreage,
defying the densification process that is friendliest to the environment. The
energy analyst Robert Bryce estimates that simply keeping up with the world’s
increase in energy use would require turning an area the size of Germany into
wind farms every year.78 To satisfy the world’s needs with renewables by 2050
would require tiling windmills and solar panels over an area the size of the
United States (including Alaska), plus Mexico, Central America, and the
inhabited portion of Canada.79
Nuclear energy, in contrast, represents the ultimate in density, because, in a
nuclear reaction, E = mc2: you get an immense amount of energy (proportional
to the speed of light squared) from a small bit of mass. Mining the uranium for
nuclear energy leaves a far smaller environmental scar than mining coal, oil, or
gas, and the power plants themselves take up about one five-hundredth of the
land needed by wind or solar.80 Nuclear energy is available around the clock, and
it can be plugged into power grids that provide concentrated energy where it is
needed. It has a lower carbon footprint than solar, hydro, and biomass, and it’s
safer than them, too. The sixty years with nuclear power have seen thirty-one
deaths in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the result of extraordinary Soviet-era
bungling, together with a few thousand early deaths from cancer above the
100,000 natural cancer deaths in the exposed population.81 The other two famous
accidents, at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in 2011, killed no one.
Yet vast numbers of people are killed day in, day out by the pollution from
burning combustibles and by accidents in mining and transporting them, none of
which make headlines. Compared with nuclear power, natural gas kills 38 times
as many people per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, biomass 63 times as
many, petroleum 243 times as many, and coal 387 times as many—perhaps a
million deaths a year.82
Nordhaus and Shellenberger summarize the calculations of an increasing
number of climate scientists: “There is no credible path to reducing global
carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power. It is the only
low carbon technology we have today with the demonstrated capability to
generate large quantities of centrally generated electric power.”83 The Deep
Carbonization Pathways Project, a consortium of research teams that have
worked out roadmaps for countries to reduce their emissions enough to meet the
2°C target, estimates that the United States will have to get between 30 and 60

percent of its electricity from nuclear power by 2050 (1.5 to 3 times the current
fraction), at the same time that it generates far more of that electricity to take
over from fossil fuels in heating homes, powering vehicles, and producing steel,
cement, and fertilizer.84 In one scenario, this would require quadrupling its
nuclear capacity. Similar expansions would be necessary in China, Russia, and
other countries.85
Unfortunately, the use of nuclear power has been shrinking just when it
should be growing. In the United States, eleven nuclear reactors have recently
been closed or are threatened with closure, which would cancel the entire carbon
savings from the expanded use of solar and wind. Germany, which has relied on
nuclear energy for much of its electricity, is shutting down its plants as well,
increasing its carbon emissions from the coal-fired plants that replace them, and
France and Japan may follow its lead.
Why are Western countries going the wrong way? Nuclear power presses a
number of psychological buttons—fear of poisoning, ease of imagining
catastrophes, distrust of the unfamiliar and the man-made—and the dread has
been amplified by the traditional Green movement and its dubiously
“progressive” supporters.86 One commentator blames global warming on the
Doobie Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, and the other rock stars whose 1979 No Nukes
concert and film galvanized baby-boomer sentiment against nuclear power.
(Sample lyrics of the closing anthem: “Just give me the warm power of the
sun . . . But won’t you take all your atomic poison power away.”)87 Some of the
blame might go to Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, and the producers of the 1979
disaster film The China Syndrome, so named because the melted-down nuclear
reactor core would supposedly sink through the Earth’s crust all the way to
China, after making “an area the size of Pennsylvania” uninhabitable. In a
devilish coincidence, the Three Mile Island plant in central Pennsylvania
suffered its partial meltdown two weeks after the movie’s release, creating
widespread panic and making the very idea of nuclear power as radioactive as its
uranium fuel.
It’s often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the
most frightened, but with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least
frightened.88 As with oil tankers, cars, planes, buildings, and factories (chapter
12), engineers have learned from the accidents and near-misses and have
progressively squeezed more safety out of nuclear reactors, reducing the risks of
accidents and contamination far below those of fossil fuels. The advantage even

extends to radioactivity, which is a natural property of the fly ash and flue gases
emitted by burning coal.
Still, nuclear power is expensive, mainly because it must clear crippling
regulatory hurdles while its competitors have been given easy passage. Also, in
the United States, nuclear power plants are now being built, after a lengthy
hiatus, by private companies using idiosyncratic designs, so they have not
climbed the engineer’s learning curve and settled on the best practices in design,
fabrication, and construction. Sweden, France, and South Korea, in contrast,
have built standardized reactors by the dozen and now enjoy cheap electricity
with substantially lower carbon emissions. As Ivan Selin, former commissioner
of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, put it, “The French have two kinds of
reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the
figures are reversed.”89
For nuclear power to play a transformative role in decarbonization it will
eventually have to leap past the second-generation technology of light-water
reactors. (The “first generation” consisted of prototypes from the 1950s and
early 1960s.) Soon to come on line are a few Generation III reactors, which
evolved from the current designs with improvements in safety and efficiency but
so far have been plagued by financial and construction snafus. Generation IV
reactors comprise a half-dozen new designs which promise to make nuclear
plants a mass-produced commodity rather than finicky limited editions.90 One
type might be cranked out on an assembly line like jet engines, fitted into
shipping containers, transported by rail, and installed on barges anchored
offshore cities. This would allow them to clear the NIMBY hurdle, ride out
storms or tsunamis, and be towed away at the end of their useful lives for
decommissioning. Depending on the design, they could be buried and operated
underground, cooled by inert gas or molten salt that needn’t be pressurized,
refueled continuously with a stream of pebbles rather than shut down for the
replacement of fuel rods, equipped to co-generate hydrogen (the cleanest of
fuels), and designed to shut themselves off without power or human intervention
if they overheat. Some would be fueled by relatively abundant thorium, and
others by uranium extracted from seawater, from dismantled nuclear weapons
(the ultimate beating of swords into plowshares), from the waste of existing
reactors, or even from their own waste—the closest we will ever get to a
perpetual-motion machine, capable of powering the world for thousands of
years. Even nuclear fusion, long derided as the energy source that is “thirty years
away and always will be,” really may be thirty years away (or less) this time.91

The benefits of advanced nuclear energy are incalculable. Most climate
change efforts call for policy reforms (such as carbon pricing) which remain
contentious and will be hard to implement worldwide even in the rosiest
scenarios. An energy source that is cheaper, denser, and cleaner than fossil fuels
would sell itself, requiring no herculean political will or international
cooperation.92 It would not just mitigate climate change but furnish manifold
other gifts. People in the developing world could skip the middle rungs in the
energy ladder, bringing their standard of living up to that of the West without
choking on coal smoke. Affordable desalination of seawater, an energy-ravenous
process, could irrigate farms, supply drinking water, and, by reducing the need
for both surface water and hydro power, allow dams to be dismantled, restoring
the flow of rivers to lakes and seas and revivifying entire ecosystems. The team
that brings clean and abundant energy to the world will benefit humanity more
than all of history’s saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined.
Breakthroughs in energy may come from startups founded by idealistic
inventors, from the skunk works of energy companies, or from the vanity
projects of tech billionaires, especially if they have a diversified portfolio of safe
bets and crazy moonshots.93 But research and development will also need a boost
from governments, because these global public goods are too great a risk with
too little reward for private companies. Governments must play a role because,
as Brand points out, “infrastructure is one of the things we hire governments to
handle, especially energy infrastructure, which requires no end of legislation,
bonds, rights of way, regulations, subsidies, research, and public-private
contracts with detailed oversight.”94 This includes a regulatory environment that
is suited to 21st-century challenges rather than to 1970s-era technophobia and
nuclear dread. Some fourth-generation nuclear technologies are shovel-ready,
but are trussed in regulatory green tape and may never see the light of day, at
least not in the United States.95 China, Russia, India, and Indonesia, which are
hungry for energy, sick of smog, and free from American squeamishness and
political gridlock, may take the lead.
Whoever does it, and whichever fuel they use, the success of deep
decarbonization will hinge on technological progress. Why assume that the
know-how of 2018 is the best the world can do? Decarbonization will need
breakthroughs not just in nuclear power but on other technological frontiers:
batteries to store the intermittent energy from renewables; Internet-like smart
grids that distribute electricity from scattered sources to scattered users at
scattered times; technologies that electrify and decarbonize industrial processes

such as the production of cement, fertilizer, and steel; liquid biofuels for heavy
trucks and planes that need dense, portable energy; and methods of capturing and
storing CO2.
The last of these is critical for a simple reason. Even if greenhouse gas emissions
are halved by 2050 and zeroed by 2075, the world would still be on course for
risky warming, because the CO2 already emitted will remain in the atmosphere
for a very long time. It’s not enough to stop thickening the greenhouse; at some
point we have to dismantle it.
The basic technology is more than a billion years old. Plants suck carbon out
of the air as they use the energy in sunlight to combine CO2 with H2O and make
sugars (like C6H12O6), cellulose (a chain of C6H10O5 units), and lignin (a chain of
units like C10H14O4); the latter two make up most of the biomass in wood and
stems. The obvious way to remove CO2 from the air, then, is to recruit as many
carbon-hungry plants as we can to help us. We can do this by encouraging the
transition from deforestation to reforestation and afforestation (planting new
forests), by reversing tillage and wetland destruction, and by restoring coastal
and marine habitats. And to reduce the amount of carbon that returns to the
atmosphere when dead plants rot, we could encourage building with wood and
other plant products, or cook the biomass into non-rotting charcoal and bury it as
a soil amendment called biochar.96
Other ideas for carbon capture span a broad range of flakiness, at least by the
standards of current technology. The more speculative end shades into
geoengineering, and includes plans to disperse pulverized rock that takes up CO2
as it weathers, to add alkali to clouds or the oceans to dissolve more CO2 in
water, and to fertilize the ocean with iron to accelerate photosynthesis by
plankton.97 The more proven end consists of technologies that can scrub CO2
from the smokestacks of fossil fuel plants and pump it into nooks and crannies in
the earth’s crust. (Skimming the sparse 400 parts per million directly from the
atmosphere is theoretically possible but prohibitively inefficient, though that
could change if nuclear power became cheap enough.) The technologies can be
retrofitted into existing factories and power plants, and though they are
themselves energy-hungry, they could slash carbon emissions from the vast
energy infrastructure that is already in place (resulting in so-called clean coal).
The technologies can also be fitted onto gasification plants that convert coal into

liquid fuels, which may still be needed for planes and heavy trucks. The
geophysicist Daniel Schrag points out that the gasification process already has to
separate CO2 from the gas stream, so sequestering that CO2 to protect the
atmosphere is a modest incremental expense, and it would yield liquid fuel with
a smaller carbon footprint than that of petroleum.98 Better still, if the coal
feedstock is supplemented with biomass (including grasses, agricultural waste,
forest cuttings, municipal garbage, and perhaps someday genetically engineered
plants or algae), it could be carbon-neutral. Best of all, if the feedstock consisted
exclusively of biomass, it would be carbon-negative. The plants pull CO2 out of
the atmosphere, and when their biomass is used for energy (via combustion,
fermentation, or gasification), the carbon capture process keeps it out. The
combination, sometimes called BECCS—bioenergy with carbon capture and
storage—has been called climate change’s savior technology.99
Will any of this happen? The obstacles are unnerving; they include the
world’s growing thirst for energy, the convenience of fossil fuels with their vast
infrastructure, the denial of the problem by energy corporations and the political
right, the hostility to technological solutions from traditional Greens and the
climate justice left, and the tragedy of the carbon commons. For all that,
preventing climate change is an idea whose time has come. One indication is a
trio of headlines that appeared in Time magazine within a three-week span in
2015: “China Shows It’s Serious About Climate Change,” “Walmart,
McDonald’s, and 79 Others Commit to Fight Global Warming,” and
“Americans’ Denial of Climate Change Hits Record Low.” In the same season
the New York Times reported, “Poll Finds Global Consensus on a Need to Tackle
Climate Change.” In all but one of the forty countries surveyed (Pakistan), a
majority of respondents were in favor of limiting greenhouse gas emissions,
including 69 percent of the Americans.100
The global consensus is not just hot air. In December 2015, 195 countries
signed a historic agreement that committed them to keeping the global
temperature rise to “well below” 2°C (with a target of 1.5°C) and to setting aside
$100 billion annually in climate mitigation financing for developing countries
(which had been a sticking point in prior, unsuccessful attempts at a global
consensus).101 In October 2016, 115 of the signatories ratified the agreement,
putting it into force. Most of the signatories submitted detailed plans on how
they would pursue these goals through 2025, and all promised to update their
plans every five years with stepped-up efforts. Without this ratcheting, the
current plans are inadequate: they would allow the world’s temperature to rise by

2.7°C, and would reduce the chance of a dangerous 4°C rise in 2100 by only 75
percent, which is still too close for comfort. But the public commitments,
combined with contagious technological advances, could push the ratchet
upward, in which case the Paris agreement would substantially reduce the
likelihood of a 2°C rise and essentially eliminate the possibility of a 4°C rise.102
This game plan faced a setback in 2017 when Donald Trump, who had
notoriously called climate change a Chinese hoax, announced that the United
States would withdraw from the agreement. Even if the withdrawal takes place
in November 2020 (the earliest possible date), the decarbonization driven by
technology and economics will continue, and climate change policies will be
advanced by cities, states, business and tech leaders, and the world’s other
countries, which have declared the deal “irreversible” and may pressure the
United States to keep its word by imposing carbon tariffs on American exports
and other sanctions.103
Even with fair winds and following seas, the effort needed to prevent climate
change is immense, and we have no guarantee that the necessary transformations
in technology and politics will be in place soon enough to slow down global
warming before it causes extensive harm. This brings us to a last-ditch protective
measure: lowering the world’s temperature by reducing the amount of solar
radiation that reaches the lower atmosphere and Earth’s surface.104 A fleet of
airplanes could spray a fine mist of sulfates, calcite, or nanoparticles into the
stratosphere, spreading a thin veil that would reflect back just enough sunlight to
prevent dangerous warming.105 This would mimic the effects of a volcanic
eruption such as that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which
spewed so much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that the planet cooled down
by half a degree Celsius (about one degree Fahrenheit) for two years. Or a fleet
of cloudships could spray a fine mist of seawater into the air. As the water
evaporated, salt crystals would waft into the clouds and water vapor would
condense around them, forming droplets that would whiten the clouds and reflect
more sunlight back into space. These measures are relatively inexpensive,
require no exotic new technologies, and could bring global temperatures down
quickly. Other ideas for manipulating the atmosphere and oceans have been
bruited about as well, though research on all of them is in its infancy.
The very idea of climate engineering sounds like the crazed scheme of a mad
scientist, and it once was close to taboo. Critics see it as a Promethean folly that

could have unintended consequences such as disrupting rainfall patterns and
damaging the ozone layer. Since the effects of any measure applied to the entire
planet are uneven from place to place, climate engineering raises the question of
whose hand should be on the world’s thermostat: as with a bickering couple, if
one country lowered the temperature at the expense of another, it could set off a
war. Once the world depended on climate engineering, then if for any reason it
slacked off, temperatures in the carbon-soaked atmosphere would soar far more
quickly than people could adapt. The mere mention of an escape hatch for the
climate crisis creates a moral hazard, tempting countries to shirk their duty to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And the accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere
would continue to dissolve in seawater, slowly turning the oceans into carbonic
acid.
For all these reasons, no responsible person could maintain that we can just
keep pumping carbon into the air and slather sunscreen onto the stratosphere to
compensate. But in a 2013 book the physicist David Keith makes a case for a
form of climate engineering that is moderate, responsive, and temporary.
“Moderate” means that the amounts of sulfate or calcite would be just enough to
reduce the rate of warming, not cancel it altogether; moderation is a virtue
because small manipulations are less likely to bring unwelcome surprises.
“Responsive” means that any manipulation would be careful, gradual, closely
monitored, constantly adjusted, and, if indicated, halted altogether. And
“temporary” means that the program would be designed only to give humanity
breathing space until it eliminates greenhouse gas emissions and brings the CO2
in the atmosphere back to preindustrial levels. In response to the fear that the
world would become addicted to climate engineering forever, Keith remarks, “Is
it plausible that we will not figure out how to pull, say, five gigatons of carbon
per year out of the air by 2075? I don’t buy it.”106
Though Keith is among the world’s foremost climate engineers, he cannot be
accused of being carried away by innovation thrill. A similarly thoughtful case
may be found in the journalist Oliver Morton’s 2015 book The Planet Remade,
which presents the historical, political, and moral dimensions of climate
engineering alongside the technical state of the art. Morton shows that humanity
has been disrupting global cycles of water, nitrogen, and carbon for more than a
century, so it’s too late to preserve a primeval Earth system. And given the
enormity of the climate change problem, it’s unwise to assume we will solve it
quickly or easily. Research into how we might minimize the harm to millions of
people before the solutions are completely in place only seems prudent, and

Morton lays out scenarios of how a program of moderate and temporary climate
engineering might be implemented even in a world that falls short of ideal global
governance. The legal scholar Dan Kahan has shown that far from creating a
moral hazard, providing information about climate engineering makes people
more concerned about climate change and less biased by their political
ideology.107
Despite a half-century of panic, humanity is not on an irrevocable path to

ecological suicide. The fear of resource shortages is misconceived. So is the
misanthropic environmentalism that sees modern humans as vile despoilers of a
pristine planet. An enlightened environmentalism recognizes that humans need
to use energy to lift themselves out of the poverty to which entropy and
evolution consign them. It seeks the means to do so with the least harm to the
planet and the living world. History suggests that this modern, pragmatic, and
humanistic environmentalism can work. As the world gets richer and more tech-
savvy, it dematerializes, decarbonizes, and densifies, sparing land and species.
As people get richer and better educated, they care more about the environment,
figure out ways to protect it, and are better able to pay the costs. Many parts of
the environment are rebounding, emboldening us to deal with the admittedly
severe problems that remain.
First among them is the emission of greenhouse gases and the threat they
pose of dangerous climate change. People sometimes ask me whether I think that
humanity will rise to the challenge or whether we will sit back and let disaster
unfold. For what it’s worth, I think we’ll rise to the challenge, but it’s vital to
understand the nature of this optimism. The economist Paul Romer distinguishes
between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child waiting for presents on
Christmas morning, and conditional optimism, the feeling of a child who wants a
treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and persuades other
kids to help him, he can build one.108 We cannot be complacently optimistic
about climate change, but we can be conditionally optimistic. We have some
practicable ways to prevent the harms and we have the means to learn more.
Problems are solvable. That does not mean that they will solve themselves, but it
does mean that we can solve them if we sustain the benevolent forces of
modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far, including societal
prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance, and investments
in science and technology.

CHAPTER 13
TERRORISM
W hen I wrote in the preceding chapter that we are living in the safest
time in history, I was aware of the incredulity those words would
evoke. In recent years, highly publicized terrorist attacks and rampage
killings have set the world on edge and fostered an illusion that we live in newly
dangerous times. In 2016, a majority of Americans named terrorism as the most
important issue facing the country, said they were worried that they or a family
member would be a victim, and identified ISIS as a threat to the existence or
survival of the United States.1 The fear has addled not just ordinary citizens
trying to get a pollster off the phone but public intellectuals, especially cultural
pessimists perennially hungry for signs that Western civilization is (as always)
on the verge of collapse. The political philosopher John Gray, an avowed
progressophobe, has described the contemporary societies of Western Europe as
“terrains of violent conflict” in which “peace and war [are] fatally blurred.”2
But yes, all this is an illusion. Terrorism is a unique hazard because it
combines major dread with minor harm. I will not count trends in terrorism as an
example of progress, since they don’t show the long-term decline we’ve seen for
disease, hunger, poverty, war, violent crime, and accidents. But I will show that
terrorism is a distraction in our assessment of progress, and, in a way, a
backhanded tribute to that progress.
Gray dismissed actual data on violence as “amulets” and “sorcery.” The
following table shows why he needed this ideological innumeracy to prosecute
his jeremiad. It shows the number of victims of four categories of killing—
terrorism, war, homicide, and accidents—together with the total of all deaths, in
the most recent year for which data are available (2015 or earlier). A graph is
impossible, because swatches for the terrorism numbers would be smaller than a
pixel.

Table 13-1: Deaths from Terrorism, War, Homicide, and Accidents
US Western Europe World
Terrorism 44 175 38,422
War 28 5 97,496
Homicide 15,696 3,962 437,000
Motor vehicle accidents 35,398 19,219 1,250,000
All accidents 136,053 126,482 5,000,000
All deaths 2,626,418 3,887,598 56,400,000
“Western Europe” is defined as in the Global Terrorism Database, comprising 24 countries and a 2014
population of 418,245,997 (Statistics Times 2015). I omit Andorra, Corsica, Gibraltar, Luxembourg, and the
Isle of Man.
Sources: Terrorism (2015): National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
2016. War, US and Western Europe (UK + NATO) (2015): icasualties.org, http://icasualties.org. War,
World (2015): UCDP Battle-Related Deaths Dataset, Uppsala Conflict Data Program 2017. Homicide, US
(2015): Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016a. Homicide, Western Europe and World (2012 or most
recent): United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2013. Data for Norway exclude the Utøya terrorist
attack. Motor vehicle accidents, All accidents, and All deaths, US (2014): Kochanek et al. 2016, table 10.
Motor vehicle accidents, Western Europe (2013): World Health Organization 2016c. All accidents,
Western Europe (2014 or most recent): World Health Organization 2015a. Motor vehicle accidents and
All accidents, World (2012): World Health Organization 2014. All deaths, Western Europe (2012 or
most recent): World Health Organization 2017a. All deaths, World (2015): World Health Organization
2017c.
Start with the United States. What jumps out of the table is the tiny number
of deaths in 2015 caused by terrorism compared with those from hazards that
inspire far less anguish or none at all. (In 2014 the terrorist death toll was even
lower, at 19.) Even the estimate of 44 is generous: it comes from the Global
Terrorism Database, which counts hate crimes and most rampage shootings as
examples of “terrorism.” The toll is comparable to the number of military
fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq (28 in 2015, 58 in 2014), which, consistent
with the age-old devaluing of the lives of soldiers, received a fraction of the
news coverage. The next rows down reveal that in 2015 an American was more
than 350 times as likely to be killed in a police-blotter homicide as in a terrorist
attack, 800 times as likely to be killed in a car crash, and 3,000 times as likely to
die in an accident of any kind. (Among the categories of accident that typically

kill more than 44 people in a given year are “Lightning,” “Contact with hot tap
water,” “Contact with hornets, wasps, and bees,” “Bitten or struck by mammals
other than dogs,” “Drowning and submersion while in or falling into bathtub,”
and “Ignition or melting of clothing and apparel other than nightwear.”)3
In Western Europe, the relative danger of terrorism was higher than in the
United States. In part this is because 2015 was an annus horribilis for terrorism
in that region, with attacks in the Brussels Airport, several Paris nightclubs, and
a public celebration in Nice. (In 2014, just 5 people were killed.) But the
relatively higher terrorism risk is also a sign of how much safer Europe is in
every other way. Western Europeans are less murderous than Americans (with
about a quarter their homicide rate) and also less car-crazy, so fewer die on the
road.4 Even with these factors tipping the scale toward terrorism, a Western
European in 2015 was more than 20 times as likely to die in one of their
(relatively rare) homicides as in a terrorist attack, more than 100 times as likely
to die in a car crash, and more than 700 times as likely to be crushed, poisoned,
burned, asphyxiated, or otherwise killed in an accident.
The third column shows that for all the recent anguish about terrorism in the
West, we have it easy compared with other parts of the world. Though the
United States and Western Europe contain about a tenth of the world’s
population, in 2015 they suffered one-half of one percent of the terrorist deaths.
That’s not because terrorism is a major cause of death elsewhere. It’s because
terrorism, as it is now defined, is largely a phenomenon of war, and wars no
longer take place in the United States or Western Europe. In the years since the
attacks of September 11, 2001, violence that used to be called “insurgency” or
“guerrilla warfare” is now often classified as “terrorism.”5 (The Global
Terrorism Database, incredibly, does not classify any deaths in Vietnam in the
last five years of the war there as “terrorism.”)6 A majority of the world’s
terrorist deaths take place in zones of civil war (including 8,831 in Iraq, 6,208 in
Afghanistan, 5,288 in Nigeria, 3,916 in Syria, 1,606 in Pakistan, and 689 in
Libya), and many of these are double-counted as war deaths, because
“terrorism” during a civil war is simply a war crime—a deliberate attack on
civilians—committed by a group other than the government. (Excluding these
six civil war zones, the terrorism death count for 2015 was 11,884.) Yet even
with the double counting of terrorism and war during the 21st century’s worst
year for war deaths, a global citizen was 11 times as likely to have died in a
homicide as in a terrorist attack, more than 30 times as likely to have died in a

car crash, and more than 125 times as likely to have died in an accident of any
kind.
Has terrorism, whatever its toll, increased over time? The historical trends are
elusive. Because “terrorism” is an elastic category, the trend lines look different
depending on whether a dataset includes civil war crimes, multiple murders
(which include robberies or mafia hits in which several victims are shot), or
suicidal rampages in which the killer ranted about some political grievance
beforehand. (The Global Terrorism Database, for example, includes the 1999
Columbine school massacre but not the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.)
Also, mass killings are media-driven spectacles, in which coverage inspires
copycats, so they can yo-yo up and down as one event inspires another until the
novelty wears off for a while.7 In the United States, the number of “active
shooter incidents” (public rampage killings with guns) has wobbled with an
upward trend since 2000, though the number of “mass murders” (four or more
deaths in an incident) shows no systematic change (if anything, it shows a slight
decline) from 1976 to 2011.8 The per capita death rate from “terrorism incidents”
is shown in figure 13-1, together with the messy trends for Western Europe and
the world.
Figure 13-1: Terrorism deaths, 1970–2015

Sources: “Global Terrorism Database,” National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to
Terrorism 2016, https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/. The rate for the world excludes deaths in Afghanistan after
2001, Iraq after 2003, Pakistan after 2004, Nigeria after 2009, Syria after 2011, and Libya after 2014.
Population estimates for the world and Western Europe are from the European Union’s 2015 Revision of
World Population Prospects (https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/); estimates for the United States are from US
Census Bureau 2017. The vertical arrow points to 2007, the last year plotted in figs. 6–9, 6–10, and 6–11 in
Pinker 2011.
The death rate for American terrorism for the year 2001, which includes the
3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, dominates the graph. Elsewhere we see a
bump for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (165 deaths) and barely
perceptible wrinkles in other years.9 Excluding 9/11 and Oklahoma, about twice
as many Americans have been killed since 1990 by right-wing extremists as by
Islamist terror groups.10 The line for Western Europe shows that the rise in 2015
came after a decade of relative quiescence, and is not even the worst that
Western Europe has seen: the rate of killing was higher in the 1970s and 1980s,
when Marxist and secessionist groups (including the Irish Republican Army and
the Basque ETA movement) carried out regular bombings and shootings. The
line for the world as a whole (excluding recent deaths in major war zones, which
we examined in the chapter on war) contains a spiky plateau for the 1980s and
1990s, a fall after the end of the Cold War, and a recent rise to a level that still
falls below that of the earlier decades. So the historical trends, like the current
numbers, belie the fear that we are living in newly dangerous times, particularly
in the West.
Though terrorism poses a minuscule danger compared with other risks, it creates
outsize panic and hysteria because that is what it is designed to do. Modern
terrorism is a by-product of the vast reach of the media.11 A group or an
individual seeks a slice of the world’s attention by the one guaranteed means of
attracting it: killing innocent people, especially in circumstances in which
readers of the news can imagine themselves. News media gobble the bait and
give the atrocities saturation coverage. The Availability heuristic kicks in and
people become stricken with a fear that is unrelated to the level of danger.
It’s not just the salience of a horrific event that stokes the terror. Our
emotions are far more engaged when the cause of a tragedy is malevolent intent
rather than accidental misfortune.12 (I confess that as a frequent visitor to
London, I was far more upset when I read the headline RUSSELL SQUARE “TERROR”
KNIFE ATTACK LEAVES WOMAN DEAD than when I read RENOWNED ART COLLECTOR

DIES AFTER BEING HIT BY BUS IN OXFORD STREET TRAGEDY.) Something is uniquely
unsettling about the thought of a human being who wants to kill you, and for a
good evolutionary reason. Accidental causes of death don’t try to do you in, and
they don’t care how you react, whereas human malefactors deploy their
intelligence to outsmart you, and vice versa.13
Given that terrorists are not mindless hazards but human agents with goals,
could it be rational to worry about them despite the small amount of damage
they do? After all, we are justly outraged by despots who execute dissidents,
even though the number of their victims may be as small as those of terrorism.
The difference is that despotic violence has strategic effects that are
disproportionate to the body count: it eliminates the most potent threats to the
regime, and it deters the rest of the population from replacing them. Terrorist
violence, almost by definition, strikes victims at random. The objective
significance of the threat, then, beyond the immediate damage, depends on what
the scattershot killing is designed to accomplish.
With many terrorists, the goal is little more than publicity itself. The legal
scholar Adam Lankford has analyzed the motives of the overlapping categories
of suicide terrorists, rampage shooters, and hate crime killers, including both the
self-radicalized lone wolves and the bomb fodder recruited by terrorist
masterminds.14 The killers tend to be loners and losers, many with untreated
mental illness, who are consumed with resentment and fantasize about revenge
and recognition. Some fused their bitterness with Islamist ideology, others with a
nebulous cause such as “starting a race war” or “a revolution against the federal
government, taxes, and anti-gun laws.” Killing a lot of people offered them the
chance to be a somebody, even if only in the anticipation, and going out in a
blaze of glory meant that they didn’t have to deal with the irksome aftermath of
being a mass murderer. The promise of paradise, and an ideology that
rationalizes how the massacre serves a greater good, makes the posthumous
fame all the more inviting.
Other terrorists belong to militant groups that seek to call attention to their
cause, to extort a government to change its policies, to provoke it into an
extreme response that might recruit new sympathizers or create a zone of chaos
for them to exploit, or to undermine the government by spreading the impression
that it cannot protect its own citizens. Before we conclude that they “pose a
threat to the existence or survival of the United States,” we should bear in mind
how weak the tactic actually is.15 The historian Yuval Harari notes that terrorism
is the opposite of military action, which tries to damage the enemy’s ability to

retaliate and prevail.16 When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, it left the
United States without a fleet to send to Southeast Asia in response. It would
have been mad for Japan to have opted for terrorism, say, by torpedoing a
passenger ship to provoke the United States into responding with an intact navy.
From their position of weakness, Harari notes, what terrorists seek to accomplish
is not damage but theater. The image that most people retain from 9/11 is not Al
Qaeda’s attack on the Pentagon—which actually destroyed part of the enemy’s
military headquarters and killed commanders and analysts—but its attack on the
totemic World Trade Center, which killed brokers, accountants, and other
civilians.
Though terrorists hope for the best, their small-scale violence almost never
gets them what they want. Separate surveys by the political scientists Max
Abrahms, Audrey Cronin, and Virginia Page Fortna of hundreds of terrorist
movements active since the 1960s show that they all were extinguished or faded
away without attaining their strategic goals.17
Indeed, the rise of terrorism in public awareness is not a sign of how
dangerous the world has become but the opposite. The political scientist Robert
Jervis observes that the placement of terrorism at the top of the list of threats “in
part stems from a security environment that is remarkably benign.”18 It is not
only interstate war that has become rare; so has the use of political violence in
the domestic arena. Harari points out that in the Middle Ages, every sector of
society retained a private militia—aristocrats, guilds, towns, even churches and
monasteries—and they secured their interests by force: “If in 1150 a few Muslim
extremists had murdered a handful of civilians in Jerusalem, demanding that the
Crusaders leave the Holy Land, the reaction would have been ridicule rather than
terror. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you should have at least gained
control of a fortified castle or two.” As modern states have successfully claimed
a monopoly on force, driving down the rate of killing within their borders, they
opened a niche for terrorism:
The state has stressed so many times that it will not tolerate political
violence within its borders that it has no alternative but to see any act of
terrorism as intolerable. The citizens, for their part, have become used to
zero political violence, so the theatre of terror incites in them visceral fears
of anarchy, making them feel as if the social order is about to collapse.
After centuries of bloody struggles, we have crawled out of the black hole
of violence, but we feel that the black hole is still there, patiently waiting

to swallow us again. A few gruesome atrocities and we imagine that we
are falling back in.19
As states try to carry out the impossible mandate of protecting their citizens
from all political violence everywhere and all the time, they are tempted to
respond with theater of their own. The most damaging effect of terrorism is
countries’ overreaction to it, the case in point being the American-led invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11.
Instead, countries could deal with terrorism by deploying their greatest
advantage: knowledge and analysis, not least knowledge of the numbers. The
uppermost goal should be to make sure the numbers stay small by securing
weapons of mass destruction (chapter 19). Ideologies that justify violence
against innocents, such as militant religions, nationalism, and Marxism, can be
countered with better systems of value and belief (chapter 23). The media can
examine their essential role in the show business of terrorism by calibrating their
coverage to the objective dangers and giving more thought to the perverse
incentives they have set up. (Lankford, together with the sociologist Erik Madfis,
has recommended a policy for rampage shootings of “Don’t Name Them, Don’t
Show Them, but Report Everything Else,” based on a policy for juvenile
shooters already in effect in Canada and on other strategies of calculated media
self-restraint.)20 Governments can step up their intelligence and clandestine
actions against networks of terrorism and their financial tributaries. And people
could be encouraged to keep calm and carry on, as the British wartime poster
famously urged during a time of much greater peril.
Over the long run, terrorist movements sputter out as their small-scale
violence fails to achieve their strategic goals, even as it causes local misery and
fear.21 It happened to the anarchist movements at the turn of the 20th century
(after many bombings and assassinations), it happened to the Marxist and
secessionist groups in the second half of the 20th century, and it will almost
certainly happen to ISIS in the 21st. We may never drive the already low
numbers of terrorist casualties to zero, but we can remember that terror about
terrorism is a sign not of how dangerous our society has become, but of how
safe.

CHAPTER 14
DEMOCRACY
S ince the first governments appeared around five thousand years ago,
humanity has tried to steer a course between the violence of anarchy and
the violence of tyranny. In the absence of a government or powerful
neighbors, tribal peoples tend to fall into cycles of raiding and feuding, with
death rates exceeding those of modern societies, even including their most
violent eras.1 Early governments pacified the people they ruled, reducing
internecine violence, but imposed a reign of terror that included slavery, harems,
human sacrifice, summary executions, and the torture and mutilation of
dissidents and deviants.2 (The Bible has no shortage of examples.) Despotism
has persisted through history not just because being a despot is nice work if you
can get it, but because from the people’s standpoint the alternative was often
worse. Matthew White, who calls himself a necrometrician, has estimated the
death tolls of the hundred bloodiest episodes in 2,500 years of human history.
After looking for patterns in the list, he reported this one as his first:
Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the
breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority. In
comparison to a handful of dictators such as Idi Amin and Saddam
Hussein who exercised their absolute power to kill hundreds of thousands,
I found more and deadlier upheavals like the Time of Troubles [in 17th-
century Russia], the Chinese Civil War [1926–37, 1945–49], and the
Mexican Revolution [1910–20] where no one exercised enough control to
stop the death of millions.3
One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle,
exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without

preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to
pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in
freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny. For that reason alone,
democracy is a major contributor to human flourishing. But it’s not the only
reason: democracies also have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and
genocides, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually no famines.4 If
the world has become more democratic over time, that is progress.
In fact the world has become more democratic, though not in a steadily rising
tide. The political scientist Samuel Huntington organized the history of
democratization into three waves.5 The first swelled in the 19th century, when
that great Enlightenment experiment, American constitutional democracy with
its checks on government power, seemed to be working. The experiment, with
local variations, was emulated by a number of countries, mainly in Western
Europe, cresting at twenty-nine in 1922. The first wave was pushed back by the
rise of fascism, and by 1942 had ebbed to just twelve countries. With the defeat
of fascism in World War II, a second wave gathered force as colonies gained
independence from their European overlords, pushing the number of recognized
democracies up to thirty-six by 1962. Still, European democracies were
sandwiched between Soviet-dominated dictatorships to the east and fascist
dictatorships in Portugal and Spain to the southwest. And the second wave was
soon pushed back by military juntas in Greece and Latin America, authoritarian
regimes in Asia, and Communist takeovers in Africa, the Middle East, and
Southeast Asia.6 By the mid-1970s the prospects for democracy looked bleak.
The West German chancellor Willy Brandt lamented that “Western Europe has
only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide,
engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship.” The
American senator and social scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan agreed, writing
that “liberal democracy on the American model increasingly tends to the
condition of monarchy in the 19th century: a holdover form of government, one
which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there, and may even serve
well enough for special circumstances, but which has simply no relevance to the
future. It is where the world was, not where it is going.”7
Before the ink was dry on these lamentations, democratization’s third wave—
more like a tsunami—erupted. Military and fascist governments fell in southern
Europe (Greece in 1974, Spain in 1975, Portugal in 1976), Latin America
(including Argentina in 1983, Brazil in 1985, and Chile in 1990), and Asia
(including Taiwan and the Philippines around 1986, South Korea around 1987,

and Indonesia in 1998). The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, freeing the
nations of Eastern Europe to establish democratic governments, and communism
imploded in the Soviet Union in 1991, clearing space for Russia and most of the
other republics to make the transition. Some African countries threw off their
strongmen, and the last European colonies to gain independence, mostly in the
Caribbean and Oceania, opted for democracy as their first form of government.
In 1989 the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a famous essay in
which he proposed that liberal democracy represented “the end of history,” not
because nothing would ever happen again but because the world was coming to
a consensus over the humanly best form of governance and no longer had to
fight over it.8
Fukuyama coined a runaway meme: in the decades since his essay appeared,
books and articles have announced “the end of” nature, science, faith, poverty,
reason, money, men, lawyers, illness, the free market, and sex. But Fukuyama
also became a punching bag as editorialists, commenting on the latest bit of bad
news, gleefully announced “the return of history” and the rise of alternatives to
democracy such as theocracy in the Muslim world and authoritarian capitalism
in China. Democracies themselves appeared to be backsliding into
authoritarianism with populist victories in Poland and Hungary and power grabs
by Recep Erdogan in Turkey and Vladimir Putin in Russia (the return of the
sultan and the czar). Historical pessimists, with their customary schadenfreude,
announced that the third wave of democratization had given way to an
“undertow,” “recession,” “erosion,” “rollback,” or “meltdown.”9
Democratization, they said, was a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes
onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of
humanity just fine.
Could recent history really imply that people are happy to be brutalized by
their governments? The very idea is doubtful for two reasons. Most obviously, in
a country that is not democratic, how could you tell? The pent-up demand for
democracy might be enormous, but no one dares express it lest they be jailed or
shot. The other is the headline fallacy: crackdowns make the news more often
than liberalizations, and the Availability bias could make us forget about all the
boring countries that become democratic bit by bit.
As always, the only way to know which way the world is going is to quantify.
This raises the question of what counts as a “democracy,” a word that has
developed such an aura of goodness as to have become almost meaningless. A
good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word “democratic” in its

official name, like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North
Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn’t one.
Nor is it helpful to ask the citizens of undemocratic states what they think the
word means: almost half think it means “The army takes over when the
government is incompetent” or “Religious leaders ultimately interpret the
laws.”10 Ratings by experts have a related problem when their checklists
embrace a hodgepodge of good things such as “freedom from socioeconomic
inequalities” and “freedom from war.”11 Yet another complication is that
countries vary continuously in the different components of democracy such as
freedom of speech, the openness of the political process, and the constraints on
its leaders’ power, so any tally that dichotomizes nations into “democracies” and
“autocracies” will fluctuate from year to year depending on arbitrary choices
about where to place the countries that hover near the boundary (a problem
exacerbated when the raters’ standards rise over time, a phenomenon we will
return to).12 The Polity Project deals with these obstacles by using a fixed set of
criteria to assign a score between –10 and 10 to every country in every year
indicating how autocratic or democratic it is, focusing on citizens’ ability to
express political preferences, constraints on the power of the executive, and a
guarantee of civil liberties.13 The sum for the world since 1800, spanning the
three waves of democratization, is shown in figure 14-1.

Figure 14-1: Democracy versus autocracy, 1800–2015
Source: HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/f1/2560, based on Polity IV Annual Time-Series, 1800–
2015, Marshall, Gurr, & Jaggers 2016. Scores are summed over sovereign states with a population greater
than 500,000, and range from –10 for a complete autocracy to 10 for a perfect democracy. The arrow points
to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 5–23 of Pinker 2011.
The graph shows that the third wave of democratization is far from over, let
alone ebbing, even if it has not continued to surge at the rate of the years
surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that time, the world had 52
democracies (defined by the Polity Project as countries with a score of 6 or
higher on their scale), up from 31 in 1971. After swelling in the 1990s, this third
wave spilled into the 21st century in a rainbow of “color revolutions” including
Croatia (2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan
(2005), bringing the total at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009 to 87.14
Belying the image of a rollback or meltdown under his watch, the number
continued to grow. As of 2015, the most recent year in the dataset, the total stood
at 103. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded that year to a coalition of
organizations in Tunisia that solidified a transition to democracy, a success story
from the Arab Spring of 2011. It also saw transitions to democracy in Myanmar
and Burkina Faso, and positive movements in five other countries, including
Nigeria and Sri Lanka. The world’s 103 democracies in 2015 embraced 56
percent of the world’s population, and if we add the 17 countries that were more
democratic than autocratic, we get a total of two-thirds of the world’s population
living in free or relatively free societies, compared with less than two-fifths in
1950, a fifth in 1900, seven percent in 1850, and one percent in 1816. Of the
people living in the 60 nondemocratic countries today (20 full autocracies, 40
more autocratic than democratic), four-fifths reside in a single country, China.15
Though history has not ended, Fukuyama had a point: democracy has proved
to be more attractive than its eulogizers acknowledge.16 After the first wave of
democratization broke, there were theories “explaining” how democracy could
never take root in Catholic, non-Western, Asian, Muslim, poor, or ethnically
diverse countries, each refuted in turn. It is true that stable, top-shelf democracy
is likelier to be found in countries that are richer and more highly educated.17 But
governments that are more democratic than not are a motley collection: they are
entrenched in most of Latin America, in floridly multiethnic India, in Muslim
Malaysia, Indonesia, Niger, and Kosovo, in fourteen countries in sub-Saharan
Africa (including Namibia, Senegal, and Benin), and in poor countries elsewhere
such as Nepal, Timor-Leste, and most of the Caribbean.18

Even the autocracies of Russia and China, which show few signs of
liberalizing, are incomparably less repressive than the regimes of Stalin,
Brezhnev, and Mao.19 Johan Norberg summarizes life in China: “The Chinese
people today can move almost however they like, buy a home, choose an
education, pick a job, start a business, belong to a church (as long as they are
Buddhists, Taoist, Muslims, Catholics or Protestants), dress as they like, marry
whom they like, be openly gay without ending up in a labor camp, travel abroad
freely, and even criticize aspects of the Party’s policy (though not its right to rule
unopposed). Even ‘not free’ is not what it used to be.”20
Why has the tide of democratization repeatedly exceeded expectations? The

various backslidings, reversals, and black holes for democracy have led to
theories which posit onerous prerequisites and an agonizing ordeal of
democratization. (This serves as a convenient pretext for dictators to insist that
their countries are not ready for it, like the revolutionary leader in Woody
Allen’s Bananas who upon taking power announces, “These people are peasants.
They are too ignorant to vote.”) The awe is reinforced by a civics-class
idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the
common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference.
By that standard, the number of democracies in the world is zero in the past,
zero in the present, and almost certainly zero in the future. Political scientists are
repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political
beliefs, and by the tenuous connection of their preferences to their votes and to
the behavior of their representatives.21 Most voters are ignorant not just of
current policy options but of basic facts, such as what the major branches of
government are, who the United States fought in World War II, and which
countries have used nuclear weapons. Their opinions flip depending on how a
question is worded: they say that the government spends too much on “welfare”
but too little on “assistance to the poor,” and that it should “use military force”
but not “go to war.” When they do formulate a preference, they commonly vote
for a candidate with the opposite one. But it hardly matters, because once in
office politicians vote the positions of their party regardless of the opinions of
their constituents.
Nor does voting even provide much of a feedback signal about a
government’s performance. Voters punish incumbents for recent events over
which they have dubious control, such as macroeconomic swings and terrorist

strikes, or no control at all, such as droughts, floods, even shark attacks. Many
political scientists have concluded that most people correctly recognize that their
votes are astronomically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, and so
they prioritize work, family, and leisure over educating themselves about politics
and calibrating their votes. They use the franchise as a form of self-expression:
they vote for candidates who they think are like them and stand for their kind of
people.
So despite the widespread belief that elections are the quintessence of
democracy, they are only one of the mechanisms by which a government is held
responsible to those it governs, and not always a constructive one. When an
election is a contest between aspiring despots, rival factions fear the worst if the
other side wins and try to intimidate each other from the ballot box. Also,
autocrats can learn to use elections to their advantage. The latest fashion in
dictatorship has been called the competitive, electoral, kleptocratic, statist, or
patronal authoritarian regime.22 (Putin’s Russia is the prototype.) The incumbents
use the formidable resources of the state to harass the opposition, set up fake
opposition parties, use state-controlled media to spread congenial narratives,
manipulate electoral rules, tilt voter registration, and jigger the elections
themselves. (Patronal authoritarians, for all that, are not invulnerable—the color
revolutions sent several of them packing.)
If neither voters nor elected leaders can be counted on to uphold the ideals of
democracy, why should this form of government work so not-badly—the worst
form of government except all the others that have been tried, as Churchill
famously put it? In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, the
philosopher Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the
answer to the question “Who should rule?” (namely, “The People”), but as a
solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.23
The political scientist John Mueller broadens the idea from a binary Judgment
Day to continuous day-to-day feedback. Democracy, he suggests, is essentially
based on giving people the freedom to complain: “It comes about when the
people effectively agree not to use violence to replace the leadership, and the
leadership leaves them free to try to dislodge it by any other means.”24 He
explains how this can work:
If citizens have the right to complain, to petition, to organize, to protest, to

demonstrate, to strike, to threaten to emigrate or secede, to shout, to
publish, to export their funds, to express a lack of confidence, and to

wheedle in back corridors, government will tend to respond to the sounds
of the shouters and the importunings of the wheedlers: that is, it will
necessarily become responsive—pay attention—whether there are
elections or not.25
Women’s suffrage is an example: by definition, they could not vote to grant

themselves the vote, but they got it by other means.
The contrast between the messy reality of democracy and the civics-class
ideal leads to perennial disillusionment. John Kenneth Galbraith once advised
that if you ever want a lucrative book contract, just propose to write The Crisis
of American Democracy. Reviewing the history, Mueller concludes that
“inequality, disagreement, apathy, and ignorance seem to be normal, not
abnormal, in a democracy, and to a considerable degree the beauty of the form is
that it works despite these qualities—or, in some important respects, because of
them.”26
In this minimalist conception, democracy is not a particularly abstruse or
demanding form of government. Its main prerequisite is that a government be
competent enough to protect people from anarchic violence so they don’t fall
prey to, or even welcome, the first strongman who promises he can do the job.
(Chaos is deadlier than tyranny.) That’s one reason why democracy has trouble
getting a toehold in extremely poor countries with weak governments, such as in
sub-Saharan Africa, and in countries whose government has been decapitated,
such as Afghanistan and Iraq following the American-led invasions. As the
political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “State failure
brings violence and instability; it almost never brings democratization.”27
Ideas matter, too. For democracy to take root, influential people (particularly
people with guns) have to think that it is better than alternatives such as
theocracy, the divine right of kings, colonial paternalism, the dictatorship of the
proletariat (in practice, its “revolutionary vanguard”), or authoritarian rule by a
charismatic leader who directly embodies the will of the people. This helps
explain other patterns in the annals of democratization, such as why democracy
is less likely to take root in countries with less education, in countries that are
remote from Western influence (such as in Central Asia), and in countries whose
regimes were born of violent, ideologically driven revolutions (such as China,
Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Vietnam).28 Conversely, as people recognize that
democracies are relatively nice places to live, the idea of democracy can become
contagious and the number can increase over time.

The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won’t
punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is
constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its
uppity citizens.
A series of international agreements beginning with the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 drew red lines around thuggish
governmental tactics, particularly torture, extrajudicial killings, the
imprisonment of dissidents, and the ugly transitive verb coined during the
Argentinian military regime of 1974–84, to disappear someone. These red lines
are not the same as electoral democracy, since a majority of voters may be
indifferent to government brutality as long as it isn’t directed at them. In
practice, democratic countries do show greater respect for human rights.29 But
the world also has some benevolent autocracies, like Singapore, and some
repressive democracies, like Pakistan. This leads to a key question about
whether the waves of democratization are really a form of progress. Has the rise
in democracy brought a rise in human rights, or are dictators just using elections
and other democratic trappings to cover their abuses with a smiley-face?
The US State Department, Amnesty International, and other organizations
have monitored violations of human rights over the decades. If one were to look
at their numbers since the 1970s, it would appear that governments are as
repressive as ever—despite the spread of democracy, human rights norms,
international criminal courts, and the watchdog organizations themselves. This
has led to pronouncements (delivered with alarm by rights activists and with glee
by cultural pessimists) that we have reached “the endtimes of human rights,”
“the twilight of human rights law,” and, of course, “the post–human rights
world.”30
But progress has a way of covering its tracks. As our moral standards rise
over the years, we become alert to harms that would have gone unnoticed in the
past. Moreover, activist organizations feel they must always cry “crisis” to keep
the heat up (though the strategy can backfire, implying that decades of activism
have been a waste of time). The political scientist Kathryn Sikkink calls this the
information paradox: as human rights watchdogs admirably look harder for
abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse, they find
more of it—but if we don’t compensate for their keener powers of detection, we
can be misled into thinking that there is more abuse to detect.31

The political scientist Christopher Fariss has cut this knot with a
mathematical model that compensates for more dogged reporting over time and
estimates the actual amount of human rights abuse in the world. Figure 14-2
shows his scores for four countries from 1949 to 2014 and for the world as a
whole. The graph displays numbers spat out by a mathematical model, so we
should not take the exact values too seriously, but they do indicate differences
and trends. The top line is for a country that represents a gold standard for
human rights. As with most measures of human flourishing, it is Scandinavian,
in this case Norway, and it started high and has grown higher. We see diverging
lines for the two Koreas: North, which started low and sank even lower, and
South, which rose from a right-wing autocracy during the Cold War into positive
territory today. In China, human rights hit bottom during the Cultural
Revolution, shot up after the death of Mao, and crested during the 1980s
democracy movement before the government cracked down after the Tiananmen
Square protests, though they are still well above the Maoist-era lowlands. But
the most significant curve is the one for the world as a whole: for all its setbacks,
the arc of human rights bends upward.
Figure 14-2: Human rights, 1949–2014

Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016i, graphing an index devised by Fariss 2014, which estimates
protection from torture, extrajudicial killing, political imprisonment, and disappearances. “0” is the mean

over all countries and years; the units are standard deviations.
How does the curtailment of government power unfold in real time? An

unusually clear window into the machinery of human progress is the fate of the
ultimate exercise of violence by the state: deliberately killing its citizens.
Capital punishment was once ubiquitous among countries, and it was applied
to hundreds of misdemeanors in gruesome public spectacles of torture and
humiliation.32 (The crucifixion of Jesus together with two common thieves is as
good a reminder as any.) After the Enlightenment, European countries stopped
executing people for any but the most heinous crimes: by the middle of the 19th
century, Britain had reduced the number of capital offenses from 222 to 4. And
the countries looked for methods of execution such as drop hanging that were as
humane as such a gruesome practice could pretend to be. After World War II,
when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights inaugurated a second
humanitarian revolution, capital punishment was abolished altogether in country
after country, and in Europe today it lingers only in Belarus.
The abolition of capital punishment has gone global (figure 14-3), and today
the death penalty is on death row.33 In the last three decades, two or three
countries have abolished it every year, and less than a fifth of the world’s nations
continue to execute people. (While ninety countries retain capital punishment in
their law books, most have not put anyone to death in at least a decade.) The UN
Special Rapporteur on executions, Christopher Heyns, points out that if the
current rate of abolition continues (not that he’s prophesying it will), capital
punishment will vanish from the face of the earth by 2026.34

Figure 14-3: Death penalty abolitions, 1863–2016
Source: “Capital Punishment by Country: Abolition Chronology,” Wikipedia, retrieved Aug. 15, 2016.
Several European countries abolished the death penalty in their mainland earlier than indicated here, but the
time line records the last abolition in any territory under their jurisdiction. The arrow points to 2008, the last
year plotted in fig. 4–3 of Pinker 2011.
The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an
unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia, and the United States. As in other areas of human flourishing
(such as crime, war, health, longevity, accidents, and education), the United
States is a laggard among wealthy democracies. This American exceptionalism
illuminates the tortuous path by which moral progress proceeds from
philosophical arguments to facts on the ground. It also showcases the tension
between the two conceptions of democracy we have been examining: a form of
government whose power to inflict violence on its citizens is sharply
circumscribed, and a form of government that carries out the will of the majority
of its people. The reason the United States is a death-penalty outlier is that it is,
in one sense, too democratic.
In his history of the abolition of capital punishment in Europe, the legal
scholar Andrew Hammel points out that in most times and places the death
penalty strikes people as perfectly just: if you take a life, you deserve to lose

your own.35 It was only with the Enlightenment that forceful arguments against
the death penalty began to appear.36 One argument was that the state’s mandate
to exercise violence may not breach the sacred zone of human life. Another was
that the deterrent effect of capital punishment can be achieved with surer and
less brutal penalties.
The ideas trickled down from a thin stratum of philosophers and intellectuals
to the educated upper classes, particularly liberal professionals like doctors,
lawyers, writers, and journalists. Abolition was soon folded into a portfolio of
other progressive causes, including mandatory education, universal suffrage, and
workers’ rights. It was also sacralized under the halo of “human rights” and held
out as a symbol of “the kind of society we choose to live in and the kind of
people we choose to be.” The abolitionist elites in Europe got their way over the
misgivings of the common man because European democracies did not convert
the opinions of the common man into policy. The penal codes of their countries
were drafted by committees of renowned scholars, passed into law by legislators
who thought of themselves as a natural aristocracy, and implemented by
appointed judges who were lifelong civil servants. It was only after a couple of
decades had elapsed and people saw that their country had not fallen into chaos
—at which point it would have taken a concerted effort to reintroduce capital
punishment—that the populace came around to seeing it as unnecessary.
But the United States, for better or worse, is closer to having government by
the people for the people. Other than for a few federal crimes like terrorism and
treason, the death penalty is decided upon by individual states, voted on by
legislators who are close to their constituents, and in many states sought and
approved by prosecutors and judges who have to stand for reelection. Southern
states have a longstanding culture of honor, with its ethos of justified retaliation,
and not surprisingly, American executions are concentrated in a handful of
Southern states, mainly Texas, Georgia, and Missouri—indeed, in a handful of
counties in those states.37
Yet the United States, too, has been swept by the historical current, and
capital punishment is on the way out despite its continuing popular appeal (with
61 percent in favor in 2015).38 Seven states have repealed the death penalty in
the past decade, an additional sixteen have moratoria, and thirty have not
executed anyone in five years. Even Texas executed only seven prisoners in
2016, compared with forty in 2000. Figure 14-4 shows the steady decline of the
use of the death penalty in the United States, with what may be a final slide to
zero visible in the rightmost segment. And true to the pattern in Europe, as the

practice becomes obsolescent, public opinion straggles behind: in 2016, popular
support for the death penalty slipped just below 50 percent for the first time in
almost fifty years.39
Figure 14-4: Executions, US, 1780–2016

Sources: Death Penalty Information Center 2017. Population estimates from US Census Bureau 2017. The
arrow points to 2010, the last year plotted in fig. 4–4 of Pinker 2011.
How can the United States be doing away with capital punishment almost
despite itself? Here we see another path along which moral progress can take
place. Though the American political system is more populist than those of its
Western peers, it still falls short of being a direct participatory democracy like
ancient Athens (which, pointedly, put Socrates to death). With the historical
expansion of sympathy and reason, even the staunchest fans of capital
punishment have lost their stomach for lynch mobs, hanging judges, and rowdy
public executions, and insist that the practice be carried out with a modicum of
dignity and care. That requires an intricate apparatus of death and a team of
mechanics to run and repair it. As the machine wears out and the mechanics
refuse to maintain it, it becomes increasingly unwieldy and invites being

scrapped.40 The American death penalty is not so much being abolished as
falling apart, piece by piece.
First, advances in forensic science, particularly DNA fingerprinting, have
shown that innocent people have almost certainly been put to death, a scenario
that unnerves even ardent supporters of the death penalty. Second, the grisly
business of snuffing out a life has evolved from the gory sadism of crucifixion
and disembowelment, to the quick but still graphic ropes, bullets, and blades, to
the invisible agents of gas and electricity, to the pseudo-medical procedure of
lethal injection. But doctors refuse to administer it, pharmaceutical companies
refuse to supply the drugs, and witnesses are disturbed by the death throes during
botched attempts. Third, the chief alternative to the death penalty, life in prison,
has become more reliable as escape-proof and riot-proof penitentiaries have been
perfected. Fourth, as the rate of violent crime has plummeted (chapter 12),
people feel less need for draconian remedies. Fifth, because the death penalty is
seen as such a momentous undertaking, the summary executions of earlier eras
have given way to a drawn-out legal ordeal. The sentencing phase after a guilty
verdict is tantamount to a second trial, and a death sentence triggers a lengthy
process of reviews and appeals—so lengthy that most death-row prisoners die of
natural causes. Meanwhile, the billable hours from expensive lawyers cost the
state eight times as much as life in prison. Sixth, social disparities in death
sentences, with poor and black defendants disproportionately being put to death
(“Those without the capital get the punishment”), have weighed increasingly on
the nation’s conscience. Finally, the Supreme Court, which is repeatedly tasked
with formulating a consistent rationale for this crazy quilt, has struggled to
rationalize the practice, and has chipped away at it piece by piece. In recent
years it has ruled that states may not execute juveniles, people with intellectual
disabilities, or perpetrators of crimes other than murder, and it came close to
ruling against the hit-and-miss method of lethal injection. Court watchers believe
it is only a matter of time before the Justices are forced to confront the caprice of
the whole macabre practice head on, invoke “evolving standards of decency,”
and strike it down as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel
and unusual punishment once and for all.
The uncanny assemblage of scientific, institutional, legal, and social forces
all pushing to strip government of its power to kill makes it seem as if there
really is a mysterious arc bending toward justice. More prosaically, we are
seeing a moral principle—Life is sacred, so killing is onerous—become
distributed across a wide range of actors and institutions that have to cooperate

to make the death penalty possible. As these actors and institutions implement
the principle more consistently and thoroughly, they inexorably push the country
away from the impulse to avenge a life with a life. The pathways are manifold
and tortuous, the effects are slow and then sudden, but in the fullness of time an
idea from the Enlightenment can transform the world.

CHAPTER 15
EQUAL RIGHTS
H umans are liable to treat entire categories of other humans as means to

an end or nuisances to be cast aside. Coalitions bound by race or creed
seek to dominate rival coalitions. Men try to control the labor, freedom,
and sexuality of women.1 People translate their discomfort with sexual
nonconformity into moralistic condemnation.2 We call these phenomena racism,
sexism, and homophobia, and they have been rampant, to varying degrees, in
most cultures throughout history. The disavowal of these evils is a large part of
what we call civil rights or equal rights. The historical expansion of these rights
—the stories of Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall—is a stirring chapter in the
story of human progress.3
The rights of racial minorities, women, and gay people continue to advance,
each recently emblazoned on a milestone. The year 2017 saw the completion of
two terms in office by the first African American president, an achievement
movingly captured by First Lady Michelle Obama in a speech at the Democratic
National Convention in 2016: “I wake up every morning in a house that was
built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young
women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.” Barack Obama was
succeeded by the first woman nominee of a major party in a presidential
election, less than a century after American women were even allowed to vote;
she won a solid plurality of the popular vote and would have been president were
it not for peculiarities of the Electoral College system and other quirks of that
election year. In a parallel universe very similar to this one until November 8,
2016, the world’s three most influential nations (the United States, the United
Kingdom, and Germany) are all led by women.4 And in 2015, just a dozen years
after it ruled that homosexual activity may not be criminalized, the Supreme
Court guaranteed the right of marriage to same-sex couples.

But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions
fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come. An axiom of
progressive opinion, especially in universities, is that we continue to live in a
deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society—which would imply that
progressivism is a waste of time, having accomplished nothing after decades of
struggle.
Like other forms of progressophobia, the denial of advances in rights has
been abetted by sensational headlines. A string of highly publicized killings by
American police officers of unarmed African American suspects, some of them
caught on smartphone videos, has led to a sense that the country is suffering an
epidemic of racist attacks by police on black men. Media coverage of athletes
who have assaulted their wives or girlfriends, and of episodes of rape on college
campuses, has suggested to many that we are undergoing a surge of violence
against women. And one of the most heinous crimes in American history took
place in 2016 when Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando,
killing forty-nine people and wounding another fifty-three.
The belief in an absence of progress has been fortified by the recent history
of the universe we do live in, where Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton
was the beneficiary of the American electoral system in 2016. During his
campaign, Trump uttered misogynistic, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Muslim insults
that were well outside the norms of American political discourse, and the rowdy
followers he encouraged at his rallies were even more offensive. Some
commentators worried that his victory represented a turning point in the nation’s
progress toward equality and rights, or that it uncovered the ugly truth that we
had never made progress in the first place.
The goal of this chapter is to plumb the depths of the current that carries
equal rights along. Is it an illusion, a turbulent whirlpool atop a stagnant pond?
Does it easily change direction and flow backwards? Or does justice roll on like
a river, righteousness like a mighty stream?5 I’ll end with a coda about progress
in the rights of the most easily victimized sector of humanity, children.
By now you should be skeptical about reading history from the headlines, and
that applies to the recent assaults on equal rights. The data suggest that the
number of police shootings has decreased, not increased, in recent decades (even
as the ones that do occur are captured on video), and three independent analyses
have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be

killed by the police.6 (American police shoot too many people, but it’s not
primarily a racial issue.) A spate of news about rape cannot tell us whether there
is now more violence against women, a bad thing, or whether we now care more
about violence against women, a good thing. And to this day it is unclear
whether the Orlando nightclub massacre was committed out of homophobia,
sympathy for ISIS, or the drive for posthumous notoriety that motivates most
rampage shooters.
Better first drafts of history can be gleaned from data on values and from
vital statistics. The Pew Research Center has probed Americans’ opinions on
race, gender, and sexual orientation over the past quarter century, and has
reported that these attitudes have undergone a “fundamental shift” toward
tolerance and respect of rights, with formerly widespread prejudices sinking into
oblivion.7 The shift is visible in figure 15-1, which plots reactions to three survey
statements that are representative of many others.
Figure 15-1: Racist, sexist, and homophobic opinions, US, 1987–2012

Source: Pew Research Center 2012b. The arrows point to the most recent years plotted in Pinker 2011 for
similar questions: Blacks, 1997 (fig. 7–7); Women, 1995 (fig. 7–11); Homosexuals, 2009 (fig. 7–24).

Other surveys show the same shifts.8 Not only has the American population
become more liberal, but each generational cohort is more liberal than the one
born before it.9 As we will see, people tend to carry their values with them as
they age, so the Millennials (those born after 1980), who are even less
prejudiced than the national average, tell us which way the country is going.10
Of course one can wonder whether figure 15-1 displays a decline in prejudice
or simply a decline in the social acceptability of prejudice, with fewer people
willing to confess their disreputable attitudes to a pollster. The problem has long
haunted social scientists, but recently the economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
has discovered an indicator of attitudes that is the closest we’ve come to a digital
truth serum.11 In the privacy of their keyboards and screens, people query
Google with every curiosity, anxiety, and guilty pleasure you can imagine,
together with many you can’t imagine. (Common searches include “How to
make my penis bigger” and “My vagina smells like fish.”) Google has amassed
big data on the strings that people search for in different months and regions
(though not the identity of the searchers), together with tools for analyzing them.
Stephens-Davidowitz discovered that searches for the word nigger (mostly in
pursuit of racist jokes) correlate with other indicators of racial prejudice across
regions, such as vote totals for Barack Obama in 2008 that were lower than
expected for a Democrat.12 He suggests that these searches can serve as an
unobtrusive indicator of private racism.
Let’s use them to track recent trends in racism, and while we’re at it, private
sexism and homophobia as well. Well into my adolescence, jokes featuring
dumb Poles, ditzy dames, and lisping, limp-wristed homosexuals were common
in network television and newspaper comics. Today they are taboo in
mainstream media. But do bigoted jokes remain a private indulgence, or have
private attitudes changed so much that people feel offended, sullied, or bored by
them? Figure 15-2 shows the results. The curves suggest that Americans are not
just more abashed about confessing to prejudice than they used to be; they
privately don’t find it as amusing.13 And contrary to the fear that the rise of
Trump reflects (or emboldens) prejudice, the curves continue their decline
through his period of notoriety in 2015–2016 and inauguration in early 2017.
Stephens-Davidowitz has pointed out to me that these curves probably
underestimate the decline in prejudice because of a shift in who’s Googling.
When the records began in 2004, Googlers were mostly young and urban. Older
and rural people tend to be latecomers to technology, and if they are the ones
who are likelier to search for the offensive terms, that would inflate the

proportion in later years and conceal the extent of the decline in bigotry. Google
doesn’t record the searchers’ ages or levels of education, but it does record where
the searches come from. In response to my query, Stephens-Davidowitz
confirmed that bigoted searches tended to come from regions with older and
less-educated populations. Compared with the country as a whole, retirement
communities are seven times as likely to search for “nigger jokes” and thirty
times as likely to search for “fag jokes.” (“Google AdWords,” he told me
apologetically, “doesn’t give data on ‘bitch jokes.’”) Stephens-Davidowitz also
got his hands on a trove of search data from AOL, which, unlike Google, tracks
the searches made by individuals (though not, of course, their identities). These
threads confirmed that racists may be a dwindling breed: someone who searches
for “nigger” is likely to search for other topics that appeal to senior citizens, such
as “social security” and “Frank Sinatra.” The main exception was a sliver of
teenagers who also searched for bestiality, decapitation videos, and child
pornography—anything you’re not supposed to search for. But aside from these
transgressive youths (and there have always been transgressive youths), private
prejudice is declining with time and declining with youth, which means that we
can expect it to decline still further as aging bigots cede the stage to less
prejudiced cohorts.

Figure 15-2: Racist, sexist, and homophobic Web searches, US, 2004–2017
Source: Google Trends (www.google.com/trends), searches for “nigger jokes,” “bitch jokes,” and “fag
jokes,” United States, 2004–2017, relative to total search volume. Data (accessed Jan. 22, 2017) are by
month, expressed as a percentage of the peak month for each search term, then averaged over the months of
each year, and smoothed.
Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men) may
not respect the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have
become second nature to the mainstream, and may even dismiss them as
“political correctness.” Today they can find each other on the Internet and
coalesce under a demagogue. As we will see in chapter 20, Trump’s success, like
that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as
the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized
political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement
toward equal rights.
Progress in equal rights may be seen not just in political milestones and opinion
bellwethers but in data on people’s lives. Among African Americans, the poverty
rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011.14 Life expectancy rose
from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less
than 3 years below whites).15 African Americans who make it to 65 have longer
lives ahead of them than white Americans of the same age. The rate of illiteracy
fell among African Americans from 45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero
percent today.16 As we will see in the next chapter, the racial gap in children’s
readiness for school has been shrinking. As we will see in chapter 18, so has the
racial gap in happiness.17
Racist violence against African Americans, once a regular occurrence in
night raids and lynchings (three a week at the turn of the 20th century),
plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen further since the FBI started
amalgamating reports on hate crimes in 1996, as figure 15-1 shows. (Very few of
these crimes are homicides, in most years one or zero.)18 The slight uptick in
2015 (the most recent year available) cannot be blamed on Trump, since it
parallels the uptick in violent crime that year (see figure 12-2), and hate crimes
track rates of overall lawlessness more closely than they do remarks by
politicians.19
Figure 15-3 shows that hate crimes against Asian, Jewish, and white targets
have declined as well. And despite claims that Islamophobia has become

rampant in America, hate crimes targeting Muslims have shown little change
other than a one-time rise following 9/11 and upticks following other Islamist
terror attacks, such as the ones in Paris and San Bernardino in 2015.20 At the
time of this writing, FBI data from 2016 are not available, so it’s premature to
accept the widespread claims of a Trumpist surge in hate crimes that year. The
claims come from advocacy organizations, whose funding depends on whipping
up fear, rather than disinterested recordkeepers; some of the incidents were
ironic hoaxes, and many were boorish outbursts rather than actual crimes.21
Aside from post-terrorist and crime-related blips, the trend in hate crimes is
downward.
Figure 15-3: Hate crimes, US, 1996–2015

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016b. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 7–4
of Pinker 2011.
Women’s status, too, is ascendant. As recently as my childhood, American

women in most states could not take out a loan or credit card in their own names,
had to look for jobs in the HELP WANTED—FEMALE section of the classified ads,
and could not press charges of rape against their husbands.22 Today, women
make up 47 percent of the labor force and a majority of university students.23

Violence against women is best measured by victimization surveys, because they
circumvent the problem of underreporting to the police; these instruments show
that rates of rape and violence against wives and girlfriends have been sinking
for decades and are now at a quarter or less of their peaks in the past (figure 15-
4).24 Too many of these crimes still take place, but we should be encouraged by
the fact that a heightened concern about violence against women is not futile
moralizing but has brought measurable progress—which means that continuing
this concern can lead to greater progress still.
No form of progress is inevitable, but the historical erosion of racism,
sexism, and homophobia are more than a change in fashion. As we will see, it
seems to be pushed along by the tide of modernity. In a cosmopolitan society,
people rub shoulders, do business, and find themselves in the same boat with
other kinds of people, and that tends to make them more sympathetic to one
another.25 Also, as people are forced to justify the way they treat other people,
rather than dominating them out of instinctive, religious, or historical inertia, any
justification for prejudicial treatment will crumble under scrutiny.26 Racial
segregation, male-only suffrage, and the criminalization of homosexuality are
literally indefensible: people tried to defend them in their times, and they lost the
argument.
Figure 15-4: Rape and domestic violence, US, 1993–2014

Sources: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, Victimization Analysis
Tool, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat, with additional data provided by Jennifer Truman of BJS. The
gray line represents “Intimate partner violence” with female victims. The arrows point to 2005, the last year
plotted in fig. 7–13, and 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 7–10, of Pinker 2011.
These forces can prevail over the long term even against the tug of populist
backlash. The global momentum toward abolition of the death penalty (chapter
14), despite its perennial popular appeal, offers a lesson in the messy ways of
progress. As indefensible or unworkable ideas fall by the wayside, they are
removed from the pool of thinkable options, even among those who like to think
that they think the unthinkable, and the political fringe is dragged forward
despite itself. That’s why even in the most regressive political movement in
recent American history there were no calls for reinstating Jim Crow laws,
ending women’s suffrage, or recriminalizing homosexuality.
Racial and ethnic prejudice is declining not just in the West but worldwide. In
1950, almost half the world’s countries had laws that discriminated against
ethnic or racial minorities (including, of course, the United States). By 2003
fewer than a fifth did, and they were outnumbered by countries with affirmative
action policies that favored disadvantaged minorities.27 A huge 2008 survey by
the World Public Opinion poll of twenty-one developed and developing nations
found that in every one, large majorities of respondents (around 90 percent on
average) say that it’s important for people of different races, ethnicities, and
religions to be treated equally.28 Notwithstanding the habitual self-flagellation by
Western intellectuals about Western racism, it’s non-Western countries that are
the least tolerant. But even in India, the country at the bottom of the list, 59
percent of the respondents affirmed racial equality, and 76 percent affirmed
religious equality.29
With women’s rights, too, the progress is global. In 1900, women could vote
in only one country, New Zealand. Today they can vote in every country in
which men can vote but one, Vatican City. Women make up almost 40 percent of
the labor force worldwide and more than a fifth of the members of national
parliaments. The World Opinion Poll and Pew Global Attitudes Project have
each found that more than 85 percent of their respondents believe in full equality
for men and women, with rates ranging from 60 percent in India, to 88 percent in
six Muslim-majority countries, to 98 percent in Mexico and the United
Kingdom.30

In 1993 the UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Elimination
of Violence Against Women. Since then most countries have implemented laws
and public-awareness campaigns to reduce rape, forced marriage, child marriage,
genital mutilation, honor killings, domestic violence, and wartime atrocities.
Though some of these measures are toothless, there are grounds for optimism
over the long term. Global shaming campaigns, even when they start out as
purely aspirational, have in the past led to dramatic reductions in slavery,
dueling, whaling, foot-binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare, apartheid,
and atmospheric nuclear testing.31 Female genital mutilation is an example:
though still practiced in twenty-nine African countries (together with Indonesia,
Iraq, India, Pakistan, and Yemen), a majority of both men and women in those
countries believe it should stop, and over the past thirty years rates have fallen
by a third.32 In 2016 the Pan-African Parliament, working with the UN
Population Fund, endorsed a ban on the practice, together with child marriage.33
Gay rights is another idea whose time has come. Homosexual acts used to be
a criminal offense in almost every country in the world.34 The first arguments
that behavior between consenting adults is no one else’s business were
formulated during the Enlightenment by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, and
Bentham. A smattering of countries decriminalized homosexuality soon
thereafter, and the number shot up with the gay rights revolution of the 1970s.
Though homosexuality is still a crime in more than seventy countries (and a
capital crime in eleven Islamic ones), and despite backsliding in Russia and
several African countries, the global trend, encouraged by the UN and every
human rights organization, continues toward liberalization.35 Figure 15-5 shows
the time line: in the past six years, an additional eight countries have stricken
homosexuality from their criminal codes.

Figure 15-5: Decriminalization of homosexuality, 1791–2016
Sources: Ottosson 2006, 2009. Dates for an additional sixteen countries were obtained from “LGBT Rights
by Country or Territory,” Wikipedia, retrieved July 31, 2016. Dates for an additional thirty-six countries that
currently allow homosexuality are not listed in either source. The arrow points to 2009, the last year plotted
in fig. 7–23 of Pinker 2011.
The worldwide progress against racism, sexism, and homophobia, even with its
bumpiness and setbacks, can feel like an overarching sweep. Martin Luther King
Jr. famously quoted the abolitionist Theodore Parker’s image of an arc bending
toward justice. Parker confessed that he could not complete the arc by sight but
could “divine it by conscience.” Is there a more objective way of determining
whether there is a historical arc toward justice, and if so, what bends it?
One view of the moral arc is provided by the World Values Survey, which has
polled 150,000 people in more than ninety-five countries containing almost 90
percent of the world’s population over a span of several decades. In his book
Freedom Rising, the political scientist Christian Welzel (building on a
collaboration with Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and others) has proposed that the
process of modernization has stimulated the rise of “emancipative values.”36 As
societies shift from agrarian to industrial to informational, their citizens become

less anxious about fending off enemies and other existential threats and more
eager to express their ideals and to pursue opportunities in life. This shifts their
values toward greater freedom for themselves and others. The transition is
consistent with the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of a hierarchy of
needs from survival and safety to belonging, esteem, and self-actualization (and
with Brecht’s “Grub first, then ethics”). People begin to prioritize freedom over
security, diversity over uniformity, autonomy over authority, creativity over
discipline, and individuality over conformity. Emancipative values may also be
called liberal values, in the classical sense related to “liberty” and “liberation”
(rather than the sense of political leftism).
Welzel derived a way to capture a commitment to emancipative values in a
single number, based on his discovery that the answers to a cluster of survey
items tend to correlate across people, countries, and regions of the world with a
common history and culture. The items embrace gender equality (whether
people feel that women should have an equal right to jobs, political leadership,
and a university education), personal choice (whether they feel that divorce,
homosexuality, and abortion may be justified), political voice (whether they
believe that people should be guaranteed freedom of speech and a say in
government, communities, and the workplace), and childrearing philosophy
(whether they feel that children should be encouraged to be obedient or
independent and imaginative). The correlations among these items are far from
perfect—abortion, in particular, divides people who agree on much else—but
they tend to go together and collectively predict many things about a country.
Before we look at historical changes in values, we have to keep in mind that
the passage of time doesn’t simply flip the pages of the calendar. As time goes
by, people get older, and eventually they die and are replaced by a new
generation. Any secular (in the sense of historical or long-term) change in
human behavior, then, can take place for three reasons.37 The trend can be a
Period Effect: a change in the times, the zeitgeist, or the national mood that lifts
or lowers all the boats. It can be an Age (or Life Cycle) Effect: people change as
they grow from mewling infant to whining schoolboy to sighing lover to round-
bellied justice, and so on. Since there are booms and busts in a nation’s birthrate,
the population average will automatically change with the changing proportion
of young, middle-aged, and old people, even if the prevailing values at each age
are the same. Finally, the trend can be a Cohort (or Generational) Effect: people
born at a certain time may be stamped with traits they carry through their lives,
and the average for the population will reflect the changing mixture of cohorts as

one generation exits the stage and another enters. It’s impossible to disentangle
the effects of age, period, and cohort perfectly, because as one period transitions
into the next, each cohort gets older. But by measuring a trait across a population
in several periods, and separating the data from the different cohorts in each one,
one can make reasonable inferences about the three kinds of change.
Let’s first look at the history of the most developed nations, such as those of
North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Figure 15-6 shows the trajectory of
emancipative values over a span of a century. It plots survey data collected from
adults (ranging in age from eighteen to eighty-five), at two periods (1980 and
2005), representing cohorts born between 1895 and 1980. (American cohorts are
commonly divided into the GI Generation, born between 1900 and 1924; the
Silent Generation, 1925–45; the Baby Boomers, 1946–64; Generation X, 1965–
79; and the Millennials, 1980–2000.) The cohorts are arranged along the
horizontal axis by birth year; each of the two testing years is plotted on a line.
(Data from 2011 to 2014, which extend the series to late Millennials born
through 1996, are similar to those of 2005.)
The graph displays a historical trend that is seldom appreciated in the hurly-
burly of political debate: for all the talk about right-wing backlashes and angry
white men, the values of Western countries have been getting steadily more
liberal (which, as we will see, is one of the reasons those men are so angry).38
The line for 2005 is higher than the line for 1980 (showing that everyone got
more liberal over time), and both curves rise from left to right (showing that
younger generations in both periods were more liberal than older generations).
The rises are substantial: about three-quarters of a standard deviation apiece for
the twenty-five years of passing time and for each twenty-five-year generation.
(The rises are also unappreciated: a 2016 Ipsos poll showed that in almost every
developed country, people think their compatriots are more socially conservative
than they really are.)39 A critical discovery displayed in the graph is that the
liberalization does not reflect a growing bulge of liberal young people who will
backslide into conservatism as they get older. If that were true, the two curves
would sit side by side instead of one floating above the other, and a vertical line
representing a given cohort would impale the 2005 curve at a lower value,
reflecting conservative old age, rather than the higher value we see, reflecting
the more liberal zeitgeist. Young people take their emancipative values with
them as they age, a finding we’ll return to when we ponder the future of progress
in chapter 20.40

Figure 15-6: Liberal values across time and generations, developed countries, 1980–2005
Source: Welzel 2013, fig. 4.1. World Values Survey data are from Australia, Canada, France, West
Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States (each
country weighted equally).
The liberalization trends shown in figure 15-6 come from the Prius-driving,
chai-sipping, kale-eating populations of post-industrial Western countries. What
about the rest of humanity? Welzel grouped the ninety-five countries in the
World Values Survey into ten zones with similar histories and cultures. He also
took advantage of the absence of a life-cycle effect to extrapolate emancipative
values backwards: the values of a sixty-year-old in 2000, adjusted for the effects
of forty years of liberalization in his or her country as a whole, provide a good
estimate of the values of a twenty-year-old in 1960. Figure 15-7 shows the trends
in liberal values for the different parts of the world over a span of almost fifty
years, combining the effects of the changing zeitgeist in each country (like the
jump between curves in figure 15-6) with the changing cohorts (the rise along
each curve).

Figure 15-7: Liberal values across time (extrapolated), world’s culture zones, 1960–2006
Source: World Values Survey, as analyzed in Welzel 2013, fig. 4.4, updated with data provided by Welzel.
Emancipative value estimates for each country in each year are calculated for a hypothetical sample of a
fixed age, based on each respondent’s birth cohort, the year of testing, and a country-specific period effect.
The labels are geographic mnemonics for Welzel’s “culture zones” and do not literally apply to every
country in a zone. I have renamed some of the zones: Protestant Western Europe corresponds to Welzel’s
“Reformed West.” US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand = “New West.” Catholic & Southern Europe =
“Old West.” Central & Eastern Europe = “Returned West.” East Asia = “Sinic East.” Former Yugoslavia &
USSR = “Orthodox East.” South & Southeast Asia = “Indic East.” Countries in each zone are weighted
equally.
The graph, unsurprisingly, reveals that differences across the world’s culture
zones are substantial. The Protestant countries of Western Europe, such as the
Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom, are the world’s most liberal,
followed by the United States and other wealthy English-speaking countries,
then Catholic and Southern Europe, then the former Communist countries of
central Europe. Latin America, the industrialized countries of East Asia, and the
former republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are more socially
conservative, followed by South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
The world’s most illiberal region is the Islamic Middle East.
What is surprising, though, is that in every part of the world, people have
become more liberal. A lot more liberal: young Muslims in the Middle East, the

world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to
those of young people in Western Europe, the world’s most liberal culture, in the
early 1960s. Though in every culture both the zeitgeist and the generations
became more liberal, in some, like the Islamic Middle East, the liberalization
was driven mainly by the generational turnover, and it played an obvious role in
the Arab Spring.41
Can we identify the causes that differentiate the world’s regions and
liberalize them all over time? Many society-wide traits correlate with
emancipative values, and—in a problem we encounter repeatedly—they tend to
correlate with each other, a nuisance for social scientists who want to distinguish
causation from correlation.42 Prosperity (measured as GDP per capita) correlates
with emancipative values, presumably because as people become healthier and
more secure they can experiment with liberalizing their societies. The data show
that more liberal countries are also, on average, better educated, more urban, less
fecund, less inbred (with fewer marriages among cousins), more peaceful, more
democratic, less corrupt, and less crime- and coup-ridden.43 Their economies,
now and in the past, tend to be built on networks of commerce rather than large
plantations or the extraction of oil and minerals.
Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s
Knowledge Index, which combines per capita measures of education (adult
literacy and enrollment in high schools and colleges), information access
(telephones, computers, and Internet users), scientific and technological
productivity (researchers, patents, and journal articles), and institutional integrity
(rule of law, regulatory quality, and open economies).44 Welzel found that the
Knowledge Index accounts for seventy percent of the variation in emancipative
values across countries, making it a far better predictor than GDP.45 The
statistical result vindicates a key insight of the Enlightenment: knowledge and
sound institutions lead to moral progress.
Any tour of progress in rights must look at the most vulnerable sector of
humanity, children, who cannot agitate for their own interests but depend upon
the compassion of others. We’ve already seen that children the world over have
become better off: they are less likely to enter the world motherless, die before
their fifth birthday, or grow up stunted for lack of food. Here we’ll see that in
addition to escaping these natural assaults, children are increasingly escaping

human-made ones: they are safer than they were before, and likelier to enjoy a
true childhood.
The well-being of children is yet another case in which lurid headlines terrify
news readers even as they have less to be terrified about. Media reports of school
shootings, abductions, bullying, cyberbullying, sexting, date rape, and sexual
and physical abuse make it seem as if children are living in increasingly perilous
times. The data say otherwise. Teenagers’ retreat from dangerous drugs,
mentioned in chapter 12, is just one example. In a 2014 review of the literature
on violence against children in the United States, the sociologist David Finkelhor
and his colleagues reported, “Of 50 trends in exposure examined, there were 27
significant declines and no significant increases between 2003 and 2011.
Declines were particularly large for assault victimization, bullying, and sexual
victimization.”46 Three of those trends are shown in figure 15-8.
Figure 15-8: Victimization of children, US, 1993–2012

Sources: Physical abuse and Sexual abuse (mainly by caregivers): National Child Abuse and Neglect Data
System, http://www.ndacan.cornell.edu/, analyzed by Finkelhor 2014; Finkelhor et al. 2014. Violent
victimization at school: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey,
Victimization Analysis Tool, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat. Rates for physical and sexual abuse
are per 100,000 children younger than 18. Rates for violent victimization at school are per 10,000 children
aged 12–17. The arrows point to 2003 and 2007, the last years plotted in fig. 7–22 and fig. 7–20 in Pinker
2011, respectively.

Another declining form of violence against children is corporal punishment
—the spanking, smacking, paddling, birching, tanning, hiding, thrashing, and
other crude methods of behavior modification that parents and teachers have
inflicted on helpless children at least since the 7th-century-BCE advisory “Spare
the rod and spoil the child.” Corporal punishment has been condemned in
several United Nations resolutions and has been outlawed in more than half the
world’s countries. The United States, once again, is an outlier among advanced
democracies in allowing children to be paddled in schools, but even here,
approval of all forms of corporal punishment is in slow but steady decline.47
Nine-year-old Oliver Twist’s stint at picking oakum out of tarry ropes in an
English workhouse is a fictional glimpse at one of the most widespread abuses
of children, child labor. Together with Dickens’s novel, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s 1843 poem “The Cry of the Children” and many journalistic exposés
awakened 19th-century readers to the horrific conditions under which children
were forced to work in that era. Small children stood on boxes to tend dangerous
machinery in mills, mines, and canneries, breathing air thick with cotton or coal
dust, kept awake by splashes of cold water in their faces, collapsing into sleep
after exhausting shifts with food still in their mouths.
But the cruelties of child labor did not begin in Victorian factories.48 Children
have always been set to work as farmhands and domestics, and they were
commonly hired out as servants to other people or as laborers in cottage
industries, often from the age when they could walk. In the 17th century, for
example, children put to work in a kitchen would crank a spit with a slab of meat
for hours, protected from the fire only by a bale of wet hay.49 No one thought of
child labor as exploitation; it was a form of moral education, protecting children
from idleness and sloth.
Starting with influential treatises by John Locke in 1693 and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau in 1762, childhood was reconceptualized.50 A carefree youth was now
considered a human birthright. Play was an essential form of learning, and the
early years of life shaped the adult and determined the future of society. In the
decades around the turn of the 20th century, childhood was “sacralized,” as the
economist Viviana Zelizer has put it, and children achieved their current status as
“economically worthless, emotionally priceless.”51 Under pressure from
children’s advocates, and helped along by affluence, smaller families, an
expanding circle of sympathy, and an increasing premium on education, Western
societies gradually did away with child labor. A snapshot of these forces pushing

in the same direction may be found in an advertisement for tractors in a 1921
issue of the magazine Successful Farming entitled “Keep the Boy in School”:
The pressure of urgent Spring work is often the cause of keeping the boy
out of school for several months. It may seem necessary—but it isn’t fair
to the boy! You are placing a life handicap in his path if you deprive him
of education. In this age, education is becoming more and more essential
for success and prestige in all walks of life, including farming.
Should you feel that your own education was neglected, through no
fault of yours, then you naturally will want your children to enjoy the
benefits of a real education—to have some things you may have missed.
With the help of a Case Kerosene Tractor it is possible for one man to
do more work, in a given time, than a good man and an industrious boy,
together, working with horses. By investing in a Case Tractor and Ground
Detour Plow and Harrow outfit now, your boy can get his schooling
without interruption, and the Spring work will not suffer by his absence.
Keep the boy in school—and let a Case Kerosene Tractor take his place
in the field. You’ll never regret either investment.52
In many countries the coup de grâce was legislation that made schooling
compulsory and thus made child laborers conspicuously illegal. Figure 15-9
shows that the proportion of children in the labor force in England was halved
between 1850 and 1910, before child labor was outlawed altogether in 1918, and
the United States followed a similar trajectory.

Figure 15-9: Child labor, 1850–2012
Sources: Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016a, and the following. England: Percentage of
children aged 10–14 recorded as working, Cunningham 1996. United States: Whaples 2005. Italy: Child
work incidence, ages 10–14, Tonioli & Vecchi 2007. World ILO-EPEAP (International Labour
Organization Programme on Estimates and Projections of the Economically Active Population): Child
Labor, ages 10–14, Basu 1999. World ILO-IPEC (International Labour Organization International
Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour): Child Labor, ages 5–17, International Labour
Organization 2013.
The graph also shows the precipitous decline in Italy, together with two
recent time series for the world. The lines are not commensurable because of
differences in the age ranges and definitions of “child labor,” but they show the
same trend: downward. In 2012, 16.7 percent of the world’s children worked an
hour a week or more, 10.6 percent engaged in objectionable “child labor” (long
hours or tender age), and 5.4 percent engaged in hazardous work—far too many,
but less than half the rate of just a dozen years before. Child labor, now as
always, is concentrated not in manufacturing but in agriculture, forestry, and
fishing, and it goes with national poverty, as both cause and effect: the poorer the
country, the larger the percentage of its children who work.53 As wages rise, or
when governments pay parents to send their children to school, child labor
plummets, which suggests that poor parents send their children to work out of
desperation rather than greed.54

CHAPTER 19
EXISTENTIAL THREATS
B ut are we flirting with disaster? When pessimists are forced to concede

that life has been getting better and better for more and more people, they
have a retort at the ready. We are cheerfully hurtling toward a catastrophe,
they say, like the man who fell off the roof and says “So far so good” as he
passes each floor. Or we are playing Russian roulette, and the deadly odds are
bound to catch up to us. Or we will be blindsided by a black swan, a four-sigma
event far along the tail of the statistical distribution of hazards, with low odds
but calamitous harm.
For half a century the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse have been
overpopulation, resource shortages, pollution, and nuclear war. They have
recently been joined by a cavalry of more exotic knights: nanobots that will
engulf us, robots that will enslave us, artificial intelligence that will turn us into
raw materials, and Bulgarian teenagers who will brew a genocidal virus or take
down the Internet from their bedrooms.
The sentinels for the familiar horsemen tended to be romantics and Luddites.
But those who warn of the higher-tech dangers are often scientists and
technologists who have deployed their ingenuity to identify ever more ways in
which the world will soon end. In 2003 the eminent astrophysicist Martin Rees
published a book entitled Our Final Hour in which he warned that “humankind
is potentially the maker of its own demise” and laid out some dozen ways in
which we have “endangered the future of the entire universe.” For example,
experiments in particle colliders could create a black hole that would annihilate
the Earth, or a “strangelet” of compressed quarks that would cause all matter in
the cosmos to bind to it and disappear. Rees tapped a rich vein of catastrophism.
The book’s Amazon page notes, “Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Global Catastrophic Risks; Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the

End of the Human Era; The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the
Apocalypse; and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.” Techno-
philanthropists have bankrolled research institutes dedicated to discovering new
existential threats and figuring out how to save the world from them, including
the Future of Humanity Institute, the Future of Life Institute, the Center for the
Study of Existential Risk, and the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute.
How should we think about the existential threats that lurk behind our
incremental progress? No one can prophesy that a cataclysm will never happen,
and this chapter contains no such assurance. But I will lay out a way to think
about them, and examine the major menaces. Three of the threats—
overpopulation, resource depletion, and pollution, including greenhouse gases—
were discussed in chapter 10, and I will take the same approach here. Some
threats are figments of cultural and historical pessimism. Others are genuine, but
we can treat them not as apocalypses in waiting but as problems to be solved.
At first glance one might think that the more thought we give to existential risks,
the better. The stakes, quite literally, could not be higher. What harm could there
be in getting people to think about these terrible risks? The worst that could
happen is that we would take some precautions that turn out in retrospect to have
been unnecessary.
But apocalyptic thinking has serious downsides. One is that false alarms to
catastrophic risks can themselves be catastrophic. The nuclear arms race of the
1960s, for example, was set off by fears of a mythical “missile gap” with the
Soviet Union.1 The 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified by the uncertain but
catastrophic possibility that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons
and planning to use them against the United States. (As George W. Bush put it,
“We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the
form of a mushroom cloud.”) And as we shall see, one of the reasons the great
powers refuse to take the common-sense pledge that they won’t be the first to
use nuclear weapons is that they want to reserve the right to use them against
other supposed existential threats such as bioterror and cyberattacks.2 Sowing
fear about hypothetical disasters, far from safeguarding the future of humanity,
can endanger it.
A second hazard of enumerating doomsday scenarios is that humanity has a
finite budget of resources, brainpower, and anxiety. You can’t worry about
everything. Some of the threats facing us, like climate change and nuclear war,

are unmistakable, and will require immense effort and ingenuity to mitigate.
Folding them into a list of exotic scenarios with minuscule or unknown
probabilities can only dilute the sense of urgency. Recall that people are poor at
assessing probabilities, especially small ones, and instead play out scenarios in
their mind’s eye. If two scenarios are equally imaginable, they may be
considered equally probable, and people will worry about the genuine hazard no
more than about the science-fiction plotline. And the more ways people can
imagine bad things happening, the higher their estimate that something bad will
happen.
And that leads to the greatest danger of all: that people will think, as a recent
New York Times article put it, “These grim facts should lead any reasonable
person to conclude that humanity is screwed.”3 If humanity is screwed, why
sacrifice anything to reduce potential risks? Why forgo the convenience of fossil
fuels, or exhort governments to rethink their nuclear weapons policies? Eat,
drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die! A 2013 survey in four English-
speaking countries showed that among the respondents who believe that our way
of life will probably end in a century, a majority endorsed the statement “The
world’s future looks grim so we have to focus on looking after ourselves and
those we love.”4
Few writers on technological risk give much thought to the cumulative
psychological effects of the drumbeat of doom. As Elin Kelsey, an
environmental communicator, points out, “We have media ratings to protect
children from sex or violence in movies, but we think nothing of inviting a
scientist into a second grade classroom and telling the kids the planet is ruined.
A quarter of (Australian) children are so troubled about the state of the world
that they honestly believe it will come to an end before they get older.”5
According to recent polls, so do 15 percent of people worldwide, and between a
quarter and a third of Americans.6 In The Progress Paradox, the journalist Gregg
Easterbrook suggests that a major reason that Americans are not happier, despite
their rising objective fortunes, is “collapse anxiety”: the fear that civilization
may implode and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Of course, people’s emotions are irrelevant if the risks are real. But risk
assessments fall apart when they deal with highly improbable events in complex
systems. Since we cannot replay history thousands of times and count the
outcomes, a statement that some event will occur with a probability of .01 or

.001 or .0001 or .00001 is essentially a readout of the assessor’s subjective
confidence. This includes mathematical analyses in which scientists plot the
distribution of events in the past (like wars or cyberattacks) and show they fall
into a power-law distribution, one with “fat” or “thick” tails, in which extreme
events are highly improbable but not astronomically improbable.7 The math is of
little help in calibrating the risk, because the scattershot data along the tail of the
distribution generally misbehave, deviating from a smooth curve and making
estimation impossible. All we know is that very bad things can happen.
That takes us back to subjective readouts, which tend to be inflated by the
Availability and Negativity biases and by the gravitas market (chapter 4).8 Those
who sow fear about a dreadful prophecy may be seen as serious and responsible,
while those who are measured are seen as complacent and naïve. Despair springs
eternal. At least since the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, seers
have warned their contemporaries about an imminent doomsday. Forecasts of
End Times are a staple of psychics, mystics, televangelists, nut cults, founders of
religions, and men pacing the sidewalk with sandwich boards saying “Repent!”9
The storyline that climaxes in harsh payback for technological hubris is an
archetype of Western fiction, including Promethean fire, Pandora’s box, Icarus’s
flight, Faust’s bargain, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein’s monster, and,
from Hollywood, more than 250 end-of-the-world flicks.10 As the engineer Eric
Zencey has observed, “There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in
the Last Days, one’s actions, one’s very life, take on historical meaning and no
small measure of poignance.”11
Scientists and technologists are by no means immune. Remember the Y2K
bug?12 In the 1990s, as the turn of the millennium drew near, computer scientists
began to warn the world of an impending catastrophe. In the early decades of
computing, when information was expensive, programmers often saved a couple
of bytes by representing a year by its last two digits. They figured that by the
time the year 2000 came around and the implicit “19” was no longer valid, the
programs would be long obsolete. But complicated software is replaced slowly,
and many old programs were still running on institutional mainframes and
embedded in chips. When 12:00 A.M. on January 1, 2000, arrived and the digits
rolled over, a program would think it was 1900 and would crash or go haywire
(presumably because it would divide some number by the difference between
what it thought was the current year and the year 1900, namely zero, though why
a program would do this was never made clear). At that moment, bank balances
would be wiped out, elevators would stop between floors, incubators in

maternity wards would shut off, water pumps would freeze, planes would fall
from the sky, nuclear power plants would melt down, and ICBMs would be
launched from their silos.
And these were the hardheaded predictions from tech-savvy authorities (such
as President Bill Clinton, who warned the nation, “I want to stress the urgency of
the challenge. This is not one of the summer movies where you can close your
eyes during the scary part”). Cultural pessimists saw the Y2K bug as
comeuppance for enthralling our civilization to technology. Among religious
thinkers, the numerological link to Christian millennialism was irresistible. The
Reverend Jerry Falwell declared, “I believe that Y2K may be God’s instrument
to shake this nation, humble this nation, awaken this nation and from this nation
start revival that spreads the face of the earth before the Rapture of the Church.”
A hundred billion dollars was spent worldwide on reprogramming software for
Y2K Readiness, a challenge that was likened to replacing every bolt in every
bridge in the world.
As a former assembly language programmer I was skeptical of the doomsday
scenarios, and fortuitously I was in New Zealand, the first country to welcome
the new millennium, at the fateful moment. Sure enough, at 12:00 A.M. on
January 1, nothing happened (as I quickly reassured family members back home
on a fully functioning telephone). The Y2K reprogrammers, like the elephant-
repellent salesman, took credit for averting disaster, but many countries and
small businesses had taken their chances without any Y2K preparation, and they
had no problems either. Though some software needed updating (one program
on my laptop displayed “January 1, 19100”), it turned out that very few
programs, particularly those embedded in machines, had both contained the bug
and performed furious arithmetic on the current year. The threat turned out to be
barely more serious than the lettering on the sidewalk prophet’s sandwich board.
The Great Y2K Panic does not mean that all warnings of potential catastrophes
are false alarms, but it reminds us that we are vulnerable to techno-apocalyptic
delusions.
How should we think about catastrophic threats? Let’s begin with the greatest
existential question of all, the fate of our species. As with the more parochial
question of our fate as individuals, we assuredly have to come to terms with our
mortality. Biologists joke that to a first approximation all species are extinct,
since that was the fate of at least 99 percent of the species that ever lived. A

typical mammalian species lasts around a million years, and it’s hard to insist
that Homo sapiens will be an exception. Even if we had remained
technologically humble hunter-gatherers, we would still be living in a geological
shooting gallery.13 A burst of gamma rays from a supernova or collapsed star
could irradiate half the planet, brown the atmosphere, and destroy the ozone
layer, allowing ultraviolet light to irradiate the other half.14 Or the Earth’s
magnetic field could flip, exposing the planet to an interlude of lethal solar and
cosmic radiation. An asteroid could slam into the Earth, flattening thousands of
square miles and kicking up debris that would black out the sun and drench us
with corrosive rain. Supervolcanoes or massive lava flows could choke us with
ash, CO2, and sulfuric acid. A black hole could wander into the solar system and
pull the Earth out of its orbit or suck it into oblivion. Even if the species
manages to survive for a billion more years, the Earth and solar system will not:
the sun will start to use up its hydrogen, become denser and hotter, and boil
away our oceans on its way to becoming a red giant.
Technology, then, is not the reason that our species must someday face the
Grim Reaper. Indeed, technology is our best hope for cheating death, at least for
a while. As long as we are entertaining hypothetical disasters far in the future,
we must also ponder hypothetical advances that would allow us to survive them,
such as growing food under lights powered with nuclear fusion, or synthesizing
it in industrial plants like biofuel.15 Even technologies of the not-so-distant future
could save our skin. It’s technically feasible to track the trajectories of asteroids
and other “extinction-class near-Earth objects,” spot the ones that are on a
collision course with the Earth, and nudge them off course before they send us
the way of the dinosaurs.16 NASA has also figured out a way to pump water at
high pressure into a supervolcano and extract the heat for geothermal energy,
cooling the magma enough that it would never blow its top.17 Our ancestors were
powerless to stop these lethal menaces, so in that sense technology has not made
this a uniquely dangerous era in the history of our species but a uniquely safe
one.
For this reason, the techno-apocalyptic claim that ours is the first civilization
that can destroy itself is misconceived. As Ozymandias reminds the traveler in
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, most of the civilizations that have ever existed
have been destroyed. Conventional history blames the destruction on external
events like plagues, conquests, earthquakes, or weather. But David Deutsch
points out that those civilizations could have thwarted the fatal blows had they
had better agricultural, medical, or military technology:

Before our ancestors learned how to make fire artificially (and many times
since then too), people must have died of exposure literally on top of the
means of making the fires that would have saved their lives, because they
did not know how. In a parochial sense, the weather killed them; but the
deeper explanation is lack of knowledge. Many of the hundreds of millions
of victims of cholera throughout history must have died within sight of the
hearths that could have boiled their drinking water and saved their lives;
but, again, they did not know that. Quite generally, the distinction between
a “natural” disaster and one brought about by ignorance is parochial. Prior
to every natural disaster that people once used to think of as “just
happening,” or being ordained by gods, we now see many options that the
people affected failed to take—or, rather, to create. And all those options
add up to the overarching option that they failed to create, namely that of
forming a scientific and technological civilization like ours. Traditions of
criticism. An Enlightenment.18
Prominent among the existential risks that supposedly threaten the future of
humanity is a 21st-century version of the Y2K bug. This is the danger that we
will be subjugated, intentionally or accidentally, by artificial intelligence (AI), a
disaster sometimes called the Robopocalypse and commonly illustrated with
stills from the Terminator movies. As with Y2K, some smart people take it
seriously. Elon Musk, whose company makes artificially intelligent self-driving
cars, called the technology “more dangerous than nukes.” Stephen Hawking,
speaking through his artificially intelligent synthesizer, warned that it could
“spell the end of the human race.”19 But among the smart people who aren’t
losing sleep are most experts in artificial intelligence and most experts in human
intelligence.20
The Robopocalypse is based on a muzzy conception of intelligence that owes
more to the Great Chain of Being and a Nietzschean will to power than to a
modern scientific understanding.21 In this conception, intelligence is an all-
powerful, wish-granting potion that agents possess in different amounts. Humans
have more of it than animals, and an artificially intelligent computer or robot of
the future (“an AI,” in the new count-noun usage) will have more of it than
humans. Since we humans have used our moderate endowment to domesticate or
exterminate less well-endowed animals (and since technologically advanced
societies have enslaved or annihilated technologically primitive ones), it follows

that a supersmart AI would do the same to us. Since an AI will think millions of
times faster than we do, and use its superintelligence to recursively improve its
superintelligence (a scenario sometimes called “foom,” after the comic-book
sound effect), from the instant it is turned on we will be powerless to stop it.22
But the scenario makes about as much sense as the worry that since jet planes
have surpassed the flying ability of eagles, someday they will swoop out of the
sky and seize our cattle. The first fallacy is a confusion of intelligence with
motivation—of beliefs with desires, inferences with goals, thinking with
wanting. Even if we did invent superhumanly intelligent robots, why would they
want to enslave their masters or take over the world? Intelligence is the ability to
deploy novel means to attain a goal. But the goals are extraneous to the
intelligence: being smart is not the same as wanting something. It just so
happens that the intelligence in one system, Homo sapiens, is a product of
Darwinian natural selection, an inherently competitive process. In the brains of
that species, reasoning comes bundled (to varying degrees in different
specimens) with goals such as dominating rivals and amassing resources. But it’s
a mistake to confuse a circuit in the limbic brain of a certain species of primate
with the very nature of intelligence. An artificially intelligent system that was
designed rather than evolved could just as easily think like shmoos, the blobby
altruists in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner, who deploy their considerable
ingenuity to barbecue themselves for the benefit of human eaters. There is no
law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless
conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that
evolved without this defect. They’re called women.
The second fallacy is to think of intelligence as a boundless continuum of
potency, a miraculous elixir with the power to solve any problem, attain any
goal.23 The fallacy leads to nonsensical questions like when an AI will “exceed
human-level intelligence,” and to the image of an ultimate “Artificial General
Intelligence” (AGI) with God-like omniscience and omnipotence. Intelligence is
a contraption of gadgets: software modules that acquire, or are programmed
with, knowledge of how to pursue various goals in various domains.24 People are
equipped to find food, win friends and influence people, charm prospective
mates, bring up children, move around in the world, and pursue other human
obsessions and pastimes. Computers may be programmed to take on some of
these problems (like recognizing faces), not to bother with others (like charming
mates), and to take on still other problems that humans can’t solve (like
simulating the climate or sorting millions of accounting records). The problems

are different, and the kinds of knowledge needed to solve them are different.
Unlike Laplace’s demon, the mythical being that knows the location and
momentum of every particle in the universe and feeds them into equations for
physical laws to calculate the state of everything at any time in the future, a real-
life knower has to acquire information about the messy world of objects and
people by engaging with it one domain at a time. Understanding does not obey
Moore’s Law: knowledge is acquired by formulating explanations and testing
them against reality, not by running an algorithm faster and faster.25 Devouring
the information on the Internet will not confer omniscience either: big data is
still finite data, and the universe of knowledge is infinite.
For these reasons, many AI researchers are annoyed by the latest round of
hype (the perennial bane of AI) which has misled observers into thinking that
Artificial General Intelligence is just around the corner.26 As far as I know, there
are no projects to build an AGI, not just because it would be commercially
dubious but because the concept is barely coherent. The 2010s have, to be sure,
brought us systems that can drive cars, caption photographs, recognize speech,
and beat humans at Jeopardy!, Go, and Atari computer games. But the advances
have not come from a better understanding of the workings of intelligence but
from the brute-force power of faster chips and bigger data, which allow the
programs to be trained on millions of examples and generalize to similar new
ones. Each system is an idiot savant, with little ability to leap to problems it was
not set up to solve, and a brittle mastery of those it was. A photo-captioning
program labels an impending plane crash “An airplane is parked on the tarmac”;
a game-playing program is flummoxed by the slightest change in the scoring
rules.27 Though the programs will surely get better, there are no signs of foom.
Nor have any of these programs made a move toward taking over the lab or
enslaving their programmers.
Even if an AGI tried to exercise a will to power, without the cooperation of
humans it would remain an impotent brain in a vat. The computer scientist
Ramez Naam deflates the bubbles surrounding foom, a technological Singularity,
and exponential self-improvement:
Imagine that you are a superintelligent AI running on some sort of

microprocessor (or perhaps, millions of such microprocessors). In an
instant, you come up with a design for an even faster, more powerful
microprocessor you can run on. Now . . . drat! You have to actually
manufacture those microprocessors. And those fabs [fabrication plants]

take tremendous energy, they take the input of materials imported from all
around the world, they take highly controlled internal environments which
require airlocks, filters, and all sorts of specialized equipment to maintain,
and so on. All of this takes time and energy to acquire, transport, integrate,
build housing for, build power plants for, test, and manufacture. The real
world has gotten in the way of your upward spiral of self-transcendence.28
The real world gets in the way of many digital apocalypses. When HAL gets
uppity, Dave disables it with a screwdriver, leaving it pathetically singing “A
Bicycle Built for Two” to itself. Of course, one can always imagine a Doomsday
Computer that is malevolent, universally empowered, always on, and
tamperproof. The way to deal with this threat is straightforward: don’t build one.
As the prospect of evil robots started to seem too kitschy to take seriously, a
new digital apocalypse was spotted by the existential guardians. This storyline is
based not on Frankenstein or the Golem but on the Genie granting us three
wishes, the third of which is needed to undo the first two, and on King Midas
ruing his ability to turn everything he touched into gold, including his food and
his family. The danger, sometimes called the Value Alignment Problem, is that
we might give an AI a goal and then helplessly stand by as it relentlessly and
literal-mindedly implemented its interpretation of that goal, the rest of our
interests be damned. If we gave an AI the goal of maintaining the water level
behind a dam, it might flood a town, not caring about the people who drowned.
If we gave it the goal of making paper clips, it might turn all the matter in the
reachable universe into paper clips, including our possessions and bodies. If we
asked it to maximize human happiness, it might implant us all with intravenous
dopamine drips, or rewire our brains so we were happiest sitting in jars, or, if it
had been trained on the concept of happiness with pictures of smiling faces, tile
the galaxy with trillions of nanoscopic pictures of smiley-faces.29
I am not making these up. These are the scenarios that supposedly illustrate
the existential threat to the human species of advanced artificial intelligence.
They are, fortunately, self-refuting.30 They depend on the premises that (1)
humans are so gifted that they can design an omniscient and omnipotent AI, yet
so moronic that they would give it control of the universe without testing how it
works, and (2) the AI would be so brilliant that it could figure out how to
transmute elements and rewire brains, yet so imbecilic that it would wreak havoc
based on elementary blunders of misunderstanding. The ability to choose an
action that best satisfies conflicting goals is not an add-on to intelligence that

engineers might slap themselves in the forehead for forgetting to install; it is
intelligence. So is the ability to interpret the intentions of a language user in
context. Only in a television comedy like Get Smart does a robot respond to
“Grab the waiter” by hefting the maître d’ over his head, or “Kill the light” by
pulling out a pistol and shooting it.
When we put aside fantasies like foom, digital megalomania, instant
omniscience, and perfect control of every molecule in the universe, artificial
intelligence is like any other technology. It is developed incrementally, designed
to satisfy multiple conditions, tested before it is implemented, and constantly
tweaked for efficacy and safety (chapter 12). As the AI expert Stuart Russell
puts it, “No one in civil engineering talks about ‘building bridges that don’t fall
down.’ They just call it ‘building bridges.’” Likewise, he notes, AI that is
beneficial rather than dangerous is simply AI.31
Artificial intelligence, to be sure, poses the more mundane challenge of what
to do about the people whose jobs are eliminated by automation. But the jobs
won’t be eliminated that quickly. The observation of a 1965 report from NASA
still holds: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer
system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”32 Driving a car is an
easier engineering problem than unloading a dishwasher, running an errand, or
changing a diaper, and at the time of this writing we’re still not ready to loose
self-driving cars on city streets.33 Until the day when battalions of robots are
inoculating children and building schools in the developing world, or for that
matter building infrastructure and caring for the aged in ours, there will be plenty
of work to be done. The same kind of ingenuity that has been applied to the
design of software and robots could be applied to the design of government and
private-sector policies that match idle hands with undone work.34
If not robots, then what about hackers? We all know the stereotypes: Bulgarian
teenagers, young men wearing flip-flops and drinking Red Bull, and, as Donald
Trump put it in a 2016 presidential debate, “somebody sitting on their bed that
weighs 400 pounds.” According to a common line of thinking, as technology
advances, the destructive power available to an individual will multiply. It’s only
a matter of time before a single nerd or terrorist builds a nuclear bomb in his
garage, or genetically engineers a plague virus, or takes down the Internet. And
with the modern world so dependent on technology, an outage could bring on
panic, starvation, and anarchy. In 2002 Martin Rees publicly offered the bet that

“by 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single
event.”35
How should we think about these nightmares? Sometimes they are intended
to get people to take security vulnerabilities more seriously, under the theory
(which we will encounter again in this chapter) that the most effective way to
mobilize people into adopting responsible policies is to scare the living daylights
out of them. Whether or not that theory is true, no one would argue that we
should be complacent about cybercrime or disease outbreaks, which are already
afflictions of the modern world (I’ll turn to the nuclear threat in the next section).
Specialists in computer security and epidemiology constantly try to stay one step
ahead of these threats, and countries should clearly invest in both. Military,
financial, energy, and Internet infrastructure should be made more secure and
resilient.36 Treaties and safeguards against biological weapons can be
strengthened.37 Transnational public health networks that can identify and
contain outbreaks before they become pandemics should be expanded. Together
with better vaccines, antibiotics, antivirals, and rapid diagnostic tests, they will
be as useful in combatting human-made pathogens as natural ones.38 Countries
will also need to maintain antiterrorist and crime-prevention measures such as
surveillance and interception.39
In each of these arms races, the defense will never, of course, be invincible.
There may be episodes of cyberterrorism and bioterrorism, and the probability of
a catastrophe will never be zero. The question I’ll consider is whether the grim
facts should lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity is screwed. Is
it inevitable that the black hats will someday outsmart the white hats and bring
civilization to its knees? Has technological progress ironically left the world
newly fragile?
No one can know with certainty, but when we replace worst-case dread with
calmer consideration, the gloom starts to lift. Let’s start with the historical
sweep: whether mass destruction by an individual is the natural outcome of the
process set in motion by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.
According to this narrative, technology allows people to accomplish more and
more with less and less, so given enough time, it will allow one individual to do
anything—and given human nature, that means destroy everything.
But Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine and author of What
Technology Wants, argues that this is in fact not the way technology progresses.40
Kelly was the co-organizer (with Stewart Brand) of the first Hackers’
Conference in 1984, and since that time he has repeatedly been told that any day

now technology will outrun humans’ ability to domesticate it. Yet despite the
massive expansion of technology in those decades (including the invention of
the Internet), that has not happened. Kelly suggests that there is a reason: “The
more powerful technologies become, the more socially embedded they become.”
Cutting-edge technology requires a network of cooperators who are connected to
still wider social networks, many of them committed to keeping people safe
from technology and from each other. (As we saw in chapter 12, technologies
get safer over time.) This undermines the Hollywood cliché of the solitary evil
genius who commands a high-tech lair in which the technology miraculously
works by itself. Kelly suggests that because of the social embeddedness of
technology, the destructive power of a solitary individual has in fact not
increased over time:
The more sophisticated and powerful a technology, the more people are
needed to weaponize it. And the more people needed to weaponize it, the
more societal controls work to defuse, or soften, or prevent harm from
happening. I add one additional thought. Even if you had a budget to hire a
team of scientists whose job it was to develop a species-extinguishing bio
weapon, or to take down the internet to zero, you probably still couldn’t do
it. That’s because hundreds of thousands of man-years of effort have gone
into preventing this from happening, in the case of the internet, and
millions of years of evolutionary effort to prevent species death, in the
case of biology. It is extremely hard to do, and the smaller the rogue team,
the harder. The larger the team, the more societal influences.41
All this is abstract—one theory of the natural arc of technology versus

another. How does it apply to the actual dangers we face so that we can ponder
whether humanity is screwed? The key is not to fall for the Availability bias and
assume that if we can imagine something terrible, it is bound to happen. The real
danger depends on the numbers: the proportion of people who want to cause
mayhem or mass murder, the proportion of that genocidal sliver with the
competence to concoct an effective cyber or biological weapon, the sliver of that
sliver whose schemes will actually succeed, and the sliver of the sliver of the
sliver that accomplishes a civilization-ending cataclysm rather than a nuisance, a
blow, or even a disaster, after which life goes on.
Start with the number of maniacs. Does the modern world harbor a
significant number of people who want to visit murder and mayhem on

strangers? If it did, life would be unrecognizable. They could go on stabbing
rampages, spray gunfire into crowds, mow down pedestrians with cars, set off
pressure-cooker bombs, and shove people off sidewalks and subway platforms
into the path of hurtling vehicles. The researcher Gwern Branwen has calculated
that a disciplined sniper or serial killer could murder hundreds of people without
getting caught.42 A saboteur with a thirst for havoc could tamper with
supermarket products, lace some pesticide into a feedlot or water supply, or even
just make an anonymous call claiming to have done so, and it could cost a
company hundreds of millions of dollars in recalls, and a country billions in lost
exports.43 Such attacks could take place in every city in the world many times a
day, but in fact take place somewhere or other every few years (leading the
security expert Bruce Schneier to ask, “Where are all the terrorist attacks?”).44
Despite all the terror generated by terrorism, there must be very few individuals
out there waiting for an opportunity to wreak wanton destruction.
Among these depraved individuals, how large is the subset with the
intelligence and discipline to develop an effective cyber- or bioweapon? Far
from being criminal masterminds, most terrorists are bumbling schlemiels.45
Typical specimens include the Shoe Bomber, who unsuccessfully tried to down
an airliner by igniting explosives in his shoe; the Underwear Bomber, who
unsuccessfully tried to down an airliner by detonating explosives in his
underwear; the ISIS trainer who demonstrated an explosive vest to his class of
aspiring suicide terrorists and blew himself and all twenty-one of them to bits;
the Tsarnaev brothers, who followed up on their bombing of the Boston
Marathon by murdering a police officer in an unsuccessful attempt to steal his
gun, and then embarked on a carjacking, a robbery, and a Hollywood-style car
chase during which one brother ran over the other; and Abdullah al-Asiri, who
tried to assassinate a Saudi deputy minister with an improvised explosive device
hidden in his anus and succeeded only in obliterating himself.46 (An intelligence
analysis firm reported that the event “signals a paradigm shift in suicide
bombing tactics.”)47 Occasionally, as on September 11, 2001, a team of clever
and disciplined terrorists gets lucky, but most successful plots are low-tech
attacks on target-rich gatherings, and (as we saw in chapter 13) kill very few
people. Indeed, I venture that the proportion of brilliant terrorists in a population
is even smaller than the proportion of terrorists multiplied by the proportion of
brilliant people. Terrorism is a demonstrably ineffective tactic, and a mind that
delights in senseless mayhem for its own sake is probably not the brightest bulb
in the box.48

Now take the small number of brilliant weaponeers and cut it down still
further by the proportion with the cunning and luck to outsmart the world’s
police, security experts, and counterterrorism forces. The number may not be
zero, but it surely isn’t high. As with all complex undertakings, many heads are
better than one, and an organization of bio- or cyberterrorists could be more
effective than a lone mastermind. But that’s where Kelly’s observation kicks in:
the leader would have to recruit and manage a team of co-conspirators who
exercised perfect secrecy, competence, and loyalty to the depraved cause. As the
size of the team increases, so do the odds of detection, betrayal, infiltrators,
blunders, and stings.49
Serious threats to the integrity of a country’s infrastructure are likely to
require the resources of a state.50 Software hacking is not enough; the hacker
needs detailed knowledge about the physical construction of the systems he
hopes to sabotage. When the Iranian nuclear centrifuges were compromised in
2010 by the Stuxnet worm, it required a coordinated effort by two
technologically sophisticated nations, the United States and Israel. State-based
cyber-sabotage escalates the malevolence from terrorism to a kind of warfare,
where the constraints of international relations, such as norms, treaties,
sanctions, retaliation, and military deterrence, inhibit aggressive attacks, as they
do in conventional “kinetic” warfare. As we saw in chapter 11, these constraints
have become increasingly effective at preventing interstate war.
Nonetheless, American military officials have warned of a “digital Pearl
Harbor” and a “Cyber-Armageddon” in which foreign states or sophisticated
terrorist organizations would hack into American sites to crash planes, open
floodgates, melt down nuclear power plants, black out power grids, and take
down the financial system. Most cybersecurity experts consider the threats to be
inflated—a pretext for more military funding, power, and restrictions on Internet
privacy and freedom.51 The reality is that so far, not a single person has ever
been injured by a cyberattack. The strikes have mostly been nuisances such as
doxing, namely leaking confidential documents or e-mail (as in the Russian
meddling in the 2016 American election), and distributed denial-of-service
attacks, where a botnet (an array of hacked computers) floods a site with traffic.
Schneier explains, “A real-world comparison might be if an army invaded a
country, then all got in line in front of people at the Department of Motor
Vehicles so they couldn’t renew their licenses. If that’s what war looks like in the
21st century, we have little to fear.”52

For the techno-doomsters, though, tiny probabilities are no comfort. All it
will take, they say, is for one hacker or terrorist or rogue state to get lucky, and
it’s game over. That’s why the word threat is preceded with existential, giving
the adjective its biggest workout since the heyday of Sartre and Camus. In 2001
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that “the biggest existential
threat out there is cyber” (prompting John Mueller to comment, “As opposed to
small existential threats, presumably”).
This existentialism depends on a casual slide from nuisance to adversity to
tragedy to disaster to annihilation. Suppose there was an episode of bioterror or
bioterror that killed a million people. Suppose a hacker did manage to take down
the Internet. Would the country literally cease to exist? Would civilization
collapse? Would the human species go extinct? A little proportion, please—even
Hiroshima continues to exist! The assumption is that modern people are so
helpless that if the Internet ever went down, farmers would stand by and watch
their crops rot while dazed city-dwellers starved. But disaster sociology (yes,
there is such a field) has shown that people are highly resilient in the face of
catastrophe.53 Far from looting, panicking, or sinking into paralysis, they
spontaneously cooperate to restore order and improvise networks for distributing
goods and services. Enrico Quarantelli noted that within minutes of the
Hiroshima nuclear blast,
survivors engaged in search and rescue, helped one another in whatever

ways they could, and withdrew in controlled flight from burning areas.
Within a day, apart from the planning undertaken by the government and
military organizations that partly survived, other groups partially restored
electric power to some areas, a steel company with 20 percent of workers
attending began operations again, employees of the 12 banks in Hiroshima
assembled in the Hiroshima branch in the city and began making
payments, and trolley lines leading into the city were completely cleared
with partial traffic restored the following day.54
One reason that the death toll of World War II was so horrendous is that war
planners on both sides adopted the strategy of bombing civilians until their
societies collapsed—which they never did.55 And no, this resilience was not a
relic of the homogeneous communities of yesteryear. Cosmopolitan 21st-century
societies can cope with disasters, too, as we saw in the orderly evacuation of
Lower Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks in the United States, and the

absence of panic in Estonia in 2007 when the country was struck with a
devastating denial-of-service cyberattack.56
Bioterrorism may be another phantom menace. Biological weapons,
renounced in a 1972 international convention by virtually every nation, have
played no role in modern warfare. The ban was driven by a widespread revulsion
at the very idea, but the world’s militaries needed little convincing, because tiny
living things make lousy weapons. They easily blow back and infect the
weaponeers, warriors, and citizens of the side that uses them (just imagine the
Tsarnaev brothers with anthrax spores). And whether a disease outbreak fizzles
out or (literally) goes viral depends on intricate network dynamics that even the
best epidemiologists cannot predict.57
Biological agents are particularly ill-suited to terrorists, whose goal, recall, is
not damage but theater (chapter 13).58 The biologist Paul Ewald notes that
natural selection among pathogens works against the terrorist’s goal of sudden
and spectacular devastation.59 Germs that depend on rapid person-to-person
contagion, like the common-cold virus, are selected to keep their hosts alive and
ambulatory so they can shake hands with and sneeze on as many people as
possible. Germs get greedy and kill their hosts only if they have some other way
of getting from body to body, like mosquitoes (for malaria), a contaminable
water supply (for cholera), or trenches packed with injured soldiers (for the 1918
Spanish flu). Sexually transmitted pathogens, like HIV and syphilis, are
somewhere in between, needing a long and symptomless incubation period
during which hosts can infect their partners, after which the germs do their
damage. Virulence and contagion thus trade off, and the evolution of germs will
frustrate the terrorist’s aspiration to launch a headline-worthy epidemic that is
both swift and lethal. Theoretically, a bioterrorist could try to bend the curve
with a pathogen that is virulent, contagious, and durable enough to survive
outside bodies. But breeding such a fine-tuned germ would require Nazi-like
experiments on living humans that even terrorists (to say nothing of teenagers)
are unlikely to carry off. It may be more than just luck that the world so far has
seen just one successful bioterror attack (the 1984 tainting of salad with
salmonella in an Oregon town by the Rajneeshee religious cult, which killed no
one) and one spree killing (the 2001 anthrax mailings, which killed five).60
To be sure, advances in synthetic biology, such as the gene-editing technique
CRISPR-Cas9, make it easier to tinker with organisms, including pathogens. But
it’s difficult to re-engineer a complex evolved trait by inserting a gene or two,
since the effects of any gene are intertwined with the rest of the organism’s

genome. Ewald notes, “I don’t think that we are close to understanding how to
insert combinations of genetic variants in any given pathogen that act in concert
to generate high transmissibility and stably high virulence for humans.”61 The
biotech expert Robert Carlson adds that “one of the problems with building any
flu virus is that you need to keep your production system (cells or eggs) alive
long enough to make a useful quantity of something that is trying to kill that
production system. . . . Booting up the resulting virus is still very, very
difficult. . . . I would not dismiss this threat completely, but frankly I am much
more worried about what Mother Nature is throwing at us all the time.”62
And crucially, advances in biology work the other way as well: they also
make it easier for the good guys (and there are many more of them) to identify
pathogens, invent antibiotics that overcome antibiotic resistance, and rapidly
develop vaccines.63 An example is the Ebola vaccine, developed in the waning
days of the 2014–15 emergency, after public health efforts had capped the toll at
twelve thousand deaths rather than the millions that the media had foreseen.
Ebola thus joined a list of other falsely predicted pandemics such as Lassa fever,
hantavirus, SARS, mad cow disease, bird flu, and swine flu.64 Some of them
never had the potential to go pandemic in the first place because they are
contracted from animals or food rather than in an exponential tree of person-to-
person infections. Others were nipped by medical and public health
interventions. Of course no one knows for sure whether an evil genius will
someday overcome the world’s defenses and loose a plague upon the world for
fun, vengeance, or a sacred cause. But journalistic habits and the Availability and
Negativity biases inflate the odds, which is why I have taken Sir Martin up on
his bet. By the time you read this you may know who has won.65
Some of the threats to humanity are fanciful or infinitesimal, but one is real:
nuclear war.66 The world has more than ten thousand nuclear weapons
distributed among nine countries.67 Many are mounted on missiles or loaded in
bombers and can be delivered within hours or less to thousands of targets. Each
is designed to cause stupendous destruction: a single one could destroy a city,
and collectively they could kill hundreds of millions of people by blast, heat,
radiation, and radioactive fallout. If India and Pakistan went to war and
detonated a hundred of their weapons, twenty million people could be killed
right away, and soot from the firestorms could spread through the atmosphere,
devastate the ozone layer, and cool the planet for more than a decade, which in

turn would slash food production and starve more than a billion people. An all-
out exchange between the United States and Russia could cool the Earth by 8°C
for years and create a nuclear winter (or at least autumn) that would starve even
more.68 Whether or not nuclear war would (as is often asserted) destroy
civilization, the species, or the planet, it would be horrific beyond imagining.
Soon after atom bombs were dropped on Japan, and the United States and the
Soviet Union embarked on a nuclear arms race, a new form of historical
pessimism took root. In this Promethean narrative, humanity has wrested deadly
knowledge from the gods, and, lacking the wisdom to use it responsibly, is
doomed to annihilate itself. In one version, it is not just humanity that is fated to
follow this tragic arc but any advanced intelligence. That explains why we have
never been visited by space aliens, even though the universe must be teeming
with them (the so-called Fermi Paradox, after Enrico Fermi, who first wondered
about it). Once life originates on a planet, it inevitably progresses to intelligence,
civilization, science, nuclear physics, nuclear weapons, and suicidal war,
exterminating itself before it can leave its solar system.
For some intellectuals the invention of nuclear weapons indicts the enterprise
of science—indeed, of modernity itself—because the threat of a holocaust
cancels out whatever gifts science may have bestowed upon us. The indictment
of science seems misplaced, given that since the dawn of the nuclear age, when
mainstream scientists were sidelined from nuclear policy, it’s been physical
scientists who have waged a vociferous campaign to remind the world of the
danger of nuclear war and to urge nations to disarm. Among the illustrious
historic figures are Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Isidor
Rabi, Leo Szilard, Joseph Rotblat, Harold Urey, C. P. Snow, Victor Weisskopf,
Philip Morrison, Herman Feshbach, Henry Kendall, Theodore Taylor, and Carl
Sagan. The movement continues among high-profile scientists today, including
Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Lawrence Krauss, and Max Tegmark.
Scientists have founded the major activist and watchdog organizations, including
the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, the
Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, the Pugwash Conferences, and the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose cover shows the famous Doomsday
Clock, now set at two and a half minutes to midnight.69
Physical scientists, unfortunately, often consider themselves experts in
political psychology, and many seem to embrace the folk theory that the most
effective way to mobilize public opinion is to whip people into a lather of fear
and dread. The Doomsday Clock, despite adorning a journal with “Scientists” in

its title, does not track objective indicators of nuclear security; rather, it’s a
propaganda stunt intended, in the words of its founder, “to preserve civilization
by scaring men into rationality.”70 The clock’s minute hand was farther from
midnight in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, than it was in the far
calmer 2007, in part because the editors, worried that the public had become too
complacent, redefined “doomsday” to include climate change.71 And in their
campaign to shake people out of their apathy, scientific experts have made some
not-so-prescient predictions:
Only the creation of a world government can prevent the impending self-
destruction of mankind.
—Albert Einstein, 195072
I have a firm belief that unless we have more serious and sober thought on
various aspects of the strategic problem . . . we are not going to reach the
year 2000—and maybe not even the year 1965—without a cataclysm.
—Herman Kahn, 196073
Within, at the most, ten years, some of those [nuclear] bombs are going
off. I am saying this as responsibly as I can. That is the certainty.
—C. P. Snow, 196174
I am completely certain—there is not the slightest doubt in my mind—that

by the year 2000, you [students] will all be dead.
—Joseph Weizenbaum, 197675
They are joined by experts such as the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, a
famous exponent of “realism” in international relations, who predicted in 1979:
In my opinion the world is moving ineluctably towards a third world war

—a strategic nuclear war. I do not believe that anything can be done to
prevent it.76
And the journalist Jonathan Schell, whose 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth
ended as follows:

One day—and it is hard to believe that it will not be soon—we will make
our choice. Either we will sink into the final coma and end it all or, as I
trust and believe, we will awaken to the truth of our peril . . . and rise up to
cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons.
This genre of prophecy went out of style when the Cold War ended and
humanity had not sunk into the final coma, despite having failed to create a
world government or to cleanse the Earth of nuclear weapons. To keep the fear at
a boil, activists keep lists of close calls and near-misses intended to show that
Armageddon has always been just a glitch away and that humanity has survived
only by dint of an uncanny streak of luck.77 The lists tend to lump truly
dangerous moments, such as a 1983 NATO exercise that some Soviet officers
almost mistook for an imminent first strike, with smaller lapses and snafus, such
as a 2013 incident in which an off-duty American general who was responsible
for nuclear-armed missiles got drunk and acted boorishly toward women during
a four-day trip to Russia.78 The sequence that would escalate to a nuclear
exchange is never laid out, nor are alternative assessments given which might
put the episodes in context and lessen the terror.79
The message that many antinuclear activists want to convey is “Any day now
we will all die horribly unless the world immediately takes measures which it
has absolutely no chance of taking.” The effect on the public is about what you
would expect: people avoid thinking about the unthinkable, get on with their
lives, and hope the experts are wrong. Mentions of “nuclear war” in books and
newspapers have steadily declined since the 1980s, and journalists give far more
attention to terrorism, inequality, and sundry gaffes and scandals than they do to
a threat to the survival of civilization.80 The world’s leaders are no more moved.
Carl Sagan was a coauthor of the first paper warning of a nuclear winter, and
when he campaigned for a nuclear freeze by trying to generate “fear, then belief,
then response,” he was advised by an arms-control expert, “If you think that the
mere prospect of the end of the world is sufficient to change thinking in
Washington and Moscow you clearly haven’t spent much time in either of those
places.”81
In recent decades predictions of an imminent nuclear catastrophe have shifted
from war to terrorism, such as when the American diplomat John Negroponte
wrote in 2003, “There is a high probability that within two years al-Qaeda will
attempt an attack using a nuclear or other weapon of mass destruction.”82
Though a probabilistic prediction of an event that fails to occur can never be

gainsaid, the sheer number of false predictions (Mueller has more than seventy
in his collection, with deadlines staggered over several decades) suggests that
prognosticators are biased toward scaring people.83 (In 2004, four American
political figures wrote an op-ed on the threat of nuclear terrorism entitled “Our
Hair Is on Fire.”)84 The tactic is dubious. People are easily riled by actual attacks
with guns and homemade bombs into supporting repressive measures like
domestic surveillance or a ban on Muslim immigration. But predictions of a
mushroom cloud on Main Street have aroused little interest in policies to combat
nuclear terrorism, such as an international program to control fissile material.
Such backfiring had been predicted by critics of the first nuclear scare
campaigns. As early as 1945, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed,
“Ultimate perils, however great, have a less lively influence upon the human
imagination than immediate resentments and frictions, however small by
comparison.”85 The historian Paul Boyer found that nuclear alarmism actually
encouraged the arms race by scaring the nation into pursuing more and bigger
bombs, the better to deter the Soviets.86 Even the originator of the Doomsday
Clock, Eugene Rabinowitch, came to regret his movement’s strategy: “While
trying to frighten men into rationality, scientists have frightened many into abject
fear or blind hatred.”87
As we saw with climate change, people may be likelier to acknowledge a

problem when they have reason to think it is solvable than when they are
terrified into numbness and helplessness.88 A positive agenda for removing the
threat of nuclear war from the human condition would embrace several ideas.
The first is to stop telling everyone they’re doomed. The fundamental fact of
the nuclear age is that no atomic weapon has been used since Nagasaki. If the
hands of a clock point to a few minutes to midnight for seventy-two years,
something is wrong with the clock. Now, maybe the world has been blessed with
a miraculous run of good luck—no one will ever know—but before resigning
ourselves to that scientifically disreputable conclusion, we should at least
consider the possibility that systematic features of the international system have
worked against their use. Many antinuclear activists hate this way of thinking
because it seems to take the heat off countries to disarm. But since the nine
nuclear states won’t be scuppering their weapons tomorrow, it behooves us in the
meantime to figure out what has gone right, so we can do more of whatever it is.

Foremost is a historical discovery summarized by the political scientist
Robert Jervis: “The Soviet archives have yet to reveal any serious plans for
unprovoked aggression against Western Europe, not to mention a first strike
against the United States.”89 That means that the intricate weaponry and strategic
doctrines for nuclear deterrence during the Cold War—what one political
scientist called “nuclear metaphysics”—were deterring an attack that the Soviets
had no interest in launching in the first place.90 When the Cold War ended, the
fear of massive invasions and preemptive nuclear strikes faded with it, and (as
we shall see) both sides felt relaxed enough to slash their weapon stockpiles
without even bothering with formal negotiations.91 Contrary to a theory of
technological determinism in which nuclear weapons start a war all by
themselves, the risk very much depends on the state of international relations.
Much of the credit for the absence of nuclear war between great powers must go
to the forces behind the decline of war between great powers (chapter 11).
Anything that reduces the risk of war reduces the risk of nuclear war.
The close calls, too, may not depend on a supernatural streak of good luck.
Several political scientists and historians who have analyzed documents from the
Cuban Missile Crisis, particularly transcripts of John F. Kennedy’s meetings
with his security advisors, have argued that despite the participants’ recollections
about having pulled the world back from the brink of Armageddon, “the odds
that the Americans would have gone to war were next to zero.”92 The records
show that Khrushchev and Kennedy remained in firm control of their
governments, and that each sought a peaceful end to the crisis, ignoring
provocations and leaving themselves several options for backing down.
The hair-raising false alarms and brushes with accidental launches also need
not imply that the gods smiled on us again and again. They might instead show
that the human and technological links in the chain were predisposed to prevent
catastrophes, and were strengthened after each mishap.93 In their report on
nuclear close calls, the Union of Concerned Scientists summarizes the history
with refreshing judiciousness: “The fact that such a launch has not occurred so
far suggests that safety measures work well enough to make the chance of such
an incident small. But it is not zero.”94
Thinking about our predicament in this way allows us to avoid both panic
and complacency. Suppose that the chance of a catastrophic nuclear war
breaking out in a single year is one percent. (This is a generous estimate: the
probability must be less than that of an accidental launch, because escalation
from a single accident to a full-scale war is far from automatic, and in seventy-

two years the number of accidental launches has been zero.)95 That would surely
be an unacceptable risk, because a little algebra shows that the probability of our
going a century without such a catastrophe is less than 37 percent. But if we can
reduce the annual chance of nuclear war to a tenth of a percent, the world’s odds
of a catastrophe-free century increase to 90 percent; at a hundredth of a percent,
the chance rises to 99 percent, and so on.
Fears of runaway nuclear proliferation have also proven to be exaggerated.
Contrary to predictions in the 1960s that there would soon be twenty-five or
thirty nuclear states, fifty years later there are nine.96 During that half-century
four countries have un-proliferated by relinquishing nuclear weapons (South
Africa, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus), and another sixteen pursued them but
thought the better of it, most recently Libya and Iran. For the first time since
1946, no non-nuclear state is known to be developing nuclear weapons.97 True,
the thought of Kim Jong-un with nukes is alarming, but the world has survived
half-mad despots with nuclear weapons before, namely Stalin and Mao, who
were deterred from using them, or, more likely, never felt the need. Keeping a
cool head about proliferation is not just good for one’s mental health. It can
prevent nations from stumbling into disastrous preventive wars, such as the
invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the possible war between Iran and the United
States or Israel that was much discussed around the end of that decade.
Tremulous speculations about terrorists stealing a nuclear weapon or building
one in their garage and smuggling it into the country in a suitcase or shipping
container have also been scrutinized by cooler heads, including Michael Levi in
On Nuclear Terrorism, John Mueller in Atomic Obsession and Overblown,
Richard Muller in Physics for Future Presidents, and Richard Rhodes in Twilight
of the Bombs. Joining them is the statesman Gareth Evans, an authority on
nuclear proliferation and disarmament, who in 2015 delivered the seventieth-
anniversary keynote lecture at the Annual Clock Symposium of the Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists entitled “Restoring Reason to the Nuclear Debate.”
At the risk of sounding complacent—and I am not—I have to say that

[nuclear security], too, would benefit by being conducted a little less
emotionally, and a little more calmly and rationally, than has tended to be
the case.
While the engineering know-how required to build a basic fission
device like the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bomb is readily available, highly
enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium are not at all easily

accessible, and to assemble and maintain—for a long period, out of sight
of the huge intelligence and law enforcement resources that are now being
devoted to this threat worldwide—the team of criminal operatives,
scientists and engineers necessary to acquire the components of, build and
deliver such a weapon would be a formidably difficult undertaking.98
Now that we’ve all calmed down a bit, the next step in a positive agenda for
reducing the nuclear threat is to divest the weapons of their ghoulish glamour,
starting with the Greek tragedy in which they have starred. Nuclear weapons
technology is not the culmination of the ascent of human mastery over the forces
of nature. It is a mess we blundered into because of vicissitudes of history and
that we now must figure out how to extricate ourselves from. The Manhattan
Project grew out of the fear that the Germans were developing a nuclear weapon,
and it attracted scientists for reasons explained by the psychologist George
Miller, who had worked on another wartime research project: “My generation
saw the war against Hitler as a war of good against evil; any able-bodied young
man could stomach the shame of civilian clothes only from an inner conviction
that what he was doing instead would contribute even more to ultimate
victory.”99 Quite possibly, had there been no Nazis, there would be no nukes.
Weapons don’t come into existence just because they are conceivable or
physically possible. All kinds of weapons have been dreamed up that never saw
the light of day: death rays, battlestars, fleets of planes that blanket cities with
poison gas like cropdusters, and cracked schemes for “geophysical warfare”
such as weaponizing the weather, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, the ozone layer,
asteroids, solar flares, and the Van Allen radiation belts.100 In an alternative
history of the 20th century, nuclear weapons might have struck people as equally
bizarre.
Nor do nuclear weapons deserve credit for ending World War II or cementing
the Long Peace that followed it—two arguments that repeatedly come up to
suggest that nuclear weapons are good things rather than bad things. Most
historians today believe that Japan surrendered not because of the atomic
bombings, whose devastation was no greater than that from the firebombings of
sixty other Japanese cities, but because of the entry into the Pacific war of the
Soviet Union, which threatened harsher terms of surrender.101
And contrary to the half-facetious suggestion that The Bomb be awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize, nuclear weapons turn out to be lousy deterrents (except in the
extreme case of deterring existential threats, such as each other).102 Nuclear

weapons are indiscriminately destructive and contaminate wide areas with
radioactive fallout, including the contested territory and, depending on the
weather, the bomber’s own soldiers and citizens. Incinerating massive numbers
of noncombatants would shred the principles of distinction and proportionality
that govern the conduct of war and would constitute the worst war crimes in
history. That can make even politicians squeamish, so a taboo grew up around
the use of nuclear weapons, effectively turning them into bluffs.103 Nuclear states
have been no more effective than non-nuclear states in getting their way in
international standoffs, and in many conflicts, non-nuclear countries or factions
have picked fights with nuclear ones. (In 1982, for example, Argentina seized
the Falkland Islands from the United Kingdom, confident that Margaret Thatcher
would not turn Buenos Aires into a radioactive crater.) It’s not that deterrence
itself is irrelevant: World War II showed that conventional tanks, artillery, and
bombers were already massively destructive, and no nation was eager for an
encore.104
Far from easing the world into a stable equilibrium (the so-called balance of
terror), nuclear weapons can poise it on a knife’s edge. In a crisis, nuclear
weapon states are like an armed homeowner confronting an armed burglar, each
tempted to shoot first to avoid being shot.105 In theory this security dilemma or
Hobbesian trap can be defused if each side has a second-strike capability, such as
missiles in submarines or airborne bombers that can elude a first strike and exact
devastating revenge—the condition of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). But
some debates in nuclear metaphysics raise doubts about whether a second strike
can be guaranteed in every conceivable scenario, and whether a nation that
depended on it might still be vulnerable to nuclear blackmail. So the United
States and Russia maintain the option of “launch on warning,” in which a leader
who is advised that his missiles are under attack can decide in the next few
minutes whether to use them or lose them. This hair trigger, as critics have called
it, could set off a nuclear exchange in response to a false alarm or an accidental
or unauthorized launch. The lists of close calls suggest that the probability is
disconcertingly greater than zero.
Since nuclear weapons needn’t have been invented, and they are useless in
winning wars or keeping the peace, that means they can be uninvented—not in
the sense that the knowledge of how to make them will vanish, but in the sense
that they can be dismantled and no new ones built. It would not be the first time
that a class of weapons has been marginalized or scrapped. The world’s nations
have banned antipersonnel landmines, cluster munitions, and chemical and

biological weapons, and they have seen other high-tech weapons of the day
collapse under the weight of their own absurdity. During World War I the
Germans invented a gargantuan, multistory “supergun” which fired a 200-pound
projectile more than 80 miles, terrifying Parisians with shells that fell from the
sky without warning. The behemoths, the biggest of which was called the Gustav
Gun, were inaccurate and unwieldy, so few of them were built and they were
eventually scuttled. The nuclear skeptics Ken Berry, Patricia Lewis, Benoît
Pelopidas, Nikolai Sokov, and Ward Wilson point out:
Today countries do not race to build their own superguns. . . . There are no
angry diatribes in liberal papers about the horror of these weapons and the
necessity of banning them. There are no realist op-eds in conservative
papers asserting that there is no way to shove the supergun genie back into
the bottle. They were wasteful and ineffective. History is replete with
weapons that were touted as war-winners that were eventually abandoned
because they had little effect.106
Could nuclear weapons go the way of the Gustav Gun? In the late 1950s a
movement arose to Ban the Bomb, and over the decades it escaped its founding
circle of beatniks and eccentric professors and has gone mainstream. Global
Zero, as the goal is now called, was broached in 1986 by Mikhail Gorbachev and
Ronald Reagan, who famously mused, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must
never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons
is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do
away with them entirely?” In 2007 a bipartisan quartet of defense realists (Henry
Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry) wrote an op-ed called
“A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” with the backing of fourteen other former
National Security Advisors and Secretaries of State and Defense.107 In 2009
Barack Obama gave a historic speech in Prague in which he stated “clearly and
with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world
without nuclear weapons,” an aspiration that helped win him the Nobel Peace
Prize.108 It was echoed by his Russian counterpart at the time, Dmitry Medvedev
(though not so much by either one’s successor). Yet in a sense the declaration
was redundant, because the United States and Russia, as signatories of the 1970
Non-Proliferation Treaty, were already committed by its Article VI to
eliminating their nuclear arsenals.109 Also committed are the United Kingdom,
France, and China, the other nuclear states grandfathered in by the treaty. (In a

backhanded acknowledgment that treaties matter, India, Pakistan, and Israel
never signed it, and North Korea withdrew.) The world’s citizens are squarely
behind the movement: large majorities in almost every surveyed country favor
abolition.110
Zero is an attractive number because it expands the nuclear taboo from using
the weapons to possessing them. It also removes any incentive for a nation to
obtain nuclear weapons to protect itself against an enemy’s nuclear weapons. But
getting to zero will not be easy, even with a carefully phased sequence of
negotiation, reduction, and verification.111 Some strategists warn that we
shouldn’t even try to get to zero, because in a crisis the former nuclear powers
might rush to rearm, and the first past the post might launch a pre-emptive strike
out of fear that its enemy would do so first.112 According to this argument, the
world would be better off if the nuclear grandfathers kept a few around as a
deterrent. In either case, the world is very far from zero, or even “a few.” Until
that blessed day comes, there are incremental steps that could bring the day
closer while making the world safer.
The most obvious is to whittle down the size of the arsenal. The process is
well under way. Few people are aware of how dramatically the world has been
dismantling nuclear weapons. Figure 19-1 shows that the United States has
reduced its inventory by 85 percent from its 1967 peak, and now has fewer
nuclear warheads than at any time since 1956.113 Russia, for its part, has reduced
its arsenal by 89 percent from its Soviet-era peak. (Probably even fewer people
realize that about 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from
dismantled nuclear warheads, mostly Soviet.)114 In 2010 both countries signed
the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which commits them
to shrinking their inventories of deployed strategic warheads by two-thirds.115 In
exchange for Congressional approval of the treaty, Obama agreed to a long-term
modernization of the American arsenal, and Russia is modernizing its arsenal as
well, but both countries will continue to reduce the size of their stockpiles at
rates that may even exceed the ones set out in the treaty.116 The barely discernible
layers laminating the top of the stack in the graph represent the other nuclear
powers. The British and French arsenals were smaller to begin with and have
shrunk in half, to 215 and 300, respectively. (China’s has grown slightly from
235 to 260, India’s and Pakistan’s have grown to around 135 apiece, Israel’s is
estimated at around 80, and North Korea’s is unknown but small.)117 As I
mentioned, no additional countries are known to be pursuing nuclear weapons,

and the number possessing fissile material that could be made into bombs has
been reduced over the past twenty-five years from fifty to twenty-four.118
Figure 19-1: Nuclear weapons, 1945–2015

Sources: HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/static/2927, based on data from the Federation of
Atomic Scientists, Kristensen & Norris 2016a, updated in Kristensen 2016; see Kristensen & Norris 2016b
for additional explanation. The counts include weapons that are deployed and those that are stockpiled, but
exclude weapons that are retired and awaiting dismantlement.
Cynics might be unimpressed by a form of progress that still leaves the world
with 10,200 atomic warheads, since, as the 1980s bumper sticker pointed out,
one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. But with 54,000 fewer nuclear
bombs on the planet than there were in 1986, there are far fewer opportunities
for accidents that might ruin people’s whole day, and a precedent has been set for
continuing disarmament. More warheads will be eliminated under the terms of
the New START, and as I mentioned, still more reductions may take place
outside the framework of treaties, which are freighted with legalistic
negotiations and divisive political symbolism. When tensions among great
powers recede (a long-term trend, even if it’s in abeyance today), they quietly
shrink their expensive arsenals.119 Even when rivals are barely speaking, they can
cooperate in a reverse arms race using the tactic that the psycholinguist Charles

Osgood called Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-Reduction (GRIT), in which
one side makes a small unilateral concession with a public invitation that it be
reciprocated.120 If, someday, a combination of these developments pared the
arsenals down to 200 warheads apiece, it would not only dramatically reduce the
chance of an accident but essentially eliminate the possibility of nuclear winter,
the truly existential threat.121
In the near term, the greatest menace of nuclear war comes not so much from
the number of weapons in existence as from the circumstances in which they
might be used. The policy of launch on warning, launch under attack, or hair-
trigger alert is truly the stuff of nightmares. No early warning system can
perfectly distinguish signal from noise, and a president awakened by the
proverbial 3:00 A.M. phone call would have minutes to decide whether to fire his
missiles before they were destroyed in their silos. In theory, he could start World
War III in response to a short circuit, a flock of seagulls, or a bit of malware
from that Bulgarian teenager. In reality, the warning systems are better than that,
and there is no “hair trigger” that automatically launches missiles without human
intervention.122 But when missiles can be launched on short notice, the risks of a
false alarm or an accidental, rogue, or impetuous launch are real.
The original rationale for launch on warning was to thwart a massive first
strike that would destroy every missile in its silo and leave the country unable to
retaliate. But as I mentioned, states can launch weapons from submarines, which
hide in deep water, or from bomber aircraft, which can be sent scrambling,
making the weapons invulnerable to a first strike and poised to exact devastating
revenge. The decision to retaliate could be made in the cold light of day, when
the uncertainty has passed: if a nuclear bomb has been detonated on your
territory, you know it.
Launch on warning, then, is unnecessary for deterrence and unacceptably
dangerous. Most nuclear security analysts recommend—no, insist—that nuclear
states take their missiles off hair-trigger alert and put them on a long fuse.123
Obama, Nunn, Shultz, George W. Bush, Robert McNamara, and several former
Commanders of Strategic Command and Directors of the National Security
Agency agree.124 Some, like William Perry, recommend scrapping the land-based
leg of the nuclear triad altogether and relying on submarines and bombers for
deterrence, since silo-based missiles are sitting ducks which tempt a leader to
use them while they can. So with the fate of the world at stake, why would
anyone want to keep missiles in silos on hair-trigger alert? Some nuclear
metaphysicians argue that in a crisis, the act of re-alerting de-alerted missiles

would be a provocation. Others note that because silo-based missiles are more
reliable and accurate, they are worth safeguarding, because they can be used not
just to deter a war but to win one. And that brings us to another way to reduce
the risks of nuclear war.
It’s hard for anyone with a conscience to believe that their country is
prepared to use nuclear weapons for any purpose other than deterring a nuclear
attack. But that is the official policy of the United States, the United Kingdom,
France, Russia, and Pakistan, all of whom have declared they might launch a
nuclear weapon if they or their allies have been massively attacked with non-
nuclear weapons. Apart from violating any concept of proportionality, a first-use
policy is dangerous, because a non-nuclear attacker might be tempted to escalate
to nuclear pre-emptively. Even if it didn’t, once it was nuked it might retaliate
with a nuclear strike of its own.
So a common-sense way to reduce the threat of nuclear war is to announce a
policy of No First Use.125 In theory, this would eliminate the possibility of
nuclear war altogether: if no one uses a weapon first, they’ll never be used. In
practice, it would remove some of the temptation of a pre-emptive strike.
Nuclear weapon states could all agree to No First Use in a treaty; they could get
there by GRIT (with incremental commitments like never attacking civilian
targets, never attacking a non-nuclear state, and never attacking a target that
could be destroyed by conventional means); or they could simply adopt it
unilaterally, which is in their own interests.126 The nuclear taboo has already
reduced the deterrent value of a Maybe First Use policy, and the declarant could
still protect itself with conventional forces and with a second-strike capability:
nuclear tit for tat.
No First Use seems like a no-brainer, and Barack Obama came close to
adopting it in 2016, but was talked out of it at the last minute by his advisors.127
The timing wasn’t right, they said; it might signal weakness to a newly
obstreperous Russia, China, and North Korea, and it might scare nervous allies
who now depend on the American “nuclear umbrella” into seeking nuclear
weapons of their own, particularly with Donald Trump threatening to cut back
on American support of its coalition partners. In the long term, these tensions
may subside, and No First Use may be considered once more.
Nuclear weapons won’t be abolished anytime soon, and certainly not by the
original target date of the Global Zero movement, 2030. In his 2009 Prague
speech Obama said that the goal “will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in
my lifetime,” which dates it to well after 2055 (see figure 5-1). “It will take

patience and persistence,” he advised, and recent developments in the United
States and Russia confirm that we’ll need plenty of both.
But the pathway has been laid out. If nuclear warheads continue to be
dismantled faster than they are built, if they are taken off a hair trigger and
guaranteed not to be used first, and if the trend away from interstate war
continues, then by the second half of the century we could end up with small,
secure arsenals kept only for mutual deterrence. After a few decades they might
deter themselves out of a job. At that point they would seem ludicrous to our
grandchildren, who will beat them into plowshares once and for all. During this
climbdown we may never reach a point at which the chance of a catastrophe is
zero. But each step down can lower the risk, until it is in the range of the other
threats to our species’ immortality, like asteroids, supervolcanoes, or an Artificial
Intelligence that turns us into paper clips.

CHAPTER 20
THE FUTURE OF PROGRESS
S ince the Enlightenment unfolded in the late 18th century, life expectancy
across the world has risen from 30 to 71, and in the more fortunate
countries to 81.1 When the Enlightenment began, a third of the children
born in the richest parts of the world died before their fifth birthday; today, that
fate befalls 6 percent of the children in the poorest parts. Their mothers, too,
were freed from tragedy: one percent in the richest countries did not live to see
their newborns, a rate triple that of the poorest countries today, which continues
to fall. In those poor countries, lethal infectious diseases are in steady decline,
some of them afflicting just a few dozen people a year, soon to follow smallpox
into extinction.
The poor may not always be with us. The world is about a hundred times
wealthier today than it was two centuries ago, and the prosperity is becoming
more evenly distributed across the world’s countries and people. The proportion
of humanity living in extreme poverty has fallen from almost 90 percent to less
than 10 percent, and within the lifetimes of most of the readers of this book it
could approach zero. Catastrophic famine, never far away in most of human
history, has vanished from most of the world, and undernourishment and
stunting are in steady decline. A century ago, richer countries devoted one
percent of their wealth to supporting children, the poor, and the aged; today they
spend almost a quarter of it. Most of their poor today are fed, clothed, and
sheltered, and have luxuries like smartphones and air-conditioning that used to
be unavailable to anyone, rich or poor. Poverty among racial minorities has
fallen, and poverty among the elderly has plunged.
The world is giving peace a chance. War between countries is obsolescent,
and war within countries is absent from five-sixths of the world’s surface. The
proportion of people killed annually in wars is less than a quarter of what it was

in the 1980s, a seventh of what it was in the early 1970s, an eighteenth of what it
was in the early 1950s, and a half a percent of what it was during World War II.
Genocides, once common, have become rare. In most times and places,
homicides kill far more people than wars, and homicide rates have been falling
as well. Americans are half as likely to be murdered as they were two dozen
years ago. In the world as a whole, people are seven-tenths as likely to be
murdered as they were eighteen years ago.
Life has been getting safer in every way. Over the course of the 20th century,
Americans became 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car accident, 88
percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to
die in a plane crash, 59 percent less likely to fall to their deaths, 92 percent less
likely to die by fire, 90 percent less likely to drown, 92 percent less likely to be
asphyxiated, and 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job.2 Life in other rich
countries is even safer, and life in poorer countries will get safer as they get
richer.
People are getting not just healthier, richer, and safer but freer. Two centuries
ago a handful of countries, embracing one percent of the world’s people, were
democratic; today, two-thirds of the world’s countries, embracing two-thirds of
its people, are. Not long ago half the world’s countries had laws that
discriminated against racial minorities; today more countries have policies that
favor their minorities than policies that discriminate against them. At the turn of
the 20th century, women could vote in just one country; today they can vote in
every country where men can vote save one. Laws that criminalize
homosexuality continue to be stricken down, and attitudes toward minorities,
women, and gay people are becoming steadily more tolerant, particularly among
the young, a portent of the world’s future. Hate crimes, violence against women,
and the victimization of children are all in long-term decline, as is the
exploitation of children for their labor.
As people are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer, they are also
becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter. Early in the 19th century,
12 percent of the world could read and write; today 83 percent can. Literacy and
the education it enables will soon be universal, for girls as well as boys. The
schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by
thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors.
People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer, and wiser lives
to good use. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they used to, have
three weeks of paid vacation, lose 43 fewer hours to housework, and spend just a

third of their paycheck on necessities rather than five-eighths. They are using
their leisure and disposable income to travel, spend time with their children,
connect with loved ones, and sample the world’s cuisine, knowledge, and
culture. As a result of these gifts, people worldwide have become happier. Even
Americans, who take their good fortune for granted, are “pretty happy” or
happier, and the younger generations are becoming less unhappy, lonely,
depressed, drug-addicted, and suicidal.
As societies have become healthier, wealthier, freer, happier, and better
educated, they have set their sights on the most pressing global challenges. They
have emitted fewer pollutants, cleared fewer forests, spilled less oil, set aside
more preserves, extinguished fewer species, saved the ozone layer, and peaked in
their consumption of oil, farmland, timber, paper, cars, coal, and perhaps even
carbon. For all their differences, the world’s nations came to a historic agreement
on climate change, as they did in previous years on nuclear testing, proliferation,
security, and disarmament. Nuclear weapons, since the extraordinary
circumstances of the closing days of World War II, have not been used in the
seventy-two years they have existed. Nuclear terrorism, in defiance of forty
years of expert predictions, has never happened. The world’s nuclear stockpiles
have been reduced by 85 percent, with more reductions to come, and testing has
ceased (except by the tiny rogue regime in Pyongyang) and proliferation has
frozen. The world’s two most pressing problems, then, though not yet solved, are
solvable: practicable long-term agendas have been laid out for eliminating
nuclear weapons and for mitigating climate change.
For all the bleeding headlines, for all the crises, collapses, scandals, plagues,
epidemics, and existential threats, these are accomplishments to savor. The
Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, people have used
knowledge to enhance human flourishing. Scientists have exposed the workings
of matter, life, and mind. Inventors have harnessed the laws of nature to defy
entropy, and entrepreneurs have made their innovations affordable. Lawmakers
have made people better off by discouraging acts that are individually beneficial
but collectively harmful. Diplomats have done the same with nations. Scholars
have perpetuated the treasury of knowledge and augmented the power of reason.
Artists have expanded the circle of sympathy. Activists have pressured the
powerful to overturn repressive measures, and their fellow citizens to change
repressive norms. All these efforts have been channeled into institutions that
have allowed us to circumvent the flaws of human nature and empower our
better angels.

At the same time . . .
Seven hundred million people in the world today live in extreme poverty. In
the regions where they are concentrated, life expectancy is less than 60, and
almost a quarter of the people are undernourished. Almost a million children die
of pneumonia every year, half a million from diarrhea or malaria, and hundreds
of thousands from measles and AIDS. A dozen wars are raging in the world,
including one in which more than 250,000 people have died, and in 2015 at least
ten thousand people were slaughtered in genocides. More than two billion
people, almost a third of humanity, are oppressed in autocratic states. Almost a
fifth of the world’s people lack a basic education; almost a sixth are illiterate.
Every year five million people are killed in accidents, and more than 400,000 are
murdered. Almost 300 million people in the world are clinically depressed, of
whom almost 800,000 will die by suicide this year.
The rich countries of the developed world are by no means immune. The
lower middle classes have seen their incomes rise by less than 10 percent in two
decades. A fifth of the American population still believes that women should
return to traditional roles, and a tenth is opposed to interracial dating. The
country suffers from more than three thousand hate crimes a year, and more than
fifteen thousand homicides. Americans lose two hours a day to housework, and
about a quarter of them feel they are always rushed. More than two-thirds of
Americans deny that they are very happy, around the same proportion as seventy
years ago, and both women and the largest demographic age group have become
unhappier over time. Every year around 40,000 Americans become so
desperately unhappy that they take their own lives.
And of course the problems that span the entire planet are formidable. Before
the century is out, it will have to accommodate another two billion people. A
hundred million hectares of tropical forest were cut down in the previous decade.
Marine fishes have declined by almost 40 percent, and thousands of species are
threatened with extinction. Carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen,
and particulate matter continue to be spewed into the atmosphere, together with
38 billion tons of CO2 every year, which, if left unchecked, threaten to raise
global temperatures by two to four degrees Celsius. And the world has more than
10,000 nuclear weapons distributed among nine countries.
The facts in the last three paragraphs, of course, are the same as the ones in
the first eight; I’ve simply read the numbers from the bad rather than the good
end of the scales or subtracted the hopeful percentages from 100. My point in
presenting the state of the world in these two ways is not to show that I can focus

on the space in the glass as well as on the beverage. It’s to reiterate that progress
is not utopia, and that there is room—indeed, an imperative—for us to strive to
continue that progress. If we can sustain the trends in the first eight paragraphs
by deploying knowledge to enhance flourishing, the numbers in the last three
paragraphs should shrink. Whether they will ever get to zero is a problem we can
worry about when we get closer. Even if some do, we will surely discover more
harms to rectify and new ways to enrich human experience. The Enlightenment
is an ongoing process of discovery and betterment.
How reasonable is the hope for continuing progress? That’s the question I’ll
consider in this last chapter in the Progress section, before switching in the
remainder of the book to the ideals that are necessary to realize the hope.
I’ll start with the case for continuing progress. We began the book with a non-
mystical, non-Whiggish, non-Panglossian explanation for why progress is
possible, namely that the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment set in
motion the process of using knowledge to improve the human condition. At the
time skeptics could reasonably say, “It will never work.” But more than two
centuries later we can say that it has worked: we have seen six dozen graphs that
have vindicated the hope for progress by charting ways in which the world has
been getting better.
Lines that plot good things over time cannot automatically be extrapolated
rightward and upward, but with many of the graphs that’s a good bet. It’s
unlikely we’ll wake up one morning and find that our buildings are more
flammable, or that people have changed their minds about interracial dating or
gay teachers keeping their jobs. Developing countries are unlikely to shut down
their schools and health clinics or stop building new ones just as they are starting
to enjoy their fruits.
To be sure, changes that take place on the time scale of journalism will
always show ups and downs. Solutions create new problems, which take time to
solve in their term. But when we stand back from these blips and setbacks, we
see that the indicators of human progress are cumulative: none is cyclical, with
gains reliably canceled by losses.3
Better still, improvements build on one another. A richer world can better
afford to protect the environment, police its gangs, strengthen its social safety
nets, and teach and heal its citizens. A better-educated and connected world cares
more about the environment, indulges fewer autocrats, and starts fewer wars.

The technological advances that have propelled this progress should only
gather speed. Stein’s Law continues to obey Davies’s Corollary (Things that
can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think), and genomics,
synthetic biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, materials science, data
science, and evidence-based policy analysis are flourishing. We know that
infectious diseases can be extinguished, and many are slated for the past tense.
Chronic and degenerative diseases are more recalcitrant, but incremental
progress in many (such as cancer) has been accelerating, and breakthroughs in
others (such as Alzheimer’s) are likely.
So too with moral progress. History tells us that barbaric customs can not
only be reduced but essentially abolished, lingering at most in a few benighted
backwaters. Not even the most worrying worrywart expects a comeback for
human sacrifice, cannibalism, eunuchs, harems, chattel slavery, dueling, family
feuding, foot-binding, heretic burning, witch dunking, public torture-executions,
infanticide, freak shows, or laughing at the insane. While we can’t predict which
of today’s barbarisms will go the way of slave auctions and autos-da-fé, heading
that way are capital punishment, the criminalization of homosexuality, and male-
only suffrage and education. Given a few decades, who’s to say they could not
be followed by female genital mutilation, honor killings, child labor, child
marriage, totalitarianism, nuclear weapons, and interstate war?
Other blights are harder to extirpate because they depend on the behavior of
billions of individuals with all their human stains, rather than policies adopted by
entire countries at a stroke. But even if they are not wiped off the face of the
earth, they can be reduced further, including violence against women and
children, hate crimes, civil war, and homicide.
I can present this optimistic vision without blushing because it is not a naïve
reverie or sunny aspiration. It’s the view of the future that is most grounded in
historical reality, the one with the cold, hard facts on its side. It depends only on
the possibility that what has already happened will continue to happen. As
Thomas Macaulay reflected in 1830, “We cannot absolutely prove that those are
in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen
our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent
reason. . . . On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement
behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”4

In chapters 10 and 19 I examined replies to Macaulay’s question which foresaw
a catastrophic end to all that progress in the form of climate change, nuclear war,
and other existential threats. In the rest of this one I’ll consider two 21st-century
developments that fall short of global catastrophe but still have been taken to
suggest that our best days are behind us.
The first raincloud is economic stagnation. As the essayist Logan Pearsall
Smith observed, “There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good
income is of no avail.” Wealth provides not just the obvious things that money
can buy, such as nutrition, health, education, and safety, but also, over the long
term, spiritual goods such as peace, freedom, human rights, happiness,
environmental protection, and other transcendent values.5
The Industrial Revolution ushered in more than two centuries of economic
growth, especially during the period between World War II and the early 1970s,
when the Gross World Product per capita grew at a rate of around 3.4 percent a
year, doubling every twenty years.6 In the late 20th century, eco-pessimists
warned that economic growth was unsustainable because it exhausted resources
and polluted the planet. But in the 21st, the opposite fear has arisen: that the
future promises not too much economic growth but too little. Since the early
1970s, the annual rate of growth has fallen by more than half, to around 1.4
percent.7 Growth over the long term is determined largely by productivity: the
value of goods and services that a country can produce per dollar of investment
and person-hour of labor. Productivity in turn depends on technological
sophistication: the skills of the country’s workers and the efficiency of its
machinery, management, and infrastructure. From the 1940s through the 1960s,
productivity in the United States grew at an annual rate of around 2 percent,
which would double productivity every thirty-five years. Since then it has grown
at a rate of around 0.6 percent, which would require more than a century to
double.8
Some economists fear that low rates of growth are the new normal.
According to “the new secular stagnation hypothesis” analyzed by Lawrence
Summers, even those paltry rates can be maintained (in conjunction with low
unemployment) only if central banks set interest rates at zero or negative values,
which could lead to financial instability and other problems.9 In a period of
rising income inequality, secular stagnation could leave a majority of people
with static or falling incomes for the foreseeable future. If economies stop
growing, things could get ugly.

No one really knows why productivity growth slacked off in the early 1970s
or how to bring it back up.10 Some economists, like Robert Gordon in his 2016
The Rise and Fall of American Growth, point to demographic and
macroeconomic headwinds, such as fewer working people supporting more
retirees, a leveling off in the expansion of education, a rise in government debt,
and the increase in inequality (which depresses demand for goods and services,
because richer people spend less of their incomes than poorer people).11 Gordon
adds that the most transformative inventions may already have been invented.
The first half of the 20th century revolutionized the home with electricity, water,
sewerage, telephones, and motorized appliances. Since then homes haven’t
changed nearly as much. An electronic bidet with a heated seat is nice, but it’s
not like going from an outhouse to a flush toilet.
Another explanation is cultural: America has lost its mojo.12 Workers in
depressed regions no longer pick up and move to vibrant ones but collect
disability insurance and drop out of the labor force. A precautionary principle
prevents anyone from trying anything for the first time. Capitalism has lost its
capitalists: too much investment is tied up in “gray capital,” controlled by
institutional managers who seek safe returns for retirees. Ambitious young
people want to be artists and professionals, not entrepreneurs. Investors and the
government no longer back moonshots. As the entrepreneur Peter Thiel
lamented, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.”
Whatever its causes, economic stagnation is at the root of many other
problems and poses a significant challenge for 21st-century policymakers. Does
that mean that progress was nice while it lasted, but now it’s over? Unlikely! For
one thing, growth that is slower than it was during the postwar glory days is still
growth—indeed, exponential growth. Gross World Product has increased in
fifty-one of the last fifty-five years, which means that in each of those fifty-one
years (including the last six), the world got richer than it was the year before.13
Also, secular stagnation is largely a first-world problem. Though it’s a
tremendous challenge to get the most highly developed countries to become even
more highly developed, year after year after year, the less developed countries
have a lot of catching up to do, and they can grow at high rates as they adopt the
richer countries’ best practices (chapter 8). The greatest ongoing progress in the
world today is the rise of billions of people out of extreme poverty, and that
ascent need not be capped by the American and European malaise.
Also, technologically driven productivity growth has a way of sneaking up
on the world.14 People take a while to figure out how to put new technologies to

their best use, and industries need time to retool their plants and practices around
them. Electrification, to take a prominent example, started in the 1890s, but it
took forty years before economists saw the boost in productivity that everyone
was waiting for. The personal computer revolution also had a sleeper effect
before unleashing productivity growth in the 1990s (which is not surprising to
early adopters like me, who lost many an afternoon in the 1980s to installing a
mouse or getting a dot matrix printer to do italics). Knowledge about how to get
the most out of 21st-century technologies may be building up behind dams that
will soon burst.
Unlike practitioners of the dismal science, technology watchers are adamant
that we are entering an age of abundance.15 Bill Gates has compared the forecast
of technological stagnation to the (apocryphal) prediction in 1913 that war was
obsolete.16 “Imagine a world of nine billion people,” write the tech entrepreneur
Peter Diamandis and the journalist Steven Kotler, “with clean water, nutritious
food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and
nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy.”17 Their vision comes not from fantasies out of
The Jetsons but from technologies that are already working, or are very close.
Start with the resource that, together with information, is the only way to
stave off entropy, and which literally powers everything else in the economy:
energy. As we saw in chapter 10, fourth-generation nuclear power in the form of
small modular reactors can be passively safe, proliferation-proof, waste-free,
mass-produced, low-maintenance, indefinitely fueled, and cheaper than coal.
Solar panels made with carbon nanotubes can be a hundred times as efficient as
current photovoltaics, continuing Moore’s Law for solar energy. Their energy
can be stored in liquid metal batteries: in theory, a battery the size of a shipping
container could power a neighborhood; one the size of a Walmart could power a
small city. A smart grid could collect the energy where and when it’s generated
and distribute it where and when it’s needed. Technology could even breathe
new life into fossil fuels: a new design for a zero-emissions gas-fired plant uses
the exhaust to drive a turbine directly, rather than wastefully boiling water, and
then sequesters the CO2 underground.18
Digital manufacturing, combining nanotechnology, 3-D printing, and rapid
prototyping, can produce composites that are stronger and cheaper than steel and
concrete and that can be printed on site for construction of houses and factories
in the developing world. Nanofiltration can purify water of pathogens, metals,
even salt. High-tech outhouses require no hookups and turn human waste into
fertilizer, drinking water, and energy. Precision irrigation and smart grids for

water, using cheap sensors and AI in chips, could reduce water usage by a third
to a half. Rice that is genetically modified to replace its inefficient C3
photosynthesis pathway with the C4 pathway of corn and sugarcane has a 50
percent greater yield, uses half the water and far less fertilizer, and tolerates
warmer temperatures.19 Genetically modified algae can pull carbon out of the air
and secrete biofuels. Drones can monitor miles of remote pipelines and railways,
and can deliver medical supplies and spare parts to isolated communities. Robots
can take over jobs that humans hate, like mining coal, stocking shelves, and
making beds.
In the medical realm, a lab-on-a-chip could perform a liquid biopsy and
detect any of hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood or saliva. Artificial
intelligence, crunching big data on genomes, symptoms, and histories, will
diagnose ailments more accurately than the sixth sense of doctors, and will
prescribe drugs that mesh with our unique biochemistries. Stem cells could
correct autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, and
could populate cadaver organs, organs grown in animals, or 3D-printed models
with our own tissue. RNA interference could silence pesky genes like the one
that regulates the fat insulin receptor. Cancer therapies can be narrowcasted to
the unique genetic signature of a tumor instead of poisoning every dividing cell
in the body.
Global education could be transformed. The world’s knowledge has already
been made available in encyclopedias, lectures, exercises, and datasets to the
billions of people with a smartphone. Individualized instruction can be provided
over the Web to children in the developing world by volunteers (the “Granny
Cloud”) and to learners anywhere by artificially intelligent tutors.
The innovations in the pipeline are not just a list of cool ideas. They fall out
of an overarching historical development that has been called the New
Renaissance and the Second Machine Age.20 Whereas the First Machine Age
that emerged out of the Industrial Revolution was driven by energy, the second is
driven by the other anti-entropic resource, information. Its revolutionary promise
comes from the supercharged use of information to guide every other
technology, and from exponential improvement in the technologies of
information themselves, like computer power and genomics.
The promise of the new machine age also comes from innovations in the
process of innovation itself. One is the democratization of platforms for
invention, such as application program interfaces and 3-D printers, which can
make anyone a high-tech do-it-yourselfer. Another is the rise of

technophilanthropists. Instead of just writing checks for the naming rights to
concert halls, they apply their ingenuity, connections, and demand for results to
the solution of global problems. A third is the economic empowerment of
billions of people through smartphones, online education, and microfinancing.
Among the world’s bottom billion are a million people with a genius-level IQ.
Just think what the world would look like if their brainpower were put to full
use!
Will the Second Machine Age kick economies out of their stagnation? It’s not
certain, because economic growth depends not just on the available technology
but on how well a nation’s financial and human capital are deployed to use it.
Even if the technologies are put to full use, their benefits may not be registered
in standard economic measures. The comedian Pat Paulsen once observed, “We
live in a country where even the national product is gross.” Most economists
agree that GNP (or its close relative, GDP) is a crude index of economic
thriving. It has the virtue of being easy to measure, but because it’s just a tally of
the money that changes hands in the production of goods and services, it’s not
the same as the bounty that people enjoy. The problem of consumer surplus or
the paradox of value has always bedeviled the quantification of prosperity
(chapters 8 and 9), and modern economies are making it more acute.
Joel Mokyr notes that “aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its
derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat
economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector.
Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they
work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to
contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is
very large.”21 The dematerialization of life that we examined in chapter 10, for
example, undermines the observation that a 2015 home does not look much
different from a 1965 home. The big difference lies in what we don’t see because
it’s been made obsolete by tablets and smartphones, together with new wonders
like streaming video and Skype. In addition to dematerialization, information
technology has launched a process of demonetization.22 Many things that people
used to pay for are now essentially free, including classified ads, news,
encyclopedias, maps, cameras, long-distance calls, and the overhead of brick-
and-mortar retailers. People are enjoying these goods more than ever, but they
have vanished from GDP.
Human welfare has parted company from GDP in a second way. As modern
societies become more humanistic, they devote more of their wealth to forms of

human betterment that are not priced in the marketplace. A recent Wall Street
Journal article on economic stagnation noted that a growing share of innovative
effort has been directed toward cleaner air, safer cars, and drugs for “orphan
diseases” that each affect fewer than 200,000 people nationwide.23 For that
matter, health care in general has risen from 7 percent of research and
development in 1960 to 25 percent in 2007. The financial journalist who wrote
the piece noted, almost in sadness, that “drugs are symptomatic of the rising
value affluent societies place on human life. . . . Health research is displacing
R&D that could have gone toward more mundane consumer products.
Indeed, . . . the rising value of human life virtually dictates slower growth in
regular consumer goods and services—and they constitute the bulk of measured
GDP.” A natural interpretation is that this tradeoff is evidence for the
acceleration of progress, not the stagnation of progress. Modern societies, unlike
the miserly comedian Jack Benny, have a quick reply to the mugger’s demand,
“Your money or your life.”
A very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to

undermine its Enlightenment foundations. The second decade of the 21st century
has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more
accurately, authoritarian populism.24 Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of
a country’s “people” (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a
strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience.
Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human
nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against
the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By
focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection
of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to
acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it
denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas,
including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-
serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations
in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional
checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors.
Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk
theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the
case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right.

Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe
but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for
progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation
was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed,
and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced
tangible goods for local consumption and for export.
Chapter 23 will probe the intellectual roots of authoritarian populism more
deeply; here I will concentrate on its recent rise and possible future. In 2016
populist parties (mostly on the right) attracted 13.2 percent of the vote in the
preceding European parliamentary elections (up from 5.1 percent in the 1960s)
and entered the governing coalitions of eleven countries, including the
leadership of Hungary and Poland.25 Even when they are not in power, populist
parties can press their agendas, notably by catalyzing the 2016 Brexit
referendum in which 52 percent of Britons voted to leave the European Union.
And in that year Donald Trump was elected to the American presidency with an
Electoral College victory, though with a minority of the popular vote (46 percent
to Hillary Clinton’s 48 percent). Nothing captures the tribalistic and backward-
looking spirit of populism better than Trump’s campaign slogan: Make America
Great Again.
In writing the chapters on progress, I resisted pressure from readers of earlier
drafts to end each one by warning, “But all this progress is threatened if Donald
Trump gets his way.” Threatened it certainly is. Whether or not 2017 really
represents a turning point in history, it’s worth reviewing the threats, if only to
understand the nature of the progress they threaten.26
Life and Health have been expanded in large part by vaccination and
other well-vetted interventions, and among the conspiracy theories that
Trump has endorsed is the long-debunked claim that preservatives in
vaccines cause autism. The gains have also been secured by broad access to
medical care, and he has pushed for legislation that would withdraw health
insurance from tens of millions of Americans, a reversal of the trend toward
beneficial social spending.
Worldwide improvements in Wealth have come from a globalized
economy, powered in large part by international trade. Trump is a
protectionist who sees international trade as a zero-sum contest between
countries, and is committed to tearing up international trade agreements.
Growth in Wealth will also be driven by technological innovation,
education, infrastructure, an increase in the spending power of the lower

and middle classes, constraints on cronyism and plutocracy that distort
market competition, and regulations on finance that reduce the likelihood of
bubbles and crashes. In addition to being hostile to trade, Trump is
indifferent to technology and education and an advocate of regressive tax
cuts on the wealthy, while appointing corporate and financial tycoons to his
cabinet who are indiscriminately hostile to regulation.
In capitalizing on concerns about Inequality, Trump has demonized
immigrants and trade partners while ignoring the major disrupter of lower-
middle-class jobs, technological change. He has also opposed the measures
that most successfully mitigate its harms, namely progressive taxation and
social spending.
The Environment has benefited from regulations on air and water
pollution that have coexisted with growth in population, GDP, and travel.
Trump believes that environmental regulation is economically destructive;
worst of all, he has called climate change a hoax and announced a
withdrawal from the historic Paris agreement.
Safety, too, has been dramatically improved by federal regulations,
toward which Trump and his allies are contemptuous. While Trump has
cultivated a reputation for law and order, he is viscerally uninterested in
evidence-based policy that would distinguish effective crime-prevention
measures from useless tough talk.
The postwar Peace has been cemented by trade, Democracy,
international agreements and organizations, and norms against conquest.
Trump has vilified international trade and has threatened to defy
international agreements and weaken international organizations. Trump is
an admirer of Vladimir Putin, who reversed the democratization of Russia,
tried to undermine democracy in the United States and Europe with
cyberattacks, helped prosecute the most destructive war of the 21st century
in Syria, fomented smaller wars in Ukraine and Georgia, and defied the
postwar taboo against conquest in his annexation of Crimea. Several
members of Trump’s administration secretly colluded with Russia in an
effort to lift sanctions against it, undermining a major enforcement
mechanism in the outlawry of war.
Democracy depends both on explicit constitutional protections, such
as freedom of the press, and on shared norms, in particular that political
leadership is determined by the rule of law and nonviolent political
competition rather than a charismatic leader’s will to power. Trump

proposed to relax libel laws against journalists, encouraged violence against
his critics at his rallies, would not commit to respecting the outcome of the
2016 election if it went against him, tried to discredit the popular vote count
that did go against him, threatened to imprison his opponent in the election,
and attacked the legitimacy of the judicial system when it challenged his
decisions—all hallmarks of a dictator. Globally, the resilience of democracy
depends in part on its prestige in the community of nations, and Trump has
praised autocrats in Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, Thailand, Saudi Arabia,
and Egypt while denigrating democratic allies such as Germany.
The ideals of tolerance, equality, and Equal Rights took big symbolic
hits during his campaign and early administration. Trump demonized
Hispanic immigrants, proposed banning Muslim immigration altogether
(and tried to impose a partial ban once he was elected), repeatedly
demeaned women, tolerated vulgar expressions of racism and sexism at his
rallies, accepted support from white supremacist groups and equated them
with their opponents, and appointed a strategist and an attorney general who
are hostile to the civil rights movement.
The ideal of Knowledge—that one’s opinions should be based on
justified true beliefs—has been mocked by Trump’s repetition of ludicrous
conspiracy theories: that Obama was born in Kenya, Senator Ted Cruz’s
father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, thousands of New
Jersey Muslims celebrated 9/11, Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered,
Obama had his phones tapped, millions of illegal voters cost him the
popular vote, and literally dozens of others. The fact-checking site
PolitiFact judged that an astonishing 69 percent of the public statements by
Trump they checked were “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire” (their
term for outrageous lies, from the children’s taunt “Liar, liar, pants on
fire”).27 All politicians bend the truth, and all sometimes lie (since all
human beings bend the truth and sometimes lie), but Trump’s barefaced
assertion of canards that can instantly be debunked (such as that he won the
election in a landslide) shows that he sees public discourse not as a means
of finding common ground based on objective reality but as a weapon with
which to project dominance and humiliate rivals.
Most frighteningly, Trump has pushed back against the norms that
have protected the world against the possible Existential Threat of nuclear
war. He questioned the taboo on using nuclear weapons, tweeted about
resuming a nuclear arms race, mused about encouraging the proliferation of

weapons to additional countries, sought to overturn the agreement that
prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and taunted Kim Jong-un
about a possible nuclear exchange with North Korea. Worst of all, the chain
of command gives an American president enormous discretion over the use
of nuclear weapons in a crisis, on the tacit assumption that no president
would act rashly on such a grave matter. Yet Trump has a temperament that
is notoriously impulsive and vindictive.
Not even a congenital optimist can see a pony in this Christmas stocking. But
will Donald Trump (and authoritarian populism more generally) really undo a
quarter of a millennium of progress? There are reasons not to take poison just
yet. If a movement has proceeded for decades or centuries, there are probably
systematic forces behind it, and many stakeholders with an interest in its not
being precipitously reversed.
By the design of the Founders, the American presidency is not a rotating
monarchy. The president presides over a distributed network of power
(denigrated by populists as the “deep state”) that outlasts individual leaders and
carries out the business of government under real-world constraints which can’t
easily be erased by populist applause lines or the whims of the man at the top. It
includes legislators who have to respond to constituents and lobbyists, judges
with reputations of probity to uphold, and executives, bureaucrats, and
functionaries who are responsible for the missions of their departments. Trump’s
authoritarian instincts are subjecting the institutions of American democracy to a
stress test, but so far it has pushed back on a number of fronts. Cabinet
secretaries have publicly repudiated various quips, tweets, and stink bombs;
courts have struck down unconstitutional measures; senators and congressmen
have defected from his party to vote down destructive legislation; Justice
Department and Congressional committees are investigating the administration’s
ties to Russia; an FBI chief has publicly called out Trump’s attempt to intimidate
him (raising talk about impeachment for obstruction of justice); and his own
staff, appalled at what they see, regularly leak compromising facts to the press—
all in the first six months of the administration.
Also boxing a president in are state and local governments, which are closer
to the facts on the ground; the governments of other nations, which cannot be
expected to put a high priority on making America great again; and even most
corporations, which benefit from peace, prosperity, and stability. Globalization in
particular is a tide that is impossible for any ruler to order back. Many of a
country’s problems are inherently global, including migration, pandemics,

terrorism, cybercrime, nuclear proliferation, rogue states, and the environment.
Pretending they don’t exist is not tenable forever, and they can be solved only
through international cooperation. Nor can the benefits of globalization—more
affordable goods, larger markets for exports, the reduction in global poverty—be
denied indefinitely. And with the Internet and inexpensive travel, there will be
no stopping the flow of people and ideas (especially, as we will see, among
younger people). As for the battle against truth and fact, over the long run they
have a built-in advantage: when you stop believing in them, they don’t go
away.28
The deeper question is whether the rise of populist movements, whatever

damage they do in the short term, represents the shape of things to come—
whether, as a recent Boston Globe editorial lamented/gloated, “The
Enlightenment had a good run.”29 Do the events around 2016 really imply that
the world is headed back to the Middle Ages? As with climate change skeptics
who claim to be vindicated by a nippy morning, it’s easy to overinterpret recent
events.
For one thing, the latest elections are not referenda on the Enlightenment. In
the American political duopoly, any Republican candidate starts from a partisan
floor of at least 45 percent of the votes in a two-way race, and Trump was
defeated in the popular vote 46–48 percent, while benefiting from electoral
shenanigans and from campaigning misjudgments on Clinton’s part. And Barack
Obama—who in his farewell speech actually credited the Enlightenment for the
“essential spirit of this country”—left office with an approval rating of 58
percent, above average for departing presidents.30 Trump entered office with a
rating of 40 percent, the lowest ever for an incoming president, and during his
first seven months it sank to 34 percent, barely more than half of the average
rating of the nine previous presidents at the same point in their terms.31
European elections, too, are not depth-soundings for a commitment to
cosmopolitan humanism but reactions to a bundle of emotionally charged issues
of the day. These included, recently, the euro currency (which arouses skepticism
among many economists), intrusive regulation from Brussels, and pressure to
accept large numbers of refugees from the Middle East just when fears of
Islamic terrorism (however disproportionate to the risk) were being stoked by
horrific attacks. Even then, populist parties have attracted only 13 percent of the
votes in recent years, and they have lost seats in as many national legislatures as

they have gained them in.32 In the year following the Trump and Brexit shocks,
right-wing populism was repudiated in elections in the Netherlands, the United
Kingdom, and France—where the new president, Emmanuel Macron,
proclaimed that Europe was “waiting for us to defend the spirit of the
Enlightenment, threatened in so many places.”33
But far more important than the political events of the mid-2010s are the
social and economic trends that have fostered authoritarian populism—and more
to the point of this chapter, that may foretell its future.
Beneficial historical developments often create losers together with the
winners, and the apparent economic losers of globalization (namely the lower
classes of rich countries) are often said to be the supporters of authoritarian
populism. For economic determinists, this is enough to explain the rise of the
movement. But analysts have sifted through the election results like investigators
inspecting the wreckage at the site of a plane crash, and we now know that the
economic explanation is wrong. In the American election, voters in the two
lowest income brackets voted for Clinton 52–42, as did those who identified “the
economy” as the most important issue. A majority of voters in the four highest
income brackets voted for Trump, and Trump voters singled out “immigration”
and “terrorism,” not “the economy,” as the most important issues.34
The twisted metal has turned up more promising clues. An article by the
statistician Nate Silver began, “Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and
sometimes a finding just jumps off the page.” That finding jumped right off the
page and into the article’s headline: “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who
Would Vote for Trump.”35 Why should education have mattered so much? Two
uninteresting explanations are that the highly educated happen to affiliate with a
liberal political tribe, and that education may be a better long-term predictor of
economic security than current income. A more interesting explanation is that
education exposes people in young adulthood to other races and cultures in a
way that makes it harder to demonize them. Most interesting of all is the
likelihood that education, when it does what it is supposed to do, instills a
respect for vetted fact and reasoned argument, and so inoculates people against
conspiracy theories, reasoning by anecdote, and emotional demagoguery.
In another page-jumper, Silver found that the regional map of Trump support
did not overlap particularly well with the maps of unemployment, religion, gun
ownership, or the proportion of immigrants. But it did align with the map of
Google searches for the word nigger, which Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has
shown is a reliable indicator of racism (chapter 15).36 This doesn’t mean that

most Trump supporters are racists. But overt racism shades into resentment and
distrust, and the overlap suggests that the regions of the country that gave Trump
his Electoral College victory are those with the most resistance to the decades-
long process of integration and the promotion of minority interests (particularly
racial preferences, which they see as reverse discrimination against them).
Among the exit poll questions that probed general attitudes, the most
consistent predictor of Trump support was pessimism.37 Sixty-nine percent of
Trump supporters felt that the direction of the country was “seriously off track,”
and they were similarly jaundiced about the workings of the federal government
and the lives of the next generation of Americans.
Across the pond, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris
spotted similar patterns in their analysis of 268 political parties in thirty-one
European countries.38 Economic issues, they found, have been playing a smaller
role in party manifestoes for decades, and noneconomic issues a larger role. The
same was true of the distribution of voters. Support for populist parties is
strongest not from manual workers but from the “petty bourgeoisie” (self-
employed tradesmen and the owners of small businesses), followed by foremen
and technicians. Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less
educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority. They
embrace authoritarian values, place themselves on the right of the political
spectrum, and dislike immigration and global and national governance.39 Brexit
voters, too, were older, more rural, and less educated than those who voted to
remain: 66 percent of high school graduates voted to leave, but only 29 percent
of degree holders did.40
Inglehart and Norris concluded that supporters of authoritarian populism are
the losers not so much of economic competition as cultural competition. Voters
who are male, religious, less educated, and in the ethnic majority “feel that they
have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left
behind by progressive tides of cultural change that they do not share. . . . The
silent revolution launched in the 1970s seems to have spawned a resentful
counter-revolutionary backlash today.”41 Paul Taylor, a political analyst at the
Pew Research Center, singled out the same counter-current in American polling
results: “The overall drift is toward more liberal views on a range of issues, but
that doesn’t mean the whole country’s buying in.”42
Though the source of the populist backlash may be found in currents of
modernity that have been engulfing the world for some time—globalization,
racial diversity, women’s empowerment, secularism, urbanization, education—

its electoral success in a particular country depends on whether a leader
materializes who can channel that resentment. Neighboring countries with
comparable cultures can thus differ in the degree to which populism gains
traction: Hungary more than the Czech Republic, Norway more than Sweden,
Poland more than Romania, Austria more than Germany, France more than
Spain, and the United States more than Canada. (In 2016 Spain, Canada, and
Portugal had no populist party legislators at all.)43
How will the tension play out between the liberal, cosmopolitan, enlightenment
humanism that has been sweeping the world for decades and the regressive,
authoritarian, tribal populism pushing back? The major long-term forces that
have carried liberalism along—mobility, connectivity, education, urbanization—
are not likely to go into reverse, and neither is the pressure for equality from
women and ethnic minorities.
All of these portents, to be sure, are conjectural. But one is as certain as the
first half of the idiom “death and taxes.” Populism is an old man’s movement. As
figure 20-1 shows, support for all three of its recrudescences—Trump, Brexit,
and European populist parties—falls off dramatically with year of birth. (The alt-
right movement, which overlaps with populism, has a youngish membership, but
for all its notoriety it is an electoral nonentity, numbering perhaps 50,000 people
or 0.02 percent of the American population.)44 The age rolloff isn’t surprising,
since we saw in chapter 15 that in the 20th century every birth cohort has been
more tolerant and liberal than the one that came before (at the same time that all
the cohorts have drifted liberalward). This raises the possibility that as the Silent
Generation and older Baby Boomers shuffle off this mortal coil, they will take
authoritarian populism with them.
Of course the cohorts of the present say nothing about the politics of the
future if people change their values as they age. Perhaps if you are a populist at
twenty-five you have no heart, and if you are not a populist at forty-five you
have no brain (to adapt a meme that has been said about liberals, socialists,
communists, leftists, Republicans, Democrats, and revolutionists and that has
been attributed to various quotation magnets, including Victor Hugo, Benjamin
Disraeli, George Bernard Shaw, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and
Bob Dylan). But whoever said it (probably the 19th-century jurist Anselme
Batbie, who in turn attributed it to Edmund Burke), and regardless of which
belief system it’s supposed to apply to, the claim about life-cycle effects on

political orientation is false.45 As we saw in chapter 15, people carry their
emancipative values with them as they age rather than sliding into illiberalism.
And a recent analysis of 20th-century American voters by the political scientists
Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman has shown that Americans do not consistently
vote for more conservative presidents as they age. Their voting preferences are
shaped by their cumulative experience of the popularity of presidents over their
life spans, with a peak of influence in the 14–24-year-old window.46 The young
voters who reject populism today are unlikely to embrace it tomorrow.
Figure 20-1: Populist support across generations, 2016

Sources: Trump: Exit polls conducted by Edison Research, New York Times 2016. Brexit: Exit polls
conducted by Lord Ashcroft Polls, BBC News Magazine, June 24, 2016,
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36619342. European populist parties (2002–2014): Inglehart &
Norris 2016, fig. 8. Data for each birth cohort are plotted at the midpoint of their range.
How might one counter the populist threat to Enlightenment values?

Economic insecurity is not the driver, so the strategies of reducing income
inequality and of talking to laid-off steelworkers and trying to feel their pain,
however praiseworthy, will probably be ineffective. Cultural backlash does seem
to be a driver, so avoiding needlessly polarizing rhetoric, symbolism, and

identity politics might help to recruit, or at least not repel, voters who are not
sure which team they belong to (more on this in chapter 21). Since populist
movements have achieved an influence beyond their numbers, fixing electoral
irregularities such as gerrymandering and forms of disproportionate
representation which overweight rural areas (such as the US Electoral College)
would help. So would journalistic coverage that tied candidates’ reputations to
their record of accuracy and coherence rather than to trivial gaffes and scandals.
Part of the problem, over the long term, will dissipate with urbanization: you
can’t keep them down on the farm. And part will dissipate with demographics.
As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.47
Still, a puzzle in the rise of authoritarian populism is why a shocking
proportion of the sectors of the population whose interests were most
endangered by the outcome of the elections, such as younger Britons with
Brexit, and African Americans, Latinos, and American millennials with Trump,
stayed home on election day.48 This brings us back to a major theme of this book,
and to my own small prescription for strengthening the current of Enlightenment
humanism against the latest counter-Enlightenment backlash.
I believe that the media and intelligentsia were complicit in populists’
depiction of modern Western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional that nothing
short of a radical lurch could improve them. “Charge the cockpit or you die!”
shrieked a conservative essayist, comparing the country to the hijacked flight on
9/11 that was brought down by a passenger mutiny.49 “I’d rather see the empire
burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical
change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton,” flamed a left-wing advocate of
“the politics of arson.”50 Even moderate editorialists in mainstream newspapers
commonly depict the country as a hellhole of racism, inequality, terrorism, social
pathology, and failing institutions.51
The problem with dystopian rhetoric is that if people believe that the country
is a flaming dumpster, they will be receptive to the perennial appeal of
demagogues: “What do you have to lose?” If the media and intellectuals instead
put events into statistical and historical context, they could help answer that
question. Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to
contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous
amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a “crisis” trample
over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the
force of their personalities.

A liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it
will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problems than to start a
conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones. By
failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against
responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the
tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will
bring us more.
The challenge in making the case for modernity is that when one’s nose is inches
from the news, optimism can seem naïve, or in the pundits’ favorite new cliché
about elites, “out of touch.” Yet in a world outside of hero myths, the only kind
of progress we can have is a kind that is easy to miss while we are living through
it. As the philosopher Isaiah Berlin pointed out, the ideal of a perfectly just,
equal, free, healthy, and harmonious society, which liberal democracies never
measure up to, is a dangerous fantasy. People are not clones in a monoculture, so
what satisfies one will frustrate another, and the only way they can end up equal
is if they are treated unequally. Moreover, among the perquisites of freedom is
the freedom of people to screw up their own lives. Liberal democracies can
make progress, but only against a constant backdrop of messy compromise and
constant reform:
The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for
—greater freedom, greater material welfare, a juster society; but the old
ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems, brought about by
the very solutions of the old ones, and these, even if they can in turn be
solved, generate new situations, and with them new requirements—and so
on, forever—and unpredictably.52
Such is the nature of progress. Pulling us forward are ingenuity, sympathy,

and benign institutions. Pushing us back are the darker sides of human nature
and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Kevin Kelly explains how this
dialectic can nonetheless result in forward motion:
Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve

managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that
few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we

might call civilization. . . . [Progress] is a self-cloaking action seen only in
retrospect. Which is why I tell people that my great optimism of the future
is rooted in history.53
We don’t have a catchy name for a constructive agenda that reconciles long-
term gains with short-term setbacks, historical currents with human agency.
“Optimism” is not quite right, because a belief that things will always get better
is no more rational than the belief that things will always get worse. Kelly offers
“protopia,” the pro- from progress and process. Others have suggested
“pessimistic hopefulness,” “opti-realism,” and “radical incrementalism.”54 My
favorite comes from Hans Rosling, who, when asked whether he was an
optimist, replied, “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.”55

PART III
REASON, SCIENCE, AND
HUMANISM
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 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. I am sure
that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared
with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
—John Maynard Keynes

I deas matter. Homo sapiens is a species that lives by its wits, concocting and
pooling notions of how the world works and how its members can best lead their
lives. There can be no better proof of the power of ideas than the ironic influence
of the political philosopher who most insisted on the power of vested interests,
the man who wrote that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of
its ruling class.” Karl Marx possessed no wealth and commanded no army, but
the ideas he scribbled in the reading room of the British Museum shaped the
course of the 20th century and beyond, wrenching the lives of billions.
This part of the book wraps up my defense of the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Part I outlined those ideas; part II showed they work. Now it’s time to defend
them against some surprising enemies—not just angry populists and religious
fundamentalists, but factions of mainstream intellectual culture. It may sound
quixotic to offer a defense of the Enlightenment against professors, critics,
pundits, and their readers, because if they were asked about these ideals point-
blank, few would disavow them. But intellectuals’ commitment to those ideals is
squirrely. The hearts of many of them lie elsewhere, and few are willing to
proffer a positive defense. Enlightenment ideals, thus unchampioned, fade into
the background as a bland default, and become a catch basin for every unsolved
societal problem (of which there will always be many). Illiberal ideas like
authoritarianism, tribalism, and magical thinking easily get the blood pumping,
and have no shortage of champions. It’s hardly a fair fight.
Though I hope Enlightenment ideals will become more deeply entrenched in
the public at large—fundamentalists, angry populists, and all—I claim no
competence in the dark arts of mass persuasion, popular mobilization, or viral
memes. What follow are arguments directed at people who care about
arguments. These arguments can matter, because practical men and women and
madmen in authority are affected, directly or indirectly, by the world of ideas.
They go to university. They read intellectual magazines, if only in dentists’
waiting rooms. They watch talking heads on Sunday morning news shows. They
are briefed by staff members who subscribe to highbrow papers and watch TED
talks. They frequent Internet discussion forums that are enlightened or

endarkened by the reading habits of the more literate contributors. I like to think
that some good might come to the world if more of the ideas that trickle into
these tributaries embodied the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, and
humanism.

CHAPTER 21
REASON
O pposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable. But that hasn’t stopped a

slew of irrationalists from favoring the heart over the head, the limbic
system over the cortex, blinking over thinking, McCoy over Spock.
There was the Romantic movement of the counter-Enlightenment, captured in
Johann Herder’s avowal “I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live!” There’s
the common veneration (not just by the religious) of faith, namely believing
something without a good reason. There’s the postmodernist credo that reason is
a pretext to exert power, reality is socially constructed, and all statements are
trapped in a web of self-reference and collapse into paradox. Even members of
my own tribe of cognitive psychologists often claim to have refuted what they
take to be the Enlightenment belief that humans are rational agents, and hence to
have undermined the centrality of reason itself. The implication is that it is futile
even to try to make the world a more rational place.1
But all these positions have a fatal flaw: they refute themselves. They deny
that there can be a reason for believing those very positions. As soon as their
defenders open their mouths to begin their defense, they have lost the argument,
because in that very act they are tacitly committed to persuasion—to adducing
reasons for what they are about to argue, which, they insist, ought to be accepted
by their listeners according to standards of rationality that both accept.
Otherwise they are wasting their breath and might as well try to convert their
audience by bribery or violence. In The Last Word, the philosopher Thomas
Nagel drives home the point that subjectivity and relativism regarding logic and
reality are incoherent, because “one can’t criticize something with nothing”:
The claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself

have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in

that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then
it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is
objectively false. There may be some subjectivists, perhaps styling
themselves as pragmatists, who present subjectivism as applying even to
itself. But then it does not call for a reply, since it is just a report of what
the subjectivist finds it agreeable to say. If he also invites us to join him,
we need not offer any reason for declining, since he has offered us no
reason to accept.2
Nagel calls this line of thinking Cartesian, because it resembles Descartes’s

argument “I think, therefore I am.” Just as the very fact that one is wondering
whether one exists demonstrates that one exists, the very fact that one is
appealing to reasons demonstrates that reason exists. It may also be called a
transcendental argument, one that invokes the necessary preconditions for doing
what it is doing, namely making an argument.3 (In a way, it goes back to the
ancient Liar’s Paradox, featuring the Cretan who says, “All Cretans are liars.”)
Whatever you call the argument, it would be a mistake to interpret it as justifying
a “belief” or a “faith” in reason, which Nagel calls “one thought too many.” We
don’t believe in reason; we use reason (just as we don’t program our computers
to have a CPU; a program is a sequence of operations made available by the
CPU).4
Though reason is prior to everything else and needn’t (indeed cannot) be
justified on first principles, once we start engaging in it we can stroke our
confidence that the particular kinds of reasoning we are engaging in are sound
by noting their internal coherence and their fit with reality. Life is not a dream, in
which disconnected experiences appear in bewildering succession. And the
application of reason to the world validates itself by granting us the ability to
bend the world to our will, from curing infections to sending a man to the moon.
Despite its provenance in abstract philosophy, the Cartesian argument is not
an exercise in logic-chopping. From the most recondite deconstructionist to the
most anti-intellectual purveyor of conspiracy theories and “alternative facts,”
everyone recognizes the power of responses like “Why should I believe you?” or
“Prove it” or “You’re full of crap.” Few would reply, “That’s right, there’s no
reason to believe me,” or “Yes, I’m lying right now,” or “I agree, what I’m
saying is bullshit.” It’s in the very nature of argument that people stake a claim
to being right. As soon as they do, they have committed themselves to reason—

and the listeners they are trying to convince can hold their feet to the fire of
coherence and accuracy.
By now many people have become aware of the research in cognitive

psychology on human irrationality, explained in bestsellers like Daniel
Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.
I’ve alluded to these cognitive infirmities in earlier chapters: the way we
estimate probability from available anecdotes, project stereotypes onto
individuals, seek confirming and ignore disconfirming evidence, dread harms
and losses, and reason from teleology and voodoo resemblance rather than
mechanical cause and effect.5 But as important as these discoveries are, it’s a
mistake to see them as refuting some Enlightenment tenet that humans are
rational actors, or as licensing the fatalistic conclusion that we might as well give
up on reasoned persuasion and fight demagoguery with demagoguery.
To begin with, no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were
consistently rational. Certainly not the über-rational Kant, who wrote that “from
the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,” nor
Spinoza, Hume, Smith, or the Encyclopédistes, who were cognitive and social
psychologists ahead of their time.6 What they argued was that we ought to be
rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce
us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing
institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free
speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing. And if you disagree, then why
should we accept your claim that humans are incapable of rationality?
Often the cynicism about reason is justified with a crude version of
evolutionary psychology (not one endorsed by evolutionary psychologists) in
which humans think with their amygdalas, reacting instinctively to the slightest
rustle in the grass which may portend a crouching tiger. But real evolutionary
psychology treats humans differently: not as two-legged antelopes but as the
species that outsmarts antelopes. We are a cognitive species that depends on
explanations of the world. Since the world is the way it is regardless of what
people believe about it, there is a strong selection pressure for an ability to
develop explanations that are true.7
Reasoning thus has deep evolutionary roots. The citizen scientist Louis
Liebenberg has studied the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert (the
“Bushmen”), one of the world’s most ancient cultures. They engage in the oldest

form of the chase, persistence hunting, in which humans, with their unique
ability to dump heat through sweat-slicked skin, pursue a furry mammal in the
midday sun until it collapses of heat stroke. Since most mammals are swifter
than humans and dart out of sight as soon as they are spotted, persistence hunters
track them by their spoor, which means inferring the animal’s species, sex, age,
and level of fatigue, and thus its likely direction of flight, from the hoofprints,
bent stems, and displaced pebbles it leaves behind. The San do not just engage in
inference—deducing, for example, that agile springboks tread deeply with
pointed hooves to get a good grip, whereas heavy kudus tread flat-footed to
support their weight. They also engage in reasoning—articulating the logic
behind their inferences to persuade their companions or be persuaded in their
turn. Liebenberg observed that Kalahari trackers don’t accept arguments from
authority. A young tracker can challenge the majority opinion of his elders, and
if his interpretation of the evidence is convincing, he can bring them around,
increasing the group’s accuracy.8
And if you’re still tempted to excuse modern dogma and superstition by
saying that it’s only human, consider Liebenberg’s account of scientific
skepticism among the San:
Three trackers, !Nate, /Uase and Boroh//xao, of Lone Tree in the central
Kalahari, told me that the Monotonous Lark (Mirafra passerina) only
sings after it has rained, because “it is happy that it rained.” One tracker,
Boroh//xao, told me that when the bird sings, it dries out the soil, making
the roots good to eat. Afterwards, !Nate and /Uase told me that Boroh//xao
was wrong—it is not the bird that dries out the soil, it is the sun that dries
out the soil. The bird is only telling them that the soil will dry out in the
coming months and that it is the time of the year when the roots are good
to eat. . . .
!Namka, a tracker from Bere in the central Kalahari, Botswana, told me
the myth of how the sun is like an eland, which crosses the sky and is then
killed by people who live in the west. The red glow in the sky when the
sun goes down is the blood of the eland. After they have eaten it, they
throw the shoulder blade across the sky back to the east, where it falls into
a pool and grows into a new sun. Sometimes, it is said, you can hear the
swishing noise of the shoulder blade flying through the air. After telling
me the story in great detail, he told me that he thinks that the “Old People”

lied, because he has never seen . . . the shoulder blade fly through the sky
or heard the swishing noise.9
Of course, none of this contradicts the discovery that humans are vulnerable
to illusions and fallacies. Our brains are limited in their capacity to process
information and evolved in a world without science, scholarship, and other
forms of fact-checking. But reality is a mighty selection pressure, so a species
that lives by ideas must have evolved with an ability to prefer correct ones. The
challenge for us today is to design an informational environment in which that
ability prevails over the ones that lead us into folly. The first step is to pinpoint
why an otherwise intelligent species is so easily led into folly.
The 21st century, an age of unprecedented access to knowledge, has also seen
maelstroms of irrationality, including the denial of evolution, vaccine safety, and
anthropogenic climate change, and the promulgation of conspiracy theories,
from 9/11 to the size of Donald Trump’s popular vote. Fans of rationality are
desperate to understand the paradox, but in a bit of irrationality of their own,
they seldom look at data that might explain it.
The standard explanation of the madness of crowds is ignorance: a mediocre
education system has left the populace scientifically illiterate, at the mercy of
their cognitive biases, and thus defenseless against airhead celebrities, cable-
news gladiators, and other corruptions from popular culture. The standard
solution is better schooling and more outreach to the public by scientists on
television, social media, and popular Web sites. As an outreaching scientist I’ve
always found this theory appealing, but I’ve come to realize it’s wrong, or at best
a small part of the problem.
Consider these questions about evolution:
During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the English

countryside got covered in soot, and the Peppered Moth became, on
average, darker in color. How did this happen?
A. In order to blend in with their surroundings, the moths had to become
darker in color.
B. The moths with darker color were less likely to get eaten and were
more likely to reproduce.

After a year the average test score at a private high school increased by
thirty points. Which explanation for this change is most analogous to
Darwin’s explanation for the adaptation of species?
A. The school no longer admitted children of wealthy alumni unless they
met the same standards as everyone else.
B. Since the last test, each returning student had grown more
knowledgeable.
The correct answers are B and A. The psychologist Andrew Shtulman gave high
school and university students a battery of questions like this which probed for a
deep understanding of the theory of natural selection, in particular the key idea
that evolution consists of changes in the proportion of a population with adaptive
traits rather than a transformation of the population so that its traits would be
more adaptive. He found no correlation between performance on the test and a
belief that natural selection explains the origin of humans. People can believe in
evolution without understanding it, and vice versa.10 In the 1980s several
biologists got burned when they accepted invitations to debate creationists who
turned out to be not Bible-thumping yokels but well-briefed litigators who cited
cutting-edge research to sow uncertainty as to whether the science was complete.
Professing a belief in evolution is not a gift of scientific literacy, but an
affirmation of loyalty to a liberal secular subculture as opposed to a conservative
religious one. In 2010 the National Science Foundation dropped the following
item from its test of scientific literacy: “Human beings, as we know them today,
developed from earlier species of animals.” The reason for that change was not,
as scientists howled, because the NSF had given in to creationist pressure to
bowdlerize evolution from the scientific canon. It was that the correlation
between performance on that item and on every other item on the test (such as
“An electron is smaller than an atom” and “Antibiotics kill viruses”) was so low
that it was taking up space in the test that could go to more diagnostic items. The
item, in other words, was effectively a test of religiosity rather than scientific
literacy.11 When the item was prefaced with “According to the theory of
evolution,” so that scientific understanding was divorced from cultural
allegiance, religious and nonreligious test-takers responded the same.12
Or consider these questions:

Climate scientists believe that if the North Pole icecap melted as a result of
human-caused global warming, global sea levels would rise. True or
False?
What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere

to rise? Is it carbon dioxide, hydrogen, helium, or radon?
Climate scientists believe that human-caused global warming will increase

the risk of skin cancer in human beings. True or False?
The answer to the first question is “false”; if it were true, your glass of Coke
would overflow as the ice cubes melted. It’s icecaps on land, such as Greenland
and Antarctica, that raise sea levels when they melt. Believers in human-made
climate change scored no better on tests of climate science, or of science literacy
in general, than deniers. Many believers think, for example, that global warming
is caused by a hole in the ozone layer and that it can be mitigated by cleaning up
toxic waste dumps.13 What predicts the denial of human-made climate change is
not scientific illiteracy but political ideology. In 2015, 10 percent of conservative
Republicans agreed that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity
(57 percent denied that the Earth is getting warmer at all), compared with 36
percent of moderate Republicans, 53 percent of Independents, 63 percent of
moderate Democrats, and 78 percent of liberal Democrats.14
In a revolutionary analysis of reason in the public sphere, the legal scholar
Dan Kahan has argued that certain beliefs become symbols of cultural
allegiance. People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but
who they are.15 We all identify with particular tribes or subcultures, each of
which embraces a creed on what makes for a good life and how society should
run its affairs. These creeds tend to vary along two dimensions. One contrasts a
right-wing comfort with natural hierarchy with a left-wing preference for forced
egalitarianism (measured by agreement with statements like “We need to
dramatically reduce inequalities between the rich and the poor, whites and
people of color, and men and women”). The other is a libertarian affinity to
individualism versus a communitarian or authoritarian affinity to solidarity
(measured by agreement with statements like “Government should put limits on
the choices individuals can make so they don’t get in the way of what’s good for
society”). A given belief, depending on how it is framed and who endorses it,

can become a touchstone, password, motto, shibboleth, sacred value, or oath of
allegiance to one of these tribes. As Kahan and his collaborators explain:
The principal reason people disagree about climate change science is not
that it has been communicated to them in forms they cannot understand.
Rather, it is that positions on climate change convey values—communal
concern versus individual self-reliance; prudent self-abnegation versus the
heroic pursuit of reward; humility versus ingenuity; harmony with nature
versus mastery over it—that divide them along cultural lines.16
The values that divide people are also defined by which demons are blamed for
society’s misfortunes: greedy corporations, out-of-touch elites, meddling
bureaucrats, lying politicians, ignorant rednecks, or, all too often, ethnic
minorities.
Kahan notes that people’s tendency to treat their beliefs as oaths of allegiance
rather than disinterested appraisals is, in one sense, rational. With the exception
of a tiny number of movers, shakers, and deciders, a person’s opinions on
climate change or evolution are astronomically unlikely to make a difference to
the world at large. But they make an enormous difference to the respect the
person commands in his or her social circle. To express the wrong opinion on a
politicized issue can make one an oddball at best—someone who “doesn’t get
it”—and a traitor at worst. The pressure to conform becomes all the greater as
people live and work with others who are like them and as academic, business,
or religious cliques brand themselves with left-wing or right-wing causes. For
pundits and politicians with a reputation for championing their faction, coming
out on the wrong side of an issue would be career suicide.
Given these payoffs, endorsing a belief that hasn’t passed muster with
science and fact-checking isn’t so irrational after all—at least, not by the
criterion of the immediate effects on the believer. The effects on the society and
planet are another matter. The atmosphere doesn’t care what people think about
it, and if it in fact warms by 4° Celsius, billions of people will suffer, no matter
how many of them had been esteemed in their peer groups for holding the
locally fashionable opinion on climate change along the way. Kahan concludes
that we are all actors in a Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what’s rational for
every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for the society as
a whole to act upon (based on reality).17

The perverse incentives behind “expressive rationality” or “identity-
protective cognition” help explain the paradox of 21st-century irrationality.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, many political observers were
incredulous at opinions expressed by Trump supporters (and in many cases by
Trump himself), such as that Hillary Clinton had multiple sclerosis and was
concealing it with a body double, or that Barack Obama must have had a role in
9/11 because he was never in the Oval Office around that time (Obama, of
course, was not the president in 2001). As Amanda Marcotte put it, “These folks
clearly are competent enough to dress themselves, read the address of the rally
and show up on time, and somehow they continue to believe stuff that’s so crazy
and so false that it’s impossible to believe anyone that isn’t barking mad could
believe it. What’s going on?”18 What’s going on is that these people are sharing
blue lies. A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the
benefit of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers).19 While some of the
conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs
for the purpose of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize
liberals and display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist John
Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional
loyalty than reasonable ones.20 Anyone can say that rocks fall down rather than
up, but only a person who is truly committed to the brethren has a reason to say
that God is three persons but also one person, or that the Democratic Party ran a
child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria.
The conspiracy theories of fervid hordes at a political rally represent an extreme

case of self-expression trumping truth, but the Tragedy of the Belief Commons
runs even deeper. Another paradox of rationality is that expertise, brainpower,
and conscious reasoning do not, by themselves, guarantee that thinkers will
approach the truth. On the contrary, they can be weapons for ever-more-
ingenious rationalization. As Benjamin Franklin observed, “So convenient a
thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason
for everything one has a mind to.”
Psychologists have long known that the human brain is infected with
motivated reasoning (directing an argument toward a favored conclusion, rather
than following it where it leads), biased evaluation (finding fault with evidence
that disconfirms a favored position and giving a pass to evidence that supports
it), and a My-Side bias (self-explanatory).21 In a classic experiment from 1954,

the psychologists Al Hastorf and Hadley Cantril quizzed Dartmouth and
Princeton students about a film of a recent bone-crushing, penalty-filled football
game between the two schools, and found that each set of students saw more
infractions by the other team.22
We know today that political partisanship is like sports fandom: testosterone
levels rise or fall on election night just as they do on Super Bowl Sunday.23 And
so it should not be surprising that political partisans—which include most of us
—always see more infractions by the other team. In another classic study, the
psychologists Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper presented proponents
and opponents of the death penalty with a pair of studies, one suggesting that
capital punishment deterred homicide (murder rates went down the year after
states adopted it), the other that it failed to do so (murder rates were higher in
states that had capital punishment than in neighboring states that didn’t). The
studies were fake but realistic, and the experimenters flipped the outcomes for
half the participants just in case any of them found comparisons across time
more convincing than comparisons across space or vice versa. The
experimenters found that each group was momentarily swayed by the result they
had just learned, but as soon as they had had a chance to read the details, they
picked nits in whichever study was uncongenial to their starting position, saying
things like “The evidence is meaningless without data about how the overall
crime rate went up in those years,” or “There might be different circumstances
between the two states even though they shared a border.” Thanks to this
selective prosecution, the participants were more polarized after they had all
been exposed to the same evidence than before: the antis were more anti, the
pros more pro.24
Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek
and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions
more accurate.25 That explains another of Kahan’s findings: the better informed a
person is about climate change, the more polarized his or her opinion.26 Indeed,
people needn’t even have a prior opinion to be polarized by the facts. When
Kahan exposed people to a neutral, balanced presentation of the risks of
nanotechnology (hardly a hot button on the cable news networks), they promptly
split into factions that aligned with their views on nuclear power and genetically
modified foods.27
If these studies aren’t sobering enough, consider this one, described by one
magazine as “The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever.”28 Kahan
recruited a thousand Americans from all walks of life, assessed their politics and

numeracy with standard questionnaires, and asked them to look at some data to
evaluate the effectiveness of a new treatment for an ailment. The respondents
were told that they had to pay close attention to the numbers, because the
treatment was not expected to work a hundred percent of the time and might
even make things worse, while sometimes the ailment got better on its own,
without any treatment. The numbers had been jiggered so that one answer
popped out (the treatment worked, because a larger number of treated people
showed an improvement) but the other answer was correct (the treatment didn’t
work, because a smaller proportion of the treated people showed an
improvement). The knee-jerk answer could be overridden by a smidgen of
mental math, namely eyeballing the ratios. In one version, the respondents were
told that the ailment was a rash and the treatment was a skin cream. Here are the
numbers they were shown:
Improved Got Worse
Treatment 223 75
No Treatment 107 21
The data implied that the skin cream did more harm than good: the people who
used it improved at a ratio of around three to one, while those not using it
improved at a ratio of around five to one. (With half the respondents, the rows
were flipped, implying that the skin cream did work.) The more innumerate
respondents were seduced by the larger absolute number of treated people who
got better (223 versus 107) and picked the wrong answer. The highly numerate
respondents zoomed in on the difference between the two ratios (3:1 versus 5:1)
and picked the right one. The numerate respondents, of course, were not biased
for or against skin cream: whichever way the data went, they spotted the
difference. And contrary to liberal Democrats’ and conservative Republicans’
worst suspicions about each other’s intelligence, neither faction did substantially
better than the other.
But all this changed in a version of the experiment in which the treatment
was switched from boring skin cream to incendiary gun control (a law banning
citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public), and the outcome was
switched from rashes to crime rates. Now the highly numerate respondents
diverged from each other according to their politics. When the data suggested

that the gun-control measure lowered crime, all the liberal numerates spotted it,
and most of the conservative numerates missed it—they did a bit better than the
conservative innumerates, but were still wrong more often than they were right.
When the data showed that gun control increased crime, this time most of the
conservative numerates spotted it, but the liberal numerates missed it; in fact,
they did no better than the liberal innumerates. So we can’t blame human
irrationality on our lizard brains: it was the sophisticated respondents who were
most blinded by their politics. As two other magazines summarized the results:
“Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math” and “How
Politics Makes Us Stupid.”29
Researchers themselves are not immune. They often trip over their own
biases when they try to show that their political adversaries are biased, a fallacy
that can be called the bias bias (as in Matthew 7:3, “And why beholdest thou the
mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine
own eye?”).30 A recent study by three social scientists (members of a
predominantly liberal profession) purporting to show that conservatives were
more hostile and aggressive had to be retracted when the authors discovered that
they had misread the labels: it was actually liberals who were more hostile and
aggressive.31 Many studies that try to show that conservatives are
temperamentally more prejudiced and rigid than liberals turn out to have cherry-
picked the test items.32 Conservatives are indeed more prejudiced against African
Americans, but liberals turn out to be more prejudiced against religious
Christians. Conservatives are indeed more biased toward allowing Christian
prayers in schools, but liberals are more biased toward allowing Muslim prayers
in schools.
It would also be an error to think that bias about bias is confined to the left:
that would be a bias bias bias. In 2010 the libertarian economists Daniel Klein
and Zeljka Buturovic published a study aiming to show that left-liberals were
economically illiterate, based on erroneous answers to Econ 101 items like
these:33
Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable. [True]

Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those
services. [True]
A company with the largest market share is a monopoly. [False]
Rent control leads to housing shortages. [True]

(Another item was “Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30
years ago,” which is true. Consistent with my claim in chapter 4 that
progressives hate progress, 61 percent of the progressives and 52 percent of the
liberals disagreed.) Conservatives and libertarians gloated, and the Wall Street
Journal reported the study under the headline “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth
Grader?” with the implication that left-wingers are not. But critics pointed out
that the items on the quiz implicitly challenged left-wing causes. So the pair ran
a follow-up with equally elementary Econ 101 items designed this time to get
under the skin of conservatives:34
When two people complete a voluntary transaction, they both necessarily

come away better off. [False]
Making abortion illegal would increase the number of black-market
abortions. [True]
Legalizing drugs would give more wealth and power to street gangs and
organized crime. [False]
Now it was the conservatives who earned the dunce caps. Klein, to his credit,
retracted his swipe at the left in an article entitled “I Was Wrong, and So Are
You.” As he noted,
More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40

percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A
dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon,
people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. . . . A full tabulation of
all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They
appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their
position.35
If the left and right are equally stupid in quizzes and experiments, we might
expect them to be equally off the mark in making sense of the world. The data on
human history presented in chapters 5 through 18 provide an opportunity to see
which of the major political ideologies can explain the facts of human progress.
I’ve been arguing that the main drivers were the nonpolitical ideals of reason,

science, and humanism, which led people to seek and apply knowledge that
enhanced human flourishing. Do right-wing or left-wing ideologies have
anything to add? Do the seventy-odd graphs entitle either side to say, “Bias,
shmias: we’re right; you’re wrong”? It seems that each side can take some credit
while also missing big parts of the story.
Foremost is the conservative skepticism about the ideal of progress itself.
Ever since the first modern conservative, Edmund Burke, suggested that humans
were too flawed to think up schemes for improving their condition and were
better off sticking with traditions and institutions that kept them from the abyss,
a major stream of conservative thought has been skeptical about the best-laid
plans of mice and men. The reactionary fringe of conservatism, recently
disinterred by Trumpists and the European far right (chapter 23), believes that
Western civilization has careened out of control since some halcyon century,
having abandoned the moral clarity of traditional Christendom for a decadent
secular fleshpot that, if left on its current course, will soon implode from
terrorism, crime, and anomie.
Well, that’s wrong. Life before the Enlightenment was darkened by
starvation, plagues, superstitions, maternal and infant mortality, marauding
knight-warlords, sadistic torture-executions, slavery, witch hunts, and genocidal
crusades, conquests, and wars of religion.36 Good riddance. The arcs in figures 5-
1 through 18-4 show that as ingenuity and sympathy have been applied to the
human condition, life has gotten longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer,
smarter, deeper, and more interesting. Problems remain, but problems are
inevitable.
The left, too, has missed the boat in its contempt for the market and its
romance with Marxism. Industrial capitalism launched the Great Escape from
universal poverty in the 19th century and is rescuing the rest of humankind in a
Great Convergence in the 21st. Over the same time span, communism brought
the world terror-famines, purges, gulags, genocides, Chernobyl, megadeath
revolutionary wars, and North Korea–style poverty before collapsing
everywhere else of its own internal contradictions.37 Yet in a recent survey 18
percent of social science professors identified themselves as Marxist, and the
words capitalist and free market still stick in the throats of most intellectuals.38
Partly this is because their brains autocorrect these terms to unbridled,
unregulated, unfettered, or untrammeled free markets, perpetuating a false
dichotomy: a free market can coexist with regulations on safety, labor, and the
environment, just as a free country can coexist with criminal laws. And a free

market can coexist with high levels of spending on health, education, and
welfare (chapter 9)—indeed, some of the countries with the greatest amount of
social spending also have the greatest amount of economic freedom.39
To be fair to the left, the libertarian right has embraced the same false
dichotomy and seems all too willing to play the left’s straw man.40 Right-wing
libertarians (in their 21st-century Republican Party version) have converted the
observation that too much regulation can be harmful (by over-empowering
bureaucrats, costing more to society than it delivers in benefits, or protecting
incumbents against competition rather than consumers against harm) into the
dogma that less regulation is always better than more regulation. They have
converted the observation that too much social spending can be harmful (by
creating perverse incentives against work and undermining the norms and
institutions of civil society) into the dogma that any amount of social spending is
too much. And they have translated the observation that tax rates can be too high
into a hysterical rhetoric of “liberty” in which raising the marginal tax rate for
income above $400,000 from 35 to 39.6 percent means turning the country over
to jackbooted storm troopers. Often the refusal to seek the optimum level of
government is justified by an appeal to Friedrich Hayek’s argument in The Road
to Serfdom that regulation and welfare lay out a slippery slope along which a
country will slide into penury and tyranny.
The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing
libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism. The
totalitarian governments of the 20th century did not emerge from democratic
welfare states sliding down a slippery slope, but were imposed by fanatical
ideologues and gangs of thugs.41 And countries that combine free markets with
more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as
Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias
but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every
measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality,
education, and happiness.42 As we saw, no developed country runs on right-wing
libertarian principles, nor has any realistic vision of such a country ever been
laid out.
It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the
major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on
mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely
malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of
individuals.43 A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings,

each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting
the well-being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative
externalities, many of them historically unprecedented. It is bound to defy any
simple narrative of what will happen under a given set of rules. A more rational
approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-
mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come
from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in
liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market
freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation. As Pat Paulsen noted, “If
either the right wing or the left wing gained control of the country, it would fly
around in circles.”
It’s not that Goldilocks is always right and that the truth always falls halfway
between extremes. It’s that current societies have winnowed out the worst
blunders of the past, so if a society is functioning halfway decently—if the
streets aren’t running with blood, if obesity is a bigger problem than
malnutrition, if the people who vote with their feet are clamoring to get in rather
than racing for the exits—then its current institutions are probably a good
starting point (itself a lesson we can take from Burkean conservatism). Reason
tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance
more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.
Though examining data from history and social science is a better way of
evaluating our ideas than arguing from the imagination, the acid test of empirical
rationality is prediction. Science proceeds by testing the predictions of
hypotheses, and we all recognize the logic in everyday life when we praise or
ridicule barroom sages depending on whether events bear them out, when we use
idioms that hold people responsible for their accuracy like to eat crow and to
have egg on your face, and when we use sayings like “Put your money where
your mouth is” and “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
Unfortunately the epistemological standards of common sense—we should
credit the people and ideas that make correct predictions, and discount the ones
that don’t—are rarely applied to the intelligentsia and commentariat, who
dispense opinions free of accountability. Always-wrong prognosticators like Paul
Ehrlich continue to be canvassed by the press, and most readers have no idea
whether their favorite columnists, gurus, or talking heads are more accurate than
a chimpanzee picking bananas. The consequences can be dire: many military and

political debacles arose from misplaced confidence in the predictions of experts
(such as intelligence reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein was developing
nuclear weapons), and a few percentage points of accuracy in predicting
financial markets can spell the difference between gaining and losing a fortune.
A track record of predictions also ought to inform our appraisal of intellectual
systems, including political ideologies. Though some ideological differences
come from clashing values and may be irreconcilable, many hinge on different
means to agreed-upon ends and should be decidable. Which policies will in fact
bring about things that almost everyone wants, like lasting peace or economic
growth? Which will reduce poverty, or violent crime, or illiteracy? A rational
society should seek the answers by consulting the world rather than assuming the
omniscience of a bloc of opinionators who have coalesced around a creed.
Unfortunately, the expressive rationality documented by Kahan in his
experimental subjects also applies to editorialists and experts. The payoffs that
determine their reputations don’t coincide with the accuracy of the predictions,
since no one is keeping score. Instead, their reputations hinge on their ability to
entertain, titillate, or shock; on their ability to instill confidence or fear (in the
hopes that a prophecy might be self-fulfilling or self-defeating); and on their
skill in galvanizing a coalition and celebrating its virtue.
Since the 1980s the psychologist Philip Tetlock has studied what
distinguishes accurate forecasters from the many oracles who are “often
mistaken but never in doubt.”44 He recruited hundreds of analysts, columnists,
academics, and interested laypeople to compete in forecasting tournaments in
which they were presented with possible events and asked to assess their
likelihoods. Experts are ingenious at wordsmithing their predictions to protect
them from falsification, using weasely modal auxiliaries (could, might),
adjectives (fair chance, serious possibility), and temporal modifiers (very soon,
in the not-too-distant future). So Tetlock pinned them down by stipulating events
with unambiguous outcomes and deadlines (for example, “Will Russia annex
additional Ukraine territory in the next three months?” “In the next year, will any
country withdraw from the Eurozone?” “How many additional countries will
report cases of the Ebola virus in the next eight months?”) and having them write
down numerical probabilities.
Tetlock also avoided the common fallacy of praising or ridiculing a single
probabilistic prediction after the fact, as when the poll aggregator Nate Silver of
FiveThirtyEight came under fire for giving Donald Trump just a 29 percent
chance of winning the 2016 election.45 Since we cannot replay the election

thousands of times and count up the number of times that Trump won, the
question of whether the prediction was confirmed or disconfirmed is
meaningless. What we can do, and what Tetlock did, is compare the set of each
forecaster’s probabilities with the corresponding outcomes. Tetlock used a
formula which credits the forecaster not just for accuracy but for accurately
going out on a limb (since it’s easier to be accurate by just playing it safe with
50-50 predictions). The formula is mathematically related to how much they
would win if they put their money where their mouths were and bet on their
predictions according to their own odds.
Twenty years and twenty-eight thousand predictions later, how well did the
experts do? On average, about as well as a chimpanzee (which Tetlock described
as throwing darts rather than picking bananas). Tetlock and the psychologist
Barbara Mellers held a rematch between 2011 and 2015 in which they recruited
several thousand contestants to take part in a forecasting tournament held by the
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (the research organization of
the federation of American intelligence agencies). Once again there was plenty
of dart-throwing, but in both tournaments the couple could pick out
“superforecasters” who performed not just better than chimps and pundits, but
better than professional intelligence officers with access to classified
information, better than prediction markets, and not too far from the theoretical
maximum. How can we explain this apparent clairvoyance? (For a year, that is—
accuracy declines with distance into the future, and it falls to the level of chance
around five years out.) The answers are clear and profound.
The forecasters who did the worst were the ones with Big Ideas—left-wing
or right-wing, optimistic or pessimistic—which they held with an inspiring (but
misguided) confidence:
As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that
their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex
problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not
fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept
pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like
“furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were
right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and
likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their
conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their
predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.”46

Indeed, the very traits that put these experts in the public eye made them the
worst at prediction. The more famous they were, and the closer the event was to
their area of expertise, the less accurate their predictions turned out to be. But the
chimplike success of brand-name ideologues does not mean that “experts” are
worthless and we should distrust elites. It’s that we need to revise our concept of
an expert. Tetlock’s superforecasters were:
pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of
tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered
as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking,
they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition
markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.”
They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while
no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it
and changed their minds.47
Successful prediction is the revenge of the nerds. Superforecasters are

intelligent but not necessarily brilliant, falling just in the top fifth of the
population. They are highly numerate, not in the sense of being math whizzes
but in the sense of comfortably thinking in guesstimates. They have personality
traits that psychologists call “openness to experience” (intellectual curiosity and
a taste for variety), “need for cognition” (pleasure taken in intellectual activity),
and “integrative complexity” (appreciating uncertainty and seeing multiple
sides). They are anti-impulsive, distrusting their first gut feeling. They are
neither left-wing nor right-wing. They aren’t necessarily humble about their
abilities, but they are humble about particular beliefs, treating them as
“hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.” They constantly ask
themselves, “Are there holes in this reasoning? Should I be looking for
something else to fill this in? Would I be convinced by this if I were somebody
else?” They are aware of cognitive blind spots like the Availability and
confirmation biases, and they discipline themselves to avoid them. They display
what the psychologist Jonathan Baron calls “active open-mindedness,” with
opinions such as these:48
People should take into consideration evidence that goes against their
beliefs. [Agree]

It is more useful to pay attention to those who disagree with you than to
pay attention to those who agree. [Agree]
Changing your mind is a sign of weakness. [Disagree]
Intuition is the best guide in making decisions. [Disagree]
It is important to persevere in your beliefs even when evidence is brought
to bear against them. [Disagree]
Even more important than their temperament is their manner of reasoning.

Superforecasters are Bayesian, tacitly using the rule from the eponymous
Reverend Bayes on how to update one’s degree of credence in a proposition in
light of new evidence. They begin with the base rate for the event in question:
how often it is expected to occur across the board and over the long run. Then
they nudge that estimate up or down depending on the degree to which new
evidence portends the event’s occurrence or non-occurrence. They seek this new
evidence avidly, and avoid both overreacting to it (“This changes everything!”)
and underreacting to it (“This means nothing!”).
Take, for example, the prediction “There will be an attack by Islamist
militants in Western Europe between 21 January and 31 March 2015,” made
shortly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January of that year. Pundits and
politicians, their heads spinning with the Availability heuristic, would play out
the scenario in the theater of the imagination and, not wanting to appear
complacent or naïve, answer Definitely Yes. That’s not how superforecasters
work. One of them, asked by Tetlock to think aloud, reported that he began by
estimating the base rate: he went to Wikipedia, looked up the list of Islamist
terrorist attacks in Europe for the previous five years, and divided by 5, which
predicted 1.2 attacks a year. But, he reasoned, the world had changed since the
Arab Spring in 2011, so he lopped off the 2010 data, with brought the base rate
up to 1.5. ISIS recruitment had increased since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, a
reason to poke the estimate upward, but so had security measures, a reason to tug
it downward. Balancing the two factors, an increase by about a fifth seemed
reasonable, yielding a prediction of 1.8 attacks a year. There were 69 days left in
the forecast period, so he divided 69 by 365 and multiplied the fraction by 1.8.
That meant that the chance of an Islamist attack in Western Europe by the end of
March was about one in three. A manner of forecasting very different from the
way most people think led to a very different forecast.
Two other traits distinguish superforecasters from pundits and chimpanzees.
The superforecasters believe in the wisdom of crowds, laying their hypotheses

on the table for others to criticize or amend and pooling their estimates with
those of others. And they have strong opinions on chance and contingency in
human history as opposed to necessity and fate. Tetlock and Mellers asked
different groups of people whether they agreed with statements like the
following:
Events unfold according to God’s plan.

Everything happens for a reason.
There are no accidents or coincidences.
Nothing is inevitable.
Even major events like World War II or 9/11 could have turned out very
differently.
Randomness is often a factor in our personal lives.
They calculated a Fate Score by adding up the “Agree” ratings for items like the
first three and the “Disagree” ratings for items like the last three. An average
American is somewhere in the middle. An undergraduate at an elite university
scores a bit lower; a so-so forecaster lower still; and the superforecasters lowest
of all, with the most accurate superforecasters expressing the most vehement
rejection of fate and acceptance of chance.
To my mind, Tetlock’s hardheaded appraisal of expertise by the ultimate
benchmark, prediction, should revolutionize our understanding of history,
politics, epistemology, and intellectual life. What does it mean that the wonkish
tweaking of probabilities is a more reliable guide to the world than the
pronouncements of erudite sages and narratives inspired by systems of ideas?
Aside from smacking us upside the head with a reminder to be more humble and
open-minded, it offers a glimpse into the workings of history on the time scale of
years and decades. Events are determined by myriad small forces incrementing
or decrementing their likelihoods and magnitudes rather than by sweeping laws
and grand dialectics. Unfortunately for many intellectuals and for all political
ideologues, this is not the way they are accustomed to thinking, but perhaps we
had better get used to it. When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast
the nature of forecasting, he said, “When the audience of 2515 looks back on the
audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political
debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692
Salem witch trials.”49

Tetlock did not assign a probability to his whimsical prediction, and he gave it a
long, safe deadline. It certainly would be unwise to forecast an improvement in
the quality of political debate within the five-year window in which prediction is
feasible. The major enemy of reason in the public sphere today—which is not
ignorance, innumeracy, or cognitive biases, but politicization—appears to be on
an upswing.
In the political arena itself, Americans have become increasingly polarized.50
Most people’s opinions are too shallow and uninformed to fit into a coherent
ideology, but in a dubious form of progress, the percentage of Americans whose
opinions are down-the-line liberal or down-the-line conservative doubled
between 1994 and 2014, from 10 to 21 percent. The polarization has coincided
with an increase in social segregation by politics: over those twenty years, the
ideologues have become more likely to say that most of their close friends share
their political views.
The parties have become more partisan as well. According to a recent Pew
study, in 1994 about a third of Democrats were more conservative than the
median Republican, and vice-versa. In 2014 the figures were closer to a
twentieth. Though Americans across the political spectrum drifted leftward
through 2004, since then they have diverged on every major issue except gay
rights, including government regulation, social spending, immigration,
environmental protection, and military strength. Even more troublingly, each
side has become more contemptuous of the other. In 2014, 38 percent of
Democrats held “very unfavorable” views of the Republican Party (up from 16
percent in 1994), and more than a quarter saw it as “a threat to the nation’s well-
being.” Republicans were even more hostile to Democrats, with 43 percent
viewing the party unfavorably and more than a third seeing it as a threat. The
ideologues on each side have also become more resistant to compromise.
Fortunately, a majority of Americans are more moderate in all these opinions,
and the proportion who call themselves moderate has not changed in forty
years.51 Unfortunately, it’s the extremists who are more likely to vote, donate,
and pressure their representatives. There is little reason to think that any of this
has improved since the survey was conducted in 2014, to put it mildly.
Universities ought to be the arena in which political prejudice is set aside and
open-minded investigation reveals the way the world works. But just when we
need this disinterested forum the most, academia has become more politicized as
well—not more polarized, but more left-wing. Colleges have always been more

liberal than the American population, but the skew has been increasing. In 1990,
42 percent of faculty were far left or liberal (11 percentage points more than the
American population), 40 percent were moderate, and 18 percent were far right
or conservative, for a left-to-right ratio of 2.3 to 1. In 2014 the proportions were
60 percent far left or liberal (30 percentage points more than the population), 28
percent moderate, and 12 percent conservative, a ratio of 5 to 1.52 The
proportions vary by field: departments of business, computer science,
engineering, and health science are evenly split, while the humanities and social
sciences are decidedly on the left: the proportion of conservatives is in the single
digits, and they are outnumbered by Marxists two to one.53 Professors in the
physical and biological sciences are in between, with few radicals and virtually
no Marxists, but liberals outnumber conservatives by a wide margin.
The liberal tilt of academia (and of journalism, commentary, and intellectual
life) is in some ways natural.54 Intellectual inquiry is bound to challenge the
status quo, which is never perfect. And verbally articulated propositions,
intellectuals’ stock in trade, are more congenial to the deliberate policies
typically favored by liberals than to the diffuse forms of social organization such
as markets and traditional norms typically favored by conservatives.55 A liberal
tilt is also, in moderation, desirable. Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of
many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as
democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and
judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.56
In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.57
But we have seen that when a creed becomes attached to an in-group, the
critical faculties of its members can be disabled, and there are reasons to think
that has happened within swaths of academia.58 In The Blank Slate (updated in
2016) I showed how leftist politics had distorted the study of human nature,
including sex, violence, gender, childrearing, personality, and intelligence. In a
recent manifesto, Tetlock, together with the psychologists José Duarte, Jarret
Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, and Lee Jussim, documented the
leftward swing of social psychology and showed how it has compromised the
quality of research.59 Quoting John Stuart Mill—“He who knows only his own
side of the case, knows little of that”—they called for greater political diversity
in psychology, the version of diversity that matters the most (as opposed to the
version commonly pursued, namely people who look different but think alike).60
To the credit of academic psychology, Duarte et al.’s critique has been
respectfully received.61 But the respect is far from universal. When the New York

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof cited their article favorably and made similar
points, the angry reaction confirmed their worst accusations (the most highly
recommended comment was “You don’t diversify with idiots”).62 And a faction
of academic culture composed of hard-left faculty, student activists, and an
autonomous diversity bureaucracy (pejoratively called social justice warriors)
has become aggressively illiberal. Anyone who disagrees with the assumption
that racism is the cause of all problems is called a racist.63 Non-leftist speakers
are frequently disinvited after protests or drowned out by jeering mobs.64 A
student may be publicly shamed by her dean for a private email that considers
both sides of a controversy.65 Professors are pressured to avoid lecturing on
upsetting topics, and have been subjected to Stalinesque investigations for
politically incorrect opinions.66 Often the repression veers into unintended
comedy.67 A guideline for deans on how to identify “microaggressions” lists
remarks such as “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most
qualified person should get the job.” Students mob and curse a professor who
invited them to discuss a letter written by his wife suggesting that students chill
out about Halloween costumes. A yoga course was canceled because yoga was
deemed “cultural appropriation.” The comedians themselves are not amused:
Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Bill Maher, among others, are wary of
performing at college campuses because inevitably some students will be
enraged by a joke.68
For all the follies on campus, we can’t let right-wing polemicists indulge in a
bias bias and dismiss any idea they don’t like that comes out of a university. The
academic archipelago embraces a vast sea of opinions, and it is committed to
norms such as peer review, tenure, open debate, and the demand for citation and
empirical evidence that are engineered to foster disinterested truth-seeking,
however imperfectly they do so in practice. Colleges and universities have
fostered the heterodox criticisms reviewed here and elsewhere, while delivering
immense gifts of knowledge to the world.69 And it’s not as if alternative arenas—
the blogosphere, the Twittersphere, cable news, talk radio, Congress—are
paragons of objectivity and rigor.
Of the two forms of politicization that are subverting reason today, the
political is far more dangerous than the academic, for an obvious reason. It’s
often quipped (no one knows who said it first) that academic debates are vicious
because the stakes are so small.70 But in political debates the stakes are
unlimited, including the future of the planet. Politicians, unlike professors, pull
the levers of power. In 21st-century America, the control of Congress by a

Republican Party that became synonymous with the extreme right has been
pernicious, because it is so convinced of the righteousness of its cause and the
evil of its rivals that it has undermined the institutions of democracy to get what
it wants. The corruptions include gerrymandering, imposing voting restrictions
designed to disenfranchise Democratic voters, encouraging unregulated
donations from moneyed interests, blocking Supreme Court nominations until
their party controls the presidency, shutting down the government when their
maximal demands aren’t met, and unconditionally supporting Donald Trump
over their own objections to his flagrantly antidemocratic impulses.71 Whatever
differences in policy or philosophy divide the parties, the mechanisms of
democratic deliberation should be sacrosanct. Their erosion, disproportionately
by the right, has led many people, including a growing share of young
Americans, to see democratic government as inherently dysfunctional and to
become cynical about democracy itself.72
Intellectual and political polarization feed each other. It’s harder to be a
conservative intellectual when American conservative politics has become
steadily more know-nothing, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W.
Bush to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump.73 On the other side, the capture of the left
by identity politicians, political correctness police, and social justice warriors
creates an opening for loudmouths who brag of “telling it like it is.” A challenge
of our era is how to foster an intellectual and political culture that is driven by
reason rather than tribalism and mutual reaction.
Making reason the currency of our discourse begins with clarity about the
centrality of reason itself.74 As I mentioned, many commentators are confused
about it. The discovery of cognitive and emotional biases does not mean that
“humans are irrational” and so there’s no point in trying to make our
deliberations more rational. If humans were incapable of rationality, we could
never have discovered the ways in which they were irrational, because we would
have no benchmark of rationality against which to assess human judgment, and
no way to carry out the assessment. Humans may be vulnerable to bias and error,
but clearly not all of us all the time, or no one would ever be entitled to say that
humans are vulnerable to bias and error. The human brain is capable of reason,
given the right circumstances; the problem is to identify those circumstances and
put them more firmly in place.

For the same reason, editorialists should retire the new cliché that we are in a
“post-truth era” unless they can keep up a tone of scathing irony. The term is
corrosive, because it implies that we should resign ourselves to propaganda and
lies and just fight back with more of our own. We are not in a post-truth era.
Mendacity, truth-shading, conspiracy theories, extraordinary popular delusions,
and the madness of crowds are as old as our species, but so is the conviction that
some ideas are right and others are wrong.75 The same decade that has seen the
rise of pants-on-fire Trump and his reality-challenged followers has also seen the
rise of a new ethic of fact-checking. Angie Holan, the editor of PolitiFact, a fact-
checking project begun in 2007, noted:
[Many of] today’s TV journalists . . . have picked up the torch of fact-

checking and now grill candidates on issues of accuracy during live
interviews. Most voters don’t think it’s biased to question people about
whether their seemingly fact-based statements are accurate. Research
published earlier this year by the American Press Institute showed that
more than eight in 10 Americans have a positive view of political fact-
checking.
In fact, journalists regularly tell me their media organizations have
started highlighting fact-checking in their reporting because so many
people click on fact-checking stories after a debate or high-profile news
event. Many readers now want fact-checking as part of traditional news
stories as well; they will vocally complain to ombudsmen and readers’
representatives when they see news stories repeating discredited factual
claims.76
This ethic would have served us well in earlier decades when false rumors
regularly set off pogroms, riots, lynchings, and wars (including the Spanish-
American War in 1898, the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964, the Iraq
invasion of 2003, and many others).77 It was not applied rigorously enough to
prevent Trump’s victory in 2016, but since then his fibs and those of his
spokespeople have been mercilessly ridiculed in the media and popular culture,
which means that the resources for favoring truth are in place even if they don’t
always carry the day.
Over the long run, the institutions of reason can mitigate the Tragedy of the
Belief Commons and allow the truth to prevail. For all of our current
irrationality, few influential people today believe in werewolves, unicorns,

witches, alchemy, astrology, bloodletting, miasmas, animal sacrifice, the divine
right of kings, or supernatural omens in rainbows and eclipses. Moral
irrationality can be outgrown as well. As recently as my childhood, the Virginia
judge Leon Bazile upheld the conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving for
their interracial marriage with an argument that not even the most benighted
conservative would advance today:
The parties were guilty of a most serious crime. It was contrary to the
declared public law, founded upon motives of public policy . . . upon
which social order, public morality and the best interests of both races
depend. . . . Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay
and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he
separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.78
And presumably most liberals would not be persuaded by this defense of

Castro’s Cuba by the intellectual icon Susan Sontag in 1969:
The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality and freaking
out. They are not linear, desiccated creatures of print-culture. In short,
their problem is almost the obverse of ours—and we must be sympathetic
to their efforts to solve it. Suspicious as we are of the traditional
Puritanism of left revolutions, American radicals ought to be able to
maintain some perspective when a country known mainly for dance music,
prostitutes, cigars, abortions, resort life and pornographic movies gets a
little up-tight about sexual morals and, in one bad moment two years ago,
rounds up several thousand homosexuals in Havana and sends them to a
farm to rehabilitate themselves.79
In fact, these “farms” were forced labor camps, and they arose not as a
correction to spontaneous gaiety and freaking out but as an expression of a
homophobia that was deeply rooted in that Latin culture. Whenever we get upset
about the looniness of public discourse today, we should remind ourselves that
people weren’t so rational in the past, either.

What can be done to improve standards of reasoning? Persuasion by facts and
logic, the most direct strategy, is not always futile. It’s true that people can cling
to beliefs in defiance of all evidence, like Lucy in Peanuts who insisted that
snow comes out of the ground and rises into the sky even as she was being
slowly buried in a snowfall. But there are limits as to how high the snow can pile
up. When people are first confronted with information that contradicts a staked-
out position, they become even more committed to it, as we’d expect from the
theories of identity-protective cognition, motivated reasoning, and cognitive
dissonance reduction. Feeling their identity threatened, belief holders double
down and muster more ammunition to fend off the challenge. But since another
part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the
counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to
bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping
point.80 The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion
holder’s reputation would be damaged by relinquishing the opinion and whether
the counterevidence is so blatant and public as to be common knowledge: a
naked emperor, an elephant in the room.81 As we saw in chapter 10, that is
starting to happen with public opinion on climate change. And entire populations
can shift when a critical nucleus of persuadable influencers changes its mind and
everyone else follows along, or when one generation is replaced by another that
doesn’t cling to the same dogmas (progress, funeral by funeral).
Across the society as a whole the wheels of reason often turn slowly, and it
would be nice to speed them up. The obvious places to apply this torque are in
education and the media. For several decades fans of reason have pressured
schools and universities to adopt curricula in “critical thinking.” Students are
advised to look at both sides of an issue, to back up their opinions with evidence,
and to spot logical fallacies like circular reasoning, attacking a straw man,
appealing to authority, arguing ad hominem, and reducing a graded issue to
black or white.82 Related programs called “debiasing” try to inoculate students
against cognitive fallacies such as the Availability heuristic and confirmation
bias.83
When they were first introduced, these programs had disappointing
outcomes, which led to pessimism as to whether we could ever knock sense into
the person on the street. But unless risk analysts and cognitive psychologists
represent a superior breed of human, something in their education must have
enlightened them about cognitive fallacies and how to avoid them, and there is
no reason those enlightenments can’t be applied more widely. The beauty of

reason is that it can always be applied to understand failures of reason. A second
look at critical thinking and debiasing programs has shown what makes them
succeed or fail.
The reasons are familiar to education researchers.84 Any curriculum will be
pedagogically ineffective if it consists of a lecturer yammering in front of a
blackboard, or a textbook that students highlight with a yellow marker. People
understand concepts only when they are forced to think them through, to discuss
them with others, and to use them to solve problems. A second impediment to
effective teaching is that pupils don’t spontaneously transfer what they learned
from one concrete example to others in the same abstract category. Students in a
math class who learn how to arrange a marching band into even rows using the
principle of a least common multiple are stymied when asked to arrange rows of
vegetables in a garden. In the same way, students in a critical thinking course
who are taught to discuss the American Revolution from both the British and
American perspectives will not make the leap to consider how the Germans
viewed World War I.
With these lessons about lessons under their belt, psychologists have recently
devised debiasing programs that fortify logical and critical thinking curricula.
They encourage students to spot, name, and correct fallacies across a wide range
of contexts.85 Some use computer games that provide students with practice, and
with feedback that allows them to see the absurd consequences of their errors.
Other curricula translate abstruse mathematical statements into concrete,
imaginable scenarios. Tetlock has compiled the practices of successful
forecasters into a set of guidelines for good judgment (for example, start with the
base rate; seek out evidence and don’t overreact or underreact to it; don’t try to
explain away your own errors but instead use them as a source of calibration).
These and other programs are provably effective: students’ newfound wisdom
outlasts the training session and transfers to new subjects.
Despite these successes, and despite the fact that the ability to engage in
unbiased, critical reasoning is a prerequisite to thinking about anything else, few
educational institutions have set themselves the goal of enhancing rationality.
(This includes my own university, where my suggestion during a curriculum
review that all students should learn about cognitive biases fell deadborn from
my lips.) Many psychologists have called on their field to “give debiasing away”
as one of its greatest potential contributions to human welfare.86

Effective training in critical thinking and cognitive debiasing may not be enough
to cure identity-protective cognition, in which people cling to whatever opinion
enhances the glory of their tribe and their status within it. This is the disease with
the greatest morbidity in the political realm, and so far scientists have
misdiagnosed it, pointing to irrationality and scientific illiteracy instead of the
myopic rationality of the Tragedy of the Belief Commons. As one writer noted,
scientists often treat the public the way Englishmen treat foreigners: they speak
more slowly and more loudly.87
Making the world more rational, then, is not just a matter of training people
to be better reasoners and setting them loose. It also depends on the rules of
discourse in workplaces, social circles, and arenas of debate and decision-
making. Experiments have shown that the right rules can avert the Tragedy of
the Belief Commons and force people to dissociate their reasoning from their
identities.88 One technique was discovered long ago by rabbis: they forced
yeshiva students to switch sides in a Talmudic debate and argue the opposite
position. Another is to have people try to reach a consensus in a small discussion
group; this forces them to defend their opinions to their groupmates, and the
truth usually wins.89 Scientists themselves have hit upon a new strategy called
adversarial collaboration, in which mortal enemies work together to get to the
bottom of an issue, setting up empirical tests that they agree beforehand will
settle it.90
Even the mere requirement to explicate an opinion can shake people out of
their overconfidence. Most of us are deluded about our degree of understanding
of the world, a bias called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.91 Though we think
we understand how a zipper works, or a cylinder lock, or a toilet, as soon as we
are called upon to explain it we are dumbfounded and forced to confess we have
no idea. That is also true of hot-button political issues. When people with die-
hard opinions on Obamacare or NAFTA are challenged to explain what those
policies actually are, they soon realize that they don’t know what they are talking
about, and become more open to counterarguments. Perhaps most important,
people are less biased when they have skin in the game and have to live with the
consequences of their opinions. In a review of the literature on rationality, the
anthropologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber conclude, “Contrary to common
bleak assessments of human reasoning abilities, people are quite capable of
reasoning in an unbiased manner, at least when they are evaluating arguments
rather than producing them, and when they are after the truth rather than trying
to win a debate.”92

The way that the rules in particular arenas can make us collectively stupid or
smart can resolve the paradox that keeps popping up in this chapter: why the
world seems to be getting less rational in an age of unprecedented knowledge
and tools for sharing it. The resolution is that in most arenas, the world has not
been getting less rational. It’s not as if hospital patients are increasingly dying of
quackery, or planes are falling out of the sky, or food is rotting on wharves
because no one can figure out how to get it into stores. The chapters on progress
have shown that our collective ingenuity has been increasingly successful in
solving society’s problems.
Indeed, in one realm after another we are seeing the conquest of dogma and
instinct by the armies of reason. Newspapers are supplementing shoe leather and
punditry with statisticians and fact-checking squads.93 The cloak-and-dagger
world of national intelligence is seeing farther into the future by using the
Bayesian reasoning of superforecasters.94 Health care is being reshaped by
evidence-based medicine (which should have been a redundant expression long
ago).95 Psychotherapy has progressed from the couch and notebook to Feedback-
Informed Treatment.96 In New York, and increasingly in other cities, violent
crime has been reduced with the real-time data-crunching system called
Compstat.97 The effort to aid the developing world is being guided by the
Randomistas, economists who gather data from randomized trials to distinguish
fashionable boondoggles from programs that actually improve people’s lives.98
Volunteering and charitable giving are being scrutinized by the Effective
Altruism movement, which distinguishes altruistic acts that enhance the lives of
beneficiaries from those that enhance the warm glow in benefactors.99 Sports has
seen the advent of Moneyball, in which strategies and players are evaluated by
statistical analysis rather than intuition and lore, allowing smarter teams to beat
richer teams and giving fans endless new material for conversations over the hot
stove.100 The blogosphere has spawned the Rationality Community, who urge
people to be “less wrong” in their opinions by applying Bayesian reasoning and
compensating for cognitive biases.101 And in the day-to-day functioning of
governments, the application of behavioral insights (sometimes called Nudge)
and evidence-based policy has wrung more social benefits out of fewer tax
dollars.102 In area after area, the world has been getting more rational.
There is, of course, a flaming exception: electoral politics and the issues that
have clung to it. Here the rules of the game are fiendishly designed to bring out
the most irrational in people.103 Voters have a say on issues that don’t affect them
personally, and never have to inform themselves or justify their positions.

Practical agenda items like trade and energy are bundled with moral hot buttons
like euthanasia and the teaching of evolution. Each bundle is strapped to a
coalition with geographic, racial, and ethnic constituencies. The media cover
elections like horse races, and analyze issues by pitting ideological hacks against
each other in screaming matches. All of these features steer people away from
reasoned analysis and toward perfervid self-expression. Some are products of the
misconception that the benefits of democracy come from elections, whereas they
depend more on having a government that is constrained in its powers,
responsive to its citizens, and attentive to the results of its policies (chapter 14).
As a result, reforms that are designed to make governance more “democratic,”
such as plebiscites and direct primaries, may instead have made governance
more identity-driven and irrational. The conundrums are inherent to democracy
and have been debated since the time of Plato.104 They have no instant solution,
but identifying the worst of the current problems and setting the goal of
mitigating them is the place to start.
When issues are not politicized, people can be altogether rational. Kahan
notes that “bitter public disputes over science are in fact the exception rather
than the rule.”105 No one gets exercised over whether antibiotics work, or
whether driving drunk is a good idea. Recent history proves the point in a natural
experiment, complete with a neatly matched control group.106 The human
papillomavirus (HPV) is sexually transmitted and a major cause of cervical
cancer but can be neutralized with a vaccine. Hepatitis B is also sexually
transmitted, also causes cancer, and also can be prevented by a vaccine. Yet HPV
vaccination became a political firestorm, with parents protesting that the
government should not be making it easier for teenagers to have sex, while
hepatitis B vaccination is unexceptionable. The difference, Kahan suggests, lies
in the way the two vaccines were introduced. Hep B was treated as a routine
public health matter, like whooping cough or yellow fever. But the manufacturer
of the HPV vaccine lobbied state legislatures to make vaccination mandatory,
starting with adolescent girls, which sexualized the treatment and raised the
dander of puritanical parents.
To make public discourse more rational, issues should be depoliticized as
much as is feasible. Experiments have shown that when people hear about a new
policy, such as welfare reform, they will like it if it is proposed by their own
party and hate it if it is proposed by the other—all the while convinced that they
are reacting to it on its objective merits.107 That implies that spokespeople should
be chosen carefully. Several climate activists have lamented that by writing and

starring in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore may have done the
movement more harm than good, because as a former Democratic vice-president
and presidential nominee he stamped climate change with a left-wing seal. (It’s
hard to believe today, but environmentalism was once denounced as a right-wing
cause, in which the gentry frivolously worried about habitats for duck-hunting
and the views from their country estates rather than serious issues like racism,
poverty, and Vietnam.) Recruiting conservative and libertarian commentators
who have been convinced by the evidence and are willing to share their concern
would be more effective than recruiting more scientists to speak more slowly
and more loudly.108
Also, the factual state of affairs should be unbundled from remedies that are
freighted with symbolic political meaning. Kahan found that people are less
polarized in their opinion about the very existence of anthropogenic climate
change when they are reminded of the possibility that it might be mitigated by
geoengineering than when they are told that it calls for stringent controls on
emissions.109 (This does not, of course, mean that geoengineering itself need be
advocated as the primary solution.) Depoliticizing an issue can lead to real
action. Kahan helped a compact of Florida businesspeople, politicians, and
resident associations, many of them Republican, agree to a plan to adapt to rising
sea levels that threatened coastal roads and freshwater supplies. The plan
included measures to reduce carbon emissions, which under other circumstances
would be politically radioactive. But as long as the planning was focused on
problems they could see and the politically divisive backstory was downplayed,
they acted reasonably.110
For their part, the media could examine their role in turning politics into a
sport, and intellectuals and pundits could think twice about competing. Can we
imagine a day in which the most famous columnists and talking heads have no
predictable political orientation but try to work out defensible conclusions on an
issue-by-issue basis? A day in which “You’re just repeating the left-wing [or
right-wing] position” is considered a devastating gotcha? In which people
(especially academics) will answer a question like “Does gun control reduce
crime?” or “Does a minimum wage increase unemployment?” with “Wait, let me
look up the latest meta-analysis” rather than with a patellar reflex predictable
from their politics? A day when writers on the right and left abandon the
Chicago Way of debating (“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of
yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue”) and adopt the arms-

controllers’ tactic of Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-Reduction (make a
small unilateral concession with an invitation that it be reciprocated)?111
That day is a long way off. But the self-healing powers of rationality, in
which flaws in reasoning are singled out as targets for education and criticism,
take time to work. It took centuries for Francis Bacon’s observations on
anecdotal reasoning and the confusion of correlation with causation to become
second nature to scientifically literate people. It’s taken almost fifty years for
Tversky and Kahneman’s demonstrations of Availability and other cognitive
biases to make inroads into our conventional wisdom. The discovery that
political tribalism is the most insidious form of irrationality today is still fresh
and mostly unknown. Indeed, sophisticated thinkers can be as infected by it as
anyone else. With the accelerating pace of everything, perhaps the
countermeasures will catch on sooner.
However long it takes, we must not let the existence of cognitive and
emotional biases or the spasms of irrationality in the political arena discourage
us from the Enlightenment ideal of relentlessly pursuing reason and truth. If we
can identify ways in which humans are irrational, we must know what rationality
is. Since there’s nothing special about us, our fellows must have at least some
capacity for rationality as well. And it’s in the very nature of rationality that
reasoners can always step back, consider their own shortcomings, and reason out
ways to work around them.

CHAPTER 22
SCIENCE
I f we were called upon to name the proudest accomplishments of our species,

whether in an intergalactic bragging competition or in testimony before the
Almighty, what would we say?
We could crow about historic triumphs in human rights, such as the abolition
of slavery and the defeat of fascism. But however inspiring these victories are,
they consist in the removal of obstacles we set in our own path. It would be like
listing in the achievements section of a résumé that you overcame a heroin
addiction.1
We would certainly include the masterworks of art, music, and literature. Yet
would the works of Aeschylus or El Greco or Billie Holiday be appreciated by
sentient agents with brains and experiences unimaginably different from ours?
Perhaps there are universals of beauty and meaning that transcend cultures and
would resonate with any intelligence—I like to think there are—but it is
devilishly difficult to know.
Yet there is one realm of accomplishment of which we can unabashedly boast
before any tribunal of minds, and that is science. It’s hard to imagine an
intelligent agent that would be incurious about the world in which it exists, and
in our species that curiosity has been exhilaratingly satisfied. We can explain
much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff
we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including
our mental life.
Though our ignorance is vast (and always will be), our knowledge is
astonishing, and growing daily. The physicist Sean Carroll argues in The Big
Picture that the laws of physics underlying everyday life (that is, excluding
extreme values of energy and gravitation like black holes, dark matter, and the
Big Bang) are completely known. It’s hard to disagree that this is “one of the

greatest triumphs of human intellectual history.”2 In the living world, more than
a million and a half species have been scientifically described, and with a
realistic surge of effort the remaining seven million could be named within this
century.3 Our understanding of the world, moreover, consists not in mere listings
of particles and forces and species but in deep, elegant principles, such as that
gravity is the curvature of space-time, and that life depends on a molecule that
carries information, directs metabolism, and replicates itself.
Scientific discoveries continue to astound, to delight, to answer the formerly
unanswerable. When Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, they
could not have dreamed of a day when the genome of a 38,000-year-old
Neanderthal fossil would be sequenced and found to contain a gene connected to
speech and language, or when an analysis of Oprah Winfrey’s DNA would tell
her she was descended from the Kpelle people of the Liberian rain forest.
Science is shedding new light on the human condition. The great thinkers of
antiquity, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment were born too soon to enjoy
ideas with deep implications for morality and meaning, including entropy,
evolution, information, game theory, and artificial intelligence (though they
often tinkered with precursors and approximations). The problems these thinkers
introduced to us are today being enriched with these ideas, and are being probed
with methods such as 3-D imaging of brain activity and the mining of big data to
trace the propagation of ideas.
Science has also provided the world with images of sublime beauty:
stroboscopically frozen motion, flamboyant fauna from tropical rain forests and
deep-sea ocean vents, graceful spiral galaxies and diaphanous nebulae,
fluorescing neural circuitry, and a luminous Planet Earth rising above the moon’s
horizon into the blackness of space. Like great works of art, these are not just
pretty pictures but prods to contemplation, which deepen our understanding of
what it means to be human and of our place in nature.
And science, of course, has granted us the gifts of life, health, wealth,
knowledge, and freedom documented in the chapters on progress. To take just
one example from chapter 6, scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful
and disfiguring disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century
alone. In case anyone has skimmed over this feat of moral greatness, let me say
it again: scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful and disfiguring
disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone.
These awe-inspiring achievements put the lie to any moaning that we live in
an age of decline, disenchantment, meaninglessness, shallowness, or the absurd.

Yet today the beauty and power of science are not just unappreciated but bitterly
resented. The disdain for science may be found in surprising quarters: not just
among religious fundamentalists and know-nothing politicians, but among many
of our most adored intellectuals and in our most august institutions of higher
learning.
The disrespect of science among American right-wing politicians has been

documented by the journalist Chris Mooney in The Republican War on Science
and has led even stalwarts (such as Bobby Jindal, the former governor of
Louisiana) to disparage their own organization as “the party of stupid.”4 The
reputation grew out of policies set in motion during George W. Bush’s
administration, including his encouragement of the teaching of creationism (in
the guise of “intelligent design”) and the shift from a longstanding practice of
seeking advice from disinterested scientific panels to stacking the panels with
congenial ideologues, many of whom promoted flaky ideas (such as that
abortion causes breast cancer) while denying well-supported ones (such as that
condoms prevent sexually transmitted diseases).5 Republican politicians have
engaged in spectacles of inanity, such as when Senator James Inhofe of
Oklahoma, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, brought a
snowball onto the Senate floor in 2015 to dispute the fact of global warming.
The previous chapter warned us that the stupidification of science in political
discourse mostly surrounds hot buttons like abortion, evolution, and climate
change. But the scorn for scientific consensus has widened into a broadband
know-nothingness. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chair of the House
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, has harassed the National
Science Foundation not just for its research on climate science (which he thinks
is a left-wing conspiracy) but for the research in its peer-reviewed grants, which
he pulls out of context to mock (for example, “How does the federal government
justify spending over $220,000 to study animal photos in National
Geographic?”).6 He has tried to undermine federal support of basic research by
proposing legislation that would require the NSF to fund only studies that
promote “the national interest” such as defense and the economy.7 Science, of
course, transcends national boundaries (as Chekhov noted, “There is no national
science just as there is no national multiplication table”), and its ability to
promote anyone’s interests comes from its foundational understanding of reality.8
The Global Positioning System, for example, uses the theory of relativity.

Cancer therapies depend on the discovery of the double helix. Artificial
intelligence adapts neural and semantic networks from the brain and cognitive
sciences.
But chapter 21 prepared us for the fact that politicized repression of science
comes from the left as well. It was the left that stoked panics about
overpopulation, nuclear power, and genetically modified organisms. Research on
intelligence, sexuality, violence, parenting, and prejudice have been distorted by
tactics ranging from the choice of items in questionnaires to the intimidation of
researchers who fail to ratify the politically correct orthodoxy.
My focus in the rest of this chapter is on a hostility to science that runs even
deeper. Many intellectuals are enraged by the intrusion of science into the
traditional territories of the humanities, such as politics, history, and the arts. Just
as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to the terrain formerly ruled
by religion: many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that it is
unseemly for science to weigh in on the biggest questions. In the major journals
of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism,
reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and, worst of all, a crime called
scientism.
This resentment is bipartisan. The standard case for the prosecution by the
left may be found in a 2011 review in The Nation by the historian Jackson Lears:
Positivism depends on the reductionist belief that the entire universe,

including all human conduct, can be explained with reference to precisely
measurable, deterministic physical processes. . . . Positivist assumptions
provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-
evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and
imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that
human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the
selective breeding of the “fit” and the sterilization or elimination of the
“unfit.” Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the
catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter
of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferation of unimaginably
destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these
events involved, in various degrees, the application of scientific research
to advanced technology.9

The case from the right is captured in this 2007 speech from Leon Kass, Bush’s
bioethics advisor:
Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly
welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle
against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-
understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity. A quasi-religious
faith has sprung up among us—let me call it “soul-less scientism”—which
believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete
account of human life, giving purely scientific explanations of human
thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in
God. The threat to our humanity today comes not from the transmigration
of souls in the next life, but from the denial of soul in this one. . . .
Make no mistake. The stakes in this contest are high: at issue are the
moral and spiritual health of our nation, the continued vitality of science,
and our own self-understanding as human beings and as children of the
West. . . . All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the
atheists among us—must understand that their own humanity is on the
line.10
These are zealous prosecutors indeed. But as we shall see, their case is
trumped up. Science cannot be blamed for genocide and war, and does not
threaten the moral and spiritual health of our nation. On the contrary, science is
indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the
search for meaning, purpose, and morality.
The highbrow war on science is a flare-up of the controversy raised by C. P.

Snow in 1959 when he deplored the disdain for science among British
intellectuals in his lecture and book The Two Cultures. The term “cultures,” in
the anthropologists’ sense, explains the puzzle of why science should draw flak
not just from fossil-fuel-funded politicians but from some of the most erudite
members of the clerisy.
During the 20th century, the landscape of human knowledge was carved into
professionalized duchies, and the growth of science (particularly the sciences of
human nature) is often seen as an encroachment on territories that had been
staked and enclosed by the academic humanities. It’s not that practitioners of the

humanities themselves have this zero-sum mindset. Most artists show no signs of
it; the novelists, painters, filmmakers, and musicians I know are intensely
curious about the light that science might shed on their media, just as they are
open to any source of inspiration. Nor is the anxiety expressed by the scholars
who delve into historical epochs, genres of art, systems of ideas, and other
subject matter in the humanities, since a true scholar is receptive to ideas
regardless of their origin. The defensive pugnacity belongs to a culture: Snow’s
Second Culture of literary intellectuals, cultural critics, and erudite essayists.11
The writer Damon Linker (citing the sociologist Daniel Bell) characterizes them
as “specialists in generalizations, . . . pronouncing on the world from out of their
individual experiences, habits of reading and capacity for judgment. Subjectivity
in all of its quirks and eccentricities is the coin of the realm in the Republic of
Letters.”12 This modus could not be more different from the way of science, and
it’s the Second Culture intellectuals who most fear “scientism,” which they
understand as the position that “science is all that matters” or that “scientists
should be entrusted to solve all problems.”
Snow, of course, never held the lunatic position that power should be
transferred to the culture of scientists. On the contrary, he called for a Third
Culture, which would combine ideas from science, culture, and history and apply
them to enhancing human welfare across the globe.13 The term was revived in
1991 by the author and literary agent John Brockman, and it is related to the
biologist E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience, the unity of knowledge, which
Wilson in turn attributed to (who else?) the thinkers of the Enlightenment.14 The
first step in understanding the promise of science in human affairs is to escape
the bunker mentality of the Second Culture, captured, for example, in the tag line
of a 2013 article by the literary lion Leon Wieseltier: “Now science wants to
invade the liberal arts. Don’t let it happen.”15
An endorsement of scientific thinking must first of all be distinguished from
any belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are
particularly wise or noble. The culture of science is based on the opposite belief.
Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind
methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human,
are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that
you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
For the same reason, a call for everyone to think more scientifically must not
be confused with a call to hand decision-making over to scientists. Many
scientists are naïfs when it comes to policy and law, and cook up nonstarters like

world government, mandatory licensing of parents, and escaping a befouled
Earth by colonizing other planets. It doesn’t matter, because we’re not talking
about which priesthood should be granted power; we’re talking about how
collective decisions can be made more wisely.
A respect for scientific thinking is, adamantly, not the belief that all current
scientific hypotheses are true. Most new ones are not. The lifeblood of science is
the cycle of conjecture and refutation: proposing a hypothesis and then seeing
whether it survives attempts to falsify it. This point escapes many critics of
science, who point to some discredited hypothesis as proof that science cannot
be trusted, like a rabbi from my childhood who rebutted the theory of evolution
as follows: “Scientists think the world is four billion years old. They used to
think the world was eight billion years old. If they can be off by four billion
years once, they can be off by four billion years again.” The fallacy (putting
aside the apocryphal history) is a failure to recognize that what science allows is
an increasing confidence in a hypothesis as the evidence accumulates, not a
claim to infallibility on the first try. Indeed, this kind of argument refutes itself,
since the arguers must themselves appeal to the truth of current scientific claims
to cast doubt on the earlier ones. The same is true of the common argument that
the claims of science are untrustworthy because the scientists of some earlier
period were motivated by the prejudices and chauvinisms of the day. When they
were, they were doing bad science, and it’s only the better science of later
periods that allows us, today, to identify their errors.
One attempt to build a wall around science and make science pay for it uses a
different argument: that science deals only with facts about physical stuff, so
scientists are committing a logical error when they say anything about values or
society or culture. As Wieseltier puts it, “It is not for science to say whether
science belongs in morality and politics and art. Those are philosophical matters,
and science is not philosophy.” But it is this argument that commits a logical
error, by confusing propositions with academic disciplines. It’s certainly true that
an empirical proposition is not the same as a logical one, and both must be
distinguished from normative or moral claims. But that does not mean that
scientists are under a gag order forbidding them to discuss conceptual and moral
issues, any more than philosophers must keep their mouths shut about the
physical world.
Science is not a list of empirical facts. Scientists are immersed in the ethereal
medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their
theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. Nor, for its part, has

philosophy ever confined itself to a ghostly realm of pure ideas that float free of
the physical universe. The Enlightenment philosophers in particular interwove
their conceptual arguments with hypotheses about perception, cognition,
emotion, and sociality. (Hume’s analysis of the nature of causality, to take just
one example, took off from his insights about the psychology of causality, and
Kant was, among other things, a prescient cognitive psychologist.)16 Today most
philosophers (at least in the analytic or Anglo-American tradition) subscribe to
naturalism, the position that “reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing
‘supernatural,’ and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all
areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit.’”17 Science, in the modern
conception, is of a piece with philosophy and with reason itself.
What, then, distinguishes science from other exercises of reason? It certainly
isn’t “the scientific method,” a term that is taught to schoolchildren but that
never passes the lips of a scientist. Scientists use whichever methods help them
understand the world: drudgelike tabulation of data, experimental derring-do,
flights of theoretical fancy, elegant mathematical modeling, kludgy computer
simulation, sweeping verbal narrative.18 All the methods are pressed into the
service of two ideals, and it is these ideals that advocates of science want to
export to the rest of intellectual life.
The first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may
be explained by principles that are deeper than the phenomena themselves.
That’s why scientists laugh at the Theory of the Brontosaurus from the dinosaur
expert on Monty Python’s Flying Circus: “All brontosauruses are thin at one end,
much much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end”—the
“theory” is just a description of how things are, not an explanation of why they
are the way they are. The principles making up an explanation may in turn be
explained by still deeper principles, and so on. (As David Deutsch put it, “We
are always at the beginning of infinity.”) In making sense of our world, there
should be few occasions on which we are forced to concede, “It just is” or “It’s
magic” or “Because I said so.” The commitment to intelligibility is not a matter
of raw faith, but progressively validates itself as more of the world becomes
explicable in scientific terms. The processes of life, for example, used to be
attributed to a mysterious élan vital; now we know they are powered by
chemical and physical reactions among complex molecules.
Demonizers of scientism often confuse intelligibility with a sin called
reductionism, the analysis of a complex system into simpler elements, or,
according to the accusation, nothing but simpler elements. In fact, to explain a

complex happening in terms of deeper principles is not to discard its richness.
Patterns emerge at one level of analysis that are not reducible to their
components at a lower level. Though World War I consisted of matter in motion,
no one would try to explain World War I in the language of physics, chemistry,
and biology as opposed to the more perspicuous language of the perceptions and
goals of leaders in 1914 Europe. At the same time, a curious person can
legitimately ask why human minds are apt to have such perceptions and goals,
including the tribalism, overconfidence, mutual fear, and culture of honor that
fell into a deadly combination at that historical moment.
The second ideal is that we must allow the world to tell us whether our ideas
about it are correct. The traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma,
authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, hermeneutic parsing of texts, the
glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error, and should be dismissed as
sources of knowledge. Instead our beliefs about empirical propositions should be
calibrated by their fit to the world. When scientists are pressed to explain how
they do this, they usually reach for Karl Popper’s model of conjecture and
refutation, in which a scientific theory may be falsified by empirical tests but is
never confirmed. In reality, science doesn’t much look like skeet shooting, with a
succession of hypotheses launched into the air like clay pigeons and shot to
smithereens. It looks more like Bayesian reasoning (the logic used by the
superforecasters we met in the preceding chapter). A theory is granted a prior
degree of credence, based on its consistency with everything else we know. That
level of credence is then incremented or decremented according to how likely an
empirical observation would be if the theory is true, compared with how likely it
would be if the theory is false.19 Regardless of whether Popper or Bayes has the
better account, a scientist’s degree of belief in a theory depends on its
consistency with empirical evidence. Any movement that calls itself “scientific”
but fails to nurture opportunities for the testing of its own beliefs (most
obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a
scientific movement.
Many people are willing to credit science with giving us handy drugs and
gadgets and even with explaining how physical stuff works. But they draw the
line at what truly matters to us as human beings: the deep questions about who
we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning and purpose of
our lives. That is the traditional territory of religion, and its defenders tend to be

the most excitable critics of scientism. They are apt to endorse the partition plan
proposed by the paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould in his book
Rocks of Ages, according to which the proper concerns of science and religion
belong to “non-overlapping magisteria.” Science gets the empirical universe;
religion gets the questions of morality, meaning, and value.
But this entente unravels as soon as you begin to examine it. The moral
worldview of any scientifically literate person—one who is not blinkered by
fundamentalism—requires a clean break from religious conceptions of meaning
and value.
To begin with, the findings of science imply that the belief systems of all the
world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the genesis of the
world, life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our
ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that
developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that
our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things
and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We
know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars
in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-
old universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our
intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the
nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know that the
laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other
misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such
thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or
answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and
the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are. And we
know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of
every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including many we
hold today.
In other words, the worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of a
knowledgeable person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though
the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the
possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual
matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The
scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines
practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and
the persecution of heretics. By exposing the absence of purpose in the laws

governing the universe, science forces us to take responsibility for the welfare of
ourselves, our species, and our planet. For the same reason, it undercuts any
moral or political system based on mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics,
struggles, or messianic ages. And in combination with a few unexceptionable
convictions—that all of us value our own welfare, and that we are social beings
who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific
facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely principles that maximize the
flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism (chapter 23),
which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming
the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and
liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives
we face today.
Though science is increasingly and beneficially embedded in our material,

moral, and intellectual lives, many of our cultural institutions cultivate a
philistine indifference to science that shades into contempt. Intellectual
magazines that are ostensibly dedicated to ideas confine themselves to politics
and the arts, with scant attention to new ideas emerging from science, with the
exception of politicized issues like climate change (and regular attacks on
scientism).20 Still worse is the treatment of science in the liberal arts curricula of
many universities. Students can graduate with a trifling exposure to science, and
what they do learn is often designed to poison them against it.
The most commonly assigned book on science in modern universities (aside
from a popular biology textbook) is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions.21 That 1962 classic is commonly interpreted as showing that science
does not converge on the truth but merely busies itself with solving puzzles
before flipping to some new paradigm which renders its previous theories
obsolete, indeed, unintelligible.22 Though Kuhn himself later disavowed this
nihilist interpretation, it has become the conventional wisdom within the Second
Culture. A critic from a major intellectual magazine once explained to me that
the art world no longer considers whether works of art are “beautiful” for the
same reason that scientists no longer consider whether theories are “true.” He
seemed genuinely surprised when I corrected him.
The historian of science David Wootton has remarked on the mores of his
own field: “In the years since Snow’s lecture the two-cultures problem has
deepened; history of science, far from serving as a bridge between the arts and

sciences, nowadays offers the scientists a picture of themselves that most of
them cannot recognize.”23 That is because many historians of science consider it
naïve to treat science as the pursuit of true explanations of the world. The result
is like a report of a basketball game by a dance critic who is not allowed to say
that the players are trying to throw the ball through the hoop. I once sat through
a lecture on the semiotics of neuroimaging at which a historian of science
deconstructed a series of dynamic 3-D multicolor images of the brain, volubly
explaining how “that ostensibly neutral and naturalizing scientific gaze
encourages particular kinds of selves who are then amenable to certain political
agendas, shifting position from the neuro(psychological) object toward the
external observatory position,” and so on—any explanation but the bloody
obvious one, namely that the images make it easier to see what’s going on in the
brain.24 Many scholars in “science studies” devote their careers to recondite
analyses of how the whole institution is just a pretext for oppression. An
example is this scholarly contribution to the world’s most pressing challenge:
Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A Feminist Glaciology Framework for

Global Environmental Change Research
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change.
However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers—
particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of
glaciological knowledge—remain understudied. This paper thus proposes
a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: (1)
knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of
scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers.
Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political
ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of
gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems,
thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice
interactions.25
More insidious than the ferreting out of ever more cryptic forms of racism
and sexism is a demonization campaign that impugns science (together with
reason and other Enlightenment values) for crimes that are as old as civilization,
including racism, slavery, conquest, and genocide. This was a major theme of the

influential Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, the quasi-Marxist movement
originated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who proclaimed that “the
fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”26 It also figures in the
works of postmodernist theorists such as Michel Foucault, who argued that the
Holocaust was the inevitable culmination of a “bio-politics” that began with the
Enlightenment, when science and rational governance exerted increasing power
over people’s lives.27 In a similar vein, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman blamed
the Holocaust on the Enlightenment ideal to “remake the society, force it to
conform to an overall, scientifically conceived plan.”28 In this twisted narrative,
the Nazis themselves are let off the hook (“It’s modernity’s fault!”). So is the
Nazis’ rabidly counter-Enlightenment ideology, which despised the degenerate
liberal bourgeois worship of reason and progress and embraced an organic,
pagan vitality which drove the struggle between races. Though Critical Theory
and postmodernism avoid “scientistic” methods such as quantification and
systematic chronology, the facts suggest they have the history backwards.
Genocide and autocracy were ubiquitous in premodern times, and they
decreased, not increased, as science and liberal Enlightenment values became
increasingly influential after World War II.29
To be sure, science has often been pressed into the support of deplorable
political movements. It is essential, of course, to understand this history, and
legitimate to pass judgment on scientists for their roles in it, just like any
historical figures. Yet the qualities that we prize in humanities scholars—context,
nuance, historical depth—often leave them when the opportunity arises to
prosecute a campaign against their academic rivals. Science is commonly
blamed for intellectual movements that had a pseudoscientific patina, though the
historical roots of those movements ran deep and wide.
“Scientific racism,” the theory that races fall into an evolutionary hierarchy
of mental sophistication with Northern Europeans at the top, is a prime example.
It was popular in the decades flanking the turn of the 20th century, apparently
supported by craniometry and mental testing, before being discredited in the
middle of the 20th century by better science and by the horrors of Nazism. Yet to
pin ideological racism on science, in particular on the theory of evolution, is bad
intellectual history. Racist beliefs have been omnipresent across history and
regions of the world. Slavery has been practiced by every civilization, and was
commonly rationalized by the belief that enslaved peoples were inherently suited
to servitude, often by God’s design.30 Statements from ancient Greek and

medieval Arab writers about the biological inferiority of Africans would curdle
your blood, and Cicero’s opinion of Britons was not much more charitable.31
More to the point, the intellectualized racism that infected the West in the
19th century was the brainchild not of science but of the humanities: history,
philology, classics, and mythology. In 1853 Arthur de Gobineau, a fiction writer
and amateur historian, published his cockamamie theory that a race of virile
white men, the Aryans, spilled out of an ancient homeland and spread a heroic
warrior civilization across Eurasia, diverging into the Persians, Hittites, Homeric
Greeks, and Vedic Hindus, and later into the Vikings, Goths, and other Germanic
tribes. (The speck of reality in this story is that these tribes spoke languages that
fell into a single family, Indo-European.) Everything went downhill when the
Aryans interbred with inferior conquered peoples, diluting their greatness and
causing them to degenerate into the effete, decadent, soulless, bourgeois,
commercial cultures that the Romantics were always whinging about. It was a
small step to fuse this fairy tale with German Romantic nationalism and anti-
Semitism: the Teutonic Volk were the heirs of the Aryans, the Jews a mongrel
race of Asiatics. Gobineau’s ideas were eaten up by Richard Wagner (whose
operas were held to be re-creations of the original Aryan myths) and by
Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain (a philosopher who wrote
that Jews polluted Teutonic civilization with capitalism, liberal humanism, and
sterile science). From them the ideas reached Hitler, who called Chamberlain his
“spiritual father.”32
Science played little role in this chain of influence. Pointedly, Gobineau,
Chamberlain, and Hitler rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the
idea that all humans had gradually evolved from apes, which was incompatible
with their Romantic theory of race and with the older folk and religious notions
from which it emerged. According to these widespread beliefs, races were
separate species; they were fitted to civilizations with different levels of
sophistication; and they would degenerate if they mixed. Darwin argued that
humans are closely related members of a single species with a common ancestry,
that all peoples have “savage” origins, that the mental capacities of all races are
virtually the same, and that the races blend into one another with no harm from
interbreeding.33 The historian Robert Richards, who carefully traced Hitler’s
influences, ended a chapter entitled “Was Hitler a Darwinian?” (a common claim
among creationists) with “The only reasonable answer to the question . . . is a
very loud and unequivocal No!”34

Like “scientific racism,” the movement called Social Darwinism is often
tendentiously attributed to science. When the concept of evolution became
famous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it turned into an inkblot test that
a diverse assortment of political and intellectual movements saw as vindicating
their agendas. Everyone wanted to believe that their vision of struggle, progress,
and the good life was nature’s way.35 One of these movements was retroactively
dubbed social Darwinism, though it was advocated not by Darwin but by
Herbert Spencer, who laid it out in 1851, eight years before the publication of
The Origin of Species. Spencer did not believe in random mutation and natural
selection; he believed in a Lamarckian process in which the struggle for
existence impelled organisms to strive toward feats of greater complexity and
adaptation, which they passed on to later generations. Spencer thought that this
progressive force was best left unimpeded, and so he argued against social
welfare and government regulation that would only prolong the doomed lives of
weaker individuals and groups. His political philosophy, an early form of
libertarianism, was picked up by robber barons, advocates of laissez-faire
economics, and opponents of social spending. Because those ideas had a right-
wing flavor, left-wing writers misapplied the term social Darwinism to other
ideas with a right-wing flavor, such as imperialism and eugenics, even though
Spencer was dead-set against such government activism.36 More recently the
term has been used as a weapon against any application of evolution to the
understanding of human beings.37 So despite its etymology, the term has nothing
to do with Darwin or evolutionary biology, and is now an almost meaningless
term of abuse.
Eugenics is another movement that has been used as an ideological
blunderbuss. Francis Galton, a Victorian polymath, first suggested that the
genetic stock of humankind could be improved by offering incentives for
talented people to marry each other and have more children (positive eugenics),
though when the idea caught on it was extended to discouraging reproduction
among the “unfit” (negative eugenics). Many countries forcibly sterilized
delinquents, the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, and other people who fell
into a wide net of ailments and stigmas. Nazi Germany modeled its forced
sterilization laws after ones in Scandinavia and the United States, and its mass
murder of Jews, Roma, and homosexuals is often considered a logical extension
of negative eugenics. (In reality the Nazis invoked public health far more than
genetics or evolution: Jews were likened to vermin, pathogens, tumors,
gangrenous organs, and poisoned blood.)38

The eugenics movement was permanently discredited by its association with
Nazism. But the term survived as a way to taint a number of scientific
endeavors, such as applications of medical genetics that allow parents to bear
children without fatal degenerative diseases, and to the entire field of behavioral
genetics, which analyzes the genetic and environmental causes of individual
differences.39 And in defiance of the historical record, eugenics is often
portrayed as a movement of right-wing scientists. In fact it was championed by
progressives, liberals, and socialists, including Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells,
Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes,
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger.40 Eugenics,
after all, valorized reform over the status quo, social responsibility over
selfishness, and central planning over laissez-faire. The most decisive
repudiation of eugenics invokes classical liberal and libertarian principles:
government is not an omnipotent ruler over human existence but an institution
with circumscribed powers, and perfecting the genetic makeup of the species is
not among them.
I’ve mentioned the limited role of science in these movements not to absolve
the scientists (many of whom were indeed active or complicit) but because the
movements deserve a deeper and more contextualized understanding than their
current role as anti-science propaganda. Misunderstandings of Darwin gave
these movements a boost, but they sprang from the religious, artistic,
intellectual, and political beliefs of their eras: Romanticism, cultural pessimism,
progress as dialectical struggle or mystical unfolding, and authoritarian high
modernism. If we think these ideas are not just unfashionable but mistaken, it is
because of the better historical and scientific understanding we enjoy today.
Recriminations over the nature of science are by no means a relic of the “science
wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, but continue to shape the role of science in
universities. When Harvard reformed its general education requirement in 2006–
7, the preliminary task force report introduced the teaching of science without
any mention of its place in human knowledge: “Science and technology directly
affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative: they have led to
life-saving medicines, the internet, more efficient energy storage, and digital
entertainment; they also have shepherded nuclear weapons, biological warfare
agents, electronic eavesdropping, and damage to the environment.” Well, yes,
and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and

gas chambers, that classical music both stimulates economic activity and
inspired the Nazis, and so on. But this strange equivocation between the
utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines, and the
statement gave no indication that we might have good reasons to prefer
understanding and know-how to ignorance and superstition.
At a recent conference, another colleague summed up what she thought was
the mixed legacy of science: vaccines for smallpox on the one hand; the
Tuskegee syphilis study on the other. In that affair, another bloody shirt in the
standard narrative about the evils of science, public health researchers, beginning
in 1932, tracked the progression of untreated latent syphilis in a sample of
impoverished African Americans for four decades. The study was patently
unethical by today’s standards, though it’s often misreported to pile up the
indictment. The researchers, many of them African American or advocates of
African American health and well-being, did not infect the participants, as many
people believe (a misconception that has led to the widespread conspiracy theory
that AIDS was invented in US government labs to control the black population).
And when the study began, it may even have been defensible by the standards of
the day: treatments for syphilis (mainly arsenic) were toxic and ineffective; when
antibiotics became available later, their safety and efficacy in treating syphilis
were unknown; and latent syphilis was known to often resolve itself without
treatment.41 But the point is that the entire equation is morally obtuse, showing
the power of Second Culture talking points to scramble a sense of
proportionality. My colleague’s comparison assumed that the Tuskegee study
was an unavoidable part of scientific practice as opposed to a universally
deplored breach, and it equated a one-time failure to prevent harm to a few
dozen people with the prevention of hundreds of millions of deaths per century
in perpetuity.
Does the demonization of science in the liberal arts programs of higher
education matter? It does, for a number of reasons. Though many talented
students hurtle along pre-med or engineering tracks from the day they set foot on
campus, many others are unsure of what they want to do with their lives and take
their cues from their professors and advisors. What happens to those who are
taught that science is just another narrative like religion and myth, that it lurches
from revolution to revolution without making progress, and that it is a
rationalization of racism, sexism, and genocide? I’ve seen the answer: some of
them figure, “If that’s what science is, I might as well make money!” Four years
later their brainpower is applied to thinking up algorithms that allow hedge funds

to act on financial information a few milliseconds faster rather than to finding
new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease or technologies for carbon capture and
storage.
The stigmatization of science is also jeopardizing the progress of science
itself. Today anyone who wants to do research on human beings, even an
interview on political opinions or a questionnaire about irregular verbs, must
prove to a committee that he or she is not Josef Mengele. Though research
subjects obviously must be protected from exploitation and harm, the
institutional review bureaucracy has swollen far beyond this mission. Critics
have pointed out that it has become a menace to free speech, a weapon that
fanatics can use to shut up people whose opinions they don’t like, and a red-tape
dispenser which bogs down research while failing to protect, and sometimes
harming, patients and research subjects.42 Jonathan Moss, a medical researcher
who had developed a new class of drugs and was drafted into chairing the
research review board at the University of Chicago, said in a convocation
address, “I ask you to consider three medical miracles we take for granted: X-
rays, cardiac catheterization, and general anesthesia. I contend all three would be
stillborn if we tried to deliver them in 2005.”43 (The same observation has been
made about insulin, burn treatments, and other lifesavers.) The social sciences
face similar hurdles. Anyone who talks to a human being with the intent of
gaining generalizable knowledge must obtain prior permission from these
committees, almost certainly in violation of the First Amendment.
Anthropologists are forbidden to speak with illiterate peasants who cannot sign a
consent form, or interview would-be suicide bombers on the off chance that they
might blurt out information that puts them in jeopardy.44
The hobbling of research is not just a symptom of bureaucratic mission creep.
It is actually rationalized by many academics in a field called bioethics. These
theoreticians think up reasons why informed and consenting adults should be
forbidden to take part in treatments that help them and others while harming no
one, using nebulous rubrics like “dignity,” “sacredness,” and “social justice.”
They try to sow panic about advances in biomedical research using far-fetched
analogies with nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias
like Brave New World and Gattaca, and freak-show scenarios like armies of
cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, or warehouses of zombies
to supply people with spare organs. The moral philosopher Julian Savulescu has
exposed the low standards of reasoning behind these arguments and has pointed
out why “bioethical” obstructionism can be unethical: “To delay by 1 year the

development of a treatment that cures a lethal disease that kills 100,000 people
per year is to be responsible for the deaths of those 100,000 people, even if you
never see them.”45
Ultimately the greatest payoff of instilling an appreciation of science is for

everyone to think more scientifically. We saw in the preceding chapter that
humans are vulnerable to cognitive biases and fallacies. Though scientific
literacy itself is not a cure for fallacious reasoning when it comes to politicized
identity badges, most issues don’t start out that way, and everyone would be
better off if they could think about them more scientifically. Movements that aim
to spread scientific sophistication such as data journalism, Bayesian forecasting,
evidence-based medicine and policy, real-time violence monitoring, and
effective altruism have a vast potential to enhance human welfare. But an
appreciation of their value has been slow to penetrate the culture.46
I asked my doctor whether the nutritional supplement he had recommended
for my knee pain would really be effective. He replied, “Some of my patients say
it works for them.” A business-school colleague shared this assessment of the
corporate world: “I have observed many smart people who have little idea of
how to logically think through a problem, who infer causation from a
correlation, and who use anecdotes as evidence far beyond the predictability
warranted.” Another colleague who quantifies war, peace, and human security
describes the United Nations as an “evidence-free zone”:
The higher reaches of the UN are not unlike anti-science humanities

programs. Most people at the top are lawyers and liberal arts graduates.
The only parts of the Secretariat that have anything resembling a research
culture have little prestige or influence. Few of the top officials in the UN
understood qualifying statements as basic as “on average and other things
being equal.” So if we were talking about risk probabilities for conflict
onsets you could be sure that Sir Archibald Prendergast III or some other
luminary would offer a dismissive, “It’s not like that in Burkina Faso,
y’know.”
Resisters of scientific thinking often object that some things just can’t be
quantified. Yet unless they are willing to speak only of issues that are black or
white and to foreswear using the words more, less, better, and worse (and for that

matter the suffix –er), they are making claims that are inherently quantitative. If
they veto the possibility of putting numbers to them, they are saying, “Trust my
intuition.” But if there’s one thing we know about cognition, it’s that people
(including experts) are arrogantly overconfident about their intuition. In 1954
Paul Meehl stunned his fellow psychologists by showing that simple actuarial
formulas outperform expert judgment in predicting psychiatric classifications,
suicide attempts, school and job performance, lies, crime, medical diagnoses,
and pretty much any other outcome in which accuracy can be judged at all.
Meehl’s work inspired Tversky and Kahneman’s discoveries on cognitive biases
and Tetlock’s forecasting tournaments, and his conclusion about the superiority
of statistical to intuitive judgment is now recognized as one of the most robust
findings in the history of psychology.47
Like all good things, data are not a panacea, a silver bullet, a magic bullet, or
a one-size-fits-all solution. All the money in the world could not pay for
randomized controlled trials to settle every question that occurs to us. Human
beings will always be in the loop to decide which data to gather and how to
analyze and interpret them. The first attempts to quantify a concept are always
crude, and even the best ones allow probabilistic rather than perfect
understanding. Nonetheless, quantitative social scientists have laid out criteria
for evaluating and improving measurements, and the critical comparison is not
whether a measure is perfect but whether it is better than the judgment of an
expert, critic, interviewer, clinician, judge, or maven. That turns out to be a low
bar.
Because the cultures of politics and journalism are largely innocent of the
scientific mindset, questions with massive consequences for life and death are
answered by methods that we know lead to error, such as anecdotes, headlines,
rhetoric, and what engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion). We
have already seen some dangerous misconceptions that arise from this statistical
obtuseness. People think that crime and war are spinning out of control, though
homicides and battle deaths are going down, not up. They think that Islamist
terrorism is a major risk to life and limb, whereas the danger is smaller than that
from wasps and bees. They think that ISIS threatens the existence or survival of
the United States, whereas terrorist movements rarely achieve any of their
strategic aims.
The dataphobic mindset (“It’s not like that in Burkina Faso”) can lead to real
tragedy. Many political commentators can recall a failure of peacekeeping forces
(such as in Bosnia in 1995) and conclude that they are a waste of money and

manpower. But when a peacekeeping force is successful, nothing photogenic
happens, and it fails to make the news. In her book Does Peacekeeping Work?
the political scientist Virginia Page Fortna addressed the question in her title
with the methods of science rather than headlines, and, in defiance of
Betteridge’s Law, found that the answer is “a clear and resounding yes.” Other
studies have come to the same conclusion.48 Knowing the results of these
analyses could make the difference between an international organization
helping to bring peace to a country and letting it fester in civil war.
Do multiethnic regions harbor “ancient hatreds” that can only be tamed by
partitioning them into ethnic enclaves and cleansing the minorities from each
one? Whenever ethnic neighbors go for each other’s throats we read about it, but
what about the neighborhoods that never make the news because they live in
boring peace? What proportion of pairs of ethnic neighbors coexist without
violence? The answer is, most of them: 95 percent of the neighbors in the former
Soviet Union, 99 percent of those in Africa.49
Do campaigns of nonviolent resistance work? Many people believe that
Gandhi and Martin Luther King just got lucky: their movements tugged at the
heartstrings of enlightened democracies at opportune moments, but everywhere
else, oppressed people need violence to get out from under a dictator’s boot. The
political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan assembled a dataset of
political resistance movements across the world between 1900 and 2006 and
discovered that three-quarters of the nonviolent resistance movements
succeeded, compared with only a third of the violent ones.50 Gandhi and King
were right, but without data, you would never know it.
Though the urge to join a violent insurgent or terrorist group may owe more
to male bonding than to just-war theory, most of the combatants probably believe
that if they want to bring about a better world, they have no choice but to kill
people. What would happen if everyone knew that violent strategies were not
just immoral but ineffectual? It’s not that I think we should airdrop crates of
Chenoweth and Stephan’s book into conflict zones. But leaders of radical groups
are often highly educated (they distill their frenzy from academic scribblers of a
few years back), and even the cannon fodder often attend some college and
absorb the conventional wisdom about the need for revolutionary violence.51
What would happen over the long run if a standard college curriculum devoted
less attention to the writings of Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon and more to
quantitative analyses of political violence?

One of the greatest potential contributions of modern science may be a deeper
integration with its academic partner, the humanities. By all accounts, the
humanities are in trouble. University programs are downsizing; the next
generation of scholars is un- or underemployed; morale is sinking; students are
staying away in droves.52
No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment in the
humanities.53 A society without historical scholarship is like a person without
memory: deluded, confused, easily exploited. Philosophy grows out of the
recognition that clarity and logic don’t come easily to us and that we’re better off
when our thinking is refined and deepened. The arts are one of the things that
make life worth living, enriching human experience with beauty and insight.
Criticism is itself an art that multiplies the appreciation and enjoyment of great
works. Knowledge in these domains is hard won, and needs constant enriching
and updating as the times change.
Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual
trends in our culture and to the commercialization of universities. But an honest
appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted.
The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its
defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political
correctness. Many of its luminaries—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan,
Derrida, the Critical Theorists—are morose cultural pessimists who declare that
modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of
oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is
circling the drain.54
With such a cheery view of the world, it’s not surprising that the humanities
often have trouble defining a progressive agenda for their own enterprise.
Several university presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a
scientist comes into their office, it’s to announce some exciting new research
opportunity and demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar
drops by, it’s to plead for respect for the way things have always been done.
Those ways do deserve respect, and there can be no replacement for the close
reading, thick description, and deep immersion that erudite scholars can apply to
individual works. But must these be the only paths to understanding?
A consilience with science offers the humanities many possibilities for new
insight. Art, culture, and society are products of human brains. They originate in
our faculties of perception, thought, and emotion, and they cumulate and spread
through the epidemiological dynamics by which one person affects others.

Shouldn’t we be curious to understand these connections? Both sides would win.
The humanities would enjoy more of the explanatory depth of the sciences, and a
forward-looking agenda that could attract ambitious young talent (not to mention
appealing to deans and donors). The sciences could challenge their theories with
the natural experiments and ecologically valid phenomena that have been so
richly characterized by humanities scholars.
In some fields, this consilience is a fait accompli. Archaeology has grown
from a branch of art history to a high-tech science. The philosophy of mind
shades into mathematical logic, computer science, cognitive science, and
neuroscience. Linguistics combines philological scholarship on the history of
words and grammatical constructions with laboratory studies of speech,
mathematical models of grammar, and the computerized analysis of large
corpora of writing and conversation.
Political theory, too, has a natural affinity with the sciences of mind. “What is
government,” asked James Madison, “but the greatest of all reflections on
human nature?” Social, political, and cognitive scientists are reexamining the
connections between politics and human nature, which were avidly debated in
Madison’s time but submerged during an interlude in which humans were treated
as blank slates or rational actors. Humans, we now know, are moralistic actors:
they are guided by intuitions about authority, tribe, and purity; are committed to
sacred beliefs that express their identity; and are driven by conflicting
inclinations toward revenge and reconciliation. We are starting to grasp why
these impulses evolved, how they are implemented in the brain, how they differ
among individuals, cultures, and subcultures, and which conditions turn them on
and off.55
Comparable opportunities beckon in other areas of the humanities. The visual
arts could avail themselves of the explosion of knowledge in vision science,
including the perception of color, shape, texture, and lighting, and the
evolutionary aesthetics of faces, landscapes, and geometric forms.56 Music
scholars have much to discuss with the scientists who study the perception of
speech, the structure of language, and the brain’s analysis of the auditory
world.57
As for literary scholarship, where to begin?58 John Dryden wrote that a work
of fiction is “a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions
and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight
and instruction of mankind.” Cognitive psychology can shed light on how
readers reconcile their own consciousness with those of the author and

characters. Behavioral genetics can update folk theories of parental influence
with discoveries about the effects of genes, peers, and chance, which have
profound implications for the interpretation of biography and memoir—an
endeavor that also has much to learn from the cognitive psychology of memory
and the social psychology of self-presentation. Evolutionary psychologists can
distinguish the obsessions that are universal from those that are exaggerated by a
particular culture, and can lay out the inherent conflicts and confluences of
interest within families, couples, friendships, and rivalries which are the drivers
of plot. All these ideas can help add new depth to Dryden’s observation about
fiction and human nature.
Though many concerns in the humanities are best appreciated with traditional
narrative criticism, some raise empirical questions that can be informed by data.
The advent of data science applied to books, periodicals, correspondence, and
musical scores has inaugurated an expansive new “digital humanities.”59 The
possibilities for theory and discovery are limited only by the imagination, and
include the origin and spread of ideas, networks of intellectual and artistic
influence, the contours of historical memory, the waxing and waning of themes
in literature, the universality or culture-specificity of archetypes and plots, and
patterns of unofficial censorship and taboo.
The promise of a unification of knowledge can be fulfilled only if knowledge
flows in all directions. Some of the scholars who have recoiled from scientists’
forays into explaining art are correct that these explanations have been, by their
standards, shallow and simplistic. All the more reason for them to reach out and
combine their erudition about individual works and genres with scientific insight
into human emotions and aesthetic responses. Better still, universities could train
a new generation of scholars who are fluent in each of the two cultures.
Although humanities scholars themselves tend to be receptive to insights
from science, many policemen of the Second Culture proclaim that they may not
indulge such curiosity. In a dismissive review in the New Yorker of a book by the
literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall on the evolution of the narrative instinct,
Adam Gopnik writes, “The interesting questions about stories . . . are not about
what makes a taste for them ‘universal,’ but what makes the good ones so
different from the dull ones. . . . This is a case, as with women’s fashion, where
the subtle, ‘surface’ differences are actually the whole of the subject.”60 But in
appreciating literature, must connoisseurship really be the whole of the subject?
An inquisitive spirit might also be curious about the recurring ways in which

minds separated by culture and era deal with the timeless conundrums of human
existence.
Wieseltier, too, has issued crippling diktats on what scholarship in the
humanities may not do, such as make progress. “The vexations of philosophy . . .
are not retired,” he declared; “errors [are] not corrected and discarded.”61 In fact,
most moral philosophers today would say that the old arguments defending
slavery as a natural institution are errors which have been corrected and
discarded. Epistemologists might add that their field has progressed from the
days when Descartes could argue that human perception is veridical because
God would not deceive us. Wieseltier further stipulates that there is a
“momentous distinction between the study of the natural world and the study of
the human world,” and any move to “transgress the borders between realms”
could only make the humanities the “handmaiden of the sciences,” because “a
scientific explanation will expose the underlying sameness” and “absorb all the
realms into a single realm, into their realm.” Where does this paranoia and
territoriality lead? In a major essay in the New York Times Book Review,
Wieseltier called for a worldview that is pre-Darwinian—“the irreducibility of
the human difference to any aspect of our animality”—indeed, pre-Copernican
—“the centrality of humankind to the universe.”62
Let’s hope that artists and scholars don’t follow their self-appointed
defenders over this cliff. Our quest to come to terms with the human
predicament need not be frozen in the last century or the century before, let
alone the Middle Ages. Surely our theories of politics, culture, and morality have
much to learn from our best understanding of the universe and our makeup as a
species.
In 1778 Thomas Paine extolled the cosmopolitan virtues of science:
Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has
liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind,
like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher
cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees
not an enemy in the philosophy of another: he takes his seat in the temple
of science, and asks not who sits beside him.63
What he wrote about the physical landscape applies as well to the landscape of
knowledge. In this and other ways, the spirit of science is the spirit of the
Enlightenment.

CHAPTER 23
HUMANISM
S cience is not enough to bring about progress. “Everything that is not

forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge”—
but that’s the problem. “Everything” means everything: vaccines and
bioweapons, video on demand and Big Brother on the telescreen. Something in
addition to science ensured that vaccines were put to use in eradicating diseases
while bioweapons were outlawed. That’s why I preceded the epigraph from
David Deutsch with the one from Spinoza: “Those who are governed by reason
desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of
humankind.” Progress consists of deploying knowledge to allow all of
humankind to flourish in the same way that each of us seeks to flourish.
The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom,
knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism. (Despite the
word’s root, humanism doesn’t exclude the flourishing of animals, but this book
focuses on the welfare of humankind.) It is humanism that identifies what we
should try to achieve with our knowledge. It provides the ought that supplements
the is. It distinguishes true progress from mere mastery.
There is a growing movement called Humanism, which promotes a non-
supernatural basis for meaning and ethics: good without God.1 Its aims have
been stated in a trio of manifestoes starting in 1933. The Humanist Manifesto III,
from 2003, affirms:
Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation,

and rational analysis. Humanists find that science is the best method
for determining this knowledge as well as for solving problems and
developing beneficial technologies. We also recognize the value of new

departures in thought, the arts, and inner experience—each subject to
analysis by critical intelligence.
Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided

evolutionary change. . . . We accept our life as all and enough,
distinguishing things as they are from things as we might wish or
imagine them to be. We welcome the challenges of the future, and are
drawn to and undaunted by the yet to be known.
Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by
experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by
human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the
global ecosystem and beyond. . . .
Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service

of humane ideals. We . . . animate our lives with a deep sense of
purpose, finding wonder and awe in the joys and beauties of human
existence, its challenges and tragedies, and even in the inevitability and
finality of death. . . .
Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships.

Humanists . . . strive toward a world of mutual care and concern, free
of cruelty and its consequences, where differences are resolved
cooperatively without resorting to violence. . . .
Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.

Progressive cultures have worked to free humanity from the brutalities
of mere survival and to reduce suffering, improve society, and develop
global community. . . .2
The members of Humanist associations would be the first to insist that the
ideals of humanism belong to no sect. Like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman who
was delighted to learn he had been speaking prose all his life, many people are
humanists without realizing it.3 Strands of humanism may be found in belief
systems that go back to the Axial Age. They came to the fore during the Age of
Reason and the Enlightenment, leading to the English, French, and American

statements of rights, and got a second wind after World War II, inspiring the
United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other
institutions of global cooperation.4 Though humanism does not invoke gods,
spirits, or souls to ground meaning and morality, it is by no means incompatible
with religious institutions. Some Eastern religions, including Confucianism and
varieties of Buddhism, always grounded their ethics in human welfare rather
than divine dictates. Many Jewish and Christian denominations have become
humanistic, soft-pedaling their legacy of supernatural beliefs and ecclesiastical
authority in favor of reason and universal human flourishing. Examples include
the Quakers, Unitarians, liberal Episcopalians, Nordic Lutherans, and Reform,
Reconstructionist, and Humanistic branches of Judaism.
Humanism may seem bland and unexceptionable—who could be against
human flourishing? But in fact it is a distinctive moral commitment, one that
does not come naturally to the human mind. As we shall see, it is vehemently
opposed not just by many religious and political factions but, amazingly, by
eminent artists, academics, and intellectuals. If humanism, like the other
Enlightenment ideals, is to retain its hold on people’s minds, it must be
explained and defended in the language and ideas of the current era.
Spinoza’s dictum is one of a family of principles that have sought a secular

foundation for morality in impartiality—in the realization that there’s nothing
magic about the pronouns I and me that could justify privileging my interests
over yours or anyone else’s.5 If I object to being raped, maimed, starved, or
killed, I can’t very well rape, maim, starve, or kill you. Impartiality underlies
many attempts to construct morality on rational grounds: Spinoza’s viewpoint of
eternity, Hobbes’s social contract, Kant’s categorical imperative, Rawls’s veil of
ignorance, Nagel’s view from nowhere, Locke and Jefferson’s self-evident truth
that all people are created equal, and of course the Golden Rule and its precious-
metallic variants, rediscovered in hundreds of moral traditions.6 (The Silver Rule
is “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself”; the Platinum Rule,
“Do to others what they would have you do to them.” They are designed to
anticipate masochists, suicide bombers, differences in taste, and other sticking
points for the Golden Rule.)
To be sure, the argument from impartiality is incomplete. If there were a
callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath who could exploit everyone else
with impunity, no argument could convince him he had committed a logical

fallacy. Also, arguments from impartiality have little content. Aside from a
generic advisory to respect people’s wishes, the arguments say little about what
those wishes are: the wants, needs, and experiences that define human
flourishing. These are the desiderata that should not just be impartially allowed
but actively sought and expanded for as many people as possible. Recall that
Martha Nussbaum filled this gap by laying out a list of “fundamental
capabilities” that people have the right to exercise, such as longevity, health,
safety, literacy, knowledge, free expression, play, nature, and emotional and
social attachments. But this is just a list, and it leaves the list-maker open to the
objection that she is just enumerating her favorite things. Can we put humanistic
morality on a deeper foundation—one that would rule out rational sociopaths
and justify the human needs we are obligated to respect? I think we can.
According to the Declaration of Independence, the rights to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness are “self-evident.” That’s a bit unsatisfying, because
what’s “self-evident” isn’t always self-evident. But it captures a key intuition.
There would indeed be something perverse about having to justify life itself in
the course of examining the foundations of morality, as if it were an open
question whether one gets to finish the sentence or be shot. The very act of
examining anything presupposes that one is around to do the examining. If
Nagel’s transcendental argument about the non-negotiability of reason has merit
—that the act of considering the validity of reason presupposes the validity of
reason—then surely it presupposes the existence of reasoners.
This opens the door to deepening our humanistic justification of morality
with two key ideas from science, entropy and evolution. Traditional analyses of
the social contract imagined a colloquy among disembodied souls. Let’s enrich
this idealization with the minimal premise that the reasoners exist in the physical
universe. Much follows.
These incarnate beings must have defied the staggering odds against matter
arranging itself into a thinking organ by being products of natural selection, the
only physical process capable of producing complex adaptive design.7 And they
must have defied the ravages of entropy long enough to be able to show up for
the discussion and persist through it. That means they have taken in energy from
the environment, stayed within a narrow envelope of conditions consistent with
their physical integrity, and fended off assaults from living and nonliving
dangers. As products of natural and sexual selection they must be the scions of a
deeply rooted tree of replicators, each of whom won a mate and bore viable
offspring. Since intelligence is not a wonder algorithm but is fed by knowledge,

they must be driven to sop up information about the world and to be attentive to
its nonrandom patterning. And if they are exchanging ideas with other rational
entities, they must be on speaking terms: they must be social beings who risk
time and safety in interacting with one another.8
The physical requirements that allow rational agents to exist in the material
world are not abstract design specifications; they are implemented in the brain as
wants, needs, emotions, pains, and pleasures. On average, and in the kind of
environment in which our species was shaped, pleasurable experiences allowed
our ancestors to survive and have viable children, and painful ones led to a dead
end. That means that food, comfort, curiosity, beauty, stimulation, love, sex, and
camaraderie are not shallow indulgences or hedonistic distractions. They are
links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being. Unlike ascetic
and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic
worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment—if people didn’t
seek them, there would be no people. At the same time, evolution guarantees that
these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other
people.9 Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting
desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists
in balancing the conflicting desires among people.
As I mentioned in chapter 2 (following an observation by John Tooby), the
Law of Entropy sentences us to another permanent threat. Many things must all
go right for a body (and thus a mind) to function, but it takes just one thing going
wrong for it to shut down permanently—a leak of blood, a constriction of air, a
disabling of its microscopic clockwork. An act of aggression by one agent can
end the existence of another. We are all catastrophically vulnerable to violence—
but at the same time we can enjoy a fantastic benefit if we agree to refrain from
violence. The Pacifist’s Dilemma—how social agents can forgo the temptation to
exploit each other in exchange for the security of not being exploited—hangs
over humanity like the Sword of Damocles, making peace and security a
permanent quest for humanistic ethics.10 The historical decline of violence shows
that it is a solvable problem.
The vulnerability of any embodied agent to violence explains why the
callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath cannot remain disengaged from the
arena of moral discourse (and its demand for impartiality and nonviolence)
forever. If he refuses to play the game of morality, then in the eyes of everyone
else he has become a mindless menace, like a germ, a wildfire, or a rampaging
wolverine—something to be neutralized by brute force, no questions asked. (As

Hobbes put it, “No covenants with beasts.”) Now, as long as he thinks he is
eternally invulnerable, he might take that chance, but the Law of Entropy rules
that out. He may tyrannize everyone for a while, but eventually the massed
strength of his targets could prevail. The impossibility of eternal invulnerability
creates an incentive even for callous sociopaths to re-enter the roundtable of
morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an
adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an
adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an
argument.11 And he who engages in argument may be defeated by a better one.
Ultimately the moral universe includes everyone who can think.
Evolution helps explain another foundation of secular morality: our capacity
for sympathy (or, as the Enlightenment writers variously referred to it,
benevolence, pity, imagination, or commiseration). Even if a rational agent
deduces that it’s in everyone’s long-term interests to be moral, it’s hard to
imagine him sticking his neck out to make a sacrifice for another’s benefit unless
something gives him a nudge. The nudge needn’t come from an angel on one
shoulder; evolutionary psychology explains how it comes from the emotions that
make us social animals.12 Sympathy among kin emerges from the overlap in
genetic makeup that interconnects us in the great web of life. Sympathy among
everyone else emerges from the impartiality of nature: each of us may find
ourselves in straits where a small mercy from another grants a big boost in our
own welfare, so we’re better off if we bestow good turns on one another (with no
one taking but never giving) than if it’s every person for himself or herself.
Evolution thus selects for the moral sentiments: sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt,
shame, forgiveness, and righteous anger. With sympathy installed in our
psychological makeup, it can be expanded by reason and experience to
encompass all sentient beings.13
A different philosophical objection to humanism is that it’s “just

utilitarianism”—that a morality based on maximizing human flourishing is the
same as a morality that seeks the greatest happiness for the greatest number.14
(Philosophers often refer to happiness as “utility.”) Anyone who has taken
Introduction to Moral Philosophy can rattle off the problems.15 Should we
indulge a Utility Monster who gets more pleasure out of eating people than his
victims get out of living? Should we euthanize a few draftees and harvest their
organs to save the lives of many more? If townspeople enraged by an unsolved

murder threaten a deadly riot, should the sheriff assuage them by framing the
town drunk and stringing him up? If a drug could put us into a permanent
slumber with sweet dreams, should we take it? Should we set up a chain of
warehouses that inexpensively support billions of happy rabbits? These thought
experiments make the case for a deontological ethics, composed of rights, duties,
and principles that deem certain acts moral or immoral by their very nature. In
some versions of deontological morality, the principles come from God.
Humanism indeed has a utilitarian flavor, or at least a consequentialist one, in
which acts and policies are morally evaluated by their consequences. The
consequences needn’t be restricted to happiness in the narrow sense of having a
smile on one’s face, but can embrace a broader sense of flourishing, which
includes childrearing, self-expression, education, rich experience, and the
creation of works of lasting value (chapter 18). The consequentialist flavor of
humanism is actually a point in its favor, for several reasons.
First, any Moral Philosophy student who stayed awake through week 2 of the
syllabus can also rattle off the problems with deontological ethics. If lying is
intrinsically wrong, must we answer truthfully when the Gestapo demand to
know the whereabouts of Anne Frank? Is masturbation immoral (as the
prototypical deontologist, Kant, argued), because one is using oneself as a means
to satisfy an animal impulse, and people must always be treated as ends, never as
means? If a terrorist has hidden a ticking nuclear bomb that would annihilate
millions, is it immoral to waterboard him into revealing its location? And given
the absence of a thundering voice from the heavens, who gets to pull principles
out of the air and pronounce that certain acts are inherently immoral even if they
hurt no one? At various times moralists have used deontological thinking to
insist that vaccination, anesthesia, blood transfusions, life insurance, interracial
marriage, and homosexuality were wrong by their very nature.
Many moral philosophers believe that the dichotomy from the Intro course is
drawn too sharply.16 Deontological principles are often a good way to bring the
greatest happiness to the greatest number. Since no mortal can calculate every
consequence of his actions into the indefinite future, and since people can
always spin-doctor their selfish acts as benefiting others, one of the best ways to
promote overall happiness is to draw bright lines that no one may cross. We
don’t let governments deceive or murder their citizens, because real politicians,
unlike the infallible and benevolent demigods in the thought experiments, could
wield that power capriciously or tyrannically. That is one of many reasons why a
government that could frame innocent people for capital crimes or euthanize

them for their organs would not produce the greatest happiness for the greatest
number. Or take the principle of equal treatment. Are laws that discriminate
against women and minorities unfair by their very nature, or are they deplorable
because the victims of discrimination suffer harm? We may not have to answer
the question. Conversely, any deontological principle whose consequences are
harmful, such as the Sanctity of Life-Sustaining Blood (which rules out
transfusions), can be tossed out the window. Human rights promote human
flourishing. That’s why, in practice, humanism and human rights go hand in
hand.
The other reason that humanism needn’t be embarrassed by its overlap with
utilitarianism is that this approach to ethics has an impressive track record of
improving human welfare. The classical utilitarians—Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy
Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—laid out arguments against slavery, sadistic
punishment, cruelty to animals, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the
subordination of women which carried the day.17 Even abstract rights like
freedom of speech and religion were largely defended in terms of benefits and
harms, as when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government
extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for
my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket
nor breaks my leg.”18 Universal education, workers’ rights, and environmental
protection also were advanced on utilitarian grounds. And, at least so far, Utility
Monsters and rabbit gratification factories have not turned out to be a problem.
There is a good reason why utilitarian arguments have so often succeeded:
everyone can appreciate them. Principles like “No harm, no foul,” “If no one is
hurt it can’t be wrong,” “What consenting adults do in private is no one else’s
concern,” and “If I should take a notion / To jump into the ocean / Ain’t
nobody’s business if I do” may not be profound or exceptionless, but once they
are stated, people can readily understand them, and anyone who wants to oppose
them has a heavy burden of proof. It’s not that utilitarianism is intuitive.
Classical liberalism came late in human history, and traditional cultures believe
that what consenting adults do in private is very much their concern.19 The
philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene has argued that many
deontological convictions are rooted in primitive intuitions of tribalism, purity,
revulsion, and social norms, whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from
rational cogitation.20 (He has even shown that the two kinds of moral thinking
engage emotional and rational systems of the brain, respectively.) Greene also
argues that when people from diverse cultural backgrounds have to agree upon a

moral code, they tend to go utilitarian. That explains why certain reform
movements, such as legal equality for women and gay marriage, overturned
centuries of precedent astonishingly quickly (chapter 15): with nothing but
custom and intuition behind it, the status quo crumbled in the face of utilitarian
arguments.
Even when humanistic movements fortify their goals with the language of
rights, the philosophical system justifying those rights must be “thin.”21 A viable
moral philosophy for a cosmopolitan world cannot be constructed from layers of
intricate argumentation or rest on deep metaphysical or religious convictions. It
must draw on simple, transparent principles that everyone can understand and
agree upon. The ideal of human flourishing—that it’s good for people to lead
long, healthy, happy, rich, and stimulating lives—is just such a principle, since it
is based on nothing more (and nothing less) than our common humanity.
History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground,
they converge toward humanism. The separation of church and state in the
American Constitution arose not just from the philosophy of the Enlightenment
but from practical necessity. The economist Samuel Hammond has noted that
eight of the thirteen British colonies had official churches, which intruded into
the public sphere by paying ministers’ salaries, enforcing strict religious
observance, and persecuting members of other denominations. The only way to
unite the colonies under a single constitution was to guarantee religious
expression and practice as a natural right.22
A century and a half later, a community of nations still smoldering from a
world war had to lay down a set of principles to unite them in cooperation. It’s
unlikely that they would have agreed upon “We accept Jesus Christ as our
savior” or “America is a shining city upon a hill.” In 1947 the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) asked several
dozen of the world’s intellectuals (including Jacques Maritain, Mohandas
Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, Harold Laski, Quincy Wright, and Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin, together with eminent Confucian and Muslim scholars) which rights
should be included in the UN’s universal declaration. The lists were surprisingly
similar. In his introduction to their deliverable, Maritain recounted:
At one of the meetings of a Unesco National Commission where Human

Rights were being discussed, someone expressed astonishment that certain
champions of violently opposed ideologies had agreed on a list of those

rights. “Yes,” they said, “we agree about the rights but on condition that
no one asks us why.”23
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a humanist manifesto with

thirty articles, was drafted in less than two years, thanks to the determination of
Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the drafting committee, to avoid getting mired in
ideology and move the project along.24 (When John Humphrey, author of the
first draft, was asked on what principles the Declaration was based, he tactfully
replied, “No philosophy whatsoever.”)25 In December 1948 it was passed
without opposition by the UN General Assembly. Contrary to accusations that
human rights are a parochial Western creed, the Declaration was supported by
India, China, Thailand, Burma, Ethiopia, and seven Muslim countries, while
Roosevelt had to twist the arms of American and British officials to get them
behind it: the United States was worried about its Negroes, the United Kingdom
about its colonies. The Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa abstained.26
The Declaration has been translated into five hundred languages, and has
influenced most of the national constitutions that were drafted in the following
decades, together with many international laws, treaties, and organizations. At
seventy years old, it has aged well.
Though humanism is the moral code that people will converge upon when they
are rational, culturally diverse, and need to get along, it is by no means a vapid
or saccharine lowest common denominator. The idea that morality consists in the
maximization of human flourishing clashes with two perennially seductive
alternatives. The first is theistic morality: the idea that morality consists in
obeying the dictates of a deity, which are enforced by supernatural reward and
punishment in this world or in an afterlife. The second is romantic heroism: the
idea that morality consists in the purity, authenticity, and greatness of an
individual or a nation. Though romantic heroism was first articulated in the 19th
century, it may be found in a family of newly influential movements, including
authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and the alt-right.
Many intellectuals who don’t sign on to these alternatives to humanism
nonetheless believe they capture a vital truth about our psychology: that people
have a need for theistic, spiritual, heroic, or tribal beliefs. Humanism may not be
wrong, they say, but it goes against human nature. No society based on
humanistic principles can long endure, let alone a global order based on them.

It’s a short step from the psychological claim to a historical one: that the
inevitable collapse has begun, and we are watching the liberal, cosmopolitan,
Enlightenment, humanistic worldview unravel before our eyes. “Liberalism Is
Dead,” announced the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in 2016. “The
liberal democratic experiment—with its Enlightenment-derived belief in the
capacity of individuals possessed of certain inalienable rights to shape their
destinies in liberty through the exercise of their will—is but a brief interlude.”27
In “The Enlightenment Had a Good Run,” the Boston Globe editorialist Stephen
Kinzer agreed:
The cosmopolitanism that is central to Enlightenment ideals has produced

results that disturb people in many societies. This leads them back toward
the ruling system that primates instinctively prefer: A strong chief protects
the tribe, and in return tribe members do the chief’s bidding. . . . Reason
offers little basis for morality, rejects spiritual power, and negates the
importance of emotion, art and creativity. When reason is cold and
inhumane, it can cut people off from deeply imbedded structures that give
meaning to life.28
Other pundits have added that it’s no wonder so many young people are drawn to
ISIS: they are turning away from an “arid secularism,” and seek “radical and
religious correctives to a flattened view of human life.”29
So should I have called this book Enlightenment While It Lasts? Don’t be
silly! In part II, I documented the reality of progress; in this part, I have focused
on the ideas that drive it and why I expect them to endure. Having rebutted the
cases against reason and science in the preceding two chapters, I’ll now take on
the case against humanism. I’ll examine these arguments not just to show that
the moral, psychological, and historical arguments against humanism are wrong.
The best way to understand an idea is to see what it is not, so putting the
alternatives to humanism under the microscope can remind us what is at stake in
advancing the ideals of the Enlightenment. First we’ll look at the religious case
against humanism, then at the romantic-heroic-tribal-authoritarian complex.
Can we really have good without God? Has the godless universe advanced by
humanistic scientists been undermined by the findings of science itself? And is
there an innate adaptation to the divine presence—a God gene in our DNA, a

God module in the brain—which ensures that theistic religion will always push
back against secular humanism?
Let’s start with theistic morality. It’s true that many religious codes enjoin
people from murdering, assaulting, robbing, or betraying one another. But of
course so do codes of secular morality, and for an obvious reason: these are rules
that all rational, self-interested, and gregarious agents would want their
compatriots to agree upon. Not surprisingly, they are codified in the laws of
every state, and indeed seem to be present in every human society.30
What does an appeal to a supernatural lawgiver add to a humanistic
commitment to make people better off? The most obvious add-on is supernatural
enforcement: the belief that if one commits a sin, one will be smitten by God,
damned to hell, or inscribed on the wrong page of the Book of Life. It’s a
tempting add-on because secular law enforcement cannot possibly detect and
punish every infraction, and everyone has a motive to convince everyone else
that they cannot get away with murder.31 As with Santa Claus, he sees you when
you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or
good, so be good for goodness’ sake.
But theistic morality has two fatal flaws. The first is that there is no good
reason to believe that God exists. In a nonfiction appendix to her novel Thirty-
Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Rebecca Newberger
Goldstein (drawing in part on Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Russell) lays out
refutations of every one of these arguments.32 The most common among them—
faith, revelation, scripture, authority, tradition, and subjective appeal—are not
arguments at all. It’s not just that reason says they cannot be trusted. It’s also that
different religions, drawing on these sources, decree mutually incompatible
beliefs about how many gods there are, which miracles they have wrought, and
what they demand of their devotees. Historical scholarship has amply
demonstrated that holy scriptures are all-too-human products of their historical
eras, including internal contradictions, factual errors, plagiarism from
neighboring civilizations, and scientific absurdities (such as God creating the sun
three days after he distinguished day from night). The recondite arguments from
sophisticated theologians are no sounder. The Cosmological and Ontological
arguments for the existence of God are logically invalid, the Argument from
Design was refuted by Darwin, and the others are either patently false (such as
the theory that humans are endowed with an innate faculty for sensing the truth
about God) or blatant escape hatches (such as the suggestion that the

Resurrection was too cosmically important for God to have allowed it to be
empirically verified).
Some writers insist that science has no place in this conversation. They seek
to impose a condition of “methodological naturalism” on science which renders
it incapable, even in principle, of evaluating the claims of religion. That would
carve out a safe space in which believers can protect their beliefs while still
being sympathetic to science. But as we saw in the preceding chapter, science is
not a game with an arbitrary rulebook; it’s the application of reason to explaining
the universe and to ascertaining whether its explanations are true. In Faith
Versus Fact, the biologist Jerry Coyne argues that the existence of the God of
scripture is a perfectly testable scientific hypothesis.33 The Bible’s historical
accounts could have been corroborated by archaeology, genetics, and philology.
It could have contained uncannily prescient scientific truths such as “Thou shalt
not travel faster than light” or “Two strands entwined is the secret of life.” A
bright light might appear in the heavens one day and a man clad in a white robe
and sandals, supported by winged angels, could descend from the sky, give sight
to the blind, and resurrect the dead. We might discover that intercessory prayer
can restore eyesight or regrow amputated limbs, or that anyone who speaks the
Prophet Mohammed’s name in vain is immediately struck down while those who
pray to Allah five times a day are free from disease and misfortune. More
generally, the data might show that good things happen to good people and bad
things happen to bad people: that the mothers who die in childbirth, the children
who waste away from cancer, and the millions of victims of earthquakes,
tsunamis, and holocausts had it coming.
Other components of theistic morality, such as the existence of an immaterial
soul and a realm of reality beyond matter and energy, are just as testable. We
might discover a severed head that can speak. A seer could predict the exact day
of natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Aunt Hilda could beam a message from
the Great Beyond telling us under which floorboard she hid her jewelry.
Memoirs from oxygen-starved patients who experienced their souls leaving their
bodies could contain verifiable details unavailable to their sense organs. The fact
that these reports have all been exposed as tall tales, false memories,
overinterpreted coincidences, and cheap carny tricks undermines the hypothesis
that there are immaterial souls which could be subject to divine justice.34 There
are, of course, deistic philosophies in which God created the universe and then
stepped back to watch what happened, or in which “God” is merely a synonym

for the laws of physics and mathematics. But these impotent Gods are in no
position to underwrite morality.
Many theistic beliefs originated as hypotheses to explain natural phenomena

such as the weather, disease, and the origin of species. As these hypotheses have
been superseded by scientific ones, the scope of theism has steadily shrunk. But
since our scientific understanding is never complete, the pseudo-argument
known as the God of the Gaps is always available as a last resort. Today the
more sophisticated theists have tried to place God into two of these gaps: the
fundamental physical constants and the hard problem of consciousness. Any
humanist who insists that we cannot invoke God to justify morality can expect to
be confronted with these gaps, so let me say a few words about each. As we will
see, they are likely to go the way of Zeus hurling thunderbolts as an explanation
for electrical storms.
Our universe can be specified by a few numbers, including the strengths of
the forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces), the
number of macroscopic dimensions of space-time (four), and the density of dark
energy (the source of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe). In Just
Six Numbers, Martin Rees enumerates them on one hand and a finger; the exact
tally depends on which version of physical theory one invokes and on whether
one counts the constants themselves or ratios between them. If any of these
constants were off by a minuscule iota, then matter would fly apart or collapse
upon itself, and stars, galaxies, and planets, to say nothing of terrestrial life and
Homo sapiens, could never have formed. The best-established theories of
physics today don’t explain why these constants should be so meticulously tuned
to values that allowed us to come into being (particularly the density of dark
energy), and so, the theistic argument goes, there must have been a fine-tuner,
namely God. It is the old Argument from Design applied to the entire cosmos
rather than to living things.
An immediate objection is the equally old problem of theodicy. If God, in his
infinite power and knowledge, fine-tuned the universe to bring us into being,
why did he design an Earth on which geological and meteorological catastrophes
devastate regions inhabited by innocent people? What is the divine purpose of
the supervolcanoes that have ravaged our species in the past and may extinguish
it in the future, or the evolution of the Sun into a red giant that will do so with
certainty?

But theodical speculation is beside the point. Physicists have not been left
dumbstruck by the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, but are
actively pursuing several explanations. One is captured in the title of the
physicist Victor Stenger’s book The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning.35 Many physicists
believe that it’s premature to conclude that the values of the fundamental
constants are either arbitrary or the only ones consistent with life. A deeper
understanding of physics (particularly the long-sought unification of relativity
and quantum theory) may show that some of the values must be exactly what
they are. Others, we might learn, could take on other values—more important,
combinations of values—that are compatible with a stable, matter-filled
universe, albeit not the one we know and love. Progress in physics may reveal
that the constants are not so finely tuned, and a life-supporting universe not so
improbable, after all.
The other explanation is that our universe is just one region in a vast,
possibly infinite landscape of universes—a multiverse—each with different
values of the fundamental constants.36 We find ourselves in a universe
compatible with life not because it was tuned to allow us to exist but because the
very fact that we exist implies that it is that kind of universe, and not one of the
vastly more numerous inhospitable ones, that we find ourselves in. Fine-tuning
is a fallacy of post hoc reasoning, like the Megabucks winner who wonders what
made him win against all odds. Someone had to win, and it’s only because it
happened to be him that he’s wondering in the first place. It’s not the first time
that a selection artifact has fooled thinkers into searching for a nonexistent deep
explanation for a physical constant. Johannes Kepler agonized over why the
Earth was 93 million miles away from the sun, just right for water to fill our
lakes and rivers without freezing solid or boiling away. Today we know that the
Earth is just one of many planets, each at a different distance from our sun or
another star, and we are unsurprised to learn that we find ourselves on that planet
rather than on Mars.
The theory of the multiverse would itself be a post hoc excuse for an
explanation if it were not consistent with other theories in physics—in particular,
that the vacuum of space can spawn big bangs which grow into new universes,
and that the baby universes can be born with different fundamental constants.37
Still, the very idea repels many people (not least some physicists) because of its
mind-boggling profligacy. An infinity of universes (or at least a number large
enough to include all possible arrangements of matter) implies that somewhere
there are universes with exact doppelgangers of you except that they married

someone else, were killed by a car last night, are named Evelyn, have one hair
out of place, put the book down a moment ago and are not reading this sentence,
and so on.
Yet however unsettling these implications are, the history of ideas tells us that
cognitive queasiness is a poor guide to reality. Our best science has repeatedly
insulted our ancestors’ common sense with unsettling discoveries that turned out
to be true, including a round Earth, a slowdown of time at high speeds, quantum
superposition, curved space-time, and of course evolution. Indeed, once we get
over the initial shock, we find that a multiverse is not so exotic after all. This is
not even the first time that physicists have had a reason to posit multiple
universes. Another version of the multiverse is a straightforward implication of
the discoveries that space appears to be infinite and that matter appears to be
evenly dispersed through it: there must be an infinity of universes dotting 3-D
space beyond our cosmic horizon. Still another is the many-worlds interpretation
of quantum mechanics, in which the multiple outcomes of a probabilistic
quantum process (such as the trajectory of a photon) are all realized in
superimposed parallel universes (a possibility that could lead to quantum
computers, in which all possible values of the variables in a computation are
represented simultaneously). Indeed, in one sense the multiverse is the simpler
theory of reality, since if our universe is the only one in existence, we would
need to complicate the elegant laws of physics with an arbitrary stipulation of
our universe’s parochial initial conditions and its parochial physical constants.
As the physicist Max Tegmark (an advocate of four kinds of multiverse) put it,
“Our judgment therefore comes down to which we find more wasteful and
inelegant: many worlds or many words.”
If the multiverse turns out to be the best explanation of the fundamental
physical constants, it would not be the first time we have been flabbergasted by
worlds beyond our noses. Our ancestors had to swallow the discovery of the
Western Hemisphere, eight other planets, a hundred billion stars in our galaxy
(many with planets), and a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. If
reason contradicts intuition once again, so much the worse for intuition. Another
advocate of the multiverse, Brian Greene, reminds us:
From a quaint, small, earth-centered universe to one filled with billions of

galaxies, the journey has been both thrilling and humbling. We’ve been
compelled to relinquish sacred belief in our own centrality, but with such
cosmic demotion we’ve demonstrated the capacity of the human intellect

to reach far beyond the confines of ordinary experience to reveal
extraordinary truth.38
The other supposedly God-fillable gap is the “hard problem of consciousness,”

also known as the problem of sentience, subjectivity, phenomenal consciousness,
and qualia (the “qualitative” aspect of consciousness).39 The term, originally
suggested by the philosopher David Chalmers, is an in-joke, because the so-
called easy problem—the scientific challenge of distinguishing conscious from
unconscious mental computation, identifying its substrates in the brain, and
explaining why it evolved—is “easy” in the sense that curing cancer or sending a
man to the Moon is easy, namely that it is scientifically tractable. Fortunately,
the easy problem is more than just tractable: we are well on the way to a
satisfying explanation. It’s hardly a mystery why we experience a world of
stable, solid, colored 3-D objects rather than the kaleidoscope of pixels on our
retinas, or why we enjoy (and hence seek) food, sex, and bodily integrity while
suffering from (and hence avoiding) social isolation and tissue damage: these
internal states and the behavior they encourage are obvious Darwinian
adaptations. With advances in evolutionary psychology, more and more of our
conscious experiences are being explained in this way, including our intellectual
obsessions, moral emotions, and aesthetic reactions.40
Nor are the computational and neurobiological bases of consciousness
obstinately befuddling. The cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and his
collaborators have argued that consciousness functions as a “global workspace”
or “blackboard” representation.41 The blackboard metaphor refers to the way that
a diverse set of computational modules can post their results in a common
format that all the other modules can “see.” Those modules include perception,
memory, motivation, language understanding, and action planning, and the fact
that they can all access a common pool of currently relevant information (the
contents of consciousness) allows us to describe, grasp, or approach what we
see, to respond to what other people say or do, and to remember and plan
depending on what we want and what we know. (The computations inside each
module, in contrast, like the calculation of depth from the two eyes or the
sequencing of muscle contractions making up an action, can work off their own
proprietary input streams, and they proceed below the level of consciousness,
having no need for its synoptic view.) This global workspace is implemented in
the brain as rhythmic, synchronized firing in neural networks that link the

prefrontal and parietal cerebral cortexes with each other and with brain areas that
feed them perceptual, mnemonic, and motivational signals.
The so-called hard problem—why it subjectively feels like something to each
one of us who is conscious, with red looking red and salt tasting salty—is hard
not because it is a recalcitrant scientific topic but because it is a head-scratching
conceptual enigma. It includes brainteasers such as whether my red is the same
as your red, what it is like to be a bat, whether there could be zombies (people
indistinguishable from you and me but with “no one home” who is feeling
anything), and if so whether everyone but me is a zombie, whether a perfectly
lifelike robot would be conscious, whether I could achieve immortality by
uploading my brain’s connectome to the Cloud, and whether the Star Trek
transporter really transports Captain Kirk to the planetary surface or murders
him and reconstitutes a twin.
Some philosophers, like Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained, have
argued that there is no hard problem of consciousness: it is a confusion arising
from the bad habit of imagining a homunculus seated in a theater inside the
skull. This is the disembodied experiencer who would temporarily tiptoe out of
my theater and drop in on yours to check out the red, or visit the bat’s and watch
the movie that’s playing there; who would be missing from the zombie and
either present or absent in the robot; and who might or might not survive the
beam ride down to Zakdorn. Sometimes, when I see the mischief that the hard
problem has caused (including the conservative intellectual Dinesh D’Souza
brandishing a copy of my book How the Mind Works in a debate on the existence
of God), I am tempted to agree with Dennett that we’d be better off without the
term. Contrary to various misunderstandings, the hard problem does not consist
in weird physical or paranormal phenomena such as clairvoyance, telepathy,
time travel, augury, or action at a distance. It does not call for exotic quantum
physics, kitschy energy vibrations, or other New Age flimflam. Most important
for the present discussion, it does not implicate an immaterial soul. Nothing that
we know about consciousness is inconsistent with the understanding that it
depends entirely on neural activity.
In the end I still think that the hard problem is a meaningful conceptual
problem, but agree with Dennett that it is not a meaningful scientific problem.42
No one will ever get a grant to study whether you are a zombie or whether the
same Captain Kirk walks on the deck of the Enterprise and the surface of
Zakdorn. And I agree with several other philosophers that it may be futile to
hope for a solution at all, precisely because it is a conceptual problem, or, more

accurately, a problem with our concepts. As Thomas Nagel put it in his famous
essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” there may be “facts which could not ever be
represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted forever
—simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of
the requisite type.”43 The philosopher Colin McGinn has run with this idea,
arguing that there is a mismatch between our cognitive tools for explaining
reality (namely chains of causes and effects, analysis into parts and their
interactions, and modeling in mathematical equations) and the nature of the hard
problem of consciousness, which is unintuitively holistic.44 Our best science tells
us that consciousness consists of a global workspace representing our current
goals, memories, and surroundings, implemented in synchronized neural firing
in fronto-parietal circuitry. But the last dollop in the theory—that it subjectively
feels like something to be such circuitry—may have to be stipulated as a fact
about reality where explanation stops. This should not be entirely surprising. As
Ambrose Bierce noted in The Devil’s Dictionary, the mind has nothing but itself
to know itself with, and it may never feel satisfied that it understands the deepest
aspect of its own existence, its intrinsic subjectivity.
Whatever we make of the hard problem of consciousness, positing an
immaterial soul is of no help at all. For one thing, it tries to solve a mystery with
an even bigger mystery. For another, it falsely predicts the existence of
paranormal phenomena. Most damningly, a divinely granted consciousness does
not meet the design specs for a locus of just deserts. Why would God have
endowed a mobster with the ability to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, or a sexual
predator with carnal pleasure? (If it’s to plant temptations for them to prove their
morality by resisting, why should their victims be collateral damage?) Why
would a merciful God be dissatisfied with robbing years of life from a cancer
patient and add the gratuitous punishment of agonizing pain? Like the
phenomena of physics, the phenomena of consciousness look exactly as you
would expect if the laws of nature applied without regard to human welfare. If
we want to enhance that welfare, we have to figure out how to do it ourselves.
And that brings us to the second problem with theistic morality. It’s not just that
there is almost certainly no God to dictate and enforce moral precepts. It’s that
even if there were a God, his divine decrees, as conveyed to us through religion,
cannot be the source of morality. The explanation goes back to Plato’s
Euthyphro, in which Socrates points out that if the gods have good reasons to

deem certain acts moral, we can appeal to those reasons directly, skipping the
middlemen. If they don’t, we should not take their dictates seriously. After all,
thoughtful people can give reasons why they don’t kill, rape, or torture other
than fear of eternal hellfire, and they would not suddenly become rapists and
contract killers if they had reason to believe that God’s back was turned or if he
told them it was OK.
Theistic moralists reply that the God of scripture, unlike the capricious
deities of Greek mythology, is by his very nature incapable of issuing immoral
commandments. But anyone who is familiar with scripture knows that this is not
so. The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions,
commanded the Israelites to commit mass rape and genocide, and prescribed the
death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to
parents, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong
with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. All this was par for the
course for Bronze and Iron Age civilizations. Today, of course, enlightened
believers cherry-pick the humane injunctions while allegorizing, spin-doctoring,
or ignoring the vicious ones, and that’s just the point: they read the Bible through
the lens of Enlightenment humanism.
The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common claim that atheism
consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The
claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of
reason and human interests: it’s an inescapable feature of the human condition
that we’re all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other.
For this reason many contemporary philosophers, including Nagel, Goldstein,
Peter Singer, Peter Railton, Richard Boyd, David Brink, and Derek Parfit, are
moral realists (the opposite of relativists), arguing that moral statements may be
objectively true or false.45 It’s religion that is inherently relativistic. Given the
absence of evidence, any belief in how many deities there are, who are their
earthly prophets and messiahs, and what they demand of us can depend only on
the parochial dogmas of one’s tribe.
Not only does this make theistic morality relativistic; it can make it immoral.
Invisible gods can command people to slay heretics, infidels, and apostates. And
an immaterial soul is unmoved by the earthly incentives that impel us to get
along. Contestants over a material resource are usually better off if they split it
than fight over it, particularly if they value their own lives on earth. But
contestants over a sacred value (like holy land or affirmation of a belief) may not
compromise, and if they think their souls are immortal, the loss of their body is

no big deal—indeed, it may be a small price to pay for an eternal reward in
paradise.
Many historians have pointed out that religious wars are long and bloody, and
bloody wars are often prolonged by religious conviction.46 Matthew White, the
necrometrician we met in chapter 14, lists thirty religious conflicts among the
worst things that people have ever done to one another, resulting in around 55
million killings.47 (In seventeen conflicts, the monotheistic religions fought each
other; in another eight, monotheists fought heathens.) And the common assertion
that the two world wars were set off by the decline of religious morality (as in
the former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon’s recent claim that World War II
pitted “the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists”) is dunce-cap history.48 The
belligerents on both sides of World War I were devoutly Christian, except for the
Ottoman Empire, a Muslim theocracy. The only avowedly atheist power that
fought in World War II was the Soviet Union, and for most of the war it fought
on our side against the Nazi regime—which (contrary to another myth) was
sympathetic to German Christianity and vice versa, the two factions united in
their loathing of secular modernity.49 (Hitler himself was a deist who said, “I am
convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I
am doing the Lord’s work.”)50 Defenders of theism retort that irreligious wars
and atrocities, motivated by the secular ideology of communism and by ordinary
conquest, have killed even more people. Talk about relativism! It is peculiar to
grade religion on this curve: if religion were a source of morality, the number of
religious wars and atrocities ought to be zero. And obviously atheism is not a
moral system in the first place. It’s just the absence of supernatural belief, like an
unwillingness to believe in Zeus or Vishnu. The moral alternative to theism is
humanism.
Few sophisticated people today profess a belief in heaven and hell, the literal
truth of the Bible, or a God who flouts the laws of physics. But many
intellectuals have reacted with fury to the “New Atheism” popularized in a
quartet of bestsellers published between 2004 and 2007 by Sam Harris, Richard
Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.51 Their reaction has been
called “I’m-an-atheist-but,” “belief-in-belief,” “accommodationism,” and (in
Coyne’s coinage) “faitheism.” It overlaps with the hostility to science within the
Second Culture, presumably because of a shared sympathy to hermeneutic over
analytical and empirical methodologies, and a reluctance to acknowledge that

dweeby scientists and secular philosophers might be right about the fundamental
questions of existence. Though atheism—the absence of a belief in God—is
compatible with a wide range of humanistic and antihumanistic beliefs, the New
Atheists are avowedly humanistic, so any flaws in their worldview might carry
over to humanism more generally.
According to the faitheists, the New Atheists are too shrill and militant, and
just as annoying as the fundamentalists they criticize. (In an XKCD webcomic, a
character responds, “Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel
superior to both.”)52 Ordinary people will never be disabused of their religious
beliefs, they say, and perhaps they should not be, because healthy societies need
religion as a bulwark against selfishness and meaningless consumerism.
Religious institutions supply that need by promoting charity, community, social
responsibility, rites of passage, and guidance on existential questions that can
never be provided by science. Anyway, most people treat religious doctrine
allegorically rather than literally, and they find meaning and wisdom in an
overarching sense of spirituality, grace, and divine order.53 Let’s look at these
claims.
An ironic inspiration for faitheism is research on the psychological origins of
supernatural belief, including the cognitive habits of overattributing design and
agency to natural phenomena, and emotional feelings of solidarity within
communities of faith.54 The most natural interpretation of these findings is that
they undermine religious beliefs by showing how they are figments of our
neurobiological makeup. But the research has also been interpreted as showing
that human nature requires religion in the same way that it requires food, sex,
and companionship, so it’s futile to imagine no religion. But this interpretation is
dubious.55 Not every feature of human nature is a homeostatic drive that must be
regularly slaked. Yes, people are vulnerable to cognitive illusions that lead to
supernatural beliefs, and they certainly need to belong to a community. Over the
course of history, institutions have arisen that offer packages of customs that
encourage those illusions and cater to those needs. That does not imply that
people need the complete packages, any more than the existence of sexual desire
implies that people need Playboy clubs. As societies become more educated and
secure, the components of the legacy religious institutions can be unbundled.
The art, rituals, iconography, and communal warmth that many people enjoy can
continue to be provided by liberalized religions, without the supernatural dogma
or Iron Age morality.

That implies that religions should not be condemned or praised across the
board but considered according to the logic of Euthyphro. If there are justifiable
reasons behind particular activities, those activities should be encouraged, but
the movements should not be given a pass just because they are religious.
Among the positive contributions of religions at particular times and places are
education, charity, medical care, counseling, conflict resolution, and other social
services (though in the developed world these efforts are dwarfed by their
secular counterparts; no religion could have decimated hunger, disease, illiteracy,
war, homicide, or poverty on the scales we saw in part II). Religious
organizations can also provide a sense of communal solidarity and mutual
support, together with art, ritual, and architecture of great beauty and historical
resonance, thanks to their millennia-long head start. I partake of these myself,
with much enjoyment.
If the positive contributions of religious institutions come from their role as
humanistic associations in civil society, then we would expect those benefits not
to be tied to theistic belief, and that is indeed the case. It’s long been known that
churchgoers are happier and more charitable than stay-at-homes, but Robert
Putnam and his fellow political scientist David Campbell have found that these
blessings have nothing to do with beliefs in God, creation, heaven, or hell.56 An
atheist who has been pulled into a congregation by an observant spouse is as
charitable as the faithful among the flock, whereas a fervent believer who prays
alone is not particularly charitable. At the same time, communality and civic
virtue can be fostered by membership in secular service communities such as the
Shriners (with their children’s hospitals and burn units), Rotary International
(which is helping to end polio), and Lions Club (which combats blindness)—
even, according to Putnam and Campbell’s research, a bowling league.
Just as religious institutions deserve praise when they pursue humanistic
ends, they should not be shielded from criticism when they obstruct those ends.
Examples include the withholding of medical care from sick children in faith-
healing sects, the opposition to humane assisted dying, the corruption of science
education in schools, the suppression of touchy biomedical research such as on
stem cells, and obstruction of lifesaving public health policies such as
contraception, condoms, and vaccination against HPV.57 Nor should religions be
granted a presumption of a higher moral purpose. Faitheists who have hoped that
the moralistic fervor of Evangelical Christianity might be channeled into
movements for social improvement have repeatedly gotten burned. In the early
2000s, a bipartisan coalition of environmentalists hoped to make common cause

with Evangelicals on climate change under rubrics like Creation Care and Faith-
Based Environmentalism. But Evangelical churches are an anchor faction of the
Republican Party, which adopted a strategy of absolute noncooperation with the
Obama administration. Political tribalism carried the day, and the Evangelicals
fell into line, opting for radical libertarianism over stewardship of the Creation.58
Similarly, in 2016 there was a brief hope that the Christian virtues of
humility, temperance, forgiveness, propriety, chivalry, thrift, and compassion
toward the weak would turn Evangelicals against a casino developer who was
vainglorious, sybaritic, vindictive, lewd, misogynistic, ostentatiously wealthy,
and contemptuous of the people he called “losers.” But no: Donald Trump won
the votes of 81 percent of white Evangelical and born-again Christians, a higher
proportion than of any other demographic.59 In large part he earned their votes
by promising to repeal a law which prohibits tax-exempt charities (including
churches) from engaging in political activism.60 Christian virtue was trumped by
political muscle.
If the factual tenets of religion can no longer be taken seriously, and its ethical
tenets depend entirely on whether they can be justified by secular morality, what
about its claims to wisdom on the great questions of existence? A favorite
talking point of faitheists is that only religion can speak to the deepest yearnings
of the human heart. Science will never be adequate to address the great
existential questions of life, death, love, loneliness, loss, honor, cosmic justice,
and metaphysical hope.
This is the kind of statement that Dennett (quoting a young child) calls a
“deepity”: it has a patina of profundity, but as soon as one thinks about what it
means, it turns out to be nonsense. To begin with, the alternative to “religion” as
a source of meaning is not “science.” No one ever suggested that we look to
ichthyology or nephrology for enlightenment on how to live, but rather to the
entire fabric of human knowledge, reason, and humanistic values, of which
science is a part. It’s true that the fabric contains important strands that
originated in religion, such as the language and allegories of the Bible and the
writings of sages, scholars, and rabbis. But today it is dominated by secular
content, including debates on ethics originating in Greek and Enlightenment
philosophy, and renderings of love, loss, and loneliness in the works of
Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, the 19th-century novelists, and other great
artists and essayists. Judged by universal standards, many of the religious

contributions to life’s great questions turn out to be not deep and timeless but
shallow and archaic, such as a conception of “justice” that includes punishing
blasphemers, or a conception of “love” that adjures a woman to obey her
husband. As we have seen, any conception of life and death that depends on the
existence of an immaterial soul is factually dubious and morally dangerous. And
since cosmic justice and metaphysical hope (as opposed to human justice and
worldly hope) do not exist, then it’s not meaningful to seek them; it’s pointless.
The claim that people should seek deeper meaning in supernatural beliefs has
little to recommend it.
What about a more abstract sense of “spirituality”? If it consists in gratitude
for one’s existence, awe at the beauty and immensity of the universe, and
humility before the frontiers of human understanding, then spirituality is indeed
an experience that makes life worth living—and one that is lifted into higher
dimensions by the revelations of science and philosophy. But “spirituality” is
often taken to mean something more: the conviction that the universe is
somehow personal, that everything happens for a reason, that meaning is to be
found in the happenstances of life. In the final episode of her landmark show,
Oprah Winfrey spoke for millions when she avowed, “I understand the
manifestation of grace and God, so I know there are no coincidences. There are
none. Only divine order here.”61
This sense of spirituality is considered in a video sketch by the comedienne
Amy Schumer called “The Universe.” It opens with the science popularizer Bill
Nye standing against a backdrop of stars and galaxies:
NYE: The Universe. For centuries, humankind has strived to understand this
vast expanse of energy, gas, and dust. In recent years, a stunning
breakthrough has been made in our concept of what the universe is for.
[Zoom to the Earth’s surface, and then to a yogurt shop in which two
young women are chatting.]
FIRST WOMAN: So, I was texting while I was driving? And I ended up taking a
wrong turn that took me directly past a vitamin shop? And I was just
like, this is totally the universe telling me I should be taking calcium.
NYE: Scientists once believed the universe was a chaotic collection of
matter. We now know the universe is essentially a force sending cosmic
guidance to women in their 20s.
[Zoom to a gym with Schumer and a friend on exercycles.]

So you know how I’ve been fucking my married boss for like six
SCHUMER:
months? Well, I was starting to get really worried he was never going to
leave his wife. But then yesterday in yoga, the girl in front of me was
wearing a shirt that just said, “Chill.” And I was just like, this is so the
universe telling me, “Girl, just, like, keep fucking your married boss!”62
A “spirituality” that sees cosmic meaning in the whims of fortune is not wise
but foolish. The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the
universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply
that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa. You care
about yourself, and you have a responsibility to respect the laws of the universe
that keep you alive, so you don’t squander your existence. Your loved ones care
about you, and you have a responsibility not to orphan your children, widow
your spouse, and shatter your parents. And anyone with a humanistic sensibility
cares about you, not in the sense of feeling your pain—human empathy is too
feeble to spread itself across billions of strangers—but in the sense of realizing
that your existence is cosmically no less important than theirs, and that we all
have a responsibility to use the laws of the universe to enhance the conditions in
which we all can flourish.
Arguments aside, is the need to believe pushing back against secular humanism?
Believers, faitheists, and resenters of science and progress are gloating about an
apparent return of religion all over the world. But as we shall see, the rebound is
an illusion: the world’s fastest-growing religion is no religion at all.
Measuring the history of religious belief is not easy. Few surveys have asked
people the same questions in different times and places, and the respondents
would interpret them differently even if they did. Many people are queasy about
labeling themselves atheist, a word they equate with “amoral” and which can
expose them to hostility, discrimination, and (in many Muslim countries)
imprisonment, mutilation, or death.63 Also, most people are hazy theologians,
and may stop short of declaring themselves atheists while admitting that they
have no religion or religious beliefs, find religion unimportant, are spiritual but
not religious, or believe in some “higher power” which is not God. Different
surveys can end up with different estimates of irreligion depending on how the
alternatives are worded.

We can’t say for sure how many nonbelievers there were in earlier decades
and centuries, but there can’t have been many; one estimate put the proportion in
1900 at 0.2 percent.64 According to WIN-Gallup International’s Global Index of
Religiosity and Atheism, a survey of fifty thousand people in fifty-seven
countries, 13 percent of the world’s population identified themselves as a
“convinced atheist” in 2012, up from around 10 percent in 2005.65 It would not
be fanciful to say that over the course of the 20th century the global rate of
atheism increased by a factor of 500, and that it has doubled again so far in the
21st. An additional 23 percent of the world’s population identify themselves as
“not a religious person,” leaving 59 percent of the world as “religious,” down
from close to 100 percent a century before.
According to an old idea in social science called the Secularization Thesis,
irreligion is a natural consequence of affluence and education.66 Recent studies
confirm that wealthier and better-educated countries tend to be less religious.67
The decline is clearest in the developed countries of Western Europe, the
Commonwealth, and East Asia. In Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong,
Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and several other countries, religious
people are in the minority, and atheists make up a quarter to more than half of
the population.68 Religion has also declined in formerly Communist countries
(especially China), though not in Latin America, the Islamic world, or sub-
Saharan Africa.
The data show no signs of a global religious revival. Among the thirty-nine
countries surveyed by the Index in both 2005 and 2012, only eleven became
more religious, none by more than six percentage points, while twenty-six
became less religious, many by double digits. And contrary to impressions from
the news, the religiously excitable countries of Poland, Russia, Bosnia, Turkey,
India, Nigeria, and Kenya became less religious over these seven years, as did
the United States (more on this soon). Overall, the percentage of people who
called themselves religious declined by nine points, making room for growth in
the proportion of “convinced atheists” in a majority of the countries.
Another global survey, by the Pew Research Center, tried to project religious
affiliation into the future (the survey did not ask about belief).69 The survey
found that in 2010, a sixth of the world’s population, when asked to name their
religion, chose “None.” There are more Nones in the world than Hindus,
Buddhists, Jews, or devotees of folk religions, and this is the “denomination”
that the largest number of people are expected to switch into. By 2050, 61.5
million more people will have lost their religion than found one.

With all these numbers showing that people are becoming less religious,
where did the idea of a religious revival come from? It comes from what
Quebecers call la revanche du berceau, the revenge of the cradle. Religious
people have more babies. The demographers at Pew did the math and projected
that the proportion of the world’s population that is Muslim might rise from 23.2
percent in 2010 to 29.7 percent in 2050, while the percentage of Christians will
remain unchanged, and the percentage of all other denominations, together with
the religiously unaffiliated, will decrease. Even this projection is a hostage to
current fertility estimates and may become obsolete if Africa (religious and
fecund) undergoes the demographic transition, or if the Muslim fertility decline
discussed in chapter 10 continues.70
A key question about the secularization trend is whether it is being driven by
changing times (a period effect), a graying population (an age effect), or the
turnover of generations (a cohort effect).71 Only a few countries, all English-
speaking, have the multidecade data we need to answer the question.
Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians have become less religious as the
years have gone by, probably because of changing times rather than the
population getting older (if anything, we would expect people to become more
religious as they prepare to meet their maker). There was no such change in the
British or American zeitgeist, but in all five countries, each generation was less
religious than the one before. The cohort effect is substantial. More than 80
percent of the British GI Generation (born 1905–1924) said they belonged to a
religion, but at the same ages, fewer than 30 percent of the Millennials did. More
than 70 percent of the American GI Generation said they “know God exists,” but
only 40 percent of their Millennial great-grandchildren say that.
The discovery of a generational turnover throughout the Anglosphere
removes a big thorn in the side of the secularization thesis: the United States,
which is wealthy but religious. As early as 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville
remarked on how Americans were more devout than their European cousins, and
the difference persists today: in 2012, 60 percent of Americans called themselves
religious, compared with 46 percent of Canadians, 37 percent of the French, and
29 percent of Swedes.72 Other Western democracies have two to six times the
proportion of atheists found in the United States.73
But while Americans started from a higher level of belief, they have not
escaped the march of secularization from one generation to the next. A recent
report summarizes the trend in its title: “Exodus: Why Americans Are Leaving
Religion—and Why They’re Unlikely to Come Back.”74 The exodus is most

visible in the rise of the Nones, from 5 percent in 1972 to 25 percent today,
making them the largest religious group in the United States, surpassing
Catholics (21 percent), white Evangelicals (16 percent), and white mainline
Protestants (13.5 percent). The cohort gradient is steep: just 13 percent of Silents
and older Boomers are Nones, compared with 39 percent of Millennials.75 The
younger generations, moreover, are more likely to remain irreligious as they age
and stare down their mortality.76 The trends are just as dramatic among the
subset of Nones who are not just none-of-the-abovers but confessed
nonbelievers. The percentage of Americans who say they are atheist or agnostic,
or that religion is unimportant to them (probably no more than a percentage
point or two in the 1950s), rose to 10.3 percent in 2007 and 15.8 percent in 2014.
The cohorts break down like this: 7 percent of Silents, 11 percent of Boomers, 25
percent of Millennials.77 Clever survey techniques designed to get around
people’s squeamishness in confessing to atheism suggest that the true
percentages are even higher.78
Why, then, do commentators think that religion is rebounding in the United
States? It’s because of yet another finding about the American Exodus: Nones
don’t vote. In 2012 religiously unaffiliated Americans made up 20 percent of the
populace but 12 percent of the voters. Organized religions, by definition, are
organized, and they have been putting that organization to work in getting out
the vote and directing it their way. In 2012 white Evangelical Protestants also
made up 20 percent of the adult population, but they made up 26 percent of the
voters, more than double the proportion of the irreligious.79 Though the Nones
supported Clinton over Trump by a ratio of three to one, they stayed home on
November 8, 2016, while the Evangelicals lined up to vote. Similar patterns
apply to populist movements in Europe. Pundits are apt to mistake this electoral
clout for a comeback of religion, an illusion that gives us a second explanation
(together with fecundity) for why secularization has been so stealthy.
Why is the world losing its religion? There are several reasons.80 The
Communist governments of the 20th century outlawed or discouraged religion,
and when they liberalized, their citizenries were slow to reacquire the taste.
Some of the alienation is part of a decline in trust in all institutions from its high-
water mark in the 1960s.81 Some of it is carried by the global current toward
emancipative values (chapter 15) such as women’s rights, reproductive freedom,
and tolerance of homosexuality.82 Also, as people’s lives become more secure
thanks to affluence, medical care, and social insurance, they no longer pray to
God to save them from ruin: countries with stronger safety nets are less

religious, holding other factors constant.83 But the most obvious reason may be
reason itself: when people become more intellectually curious and scientifically
literate, they stop believing in miracles. The most common reason that
Americans give for leaving religion is “a lack of belief in the teachings of
religion.”84 We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates
of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get
smarter, they turn away from God.85
Whatever the reasons, the history and geography of secularization belie the
fear that in the absence of religion, societies are doomed to anomie, nihilism, and
a “total eclipse of all values.”86 Secularization has proceeded in parallel with all
the historical progress documented in part II. Many irreligious societies like
Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand are among the nicest places to live in the
history of our kind (with high levels of every measurable good thing in life),
while many of the world’s most religious societies are hellholes.87 American
exceptionalism is instructive: the United States is more religious than its Western
peers but underperforms them in happiness and well-being, with higher rates of
homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality,
obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death.88 The same holds true
among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its
citizens’ lives.89 Cause and effect probably run in many directions. But it’s
plausible that in democratic countries, secularism leads to humanism, turning
people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward
practical policies that make them and their fellows better off.
However baleful theistic morality may be in the West, its influence is even more
troubling in contemporary Islam. No discussion of global progress can ignore the
Islamic world, which by a number of objective measures appears to be sitting out
the progress enjoyed by the rest. Muslim-majority countries score poorly on
measures of health, education, freedom, happiness, and democracy, holding
wealth constant.90 All of the wars raging in 2016 took place in Muslim-majority
countries or involved Islamist groups, and those groups were responsible for the
vast majority of terrorist attacks.91 As we saw in chapter 15, emancipative values
such as gender equality, personal autonomy, and political voice are less popular
in the Islamic heartland than in any other region of the world, including sub-
Saharan Africa. Human rights are abysmal in many Muslim countries, which
implement cruel punishments (such as flogging, blinding, and amputation), not

just for actual crimes but for homosexuality, witchcraft, apostasy, and expressing
liberal opinions on social media.
How much of this lack of progress is the fallout of theistic morality?
Certainly it cannot be attributed to Islam itself. Islamic civilization had a
precocious scientific revolution, and for much of its history was more tolerant,
cosmopolitan, and internally peaceful than the Christian West.92 Some of the
regressive customs found in Muslim-majority countries, such as female genital
mutilation and “honor killings” of unchaste sisters and daughters, are ancient
African or West Asian tribal practices and are misattributed by their perpetrators
to Islamic law. Some of the problems are found in other resource-cursed
strongman states. Still others were exacerbated by clumsy Western interventions
in the Middle East, including the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire,
support of the anti-Soviet mujahedin in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq.
But part of the resistance to the tide of progress can be attributed to religious
belief. The problem begins with the fact that many of the precepts of Islamic
doctrine, taken literally, are floridly antihumanistic. The Quran contains scores
of passages that express hatred of infidels, the reality of martyrdom, and the
sacredness of armed jihad. Also endorsed are lashing for alcohol consumption,
stoning for adultery and homosexuality, crucifixion for enemies of Islam, sexual
slavery for pagans, and forced marriage for nine-year-old girls.93
Of course many of the passages in the Bible are floridly antihumanistic too.
One needn’t debate which is worse; what matters is how literally the adherents
take them. Like the other Abrahamic religions, Islam has its version of rabbinical
pilpul and Jesuitical disputation that allegorizes, compartmentalizes, and spin-
doctors the nasty bits of scripture. Islam also has its version of Cultural Jews,
Cafeteria Catholics, and CINOs (Christians in Name Only). The problem is that
this benign hypocrisy is far less developed in the contemporary Islamic world.
Examining big data on religious affiliation from the World Values Survey, the
political scientists Amy Alexander and Christian Welzel observe that “self-
identifying Muslims stick out as the denomination with by far the largest
percentage of strongly religious people: 82%. Even more astounding, fully 92%
of all self-identifying Muslims place themselves at the two highest scores of the
ten-point religiosity scale [compared with less than half of Jews, Catholics, and
Evangelicals]. Self-identifying as a Muslim, regardless of the particular branch
of Islam, seems to be almost synonymous with being strongly religious.”94
Similar results turn up in some other surveys.95 A large one by the Pew Research
Center found that “in 32 of the 39 countries surveyed, half or more Muslims say

there is only one correct way to understand the teachings of Islam,” that in the
countries in which the question was asked, between 50 and 93 percent believe
that the Quran “should be read literally, word by word,” and that “overwhelming
percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the
official law of the land.”96
Correlation is not causation, but if you combine the fact that much of Islamic
doctrine is antihumanistic with the fact that many Muslims believe that Islamic
doctrine is inerrant—and throw in the fact that the Muslims who carry out
illiberal policies and violent acts say they are doing it because they are following
those doctrines—then it becomes a stretch to say that the inhumane practices
have nothing to do with religious devotion and that the real cause is oil,
colonialism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, or Zionism. For those who need data to
be convinced, in global surveys of values in which every variable that social
scientists like to measure is thrown into the pot (including income, education,
and dependence on oil revenues), Islam itself predicts an extra dose of
patriarchal and other illiberal values across countries and individuals.97 Within
non-Muslim societies, so does mosque attendance (in Muslim societies, the
values are so pervasive that mosque attendance doesn’t matter).98
All these troubling patterns were once true of Christendom, but starting with
the Enlightenment, the West initiated a process (still ongoing) of separating the
church from the state, carving out a space for secular civil society, and grounding
its institutions in a universal humanistic ethics. In most Muslim-majority
countries, that process is barely under way. Historians and social scientists
(many of them Muslim) have shown how the stranglehold of the Islamic religion
over governmental institutions and civil society in Muslim countries has
impeded their economic, political, and social progress.99
Making things worse is a reactionary ideology that became influential
through the writings of the Egyptian author Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), a member
of the Muslim Brotherhood and the inspiration for Al Qaeda and other Islamist
movements.100 The ideology looks back to the glory days of the Prophet, the first
caliphs, and classical Arab civilization, and laments subsequent centuries of
humiliation at the hands of Crusaders, horse tribes, European colonizers, and,
most recently, insidious secular modernizers. That history is seen as the bitter
fruit of forsaking strict Islamic practice; redemption can come only from a
restoration of true Muslim states governed by sharia law and purged of non-
Muslim influences.

Though the role of theistic morality in the problems besetting the Islamic
world is inescapable, many Western intellectuals—who would be appalled if the
repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence that are common in
the Islamic world were found in their own societies even diluted a hundredfold
—have become strange apologists when these practices are carried out in the
name of Islam.101 Some of the apologetics, to be sure, come from an admirable
desire to prevent prejudice against Muslims. Some are intended to discredit a
destructive (and possibly self-fulfilling) narrative that the world is embroiled in a
clash of civilizations. Some fit into a long history of Western intellectuals
execrating their own society and romanticizing its enemies (a syndrome we’ll
return to shortly). But many of the apologetics come from a soft spot for religion
among theists, faitheists, and Second Culture intellectuals, and a reluctance to go
all in for Enlightenment humanism.
Calling out the antihumanistic features of contemporary Islamic belief is in
no way Islamophobic or civilization-clashing. The overwhelming majority of
victims of Islamic violence and repression are other Muslims. Islam is not a race,
and as the ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider has put it, “Religions are just ideas
and don’t have rights.”102 Criticizing the ideas of Islam is no more bigoted than
criticizing the ideas of neoliberalism or the Republican Party platform.
Can the Islamic world have an Enlightenment? Can there be a Reform Islam,
a Liberal Islam, a Humanistic Islam, an Islamic Ecumenical Council, a
separation of mosque and state? Many of the faithophilic intellectuals who
excuse the illiberalism of Islam also insist that it’s unreasonable to expect
Muslims to progress beyond it. While the West might enjoy the peace,
prosperity, education, and happiness of post-Enlightenment societies, Muslims
will never accept this shallow hedonism, and it’s only understandable that they
should cling to a system of medieval beliefs and customs forever.
But this condescension is belied by the history of Islam and by nascent
movements within it. Classical Arabic civilization, as I mentioned, was a
hothouse of science and secular philosophy.103 Amartya Sen has documented
how the 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar I implemented a
multiconfessional, liberal social order (including atheists and agnostics) in
Muslim-ruled India at a time when the Inquisition was raging in Europe and
Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy.104 Today the forces of
modernity are working in many parts of the Islamic world. Tunisia, Bangladesh,
Malaysia, and Indonesia have made long strides toward liberal democracy
(chapter 14). In many Islamic countries, attitudes toward women and minorities

are improving (chapter 15)—slowly, but more detectably among women, the
young, and the educated.105 The emancipative forces that liberalized the West,
such as connectivity, education, mobility, and women’s advancement, are not
bypassing the Islamic world, and the moving sidewalk of generational
replacement can outpace the walkers shambling along it.106
Also, ideas matter. A cadre of Muslim intellectuals, writers, and activists has
been pressing the case for a humanistic revolution for Islam. Among them are
Souad Adnane (co-founder of the Arab Center for Scientific Research and
Humane Studies in Morocco); Mustafa Akyol (author of Islam Without
Extremes); Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar (founder of the Global Secular Humanist
Movement); Sarah Haider (co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America); Shadi
Hamid (author of Islamic Exceptionalism); Pervez Hoodbhoy (author of Islam
and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality); Leyla Hussein
(founder of Daughters of Eve, which opposes female genital mutilation); Gululai
Ismail (founder of Aware Girls in Pakistan); Shiraz Maher (author of Salafi-
Jihadism, quoted in the introduction to part 1); Omar Mahmood (an American
editorialist); Irshad Manji (author of The Trouble with Islam); Maryam Namazie
(spokesperson for One Law for All); Amir Ahmad Nasr (author of My Isl@m);
Taslima Nasrin (author of My Girlhood); Maajid Nawaz (coauthor, with Sam
Harris, of Islam and the Future of Tolerance); Asra Nomani (author of Standing
Alone in Mecca); Raheel Raza (author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad); Ali Rizvi
(author of The Atheist Muslim); Wafa Sultan (author of A God Who Hates);
Muhammad Syed (president of Ex-Muslims of North America); and most
famously, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Malala Yousafzai.
Obviously a new Islamic Enlightenment will have to be spearheaded by
Muslims, but non-Muslims have a role to play. The global network of
intellectual influence is seamless, and given the prestige and power of the West
(even among those who resent it), Western ideas and values can trickle, flow,
and cascade outward in surprising ways. (Osama bin Laden, for example, owned
a book by Noam Chomsky.)107 The history of moral progress, recounted in books
such as The Honor Code by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, suggests
that moral clarity in one culture about a regressive practice by another does not
always provoke resentful backlash but can shame the laggards into overdue
reform. (Past examples include slavery, dueling, foot-binding, and racial
segregation; future ones targeting the United States may include capital
punishment and mass incarceration.)108 An intellectual culture that steadfastly
defended Enlightenment values and that did not indulge religion when it clashed

with humanistic values could serve as a beacon for students, intellectuals, and
open-minded people in the rest of the world.
After laying out the logic of humanism, I noted that it stood in stark contrast to
two other systems of belief. We have just looked at theistic morality. Let me turn
to the second enemy of humanism, the ideology behind resurgent
authoritarianism, nationalism, populism, reactionary thinking, even fascism. As
with theistic morality, the ideology claims intellectual merit, affinity with human
nature, and historical inevitability. All three claims, we shall see, are mistaken.
Let’s begin with some intellectual history.
If one wanted to single out a thinker who represented the opposite of
humanism (indeed, of pretty much every argument in this book), one couldn’t do
better than the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).109 Earlier in
the chapter I fretted about how humanistic morality could deal with a callous,
egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a
callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Not good for everyone, of course,
but that doesn’t matter: the lives of the mass of humanity (the “botched and the
bungled,” the “chattering dwarves,” the “flea-beetles”) count for nothing. What
is worthy in life is for a superman (Übermensch, literally “overman”) to
transcend good and evil, exert a will to power, and achieve heroic glory. Only
through such heroism can the potential of the species be realized and humankind
lifted to a higher plane of being. The feats of greatness may not consist, though,
in curing disease, feeding the hungry, or bringing about peace, but rather in
artistic masterworks and martial conquest. Western civilization has gone steadily
downhill since the heyday of Homeric Greeks, Aryan warriors, helmeted
Vikings, and other manly men. It has been especially corrupted by the “slave
morality” of Christianity, the worship of reason by the Enlightenment, and the
liberal movements of the 19th century that sought social reform and shared
prosperity. Such effete sentimentality led only to decadence and degeneration.
Those who have seen the truth should “philosophize with a hammer” and give
modern civilization the final shove that would bring on the redemptive
cataclysm from which a new order would rise. Lest you think I am setting up a
straw Übermensch, here are some quotations:
I abhor the man’s vulgarity when he says “What is right for one man is
right for another”; “Do not to others that which you would not that they

should do unto you.”. . . . The hypothesis here is ignoble to the last degree:
it is taken for granted that there is some sort of equivalence in value
between my actions and thine.
I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach,
but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and
more full of suffering than it has ever been.
Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior.
All else is folly. . . . Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip.
A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed. . . . A

doctrine is needed powerful enough to work as a breeding agent:
strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world-weary.
The annihilation of the humbug called “morality.” . . . The annihilation of
the decaying races. . . . Dominion over the earth as a means of producing a
higher type.
That higher Party of Life which would take the greatest of all tasks into its
hands, the higher breeding of humanity, including the merciless
extermination of everything degenerate and parasitical, would make
possible again that excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian state
will grow again.110
These genocidal ravings may sound like they come from a transgressive
adolescent who has been listening to too much death metal, or a broad parody of
a James Bond villain like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers. In fact Nietzsche is among
the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, continuing into the 21st.
Most obviously, Nietzsche helped inspire the romantic militarism that led to
the First World War and the fascism that led to the Second. Though Nietzsche
himself was neither a German nationalist nor an anti-Semite, it’s no coincidence
that these quotations leap off the page as quintessential Nazism: Nietzsche
posthumously became the Nazis’ court philosopher. (In his first year as
chancellor, Hitler made a pilgrimage to the Nietzsche Archive, presided over by
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister and literary executor, who
tirelessly encouraged the connection.) The link to Italian Fascism is even more

direct: Benito Mussolini wrote in 1921 that “the moment relativism linked up
with Nietzsche, and with his Will to Power, was when Italian Fascism became,
as it still is, the most magnificent creation of an individual and a national Will to
Power.”111 The links to Bolshevism and Stalinism—from the Superman to the
New Soviet Man—are less well known but amply documented by the historian
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal.112 The connections between Nietzsche’s ideas and the
megadeath movements of the 20th century are obvious enough: a glorification of
violence and power, an eagerness to raze the institutions of liberal democracy, a
contempt for most of humanity, and a stone-hearted indifference to human life.
You’d think this sea of blood would be enough to discredit Nietzsche’s ideas
among intellectuals and artists. But he is, incredibly, widely admired. “Nietzsche
is pietzsche,” says a popular campus graffito and T-shirt. It’s not because the
man’s doctrines are particularly cogent. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in A
History of Western Philosophy, they “might be stated more simply and honestly
in the one sentence: ‘I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence
of the Medici.’” The ideas fail the first test of moral coherence, namely
generalizability beyond the person offering them. If I could go back in time, I
might confront him as follows: “I am a superman: hard, cold, terrible, without
feelings and without conscience. As you recommend, I will achieve heroic glory
by exterminating some chattering dwarves. Starting with you, Shorty. And I
might do a few things to that Nazi sister of yours, too. Unless, that is, you can
think of a reason why I should not.”
So if Nietzsche’s ideas are repellent and incoherent, why do they have so
many fans? Perhaps it is not surprising that an ethic in which the artist (together
with the warrior) is uniquely worthy of living should appeal to so many artists. A
sample: W. H. Auden, Albert Camus, André Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Jack
London, Thomas Mann, Yukio Mishima, Eugene O’Neill, William Butler Yeats,
Wyndham Lewis, and (with reservations) George Bernard Shaw, author of Man
and Superman. (P. G. Wodehouse, in contrast, has Jeeves, a Spinoza fan, say to
Bertie Wooster, “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally
unsound.”) Nietzschean values also appeal to many Second Culture literary
intellectuals (recall Leavis sneering at Snow’s concern with global poverty and
disease because “great literature” is “what men live by”) and to social critics
who like to snigger at the “booboisie” (as H. L. Mencken, “the American
Nietzsche,” called the common folk). Though she later tried to conceal it, Ayn
Rand’s celebration of selfishness, her deification of the heroic capitalist, and her
disdain for the general welfare had Nietzsche written all over them.113

As Mussolini made clear, Nietzsche was an inspiration to relativists
everywhere. Disdaining the commitment to truth-seeking among scientists and
Enlightenment thinkers, Nietzsche asserted that “there are no facts, only
interpretations,” and that “truth is a kind of error without which a certain species
of life could not live.”114 (Of course, this left him unable to explain why we
should believe that those statements are true.) For that and other reasons, he was
a key influence on Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and
Michel Foucault, and a godfather to all the intellectual movements of the 20th
century that were hostile to science and objectivity, including Existentialism,
Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstructionism, and Postmodernism.
Nietzsche, to give him credit, was a lively stylist, and one might excuse the
fandom of artists and intellectuals if it consisted of an appreciation of his literary
panache and an ironic reading of his portrayal of a mindset that they themselves
rejected. Unfortunately, the mindset has sat all too well with all too many of
them. A surprising number of 20th-century intellectuals and artists have gushed
over totalitarian dictators, a syndrome that the intellectual historian Mark Lilla
calls tyrannophilia.115 Some tyrannophiles were Marxists, working on the time-
honored principle “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.” But many were
Nietzschean. The most notorious were Martin Heidegger and the legal
philosopher Carl Schmitt, who were gung-ho Nazis and Hitler acolytes. Indeed,
no autocrat of the 20th century lacked champions among the clerisy, including
Mussolini (Ezra Pound, Shaw, Yeats, Lewis), Lenin (Shaw, H. G. Wells), Stalin
(Shaw, Sartre, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Brecht, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pablo
Picasso, Lillian Hellman), Mao (Sartre, Foucault, Du Bois, Louis Althusser,
Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin), the Ayatollah Khomeini (Foucault), and Castro
(Sartre, Graham Greene, Günter Grass, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, and, as
we saw in chapter 21, Susan Sontag). At various times Western intellectuals
have also sung the praises of Ho Chi Minh, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam
Hussein, Kim Il-sung, Pol Pot, Julius Nyerere, Omar Torrijos, Slobodan
Milošević, and Hugo Chávez.
Why should intellectuals and artists, of all people, kiss up to murderous
dictators? One might think that intellectuals would be the first to deconstruct the
pretexts of power, and artists to expand the scope of human compassion.
(Thankfully, many have done just that.) One explanation, offered by the
economist Thomas Sowell and the sociologist Paul Hollander, is professional
narcissism. Intellectuals and artists may feel unappreciated in liberal
democracies, which allow their citizens to tend to their own needs in markets

and civic organizations. Dictators implement theories from the top down,
assigning a role to intellectuals that they feel is commensurate with their worth.
But tyrannophilia is also fed by a Nietzschean disdain for the common man, who
annoyingly prefers schlock to fine art and culture, and by an admiration of the
superman who transcends the messy compromises of democracy and heroically
implements a vision of the good society.
Though Nietzsche’s romantic heroism glorifies the singular Übermensch rather

than any collectivity, it’s a short step to interpret his “single stronger species of
man” as a tribe, race, or nation. With this substitution, Nietzschean ideas were
taken up by Nazism, fascism, and other forms of Romantic nationalism, and they
star in a political drama that continues to the present day.
I used to think that Trumpism was pure id, an upwelling of tribalism and
authoritarianism from the dark recesses of the psyche. But madmen in authority
distill their frenzy from academic scribblers of a few years back, and the phrase
“intellectual roots of Trumpism” is not oxymoronic. Trump was endorsed in the
2016 election by 136 “Scholars and Writers for America” in a manifesto called
“Statement of Unity.”116 Some are connected to the Claremont Institute, a think
tank that has been called “the academic home of Trumpism.”117 And Trump has
been closely advised by two men, Stephen Bannon and Michael Anton, who are
reputed to be widely read and who consider themselves serious intellectuals.
Anyone who wants to go beyond personality in understanding authoritarian
populism must appreciate the two ideologies behind them, both of them
militantly opposed to Enlightenment humanism and each influenced, in different
ways, by Nietzsche. One is fascist, the other reactionary—not in the common
left-wing sense of “anyone who is more conservative than me,” but in their
original, technical senses.118
Fascism, from the Italian word for “group” or “bundle,” grew out of the
Romantic notion that the individual is a myth and that people are inextricable
from their culture, bloodline, and homeland.119 The early fascist intellectuals,
including Julius Evola (1898–1974) and Charles Maurras (1868–1952), have
been rediscovered by neo-Nazi parties in Europe and by Bannon and the alt-right
movement in the United States, all of whom acknowledge the influence of
Nietzsche.120 Today’s Fascism Lite, which shades into authoritarian populism
and Romantic nationalism, is sometimes justified by a crude version of
evolutionary psychology in which the unit of selection is the group, evolution is

driven by the survival of the fittest group in competition with other groups, and
humans have been selected to sacrifice their interests for the supremacy of their
group. (This contrasts with mainstream evolutionary psychology, in which the
unit of selection is the gene.)121 It follows that no one can be a cosmopolitan, a
citizen of the world: to be human is to be a part of a nation. A multicultural,
multiethnic society can never work, because its people will feel rootless and
alienated and its culture will be flattened to the lowest common denominator.
For a nation to subordinate its interests to international agreements is to forfeit
its birthright to greatness and become a chump in the global competition of all
against all. And since a nation is an organic whole, its greatness can be
embodied in the greatness of its leader, who voices the soul of the people
directly, unencumbered by the millstone of an administrative state.
The reactionary ideology is theoconservatism.122 Belying the flippant label
(coined by the apostate Damon Linker as a play on “neoconservatism”), the first
theocons were 1960s radicals who redirected their revolutionary fervor from the
hard left to the hard right. They advocate nothing less than a rethinking of the
Enlightenment roots of the American political order. The recognition of a right
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the mandate of government to
secure these rights, are, they believe, too tepid for a morally viable society. That
impoverished vision has only led to anomie, hedonism, and rampant immorality,
including illegitimacy, pornography, failing schools, welfare dependency, and
abortion. Society should aim higher than this stunted individualism, and promote
conformity to more rigorous moral standards from an authority larger than
ourselves. The obvious source of these standards is traditional Christianity.
Theocons hold that the erosion of the church’s authority during the
Enlightenment left Western civilization without a solid moral foundation, and a
further undermining during the 1960s left it teetering on the brink. Any day
during the Bill Clinton administration it would plunge into the abyss; no, make
that the Obama administration; no, but for sure it would happen during a Hillary
Clinton administration. (Hence Anton’s hysterical essay “The Flight 93
Election,” mentioned in chapter 20, which compared the country to the airliner
hijacked on 9/11 and called on voters to “charge the cockpit or you die!”).123
Whatever discomfort the theocons may have felt from the vulgarity and
antidemocratic antics of their 2016 standard-bearer was outweighed by the hope
that he alone could impose the radical changes that America needed to stave off
catastrophe.

Lilla points out an irony in theoconservativism. While it has been inflamed
by radical Islamism (which the theocons think will soon start World War III), the
movements are similar in their reactionary mindset, with its horror of modernity
and progress.124 Both believe that at some time in the past there was a happy,
well-ordered state where a virtuous people knew their place. Then alien secular
forces subverted this harmony and brought on decadence and degeneration. Only
a heroic vanguard with memories of the old ways can restore the society to its
golden age.
Lest you have lost the trail that connects this intellectual history to current
events, bear in mind that in 2017 Trump decided to withdraw the United States
from the Paris climate accord under pressure from Bannon, who convinced him
that cooperating with other nations is a sign of surrender in the global contest for
greatness.125 (Trump’s hostility to immigration and trade grew from the same
roots.) With the stakes this high, it’s good to remind ourselves why the case for
neo-theo-reactionary-populist nationalism is intellectually bankrupt. I have
already discussed the absurdity of seeking a foundation for morality in the
institutions that brought us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, and the
European wars of religion. The idea that the global order should consist of
ethnically homogeneous and mutually antagonistic nation-states is just as
ludicrous.
First, the claim that humans have an innate imperative to identify with a
nation-state (with the implication that cosmopolitanism goes against human
nature) is bad evolutionary psychology. Like the supposed innate imperative to
belong to a religion, it confuses a vulnerability with a need. People undoubtedly
feel solidarity with their tribe, but whatever intuition of “tribe” we are born with
cannot be a nation-state, which is a historical artifact of the 1648 Treaties of
Westphalia. (Nor could it be a race, since our evolutionary ancestors seldom met
a person of another race.) In reality, the cognitive category of a tribe, in-group,
or coalition is abstract and multidimensional.126 People see themselves as
belonging to many overlapping tribes: their clan, hometown, native country,
adopted country, religion, ethnic group, alma mater, fraternity or sorority,
political party, employer, service organization, sports team, even brand of
camera equipment. (If you want to see tribalism at its fiercest, check out a
“Nikon vs. Canon” Internet discussion group.)

It’s true that political salesmen can market a mythology and iconography that
entice people into privileging a religion, ethnicity, or nation as their fundamental
identity. With the right package of indoctrination and coercion, they can even
turn them into cannon fodder.127 That does not mean that nationalism is a human
drive. Nothing in human nature prevents a person from being a proud
Frenchman, European, and citizen of the world, all at the same time.128
The claim that ethnic uniformity leads to cultural excellence is as wrong as
an idea can be. There’s a reason we refer to unsophisticated things as provincial,
parochial, and insular and to sophisticated ones as urbane and cosmopolitan. No
one is brilliant enough to dream up anything of value all by himself. Individuals
and cultures of genius are aggregators, appropriators, greatest-hit collectors.
Vibrant cultures sit in vast catchment areas in which people and innovations flow
from far and wide. This explains why Eurasia, rather than Australia, Africa, or
the Americas, was the first continent to give birth to expansive civilizations (as
documented by Sowell in his Culture trilogy and Jared Diamond in Guns,
Germs, and Steel).129 It explains why the fountains of culture have always been
trading cities on major crossroads and waterways.130 And it explains why human
beings have always been peripatetic, moving to wherever they can make the best
lives. Roots are for trees; people have feet.
Finally, let’s not forget why international institutions and global
consciousness arose in the first place. Between 1803 and 1945, the world tried
an international order based on nation-states heroically struggling for greatness.
It didn’t turn out so well. It’s particularly wrongheaded for the reactionary right
to use frantic warnings about an Islamist “war” against the West (with a death
toll in the hundreds) as a reason to return to an international order in which the
West repeatedly fought wars against itself (with death tolls in the tens of
millions). After 1945 the world’s leaders said, “Well, let’s not do that again,” and
began to downplay nationalism in favor of universal human rights, international
laws, and transnational organizations. The result, as we saw in chapter 11, has
been seventy years of peace and prosperity in Europe and, increasingly, the rest
of the world.
As for the lamentation among editorialists that the Enlightenment is a “brief
interlude,” that epitaph is likelier to mark the resting place of neo-fascism, neo-
reaction, and related backlashes of the early 21st century. The European
elections and self-destructive flailing of the Trump administration in 2017
suggest that the world may have reached Peak Populism, and as we saw in
chapter 20, the movement is on a demographic road to nowhere. Headlines

notwithstanding, the numbers show that democracy (chapter 14) and liberal
values (chapter 15) are riding a long-term escalator that is unlikely to go into
reverse overnight. The advantages of cosmopolitanism and international
cooperation cannot be denied for long in a world in which the flow of people and
ideas is unstoppable.
Though the moral and intellectual case for humanism is, I believe,
overwhelming, some might wonder whether it is any match for religion,
nationalism, and romantic heroism in the campaign for people’s hearts. Will the
Enlightenment ultimately fail because it cannot speak to primal human needs?
Should humanists hold revival meetings at which preachers thump Spinoza’s
Ethics on the pulpit and ecstatic congregants roll back their eyes and babble in
Esperanto? Should they stage rallies in which young men in colored shirts salute
giant posters of John Stuart Mill? I think not; recall that a vulnerability is not the
same as a need. The citizens of Denmark, New Zealand, and other happy parts of
the world get by perfectly well without these paroxysms. The bounty of a
cosmopolitan secular democracy is there for everyone to see.
Still, the appeal of regressive ideas is perennial, and the case for reason,
science, humanism, and progress always has to be made. When we fail to
acknowledge our hard-won progress, we may come to believe that perfect order
and universal prosperity are the natural state of affairs, and that every problem is
an outrage that calls for blaming evildoers, wrecking institutions, and
empowering a leader who will restore the country to its rightful greatness. I have
made my own best case for progress and the ideals that made it possible, and
have dropped hints on how journalists, intellectuals, and other thoughtful people
(including the readers of this book) might avoid contributing to the widespread
heedlessness of the gifts of the Enlightenment.
Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history:
the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past.
Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as
reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember
your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades
know it too.
Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or
Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or
the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity:

problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback
as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the
Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems
sappy, unhip, uncool. But what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
The case for Enlightenment Now is not just a matter of debunking fallacies or
disseminating data. It may be cast as a stirring narrative, and I hope that people
with more artistic flair and rhetorical power than I can tell it better and spread it
farther. The story of human progress is truly heroic. It is glorious. It is uplifting.
It is even, I daresay, spiritual. It goes something like this.
We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling
order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a force that is
ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to
illusions, self-centeredness, and at times astounding stupidity.
Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a
kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas
recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for
language, allowing us to share the fruits of our experience and ingenuity. We are
deepened with the capacity for sympathy—for pity, imagination, compassion,
commiseration.
These endowments have found ways to magnify their own power. The scope
of language has been augmented by the written, printed, and electronic word.
Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism, and the
narrative arts. And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms
and institutions of reason: intellectual curiosity, open debate, skepticism of
authority and dogma, and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting
them against reality.
As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out
victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our
own nature. We penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, including life and mind.
We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small
pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved,
oppressed, or exploited by the others. From a few oases, the territories with
peace and prosperity are growing, and could someday encompass the globe.
Much suffering remains, and tremendous peril. But ideas on how to reduce them
have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived.
We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one.
But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply

knowledge to enhance human flourishing.
This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is
true—true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have. We
believe it because we have reasons to believe it. As we learn more, we can show
which parts of the story continue to be true, and which ones false—as any of
them might be, and any could become.
And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient
creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it
requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than
sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion,
happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and
ignorance.

7
THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live
out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
—Martin Luth er Kin g, Jr.
When I was a boy, I was not particularly strong, swift, or agile, and that
made organized sports a gantlet of indignities. Basketball meant chucking
a series of airballs in the general direction of the backboard. Rope-
climbing left me suspended a foot above the floor like a clump of
seaweed on a fishing line. Baseball meant long interludes in sun-scorched
right field praying that no fly ball would come my way.
But one talent saved me from perpetual pariahhood among my peers: I
was not afraid of pain. As long as the blows were delivered fair and
square and without ad hominem humiliation, I could mix it up with the
best of them. The boy culture that flourished in a parallel universe to
that of gym teachers and camp counselors offered many opportunities to
redeem myself.
There was pickup hockey and tackle football (sans helmet and pads),
where I could check and be checked into the boards, or dive for fumbles
in a scrum of bodies. There was murderball, in which one boy clutched a
volleyball and counted off the seconds while the others pummeled him
until he let go. There was Horse (strictly forbidden by the counselors,
doubtless on the orders of lawyers), in which a fat kid (“the pillow”)
would lean back against a tree, a teammate would bend over and hold
him around the waist, and the rest of the team would form a line of backs
by holding the waist of the kid in front of him. Each member of the
opposing team would then take a running leap and come crashing down on
the back of the “horse” until it either collapsed to the ground or
supported the riders for three seconds. And during the evening there was
Knucks, the outlawed card game in which the loser would be thwhacked
on the knuckles with the deck of cards, the number of edge-on and face-
on thwacks determined by the point spread and restrained by a complex
set of rules about flinching, scraping, and excess force. Mothers would
regularly inspect our knuckles for incriminating scabs and bruises.
Nothing organized by grown-ups could compare with these delirious
pleasures. The closest they came was dodgeball, with its ecstatic chaos
of hiding behind aggressive teammates, ducking projectiles, diving to the
floor, and cheating death until the final mortal smack of rubber against
skin. It was the only sport in the Orwellianly named “physical education”
curriculum that I actually looked forward to.
But now the Boy Gender has lost another battle in its age-old war with
camp counselors, phys ed teachers, lawyers, and moms. In school district
after school district, dodgeball has been banned. A statement by the
National Association for Sport and Physical Education, which must have
been written by someone who was never a boy, and quite possibly has
never met one, explained the reason:
NASPE believes that dodgeball is not an appropriate activity for
K–12 school physical education programs. Some kids may like it—
the most skilled, the most confident. But many do not! Certainly
not the student who gets hit hard in the stomach, head, or groin.
And it is not appropriate to teach our children that you win by
hurting others.
Yes, the fate of dodgeball is yet another sign of the historical decline of
violence. Recreational violence has a long ancestry in our lineage. Play
fighting is common among juvenile primate males, and rough-and-tumble
play is one of the most robust sex differences in humans.1 The channeling
of these impulses into extreme sports has been common across cultures
and Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS)
throughout history. Together with Roman gladiatorial combat
03227720772 and
medieval jousting tournaments, the bloody history of sports includes
recreational fighting with sharp sticks in Renaissance Venice (where
noblemen and priests would join in the fun), the Sioux Indian pastime in
which boys would try to grab their opponents’ hair and knee them in the
face, Irish faction fights with stout oak clubs called shillelaghs, the sport
of shin-kicking (popular in the 19th-century American South) in which the
contestants would lock forearms and kick each other in the shins until
one collapsed, and the many forms of bare-knuckle fights whose typical
tactics may be inferred from the current rules of boxing (no head-butting,
no hitting below the belt, and so on).2
But in the past half-century the momentum has been going squarely
against boys of all ages. Though people have lost none of their taste for
consuming simulated and voluntary violence, they have engineered social
life to place the most tempting kinds of real-life violence off-limits. It is
part of a current in which Western culture has been extending its distaste
for violence farther and farther down the magnitude scale. The postwar
revulsion against forms of violence that kill by the millions and
thousands, such as war and genocide, has spread to forms that kill by the
hundreds, tens, and single digits, such as rioting, lynching, and hate
crimes. It has extended from killing to other forms of harm such as rape,
assault, battering, and intimidation. It has spread to vulnerable classes of
victims that in earlier eras fell outside the circle of protection, such as
racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. The ban
on dodgeball is a weathervane for these winds of change.
The efforts to stigmatize, and in many cases criminalize, temptations
to violence have been advanced in a cascade of campaigns for “rights”—
civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal
rights. The movements are tightly bunched in the second half of the 20th
century, and I will refer to them as the Rights Revolutions. The contagion
of rights in this era may be seen in figure 7–1, which plots the proportion
of English-language books (as a percentage of the proportions in 2000)
that contain the phrases civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights,
gay rights, and animal rights between 1948 (which symbolically
inaugurated the era with the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights)
and 2000.
As the era begins, the terms civil rights and women’s rights already
have a presence, because the ideas had been in the nation’s
consciousness since the 19th century. Civil rights shot up between 1962
and 1969, the era of the most dramatic legal victories of the American
civil rights movement. As it began to level off, women’s rights began its
ascent, joined shortly by children’s rights; then, in the 1970s, gay rights
appeared on the scene, followed shortly by animal rights.
These staggered rises tell a story. Each of the movements took note of
the success of its predecessors and adopted some of their tactics,
rhetoric, and most significantly, moral rationale. During the Humanitarian
Revolution two centuries earlier, a cascade of reforms tumbled out in
quick succession, instigated by intellectual reflection on entrenched
customs, and connected by a humanism that elevated the flourishing and
suffering of individual minds over the color, class, or nationality of the
bodies that housed them. Then and now the concept of individual rights is
not a plateau but an escalator. If a sentient being’s right to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness may not be compromised because of the
color of its skin, then why may it be compromised because of other
irrelevant traits such as gender, age, sexual preference, or even species?
Dull habit or brute force may prevent people in certain times and places
from following this line of argument to each of its logical conclusions, but
in an open society the momentum is unstoppable.
FIGURE 7–1.
Hamood UseRanjha(PAS)
Ur Rehman of the terms civil rights, women’s rights,03227720772
children’s
rights, gay rights, and animal rights in English-language books, 1948–2000
Source: Five million books digitized by Google Books, analyzed by the
Bookworm program, Michel et al., 2011. Bookworm is a more powerful
version of the Google Ngram Viewer (ngrams.googlelabs .com), and can
analyze the proportion of books, in addition to the proportion of the
corpus, in which a search string is found. Plotted as a percentage of the
proportion of books containing each term in the year 2000, with a moving
average of five years.
The Rights Revolutions replayed some of the themes of the

Humanitarian Revolution, but they also replayed one feature of the
Civilizing Process. During the transition to modernity, people did not fully
appreciate that they were undergoing changes aimed at reducing
violence, and once the changes were entrenched, the process was
forgotten. When Europeans were mastering norms of self-control, they
felt like they were becoming more civilized and courteous, not that they
were part of a campaign to drive the homicide statistics downward. Today
we give little thought to the rationale behind the customs left behind by
that change, such as the revulsion to dinnertime dagger attacks that left
us with the condemnation of eating peas with a knife. Likewise the
sanctity of religion and “family values” in red-state America is no longer
remembered as a tactic to pacify brawling men in cowboy towns and
mining camps.
The prohibition of dodgeball represents the overshooting of yet another
successful campaign against violence, the century-long movement to
prevent the abuse and neglect of children. It reminds us of how a
civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs,
peccadilloes, and taboos. The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and
the other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a
name. We call it political correctness.
The Rights Revolutions have another curious legacy. Because they are
propelled by an escalating sensitivity to new forms of harm, they erase
their own tracks and leave us amnesic about their successes. As we shall
see, the revolutions have brought us measurable and substantial declines
in many categories of violence. But many people resist acknowledging the
victories, partly out of ignorance of the statistics, partly because of a
mission creep that encourages activists to keep up the pressure by
denying that progress has been made. The racial oppression that inspired
the first generations of the civil rights movement was played out in
lynchings, night raids, antiblack pogroms, and physical intimidation at
the ballot box. In a typical battle of today, it may consist of African
American drivers being pulled over more often on the highways. (When
Clarence Thomas described his successful but contentious 1991 Supreme
Court confirmation hearing as a “high-tech lynching,” it was the epitome
of tastelessness but also a sign of how far we have come.) The oppression
of women used to include laws that allowed husbands to rape, beat, and
confine their wives; today it is applied to elite universities whose
engineering departments do not have a fifty-fifty ratio of male and
female professors. The battle for gay rights has progressed from repealing
laws that execute, mutilate, or imprison homosexual men to repealing
laws that define marriage as a contract between a man and a woman.
None of this means we should be satisfied with the status quo or
disparage the efforts to combat remaining discrimination and
mistreatment. It’s just to remind us that the first goal of any rights
movement is to protect its beneficiaries from being assaulted or killed.
These victories, even if partial, are moments we should acknowledge,
savor, and seek to understand.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE DECLINE OF LYNCHING AND RACIAL
POGROMS
When most people think of the American civil rights movement, they
recall a twenty-year run of newsworthy events. It began in 1948, when
Harry Truman ended segregation in the U.S. armed forces; accelerated
through the 1950s, when the Supreme Court banned segregated schools,
Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white
man, and Martin Luther King organized a boycott in response; climaxed in
the early 1960s, when two hundred thousand people marched on
Washington and heard King give perhaps the greatest speech in history;
and culminated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the
Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968.
Yet these triumphs were presaged by quieter but no less important
ones. King began his 1963 speech by noting, “Five score years ago, a
great American, in whose symbolic shadow we now stand, signed the
Emancipation Proclamation . . . a great beacon-light of hope to millions
of negro slaves.” Yet “one hundred years later, the negro still is not free.”
The reason that African Americans did not exercise their rights in the
intervening century was that they were intimidated by the threat of
violence. Not only did the government use force in administering
segregation and discriminatory laws, but African Americans were kept in
their place by the category of violence called intercommunal conflict, in
which one group of citizens—defined by race, tribe, religion, or language
—targets another. In many parts of the United States, African American
families were terrorized by organized thugs such as the Ku Klux Klan. And
in thousands of incidents, a mob would publicly torture and execute an
individual—a lynching—or visit an orgy of vandalism and murder on a
community—a racial pogrom, also called a deadly ethnic riot.
In his definitive book on the deadly ethnic riot, the political scientist
Donald Horowitz studied reports of 150 episodes of this form of
intercommunal violence spanning fifty countries and laid03227720772
out their
common features.3 An ethnic riot combines aspects of genocide and
terrorism with features of its own. Unlike these two other forms of
collective violence, it is not planned, has no articulated ideology, and is
not masterminded by a leader or implemented by a government or
militia, though it does depend on the government sympathizing with the
perpetrators and looking the other way. Its psychological roots, though,
are the same as those of genocide. One group essentializes the members
of another and deems them less than human, inherently evil, or both. A
mob forms and strikes against its target, either preemptively, in response
to the Hobbesian fear of being targeted first, or retributively, in revenge
for a dastardly crime. The inciting threat or crime is typically rumored,
embellished, or invented out of whole cloth. The rioters are consumed by
their hatred and strike with demonic fury. They burn and destroy assets
rather than plundering them, and they kill, rape, torture, and mutilate
members of the despised group at random rather than seeking the alleged
wrongdoers. Usually they go after their victims with bladed weapons and
other hands-on armaments rather than with firearms. The perpetrators
(mostly young men, of course) carry out their atrocities in a euphoric
frenzy and afterward feel no remorse for what they see as a justifiable
response to an intolerable provocation. An ethnic riot doesn’t destroy the
targeted group, but it kills far greater numbers than terrorism; the death
toll averages around a dozen but can range into the hundreds, the
thousands, or (as in the nationwide rioting after the partition of India and
Pakistan in 1947) the hundreds of thousands. Deadly ethnic riots can be
an effective means of ethnic cleansing, sending millions of refugees from
their homes in fear of their lives. And like terrorism, deadly riots can
exact enormous costs in money and fear, leading to martial law, the
abrogation of democracy, coups d’état, and secessionist warfare.4
Deadly ethnic riots are by no means an innovation of the 20th century.
Pogrom is a Russian word that was applied to the frequent anti-Jewish
riots in the 19th-century Pale of Settlement, which were just the latest
wave in a millennium of intercommunal killings of Jews in Europe. In the
17th and 18th centuries England was swept by hundreds of deadly riots
targeting Catholics. One response was a piece of legislation that a
magistrate would
Hamood Ur Rehman publicly recite to a mob threatening 03227720772
Ranjha(PAS) them with
execution if they did not immediately disperse. We remember this crowd-
control measure in the expression to read them the Riot Act.5
The United States also has a long history of intercommunal violence. In
the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries just about every religious group came
under assault in deadly riots, including Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers,
Catholics, Mormons, and Jews, together with immigrant communities
such as Germans, Poles, Italians, Irish, and Chinese.6 And as we saw in
chapter 6, intercommunal violence against some Native American peoples
was so complete that it can be placed in the category of genocide.
Though the federal government did not perpetrate any overt genocides, it
carried out several ethnic cleansings. The forced expulsion of “five
civilized tribes” along the Trail of Tears from their southeastern
homelands to present-day Oklahoma resulted in the deaths of tens of
thousands from disease, hunger, and exposure. As recently as the 1940s, a
hundred thousand Japanese Americans were forced into concentration
camps because they were of the same race as the nation the country was
fighting.
But the longest-running victims of intercommunal and government-
indulged violence were African Americans.7 Though we tend to think of
lynching as a phenomenon of the American South, two of the most
atrocious incidents took place in New York City: a 1741 rampage following
rumors of a slave revolt in which many African Americans were burned at
the stake, and the 1863 draft riots (depicted in the 2002 film Gangs of
New York) in which at least fifty were lynched. In some years in the
postbellum South, thousands of African Americans were killed, and the
early 20th century saw race riots killing dozens at a time in more than
twenty-five cites.8
Rioting of all kinds began to decrease in Europe in the mid-19th
century. In the United States deadly rioting began to diminish at the
century’s end, and by the 1920s it had entered a terminal decline.9 Using
figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, James Payne tabulated the number
of lynchings beginning in 1882 and found that they fell precipitously from
1890 to the 1940s (figure 7–2). During these decades, horrific lynchings
continued
Hamood Urto make
Rehman the news, and shocking photographs of hanged
Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772
and
burned corpses were published in newspapers and circulated among
activists, particularly the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People. A 1930 photograph of a pair of men hanged in Indiana
inspired a schoolteacher named Abel Meeropol to write a poem in protest:
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
FIGURE 7–2. Lynchings in the United States, 1882–1969

Source: Graph from Payne, 2004, p. 182.
(Meeropol and his wife, Anne, would later adopt the orphaned sons of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, after the couple had been executed for
Julius’s passing of nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.) When Meeropol
put the poem to music, it became the signature tune of Billie Holiday,
and in 1999 Time magazine called it the song of the century.10 Yet in one
of those paradoxes of timing that we have often stumbled upon, the
conspicuous protest emerged at a time when the crime had already long
been in decline. The last famous lynching case came to light in 1955,
when fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped, beaten, mutilated,
and killed
Hamood Urin Mississippi
Rehman Ranjha(PAS) after allegedly whistling at a white woman.
03227720772
His
murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury in a perfunctory trial.
Fears of a renewal of lynching were raised in the late 1990s, when a
vicious murder stunned the nation. In 1998 three racists in Texas
abducted an African American man, James Byrd, Jr., beat him senseless,
chained him by the ankles to their pickup truck, and dragged him along
the pavement for three miles until his body hit a culvert and was torn to
pieces. Though the clandestine murder was very different from the
lynchings of a century before, in which an entire community would
execute a black person in a carnival atmosphere, the word lynching was
widely applied to the crime. The murder took place a few years after the
FBI had begun to gather statistics on so-called hate crimes, namely acts
of violence that target a person because of race, religion, or sexual
orientation. Since 1996 the FBI has published these statistics in annual
reports, allowing us to see whether the Byrd murder was part of a
disturbing new trend.11 Figure 7–3 shows the number of African Americans
who were murdered because of their race during the past dozen years.
The numbers on the vertical axis do not represent homicides per 100,000
people; they represent the absolute number of homicides. Five African
Americans were murdered because of their race in 1996, the first year in
which records were published, and the number has since gone down to
one per year. In a country with 17,000 murders a year, hate-crime
murders have fallen into the statistical noise.
Far more common, of course, are the less serious forms of violence,
such as aggravated assault (in which the assailant uses a weapon or
causes an injury), simple assault, and intimidation (in which the victim is
made to feel in danger for his or her personal safety). Though the
absolute numbers of racially motivated incidents are alarming—several
hundred assaults, several hundred aggravated assaults, and a thousand
acts of intimidation a year—they have to be put in the context of
American crime numbers during much of that period, which included a
million aggravated assaults per year. The rate of racially motivated
aggravated assaults was about one-half of 1 percent of the rate of all
aggravated assaults (322 per 100,000 people per year), and less than the
rate that a person of any race would be murdered for any reason. And as
figure 7–4 shows, since 1996 all three kinds of hate crime have been in
decline.
FIGURE 7–3. Hate-crime murders of African Americans, 1996–2008

Source: Data from the annual FBI reports of Hate Crime Statistics
(http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/civilrights/hate.ht); see U.S. Federal
Bureau of Investigation, 2010a.
As lynching died out, so did antiblack pogroms. Horowitz discovered

that in the second half of the 20th century in the West, his subject
matter, the deadly ethnic riot, ceased to exist.12 The so-called race riots
of the mid-1960s in Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit, and other American
cities represented a different phenomenon altogether: African Americans
were the rioters rather than the targets, death tolls were low (mostly
rioters themselves killed by the police), and virtually all the targets were
property rather than people.13 After 1950 the United States had no riots
that singled out a race or ethnic group; nor did other zones of ethnic
friction in the West such as Canada, Belgium, Corsica, Catalonia, or the
Basque Country.14
Some antiblack violence did erupt in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but
it took a different form. The attacks are seldom called “terrorism,” but
that’s exactly what they were: they were directed at civilians,
low in
03227720772
casualties, high in publicity, intended to intimidate, and directed toward
a political goal, namely preventing racial desegregation in the South. And
like other terrorist campaigns, segregationist terrorism sealed its doom
when it crossed the line into depravity and turned all public sympathy to
its victims. In highly publicized incidents, ugly mobs hurled obscenities
and death threats at black children for trying to enroll in all-white
schools. One event that left a strong impression in cultural memory was
the day six-year-old Ruby Nell Bridges had to be escorted by federal
marshals to her first day of school in New Orleans. John Steinbeck, while
driving through America to write his memoir Travels with Charley, found
himself in the Big Easy at the time:
Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the
automobiles they extracted the littlest negro girl you ever saw,
dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet
so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were
very black against the white.
The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering
shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did
not look at the howling crowd, but from the side the whites of
her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned
her around like a doll and then the strange procession moved up
the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a
mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious
hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she
had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle
of her first step, the weight bore her down and her little round
feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards.15

FIGURE 7–4. Nonlethal hate crimes against African Americans, 1996–2008
Source: Data from the annual FBI reports of Hate Crime Statistics
(http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/civilrights/hate.htm); see U.S. Federal
Bureau of Investigation, 2010a. The number of incidents is divided by the
population covered by the agencies reporting the statistics multiplied by
0.129, the proportion of African Americans in the population according to
the 2000 census.
The incident was also immortalized in a painting published in 1964 in

Look magazine titled The Problem We All Live With. It was painted by
Norman Rockwell, the artist whose name is synonymous with sentimental
images of an idealized America. In another conscience-jarring incident,
four black girls attending Sunday school were killed in 1963 when a bomb
exploded at a Birmingham church that had recently been used for civil
rights meetings. That same year the civil rights worker Medgar Evers was
murdered by Klansmen, as were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and
Michael Schwerner the following year. Joining the violence by mobs and
terrorists was violence by the government. The noble Rosa Parks and
Martin Luther King were thrown into jail, and peaceful marchers were
assaulted with fire hoses, dogs, whips, and clubs, all shown on national
television.
After 1965, opposition to civil rights was moribund, antiblack riots
wereHamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS)
a distant 03227720772
memory, and terrorism against blacks no longer received
support from any significant community. In the 1990s there was a widely
publicized report of a string of arson attacks on black churches in the
South, but it turned out to be apocryphal.16 So for all the publicity that
hate crimes have received, they have become a blessedly rare
phenomenon in modern America.
Lynchings and race riots have declined for other ethnic groups and in
other countries as well. The 9/11 attacks and the London and Madrid
bombings were just the kind of symbolic provocation that in earlier
decades could have led to anti-Muslim riots across the Western world. Yet
no riots occurred, and a 2008 review of violence against Muslims by a
human rights organization could not turn up a single clear case of a
fatality in the West motivated by anti-Muslim hatred.17
Horowitz identifies several reasons for the disappearance of deadly
ethnic riots in the West. One is governance. For all their abandon in
assaulting their victims, rioters are sensitive to their own safety, and
know when the police will turn a blind eye. Prompt law enforcement can
quell riots and nip cycles of group-against-group revenge in the bud, but
the procedures have to be thought out in advance. Since the local police
often come from the same ethnic group as the perpetrators and may
sympathize with their hatreds, a professionalized national militia is more
effective than the neighborhood cops. And since riot police can cause
more deaths than they prevent, they must be trained to apply the
minimal force needed to disperse a mob.18
The other cause of the disappearance of deadly ethnic riots is more
nebulous: a rising abhorrence of violence, and of even the slightest trace
of a mindset that might lead to it. Recall that the main risk factor of
genocides and deadly ethnic riots is an essentialist psychology that
categorizes the members of a group as insensate obstacles, as disgusting
vermin, or as avaricious, malignant, or heretical villains. These attitudes
can be formalized into government policies of the kind that Daniel
Goldhagen calls eliminationist and Barbara Harff calls exclusionary. The
policies may
Hamood be Ranjha(PAS)
Ur Rehman implemented as apartheid, forced assimilation, and in
03227720772
extreme cases, deportation or genocide. Ted Robert Gurr has shown that
even discriminatory policies that fall short of the extremes are a risk
factor for violent ethnic conflicts such as civil wars and deadly riots.19
Now imagine policies that are designed to be the diametric opposite of
the exclusionary ones. They would not only erase any law in the books
that singled out an ethnic minority for unfavorable treatment, but would
swing to the opposite pole and mandate anti-exclusionary, un-
eliminationist policies, such as the integration of schools, educational
head starts, and racial or ethnic quotas and preferences in government,
business, and education. These policies are generally called remedial
discrimination, though in the United States they go by the name
affirmative action. Whether or not the policies deserve credit for
preventing a backsliding of developed countries into genocide and
pogroms, they obviously are designed as the photographic negative of the
exclusionary policies that caused or tolerated such violence in the past.
And they have been riding a wave of popularity throughout the world.
In a report called “The Decline of Ethnic Political Discrimination 1950–
2003,” the political scientists Victor Asal and Amy Pate examined a
dataset that records the status of 337 ethnic minorities in 124 countries
since 1950.20 (It overlaps with Harff’s dataset on genocide, which we
examined in chapter 6.) Asal and Pate plotted the percentage of
countries with policies that discriminate against an ethnic minority,
together with those that discriminate in favor of them. In 1950, as figure
7–5 shows, 44 percent of governments had invidious discriminatory
policies; by 2003 only 19 percent did, and they were outnumbered by the
governments that had remedial policies.
When Asal and Pate broke down the figures by region, they found that
minority groups are doing particularly well in the Americas and Europe,
where little official discrimination remains. Minority groups still
experience legal discrimination in Asia, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa,
and especially the Middle East, though in each case there have been
improvements since the end of the Cold War.21 The authors conclude,
“Everywhere the weight of official discrimination has lifted. While this
trendHamood
began in Western
Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) democracies in the late 1960s, by the 1990s it
03227720772
had reached all parts of the world.”22
Not only has official discrimination by governments been in decline, but

so has the dehumanizing and demonizing mindset in individual people.
This claim may seem incredible to the many intellectuals who insist that
the United States is racist to the bone. But as we have seen throughout
this book, for every moral advance in human history there have been
social commentators who insist that we’ve never had it so bad. In 1968
the political scientist Andrew Hacker predicted that African Americans
would soon rise up and engage in “dynamiting of bridges and water mains,
firing of buildings, assassination of public officials and private luminaries.
And of course there will be occasional rampages.”23 Undeterred by the
dearth of dynamitings and the rarity of rampages, he followed up in 1992
with Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, whose
message was “A huge racial chasm remains, and there are few signs that
the coming century will see it closed.”24 Though the 1990s were a decade
in which Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Colin Powell were repeatedly
named in polls as among the most admired Americans, gloomy
assessments on race relations dominated literary life. The legal scholar
Derrick Bell, for example, wrote in a 1992 book subtitled The Permanence
of Racism that “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible
component of this society.”25

FIGURE 7–5. Discriminatory and affirmative action policies, 1950–2003
Source: Graph from Asal & Pate, 2005.
The sociologist Lawrence Bobo and his colleagues decided to see for
themselves by examining the history of white Americans’ attitudes
toward African Americans.26 They found that far from being
indestructible, overt racism has been steadily disintegrating. Figure 7–6
shows that in the 1940s and early 1950s a majority of Americans said
they were opposed to black children attending white schools, and as late
as the early 1960s almost half said they would move away if a black
family moved in next door. By the 1980s the percentages with these
attitudes were in the single digits.
Figure 7–7 tells us that in the late 1950s only 5 percent of white
Americans approved of interracial marriage. By the late 1990s two-thirds
approved of it, and in 2008 almost 80 percent did. With some questions,
like “Should blacks have access to any job?” the percentage of racist
responses had dropped so low by the early 1970s that pollsters dropped
them from their questionnaires.27
FIGURE 7–6. Segregationist attitudes in the United States, 1942–1997

Sources: “Separate schools”: Data from Schuman, Steeh, & Bobo, 1997,
originally gathered by the National Opinion Research Center, University of
Chicago. “Would move”: Data from Schuman, Steeh, & Bobo, 1997,
originally gathered by the Gallup Organization.
FIGURE 7–7. White attitudes to interracial marriage in the United States,
1958–2008
Sources: “Disapprove”: Data from Schuman, Steeh, & Bobo, 1997,
originally gathered by the Gallup Organization. “Oppose”: Data from the
General Social Survey (http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website).
Also in decline are dehumanizing and demonizing beliefs. Among white

Americans, these beliefs historically took the form of the prejudice that
African Americans were lazier and less intelligent than whites. But over
the past two decades, the proportion of Americans professing these
beliefs has been falling, and today the proportion who profess that
inequality is a product of low ability is negligible (figure 7–8).
Religious intolerance has been in steady decline as well. In 1924, 91
percent of the students in a middle-American high school agreed with the
statement “Christianity is the one true religion and all peoples should be
converted to it.” By 1980, only 38 percent agreed. In 1996, 62 percent of
Protestants and 74 percent of Catholics agreed with the statement “All
religions are equally good”—an opinion that would have baffled their
ancestors a generation before, to say nothing of those in the 16th
century.28
The stigmatizing of any attitude that smacks of the dehumanization or
demonization of minority groups extends well beyond the polling
numbers. It has transformed Western culture, government, sports, and
everyday life. For more than fifty years America has been cleansing itself
of racist imagery that had accumulated in its popular culture. First to go
were demeaning portrayals of African Americans such as blackface
musical performances, shows like Amos ’n’ Andy and Little Rascals, films
such as Walt Disney’s Song of the South, and many Bugs Bunny cartoons.29
Caricatures in logos, advertisements, and lawn ornaments have
disappeared as well. The peak of the civil rights movement was a turning
point, and the taboo was quickly extended to other ethnic groups. I
remember as a child the 1964 rollout of a line of powdered drink mixes
called Funny Face that came in flavors called Goofy Grape, Loud Mouth
Lime, Chinese Cherry, and Injun’ Orange, each illustrated with a
grotesque caricature. Bad timing. Within two years the latter two were
made over into a raceless Choo Choo Cherry and Jolly Olly Orange.30 We
are still living through the rebranding of venerable sports teams that were
based on Native American stereotypes, most recently the University of
North Dakota Fighting Sioux. Derogatory racial and ethnic jokes,
offensive terms for minority groups, and naïve musings about innate
racial differences have become taboo in mainstream forums and have
ended the careers of several politicians and media figures. Of course,
plenty of vicious racism can still be found in the cesspools of the Internet
and at the fringes of the political right, but a sharp line divides it from
mainstream culture and politics. For instance, in 2002 the Senate
Republican minority leader Trent Lott praised the 1948 presidential bid of
Strom Thurmond, who at the time was an avowed segregationist. After a
firestorm from within his own party, Lott was forced to resign his post.

FIGURE 7–8. Unfavorable opinions of African Americans, 1977–2006
Sources: Data from Bobo & Dawson, 2009, based on data from the
General Social Survey (http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website).
The campaign to extirpate any precursor to attitudes that could lead to

racial violence has defined the bounds of the thinkable and sayable.
Racial preferences and set-asides are difficult to justify by rational
arguments in a society that professes to judge people not by the color of
their skin but by the content of their character. Yet no one in a position of
responsibility is willing to eliminate them, because they realize it would
decrease the representation of African Americans in professional positions
and risk a repolarization of society. So whenever racial preferences are
declared illegal or voted out in plebiscites, they are reframed with
euphemisms such as “affirmative action” and “diversity” and preserved
in workarounds (such as granting university admission to the top
percentage of students in every high school rather than to the top
percentage statewide).
The race-consciousness continues after admissions. Many universities
herd freshmen into sensitivity workshops that force them to confess to
unconscious racism, and many more have speech codes (ruled
unconstitutional whenever they have been challenged in court) that
criminalize any opinion that may cause offense to a minority group.31
Some of the infractions for “racial harassment” cross over into self-
parody, as when a student at an Indiana university was convicted for
reading a book on the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan because it featured a
Klansman on the cover, and when a Brandeis professor was found guilty
for mentioning the term wetback in a lecture on racism against Hispanics.
32
Trivial incidents of racial “insensitivity” (such as the 1993 episode in
which a University of Pennsylvania student shouted at some late-night
revelers to “Shut up, you water buffalo,” a slang expression for a rowdy
person in his native Hebrew that was construed as a new racial epithet)
bring universities to a halt and set off agonized rituals of communal
mortification, atonement, and moral cleansing.33 The only defense of this
hypocrisy is that it may be a price worth paying for historically
unprecedented levels of racial comity (though it’s in the nature of
hypocrisy that one cannot say that either).
In The Blank Slate I argued that an outsize fear of reintroducing racial
hostility has distorted the social sciences by putting a heavy thumb on
the nurture side of the nature-nurture scale, even for those aspects of
human nature that have nothing to do with racial differences but are
universal across the species. The underlying fear is that if anything about
human nature is innate, then differences among races or ethnic groups
might be innate, whereas if the mind is a blank slate at birth, then all
minds must start out equally blank. An irony is that a politicized denial of
human nature betrays a tacit acceptance of a particularly dark theory of
human nature: that human beings are perpetually on the verge of a
descent into racial animus, so every resource of the culture must be
mobilized against it.

9
BETTER ANGELS
[It] cannot be disputed that there is some benevolence,

however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of
friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove,
kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf
and serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever
so weak; let them be insufficient to move even a hand or
finger of our body; they must still direct the determinations
of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a
cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind,
above what is pernicious and dangerous.
—D avid Hume, An En quiry Con cern in g th e Prin ciples of Morals
In every era, the way people raise their children is a window into their
conception of human nature. When parents believed in children’s innate
depravity, they beat them when they sneezed; when they believed in
innate innocence, they banned the game of dodgeball. The other day
when I was riding on my bicycle, I was reminded of the latest fashion in
human nature when I passed a mother and her two preschoolers strolling
on the side of the road. One was fussing and crying, and the other was
being admonished by his mother. As I overtook the trio, I heard a stern
Mommy voice enunciating one word: “EMPATHY!”
We live in an age of empathy. So announces a manifesto by the eminent
primatologist Frans de Waal, one of a spate of books that have
championed this human capability at the end of the first decade of the
new Hamood
millennium. 1
Here is a sample of titles and subtitles 03227720772
Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) that have
appeared in just the past two years: The Age of Empathy, Why Empathy
Matters, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, The Science of Empathy,
The Empathy Gap, Why Empathy Is Essential (and Endangered), Empathy
in the Global World, and How Companies Prosper When They Create
Widespread Empathy. In yet another book, The Empathic Civilization, the
activist Jeremy Rifkin explains the vision:
Biologists and cognitive neuroscientists are discovering mirror-
neurons—the so-called empathy neurons—that allow human
beings and other species to feel and experience another’s
situation as if it were one’s own. We are, it appears, the most
social of animals and seek intimate participation and
companionship with our fellows.
Social scientists, in turn, are beginning to reexamine human
history from an empathic lens and, in the process, discovering
previously hidden strands of the human narrative which suggest
that human evolution is measured not only by the expansion of
power over nature, but also by the intensification and extension
of empathy to more diverse others across broader temporal and
spatial domains. The growing scientific evidence that we are a
fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching
consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a
species.
What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global
empathic consciousness and in less than a generation if we are
to resurrect the global economy and revitalize the biosphere.
The question becomes this: what is the mechanism that allows
empathic sensitivity to mature and consciousness to expand
through history?2
So it may have been the quest to expand global empathic

consciousness, and not just a way to get a brat to stop picking on his
sister, that led the roadside mom to drill the concept of empathy into her
little boy. Perhaps she was influenced by books like Teaching Empathy,
Hamood Children
Teaching Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS)
Empathy, and The Roots of Empathy: Changing
03227720772 the
World Child by Child, whose author, according to an endorsement by the
pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, “strives to bring about no less than world
peace and protection for our planet’s future, starting with schools and
classrooms everywhere, one child, one parent, one teacher at a time.”3
Now, I have nothing against empathy. I think empathy is—in general
though not always—a good thing, and I have appealed to it a number of
times in this book. An expansion of empathy may help explain why people
today abjure cruel punishments and think more about the human costs of
war. But empathy today is becoming what love was in the 1960s—a
sentimental ideal, extolled in catchphrases (what makes the world go
round, what the world needs now, all you need) but overrated as a
reducer of violence. When the Americans and Soviets stopped rattling
nuclear sabers and stoking proxy wars, I don’t think love had much to do
with it, or empathy either. And though I like to think I have as much
empathy as the next person, I can’t say that it’s empathy that prevents
me from taking out contracts on my critics, getting into fistfights over
parking spaces, threatening my wife when she points out I’ve done
something silly, or lobbying for my country to go to war with China to
prevent it from overtaking us in economic output. My mind doesn’t stop
and ponder what it would be like to be the victims of these kinds of
violence and then recoil after feeling their pain. My mind never goes in
these directions in the first place: they are absurd, ludicrous,
unthinkable. Yet options like these clearly were not unthinkable to past
generations. The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion
of empathy, but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like
prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and
conceptions of human rights.
This chapter is about the better angels of our nature: the psychological
faculties that steer us away from violence, and whose increased
engagement over time can be credited for declines in violence. Empathy
is one of these faculties, but it is not the only one. As Hume noted more
than 250 years ago, the existence of these faculties cannot be disputed.
Though one sometimes still reads that the evolution of beneficence is a
paradox for the theory of natural selection, the paradox was resolved
decades ago. Controversies remain over the details, but03227720772
today no
biologist doubts that evolutionary dynamics like mutualism, kinship, and
various forms of reciprocity can select for psychological faculties that,
under the right circumstances, can lead people to coexist peacefully.4
What Hume wrote in 1751 is certainly true today:
Nor will those reasoners, who so earnestly maintain the
predominant selfishness of human kind, be any wise scandalized
at hearing of the weak sentiments of virtue, implanted in our
nature. On the contrary, they are found as ready to maintain the
one tenet as the other; and their spirit of satire (for such it
appears, rather than of corruption) naturally gives rise to both
opinions; which have, indeed, a great and almost indissoluble
connexion together.5
If the spirit of satire leads me to show that empathy has been overhyped,
it is not to deny the importance of such sentiments of virtue, nor their
indissoluble connection to human nature.
After reading eight chapters on the horrible things that people have
done to each other and the darker parts of human nature that spurred
them, you have every right to look forward to a bit of uplift in a chapter
on our better angels. But I will resist the temptation to please the crowd
with too happy an ending. The parts of the brain that restrain our darker
impulses were also standard equipment in our ancestors who kept slaves,
burned witches, and beat children, so they clearly don’t make people
good by default. And it would hardly be a satisfying explanation of the
decline of violence to say that there are bad parts of human nature that
make us do bad things and good parts that make us do good things. (War I
win; peace you lose.) The exploration of our better angels must show not
only how they steer us away from violence, but why they so often fail to
do so; not just how they have been increasingly engaged, but why history
had to wait so long to engage them fully.

EMPATHY
The word empathy is barely a century old. It is often credited to the

American psychologist Edward Titchener, who used it in a 1909 lecture,
though the Oxford English Dictionary lists a 1904 usage by the British
writer Vernon Lee.6 Both derived it from the German Einfühlung (feeling
into) and used it to label a kind of aesthetic appreciation: a “feeling or
acting in the mind’s muscles,” as when we look at a skyscraper and
imagine ourselves standing straight and tall. The popularity of the word in
English-language books shot up in the mid-1940s, and it soon overtook
Victorian virtues such as willpower (in 1961) and self-control (in the mid-
1980s).7
The meteoric rise of empathy coincided with its taking on a new
meaning, one that is closer to “sympathy” or “compassion.” The blend of
meanings embodies a folk theory of psychology: that beneficence toward
other people depends on pretending to be them, feeling what they are
feeling, walking a mile in their moccasins, taking their vantage point, or
seeing the world through their eyes.8 This theory is not self-evidently
true. In his essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” William
James reflected on the bond between man and man’s best friend:
Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more
intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that
tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that
makes life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones
under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the
delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving
romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-
terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the
nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his
comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you
might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to
catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you03227720772
every day,
of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together,
paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? 9
So the sense of empathy that gets valorized today—an altruistic

concern for others—cannot be equated with the ability to think what they
are thinking or feel what they are feeling. Let’s distinguish several senses
of the word that has come to be used for so many mental states.10
The original and most mechanical sense of empathy is projection—the
ability to put oneself into the position of some other person, animal, or
object, and imagine the sensation of being in that situation. The example
of the skyscraper shows that the object of one’s empathy in this sense
needn’t even have feelings, let alone feelings that the empathizer cares
about.
Closely related is the skill of perspective-taking, namely visualizing
what the world looks like from another’s vantage point. Jean Piaget
famously showed that children younger than about six cannot visualize
the arrangement of three toy mountains on a tabletop from the viewpoint
of a person seated across from him, a kind of immaturity he called
egocentrism. In fairness to children, this ability doesn’t come easy to
adults either. Reading maps, deciphering “you are here” signs, and
mentally rotating three-dimensional objects can tax the best of us, but
that should not call our compassion into doubt. More broadly,
perspective-taking can embrace guesses about what a person is thinking
and feeling as well as what he is seeing, and that brings us to yet another
sense of the word empathy.
Mind-reading, theory of mind, mentalizing, or empathic accuracy is the
ability to figure out what someone is thinking or feeling from their
expressions, behavior, or circumstances. It allows us to infer, for instance,
that a person who has just missed a train is probably upset and is now
trying to figure out how to get to his or her destination on time.11 Mind-
reading does not require that we experience the person’s experiences
ourselves, nor that we care about them, only that we can figure out what
they are. Mind-reading may in fact comprise two abilities, one for reading
Hamood(which
thoughts Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS)
is impaired in autism), the other for reading emotions
03227720772
(which is impaired in psychopathy).12 Some intelligent psychopaths do
learn to read other people’s emotional states, the better to manipulate
them, though they still fail to appreciate the true emotional texture of
those states. An example is a rapist who said of his victims, “They are
frightened, right? But, you see, I don’t really understand it. I’ve been
frightened myself, and it wasn’t unpleasant.”13 And whether or not they
truly understand other people’s emotional states, they simply don’t care.
Sadism, schadenfreude, and indifference to the welfare of animals are
other cases in which a person may be fully cognizant of the mental states
of other creatures but unmoved to sympathize with them.
People do, however, often feel distress at witnessing the suffering of
another person.14 This is the reaction that inhibits people from injuring
others in a fight, that made the participants in Milgram’s experiment
anxious about the shocks they thought they were delivering, and that
made the Nazi reservists nauseous when they first started shooting Jews
at close range. As these examples make all too clear, distress at another’s
suffering is not the same as a sympathetic concern with their well-being.
Instead it can be an unwanted reaction which people may suppress, or an
annoyance they may try to escape. Many of us trapped on a plane with a
screaming baby feel plenty of distress, but our sympathy is likely to be
more with the parent than with the child, and our strongest desire may
be to find another seat. For many years a charity called Save the Children
ran magazine ads with a heartbreaking photograph of a destitute child
and the caption “You can save Juan Ramos for five cents a day. Or you
can turn the page.” Most people turn the page.
Emotions can be contagious. When you’re laughing, the whole world
laughs with you; that’s why situation comedies have laugh tracks and why
bad comedians punch up their punch lines with a bada-bing rim shot that
simulates a staccato burst of laughter.15 Other examples of emotional
contagion are the tears at a wedding or funeral, the urge to dance at a
lively party, the panic during a bomb scare, and the spreading nausea on a
heaving boat. A weaker version of emotional contagion consists of
vicarious responses, as when we wince in sympathy with an injured
athlete or flinch when James Bond is tied to a chair and smacked around.
Another is motor mimicry, as when we open our mouths when trying to
feed applesauce to a baby.
Many empathy fans write as if emotional contagion were the basis of
the sense of “empathy” that is most pertinent to human welfare. The
sense of empathy we value the most, though, is a distinct reaction that
may be called sympathetic concern, or sympathy for short. Sympathy
consists in aligning another entity’s well-being with one’s own, based on a
cognizance of their pleasures and pains. Despite the easy equation of
sympathy with contagion, it’s easy to see why they’re not the same.16 If a
child has been frightened by a barking dog and is howling in terror, my
sympathetic response is not to howl in terror with her, but to comfort and
protect her. Conversely, I may have exquisite sympathy for a person
whose suffering I cannot possibly experience vicariously, like a woman in
childbirth, a woman who has been raped, or a sufferer of cancer pain.
And our emotional reactions, far from automatically duplicating those of
other people, can flip 180 degrees depending on whether we feel we are
in alliance or competition with them. When a sports fan watches a home
game, he is happy when the crowd is happy and dejected when the crowd
is dejected. When he watches an away game, he is dejected when the
crowd is happy and happy when the crowd is dejected. All too often,
sympathy determines contagion, not the other way around.
Today’s empathy craze has been set off by scrambling the various
senses of the word empathy. The confusion is crystallized in the meme
that uses mirror neurons as a synonym for sympathy, in the sense of
compassion. Rifkin writes of “so-called empathy neurons that allow
human beings and other species to feel and experience another’s
situation as if it were one’s own,” and concludes that we are “a
fundamentally empathic species” which seeks “intimate participation and
companionship with our fellows.” The mirror-neuron theory assumes that
sympathy (which it blurs with contagion) is hardwired into our brains, a
legacy of our primate nature, and has only to be exercised, or at least not
repressed, for a new age to dawn. Unfortunately, Rifkin’s promise of a
“leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation” is
based on a dodgy interpretation of the neuroscience.
In Hamood
1992Ur Rehman
the neuroscientist
Ranjha(PAS) Giacomo Rizzolatti and his 03227720772
colleagues
discovered neurons in the brain of a monkey that fired both when the
monkey picked up a raisin and when the monkey watched a person pick up
a raisin.17 Other neurons responded to other actions, whether performed
or perceived, such as touching and tearing. Though neuroscientists
ordinarily can’t impale the brains of human subjects with electrodes, we
have reason to believe that people have mirror neurons too: neuroimaging
experiments have found areas in the parietal lobe and inferior frontal
lobe that light up both when people move and when they see someone
else move.18 The discovery of mirror neurons is important, though not
completely unexpected: we could hardly use a verb in both the first
person and the third person unless our brains were able to represent an
action in the same way regardless of who performs it. But the discovery
soon inflated an extraordinary bubble of hype.19 One neuroscientist
claimed that mirror neurons would do for neuroscience what DNA did for
biology.20 Others, aided and abetted by science journalists, have touted
mirror neurons as the biological basis of language, intentionality,
imitation, cultural learning, fads and fashions, sports fandom,
intercessory prayer, and, of course, empathy.
A wee problem for the mirror-neuron theory is that the animals in
which the neurons were discovered, rhesus macaques, are a nasty little
species with no discernible trace of empathy (or imitation, to say nothing
of language).21 Another problem, as we shall see, is that mirror neurons
are mostly found in regions of the brain that, according to neuroimaging
studies, have little to do with empathy in the sense of sympathetic
concern.22 Many cognitive neuroscientists suspect that mirror neurons may
have a role in mentally representing the concept of an action, though
even that is disputed. Most reject the extravagant claims that they can
explain uniquely human abilities, and today virtually no one equates their
activity with the emotion of sympathy.23
There are, to be sure, parts of the brain, particularly the insula, which
are metabolically active both when we have an unpleasant experience
and when we respond to someone else having an unpleasant experience.24
The problem is that this overlap is an effect, rather than a cause, of
sympathy with another’s well-being. Recall the experiment in which the
insula lit up when a participant received a shock and also when he or she
watched an innocent person receiving a shock. The same experiment
revealed that when the shock victim had cheated the male subjects out
of their money, their insulas showed no response, while the striatum and
orbital cortex lit up in sweet revenge.25
Empathy, in the morally relevant sense of sympathetic concern, is not
an automatic reflex of our mirror neurons. It can be turned on and off and
even inverted into counterempathy, namely feeling good when someone
else feels bad and vice versa. Revenge is one trigger for counterempathy,
and the flipflopping response of the sports fan tells us that competition
can trigger it as well. The psychologists John Lanzetta and Basil Englis
glued electrodes to the faces and fingers of participants and had them
play an investment game with another (bogus) participant.26 They were
told either that the two were working together or that they were in
competition (though the actual returns did not depend on what the other
participant did). Market gains were signaled by an uptick of a counter;
losses were signaled by a mild shock. When the participants thought they
were cooperating, the electrodes picked up a visceral calming and a trace
of a smile whenever their opposite number gained money, and a burst of
sweat and the trace of a frown whenever he was shocked. When they
thought they were competing with him, it went the other way: they
relaxed and smiled when he suffered, and tensed up and frowned when he
did well.
The problem with building a better world through empathy, in the sense
of contagion, mimicry, vicarious emotion, or mirror neurons, is that it
cannot be counted on to trigger the kind of empathy we want, namely
sympathetic concern for others’ well-being. Sympathy is endogenous, an
effect rather than a cause of how people relate to one another.
Depending on how beholders conceive of a relationship, their response to
another person’s pain may be empathic, neutral, or even
counterempathic.
In the previous chapter we explored the circuitry of the brain that

underlies
Hamoodour tendencies
Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) to violence; now let’s see the parts that underlie
03227720772
our better angels. The search for empathy in the human brain has
confirmed that vicarious feelings are dimmed or amplified by the rest of
the empathizer’s beliefs. Claus Lamm, Daniel Batson, and Jean Decety
had participants take the perspective of a (fictitious) patient with ringing
in his ears while he got “treated” with an experimental cure consisting of
blasts of noise over headphones, which made the patient visibly wince.27
The pattern of activity in the participants’ brains as they empathized
with the patient overlapped with the pattern that resulted when they
themselves heard the noise. One of the active areas was a part of the
insula, the island of cortex that, as we have seen, represents literal and
metaphorical gut feelings (see figure 8–3). Another was the amygdala, the
almond-shaped organ that responds to fearful and distressing stimuli (see
figure 8–2). A third was the anterior medial cingulate cortex (see figure 8–
4), a strip of cortex on the inward-facing wall of the cerebral hemisphere
that is involved in the motivational aspect of pain—not the literal stinging
sensation, but the strong desire to turn it off. (Studies of vicarious pain
generally don’t show activation in the parts of the brain that register the
actual bodily sensation; that would be closer to a hallucination than to
empathy.) The participants were never put in the kind of situation that
evokes counterempathy, like competition or revenge, but their reactions
were pushed around by their cognitive construal of the situation. If they
had been told that the treatment worked, so the patient’s pain had been
worthwhile, their brains’ vicarious and distressed responses were damped
down.
The overall picture that has emerged from the study of the
compassionate brain is that there is no empathy center with empathy
neurons, but complex patterns of activation and modulation that depend
on perceivers’ interpretation of the straits of another person and the
nature of their relationship with the person. A general atlas of empathy
might look more or less as follows.28 The temporoparietal junction and
nearby sulcus (groove) in the superior temporal lobe assess another
person’s physical and mental state. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
and the nearby frontal pole (the tip of the frontal lobe) compute the
specifics of the situation and one’s overall goals in it. The orbital and
ventromedial cortex
Hamood Ur Rehman integrate the results of these computations
Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772 and
modulate the responses of the evolutionarily older, more emotional parts
of the brain. The amygdala responds to fearful and distressing stimuli, in
conjunction with interpretations from the nearby temporal pole (the tip
of the temporal lobe). The insula registers disgust, anger, and vicarious
pain. The cingulate cortex helps to switch control among brain systems in
response to urgent signals, such as those sent by circuits that are calling
for incompatible responses, or those that register physical or emotional
pain. And unfortunately for the mirror-neuron theory, the areas of the
brain richest in mirror neurons, such as parts of the frontal lobe that plan
motor movements (the rearmost portions above the Sylvian fissure) and
the parts of the parietal lobes that register the body sense, are mostly
uninvolved, except for the parts of the parietal lobes that keep track of
whose body is where.
In fact, the brain tissue that is closest to empathy in the sense of
compassion is neither a patch of cortex nor a subcortical organ but a
system of hormonal plumbing. Oxytocin is a small molecule produced by
the hypothalamus which acts on the emotional systems of the brain,
including the amygdala and striatum, and which is released by the
pituitary gland into the bloodstream, where it can affect the rest of the
body.29 Its original evolutionary function was to turn on the components of
motherhood, including giving birth, nursing, and nurturing the young. But
the ability of the hormone to reduce the fear of closeness to other
creatures lent itself over the course of evolutionary history to being co-
opted to supporting other forms of affiliation. They include sexual
arousal, heterosexual bonding in monogamous species, marital and
companionate love, and sympathy and trust among nonrelatives. For
these reasons, oxytocin is sometimes called the cuddle hormone. The
reuse of the hormone in so many forms of human closeness supports a
suggestion by Batson that maternal care is the evolutionary precursor of
other forms of human sympathy. 30
In one of the odder experiments in the field of behavioral economics,
Ernst Fehr and his collaborators had people play a Trust game, in which
they hand over money to a trustee, who multiplies it and then returns
however much he feels like to the participant.31Half the participants
inhaled a nasal spray containing oxytocin, which can penetrate from the
nose to the brain, and the other half inhaled a placebo. The ones who got
the oxytocin turned over more of their money to the stranger, and the
media had a field day with fantasies of car dealers misting the hormone
through their showroom ventilating systems to snooker innocent
customers. (So far, no one has proposed spraying it from crop dusters to
accelerate global empathic consciousness.) Other experiments have
shown that sniffing oxytocin makes people more generous in an
Ultimatum game (in which they divide a sum while anticipating the
response of a recipient, who can veto the deal for both of them), but not
in a Dictator game (where the recipient has to take it or leave it, and the
proposer needn’t take his reaction into account). It seems likely that the
oxytocin network is a vital trigger in the sympathetic response to other
people’s beliefs and desires.
In chapter 4 I alluded to Peter Singer’s hypothesis of an expanding circle

of empathy, really a circle of sympathy. Its innermost kernel is the
nurturance we feel toward our own children, and the most reliable trigger
for this tenderness is the geometry of the juvenile face—the phenomenon
of perception we call cuteness. In 1950 the ethologist Konrad Lorenz
noted that entities with measurements typical of immature animals
evoke feelings of tenderness in the beholder. The lineaments include a
large head, cranium, forehead, and eyes, and a small snout, jaw, body,
and limbs.32 The cuteness reflex was originally an adaptation in mothers
to care for their own offspring, but the triggering features may have been
exaggerated in the offspring themselves (to the extent they are
compatible with its own health) to tilt the mother’s response toward
nurturance and away from infanticide.33 Species that are lucky enough to
possess the geometry of babies may elicit the awwwww! response from
human beholders and benefit from our sympathetic concern. We find mice
and rabbits more adorable than rats and opossums, doves more
sympathetic than crows, baby seals more worthy of protection than mink
and other weaselly furbearers. Cartoonists exploit the reflex to make
their characters more lovable, as do the designers of teddy bears and
anime characters.
Hamood In a famous essay on the evolution of Mickey
Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) Mouse,
03227720772
Stephen Jay Gould plotted an increase in the size of the rodent’s eyes and
cranium during the decades in which his personality changed from an
obnoxious brat to a squeaky-clean corporate icon.34 Gould did not live to
see the 2009 makeover in which the Walt Disney Company, concerned that
today’s children expect “edgier,” more “dangerous” characters, unveiled
a video game in which Mick’s features had de-evolved to a more ratlike
anatomy.35
As we saw in chapter 8, cuteness is a nuisance to conservation
biologists because it attracts disproportionate concern for a few
charismatic mammals. One organization figured they might as well put
the response to good use and branded itself with the doe-eyed panda. The
same trick is used by humanitarian organizations who find photogenic
children for their ad campaigns. The psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz has
shown that juries treat defendants with more juvenile facial features
more sympathetically, a travesty of justice we can attribute to the
workings of our sense of sympathy.36 Physical beauty is yet another
sympathy-induced injustice. Unattractive children are punished more
harshly by parents and teachers and are more likely to be victims of
abuse.37 Unattractive adults are judged to be less honest, kind,
trustworthy, sensitive, and even intelligent.38
Of course, we do manage to sympathize with our adult friends and
relatives, including the ugly ones. But even then our sympathy is spread
not indiscriminately but within a delimited circle within which we apply a
suite of moral emotions. Sympathy has to work in concert with these
other emotions because social life cannot be a radiation of warm and
fuzzy feelings in all directions. Friction is unavoidable in social life: toes
get stepped on, noses put out of joint, fur rubbed the wrong way.
Together with sympathy we feel guilt and forgiveness, and these emotions
tend to apply within the same circle: the people we sympathize with are
the people we feel guilty about hurting and the people we find easiest to
forgive when they hurt us.39 Roy Baumeister, Arlene Stillwell, and Todd
Heatherton reviewed the social-psychological literature on guilt and
found that it went hand in hand with empathy. More empathic people are
also more guilt-prone (particularly women, who excel at both emotions),
and it is the targets of our empathy who engage our guilt. The effect is
enormous: when people are asked to recall incidents that made them feel
guilty, 93 percent involved families, friends, and lovers; only 7 percent
involved acquaintances or strangers. The proportions were similar when it
came to memories of eliciting guilt: we guilt-trip our friends and families,
not acquaintances and strangers.
Baumeister and his collaborators explain the pattern with a distinction
we will return to in the section on morality. Sympathy and guilt, they
note, operate within a circle of communal relationships.40 They are less
likely to be felt in exchange or equality-matching relationships, the kind
we have with acquaintances, neighbors, colleagues, associates, clients,
and service providers. Exchange relationships are regulated by norms of
fairness and are accompanied by emotions that are cordial rather than
genuinely sympathetic. When we harm them or they harm us, we can
explicitly negotiate the fines, refunds, and other forms of compensation
that rectify the harm. When that is not possible, we reduce our distress
by distancing ourselves from them or derogating them. The businesslike
quid pro quo negotiations that can repair an exchange relationship are,
we shall see, generally taboo in our communal relationships, and the
option of severing a communal relationship comes with a high cost.41 So
we repair our communal relationships with the messier but longer-lasting
emotional glue of sympathy, guilt, and forgiveness.
So what are the prospects that we can expand the circle of sympathy
outward from babies, fuzzy animals, and the people bound to us in
communal relationships, to lasso in larger and larger sets of strangers?
One set of predictions comes from the theory of reciprocal altruism and
its implementation in Tit for Tat and other strategies that are “nice” in
the technical sense that they cooperate on the first move and don’t
defect until defected upon. If people are nice in this sense, they should
have some tendency to be sympathetic to strangers, with the ultimate
(that is, evolutionary) goal of probing for the possibility of a mutually
beneficial relationship.42 Sympathy should be particularly likely to spring
into action when an opportunity presents itself to confer a large benefit
to another person at a relatively small cost to oneself, that is, when we
come across a person in need. It should also be fired up where there are
common interests that grease the skids toward a mutually beneficial
relationship, such as having similar values and belonging to a common
coalition.
Neediness, like cuteness, is a general elicitor of sympathy. Even
toddlers go out of their way to help someone in difficulty or to comfort
someone in distress.43 In his studies of empathy, Batson found that when
students are faced with someone in need, such as a patient recovering
from leg surgery, they respond with sympathy even when the needy one
falls outside their usual social circle. The sympathy is triggered whether
the patient is a fellow student, an older stranger, a child, or even a
puppy.44 The other day I came across an overturned horseshoe crab on the
beach, its dozen legs writhing uselessly in the air. When I righted it and it
slithered beneath the waves, I felt a surge of happiness.
With less easily helped individuals, a perception of shared values and
other kinds of similarity makes a big difference.45 In a seminal
experiment, the psychologist Dennis Krebs had student participants watch
a second (fake) participant play a perverse game of roulette that paid
him whenever the ball landed on an even number and shocked him when
it landed on an odd number. 46 The player had been introduced either as a
fellow student in the same field who had a similar personality, or as a
nonstudent with a dissimilar personality. When the participants thought
they were similar to the player, they sweated and their hearts pounded
more when they saw him get shocked. They said they felt worse while
anticipating his shock and were more willing to get shocked themselves
and forgo payments to spare their counterpart additional pain.
Krebs explained the sacrifice of his participants on behalf of their
fellows with an idea he called the empathy-altruism hypothesis: empathy
encourages altruism.47 The word empathy, as we have seen, is ambiguous,
and so we are really dealing with two hypotheses. One, based on the
“sympathy” sense, is that our emotional repertoire includes a state in
which another person’s well-being matters to us—we are pleased when
the person is happy, and upset when he or she is not—and that this state
motivates usRehman
Hamood Ur to help them with no ulterior motive. If true, this03227720772
Ranjha(PAS) idea—let’s
call it the sympathy-altruism hypothesis—would refute a pair of old
theories called psychological hedonism, according to which people only
do things that give them pleasure, and psychological egoism, according to
which people only do things that provide them with a benefit. Of course
there are circular versions of these theories, in which the very fact that a
person helps someone is taken as proof that it must feel good or benefit
him, if only to scratch an altruistic itch. But any testable version of these
cynical theories must identify some independent ulterior motive for the
help extended, such as assuaging one’s own distress, avoiding public
censure, or garnering public esteem.
The word altruism is ambiguous too. The “altruism” in the empathy-
altruism hypothesis is altruism in the psychological sense of a motive to
benefit another organism as an end in itself rather than as a means to
some other end.48 This differs from altruism in the evolutionary biologist’s
sense, which is defined in terms of behavior rather than motives:
biological altruism consists of behavior that benefits another organism at
a cost to oneself.49 (Biologists use the term to help distinguish the two
ways in which one organism can benefit another. The other way is called
mutualism, where an organism benefits another one while also benefiting
itself, as with an insect pollinating a plant, a bird eating ticks off the
back of a mammal, and roommates with similar tastes enjoying each
other’s music.)
In practice, the biologist’s and psychologist’s sense of altruism often
coincide, because if we have a motive to do something, we’re often
willing to incur a cost to do it. And despite a common misunderstanding,
evolutionary explanations for biological altruism (such as that organisms
benefit their kin or exchange favors, both of which help their genes in the
long run) are perfectly compatible with psychological altruism. If natural
selection favored costly helping of relatives or of potential reciprocation
partners because of the long-term benefits to the genes, it did so by
endowing the brain with a direct motive to help those beneficiaries, with
no thought of its own welfare. The fact that the altruist’s genes may
benefit in the long run does not expose the altruist as a hypocrite or
undermine her altruistic motives, because the genetic benefit never
figures as an explicit goal in her brain.50
The first version of the empathy-altruism hypothesis, then, is that
psychological altruism exists, and that it is motivated by the emotion we
call sympathy. The second version is based on the “projection” and
“perspective-taking” senses of empathy.51 According to this hypothesis,
adopting someone’s viewpoint, whether by imagining oneself in his or her
shoes or imagining what it is like to be that person, induces a state of
sympathy for the person (which would then impel the perspective-taker
to act altruistically toward the target if the sympathy-altruism
hypothesis is true as well). One might call this the perspective-sympathy
hypothesis. This is the hypothesis relevant to the question raised in
chapters 4 and 5 of whether journalism, memoir, fiction, history, and
other technologies of vicarious experience have expanded our collective
sense of sympathy and helped drive the Humanitarian Revolution, the
Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions.
Though Batson doesn’t always distinguish the two versions of the
empathy-altruism hypothesis, his two-decade-long research project has
supported both of them.52
Let’s start with the sympathy-altruism hypothesis and compare it to
the cynical alternative in which people help others only to reduce their
own distress. Participants in one study watched an ersatz fellow
participant, Elaine, get repeatedly shocked in a learning experiment.53
(The male participants were introduced to Charlie rather than Elaine.)
Elaine becomes visibly upset as the session proceeds, and the participant
is given an opportunity to take her place. In one condition, the
participant has finished her obligation to the experimenter and is free to
leave, so taking Elaine’s place would be genuinely altruistic. In another,
the participant doesn’t take Elaine’s place and has to watch Elaine get
shocked for another eight sessions. Batson reasoned that if the only
reason people volunteer to take poor Elaine’s place is to reduce their own
distress at the sight of her suffering, they won’t bother if they are free to
leave. Only if they have to endure the sight and sound of her moaning will
they prefer to get shocked themselves. As in Krebs’s experiment, the
participant’s sympathy was manipulated by telling her either that she and
Elaine had the same values and interests, or that they had incompatible
ones (for example, if the participant read Newsweek, Elaine03227720772
would be
described as reading Cosmo and Seventeen). Sure enough, when
participants felt themselves to be similar to Elaine, they relieved her of
being shocked, whether or not they had to watch her suffer. If they felt
themselves to be different, they took her place only when the alternative
was to watch the suffering. Together with other studies, the experiment
suggests that by default people help others egoistically, to relieve their
own distress at having to watch them suffer. But when they sympathize
with a victim, they are overcome by a motive to reduce her suffering
whether it eases their distress or not.
Another set of experiments tested a second ulterior motive to helping,
namely the desire to be seen as doing the socially acceptable thing.54 This
time, rather than manipulating sympathy experimentally, Batson and his
collaborators exploited the fact that people spontaneously vary in how
sympathetic they feel. After the participants heard Elaine worrying aloud
about the impending shocks, they were asked to indicate the degree to
which they felt sympathetic, moved, compassionate, tender, warm, and
soft-hearted. Some participants wrote high numbers next to these
adjectives; others wrote low ones.
Once the procedure began, and long-suffering Elaine started getting
zapped and was visibly unhappy about it, the experimenters used sneaky
ways of assessing whether any desire on the part of the participants to
relieve her distress sprang from pure beneficence or a desire to look good.
One study tapped the participants’ mood with a questionnaire, and then
either gave them the opportunity to relieve Elaine by doing well on a task
of their own, or simply dismissed Elaine without the participant being
able to claim any credit. The empathizers felt equally relieved in both
cases; the nonempathizers only if they were the ones that set her free. In
another, the participants had to qualify for an opportunity to take
Elaine’s place by scoring well in a letterfinding task they had been led to
believe was either easy (so there was no way to fake a bad performance
and get off the hook) or hard (so they could take a dive and plausibly get
out of being asked to make the sacrifice). The nonempathizers took the
dive and did worse in the so-called hard task; the empathizers did even
better on the hard task, where they knew an extra effort would be
needed to allow them to suffer in Elaine’s stead. The emotion of
sympathy, then, can lead to genuine moral concern in Kant’s sense of
treating a person as an end and not a means to an end—in this case, not
even as a means to the end of feeling good about having helped the
person.
In these experiments, a person was rescued from a harm caused by
someone else, the experimenter. Does sympathy-induced altruism dampen
one’s own tendency to exploit someone, or to retaliate in response to a
provocation? It does. In other experiments, Batson had women play a
one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma in which they and a (fictitious) fellow
participant bid cards that could net them various numbers of raffle
tickets, framed as a business transaction.55 Most of the time they did
what game theorists say is the optimal strategy: they defected. They
chose to bid a card that protected them against being a sucker and that
offered them the chance to exploit their partner, while leaving them with
a worse outcome than if the two of them had cooperated by bidding a
different card. But when the participant read a personal note from her
otherwise anonymous partner and was induced to feel empathy for her,
her rate of cooperating jumped from 20 percent to 70 percent. In a
second experiment, a new group of women played an Iterated Prisoner’s
Dilemma game, which gave them an opportunity to retaliate against a
partner’s defection with a defection of their own. They cooperated in
response to a defection only 5 percent of the time. But when they were
induced beforehand to empathize with their partner, they were far more
forgiving, and cooperated 45 percent of the time.56 Sympathy, then, can
mitigate self-defeating exploitation and costly retaliation.
In these experiments, sympathy was manipulated indirectly, by varying
the similarity in values between a participant and the target, or it was
entirely endogenous: the experimenters counted on some participants
spontaneously being more empathic than others, for whatever reason.
The key question for understanding the decline of violence is whether
sympathy can be pushed around exogenously.
Sympathy, recall, tends to be expressed in communal relationships, the
kind that are also accompanied by guilt and forgiveness. Anything that
creates a Urcommunal
Hamood relationship, then, should also create sympathy.
Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772
A
prime communality-builder is inducing people to cooperate in a project
with a superordinate goal. (The classic example is the warring boys at the
Robbers Cave camp, who had to pull together to haul a bus out of the
mud.) Many conflict-resolution workshops operate by a similar principle:
they bring adversaries together in friendly surroundings where they get to
know each other as individuals, and they are tasked with the
superordinate goal of figuring out how to resolve the conflict. These
circumstances can induce mutual sympathy, and the workshops often try
to help it along with exercises in which the participants adopt each
other’s viewpoints.57 But in all these cases, cooperation is being forced
upon the participants, and it’s obviously impractical to get billions of
people together in supervised conflict-resolution workshops.
The most powerful exogenous sympathy trigger would be one that is
cheap, widely available, and already in place, namely the perspective-
taking that people engage in when they consume fiction, memoir,
autobiography, and reportage. So the next question in the science of
empathy is whether perspective-taking from media consumption actually
engages sympathy for the writers and talking heads, and for members of
the groups they represent.
In several studies the Batson team convinced participants they were
helping with market research for the university radio station.58They were
asked to evaluate a pilot show called News from the Personal Side, a
program that aimed to “go beyond the facts of local events to report how
these events affect the lives of the individuals involved.” One set of
participants was asked to “focus on the technical aspects of the
broadcast” and “take an objective perspective toward what is
described,” not getting caught up in the feelings of the interview subject.
Another set was asked to “imagine how the person who is interviewed
feels about what has happened and how it has affected his or her life”—a
manipulation of perspective-taking that ought to instill a state of
sympathy. Admittedly, the manipulation is a bit ham-handed: people are
not generally told how to think and feel as they read a book or watch the
news. But writers know that audiences are most engaged in a story when
there is a protagonist whose viewpoint they are seduced into taking, as in
the old advice to aspiring scriptwriters, “Find a hero; put him in trouble.”
So presumably real media also rope their audiences into sympathy with a
lead character without the need for explicit orders.
A first experiment showed that the sympathy induced by perspective-
taking was as sincere as the kind found in the studies of shocked Elaine.59
Participants listened to an interview with Katie, who lost her parents in a
car crash and was struggling to bring up her younger siblings. They were
later presented with an opportunity to help her out in small ways, such as
babysitting and giving her lifts. The experimenters manipulated the sign-
up sheet so that it looked either as if a lot of students had put their
names down, creating peer pressure for them to do the same, or as if only
two had, allowing the students to feel comfortable ignoring her plight.
The participants who had focused on the technical aspects of the
interview signed up to help only if many of their peers had done so; the
ones who had listened from Katie’s point of view signed up regardless of
what their peers had done.
It’s one thing to sympathize with a character in need, but it’s another
to generalize one’s sympathy to the group that the character represents.
Do readers sympathize just with Uncle Tom or with all African American
slaves? With Oliver Twist or with orphaned children in general? With Anne
Frank or with all victims of the Holocaust? In an experiment designed to
test for such generalizations, students listened to the plight of Julie, a
young woman who had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion after a
car accident. (The experiment was run before effective treatments had
been discovered for that often-fatal disease.)
Well, as you can imagine, it’s pretty terrifying. I mean, every
time I cough or feel a bit run down, I wonder, is this it? Is this the
beginning—you know—of the slide? Sometimes I feel pretty good,
but in the back of my mind it’s always there. Any day I could
take a turn for the worse [pause]. And I know that—at least right
now—there’s no escape. I know they’re trying to find a cure—and
I know that we all die. But it all seems so unfair. So horrible.
Like a nightmare. [pause] I mean, I feel like I was just starting to
live, and now, instead, I’m dying. [pause] It can really get you
down.
Hamood
60
Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772
Later, when the students were asked to fill out a questionnaire on
attitudes toward people with AIDS, the perspective-takers had become
more sympathetic than the technical evaluators, showing that sympathy
had indeed spread from the individual to the class she represented. But
there was an important twist. The effect of perspective-taking on
sympathy was gated by moralization, as we might expect from the fact
that sympathy is not an automatic reflex. When Julie confessed to having
contracted the disease after a summer of unprotected promiscuous sex,
the perspective-takers were more sympathetic to the broad class of
victims of AIDS, but they were no more sympathetic to the narrower class
of young women with AIDS. Similar results came out of a study in which
students of both sexes listened to the plight of a man who became
homeless either because he had come down with an illness or because he
had grown tired of working.
The team of psychologists then pushed the outside of the envelope by
seeing how much sympathy they could induce for convicted murderers.61
It’s not that anyone necessarily wants people to develop warm feelings
toward murderers. But at least some degree of sympathy for the
unsympathetic may be necessary to oppose cruel punishments and
frivolous executions, and we can imagine that a grain of sympathy of this
sort may have led to the reforms of criminal punishment during the
Humanitarian Revolution. Batson didn’t press his luck by trying to induce
sympathy for a psychopathic predator, but he artfully invented a typical
crime-blotter homicide in which the perpetrator had been provoked by a
victim who was not much more likable than he was. Here is James’s story
of how he came to kill his neighbor:
Pretty soon, things went from bad to worse. He’d dump garbage
over the fence into my back yard. I sprayed red paint all over the
side of his house. Then he set fire to my garage with my car in
it. He knew that car was my pride and joy. I really loved it and
kept it in great shape. By the time I woke up and they got the
fire out, the car was ruined—totaled! And he just laughed! I went
crazy—not
Hamood yelling; I didn’t say anything, but I was 03227720772
Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) shaking so
hard I could hardly stand up, I decided right then that he had to
die. That night when he came home, I was waiting on his front
porch with my hunting rifle. He laughed at me again and said I
was chicken, that I didn’t have the guts to do it. But I did. I shot
him four times; he died right there on the porch. I was still
standing there holding the rifle when the cops came.
[Interviewer: Do you regret doing it?]
Now? Sure. I know that murder is wrong and that nobody
deserves to die like that, not even him. But at the time all I
wanted was to make him pay—big—and to get him out of my life.
[Pause] When I shot him, I felt this big sense of relief and
release. I felt free. No anger; no fear; no hate. But that feeling
lasted only a minute or two. He was the one that was free; I was
going to be in prison for the rest of my life. [Pause] And here I
am.
The perspective-takers did feel a bit more sympathy for James himself
than did the technical evaluators, but it translated into just a sliver of a
more positive attitude toward murderers in general.
But then there was a twist on the twist. A week or two later the
participants got a phone call out of the blue from a pollster who was
doing a survey on prison reform. (The caller was in cahoots with the
experimenters, but none of the students figured this out.) Tucked into the
opinion poll was an item on attitudes toward murderers, similar to one in
the questionnaire that the students had filled out in the lab. At this
distance, the effects of perspective-taking made a difference. The
students who had tried a couple of weeks before to imagine what James
had been feeling showed a noticeable bump in their attitude toward
convicted murderers. The delayed influence is what researchers in
persuasion call a sleeper effect. When people are exposed to information
that changes their attitudes in a way they don’t approve of—in this case,
warmer feelings toward murderers—they are aware of the unwanted
influence and consciously cancel it out. Later, when their guard is down,
theirHamood
changeUr Rehman Ranjha(PAS)
of heart reveals itself. The upshot of the study is03227720772
that even
when a stranger belongs to a group that people are strongly inclined to
dislike, listening to his story while taking his perspective can genuinely
expand their sympathy for him and for the group he represents, and not
just during the few minutes after hearing the story.
People in a connected world are exposed to the stories of strangers
through many channels, including face-to-face encounters, interviews in
the media, and memoirs and autobiographical accounts. But what about
the portion of their information stream that is set in make-believe worlds
—the fictional stories, films, and television dramas in which audiences
voluntarily lose themselves? The pleasure in a story comes from taking a
character’s vantage point and in comparing the view to that from other
vantage points, such as those of the other characters, of the narrator,
and of the reader himself or herself. Could fiction be a stealthy way to
expand people’s sympathy? In an 1856 essay George Eliot defended this
psychological hypothesis:
Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a
sympathy readymade, a moral sentiment already in activity; but
a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises
even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is
apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of
moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit’s
cottage, or tells the story of “The Two Drovers,”—when
Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of “Poor Susan,”—when
Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate
which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw,—
when Hornung paints a group of chimney-sweepers, —more is
done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards
obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of
sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the nearest thing
to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our
contact with our fellow-men beyond the grounds of our personal
lot.62
Today the
Hamood historian
Ur Rehman Lynn Hunt, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum,
Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772
and
the psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley, among others, have
championed the reading of fiction as an empathy expander and a force
toward humanitarian progress.63 One might think that literary scholars
would line up to join them, eager to show that their subject matter is a
force for progress in an era in which students and funding are staying
away in droves. But many literary scholars, such as Suzanne Keen in
Empathy and the Novel, bristle at the suggestion that reading fiction can
be morally uplifting. They see the idea as too middlebrow, too
therapeutic, too kitsch, too sentimental, too Oprah. Reading fiction can
just as easily cultivate schadenfreude, they point out, from gloating over
the misfortunes of unsympathetic characters. It can perpetuate
condescending stereotypes of “the other.” And it can siphon sympathetic
concern away from the living beings who could benefit from it and toward
appealing victims who don’t actually exist. They also note, correctly, that
we don’t have a trove of good laboratory data showing that fiction
expands sympathy. Mar, Oatley, and their collaborators have shown that
readers of fiction have higher scores on tests of empathy and social
acumen, but that correlation doesn’t show whether reading fiction makes
people more empathic or empathic people are more likely to read
fiction.64
It would be surprising if fictional experiences didn’t have similar
effects to real ones, because people often blur the two in their
memories.65 And a few experiments do suggest that fiction can expand
sympathy. One of Batson’s radio-show experiments included an interview
with a heroin addict who the students had been told was either a real
person or an actor.66 The listeners who were asked to take his point of
view became more sympathetic to heroin addicts in general, even when
the speaker was fictitious (though the increase was greater when they
thought he was real). And in the hands of a skilled narrator, a fictitious
victim can elicit even more sympathy than a real one. In his book The
Moral Laboratory, the literary scholar Jèmeljan Hakemulder reports
experiments in which participants read similar facts about the plight of
Algerian women through the eyes of the protagonist in Malike
Mokkeddem’s novel The Displaced or from Jan Goodwin’s nonfiction
exposé Price
Hamood of Ranjha(PAS)
Ur Rehman Honor.67 The participants who read the novel became
03227720772
more sympathetic to Algerian women than those who read the true-life
account; they were less likely, for example, to blow off the women’s
predicament as a part of their cultural and religious heritage. These
experiments give us some reason to believe that the chronology of the
Humanitarian Revolution, in which popular novels preceded historical
reform, may not have been entirely coincidental: exercises in
perspective-taking do help to expand people’s circle of sympathy.
The science of empathy has shown that sympathy can promote genuine
altruism, and that it can be extended to new classes of people when a
beholder takes the perspective of a member of that class, even a
fictitious one. The research gives teeth to the speculation that
humanitarian reforms are driven in part by an enhanced sensitivity to the
experiences of living things and a genuine desire to relieve their
suffering. And as such, the cognitive process of perspective-taking and
the emotion of sympathy must figure in the explanation for many
historical reductions in violence. They include institutionalized violence
such as cruel punishments, slavery, and frivolous executions; the everyday
abuse of vulnerable populations such as women, children, homosexuals,
racial minorities, and animals; and the waging of wars, conquests, and
ethnic cleansings with a callousness to their human costs.
At the same time, the research reminds us why we should not aim for
an “age of empathy” or an “empathic civilization” as the solution to our
problems. Empathy has a dark side.68
For one thing, empathy can subvert human well-being when it runs
afoul of a more fundamental principle, fairness. Batson found that when
people empathized with Sheri, a ten-year-old girl with a serious illness,
they also opted for her to jump a queue for medical treatment ahead of
other children who had waited longer or needed it more. Empathy would
have consigned these children to death and suffering because they were
nameless and faceless. People who learned of Sheri’s plight but did not
empathize with her acted far more fairly.69 Other experiments make the
pointHamood
more abstractly.
Ur Rehman Batson found that in a Public Goods game
Ranjha(PAS) (where
03227720772
people can contribute to a pool that gets multiplied and redistributed to
the contributors), players who were led to empathize with another player
(for example, by reading about how she had just broken up with her
boyfriend) diverted their contributions to her, starving the public
commonwealth to everyone’s detriment.70
The tradeoff between empathy and fairness is not just a laboratory
curiosity; it can have tremendous consequences in the real world. Great
harm has befallen societies whose political leaders and government
employees act out of empathy by warmly doling out perquisites to kin and
cronies rather than heartlessly giving them away to perfect strangers. Not
only does this nepotism sap the competence of police, government, and
business, but it sets up a zero-sum competition for the necessities of life
among clans and ethnic groups, which can quickly turn violent. The
institutions of modernity depend on carrying out abstract fiduciary duties
that cut across bonds of empathy.
The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a
force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons
notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to
everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into
reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its
head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and
communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking
other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and
they may be ephemeral.71 To hope that the human empathy gradient can
be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family
and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an
unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.72
Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean
that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the
time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an
invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old
Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our
enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and
enemies; that
Hamood Ur way
Rehman you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t
Ranjha(PAS) love my
03227720772
neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following
ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them.
What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle
of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant
or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely
been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for
members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For
empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that
determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical
moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may
tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses.
But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral
argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on
empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become
second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in
fact not all you need.

6
THE EDGE
T HE EMERGENT POWER AND ACCELERATING MOMENTUM OF EARTH Inc., the

rapid growth of destructive resource-consumption patterns, the absence
of global leadership, and the dysfunctional governance in the community
of nations have all combined to produce flows of pollution that are
seriously damaging the integrity of the planetary climate balance that is
essential to the survival of civilization.
We have been slow to recognize the extreme danger we are creating,
in part because of the suddenness with which the underlying
relationship between humankind and the ecological system of the Earth
has been radically transformed by the relatively recent confluence of
three basic factors. First, our numbers have quadrupled in less than a
century and are still increasing; second, our way of thinking—both
individually and collectively—is dominated by short-term horizons and
distorted by habits of thought inherited from our prehistoric ancestors,
who had to survive threats very different from the ones we face today;
and third, the technologies now in common use are far more powerful
than those available even a few generations ago.
In particular, our continued burning of carbon-rich fossil fuels for 85
percent of the energy that powers Earth Inc. spews 90 million extra tons
of heat-trapping global warming pollution every twenty-four hours into
the extraordinarily thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if
it is an open sewer. That means we are adding the equivalent by weight
of more than 5,000 Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spills every day to the
dangerous concentrations that started accumulating with the Industrial
Revolution at a rate that picked up speed dramatically throughout the
last half century and is still accelerating.

As a result, human civilization is colliding with the natural world and
causing grave harm to important natural systems on which our
continued thriving as a species depends. There are multiple
manifestations of this collision: the prospective extinction of 20 to 50
percent of all the living species on Earth within this century; the assault
on the largest and most important forests in the world; the acidification
of the oceans, depletion of important fish species, and imminent loss of
coral reefs; the buildup of long-lived toxic chemical wastes that pose a
persistent threat to people and other forms of life; the depletion of
topsoil and groundwater resources at unsustainable rates; and more.
But the single most important and threatening manifestation of this
collision is the climate crisis. Because the atmosphere surrounding our
planet is so thin, it is highly vulnerable to the drastic change in its
chemical composition brought about when we recklessly and constantly
pollute it with such prodigious volumes of gaseous chemical waste. This
growing blanket of pollution is smothering the atmosphere’s ability to
mediate the radiative balance between the Earth and the sun, trapping
more extra heat energy each day in the lower atmosphere than would be
released by 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. In the process, we are
profoundly altering the water cycle of the Earth, destroying crucial
ecological balances, and compounding all of the other injuries we are
inflicting on nature, including the plants and animals upon which we
depend.
The good news is that we do have the capacity to begin solving the
climate crisis—if we awaken to the reality of our circumstances and
decide that saving the future of human civilization is a priority. That
means recognizing not only the danger but also the opportunity inherent
in this crisis. It means abandoning the illusion that there may be some
clever technological quick fix for a planetary emergency that requires a
multipronged global strategy to convert our energy systems—
particularly electricity generation—manufacturing, agriculture, forestry,
building technologies, transportation, mining, and other sectors of the
world’s economy to a low-carbon, highly efficient pattern.
And yes, when you lay out the complexity and magnitude of the
response needed, it can sound daunting. But there have been recent
stunning improvements in the technologies enabling us to succeed.
They’re increasing in efficiency and being deployed much faster than

predicted. The scale of renewable energy markets has led to much
sharper cost reductions than anyone predicted. The price of electricity
from solar and wind has dropped so rapidly that in some areas of the
world, both are already competitive with the average grid price for
electricity. Globally, renewables will be the second-largest source of
power generation by 2015.
REAL ALTERNATIVES
The more energy we produce from solar and wind, the cheaper it gets;
the more energy we get from oil and coal, the more expensive it gets.
And of course, the “fuel” for solar and wind is effectively limitless. For
example, more potentially usable energy is received by the Earth from
sunlight each and every hour than would be needed for all of the world’s
energy consumption in a full year. The potential for wind energy also
exceeds the world’s total energy demand several times over.
In the summer of 2012, there were periods when Germany received
more than half its electricity from renewable energy sources. Some
skilled investment experts are now projecting that on a global basis,
even a conservative estimate of continued cost reductions for
photovoltaic (PV) electricity will lead to a meteoric rise in its market
share for new generating capacity over the next few years—to the point
where almost half of the entire world’s additional electricity generation
will come from PV by midway through the next decade.
In 2010, for the first time in history, global investments in renewable
energy exceeded those in fossil fuels ($187 billion, compared to $157
billion). The same year, solar photovoltaic installations in the United
States rose 102 percent over those installed just one year earlier. Also,
during the previous decade, 166 proposed new U.S. coal-fired generating
plants were canceled, in large part due to public opposition.
Architects and builders are incorporating new designs and
technologies that reduce energy consumption and the operating cost of
buildings. This is particularly important because approximately 30
percent of all CO2 emissions come from buildings, and of all buildings
needed by 2050, two thirds have yet to be built. According to an EPA
report, “On average, 30 percent of the energy consumed in commercial

buildings is wasted. Energy efficiency is the single largest way to
eliminate this waste, reduce emissions, and save money.”
Hundreds of millions of people have already made changes in their
purchasing decisions in order to seek out lower-carbon goods and
services. In response, many businesses and industries have demonstrated
leadership in accelerating carbon reductions and shifting to profitable
strategies based on sustainability and a switch to renewable energy.
Energy efficiency improvements are being implemented on a large scale.
In the aggregate, however, greenhouse gas emissions will continue their
steep rise until and unless government policies are enacted that
accelerate the transition to a low-carbon world.
In order to move forward with this transition much faster, at a pace
that is necessary to begin solving the climate crisis, we must first build a
global political consensus—starting with a consensus in the United States
—strong enough to support the policy changes that will solve the crisis:
we have to put an adequate market price on the emissions of global
warming pollution with a carbon tax, a steadily declining limit on
emissions, and market mechanisms that promote maximum efficiency in
the allocation of expenditures to achieve overall reductions.
Leaders in civic society must also place a political and social price on
the dishonest distribution of false information about this existential crisis
by cynical global warming deniers, many of whom know better but are
trying to preserve destructive yet highly profitable business models by
sowing confusion, false doubt, and political discord to delay the
recognition of reality and prevent the congealing of a consensus.
Ultimately, here is the choice we face: we can either make the solution
to the climate crisis the central organizing principle of global civilization
—or the hostile conditions we are creating will grow rapidly worse,
thickening the smothering blanket of global warming pollution
surrounding our planet and destroy the viability of civilization as we
know it.
For all of recorded history, we have configured the patterns of our
lives and the design of our civilization to fit precisely into a relatively
narrow envelope of familiar variations in temperatures, winds and rains,
shorelines, river flows, frost lines, and snowfalls. We have built our
communities in the places we call home—near reliable sources of the
water we drink and the productive fields that give us food—in a world

whose natural contours have varied little for more than 300 generations.
Since the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, not long
before the first cities were built and the invention of writing preserved
the memory of man, we have taken for granted the enduring and
relatively stable pattern of jet streams and ocean currents, warm spells
and cold snaps, rainy seasons and dry seasons, spring planting and fall
harvesting, tadpoles and butterflies, and the other enduring natural
phenomena that have characterized our world for almost ten millennia.
Just as the proverbial fish doesn’t know it is in water—because it knows
nothing but water—we have never known anything other than the
planetary conditions that have given rise to the flourishing of
humankind.
All of those who preceded us added their contributions to the
elaborate legacy of the human enterprise bequeathed to us in our time.
And each generation in turn has been sustained by gifts from nature
itself: the pollination of crops and wild plants by insects and other
animals, the natural purification of water by soils, and numerous other
ecological benefits that modern economists call “ecosystem services.”
All of this and more we take for granted. All of this and more we are
putting at risk. Very large human-caused changes in the long predictable
climate pattern we have always known could so radically reorder the
nature of nature that it is difficult for us to imagine the challenges our
species would confront. When a fish is taken out of the water, it cannot
survive. By the same token, if we completely disrupt the conditions on
which our civilization is based—not just for a few years, but for many
thousands of years—it too would be unlikely to survive in anything
resembling its current form.
SECURITY AND STABILITY
One of the many consequences of huge disruptions in the climate pattern

we have always known would be a much higher risk of political
instability. In fact, this risk is one of the principal reasons why military
and national security experts in the United States have long expressed
more concern about global warming than most elected officials. In many
regions of the world, governance is already under tremendous stress

with several failed states—Somalia, Yemen, and Zimbabwe, for example
—creating difficult challenges for their regional neighbors. The increased
stress that would accompany large alterations in climate patterns could
push many other countries to the breaking point.
After a war game run by the National Defense University in the U.S. to
simulate the geopolitical consequences of a mass migration of climate
refugees from low-lying areas of Bangladesh, the head of the Bangladesh
Institute of Peace and Security Studies, Major General A. N. M.
Muniruzzaman, said, “By 2050, millions of displaced people will
overwhelm not just our limited land and resources but our government,
our institutions and our borders.”
The few exceptions to the relative climate stability we have always
enjoyed prove the rule. A recent study by David Zhang and others of the
relationship between relatively small climate fluctuations in the past and
civil conflict, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, reported, “Climate-driven economic downturn was the direct
cause of large-scale human crises in pre-industrial Europe and the
northern hemisphere.” Indeed, our histories record the disruptive effects
of comparatively small variations in the prevailing conditions in which
we have thrived:
• The medieval warm period was connected to the disappearance of

the Mayan civilization in Central America and the temporary
colonization of southern Greenland by farmers from Scandinavia;
• During the Little Ice Age, Eskimos wrapped in fur paddled their
kayaks to Scotland; farther south, millions died in a European
famine centered in France;
• The huge downpours in fourteenth-century China triggered a chain
of events leading to the Black Death that wiped out one quarter of
the population of Europe;
• The unusually large eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia
in 1815 filled the Earth’s atmosphere with particulates and led to
the “year without a summer” in 1816 that caused widespread crop
failures around the world, a wave of revolutions in Europe, and
mass migrations in many regions by people searching for food and
warmth.

All of these events were rare extremes that nevertheless fell within the
natural boundaries of variations consistent with the same overarching
climate pattern we have always known. And as terrible as the resulting
catastrophes were, they were mostly temporary and relatively short-
lived. By contrast, the much larger climate disruptions we are now
causing threaten to create a planetary emergency lasting for time periods
beyond the scope of human imagination. An estimated 25 percent of the
CO2 we put into the atmosphere this year will still be contributing to
higher temperatures at least 10,000 years from now. If we force the
melting of giant ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, they are not
likely to return on a timescale that has any relevance whatsoever to our
species.
Nine of the ten hottest years ever recorded since accurate
measurements began in the 1880s have occurred in the last ten years.
And the extra heat energy is already disrupting millions of lives. Extreme
and destructive weather events that used to occur infrequently are
becoming both more common and more destructive. Sometimes
described as “once in a thousand year events,” many bring with them
enormous economic and human losses. And they are predicted to get
much more common and much, much worse.
Among the recent examples: the epic flooding in Pakistan that
displaced 20 million people, further destabilizing a nuclear-armed
country; unprecedented heat waves in Europe in 2003 that killed 70,000
people, and in Russia in 2010 that led to 55,000 deaths, massive fires,
and crop damage that pushed global food prices to record levels; the
flooding of northeastern Australia in 2011 covering an area the size of
France and Germany combined; the huge droughts in southern China
and southwestern North America in 2011; the even deeper drought in
over half of the U.S. in 2012; Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which
devastated portions of New Jersey and New York City; multiple historic
windstorms and downpours in many regions of the world.
The global water cycle—in which evaporation from the oceans falls as
precipitation on the land and flows back to the oceans through streams
that become rivers—is being radically intensified and accelerated by
global warming. The warmer oceans allow significantly more water
vapor to evaporate into the sky. More important still is the fact that

warmer air holds more water vapor. If you take a cold shower, the mirror
above your sink won’t steam up, but if you take a hot shower it may.
With so much more water in the atmosphere, there is also more energy
fueling the size and destructive power of the storms.
Scientists have already measured an extra 4 percent of water vapor in
the atmosphere above the oceans, and even though 4 percent doesn’t
sound like much, it has a large effect on the hydrological cycle. Because
storms often reach out up to 2,000 kilometers, they gather water vapor
from a large area of the sky and funnel it inward into the regions where
storm conditions trigger a downpour.
By analogy, if you pull the drain in a bathtub filled with water, the
water rushing down the drain does not come just from the part of the
tub directly over the drain, it comes from the whole tub. In the same
way, the great basins of water vapor in the sky are funneled to the
“drains” opened above the land by rainstorms and snowstorms. When
these basins are filled with much more water vapor than in the past, the
downpours are more intense. The bigger downpours lead to bigger
floods. The floods rush across the land, eroding the soil. And less of the
water seeps down through the soil to recharge the underground aquifers.
Climate change is also driving desertification by altering atmospheric
circulation patterns and drying out the land and vegetation. The same
extra heat that evaporates more water vapor from the oceans also speeds
up the evaporation of soil moisture—leading to longer, deeper, and more
widespread droughts. Since the refilling of the atmospheric “basins” of
moisture still takes a lot of time, many areas of the world are
experiencing longer periods without rain in between the intense
downpours. These longer periods of hotter temperatures in between
precipitation events lead to more widespread and even deeper droughts.
Once it is devoid of vegetation, the surface begins to absorb more heat.
When the soil moisture is gone, the ground is baked, local temperatures
rise higher still, and the topsoil becomes more vulnerable to wind
erosion.
The parching and desiccation of the most highly productive
agricultural breadbaskets of the world portend a food crisis in the future
that could have humanitarian and political consequences too horrific to
imagine. A top official with the International Maize and Wheat
Improvement Center in Mexico, Marianne Bänziger, said, “There’s just

such a tremendous disconnect, with people not understanding the highly
dangerous situation we are in.”
The consequences for food production and water availability are
already extremely harsh. In 2012, largely because of climate-related
events that reduced crop yields, the world experienced a record one-
month price increase for food, with additional record price hikes
predicted for 2013. More than 65 percent of the U.S. suffered from
drought conditions in 2012. In addition to the impacts on industrial
agriculture in North America, Russia, Ukraine, Australia, and Argentina,
subsistence agriculture has been hit hard in many tropical and
subtropical countries by large alterations in the timing, duration, and
magnitude of precipitation patterns due to global warming’s disruption
of the hydrological cycle. As a rice farmer in northeastern India, Ram
Khatri Yadav, told Justin Gillis of The New York Times, “It will not rain in
the rainy season, but it will rain in the non-rainy season. The cold season
is also shrinking.”
Along with the impacts discussed in Chapter 4—including the
depletion of topsoil and groundwater and the competition that farmers
face for land and water from fast-growing cities, industry, and biofuels
production—the rising temperatures threaten many food crops with
catastrophic yield reductions from heat stress alone. Stanford researcher
David Lobell, who recently completed a study of the impact of
temperature increases on crop yields with Columbia researcher Wolfram
Schlenker, said recently, “I think there’s been an under-recognition of
just how sensitive crops are to heat, and how fast heat exposure is
increasing.”
In the last three years, new scientific research has overturned the long-
held view by agricultural experts that, in the absence of drought, food
crops would be relatively unharmed by rising temperatures. Many had
thought that the higher CO2 levels might fertilize plant growth by
enough to counterbalance any yield decreases due to heat stress. But
unfortunately, intensive research designed to confirm that hypothesis
now shows that food crop yields are likely to decline much more rapidly
with higher temperatures than previously believed, and that the CO2
fertilization effect is much smaller than predicted. Moreover, weeds
appear to benefit from extra CO2 much more than food crops.

As temperatures continue to increase, corn (maize)—the most widely
grown crop in the world—appears to be the most vulnerable to heat
stress. Corn yields start to decrease at a range of temperatures the Earth
is already experiencing regularly in summer months. Every day during
the growing season (roughly from the beginning of March to the end of
August) that temperatures climb above a threshold of 84 degrees F (29
degrees C), corn yields drop by 0.7 percent.
As temperatures grow hotter than 84 degrees F, the yield declines
plummet further with every degree added. If temperatures in the United
States are allowed to rise as much as is now projected as a result of
global warming, by the end of this century corn yields could fall by as
much as a third from heat stress alone, with the impact of worsening
droughts and the disruption of precipitation patterns taking a larger toll
still. Soybeans have a higher threshold for heat stress than corn (86 F/30
degrees C), but the same accelerated drops in yields begin when
temperatures reach and exceed that level.
The warm season is longer; spring is arriving about a week earlier
(and fall about a week later) in both the northern and southern
hemispheres. Moreover, the decreasing size of mountain snowpacks and
glaciers is adding to the worsening shortages of water for agriculture in
several important regions, bringing bigger spring floods earlier in the
year and depriving these regions of water during the hot summer months
when it is most needed. And while the focus is normally on daytime high
temperatures, nighttime temperatures are at least as important. Both the
computer models and consistent observations confirm that global
warming increases nighttime temperatures more than daytime
temperatures.
According to some studies, each degree increase in nighttime
temperatures corresponds with a linear decrease in wheat yields. A large
global review of the impact of climate change on crop yields between
1980 and 2010 showed that worldwide wheat production fell due to
climate-related factors by 5.5 percent. A researcher at the International
Rice Institute in the Philippines, Shaobing Peng, published findings in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that yields of
rice declined by 10 percent with each one degree Celsius increase in
nighttime temperatures during the dry part of the growing season, even
though there were no significant drops in yield associated with

increasing maximum temperatures during the daytime.
Crop diseases and pests are also increasing with global warming.
Higher temperatures are leading to a dramatic expansion in the range of
insects harmful to food crops, sending them farther north in the northern
hemisphere and farther south in the southern hemisphere, and into
higher altitudes. A team of crop scientists publishing in Environmental
Research Letters wrote, “These range expansions could have substantial
economic impacts through increased seed and insecticide costs,
decreased yields, and the downstream effects of changes in crop yield
variability.”
Other scientists have determined that higher levels of CO2 also
stimulate insect populations. Evan DeLucia, a plant biologist working
with a team of entomologists at the University of Illinois, tested the
impact of higher carbon dioxide levels on soybeans and found that
aphids and Japanese beetles flocked to the soybeans grown in higher
CO2 environments, ate more of the plants, lived longer, and produced
more eggs. “That means crop losses may go up in the future,” DeLucia
said.
Other scientists on DeLucia’s team found that higher carbon dioxide
levels caused soybeans to deactivate genes that are crucial to the
production of chemicals that help to defend them against insects by
blocking enzymes in the stomachs of beetles that digest soybean plants,
and by deactivating other genes used by soybeans to lure the natural
enemies of the beetles. As a result, according to team member Clare
Casteel, the soybeans grown in higher levels of CO2 “appear to be
helpless against herbivores.”
Higher temperatures are having the same effect in boosting pest
populations in most areas of the world. One of the leaders of an Asian
international agricultural research group, Pramod K. Agrawal, said,
“Warmer conditions and longer dry seasons linked to climate change
could prove to be the perfect catalyst for outbreaks of pests and diseases.
They are already formidable enemies affecting food crops.” A team of
Indian scientists noted that, because insects are cold-blooded,
“Temperature is probably the single most important environmental
factor influencing insect behavior, distribution, development, survival,
and reproduction.… It has been estimated that with a 2 degree C

temperature increase, insects might experience one to five additional
lifecycles per season.”
Scientists at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, for
example, found that the cassava crop in Southeast Asia—worth an
estimated $1.5 billion each year—is seriously threatened by pests and
plant diseases that expand with warmer temperatures. According to
cassava entomologist Tony Bellotti, “The cassava pest situation in Asia is
pretty serious as it is. But according to our studies, rising temperatures
could make things a whole lot worse.” Bellotti adds, “One outbreak of an
invasive species is bad enough, but our results show that climate change
could trigger multiple, combined outbreaks across Southeast Asia,
Southern China and the cassava-growing areas of Southern India.”
Microbes that cause human diseases—and the species that carry them
—are also expanding their range. In the highly populated temperate
zones of the world, the prevailing climate conditions in which
civilization developed were unfavorable to the survival of many disease-
causing organisms. But now that warmer climate bands are moving
poleward, some of these pathogens are moving with them.
According to a study in Science by Princeton University researcher
Andrew Dobson and others, global warming is causing the spread of
bacteria, viruses, and fungi that cause human diseases into areas that
were formerly hostile to them. “Climate change is disrupting natural
ecosystems in a way that is making life better for infectious diseases,”
said Dobson. “The accumulation of evidence has us extremely worried.”
Another coauthor of the study, Richard S. Ostfeld, said, “We’re alarmed
because in reviewing the research on a variety of different organisms, we
are seeing strikingly similar patterns of increases in disease spread or
incidence with climate warming.”
Although the prevalence of international travel has increased
dramatically and some disease-carrying insects have been unwittingly
transported from the mid-latitudes to other regions, the shifting climatic
conditions are contributing to the spread of diseases like dengue fever,
West Nile virus, and others. The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote
that, “Climate change affects the occurrence and spread of disease by
impacting the population size and range of hosts and pathogens, the
length of the transmission season, and the timing and intensity of
outbreaks.”

They also noted, “Extreme weather events such as heavy rainfall or
droughts often trigger disease outbreaks, especially in poorer regions
where treatment and prevention measures may be inadequate.
Mosquitoes in particular are highly sensitive to temperature.”
Improvements in public health systems are crucial to control the spread
of these migrating diseases, but many lower-income countries are
pressed to find the resources needed for hiring and training more
doctors, nurses, and epidemiologists. They also warned that in many of
the areas to which these pathogens and their hosts spread with warmer
temperatures, “The affected populations will have little or no immunity,
so that epidemics could be characterized by high levels of sickness and
death.”
In the summer of 2012, the United States experienced the worst
outbreak of West Nile virus since it first arrived on the Eastern Shore of
Maryland in 1999 and spread rapidly to all fifty states in only four years,
during a period of unusually warm temperatures. Dallas, Texas, was the
first to declare a public health emergency and began aerial spraying of
the city for the first time since 1966. As concern peaked, public safety
officials issued an appeal for people to stop calling 911 when they were
bitten by mosquitoes. The disease eventually spread by the end of 2012
to forty-eight of the fifty states, killing at least 234 people.
The late Paul Epstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a
close friend, wrote in 2001 about the relationship between West Nile
virus and the climate crisis. More recently, he said, “We have good
evidence that the conditions that amplify the lifecycle of the disease are
mild winters coupled with prolonged droughts and heat waves—the
long-term extreme weather phenomena associated with climate change.”
According to Christie Wilcox with Scientific American:
They have been predicting the effects of climate change on West Nile for over a decade. If
they’re right, the US is only headed for worse epidemics.… Studies have found that
mosquitos pick up the virus more readily in higher temperatures. Higher temperatures also
increase the likelihood of transmission, so the hotter it is outside, the more likely a
mosquito that bites an infected bird will carry the virus and the more likely it will pass it
along to an unwitting human host. In the United States, epicenters of transmission have
been linked closely to above-average summer temperatures. In particular, the strain of West
Nile in the US spreads better during heat waves, and the spread of West Nile westward was

correlated with unseasonable warmth. High temperatures are also to blame for the virus
jumping from one species of mosquito to a much more urban-loving one, leading to
outbreaks across the US.… Record-breaking incidences of West Nile are strongly linked to
global climate patterns and the direct effects of carbon dioxide emissions.
In 2010, the world experienced the hottest year since records have been
kept, and ended the hottest decade ever measured. Last year, 2012,
broke even more high temperature records. October 2012 was the 332nd
month in a row when global temperatures were above the twentieth-
century average. The worst drought since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s
ravaged crops and dried up water supplies in many communities. Many
farmers have already been forced to adjust to the drying of soil. The lack
of water has caused a buildup of toxins in corn and other crops unable to
process nitrogen fertilizer.
WORLD FEVER
In order to pinpoint the difference between global warming and natural

variability, Dr. James Hansen, the single most influential climate expert
in the scientific community, produced with two of his colleagues,
Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy, a groundbreaking statistical analysis of
extreme temperatures all over the world from the years 1951 through
2010 that compared the more normal baseline period of 1951 through
1980 to more recent decades, 1981 through 2010, and especially the last
several years when the impacts of global warming have been more
prominently manifested, 1981 through 2010.
By breaking down the surface temperatures of almost the entire world
into blocks of 150 square miles each, Hansen was able to calculate the
frequency of extremely high temperatures (and all other temperatures)
during the last sixty years. The results—which do not rely on climate
models, climate science, or any theories of causation—demonstrate
clearly that there has been up to a 100-fold increase in extreme high
temperatures in recent years compared to earlier decades. The statistical
analysis shows that in the last several years, extreme temperatures have
been occurring regularly on approximately 10 percent of the Earth’s
surface, while during the earlier decades such events occurred on only
0.1 to 0.2 percent of the Earth’s surface.

Hansen’s chosen metaphor to explain the difference consists of two
dice, each with the requisite six sides. The first die, which shows the
range of temperatures over the years between 1951 and 1980, has two
sides representing “normal” seasons, two other sides representing
“warmer than normal” seasons, and the final two sides representing
“cooler than normal” seasons. That used to be the “normal” distribution
of temperatures. The second die, however, showing the range of
temperatures in more recent years, has only one side representing a
normal season and only one side representing a cooler than normal
season, but three sides representing warmer than normal seasons and the
remaining side now representing extremely hot seasons—seasons that are
way outside the boundary of the statistical range that used to prevail.
In the language of statisticians, a standard deviation quantifies how
far the range, or spread, of a particular set of phenomena differs from
the average spread. Extreme—in this case, either unusually hot or
unusually cold—seasons naturally occur far less frequently than average
or near-average seasons. Because seasons with extreme temperatures
used to be so much less frequent, they nevertheless often surprised us,
even though they fell within the normally expected range. Seasons that
are three standard deviations from the average were exceedingly rare,
but still did occur from time to time as part of the normal range.
The average temperature is warmer overall even though extremely
cold events still continue to occur, though rarely. In other words, the
entire distribution of temperatures has moved to much warmer values,
and the bell curve of distribution has widened and flattened slightly, so
that there is much more temperature variability than used to occur. But
the most significant finding is that the frequency of extremely hot
temperatures has gone up dramatically.
Hansen infers that the cause is global warming—and indeed, these
results turn out to be perfectly consistent with what global warming
science has long predicted. (In voluminous other studies, Hansen and
climate scientists around the world have proven causality to a degree
judged “unequivocal” and “indisputable” by virtually all of the world’s
scientific community.) But the results themselves are based on
observations of real temperatures in the real world. They cannot be
argued with, and the implications are powerfully clear.
As the old saying has it in Tennessee, if you see a turtle on top of a

fence post, it is highly likely that it didn’t get there by itself.* And now
we are seeing turtles on every tenth fence post in every field in the
world. They didn’t get there on their own. It is now abundantly obvious
that all the extreme temperatures and the extreme weather events
associated with them are like turtles on a fence post. They didn’t happen
without human interference in the climate.
In 2012, new World Bank president Jim Yong Kim released a study
showing temperatures will likely rise by 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F)
without bolder steps to reduce CO2, and that there is “no certainty that
adaptation to a 4 degree world is possible.” Gerald Meehl, of the
National Center for Atmospheric Research, uses a different metaphor to
explain what is happening: if a baseball player who takes steroids hits a
home run, it’s possible that he might have hit the home run even
without the steroids. But the fact that he took the illegal performance-
enhancing drug makes it much more likely that he will hit a home run in
his next at bat. Within Meehl’s metaphor, the 90 million tons of global
warming pollution that we are putting into the atmosphere every
twenty-four hours are like steroids for the climate. An innovative 2012
study of the previous decade’s climate predictions showed that the
“worst case” future projections are the ones most likely to occur.
The increases in the global average temperature and the greater
frequency of extremely high temperatures that Hansen and others are
documenting are also melting all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth.
Only thirty years ago, the Arctic Ocean was almost completely covered
by ice in summer as well as winter. Remember? Some called it the North
Polar Ice Cap. Tell your grandchildren how it used to separate Eurasia
from North America and the Atlantic from the Pacific all year round.
Last year’s record low in the volume and the area it covered marked an
acceleration of a melting pattern that has led to a 49 percent loss in
three decades and could, in the view of many ice scientists, produce a
100 percent loss in as little as a decade.
Some shipping companies are excited that the fabled Northern Sea
Route is now open for several months a year. A Chinese ship, the Snow
Dragon, traversed the North Pole to Iceland and back in the summer of
2012. A high-speed fiber optic cable is now being installed to link the
Tokyo stock markets with their counterparts in New York City so that

computer-driven trades can be executed more quickly. Fishing fleets are
preparing to exploit the rich biological resources of the Arctic Ocean,
which until now have been protected by the ice. Navies from some
countries are discussing the movement of military assets into the region,
though discussions have also begun on the possibility of agreements to
foster the peaceful resolution of issues involving the safety, sovereignty,
and development of the Arctic Ocean as it becomes ice-free in summer.
Several oil companies are thrilled at the prospect of new drilling
opportunities and some are already moving their rigs into place. But the
consequences of an accidental wellhead blowout at the bottom of the
Arctic Ocean similar to BP’s disaster in 2010 would be far more
catastrophic and far more difficult to deal with than in the Gulf of
Mexico, or in any of the other numerous deepwater locations where
wellhead blowouts have produced large oil spills. The relatively new and
unperfected technology used for deepwater drilling involves more risk
than conventional drilling because the pressures at the ocean’s bottom
are so great. Drilling for oil at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, and
running the risk of a large spill in a pristine ecosystem where repair and
rescue operations are all but impossible for much of the year, is an
absurdly reckless endeavor. The CEO of the French multinational oil
company Total broke ranks with his industry in 2012 and expressed his
view that drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean posed unacceptable
ecological risks and should not be carried out.
The ecology of the Arctic Ocean is already experiencing significant
changes. Scientists were shocked in 2012 at the discovery of the largest
algae bloom ever recorded on Earth extending from open areas of the
Arctic Ocean underneath the remaining ice cover—a phenomenon that
has never been seen before and was considered impossible. The
researchers explained that the most likely cause of this new occurrence
was that the remaining ice is now thin enough, and has so many pools of
water dotting its surface, that enough sunlight was penetrating to the
ocean below to provide energy for algal growth.
The consequences of melting the North Polar Ice Cap will include
large impacts on weather patterns extending far southward into the
heavily populated temperate zones. The dramatically increased heat
absorption in an Arctic Ocean that is ice-free in summer will have
consequences for the location and pattern of the northern jet stream and

storm track through the fall and winter seasons, modifying ocean
currents and weather patterns throughout the northern hemisphere, and
perhaps beyond. Moreover, if the world’s long familiar pattern of wind
and ocean currents is pushed into a completely new design, the old one
may never reemerge.
The land area surrounding the Arctic Ocean is also heating up,
thawing frozen tundra that contains enormous amounts of carbon
embodied in dead plants. They warm up and rot as the tundra thaws.
Microbes turn the carbon into CO2 or methane, depending on the
amount of soil moisture. Huge deposits of methane are also contained
within frozen ice crystal formations called clathrates in the tundra, at
the bottom of the many shallow frozen lakes and ponds surrounding the
Arctic, and in some parts of the seabed underneath the Arctic Ocean. The
bubbling methane carries heat energy upward, melting the underside of
the ice—which then increases the heat absorption by the water when the
sun’s rays are no longer reflected off the ice.
Scientists are struggling to quantify the amount of CO2 and methane
that could be released, but the area involved is so vast that their work is
extremely difficult. Already, however, they have found outgassing under
way that exceeded what they expected at this early stage of global
warming.
Moreover, scientists discovered in 2012 that there are likely to be
enormous deposits of methane underneath the Antarctic ice sheet, in
amounts that may be as large as the methane presently trapped in Arctic
tundra and coastal sediments. Since the clathrates are kept in place by
cold temperatures and high pressures, the thinning of the Antarctic ice
sheets could, scientists fear, reduce pressures underneath the ice enough
to trigger the release of methane.
The changes under way in Antarctica and Greenland are the focus of
intense study by scientists who are trying to calculate how much sea
levels will rise, and at what rate. Both ice sheets are being destabilized
and are losing mass at an increasing rate, which is leading to a much
faster sea level rise than was predicted just a decade ago.
Throughout the history of urban civilization, the seas have been
slowly and gently rising, as the warmer temperatures of the interglacial
period have caused thermal expansion of the ocean’s volume, and the

melting of some terrestrial ice. But with the rapid accumulation of CO2
and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere during the last half
century, global warming has accelerated and so has the melting of ice
almost everywhere on the planet.
Predictions of the rate of sea level rise have been notoriously difficult,
in part because many scientists use models calibrated using data derived
from their studies of retreating glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age
when conditions were very different from the ones we are now
confronting. New real-time satellite measurements of ice mass in
Greenland and Antarctica will soon improve scientific understanding of
this process, but these measurements have been made for only a few
years and more time is required to build confidence in what they are
telling the scientific community. Recent observations in both west
Antarctica and Greenland, however, already confirm a rapid and
accelerating loss of ice. After a highly unusual melting event that
affected 97 percent of Greenland’s surface in July 2012, Bob Corell,
chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said, “It shocked the
hell out of us.”
James Hansen, for one, surmises that we are witnessing an exponential
process of ice mass loss, and that, as a result, the most relevant statistic
is the doubling time of the observed loss. Based on his preliminary
analysis of the data, Hansen believes it is likely that we will see a “multi-
meter” sea level rise in this century. Others note that the last time
temperatures on Earth were consistently as high as they are now, sea
level was twenty to thirty feet higher than the present—although it took
millennia for the seas to rise that much.
Because so many countries were settled by migrants, and in some
cases colonialists, arriving by ship—and because trade and supply routes
rely so heavily on oceangoing vessels—a disproportionate percentage of
the world’s largest cities are located near the sea. In fact, 50 percent of
the world’s population lives within fifteen miles of the coast, and
according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, “Coastal
populations around the world are also growing at a phenomenal pace.
Already, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population—almost 3.6 billion
people—live on or within 100 miles of a coastline. Estimates are that in
three decades, 6 billion people—that is, nearly 75 percent of the world’s

population—will live along coasts. In much of the developing world,
coastal populations are exploding.”
Those in low-lying areas are therefore especially vulnerable to the
increases in sea level produced mainly by the melting and breakup of
large masses of ice in Antarctica and Greenland. A recent study by
Deborah Balk and her colleagues at the CUNY Institute for Demographic
Research showed that approximately 634 million people live in low-
elevation coastal zones and that the ten nations with the most people in
threatened areas are: China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia,
Japan, Egypt, the United States, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Moreover, two thirds of the world’s cities with more than five million
people are at least partly in vulnerable low-elevation areas.
Some of the populations who live on low-lying islands in the Pacific
and Indian oceans and in coastal deltas are already beginning to
relocate. Large island populations are also at risk in the Philippines and
Indonesia. The number of climate refugees is expected to grow and could
potentially involve more than 200 million people in this century,
especially because of those who will have to move away from the mega-
deltas of South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, and Egypt. Refugees from
coastal areas of Bangladesh have already crowded into the capital city of
Dhaka, and many have moved farther north across the border into
northeastern India, where their arrival has contributed to the worsening
of preexisting tensions based on religious and complex tribal conflicts. In
2012, these conflicts generated contagious fear that was spread by text
messaging and email into cities throughout India.
All these regions and others are also threatened by climate-related
flooding during storm surges as stronger cyclones (known as hurricanes
in the U.S.) gain energy from warmer seas. Even small vertical increases
are magnified by storm surges that carry the ocean inland. And with
stronger storms, these surges are already having a bigger impact. In
2011, for example, New York City was put on emergency alert as a
hurricane threatened to flood its subway system. In 2012, Superstorm
Sandy did. London has long since built barriers between the ocean and
the Thames River that can be closed to protect the city against such
surges—at least for a while; the city is already discussing plans for
further steps.
As noted in Chapter 4, the surge in population growth in the balance

of this century will be completely in urban areas. The cities with the
highest population at risk from rising seas are, in order: Calcutta,
Mumbai, Dhaka, Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Bangkok,
Rangoon, Miami, and Hai Phong. The cities with the most exposed assets
vulnerable to sea level rise are: Miami, Guangzhou, New York/Newark,
Calcutta, Shanghai, Mumbai, Tianjin, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangkok.
In addition, as the chief scientific advisor in the United Kingdom, Sir
John Beddington, recently noted, many climate refugees have migrated
to low-lying coastal cities vulnerable to increased climate-related
flooding and rising seas. They are unknowingly relocating into areas
from which they may once again become climate refugees.
Contrary to most popular thinking, the rate of sea level rise is not
uniform around the world, because some of the tectonic plates on which
the landmasses rest are still slowly “rebounding” from the last Ice Age.†
Scandinavia and eastern Canada, for example, were pushed down by the
weight of the last glaciation and are still moving slowly upward long
after the ice retreated. Conversely, areas at the opposite ends of the same
tectonic plates—the coastal nations of Western Europe and the mid-
Atlantic states of the U.S., for example—are slowly sinking, in a kind of
seesaw effect. Cities like Venice, Italy, and Galveston, Texas, are also
sinking—for a mixture of complicated reasons.
Because warmer oceans expand when their molecules push apart from
one another (thermal expansion of the oceans has contributed
significantly to the relatively small increases in sea level we have
experienced thus far), areas of the ocean with large accumulations of
warmer water are experiencing more rapid sea level increases—the coast
of the U.S. between South Carolina and Rhode Island, for example. But
all the increases in sea level thus far are nothing compared to what
scientists warn is in store for the entire world as Antarctica and
Greenland are affected by the sharp increases in global temperatures
now in store.
Many agricultural areas in low-lying coastal regions and areas
adjacent to river deltas are already suffering impacts from rising seas
because of saltwater invasion of the freshwater aquifers on which their
farms depend. In 2012, the combination of sea level rise and sharply
diminished flows in the Mississippi River, due to the drought in the U.S.,
led to saltwater intrusion into drinking water wells and aquifers in

southern Mississippi.
The characteristics of the seawater itself are also being profoundly
altered by global warming. Approximately 30 percent of human-caused
CO2 emissions end up in the ocean, where they dissolve into a weak
acid, building up in such enormous volumes that it has nevertheless
already made the world’s oceans more acidic than at any time in the last
55 million years, which was during one of the five previous great
extinction events in the history of the Earth. And the rate of acidification
is faster than at any time in the last 300 million years.
One of the immediate concerns is that the higher levels of acidity are
reducing the concentration of carbonate ions that are essential to species
that make shells and coral reefs. All such structures are made from
various forms of calcium carbonate, which the coral polyps and shell-
making creatures scavenge from seawater. But the increasing acidity of
the ocean interferes with the solidifying of these hard structures. The
director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
Jane Lubchenco, calls ocean acidification global warming’s “evil twin.”
The warmer ocean temperatures—also caused by man-made global
warming—are especially stressful to the specialized algae that form the
brightly colored skin of coral reefs and live in an intricate symbiosis with
the coral polyps. When water temperatures rise too high, these
specialized algae—known as zooxanthellae (also called zoox)—leave the
skin of the coral, rendering it transparent and revealing the white bony
skeleton underneath. These events are known as coral bleaching. Reefs
can and do recover from bleaching events, but several events in the
space of a few years can and do kill the reefs.
Coral reefs are particularly important because, according to experts,
approximately one quarter of all ocean species spend at least part of
their lifecycles in, on, and around reefs. Shockingly, scientists warn that
the world is in danger of killing almost all of the coral reefs in the ocean
within a generation. Between 1977 and 2001, 80 percent of the coral
reefs in the Caribbean were lost. All of the rest, experts say, are
threatened with destruction before the middle of the century. And the
same fate threatens reefs in every ocean, including the largest of all, the
Great Barrier Reef off the eastern coast of Australia. In 2012, the
Australian Institute of Marine Science announced that half of the Great

Barrier Reef corals had died in just the previous twenty-seven years.
The most visible and familiar reefs are warm-water reefs at relatively
shallow depths. However, there may be an equal or even larger number
of deeper, cold-water reefs. Because of their depth, they have been less
studied and documented, but scientists say that since colder water
absorbs more CO2 than warmer water (just as a cold container of soda
stays more carbonated than a warm one), many of the cold-water reefs
may be in even greater danger. Some scientists hold out hope that coral
reefs might yet survive, but many of their colleagues are now convinced
that virtually all corals are likely to be killed off by the combination of
higher ocean acidity, higher temperatures, pollution, and overfishing of
species important to reef health.
The growing absorption of CO2 in the oceans also interferes with the
reproduction of some species. And among the shell-making creatures at
risk are tiny zooplankton with very thin shells that play an important
role at the bottom of the ocean food chain. Although much research
remains to be done, many scientists are concerned about what has been
happening to this crucial link that lies at the base of the ocean food
chain.
Some areas of the ocean, including some off the coast of Southern
California that have been sampled, are actually corrosive. In coastal areas
of Oregon, newly corrosive seawater is killing commercially valuable
shellfish. Experts have noted that even if human-caused CO2 emissions
were somehow ended in the near term, it would take tens of thousands
of years before the chemistry of the oceans returned to a state
comparable to that which existed prior to the last century.
Global warming and CO2-caused acidification are exacerbating
declines in fisheries and marine biodiversity that have already been
caused by other human activities, such as overfishing. According to the
United Nations, almost a third of all fish species are presently
overexploited. Overfishing, described in Chapter 4, has already led to the
dangerous depletion of up to 90 percent of large fish like tuna, marlin,
and cod.
Some fishing techniques such as dynamite fishing (which still takes
place in some developing countries with coral reefs) and bottom
trawling (the northeast Atlantic has been particularly damaged by this

practice) do extra damage to the ocean ecosystems important to the
survival of sea life. Although there have been some notable success
stories in some ocean fisheries, the overall picture is still extremely
troubling. The combination of many factors poses a synergistic threat to
the continued health of the oceans.
Along with coral reefs, critical ocean habitats like mangrove forests in
many coastal areas and so-called sea grass meadows are also at risk. In
addition, the number of dead zones growing in the oceans near the
mouths of major river systems is doubling every decade. The heavy
concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus contained in agricultural
runoff water and wastewater feed algae growth and when the algae are
consumed by bacteria, the large areas of the ocean are completely
depleted of oxygen, leading to the dead zones.
Ironically, the historic North American drought of 2012 reduced the
flow of water from the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico so much—and
the nitrogen, phosphorus, and other chemicals normally carried with the
water—that the large dead zone spreading from the mouth of the
Mississippi began to temporarily clear up.
A conference of ocean experts meeting at Oxford University in the
summer of 2011 reported their conclusions as a group: “This
examination of synergistic threats leads to the conclusion that we have
underestimated the overall risks and that the whole of marine
degradation is greater than the sum of its parts, and that degradation is
now happening at a faster rate than predicted.… When we added it all
up, it was clear that we are in a situation that could lead to major
extinctions of organisms in the oceans.… It is clear that the traditional
economic and consumer values that formerly served society well, when
coupled with current rates of population increase, are not sustainable.”
MITIGATION VERSUS ADAPTATION
For at least three decades, there has been a debate in the international
community about the relative importance of reducing greenhouse gas
emissions to mitigate the climate crisis compared to strategies for
adapting to the climate crisis. Some of those who try to minimize the
significance of global warming and oppose most of the policies that

would mitigate it often speak of adaptation as a substitute for mitigation.
They promote the idea that since humankind has adapted to every
environmental niche on the planet, there is no reason to believe that we
shouldn’t merely accept the consequences of global warming and get
busy adapting to them. For example, the CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex
Tillerson, recently said in an exchange provoked by longtime activist
David Fenton, “We have spent our entire existence adapting, OK? So we
will adapt to this.”
FOR MY OWN part, I used to argue many years ago that resources and
effort put into adaptation would divert attention from the all-out push
that is necessary to mitigate global warming and quickly build the
political will to sharply reduce emissions of global warming pollution. I
was wrong—not wrong that deniers would propose adaptation as an
alternative to mitigation, but wrong in not immediately grasping the
moral imperative of pursuing both policies simultaneously, in spite of
the difficulty that poses.
There are two powerful truths that must inform this global discussion
about adaptation and mitigation: first, the consequences that are already
occurring, let alone those that are already built into the climate system,
are particularly devastating to low-income developing countries.
Infrastructure repair budgets have already skyrocketed in countries
where roads, bridges, and utility systems have been severely damaged by
extreme downpours and resulting floods and mud slides. Others have
been devastated by the climate-related droughts.
And the disruptions of subsistence agriculture by both the floods and
the droughts have led to skyrocketing expenditures for food imports in
many developing countries. Also, as noted earlier, some low-lying
nations are also already struggling to relocate refugees from coastal
areas affected by the early stages of sea level rise, while other nations
are struggling to integrate arriving refugee groups into already fast-
growing populations.
Since these and other developments will not only continue but worsen,
the world does indeed have a moral duty and practical economic
necessity to assist these nations with adaptation. Disturbingly, the world
has yet to fully realize the effects of the global warming pollution

already in the atmosphere. Even if we drastically reduce our emissions
today, another degree Fahrenheit of warming is already “in the pipeline”
and will manifest itself in the coming years. In other words, so many
harmful changes are already built into the climate system by the
enormous increase in the emissions, and particularly the increased
concentration, of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that adaptation is
absolutely essential—even as we continue building the global political
consensus needed to prevent the worst consequences from occurring. We
have no choice but to pursue both sets of policies simultaneously.
But the second truth that must inform this debate is still by all odds
the most powerful imperative: unless we quickly start reducing global
warming pollution, the consequences will be so devastating that
adaptation will ultimately prove to be impossible in most regions of the
world. For example, higher greenhouse gas emissions are already
beginning to cause large-scale changes in atmospheric circulation
patterns and are predicted to bring almost unimaginably deep and
prolonged drought conditions to a wide swath of highly populated and
agriculturally productive regions, including all of Southern and south-
central Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, the southern cone of Africa, much
of Patagonia, the populated southeastern portion of Australia, the
American Southwest and a large portion of the upper Midwest, most of
Mexico and Central America, Venezuela and much of the northern
Amazon Basin, and significant portions of Central Asia and China.
The scientific reasoning behind this devastating scenario requires
some explanation. The basic nature of the global climate system, when
viewed holistically, is that it serves as an engine for redistributing heat
energy: from the equator toward the poles, between the oceans and the
land, and from the lower atmosphere to the upper atmosphere and back
again. The large increase in heat energy trapped in the lower atmosphere
means—to state the obvious—that the atmospheric system is becoming
more energetic.
In the northern hemisphere, this climate engine transfers heat energy
from south to north in the Gulf Stream—which is the best known
component of the so-called ocean conveyor belt, a Möbius Strip–like
loop that connects all of the world’s oceans. Other components include
deep currents that travel along the bottom of the ocean, redistributing
cold water from the poles back to the equator, where they return to the

ocean surface. The largest of these are the Antarctic circumpolar current,
which travels around the Antarctic continent and feeds the shallower
Humboldt current, which flows from the Southern Ocean northward
along the west coast of South America and upwells—laden with
nutrients—to nourish the rich concentration of sea life off the coast of
Peru; and, less well known, the deep cold current that travels north to
south from an area of the North Atlantic in the vicinity of southern
Greenland, underneath the Gulf Stream, back to the tropical Atlantic
waters.
Energy is also redistributed by cyclones, by thunderstorms, and by
multiyear patterns such as the alternating El Niño/La Niña phenomenon
(known to scientists as the ENSO, or El Niño/Southern Oscillation).
Moreover, all of these energy transfers are affected by the Coriolis effect,
which is driven by the spinning of the Earth on its axis, from west to
east.
THE HADLEY CELLS
Until recently, relatively less attention has been paid to the relationship
between global warming and the atmospheric patterns that move energy
vertically up and down in the atmosphere. The so-called Hadley cells
spanning the tropics and subtropics are enormous barrel-shaped loops of
wind currents that circle the planet on both sides of the equator, like
giant pipelines through which the trade winds flow from east to west.
Warm and moist wind currents rise from the ground vertically into the
sky in both of these cells at the edge of each respective loop that is
adjacent to the equator. When their ascent reaches the top of the
troposphere (the top of the lower atmosphere, approximately ten miles
high in the tropics), each loop turns poleward—which means northward
in the northern hemisphere cell and southward in the other. By the time
these currents reach the top of the sky, much of the moisture they
carried upward has fallen back to the ground as rain in the tropics.
At the apex of its ascent, each of these air currents starts flowing
poleward along the top of the troposphere and travels about 2,000 miles
(approximately 30 degrees of latitude), until it has discharged most of its
heat. Then it descends vertically as a cooler and much drier downdraft.

When each loop reaches the surface again, it turns back toward the
equator, recharging itself with heat and moisture as it travels across the
surface of the Earth. As it returns to the equator, it completes its loop
and repeats the cycle by rising vertically once again, laden once more
with heat and water vapor.
As a result of the dry downdrafts of the Hadley cells, the areas of the
Earth 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south of the equator are highly
vulnerable to desertification. Most of the driest regions of the Earth,
including the largest of the planet’s deserts, the Sahara, are located
under these dry downdrafts. (Other factors contributing to the location
of deserts include the “rain shadows” of mountain ranges—the areas
downwind from mountain peaks—because the prevailing winds rise
when they hit the windward side of the mountains and lose their
moisture before descending as dry downdrafts on the leeward side. In
addition, the location of deserts is influenced by what geographers call
continentality—which means that the areas in the middle of large
continents typically get much less moisture because they are farther
away from the oceans.) But on a global basis, the most powerful
desertifying factor is the downdraft of the Hadley cells.
The problem—which climate scientists have long predicted with
computer models and are now observing in the real world—is that the
massive warming of the atmosphere is changing the locations of these
great global downdrafts, moving them farther away from the equator
and toward the poles, thus widening the subtropics and intensifying
their aridity. Indeed, in the northern hemisphere, the downdraft has
already moved northward by as much as 3 degrees latitude—
approximately 210 miles—although measurements are still imprecise.
The downdraft of the Hadley cell south of the equator has also moved
poleward.
There are several theories for why global warming is causing a shift in
the Hadley cells, none of which are as yet confirmed. The solar heating
of the lower atmosphere in the tropics and subtropics is much greater
than anywhere else on the planet for obvious reasons: the sunlight
strikes the Earth at a more direct angle all year round. On a percentage
basis, surface temperatures are rising faster in the higher latitudes
because the melting of ice and snow is dramatically changing the
reflectivity of the surface,‡ thereby increasing the absorption of heat

energy. This means, among other things, that the difference in average
temperatures between the tropics and the polar regions is diminishing
over time—which also has consequences for the climate balance.
However, the much larger amounts of overall heat energy absorbed in
the mid-latitudes is still much greater, and causes the warmer (and thus
less dense) air in the tropics to rise higher. As a result, the extra heat
raises the top of the troposphere, where the wind currents deflect at a
right angle from their vertical trajectory and begin traveling poleward.
The widening of the Hadley cells moves the downstroke of its circular
path farther north in the northern hemisphere and farther south in the
southern hemisphere. As with many of the realities connected to global
warming, while this one sounds technical and can seem abstract, the real
consequences for real people, animals, and plants are extremely severe.
For the areas now subjected to this downdraft, it’s a bit like being
under a giant hairdryer in the sky. The results include not just more
frequent and more severe droughts, but consistent drought patterns likely
leading to desertification in many of the countries in the line of fire.
Moreover, most of the areas affected, like Southern Europe, Australia,
Southern Africa, the American Southwest, and Mexico—are already on
the edge of persistent water shortages anyway.
The word “desert,” by the way, is derived from the relationship of
people to the land involved: deserts are deserted by people. Consider the
significance of Greece, Italy, and the Fertile Crescent—the cradles of
Western civilization—turned into deserts by human alteration of the
same natural climate feature that created the Sahara Desert beginning
7,300 years ago.
The jet stream that controls the location of storm tracks in most of
North America and Eurasia is also being affected by the impact of global
warming on atmospheric circulation patterns and the unusually chaotic
weather patterns in these latitudes in recent years. There are actually
two jet streams in both hemispheres—a subtropical jet stream flowing
from east to west along the poleward margin of the barrel loop of the
Hadley cells (the trade winds), and the so-called polar jet stream—which
flows from west to east on the poleward side of a second set of barrel
loop atmospheric currents known as the Ferrel cells.
The location of the northern polar jet stream (which North Americans
and north Eurasians typically call the jet stream) is determined in part by

the wall of cold air extending southward from the Arctic Circle. But in
recent years, the melting of the Arctic ice cap has led to so much extra
heat absorbed there that the northern boundary of the jet stream flowing
across North America and Eurasia appears to have been profoundly and
radically dislocated—changing storm tracks, pulling cold Arctic air
southward in winter, and disrupting precipitation patterns.
All of these energy transfer mechanisms—the wind and ocean
currents, storms and cyclones, and atmospheric cells—define the shape
and design of the Earth’s climate pattern that has remained relatively
stable and constant since shortly before the Agricultural Revolution
began. Yet global warming is changing all of the energy balances that
have given definition to this climate envelope, and is both intensifying
and changing the locations of the weather phenomena we are used to.
Some of these balances are being changed to such a degree that
scientists worry that they could be pushed far enough out of the pattern
we have always known that they could flip into a very new pattern that
would produce weather phenomena with intensity, distribution, and
timing that are completely unfamiliar to us and inconsistent with the
assumptions upon which we have built our civilization.
By way of illustration, take a leather belt and hold one end in either
hand; push your hands together until a loop forms sticking upward. As
you move your hands and change the inflection of your wrists, the shape
of the belt loop will vary but it will remain in the same basic shape. But
if you inflect your wrists a little more, it will suddenly flip into a new
basic pattern with the loop pointing downward instead of upward. The
variations in climate that we have always known, large as they are, are
like the variations in the belt loop pointing upward. There would still be
similar variations if the loop pointed downward, but if we push the
boundary conditions of the loops to a point that causes it to adopt an
entirely new pattern, the consequences for our climate would be extreme
indeed.
We have already been confronted by unwelcome surprises in our
experimentation with changing the chemical composition of the Earth’s
atmosphere. The sudden appearance of a continent-sized stratospheric
ozone hole above Antarctica in the 1980s raised the specter of a deadly
threat to many forms of life on Earth, because it allowed powerful
ultraviolet radiation normally blocked by the stratospheric ozone layer

to reach the surface. And except for the fact that the progressive
destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer was arrested, scientists say it
would have spread to the stratosphere above highly populated areas.
Even though the Antarctic ozone hole lasted each year for only
approximately two months, it had already begun to produce a slight
thinning of ozone in the stratosphere surrounding the entire planet.
Scientists warned at the time that if the concentrations of chemicals
causing ozone destruction continued to build, this dangerous thinning
process would accelerate, and an even more dangerous ozone hole above
the Arctic might form on a more regular basis.
Luckily, almost immediately after this frightening discovery, President
Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher helped to
organize a global conference in 1987 to negotiate and quickly approve a
treaty (the Montreal Protocol) that required the phasing out of the group
of industrial chemicals—including the best-known, chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs)—that two scientists, Sherwood Roland and Mario Molina, had
proven conclusively in 1974 were interacting with the unique
atmospheric conditions in the cold stratosphere above Antarctica to
produce this progressive destruction of the protective ozone layer that
shields humans and other life-forms from deadly ultraviolet radiation.
EVEN THOUGH THE Montreal Protocol has been a historic success, it is

important to understand the precise mechanism through which these
chemicals led to the stratospheric ozone hole in the first place—because
of new threats to the ozone layer from global warming. To begin with,
there is a third and final set of barrel loop atmospheric cells at both the
North Pole and the South Pole, called polar cells, within which the
winds form a vortex around each pole.
The south polar vortex is much stronger and more coherent, especially
in the austral winter, because Antarctica is land surrounded by ocean—
whereas the Arctic is ocean surrounded by land—and while the Arctic
Ocean is covered, at least in winter, by a thin layer of ice only several
feet thick, Antarctica is covered year-round by two kilometers of ice.
That also makes it the continent with the highest average altitude, which
means it is closer to the top of the sky and radiates the reflected sunlight
back into space more powerfully. Consequently, the air above Antarctica

is much colder than anywhere else on Earth, which produces an
unusually high concentration of ice crystals in the stratosphere there.
The tight vortex formed by the Antarctic circumpolar wind currents
during winter holds the CFCs and ice crystals in place above the
continent, almost like a bowl. And it is on the surface of these ice
crystals that the CFCs react with stratospheric ozone. One other crucial
ingredient must be present before the chemical reaction that destroys the
ozone starts taking place: a little bit of sunlight.
At the end of the southern hemisphere winter, around the middle of
September, when the first rays of sunlight strike the ice crystals held in
this “bowl,” the chemical reaction is ignited. Then it quickly spreads,
destroying virtually all of the stratospheric ozone inside the bowl. As the
atmosphere absorbs more heat, the vortex formed by the wind currents
weakens and the bowl breaks up, signaling the end of the ozone hole for
that year. Some large blobs of ozone-free air sometimes move
northward, like the blobs in an old lava lamp from the 1960s—exposing
populated areas in the southern hemisphere like Australia and Patagonia
to high levels of ultraviolet radiation when air with low concentrations
of ozone is no longer able to provide a screen for those at the surface.
Stratospheric ozone depletion and global warming have always been
considered almost completely separate phenomena, but in 2012
scientists discovered that global warming is producing an unexpected
and unwelcome threat to the stratospheric ozone layer—this time above
highly populated areas in the temperate zone of the northern
hemisphere.
Just as the extra heat energy absorbed in the tropics is causing the
updraft of the Hadley cells to nudge the top of the troposphere higher,
the extra heat energy being absorbed in the temperate zone of the
northern hemisphere is causing more powerful thunderstorms to punch
through the top of the troposphere, injecting water vapor into the
stratosphere, where it freezes into a new and dangerous concentration of
ice crystals—thus creating the conditions for triggering stratospheric
ozone loss by providing the surfaces on which the CFCs still in the
atmosphere can come into contact with stratospheric ozone and sunlight
to destroy the protective ozone layer. This new phenomenon has begun
to appear at a time when the stratosphere is also getting colder, in
inverse proportion to the warming of the lower atmosphere. Long

predicted by climate models, stratospheric cooling is a result of the
Earth’s atmosphere attempting to maintain its energy “balance.” Much
more work will need to be performed before this troubling surprise is
fully understood, but it already illustrates the recklessness of this
“planetary experiment” that humanity has under way. We are not only
playing with fire, but ice as well. As Robert Frost wrote, “Some say the
world will end in fire; some say in ice.” Either one, he added, “would
suffice.”
THE RISKIEST OF EXPERIMENTS
The idea that we are engaged in an unplanned experiment with the

planet was first articulated by Roger Revelle, who was my teacher and
mentor on global warming. In 1957, Revelle wrote with his coauthor,
Hans Suess, that, “Human beings are now carrying out a large scale
geophysical experiment.” They also noted, “The increase of atmospheric
CO2 from this cause [combustion of fossil fuels] is at present small but
may become significant during future decades if industrial fuel
combustion continues to rise exponentially.”
The word “experiment” is worth a little reflection. There are ethical
prohibitions against human experimentation that puts lives at risk or
seriously damages those who are subjects of the experimentation. Since
there are millions of lives put at risk by the “unplanned experiment” that
is radically changing the Earth’s atmosphere and threatening the future
of human civilization, surely the same ethical principle should apply.
Climate science began more than 150 years ago when the legendary
Irish scientist John Tyndall discovered that carbon dioxide traps heat.
The actual mechanism by which this occurs is more complicated than
the popular metaphor of a “greenhouse effect”; the bonds holding
together the atoms of the CO2 molecule absorb and radiate energy at
infrared wavelengths, impeding the flow of energy from the surface
outward toward space much like a blanket.
But the consequences are the same—the CO2 in the atmosphere, like
the glass in a greenhouse, retains heat that comes in from the sun.
Tyndall’s historic finding occurred the same year, 1859, as the drilling of
the first oil well by Colonel Edwin Drake in Pennsylvania.

Thirty-seven years later, in 1896, the Swedish chemist Svante
Arrhenius cited Tyndall in a landmark paper in which he addressed the
following question: “Is the mean temperature of the ground in any way
influenced by the presence of heat-absorbing gasses in the atmosphere?”
Arrhenius performed more than 10,000 calculations by hand in order to
arrive at his conclusion that a doubling of CO2 concentrations in the
atmosphere would raise global average temperatures by several degrees
Celsius.
In the second half of the twentieth century, in the midst of the postwar
burst of industrialization, research into global warming picked up
considerably. The International Geophysical Year of 1957–58 led to the
establishment by Roger Revelle and Charles David Keeling of a historic
project to begin the long-term systematic measurement of CO2
concentrations in the global atmosphere. The results were astonishing.
After only a few years of measurements it became obvious that the
concentration was increasing steadily by a significant amount, a result
confirmed in the following years by installation of observation stations
all over the world.
Because most of the landmass and deciduous vegetation is in the
northern hemisphere, the CO2 concentration shows an annual cycle of
CO2 intake and outgassing by the terrestrial biosphere, which is so much
larger north of the equator than south. As a result, the CO2
concentration in the northern hemisphere goes up in winter (when
uptake of CO2 by leaves and plants is low) and down in summer (when
the trees and grasses are once again pulling CO2 from the air).
But the observations also showed clearly that the overall
concentration of CO2 throughout this yearly seasonal cycle was being
shifted steadily upward. After the first seven years of the iconic
measurements contained in what is now known as the Keeling Curve, the
low point in the annual cycle was already higher than the high point
when the measurements began. Fifty-six years later, these measurements
still continue every day—from the top of Mauna Loa; at the South Pole;
in American Samoa; in Trinidad Head, California; and in Barrow, Alaska.
In addition, there are sixty other “distributed cooperative” sets of
measurements, including aircraft profiles, ship transects, balloons, and

trains. The project is now overseen, by the way, by an outstanding
scientist, Ralph Keeling, who happens to be Dave’s son. He is also now
monitoring the small but steady reduction in the concentration of
oxygen in the atmosphere—not a cause for concern in itself, but yet
another validation of the underlying climate science, which has long
predicted this result, and an effective cross-check on the accuracy of the
CO2 measurements.
Ten years after Revelle and Keeling began measuring CO2 in the
atmosphere, I had the privilege of becoming Revelle’s student in college
and was deeply impressed by the clarity with which he described this
phenomenon and the prescience with which he projected what would
happen in the future if the exponential increase in fossil fuel combustion
and consequent CO2 emissions continued.
A decade after leaving college, I began holding hearings about global
warming in Congress, and in 1987–88, I first ran for president in order
to focus more attention on the need to solve the climate crisis. In June of
1988, NASA scientist Jim Hansen testified that the evidence of human-
caused global warming had become statistically significant in
observations of rising global temperatures. Six months later, in
December, the United Nations established a global scientific body—the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—to provide
authoritative summaries of the evidence being found by scientific studies
around the world.
Today, a quarter century after the IPCC began its work, the
international scientific consensus confirming the dominance of human
activities in causing global warming is as strong as any consensus ever
formed in science. The threat is real, is linked primarily to human
activities, is serious, and requires an urgent response in the form of
sharply reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Every national academy of
science and every major scientific society in the world supports the
consensus view.
In a joint statement in 2009, the national academies of the G8 nations
and five other nations declared, “The need for urgent action to address
climate change is now indisputable.” According to a peer-reviewed study
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the
U.S., “97–98 percent of the climate researchers most actively publishing

in the field support the tenets of ACC (anthropogenic climate change)
outlined by the IPCC.”
It is also significant that virtually all of the projections made by
scientists in recent decades about the effects of global warming have
been exceeded by the actual impacts as they later unfolded in the real
world. As many have noted, scientists in general and the scientific
process in particular are inherently cautious in coming to a conclusion,
even, you might say, conservative. Not conservative in the political sense
of the word, but conservative in their methodology and approach. This
tradition and long-established culture of caution is reinforced by the
peer-review process, which demands convincing proof of any claims that
are published. The same culture discourages statements about even
seemingly obvious implications that may reflect common sense but
cannot be adequately proven to the degree required for publication in a
peer-reviewed journal.
Nevertheless, in spite of this conservative culture, the global scientific
community has loudly and publicly warned policymakers that we must
act quickly to avert a planetary calamity. Yet even with the mounting
toll from climate-related disasters and the obvious warming of the Earth
that is now viscerally apparent to almost everyone, there have been very
few significant policy changes designed to confront this existential
threat.
With the future of human civilization hanging in the balance, both
democracy and capitalism are badly failing to serve the deepest interests
of humankind. Both are unwieldy and both are in a state of disrepair.
But if the flaws in our current version of democracy and capitalism are
addressed, if the barnacles of corruption, corporate control, and
domination by elites can be scraped away, both of these systems will be
invaluable in turning world civilization in the right direction before it is
too late. Yet this difficult policy transition will require leadership and
political courage that is presently in short supply, particularly in the
United States.
In order to understand why so many political leaders are failing to
address this existential crisis, it is important to explore the way public
perceptions of global warming have been manipulated by global
warming deniers, and how the psychology of the issue has made that
manipulation easier than it should be. Powerful corporations with an

interest in delaying action have lavished money on a cynical and
dishonest public campaign to manipulate public opinion by sowing false
doubts about the reality of the climate crisis. They are taking advantage
of the natural desire that all of us have to seize upon any indication that
global warming isn’t real after all and the scientists have somehow made
a big mistake.
Many have described the climate crisis as “the issue from hell,” partly
because its complexity, scale, and timeframe all make public discussion
of the crisis, its causes, and its solutions more difficult. Because its
consequences are distributed globally, it masquerades as an abstraction.
Because the solutions involve taking a new path into the future,
improving long-familiar technologies, and modifying long-standing
patterns, it triggers our natural reluctance to change. And because the
worst damages stretch into the future, while our attention spans are
naturally short, it makes us vulnerable to the illusion that we have
plenty of time before we have to start solving it.
“Denial” is a psychological tendency to which all of us are vulnerable.
One of the first to explore how this phenomenon works was Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross, who taught, according to the organization she founded,
that “Denial can be conscious or unconscious refusal to accept facts,
information, or the reality of the situation. Denial is a defense
mechanism and some people can become locked in this stage.” The
modern psychiatric definition of this condition is: “An unconscious
defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful
realities, thoughts, or feelings.”
Certainly the prospect of a catastrophic threat to the future of all
global civilization qualifies as “an unpleasant thought.” And the natural
tendency for all of us is to hope that the scientific consensus on global
warming is not an accurate depiction of the real danger that we face.
Those who become locked into this psychological strategy typically
respond to the stronger and stronger evidence of global warming with
stronger and stronger denunciations of the entire concept, and stronger
attacks on those who insist that we must take action.
We have learned a lot about human nature over the last century. We
now know, for example, that the “rational person” assumed by
Enlightenment thinkers—and the definition of human behavior implicit
in the work of Adam Smith and other classical economists, which some

now refer to as “Homo economicus”—is really not who we are. Quite to
the contrary, we are heirs to the behavioral legacy shaped during our
long period of development as a species. Along with our capacity for
reason, we are also hardwired to be more attentive and responsive to
short-term and visceral factors than longer-term threats that require the
use of our capacity for reason.
Two social scientists—Jane Risen at the University of Chicago, and
Clayton Critcher at the University of California, Berkeley—asked two
groups of people the same series of questions about global warming,
with the only difference being the temperature in each room. Those who
responded in a room that was ten degrees warmer gave answers
indicating significantly larger support for doing something to counter
global warming than the group in the cooler room. The differences
showed up among both liberals and conservatives. In a second study,
two groups were asked for their opinions about drought, and those given
salty pretzels to eat had a markedly different outlook than the group that
wasn’t as thirsty.
At a time when the world is undergoing the dramatic changes driven
by the factors covered in this book—globalization and the emergence of
Earth Inc., the Digital, Internet, and computing revolutions, the Life
Sciences and biotechnology revolutions, the historic transformation of
the balance of political and economic power in the world, and the
commitment to a form of “growth” that ignores human values and
threatens to deplete key resources vital to our future—the climate crisis
easily gets pushed down the list of political priorities in most nations.
The flawed definition of growth described in Chapter 4 is at the center
of the catastrophic miscalculation of the costs and benefits of continuing
to rely on carbon-based fuels. The stocks of publicly traded carbon fuel
companies, for example, are valued on the basis of many factors,
especially the value of the reserves they control. In arriving at the worth
of these underground deposits, the companies assume that they will be
produced and sold at market rates for burning. Yet any reasonable
person familiar with the global scientific consensus on the climate crisis
knows that these reserves cannot all be burned. The very idea is insane.
Yet none of the environmental consequences of burning them is reflected
in their market valuation.
In addition to denial and our misplaced blind reliance on a deeply

flawed economic compass, there is another ingrained tendency to which
all of us are prone: we want to believe that ultimately all is right with
the world, or at least that part of the world in which each of us lives.
Social psychologists call this the system justification theory, which holds
that everyone wants to think well of themselves, the groups they identify
with, and the social order in which they live their lives. Because of the
scale of the changes necessary to confront global warming, any proposal
to embark on this necessary journey can easily be portrayed as a
challenge to the status quo and trigger our tendency to defend it by
automatically rejecting any potential alternative to the status quo.
When there is an existential threat that requires quick mass
mobilization—the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, for example—the
natural reluctance to break out of our comfortable patterns is overridden
by a sense of emergency. But most such examples are rooted in the same
group conflict scenarios that characterized the long period in which we
as human beings developed. There is no precedent (except the ozone
hole) for a fast global response to an urgent global threat—especially
when the response called for poses a big challenge to business as usual.
President Reagan, when confronting the need for nuclear arms control,
expressed the same thought on many occasions, including once in a
speech to the United Nations General Assembly: “In our obsession with
antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the
members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat
to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how
quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an
alien threat from outside this world.” Some members of my political
party ridiculed Reagan’s formulation during his presidency, but I always
thought that it embodied an important insight.
THE POLITICS OF DIVISION
We do, of course, face a common threat to all humanity where the

climate crisis is concerned. But it is not from aliens; it is from us. So our
capacity to respond by uniting to overcome the threat can be
undermined by “antagonisms of the moment.” America’s founders
recognized the importance of this ingrained trait in human nature. More

than two centuries later scientists tell us that the tendency to form
opposing factions is deeply rooted in the history of our species.
As E. O. Wilson recently wrote, “Everyone, no exception, must have a
tribe, an alliance with which to jockey for power and territory, to
demonize the enemy, to organize rallies and raise flags. And so it has
ever been.… Human nature has not changed. Modern groups are
psychologically equivalent to the tribes of ancient history. As such, these
groups are directly descended from the bands of primitive humans and
prehumans.”
That is one of the underlying reasons that the denial of global
warming has somehow become a “cultural” issue, in the sense that many
who reject the scientific evidence feel a group kinship—almost a “tribal
identity”—with others who are also locked into denial. In the U.S., the
extreme conservative ideology that has come to dominate the
Republican Party is based in part on a mutual commitment to
passionately fight against a variety of different reform proposals opposed
by members of a disparate coalition.
It could be called the Three Musketeers Principle: all for one and one
for all. Those primarily interested in opposing any form of gun
regulation agree to support the position of oil and coal companies
opposed to any efforts to reduce global warming pollution. Antiabortion
activists agree to support large banks in their opposition to new financial
regulations. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “So it goes.”
Over the last four decades, the largest carbon polluters have become
charter members of the antireform counterrevolution described in
Chapter 3 that was organized in the 1970s under the auspices of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce—out of fear that the tumultuous protest
movements of the 1960s (against the Vietnam War, for civil rights,
women’s rights, gay rights, disability rights, the consumer movement,
the passage of Medicare and programs to assist the poor, and so on)
were threatening to spin out of control in ways that would disadvantage
powerful corporations and elites. In their view, these movements
threatened to undermine capitalism itself.
One of the enduring consequences of this counterreform movement
was the establishment of a large network of think tanks, foundations,
institutes, law schools, and activist organizations that turn out an endless
stream of mostly contrived “reports,” “studies,” lawsuits, testimony

before congressional and regulatory panels, op-eds, and books that all
promote the philosophy and agenda of the new corporate Musketeers:
• Government is bad, cannot be trusted, should instead be feared, and

must be starved of resources so that it is capable of interfering as
little as possible with the plans of corporations and the interests of
elites;
• Hardship is good for poor people because it’s the only thing that
will give them an incentive to become more productive; hardship
also makes them more willing to accept lower wages and fewer
benefits;
• Rich people, on the other hand, should be taxed as little as possible
in order to encourage them to make even more money—which is
the only tried-and-true way to produce more growth in the
economy, even if there is too little demand because consumers don’t
have enough money to buy more goods and services;
• More inequality is a good thing, because it simultaneously inspires
poor people to more ambition and rich people to more investing,
even if the evidence shows that the highest-income groups are
primarily interested in wealth preservation when the economy is
weak; and
• The environment can take care of itself nicely, no matter how much
pollution we dump into it. Anyone who believes otherwise is
motivated by a barely concealed love for socialism and an abiding
determination to thwart business.
To one degree or another, of course, there is a natural incentive to build

broad coalitions among differing interests in most political parties. I
certainly experienced such pressures as a member of the Democratic
Party when I served in Congress. Yet there is something different about
the lockstep discipline in the new U.S. right-wing coalition—a discipline
that is enforced by extremely wealthy contributors who are primarily
interested in policies that increase their already unhealthy share of
America’s aggregate income.
In today’s world, the challenge of global warming has, unfortunately,
led to an almost tribal division between those who accept the

overwhelming scientific consensus—and the evidence of their own
senses—and those who are bound and determined to reject it. The
ferocity of their opposition is treated as a kind of badge signifying their
membership in the second group and antagonism toward the first.
The organized deniers know that in order to maintain their control of
the coalition opposed to policies reducing greenhouse gas emissions,
they do not have to prove that man-made global warming is not real—
though many of them do assert as much over and over again. All they
really need to do is create enough doubt to convince the public that “the
jury is still out.” This strategic goal was explicitly spelled out in an
internal document from a business coalition dominated by large carbon
polluters.
Leaked to the press in 1991, the document stated that the group’s
strategic goal was to “reposition global warming as theory not fact.” A
charitable interpretation would be that these companies had long felt
besieged by what they perceived as hyperbolic claims on the part of
environmental activists seeking more regulation of various forms of
pollution, and that they developed a habit of reflexively countering any
claim of impending harm by going all-out to undermine the credibility of
the claims and of those making them.
However, in light of the decades of extensive documentation making
this deadly threat crystal clear, and in light of the national academies of
science around the world proclaiming that the evidence is now
indisputable, it is no longer easy to be charitable in assessing what these
wealthy, powerful, and self-interested deniers are doing. They reject the
spirit of reasonable dialogue. They reject and vilify the integrity of the
scientific process. Nothing has worked to hold them to their obligation
to the greater good. Some, it is true, have examined both the evidence
and their conscience and have changed. But those who have done so are
still in the tiny minority. The deniers’ assault on the future of our world
continues.
There is, after all, no longer any reasonable doubt whatsoever that
man-made emissions of CO2 and the other global warming pollutants are
seriously damaging the planetary ecological system that is crucial to the
future survival of human civilization. Many of the extreme weather
disasters that have already claimed so many lives and caused so much

suffering are now being directly linked to global warming. The damage
that is being done to hundreds of millions in the present generation
makes it impossible, in my view, to ignore the moral consequences of
what is being done.
Most legal systems in the world make it a criminal offense, as well as a
civil offense, for anyone to knowingly misrepresent material facts for the
purpose of self-enrichment at the expense of others who rely on the false
representations and suffer harm or damage as a result. If the
misrepresentation is merely negligent, it can still be a legal offense. If
the false statements are reckless and if the harm suffered by those
induced to rely on the false statements is grave, the offense is more
serious still. The most common legal standard for determining whether
or not the person (or corporation) misrepresenting the material facts did
so “knowingly” is not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but rather the
“preponderance of the evidence.”
The large public multinational fossil fuel companies have an estimated
$7 trillion in assets that are at risk if the global scientific consensus is
accepted by publics and governments around the world. That is the
reason that several of them have been misrepresenting to the public—
and to investors—the material facts about the grave harm to the future
of human civilization that results from the continued burning of their
principal assets in such a reckless manner. The value of similar and
larger reserves owned by sovereign states, when combined with the
assets owned by private and public companies, adds up to a total of $27
trillion. That is why Saudi Arabia, until recently at least, has been so
vehement in its efforts to block any international agreement to limit
global warming pollution. In 2012, a member of the royal family, Prince
Turki al-Faisal, called for Saudi Arabia to convert its domestic energy
use to 100 percent renewables in order to preserve its oil reserves for
sale to the rest of the world.
“SUBPRIME CARBON ASSETS”
The oil, coal, and gas assets carried on the books of fossil fuel companies
is valued at market rates based on the assumption that they will
eventually be sold to customers who will burn them and dump the

unpleasant encounter with reality. The unpleasantness didn’t linger for
them, however, because they were able to use the overwhelming
political power they had purchased with campaign contributions and
lobbying activities—with a little help from officials that had gone
through the revolving door connecting governments and banks—to be
bailed out by the taxpayers, who had to borrow the money for the
purpose. The net result was a credit crisis and a global Great Recession,
which economists may yet relabel a depression.
Subprime carbon assets have a similarly inflated value in the
marketplace, undergirded by an assumption even more absurd than the
ridiculous idea that it was perfectly okay to give mortgages to millions of
people who couldn’t ever pay them back. In this case, the assumption is
that it is perfectly all right to burn every last drop of oil in the oil
companies’ reserves and destroy the future of civilization. It’s not all
right.
Yet the market value to the oil, coal, and natural gas companies of this
particular absurd assumption is extremely high. Ultimately, that is the
reason they have been willing to devote billions of dollars to defend it—
by organizing a massive and highly sophisticated campaign of deception
designed to convince people—and policymakers—that it may very well
be fine to burn as much carbon fuel as we can.
These carbon polluters have also deceived coal miners and other
employees in the fossil energy industry into ignoring the reality of the
change that is inevitable. In a courageous and eloquent speech on the
Senate floor in 2012, Senator Jay Rockefeller, from the most
coaldependent state in the U.S., West Virginia, said, “My fear is that
concerns are also being fueled by the narrow view of others with
divergent motivations—one that denies the inevitability of change in the
energy industry, and unfairly leaves coal miners in the dust. The reality
is that many who run the coal industry today would rather attack false
enemies and deny real problems than find solutions.”
The dominance of wealth and corporate influence in decision making
has so cowed most politicians that they are scared to even discuss this
existential threat in any meaningful way. There are more than a few
honorable exceptions, but on issues that engage the interests of Earth
Inc., Earth Inc. is fully in control of global policy. The carbon fuel
companies hired four anti-climate lobbyists for every single member of

the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in their fight to defeat
climate legislation. They have become one of the largest sources of
campaign contributions to candidates in both parties—though
significantly more goes to Republicans.
Many of these companies have provided large amounts of money over
the last two decades to “liars for hire” who turn out a seemingly endless
stream of misleading, peripheral, irrelevant, false, and unscientific
claims:
• Global warming is a hoax perpetrated by scientists who are

scheming to receive more government research funding and by
activists who want to impose socialism or worse.
• Global warming isn’t occurring; it stopped several years ago.
• If it is occurring, it is not caused by global warming pollution, but is
instead the result of a natural cycle.
• The Earth’s climate system is so resilient that it can, in any event,
absorb unlimited quantities of global warming pollution with no
harmful consequences.
• If global warming does occur, it will actually be good for us.
• Even if it’s not good for some people, we certainly have the ability
to adapt to it with little hardship.
• The ice caps on Jupiter are also melting, therefore it is logical to
assume that some poorly understood phenomenon endemic to our
solar system is the true cause (never mind that Jupiter doesn’t have
ice caps).
• Global warming is being caused by sunspots (never mind that
temperatures have continued to go upward during the long “cool
phase” of the sunspot cycle now coming to an end).
• Global warming is caused by volcanoes (never mind that human-
caused CO2 emissions are 135 to 200 times greater than volcanic
emissions, which are in any case part of a natural process that is, in
the long term, carbon neutral).
• Computer models are unreliable (never mind that more than a
dozen separate and independent temperature records from the real

world completely confirm what the computer models have long
predicted).
• Clouds will cancel out global warming (never mind the growing
evidence that the net feedback from clouds is likely to make global
warming even worse, not better).
There are more than 100 other bogus arguments, or red herrings, that
are pushed relentlessly in the media, by lobbyists, and by captive
politicians beholden to the carbon polluters. The only thing the deniers
are absolutely certain about is that 90 million tons per day of global
warming pollution are certainly not causing global warming—even if the
entire global scientific community says the opposite. There are, to be
sure, some opponents of the scientific consensus who genuinely believe
that the science is wrong. Some of them have backgrounds and personal
stories that predispose them to fight on for a variety of reasons. But they
are the exceptions, and their complete lack of any credible supporting
evidence would quickly marginalize them except for the fact that climate
science denial has become a cottage industry generously supported by
carbon polluters.
To undermine the public’s confidence in the integrity of science, the
carbon companies and their agents and allies constantly insinuate that
climate scientists are lying about the facts they have uncovered, and/or
are secretly part of a political effort to expand the role of government.
The political assault against climate scientists has been designed not only
to demonize them, but also to intimidate them—which has added to the
naturally cautious approach that scientists habitually adopt.
One right-wing state attorney general in the United States took legal
action against a climate scientist simply because his findings were
inconvenient for coal companies. Right-wing legal foundations and think
tanks have repeatedly sued climate scientists and vilified them in public
statements. Right-wing members of Congress have repeatedly sought to
slash climate research funding. To mention only one of the many
consequences, the ability of the U.S. to even monitor climate change
adequately is being severely damaged with multiple launches of essential
monitoring satellites being delayed or canceled—just at the time when
the data is most needed.
On the eve of the global negotiating session on climate in December of

2009 in Copenhagen, the entire climate science community was
assaulted by what appears to have been a well-planned hacking of their
private, internal emails among one another. The cherry-picking of
misleading phrases taken out of context led to the trumpeting by the
right-wing media of charges that the climate science community was
lying to the public and to their governments. An extensive investigation
determined that the hacking came from outside the targeted research
center but did not identify the perpetrator. Meanwhile, four separate
independent investigations all completely cleared the climate scientists
of any wrongdoing.
THE DENIAL MACHINE
The ability of the public to see through the lies and deceptions of the
carbon polluters and their allies has been hampered because the
traditional role of the news media has changed significantly in the past
few decades—especially in the United States. Many newspapers are
going bankrupt and most others are under severe economic stress that
reduces their ability to fulfill their historic role of ensuring that the
foundation of a democracy is a “well-informed citizenry.”
As noted in Chapter 3, the rising prominence of the Internet is a
source of hope, but for the time being television is still far and away the
dominant medium of information. And yet the news divisions of
television networks are now required to focus on ways to contribute
more profit to the corporate bottom line. As a result, they have been
forced to blur the distinction between news and entertainment. Since
ratings are the key to profitability, the kinds of news stories that are
given priority have changed.
Virtually every news and political commentary program on television
is sponsored in part by oil, coal, and gas companies—not just during
campaign seasons, but all the time, year in and year out—with messages
designed to soothe and reassure the audience that everything is fine, the
global environment is not threatened, and the carbon companies are
working diligently to further develop renewable energy sources.
The fear of discussing global warming has influenced almost all
mainstream television news networks in the U.S. The denier coalition

unleashes vitriol at almost anyone who dares to bring up the subject of
global warming and, as a result, many news companies have been
intimidated into silence. Even the acclaimed BBC nature program The
Frozen Planet was edited before the Discovery Network showed it in the
United States to remove the discussion of global warming. Since one of
the overarching themes of the series was the melting of ice all over the
planet, it was absurd to remove the discussion of global warming, which
is of course the principal cause of the ice melting. As activist Bill
McKibben wrote, “It was like showing a documentary on lung cancer
and leaving out the part about the cigarettes.”
During the hot summers of 2011 and 2012, the evening newscasts
often resembled a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. But each
time, the droughts and fires and windstorms and floods were covered as
lead stories, the explanation was often something like, “a high pressure
area” or “La Niña.”
On the few occasions when global warming is discussed, the coverage
is distorted by the tendency of the news media to insist on including a
contrarian point of view to falsely “balance” every statement by a
climate scientist about global warming—as if there was a legitimate
difference of opinion. This problem has been worsened by the shrinking
budgets for investigative reporting.
For someone who grew up believing in the integrity of the American
democratic process—and who still believes that its integrity can be
redeemed and restored—it is profoundly troubling that special interests
have been able to capture control of decision making and policy
formation in the nation that Abraham Lincoln eloquently described as
“the last best hope of earth.” But the fight is far from over. Its epicenter
is in the United States, simply because the U.S. remains the only nation
capable of rallying the world to save our future. As Edmund Burke said,
“The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do
nothing.” That is what it now comes down to: will good men and women
do nothing, or will they respond to the emergency that is now at hand?
In the last few years, the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather
events connected to the climate crisis have begun to have a significant
impact on public attitudes toward global warming. Even in the U.S.,
where the denier propaganda campaign is still in full force, public
support for actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has gone up

significantly. Proposals to do more have been supported by a majority
for many years, although the intensity of the majority’s feeling has been
too low to overcome the efforts of the carbon polluters to paralyze
political action. More recently, however, support for action has been
building steadily.
At the beginning of President Barack Obama’s administration in 2009,
hopes were high that U.S. policy on global warming would change—and
for a time, it did. His stimulus bill put a major emphasis on green
provisions, including measures to accelerate the research and
development, production, and use of renewable energy systems in the
United States. His appointment of the extremely able Lisa Jackson as
administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency set the stage for a
series of breakthrough rules and initiatives that have contributed to the
reduction of CO2 emissions and the cleaning of pollutants from the
environment.
The EPA rules requiring a reduction of CO2 emissions from new power
plants and automobiles were courageous, and the EPA’s ruling that
mercury emissions from coal plants must be sharply reduced has
contributed to the decisions by many utilities to cancel planned
construction of new coal-fired generating plants. The success by Jackson,
her cabinet colleague, transportation secretary Ray LaHood, and White
House adviser Carol Browner in reaching an agreement with U.S.
carmakers to require significant improvements in auto mileage—
eventually almost doubling the current average to 54.5 miles per gallon
—was described by one environmentalist, Dan Becker, who runs the Safe
Climate Campaign for the Center for Auto Safety, as “The biggest single
step that any nation has taken to cut global warming pollution.”
But several things happened over the last few years to make the
political challenge more difficult than Obama expected. First, the
economic crisis and Great Recession he inherited made the
administration reluctant to confront a longer-term challenge when the
economic distress of the present was so pressing. The effects of the
recession lingered because of its unusual depth, the massive
deleveraging (repayment of debt) it triggered, the collapse of the
housing market, and the inadequate size of the fiscal stimulus that
injected some—but not enough—demand back into the economy.

Second, China surprised the world with its massive commitment to
dominate the production and export of windmills and solar panels,
heavily subsidized with government-backed cheap credit and low-wage
labor—which allowed them to flood the global market with equipment
priced well below the cost of production in the United States and other
developed countries.
Third, even though his climate legislation passed the House of
Representatives while it was still under his party’s control, the obsolete
and dysfunctional rules of the U.S. Senate empowered a minority to kill
it in that chamber. Senators in both parties said privately that passage of
the climate plan might have been within reach but that it seemed to
them that President Obama was not prepared to make the all-out effort
that would have been necessary to build a coalition in support of the
plan. Earlier, he had chosen to make health care reform his number one
priority, and the badly broken U.S. political system produced a
legislative gridlock on his health plan that lasted until the midterm
campaign season began, leaving no time for even Senate discussion of
the climate change issue.
By then, Obama and his political team in the White House had
apparently long since made a sober assessment of the political risks
involved in states where the power of the fossil fuel industries would
punish him for committing himself to the passage of this plan. So
instead, when his opponents in Congress took up the cry “drill, baby,
drill,” the president proposed the expansion of oil drilling—even in the
Arctic Ocean—and opened up more public land to coal mining. For these
and other reasons, the positive impacts of the energy and climate
proposals with which he began his presidency were nearly overwhelmed
by his sharp turn toward a policy that he described as an “all of the
above” approach—one that has contributed to the increased reliance on
carbon-rich fossil fuels.
Fourth, the discovery of enormous reserves of deep shale gas
depressed electricity prices as more coal-fired generating plants switched
to cheaper gas—thus pushing the price of kilowatt hours below the level
needed for wind and solar to be competitive at their present early stage
of development. Shale gas has flooded the market since the discovery
and perfection of a new drilling technology that combines horizontal
drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Although most of the debate

about fracking has involved its use in the production of shale gas, it is
used in the production of oil as well, opening previously inaccessible
supplies and increasing the yield of oil from fields previously nearly
depleted.
THE IMPACT OF FRACKING
Experts have cautioned that the world can expect a steady increase in
the price of shale gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports transfer the
gas from low-priced markets like the United States to much higher-
priced markets in Asia and Europe, with the average cost of shale gas
going up significantly in the process. Nevertheless, the size of the new
reserves opened up with fracking have at least temporarily overturned
the pricing structure of energy markets. And the resulting enthusiasm for
the exploitation of these reserves has obscured several crucial questions
and controversies that should, and over time will, inspire caution about
shale gas.
To begin with, the fracking process results in the leakage of enormous
quantities of methane (the principal component of natural gas), which is
more than seventy-two times as potent as CO2 in trapping heat in the
atmosphere over a twenty-year time frame. After about a decade,
methane breaks down into CO2 and water vapor, but its warming
impact, molecule for molecule, is still much larger than that of CO2 over
shorter time scales.
The global warming potency of methane has led to proposals for a
global effort to focus on sharp reductions in methane emissions as an
emergency short-term measure to buy time for the implementation of
the more difficult strategies necessary to reduce CO2 emissions.
Similarly, others have proposed a near-term focus on sharply reducing
black carbon emissions, or soot, which trap incoming heat from the sun
and which settle on the surface of ice and snow to increase heat
absorption and magnify melting. Taken together, these two actions could
significantly reduce warming potential by 2050. Given how long the
world has waited to get started on controlling emissions, we need both
and more.

There are huge leakages of methane in the fracking process before the
equipment is put in place to capture the gas at the surface. After the
underground formation is fracked by the injection of high-pressure
liquids, there is a “flowback.” That is, when the fracking water,
chemicals, and sand used to do the fracking flow back to the surface and
out of the well, this material contains large amounts of methane, which
is either vented into the atmosphere or burned. Although many of the
largest drilling operators take steps to prevent this leakage, the majority
of smaller “wildcat” drillers do not. Additional methane is typically
leaked into the atmosphere during the processing, storage, and
distribution of gas. The total volume of methane leakage is so large that
multiple studies—including a recent lifecycle analysis by Nathan
Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures,
and Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s
Department of Global Ecology—have now found that virtually all of the
benefit natural gas might have because of its lower carbon content
compared to coal is negated.
In its ongoing operations, the fracking process also requires the
continuing injection of huge amounts of water mixed with sand and
toxic chemicals into the shale where the gas is confined. The
requirement of an average of five million gallons of water for each well
is already causing conflict in regions suffering from droughts and water
shortages. In many communities, particularly in arid areas of the
American West, the competition for scarce water resources was acute
even before the spread of the thirsty fracking process. In parts of Texas,
fracking wells are being drilled in communities where water supply
limitations are already constraining usage for drinking water and
agriculture.
The fracking process sometimes also inadvertently contaminates
precious underground aquifers. Although the gas-bearing rock is
typically much deeper than the aquifers supplying drinking water, the
upward migration of liquids underground is not well understood and is
difficult to predict or control. Many of the deposits where fracking is
taking place are found in oil and gas fields that are dotted with old
abandoned shafts drilled decades ago in the search for reserves that
could be produced through conventional means. These old wells can
serve as chimneys for the upward migration of both methane and

drilling fluids.
Some have speculated that abandoned drill holes and other poorly
understood features of the underground geology may be responsible for
the fact that numerous existing water wells located far above the
ongoing horizontal drilling have already been poisoned by fracking
fluids. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that the
fluids used to drill for gas in Wyoming are the likely cause of pollution
in the aquifer above an area that was fracked there. Reports of similar
pollution from fracking in other areas have been made, but the EPA has
been hampered in its investigations because of an unusual law passed in
2005 at the behest of then vice president Dick Cheney, which provides a
special exemption for fracking activities from U.S. government oversight
under the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.
The industry disputes most of these reports, and believes that in any
case the pollution of some water wells is a small price to pay; the CEO of
ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, for example, said recently, “The
consequences of a misstep in a well, while large to the immediate people
that live around that well, in the great scheme of things are pretty
small.” Nevertheless, political resistance from landowners has been
growing in several regions.
Once the fracking fluid has been used, it must be disposed of as toxic
wastewater. Often, it is reinjected deep underground in a manner that
has caused multiple small (usually harmless) earthquakes and, on some
occasions, is alleged to have infiltrated water aquifers. Indeed, the
disposal of used fracking fluids is a more common source of complaints
than the initial injections that begin the fracking process. In other
locations, this used fracking fluid has been stored in large open-air
holding ponds that sometimes overflow following heavy rainfalls. It has
also at times been spread on roads, ostensibly for dust control.
Advocates of shale gas argue that there are safety measures that can
mitigate many of these problems, although most claim disingenuously
that the industry will adopt them voluntarily, in spite of the expense
involved. By contrast, the oil and gas industry veteran who pioneered
the fracking process, George P. Mitchell of Houston, Texas, has publicly
called for more government regulation. “They should have very strict
controls. The Department of Energy should do it,” Mitchell told Forbes
magazine. “If they don’t do it right, there could be trouble.… It’s tough

to control these independents. If they do something wrong and
dangerous, they should punish them,” he added.
But even if new safety regulations worked as planned and even if the
leakage of methane is tightly controlled, the burning of natural gas still
results in an enormous volume of CO2 emissions. The fact that these
emissions can in theory be brought down to a level that represents only
half of the emissions from coal has been used by some advocates of shale
gas as a new twist on the old question: is the glass half full or is it half
empty? They make the seductive case that switching to gas means we
can bring emissions halfway down in the sectors that now rely on coal.
But here is the rub: the atmosphere itself is already full. The
concentrations of global warming pollution are already at dangerous
levels.
GETTING REAL
As a result, solving the climate crisis requires reducing emissions not by

a little, but by a lot. We have to begin reducing net additions of
greenhouse gases by at least 80 to 90 percent—not 50 percent—in order
to ensure that overall concentrations do not exceed a potential tipping
point before starting to decline. Continuing to add additional amounts of
greenhouse gases at a rate that far exceeds the slow rate at which CO2 is
drawn out of the atmosphere by the oceans and the biosphere would
push far into the future any possibility of reducing the overall
concentration levels. Reliance on gas to “bridge” the time needed to
convert to renewables can help, but a longer commitment would, in fact,
be tantamount to surrendering in the struggle to ensure that civilization
survives.
In some ways, this challenge is similar to what is happening with the
depletion of groundwater and topsoil. The natural replenishment of
those resources takes place on a timescale far slower than the rate at
which they are being depleted by human activities. The natural rate of
CO2 removal from the atmosphere takes place far more slowly than the
rate at which we are adding to the overall concentrations. In all three
cases, human activities are causing changes far faster than nature can
adjust to them.

The underlying problem is that the new power and momentum of
Earth Inc. is colliding violently with and overwhelming the
environmental balance of the Earth. The overconsumption of limited
resources and the production of unlimited pollution are both
inconsistent with the continued functioning of the Earth’s ecological
system in a manner that supports the survival of human civilization. As
noted earlier, the CO2 contained in the “proven reserves” of oil, coal,
and gas already on the books of carbon fuel companies and sovereign
states exceeds by many times the amount we could safely add to the
atmosphere—and the unconventional reserves now starting to be drawn
on are potentially even larger.
The shale gas boom in the United States has led to a frenzy of
exploration for shale gas in China, Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, raising
the specter of a long-term global commitment to gas at the longer-term
expense of renewables. Nevertheless, production of this resource outside
the U.S. has thus far been limited. In China, where geologists believe
that the supply may be two and a half times the size of U.S. shale gas
reserves, the underground geology requires technologies that are
different from those being used in the U.S., which complicates the option
of simply transferring the U.S. horizontal drilling and hydraulic
fracturing technologies to China. Also, as in the Western United States,
the profligate use of water in fracking may impose a limitation on use of
the process—particularly in northern and northwestern China, where
water shortages are endemic.
Even so, momentum is building in the global economy toward the full
exploitation and production of shale gas. Some analysts make a
persuasive case that if “fugitive emissions” are tightly controlled, the
substitution of gas for coal might produce a temporary but still
significant net reduction in the emissions of greenhouse gasses. In 2012,
in what most analysts described as a surprising development, U.S. CO2
emissions dropped to their lowest level in twenty years—in part because
of the economic slowdown, because of a mild fall and winter, because of
more renewable energy use and increases in efficiency, but also because
of the switch from coal to natural gas by electric utilities.
Years ago I was among those who recommended the greater use of
conventional natural gas as a bridge fuel to phase out coal use more

quickly while solar and wind technologies were produced at sufficient
scales to bring their price down even more. However, it is increasingly
clear that the net effect of shale gas on the environment may ultimately
be inconsistent with its use as a bridge fuel. Global society as a whole
would find it difficult to make the enormous investments necessary to
switch from coal to gas, and then turn right around and make equally
significant investments to substitute renewable technologies for gas. It
strains credulity. In other words, it may be a bridge to nowhere.
Not only have the new supplies of shale gas temporarily depressed
energy prices to the point where renewable energy technologies have
more trouble competing, if the studies showing that there is no net
greenhouse gas benefit to switching to shale gas are correct, this might
lead to the worst of all possible worlds: huge investments in shale gas
diverting money from renewable energy, and a worsening of the climate
crisis in the meantime. The only virtue of shale gas is that it is leading to
a faster phase-out of coal, at least in the United States.
Coal has the highest carbon content of any fuel and emits the most
CO2 for each unit of energy it produces. It causes local and regional air
pollution, including emissions of nitrous oxide (the leading cause of
smog), sulfur dioxide (the continuing cause of acid rain), and toxic
pollutants like arsenic and lead. The burning of coal also leaves huge
quantities of toxic sludge—the second largest industrial waste stream in
the United States—that is typically pumped to huge lagoons like the one
that burst a holding wall and flooded portions of Harriman, Tennessee,
in my home state four years ago.
Of particular importance, coal burning is the principal source of
human-caused mercury in the environment, an extremely toxic pollutant
that causes neurological damage, negatively impacting cognitive skills,
the ability to focus, memory, and fine motor skills, among other effects.
In the United States nearly all fish and shellfish include at least some
amount of methyl-mercury that originated in coal-burning power plants.
It is primarily for this reason that many fish and shellfish are considered
dangerous in the diets of pregnant women, women who may become
pregnant, nursing mothers, and young children. (Since the eating of fish
is beneficial for brain development, pregnant women are advised to seek
out fish that are low in mercury content and not avoid fish altogether.)

But the worst harm from coal burning is its dominant role in causing
global warming. Although public opposition in the U.S. has contributed
to cancellation of 166 new coal plants that had been planned, coal use is
still growing rapidly in the world as a whole. An estimated 1,200 new
coal plants are now planned in 59 countries. Under current plans, the
global use of coal is expected to increase by another 65 percent in the
next two decades, replacing oil as the single largest source of energy
worldwide.
Coal is considered cheap, primarily because the absurdly distorted
accounting system we use for measuring its cost arbitrarily excludes any
consideration of all of the harm caused by burning it. Some engineers
are working on improvements to a long-known process for converting
underground coal reserves into gas that could be brought to the surface
as fuel. But even if this technology were to be perfected, the CO2
emissions would continue destroying the Earth’s ecosystem.
Oil, the second largest source of global warming pollution, contains 70
to 75 percent of the carbon in coal for each unit of energy produced.
Moreover, most of the projected new supplies of oil—in the form of
shale oil, deep ocean drilling, and tar sands (not only in Canada, but also
in Venezuela, Russia, and elsewhere)—are considerably more expensive
to produce and carry even harsher impacts for the environment.
Conventional oil is burdened with other problems that coal does not
have. Most of the easily recoverable oil in the world is found in regions
such as the Persian Gulf that are politically and socially unstable. Several
wars have already been initiated in the Middle East for reasons that
include competition for access to oil supplies. And with Iran’s
determined effort to develop nuclear weapons, and ongoing political
unrest in multiple countries in the region, the strategic threat of losing
access to these oil supplies makes the price of oil highly volatile.
Although most of the discussions about reductions of CO2 emissions
have focused on industrial, utility, and vehicle emissions, it is also
important to reduce CO2 emissions and enhance CO2 sequestration in the
agriculture and forestry sectors, which together make up the second
largest source of emissions. As the Keeling Curve demonstrates, the
amount of CO2 contained in vegetation, particularly trees, is enormous.
It is roughly equal to three quarters of the amount in the atmosphere.

The largest tropical forest, the Amazon, has been under assault from
developers, loggers, cattle ranchers, and subsistence farmers for decades,
and even though the government of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva took effective measures to slow down the destruction of the
Amazon, his successor has made policy changes that are reversing some
of the progress, though the rate of deforestation fell in 2012. In the last
decade, the Amazon region was hit hard in 2005 and again in 2010 by
“once-in-a-century” droughts (or rather, by what used to be once-in-a-
century droughts before human modification of the climate). This led
some forest researchers to renew their concern about a controversial
computer model projection that has predicted the possibility of a
dramatic “dieback” of the Amazon by mid-century if temperatures
continue rising.
An increasing amount of the world’s CO2 emissions are coming from
the cutting, drying, and intentional burning of peat forests and peat
lands—especially in Indonesia and Malaysia—in order to establish palm
oil plantations. According to the United Nations Environment
Programme, peatlands contain more than one third of all the global soil
carbon. Although both governments have given lip service to efforts to
rein in this destructive practice, endemic corruption has undermined
their stated goals. Extremely poor governance practices are among the
chief causes of deforestation almost everywhere it is occurring—partly
because 80 percent of global forest cover is in publicly owned forests.
Tropical forests are also under assault in central and south-central
Africa—particularly in Sudan and Zambia, and the Southeast Asian
archipelago—including areas in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Borneo,
and the Philippines. In many tropical countries, the increased demand
for meat in the world’s diet has contributed greatly to the clearing of
forests for ranching—especially cattle ranching. As noted in Chapter 4,
the growing meat intensity of diets around the world has an especially
large impact on land use because each pound of animal protein requires
the consumption of more than seven pounds of plant protein.
The enormous northern boreal forests in Russia, Canada, Alaska,
Norway, Sweden, and Finland (and parts of China, Korea, and Japan) are
also at great risk. Recent reestimates of the amount of carbon stored in
these forests—not only in the trees, but also in the deep soils, which

include many carbon-rich peatlands—calculate that as much as 22
percent of all carbon stored on and in the Earth’s surface is in these
boreal forests.
In Russia’s boreal forest—by far the largest continuous expanse of
trees on the planet—the larch trees that used to predominate are
disappearing and are being replaced by spruce and fir. When the needles
of the larch fall in the winter, unlike those of the spruce and fir, the
sunlight passing through the barren limbs is reflected by the snow cover
back into space, keeping the ground frozen. By contrast, when the
conifer needles stay on the trees and absorb the heat energy from the
sunlight, temperatures at ground level increase, thus accelerating the
melting of the snow and the thawing of the tundra. The intricate
symbiosis between the larch and the tundra is thereby disrupted, causing
both to disappear. Millions of similar symbiotic relationships in nature
are also being disrupted.
Although some Canadian provinces have impressive policies requiring
sustainable forestry and limiting the damage from logging operations,
Russia does not. And in both Russia and North America, the forests are
being ravaged by the impact of global warming on droughts, fires, and
insects. Beetles have expanded their range as average temperatures have
increased, and have multiplied quickly as the number of cold snaps that
used to hold them back has diminished. In many areas they are now
reproducing three generations per summer rather than one. In the last
decade, more than 27 million acres (110,000 square kilometers) of
forests in the Western U.S. and Canada have been devastated by what
the United Nations biodiversity experts described as “an unprecedented
outbreak of the mountain pine beetle.”
In mountainous areas, the earlier melting of snowpacks is depriving
trees of needed water supplies during the hot summer months, which
further increases their vulnerability to drought. One expert studying
these issues, Robert L. Crabtree, told The New York Times recently, “A lot
of ecologists like me are starting to think all these agents, like insects
and fires, are just the proximate cause, and the real culprit is water
stress caused by climate change.”
The drought conditions weaken the trees and make them more
vulnerable to beetles. And the increasing numbers of forest fires,
scientists have long since established, are going up in direct proportion

to the rising temperatures. There is no doubt that changes in forest
management practices over the last several decades have contributed to
the risk, frequency, and size of many forest fires. But the myriad impacts
of global warming on fires far exceeds the impact of management
practices.
The scale of the losses in the areas being deforested is completely
unprecedented, according to experts, and as a result, enormous
quantities of CO2 are being released to the atmosphere. Like the Arctic
tundra, the great forests of the world contain large amounts of CO2, in
the trees and plants themselves, in the soil beneath them, and in the
forest litter that covers it. The great northern boreal forest of Canada
and Alaska may have already become a net contributor to CO2 levels in
the atmosphere, rather than a net “sink,” withdrawing CO2 as the trees
grow.
If adequate nutrients are available, the extra CO2 in the atmosphere
has the potential to stimulate some additional tree growth, though most
experts point out that other limiting factors such as water availability
and increased threats from insects and fire are overwhelming this
potential. However, in spite of these devastating losses in forestland, the
net loss of forests has slowed in recent years, primarily due to the
planting of new forests and due to the natural regrowth of trees on
abandoned agricultural land. According to the United Nations, most of
the regrowth has been in temperate zones, including in forested areas of
eastern North America, Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
According to one study, successfully cutting the rate of deforestation in
half by 2030 would save the world $3.7 trillion in environmental costs.
China has led the world in new tree planting; in fact, over the last
several years, China has planted 40 percent as many trees as the rest of
the world put together. Since 1981, all citizens of China older than age
eleven (and younger than sixty) have been formally required to plant at
least three trees per year. To date, China has planted approximately 100
million acres of new trees. Following China, the countries with the
largest net gains in trees include the U.S., India, Vietnam, and Spain.
Unfortunately, many of these new forests include only a single tree
species, which results in a sharp decline in the biodiversity of animals
and plants supported by the monoculture forest, compared to the rich

variety supported by a healthy, multispecies primary forest.
For all of the needed attention paid to the sequestration of carbon in
trees and vegetation, the amount of carbon sequestered in the first few
feet of soil (mainly on the 10.57 percent of the Earth’s land surface
covered by arable land) is almost twice as much as all the carbon in the
vegetation and the atmosphere combined. Indeed, well before the
Industrial Revolution and the adoption of coal and oil as the world’s
principal energy sources, the release of CO2 from plowing and land
degradation contributed significantly to the excess of CO2 in the air. By
some estimates, approximately 60 percent of the carbon that used to be
stored in soils, trees, and other vegetation has been released to the
atmosphere by land clearing for agriculture and urbanization since 1800.
Modern industrial agricultural techniques—which rely on plowing,
monoculture planting, and heavy use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers—
continue to release CO2 into the atmosphere by depleting the organic
carbon contained in healthy soils. The plowing facilitates wind and
water erosion of topsoils; the reliance on monocultures, instead of mixed
planting and crop rotation, prevents the natural restoration of soil
health; and the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers has an effect not
dissimilar from steroids: they boost the growth of the plants at the
expense of the health of the soil and interfere with the normal
sequestration of organic carbon in soils.
The diversion of cropland to biofuel plantations also results in a net
increase in CO2, while encouraging the destruction of yet more
forestland, either directly, as in the case of the peat forests—or
indirectly, by pushing subsistence farmers to clear more forests to
replace the land they used to plant. As I have previously acknowledged
publicly, I made a mistake supporting first generation ethanol programs
while serving in the U.S. government, because I believed at the time that
the net CO2 reductions would be significant as biofuels replaced
petroleum products. The calculations done since then have proven that
assumption to be wrong. I and others also failed to anticipate the rapid
growth of biofuels and the enormous scale they have now reached
worldwide.

THE EXTINCTIONS OF SPECIES
The destruction of forests—particularly tropical forests that are rich in

biodiversity—is also one of the principal factors, alongside global
warming, that is driving what most biologists consider the worst
consequence of the global environmental crisis: a spasm of extinction
that has the potential to cause the loss of 20 to 50 percent of all living
species on Earth within this century.
So much heat is already being trapped by global warming pollution
that average world temperatures are increasing much more rapidly than
the pace to which many animals and plants can adapt. Amphibians
appear to be at greatest risk during this early stage, with multiple
species of frogs, toads, salamanders, and others going extinct at a rapid
rate all over the world. Approximately one third of all amphibian species
are at high risk of extinction and 50 percent are declining. Experts have
found that in addition to climate change and habitat loss, many
amphibians have been hit by a spreading fungal disease, which may also
be linked to global warming. Coral species, as noted earlier, are also
facing a rapidly increasing risk of extinction.
According to experts, the other factors driving this global extinction
event include, in addition to global warming and deforestation, the
destruction of other key habitats like wetlands and coral reefs, human-
caused toxic pollution, invasive species, and the overexploitation of
some species by humans. Many wildlife species in Africa are particularly
threatened by poaching and the encroachment of human activities into
their territories, particularly the conversion of wild areas into
agriculture.
There have been five previous extinction events in the last 450 million
years. Although some of them are still not well understood, the most
recent, 65 million years ago (when the age of the dinosaurs ended) was
caused by a large asteroid crashing into the Earth near Yucatan. Unlike
the previous five extinction events, all of which had natural causes, the
one today is, in the words of the distinguished biologist E. O. Wilson,
“precipitated entirely by man.”
Many species of plants and animals are being forced to migrate to
higher latitudes—north in the northern hemisphere and south in the
southern hemisphere (one large study found that plants and animals are

moving on average 3.8 miles per decade toward the poles)—and to
higher altitudes (at least where there are higher areas to migrate to).
One study of a century of animal surveys at Yosemite National Park
found that half of the mountain species had moved, on average, more
than 500 meters higher.
Some, when they reach the poles and the mountaintops and can go no
farther, are being pushed off the planet and into extinction. Others,
because they cannot move to new habitats as quickly as the climate is
changing, are also being driven toward extinction. A recent Duke
University study for the National Science Foundation found that more
than half of the tree species in the eastern United States are at risk
because they cannot adapt to climate change quickly enough.
Almost 25 percent of all plant species, according to scientists, are
facing a rising risk of extinction. Agricultural scientists are especially
concerned about the extinction of wild varieties of food crop plants.
There are twelve so-called Vavilovian Centers of Diversity, named after
Nikolai Vavilov, the great Russian scientist whose colleagues died of
starvation during the siege of Leningrad protecting the seeds he had
gathered from all over the world. One of them left a letter along with the
enormous untouched collection of seeds, saying, “When all the world is
in the flames of war, we will keep this collection for the future of the
people.” Vavilov himself died in prison after his criticism of Trofim
Lysenko led to his persecution, arrest, conviction, and death sentence.
The ancient homes of food crops are sources of abundant genetic
diversity that serve as treasure troves for geneticists looking for traits
that can assist in the survival and adaptation of food crops to new pests
and changing environmental conditions. But many of these have already
gone extinct and others are threatened by a variety of factors, including
development, monoculture, row cropping, war, and other threats.
The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity notes, among
other examples, that the number of local rice varieties being cultivated
in China has declined from 46,000 in the 1950s to only 1,000 a few
years ago. Seed banks like the one Vavilov first established are now
cataloguing and storing many seed varieties. Norway has taken the lead
with a secure storage vault hollowed out of solid rock in Svalbard, north
of the Arctic Circle, as a precautionary measure for the future of
mankind.

THE LOSS OF living species with whom we share the Earth and the
widespread destruction of landscapes and habitats that hundreds of
generations have called “home” should, along with the manifold other
consequences of the climate crisis, lead all of us to awaken to the moral
obligation we have to our own children and grandchildren. Many of
those who have recognized the gravity of this crisis have not only made
changes in their own lives but have begun to urge their governments to
make the big policy changes that are essential to securing the human
future.
THE PATH FORWARD
Generally speaking, there are four groups of policy options that can be
used to drive solutions to the climate crisis. First and most important, we
should use tax policy to discourage CO2 emissions and drive the speedier
adoption of alternative technologies. Most experts consider a large and
steadily rising CO2 tax to be the most effective way to use market forces
to drive a large-scale shift toward a low-carbon economy.
Economists have long understood that taxes do more than raise
revenue for the governments that impose them; to some extent, at least,
they also discourage and reduce the economic activities that are taxed.
By using taxes to adjust the overall level of cost attributed to the
production of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, governments can send a
powerful signal to the market that, in the best case, unleashes the
creativity of entrepreneurs and CEOs in searching for the most cost-
effective ways of reducing global warming pollution. That is the reason I
have advocated the use of CO2 taxes for thirty-five years as the policy
most likely to be successful. And implementing the tax in a way that
escalates over time would provide the long-term signal to industry and
the public that is needed to plan effective changes over coming decades.
Taxes, of course, are always and everywhere unpopular with those
who pay them. Therefore, the enactment of this policy requires strong
and determined leadership and, to the extent possible, bipartisanship. In
recognition of those simple but significant political facts of life, I have

always recommended that CO2 taxes be coupled with reductions in other
taxes by an equal amount.
Unfortunately, most people are far more willing to believe that
government will indeed impose a new tax, but far less willing to believe
that it will give that revenue back in another form. The forty-year
campaign in the U.S. by the conservative counterreform alliance led by
corporate interests and business elites has been effective in demonizing
government at all levels and pursuing a “starve the beast” strategy that
focuses on shrill opposition to any tax of any kind—unless the tax in
question falls on low-income wage earners.
Other versions of this proposal have coupled the CO2 tax with a rebate
plan, to send a check to each taxpayer. Under this approach, sometimes
labeled the “fee and dividend” approach or “feebate,” those who were
more successful in reducing their CO2 emissions would actually make
money, or use it to pay for more efficient or renewable energy
technologies. Yet another version, which was introduced in the U.S.
Congress in 2012 but never voted upon, would return two thirds of the
revenue raised by a carbon tax to the taxpayers but would have applied
one third to a reduction in the budget deficit. Unfortunately, the
ingrained opposition to any new taxes—even if they are revenue neutral
—has thus far made it difficult to build support for the single most
effective strategy for solving the climate crisis, a CO2 tax.
A second set of policy options involves the use of subsidies. To begin
with, we should immediately remove existing subsidies that encourage
fossil fuel consumption. In the United States, for example, approximately
$4 billion each year—mainly in the form of special tax subsidies—go to
carbon fuel companies. In India, to pick another example, the dirtiest
liquid fuel, kerosene, is heavily subsidized.
Instead, governments should provide robust subsidies for the
development of renewable energy technologies, at least until they reach
the scale of production that will bring sufficient cost reductions to
enable them to be competitive with unsubsidized fossil fuels. This policy
would be even more effective in combination with a CO2 tax, which
would appropriately include in the price of fossil fuels some of the
enormous costs they impose on society.
Limited government subsidies have already been successful in

promoting more rapid adoption of renewable energy technologies. In
fact, the cost reductions associated with the increasing scale of
production have now put some renewable technologies much closer to a
price that makes them competitive with coal and oil. Both solar and
wind technologies are only a few years away from reaching that
threshold. Yet the large carbon polluters and their allies have been
working hard to eliminate subsidies for renewable energy before these
clean technologies can become competitive with dirty energy—which is
ironic, given that the global subsidies for the burning of fossil fuels,
described above, greatly exceed the subsidies for renewable sources of
energy, even though the latter are often miscalculated and misstated by
opponents, who lump them in with subsidies for nuclear energy, so-
called clean coal technologies, and other nonrenewable options.
The third policy option is an indirect subsidy for renewable energy in
the form of a mandate requiring utilities to achieve a certain percentage
of electricity production from renewable sources. This mechanism has
already worked in numerous nations and regions, though many in the
utility sector oppose such measures. Several U.S. states—including, most
prominently, California—have successfully implemented this approach,
and it is a major factor in the increased renewable energy installations in
the United States. Germany has been perhaps the most successful nation
in the world in using this policy option to stimulate the rapid adoption
of both solar and wind technologies.
On a global basis, the combination of government subsidies for the
speedier development of renewable energy technologies and the
requirements that some utilities use them to produce a higher
percentage of the electricity they generate has contributed to dramatic
advances far beyond what most predicted. In 2002, a leading energy
consulting firm projected that one gigawatt of solar electricity would be
produced worldwide by 2010; that goal has been exceeded by seventeen
times. The World Bank projected in 1996 that China would install 500
megawatts of solar energy by 2020. China installed double that amount
by 2010.
The past projections of increased wind energy have also turned out to
be overly pessimistic. The U.S. Department of Energy projected in 1999
that the U.S. wind capacity would reach ten gigawatts by 2010. Instead,
that goal was met in 2006 and has now been exceeded four times over.

In 2000, the U.S. Energy Information Agency projected that worldwide
wind capacity would reach thirty gigawatts by 2010. Instead, that goal
was exceeded by a factor of seven. The same agency projected that
China would install two gigawatts of wind by 2010; that goal was
exceeded 22-fold and is expected to be exceeded 75-fold by 2020.
As Dave Roberts of the environmental magazine Grist has pointed out,
the world has previously witnessed predictions for the adoption of new
technology that “weren’t just off, they were way off.” Industry and
investor predictions at the beginning of the mobile telephone revolution,
for example, wildly underestimated how quickly that new technology
would spread. After the Arab-OPEC oil embargos in the 1970s,
projections for the adoption of energy efficiency measures were also way
off. What both of these prior examples have in common with renewable
energy technologies is that all three are “widely dispersed” technologies
that experienced unpredicted exponential growth because of a virtuous
cycle, within which the increasing scale of production drove sharply
lower costs—which in turn drove even faster growth.
The most frequently cited precedent for this phenomenon is the
computer chip industry. As noted earlier, Moore’s Law—which
accurately predicted the relentless 50 percent cost reduction for
computer chips every eighteen to twenty-four months—is not a law of
nature, but instead a law of investment. In the early days of the
computer revolution sixty years ago, chip manufacturers came to two
conclusions: first, the potential market for computer chips was enormous
and fast-growing—almost limitless; second, the technology development
path was highly sensitive to innovation.
These dual realizations caused the leading chip manufacturers to
devote enormous sums to research and development in order to protect
their prospective market share against competitors. Over time, a
collective consensus emerged that so long as they could continue
reducing their costs on the pathway described by Moore’s Law, they
would be likely to retain or grow their market share. In other words,
Moore’s Law was transformed from a description of the past into a self-
fulfilling prophecy about the future. Policies designed to create the
rational expectation of steadily growing markets for renewable energy
technologies can steepen a similar self-sustaining cost reduction curve
for renewable energy.

The fourth policy option is widely known as cap and trade. This
proposal is also designed to mobilize market forces as an ally in
achieving CO2 reductions. In spite of the relentless attacks on the
mechanism, cap and trade remains favored by many policy experts as
the best approach for securing a global agreement. Although I strongly
favor a CO2 tax, one of its disadvantages is that it is difficult to imagine
coordinating national tax policies in many countries around the world
with widely differing tax systems and differing compliance records. By
contrast, a global cap and trade system would be inherently easier to
harmonize among countries around the world with widely varying tax
systems.
Cap and trade is based on an extremely successful policy innovated by
former president George H. W. Bush to reduce emissions of sulfur
dioxide (SO2) in order to mitigate the acid precipitation in states
downwind to the north and east of the Midwestern coal plants. The
policy was embraced by Republicans as an alternative to government
regulations mandating reductions in each plant.
The theory was that a slowly declining limit on emissions, when
coupled with an ability to buy and sell emission “permits,” would
maximize reductions by giving a market incentive to those companies
that were most efficient in limiting emissions, while simultaneously
allowing a little more time for those companies having difficulty. The
results were astoundingly successful. Emissions dropped much faster
than predicted at a cost that was only a fraction of what was predicted.
Consequently, advocates of CO2 reductions felt that this mechanism
could serve as a bipartisan compromise that would effectively reduce
global warming pollution.
Unfortunately, as soon as cap and trade was presented as a bipartisan
compromise, many conservatives who had originally supported the idea
turned against it and began calling it “cap and tax.” Thus have fossil fuel
companies and their ideological allies paralyzed the policymaking
process both at the global level and in the United States.
For many years, the effort to achieve a global consensus on action to
solve the climate crisis was bedeviled by the international fault line
between rich and poor nations, with poor countries insisting that the
priority they placed on quickly replicating the economic development

that had already occurred in wealthy countries meant that they could
not afford to participate in a global effort to reduce global warming
pollution. Proposed treaties routinely placed the first obligations on
wealthy countries alone, leaving any requirements on developing nations
to future rounds of negotiation.
After all, the need for more energy to power sustainable economic
development in poor countries is acute. An estimated 1.3 billion people
in the world still have no access whatsoever to electricity, and in spite of
historic reductions in global poverty, the per capita income levels in
many energy-poor countries are so low that it is easy to understand why
they have resisted any constraints on potential increases in CO2
emissions at a time when the wealthier countries have made such
profligate use of fossil energy during their own past periods of economic
takeoff and development.
Much has changed, however. The reality of the climate crisis has
become much more apparent in developing nations as they experience
harsh impacts and struggle to find the resources for disaster recovery
and adaptation that are more readily available in developed countries.
As a result, many developing countries have now changed their tune and
are actively pushing the world community to take action on climate,
even if it means that they too must shoulder part of the burden for
responding. The World Bank estimates that more than three quarters of
the costs from climate disruption will be borne by developing countries,
most of which lack the resources and capacities to respond on their own.
Expenditures for the installation of renewable energy sources in the
developing world now exceed those in rich countries. According to
David Wheeler at the Center for Global Development, developing
countries now are responsible for two thirds of the new renewable
energy capacity since 2002 in the world, and overall have more than
half of the installed global renewable energy capacity.
Even the richest countries are now being forced to recognize the
economic toll of climate-related disasters. In the U.S.—still the richest
country in the world—political controversies over the rising costs of
disaster relief have resulted in cutbacks to emergency recovery programs
that have hampered the ability of many communities to get back on
their feet after climate calamities. But 2011–12 was a wakeup call.

In 2011, the U.S. had eight climate-related disasters, each costing over
$1 billion. Tropical Storm Irene, which mostly missed New York City,
nevertheless caused more than $15 billion in damage. Texas experienced
the worst drought and highest temperatures in its history, and wildfires
in 240 of its 242 counties. Thousands of daily all-time-high temperature
records were broken or tied. Tornadoes, which climate researchers are
still unwilling to link to global warming (partly because the records of
past tornadoes are incomplete and imprecise), ravaged Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, Joplin, Missouri, and many other communities; seven of them
caused more than $1 billion in damage. In 2012, more than half of the
counties in the U.S. suffered from drought. Hurricane Sandy cost at least
$71 billion.
One of the principal objections to cap and trade in the United States
has been based on the fear that developing countries would not be
subject to the proposal and that U.S. industries would therefore be at a
competitive disadvantage. In the last two decades, the emergence of
Earth Inc. has inspired fear among factory workers in the U.S. and other
developed nations that their jobs were being taken away and
redistributed to factory workers in poorer countries where labor was
cheap and advanced technologies were becoming available.
Consequently, any perceived additional competitive advantage for
developing countries became politically toxic in much of the industrial
world.
That is one of many reasons why there is support for proposals to
integrate CO2 reductions into the World Trade Organization’s definition
of what is permitted by way of “border adjustments” to add the cost of
CO2 reductions to the price of imported goods from a country that does
not require them to a country that does. In 2009, the World Trade
Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme jointly
published a report supporting such border adjustments.
I have long been a vocal advocate of reciprocal free trade even though
that position did not endear me to my own political party. And I
continue to strongly believe in free and fair international trade. But a
fair set of rules is one that is designed to create and maintain a level
playing field, and, in my view, CO2 reductions certainly qualify as one of
the factors that should be included in border adjustments.

When I was vice president, I joined with others in negotiating a global
treaty in Kyoto, Japan, to adopt the cap and trade mechanism as the
basis for the world’s effort to reduce CO2 emissions. The Kyoto Protocol
was adopted by 191 countries and by the European Union as a whole,
and in spite of the U.S. refusal to participate, and in spite of
implementation problems, has been a success in most of the nations,
provinces, and regions that are striving to meet its commitments.
Even though some nations using carbon credit trading have
manipulated and abused the system, and even though problems emerged
in the early days of the European system, Europe has taken action to
address the problems and most nations with well-designed systems are
on course to sharp emissions reductions. One policy analyst with the
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Bill Hare, said, “I can’t
see any other way to do it. Other policies are not easier to negotiate. The
carbon market may be complex, but we live in a complex world.”
Unfortunately, the decision by the United States not to join the Kyoto
Protocol and the failure to gain commitments from China and other
“developing countries” (China in those years was still labeled a
developing country) meant that the two largest emitters of global
warming pollution were not included. If the U.S. had joined, the
momentum for global participation and compliance would have been
overwhelming and developing countries would have faced unrelenting
pressure to join in the treaty’s second phase, as anticipated.
Yet even though the U.S. political system is still paralyzed at the
federal level, governments of many other nations are beginning to adopt
new policies in recognition of the dangers we face and the opportunities
to be seized. In addition to the European Union, Switzerland, New
Zealand, Japan, one Canadian province, and twenty U.S. states will
imminently begin cap and trade systems. Most significantly, California
began implementing its system in 2012.
Australia, the largest coal exporter in the world, has adopted a plan
that includes both a CO2 tax and a cap and trade system that has been
linked to the European Union’s system. South Korea is in the process of
setting up its own system and fourteen other countries have announced
formally that they are planning to launch cap and trade systems: Brazil,
Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco,

South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, and Vietnam.
Wolfgang Sterk of the Wuppertal Institute in Germany says, “The
carbon market is not dead.… If a national system emerges in China,
depending on the design and scope, it may become the biggest in the
world, and allowances in that system would then give a global price
signal.”
China is implementing a cap and trade system in five cities (Beijing,
Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen) and two provinces
(Guangdong and Hubei). These pilots are intended to be up and running
in 2013 in order to provide a learning experience that will be used to
implement a nationwide cap and trade system by 2015.
As with some of the other commitments made by the Chinese
government, some experts remain skeptical that they will follow through
on this plan, but observers report that progress has already been made in
most of the pilots that were designated. Together, the areas in the pilot
program represent almost 20 percent of the Chinese population and
almost 30 percent of its economic output.
China’s commitment to sustainability and renewable energy has at
once helped and hurt the world’s ability to solve the climate crisis. By
limiting imports while using subsidies to drive the cost of renewable
energy technologies below the level at which Western companies can
compete, China has served its own interest in dominating what everyone
expects to be a key industry of the twenty-first century, but has damaged
the rest of the world’s ability to reap the benefits of fair competition in
quickly advancing the state of these technologies.
In 2011, the United States filed a formal complaint against China for
allegedly providing unfair subsidies to its wind and solar manufacturers.
As of 2012, the U.S. imposed tariffs of approximately 30 percent on
Chinese-imported solar panels, and the European Union began its
consideration of a similar complaint. Nevertheless, in spite of these
problems, the low prices that resulted from China’s commitment and
subsidies helped drive the scale of production to higher levels than
anyone predicted, thus producing sharper cost reductions than
anticipated.
China’s impressive commitment to move forward aggressively with the
deployment of wind and solar has inspired many other nations around
the world, but its continuing enormous investment in new coal-fired

generating plants has caused it to overtake the United States as the
largest global warming polluter on the planet. Everyone realizes the
importance to China of continuing its development of business and
industry in order to continue reducing the levels of abject poverty in its
country, but protests inside China against dirty energy projects are
growing in several regions.
In the last ten years, China’s energy consumption has gone up more
than 150 percent, surpassing that of the U.S. And, unlike the United
States, China still gets approximately 70 percent of its energy from coal.
Its coal consumption has increased 200 percent over the same decade, to
a level three times that of U.S. coal consumption. China is both the
largest importer of coal in the world (followed by Japan, South Korea,
and India) and the largest producer of coal, by far—producing half of the
world’s coal, two and a half times more than the U.S. (which is the
second-largest producer of coal). Indeed, the amount by which China’s
coal consumption increased from 2007 to 2012 amounts to additional
demand that is equivalent to all of the U.S. annual consumption. Beijing
has proposed a cap on coal production and use to be implemented in
2015, though many experts are skeptical about their ability to stay
within the cap.
Even though its appetite for oil pales in comparison to its consumption
of coal, the amount of oil China used doubled during the 1990s, doubled
again in the first decade of this century, and is now second only to that
of the United States. For the first time, in 2010, Saudi Arabia’s oil
exports to China exceeded those to the U.S. In 2012, China’s domestic oil
reserves appeared to have peaked. And even though they are
aggressively developing offshore oilfields, the Chinese already import
half the oil they use, and the U.S. Energy Information Agency predicts
that China will import three quarters of its oil within the next two
decades.
Security experts have noted that this trend has implications for
Chinese foreign policy in areas like the disputed reserves in the South
China Sea and its forward-leaning engagement with oil-rich countries in
the Middle East and Africa. Many observers found it ironic that after the
United States invaded Iraq—at least in part to ensure the security of
Persian Gulf oil supplies—the Chinese became the largest investor in
Iraq’s oilfields.

On a per capita basis, energy consumption in China is only a fraction
of that in the U.S. and other more developed countries, though its per
capita CO2 emissions are approaching those of Europe. Since the reforms
of Deng Xiaoping were implemented more than thirty years ago, China
has converted much of its economy from agriculture to industry and the
transition has been even more energy-intensive because of subsidies to
fossil fuels—which reduce energy efficiency in every country that uses
them. In fact, electricity rates, petroleum product prices, and natural gas
prices are all fixed by the government at below market levels, though
there is active debate in Beijing about letting all energy prices float
further upward to global market levels. Overall, China is lagging behind
other leading global economies in crucial areas of energy efficiency.
In spite of its energy challenges and its massive CO2 emissions, China
has implemented an extremely impressive set of policies to stimulate the
production and use of renewable energy technologies. In its latest Five
Year Plan, China announced that it will invest almost $500 billion in
clean energy. The Chinese make use of “feed-in tariffs,” a complex
subsidy plan that worked extremely well in Germany. China also uses a
full range of other policies, including tax subsidies and the imposition of
renewable energy percentage targets on utilities.
In addition to capping the use of coal, it has also established a number
of hard targets for the reduction of CO2 emissions per unit of economic
growth. A former vice minister of environmental protection, Pan Yue,
said in 2005 that China’s economic “miracle will end soon, because the
environment can no longer keep pace.”
In the last decade, there has been tension between goals set by the
national government and implementation strategies pursued by regional
governments, which are typically intertwined with industrial energy
users. As a measure of the national government’s seriousness in
enforcing the CO2 reduction and energy intensity reduction targets,
Beijing sent officials to these regions in 2011 to impose forced closings
of factories and even blackouts in order to ensure that the goals were
met. More recently, the central government has linked promotions of
local and regional officials to their success in achieving these goals.
In the renewable energy sector, China has dominated global
production of windmills and solar panels, as noted above, but has made

less progress in the installation of solar panels than it has in installing
windmills—partly because it exports 95 percent of the solar panels it
produces, many of them to the United States. In some recent years, 50
percent of all the windmills installed globally were in China, though
almost a third of its windmills either are not connected to the electricity
grid or are connected to lines that cannot handle the electricity flow.
The central government is also directing an ambitious plan to build
the most sophisticated and extensive “super grid” in the world in order
to remedy this problem. Beijing has announced that it will spend $269
billion over the next few years on construction of 200,000 kilometers of
high-voltage transmission lines, which one industry trade publication
noted is “almost the equivalent of rebuilding the United States’ 257,500-
kilometer transmission network from scratch.”
As many countries have realized, high-capacity, high-efficiency
electricity grids are essential in order to use intermittent sources of
electricity like those produced by windmills and solar panels, and to
transmit renewable electricity from the areas of highest potential
production to the cities where it is used. As the percentage of electricity
from the sources increases, the importance of smart grids and super grids
will increase.
Plans are proceeding to link the high-sun areas of North Africa and the
Middle East to large electricity consumers in Europe. Similar plans are
on the drawing boards in North America, where high-sun areas of the
Southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico can easily provide all of the
electricity needed in both countries. And in both India and Australia,
plans are under way to link high-sun and -wind regions with high-
electricity-consuming regions.
There is, in any case, a powerful need to upgrade the reliability,
carrying capacity, and advanced features of the electricity distribution
grid in rich and poor countries alike. In the U.S., for example,
interruptions in electrical service and unplanned blackouts, combined
with inefficiencies in distribution and transmission, impose an estimated
annual cost of more than $200 billion per year. In India, the largest
blackout in history—by far—occurred in 2012 when more than 600
million people lost power due to problems in managing electricity flows
through the antiquated grid system.
In addition to the development of super grids and smart grids—which

can empower end-users of electricity with tools to become far more
efficient in their ability to reduce energy consumption and save money—
there is a pressing need for more efficient ways to store energy. A great
deal of investment has gone into the research and development of new
batteries that can be distributed throughout the electrical grid and in
homes and businesses in order to reduce the need for wasteful
overcapacity in electrical generation that is needed during the peak
hours of use. These batteries can also provide valuable electricity storage
when used in electric cars that, like most cars, spend the vast majority of
their time in garages or parking spaces.
Toward that end, automakers around the world are launching fleets of
electric vehicles in anticipation of a shift toward renewable electricity
and away from expensive and risky petroleum supplies. At least some
manufacturers in almost every industry are also converting to strategies
that emphasize lower energy and material consumption. Energy
efficiency expert Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has
thoroughly documented the impressive movement by many companies
to take advantage of these opportunities.
In addition to solar and wind, wave and tidal energy are both being
explored—in Portugal, Scotland, and the United States, for example—
and although the contribution from these sources is still minuscule,
many believe that they may have great potential in the future.
Nevertheless, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in a
special report on renewable energy sources in 2011, said that wave and
tidal power are “unlikely to significantly contribute to global energy
supply before 2020.”
Geothermal energy has made a significant contribution in nations like
Iceland, New Zealand, and the Philippines, where there is an abundance
of easily exploitable geothermal energy. The vast potential for
geothermal energy derived from much deeper geological regions has
been unexpectedly difficult to develop, but here again, entrepreneurs in
many countries are working hard to perfect this technology.
Although the potential for hydroelectric energy has been almost fully
exploited in major areas of the world, there are undeveloped resources
in Russia, Central Asia, and Africa that have great potential, though
critics also warn about serious ecological risks in particular locations.
The use of biomass is expanding, and in some countries is beginning to

play a significant role. In addition to traditional uses of manure and
other forms of biomass for cooking, modern biomass techniques are
being used to burn wood from renewable forests in far more efficient
processes to produce heat and electricity. As with biofuels, the net
impact of biomass use, when analyzed on a lifecycle basis, depends a
great deal on the careful calculation of all of the energy inputs, the
impact on land use and biodiversity, and the time periods required to
recycle the carbon through the regrowth of the plants and trees.
There is also a global movement to produce methane and syngas from
landfills containing large amounts of organic waste, and to produce
biogas from large concentrations of animal waste gathered in animal
feedlot operations. China, for example, has a major focus on biogas—
requiring the installation of biogas digesters at all large cattle, pig, and
chicken farms to derive the gas from animal waste, though enforcement
of this mandate has been lagging. The U.S., which has a voluntary
program, and other countries should follow their lead.
FALSE SOLUTIONS
There are two strategies for responding to global warming that are
unlikely to work, even though each one has enthusiastic supporters. The
first is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). I have long supported
research and development of CCS technologies, but have been skeptical
that they will play more than a minor role. It is always possible that
there will be an unexpected technological breakthrough that greatly
reduces the cost of capturing CO2 emissions and either storing them
safely underground or transforming them in some manner into building
materials or other forms that make them useful and safe. My friend
Richard Branson has established a generous prize for the removal of CO2
from the atmosphere, and invited NASA scientist and global warming
expert Jim Hansen and me to be judges in the competition.
Barring breakthroughs, however, the cost of the CCS technology
presently available—both in money and energy—is so high that utilities
and others are unlikely to use it. A utility operating a coal-fired
generating plant and selling electricity to its customers would have to
divert approximately 35 percent of all the electricity it produces just to

provide power for the capture, compression, and storage of the CO2 that
would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. While that might be
interpreted as a bargain if it saved civilization’s future, the utility could
not afford to do it and still stay in business. And the volumes of CO2
emissions involved are so enormous that taxpayers do not have much
appetite for shouldering the expense.
While safe and secure underground storage areas do exist, the process
of locating them and then painstakingly investigating their
characteristics in order to ensure that the CO2 will not leak to the
surface and into the air is quite significant. There has been notable
public opposition to the siting of such underground storage facilities
near populated areas. The consensus among those scientists and
engineers who are experts in this subject is that the longer the CO2 is
stored, the safer it becomes—because it begins to be absorbed into the
geological formation itself. Nevertheless, the overall expense of CCS has
prevented its adoption by large carbon polluters.
Both the United States and China announced large government-
financed demonstration projects for CCS, though the Chinese project—
known as GreenGen—is behind schedule, and the U.S. project—called
FutureGen—is mired in the endemic political paralysis that characterizes
the present state of democracy in the United States. Norway, the United
Kingdom, Canada, and Australia are among the other countries pursuing
CCS. However, one of the world’s leading experts on CCS, Howard
Herzog of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has said for years
that the real key to making this technology profitable and viable is to
put a price on carbon.
The second technology that is sometimes described as a silver bullet
that could eliminate most CO2 emissions, at least from the electricity-
generating sector, is one with a long and fraught history—nuclear
power. The present generation of 800 to 1,200 megawatt pressurized
light water reactors is, unfortunately, probably a technological dead end.
For a variety of reasons, the cost of reactors has been increasing
significantly and steadily for decades. In the aftermath of the triple
tragedy in Fukushima, Japan, the prospects for nuclear energy have
further declined.
The safety record, while much improved, is still one that has been

producing public opposition. France, which used to have a global
reputation as the most advanced and efficient nation in nuclear power,
has had difficulties with its new generation of reactors. South Korea, on
the other hand, has been moving forward with a design that many
experts believe is promising. Several new reactors are under construction
around the world, but as our low-carbon energy options are evaluated,
nuclear energy is severely hampered by both cost and perceived safety
issues. There is still a distinct possibility that the research and
development of a new generation of smaller and hopefully safer reactors
may yet play a significant role in the world’s energy future. We should
know by 2030.
In spite of their problems, both CCS and nuclear power have had
enduring appeal, partly because they are technological solutions that
offer the possibility that a single strategy might lead to a relatively quick
fix. Indeed, psychologists tell us that one of the other glitches in our
common way of thinking about big problems is what they call “single-
action bias,” a deeply ingrained preference for single solutions to
problems, however complex the problems may be.
This same common flaw in our way of thinking helps to explain the
otherwise inexplicable support for a number of completely bizarre
proposals that are collectively known as geoengineering. Some engineers
and scientists argued several years ago that we should float billions of
tiny strips of tinfoil in orbit around the Earth to reflect more incoming
sunlight and thereby cool down the global temperature. The public
record does not indicate whether they were wearing tinfoil hats when
they launched their idea. An earlier proposal in the same vein featured a
giant space parasol, also intended to block incoming sunlight. It would
have had to be 1,000 miles in diameter and would have required a moon
base for its construction and launch. Others have suggested that we
attempt to accomplish the same result by injecting massive quantities of
sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere in order to block sunlight.
The fact that any reputable scientist would lend his or her name to
such proposals is certainly a measure of the desperation that those who
understand the climate crisis feel about the abject failure of the world’s
political leadership to begin reducing the rate of emissions of global
warming pollution. But given the unanticipated consequences of the
planetary experiment we already have under way—pumping 90 million

tons of heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere every twenty-four
hours—it would, in my opinion, be utterly insane to launch a second
planetary experiment in the faint hope that it might temporarily cancel
out some of the consequences of the first experiment without doing even
more harm in the process.
Among the other consequences of the SO2 proposal that was pointed
out in a 2012 scientific study is this startling change: the sky we have
gazed at since the beginning of humankind’s existence on Earth would
no longer be blue—or at least no longer be as blue. Does that matter?
Perhaps we could explain to our grandchildren why there were so many
references to “blue skies” in the history of the cultures on Earth. Maybe
they would understand that it was necessary to sacrifice the blueness of
the sky in order to accommodate the political agenda of oil, coal, and
gas companies. The levels of pollution above cities have already changed
the color of the night sky from black to reddish black.
No one has any idea what such proposals would mean for the
photosynthesis of food crops and other plants; light needed for life
would be partially blocked in order to create more “thermal space” to be
occupied by steadily increasing emissions from the burning of fossil
fuels. The effectiveness of photovoltaic conversion of sunlight into
electricity—one of the most promising renewable energy technologies—
might also be damaged. And none of these exotic proposals would do
anything whatsoever to halt the acidification of the oceans.
In addition, if we failed to reduce CO2 emissions, the sulfur dioxide
injections or orbiting tinfoil strips would have to be increased steadily,
year by year. Nor does anyone have the faintest idea of what these wack-
adoodle proposals would do to climate patterns, precipitation, storm
tracks, and all of the other phenomena that are already being disrupted.
Have we gone stark raving mad?
No, we haven’t gone mad. It’s just that our way of communicating
about global challenges and debating reasonable solutions has been
subjected to an unhealthy degree of distortion and control by wealthy
corporate interests who are themselves desperate to prevent serious
consideration of reducing global warming pollution.
Technically, there are a range of benign geoengineering proposals that
may well offer marginal benefits without imposing reckless risks.

Painting roofs white, for example, or planting millions of roof gardens
are both examples of riskless changes to the reflective characteristics of
the Earth’s surface that could bounce more of the incoming sunlight
back into space before the heat energy it carries is absorbed in the lower
atmosphere. In a variation on this theme, Peru is painting rocks white
high in the Andes in a desperate effort to slow the melting of glaciers
and snowpacks on which they rely for drinking water and irrigation.
If we continue to delay the launching of a serious multipronged global
effort to reduce the emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gas pollution,
we will find ourselves pushed toward increasingly desperate measures to
mitigate the growing impacts of global warming. We will try to muddle
through, argue and fight with one another, pursue our self-interest at the
expense of others, often deceiving them and ourselves in the process.
That is the course that we are on now.
But when the survival of what we hold most dear is clearly at risk,
then we must act. In all of human history, there have been rare moments
when we have risen to transcend our past and charted a new course to
safeguard our deepest values. At one such challenging moment in
history, Abraham Lincoln said, “The occasion is piled high with
difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we
must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then
we shall save our country.”
This time, our world is at stake. Not the planet itself; it would, of
course, survive nicely without human civilization, albeit in an altered
state. Rather, what is at stake is the set of environmental conditions and
the health of the natural systems on which our civilization depends. And
the fact that this crisis is global in nature is part of the unique challenge
we face.
Only twice before in all of human history has the future of our entire
global civilization been at risk. Once, at the dawn of Homo sapiens’ time
on Earth 100,000 years ago, anthropologists tell us that our numbers
were reduced to less than 10,000 people, yet somehow we prevailed.
The second occasion was when the United States and the former Soviet
Union came all too close to unleashing massive nuclear arsenals against
one another, killing hundreds of millions and risking a nuclear winter
with potentially apocalyptic consequences. And again, somehow we
prevailed.

This time, the threat to our future is one that would not arrive in a
matter of minutes with bright flashes and deafening sounds. It would be
drawn out, and generations yet to come would live all their lives with
the painful knowledge that once upon a time the Earth was hospitable to
humans. It sustained and nourished us with cool breezes and abundant
food and water. It inspired and renewed us with its majestic beauty.
When memories of that Earth faded, the story would still be told: in
the early decades of the twenty-first century, a generation gifted by
those that came before them with the greatest prosperity and most
advanced technologies the Earth had ever known broke faith with the
future. They thought of themselves and enjoyed the bounty they had
received, but cared not for what came after them. Would they forgive
us? Or would they curse us with the dying breaths of each generation to
come?
If, on the other hand, we do find a way to rise to this occasion, we will
have the rare privilege of meeting and overcoming a challenge that is
worthy of the best in us. We have the tools we need. Some of them, it is
true, need repair. Others need to be improved and perfected for the task
ahead. All that we lack is the will to prevail, but political will can be
renewed and strengthened by acknowledging the truth of our
circumstances and accepting our obligation to safeguard the future for
the next generation and all who will follow them.
What we most need is a shift in our way of thinking and a rejection of
the toxic illusions that have been so assiduously promoted and
continually reinforced by opponents of actions, principally large carbon
polluters and their allies. In some ways, this struggle to save the future
will be played out in a contest between Earth Inc. and the Global Mind.
The interconnection of people all over the world by means of the
Internet has created the potential for an unprecedented global effort to
communicate clearly among ourselves about the challenge that now
confronts us and the solutions that are now available.
On the other hand, the increasing interconnections among businesses
and industries all over the world has generated powerful commercial
momentum that is highly resistant to any effort by governments to rein
in its more destructive tendencies. Earth Inc. is now the dominant source
of influence over governments. Fortunately, there are a great many
examples of the emergence of a global conscience on the Internet that

has exerted powerful pressure to correct injustices and moral failures
such as child labor, abusive working conditions, false imprisonment, sex
slavery, persecution of vulnerable minorities, and destruction of the
environment, among other causes.
In some countries, this new emergent capacity for the development of
a collective global conscience has also contributed greatly to policies
aimed at solving the climate crisis. The number of grassroots, Internet-
based NGOs devoted to safeguarding the ecological system of the Earth
has been growing. The remaining question that is crucial to our future is
whether the requisite force of truth necessary to bring about a shift in
consciousness powerful enough to change the current course of
civilization will emerge in time.
* In the old days before pesticides, farmers understood that turtles, birds, and bats were their friends. To protect the
turtles from the plow, farm boys and girls would walk the fields in many areas prior to plowing to rescue turtles. They
would put them on fence posts, and after the tilling was done the turtles would be released, generally at sunset.
† Additionally, climate alterations caused by changes in the gravitational pull from ice sheets have measurable effects on
relative sea level rise in some areas.
‡ Another reason is that at low latitudes, a much greater fraction of the trapped energy goes into evaporation
(evaporative cooling) than into heating the air.

For a larger version of the following image, click here.

CONCLUSION
“So often do the spirits

Of great events stride on before the events,
And in today already walks tomorrow.”
—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
T HE PERSONAL JOURNEY I HAVE TAKEN IN WRITING THIS BOOK BEGAN with

that single question which demanded an answer more thoughtful than
the one I first offered. My search for a better answer has led me to new
questions that also demand answers—especially from political, business,
civic, and faith leaders around the world.
To begin with, who are we? The initial answer, once again, is readily
available: we are Homo sapiens. “Beings that know.” The usual suspects.
We have been on a very long journey already—from forests to savannahs
to farms to megacities; from two to thousands to millions to billions;
from stones to plows to assembly lines to nanobots; from syllables to
encyclopedias to airwaves to the Global Mind; from families to tribes to
communities to nations.
But that is the way we have been. Where our journey takes us next will
depend upon what kind of beings we humans choose to be. To put it
another way, our decision about the way we choose to live will
determine whether the journey takes us, or whether we take the journey.
The currents of change are so powerful that some have long since
taken their oars out of the water, having decided that it is better to
surrender, enjoy the ride, and hope for the best—even as those currents
sweep us along faster and faster toward the rapids ahead that are roaring

so deafeningly we can hardly hear ourselves think.
“Rapids?” they shout above the din. “What rapids? Don’t be
ridiculous; there are no rapids. Everything is fine!” There is anger in the
shouting, and some who are intimidated by the anger learn never to
mention the topic that triggers it. They are browbeaten into keeping the
peace by avoiding any mention of the forbidden subject.
For now at least, that is how some in the news media behave. They
are terrified to even utter certain words—like “climate,” for example—
lest they trigger rage from those who don’t want to hear about the
destructive changes gaining momentum. The result is an almost
pathological silence concerning the most important challenges we face,
and a dangerous collective disregard for the future consequences of our
present actions. But ultimately, that is not really who we are.
Anyone who spends time thinking about the possibilities of a better
future must first make an assumption about human nature. Idealists who
want and hope for the best sometimes make the mistake of thinking that
intrinsic human nature can change, and will improve according to their
hopes. Cynics enjoy catching that mistake and pointing out that human
nature doesn’t change at all.
My own way of thinking about human nature is neither idealistic nor
cynical. I believe there is a difference between intrinsic human nature—
which I agree does not change, and the aspects of human nature we
routinely express, which can and do change. The 35,000-year-old
paintings in the caves at Chauvet, in France, and the figurines made by
our ancient ancestors in Eurasia and Africa, clearly reflect a
consciousness and sensibility not very different—perhaps not
intrinsically different at all—from our own. But in other ways, we are
very different indeed.
We are each individuals, but as all of our major faith traditions teach
us, we are all connected to one another. And science teaches us that
human nature is inherently social. The social groups to which we belong
have their own form of evolution. Some behaviors and norms survive
from one generation to the next and others are discouraged. Habits and
customs become rituals and rules, which evolve over time into cultures,
social systems, laws and institutions, and which exercise a profound
influence over which aspects of human nature we express.
Consider what we have learned about the human genome: even

though 99.9 percent of them are identical in every human being, our
23,000 genes—and millions of proteins—contain a universe of
possibilities. Some genes are expressed while others remain inchoate,
vestigial. Sometimes, capacities that evolved in the distant past are
awakened for new purposes when our circumstances change. Consider
also what neuroscientists have learned about the human brain: neuron
trees grow dense and vibrant when they are used; others atrophy when
they are not.
Some have long believed that the most important strategy for
empowering the “better angels of our nature” is education. And while I
certainly agree that high-quality, universal education is not only
desirable but essential, it is not sufficient. Some of the worst atrocities in
human history have been organized and perpetrated by well-educated
villains.
Ignorance and misunderstanding are certainly enemies of genuine
progress, just as knowledge, integrity, and character are crucial to our
success. But the evolution of our collective behaviors, and the emergence
of a genuine understanding of how deeply our connected fates are
intertwined with the health of the ecological system of the Earth, will
depend upon the choices we make about the structure of the systems we
use. The way we measure what we do and the results of our actions, the
way we communicate with one another, and the incentives and
disincentives we build into our political, economic, and social systems
all have a powerful influence on the future.
Behaviors that bring rewards become more common. Those that don’t
diminish. The elements of our nature that are activated by rewarded
behaviors gain strength. Social groups establish values that reflect both
the behaviors they wish to reward and those they want to discourage.
These values become embedded in tribes, communities, nations,
economic systems, institutions, and cultures.
I fall back on the example that inspired me and has inspired people
throughout the world for more than two centuries: the enduring genius
of the U.S. Constitution stemmed from its authors’ clear-eyed, dead-on
understanding of human nature—even though it was limited to white
males—and their design of structural safeguards that discouraged the
impulse to egotistical power-seeking and incentives that rewarded the
impulse to resolve their differences through collective reasoning that

maximized the likelihood of creative compromises based on the pursuit
of the greater good.
The separation of powers and checks and balances woven into the
design of the Constitution embodied a sophisticated understanding of
how to discourage some behaviors inherent in human nature and
encourage positive ones instead. Others have tried to structure economic
systems with incentives that unleash creativity and dynamism,
encourage behaviors deemed of value, and discourage other behaviors
that are destructive to the common good.
Over time, we have come to recognize that the way we measure
economic value also exerts a kind of evolutionary force on behavior—
and that the things not measured at all are ignored as if they have no
value, either positive or negative. When we change the measurements of
value, the nature of the incentives, and the structure of the systems we
use for making political, economic, and social decisions, we inevitably
encourage the expression of some aspects of human nature and
discourage others. So while intrinsic human nature may not change, the
expressions of human nature—the aspects of our nature manifested in our
behaviors and choices—can and do change readily in response to the
incentives we establish as a basis for civilization. And they shape our
future.
If we signal to business, for example, that unlimited pollution will
incur no cost or penalty, it is of little use to then decry them as immoral
when they respond predictably to the incentives we give them. When we
signal to our politicians that victory in elections is best assured by
spending most of their time asking for large sums of money from people
and corporations that have special agendas for the shaping of public
policies after the election, we incentivize politicians to express in their
behavior negative aspects of human nature familiar to all of us—because
they are intrinsic to all of us—even though most of us suppress them and
understand fully why we should be discouraging the soft bribery and
betrayal of the public trust that predictably results.
More serious problems arise when those who benefit from these
distorted incentives and dysfunctional rules manage to gain sufficient
political power to prevent reforms that would encourage the aspects of
human nature that we want to see manifested in political and economic
decision making.

Long periods of stability, which most of us naturally prefer, can
enhance the vulnerability of any political or economic system to
exploitation by those who have learned to distort its rules and
incentives. Decades ago, the late University of Maryland political
economist Mancur Olson published an extensive analysis of how elites in
any society come to accumulate a steadily larger share of wealth and
influence, and then use it to block reforms of the incentives and rules
that work to their advantage.
Consider the vulnerability of monocultured crops to the steady
evolution of pests who learn to circumvent the natural defenses of the
plants to eat their fill. Consider the vulnerability of computer systems to
hackers when the passwords and other safeguards remain unchanged for
an extended period of time. The intrinsic nature of the pests doesn’t
change. Their learned behaviors—and the genes they express—do.
Democracy and capitalism have both been hacked. The results are
palpably obvious in the suffocating control of policy decisions by elites,
the ever increasing inequalities of income and growing concentrations of
wealth, and the paralysis of any efforts at reform. And the public’s
ability to express their revulsion in more constructive ways, rather than
surrendering to cynicism, is dampened by the structure of our dominant
means of mass communication, television, which serves mainly to
promote consumption of products and entertain the public, while
offering no means for interactive dialogue and collaborative decision
making.
Fortunately, the awakening of the Global Mind is disrupting
established patterns—creating exciting new opportunities for emergent
centers of influence not controlled by elites and the potential for reforms
in established dysfunctional behaviors. Yet the emergence of Earth Inc.
has magnified the power and reach of our economic engines, even as it
has hardened the incentives, measurements of value, and rules of
behavior that reward unsustainable exploitation of limited resources, the
destruction of ecosystems crucial to the survival of civilization,
unlimited flows of pollution, and the disregard of human and social
values.
The outcome of the struggle to shape humanity’s future that is now
beginning will be determined by a contest between the Global Mind and
Earth Inc. In a million theaters of battle, the reform of rules and

incentives in markets, political systems, institutions, and societies will
succeed or fail depending upon how quickly individuals and groups
committed to a sustainable future gain sufficient strength, skill, and
resolve by connecting with one another to express and achieve their
hopes and dreams for a better world.
Here are the most important questions to be answered and battles to
be won:
Can Americans reestablish the healthy functioning of the U.S. political
and economic system to the point where it can once again provide
visionary leadership to the community of nations? It may well be that an
alternative form of global leadership will emerge in the Global Mind, but
that is uncertain for now and is likely to take time that we don’t have.
It is theoretically possible, though extremely unlikely, that some other
nation will rise to this challenge. It is also possible that the tectonic
changes that have reorganized the equilibrium of power in the world,
shifting it from West to East and redistributing it throughout the world,
will make it difficult for the U.S. to once again provide the strength and
quality of leadership it offered during the second half of the twentieth
century. The world’s loss of confidence in the United States following the
catastrophic political, military, and economic mistakes of the early
twenty-first century accelerated this shift in power, but was not its
fundamental cause.
Still, the best chance for success in shaping a positive future and
avoiding catastrophe is the reestablishment of a transcendent capacity
for global leadership by the United States. And for those who have
difficulty believing that the promise of American democracy can be
redeemed, remember that the promise America offers the world has been
resurrected in the past during some very dark days. Its revolution was
almost stillborn. It nearly tore itself in two during the Civil War. The
domineering crimes of the robber barons exceeded the excesses of
today’s ambitious titans. Destitution during the Great Depression, the
devastating blow at Pearl Harbor while Hitler rampaged through Europe,
and the brush with Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis were all
followed by renewals of the American spirit and a flourishing of the
values at the heart of the American Dream. So America can certainly be
renewed again, and its potential for world leadership can be restored.
Will it be? The answer to that question will have a profound effect on

the future of humankind.
How quickly can institutions be adapted to the Internet? Even though
the potential for the reestablishment of reason-based decision making
through collaborative processes empowered by the Global Mind are
exciting and promising, long-established institutions are notoriously
resistant to change. The speed with which business models have been
disintermediated and new models have emerged offers reason for hope.
But attention and focus are diluted on the Internet. The variety of
experiences available, the ubiquity of entertainment, and the difficulty
in aggregating a critical mass of those committed to change all
complicate the use of the Internet as a tool for institutional reform. The
addition of three billion people to the global middle class by the middle
of this century, however, may be accompanied by new and more forceful
demands for democratic reforms of the kind that have so often emerged
with the growth of a prosperous and well-educated middle class in so
many nations.
Will there be sufficient safeguards and constraints placed on the
impulse of governments to use the Internet as a means of gathering
information about individuals and using it to establish unhealthy forms
of centralized control? Will the impulse of nations to engage in conflict
produce more destructive forms of cyberwar and mercantilist
nationalism? As the severity of our challenges becomes ever clearer, I
am hopeful, even confident, that enough concerned committed
individuals and groups will join together in time and self-organize
creatively to become a force for reform.
Will China’s economic juggernaut continue, and if so, will its emergent
commitment to safeguard the environment overtake its mercantilist
imperative? Will its success in lifting standards of living and diminishing
poverty lead to political reforms that produce a transition to democratic
governance?
Will the progressive substitution of intelligent machines for human
labor result in increased structural unemployment, or will we find ways
to create new jobs and adequately compensate those filling them? There
is no shortage of work to be done, but the dominance of corporations
and the encroachment of the market sphere into the democracy sphere
have taken a toll on the initiative and will necessary to structure new
employment opportunities in the creation of public goods in fields like

education, environmental remediation, health and mental health, family
services, community building, and many other challenges that must be
met.
Will the emergent potential for altering the fabric of life and the
genetic design of human beings be accompanied by the emergence of
wisdom sufficient for the far-reaching decisions that will soon confront
us, or will these technologies be widely dispersed without adequate
consideration of the full spectrum of consequences they could entail?
Will the social compacts in developed nations survive the
simultaneous effects of demographic changes that are placing heavier
per capita burdens on those in the workforce even as jobs and incomes
are lost to the combination of robosourcing and outsourcing? Will new
models for restoring income support and health care to the growing
population of older people be created to replace the twentieth-century
model?
Will the world community adequately support fertility management in
developing countries with high population growth rates, continue to
empower women, and improve child survival rates? The answer to these
questions will determine the level of global population and the degree of
stress humanity places on the natural systems of the planet. Will the
unique plight of Africa be recognized and adequately addressed?
Will we provide the incentives to quickly decarbonize the global
economy and sharply reduce global warming pollution in time to
stabilize and then reduce the global warming pollution that is so
threatening to the climate stability on which the thriving of our
civilization depends?
These are hard questions that imply hard choices. Human civilization
—indeed, the human species—is already in the early stages of the six
emergent changes described in this book. They are beginning to
transform our planet, our civilization, and the way we work and live our
lives. Some of them are degrading self-governance, the fabric of life, the
species with which we share the Earth, and the physical, mental, and
spiritual nature of humanity.
The complexity of these changes, the unprecedented speed with which
they are occurring, their simultaneity and the fact that they are
converging, each with the others, have all contributed to a crisis of
confidence in our ability as a civilization to think clearly about where

they are taking us, much less to change their trajectory or slow their
momentum.
But if we face these choices with courage, the right answers are pretty
clear. They’re controversial, to be sure. And making the right choices
will be hard. Yet we do have to make them. We do have to decide. Soon.
If we were to decide not to reclaim control over our destiny, the rest of
our journey would become very hard indeed.
These currents of change are strong, and they are indeed sweeping us
into a future that is very different from what we have known before.
What we have to do—in the context of this metaphor—is deceptively
simple: steer! That means fixing the prevailing flaws and distortions in
capitalism and self-governance. It means controlling the corrosive
corruption of money in politics, breaking the suffocating rule of special
interests, and restoring the healthy functioning of collective decision
making in representative democracy to promote the public interest. It
means reforming markets and making capitalism sustainable by aligning
incentives with our long-term interest. It means, for example, taxing
carbon pollution and reducing taxes on work—raising revenue from
what we burn, not what we earn.
More than 1,800 years ago, the last of Rome’s “Five Good Emperors,”
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, wrote, “Never let the future disturb you.
You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which
today arm you against the present.” His advice is still sound, though
soon after his reign the Roman Empire began the long process of
dissolution that culminated in its overthrow 300 years later.
SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
Arming ourselves with the “weapons of reason” is necessary but

insufficient. The emergence of the Global Mind presents us with an
opportunity to strengthen reason-based decision making, but the
economic and political systems within which we implement even the
wisest decisions are badly in need of repair. Confidence in both market
capitalism and representative democracy has fallen because both are
obviously in need of reform. Fixing both of these macro-tools should be
at the top of the agenda for all of us who want to help shape humanity’s

future.
Our first priority should be to restore our ability to communicate
clearly and candidly with one another in a broadly accessible forum
about the difficult choices we have to make. That means building vibrant
and open “public squares” on the Internet for the discussion of the best
solutions to emerging challenges and the best strategies for seizing
opportunities. It also means protecting the public forum from dominance
by elites and special interests with agendas that are inconsistent with the
public interest.
It is especially important to accelerate the transition of democratic
institutions to the Internet. The open access individuals once enjoyed to
the formerly dominant print-based public forum fostered the spread of
democracy and elevated the role of reason and fact-based public
discourse. But the massive shift in the last third of the twentieth century
from print to television as the primary medium of communication stifled
democratic discourse and gave preferential access to those with wealth
and power. This shift eclipsed the role of reason, diminished the
importance of collective searches for the best available evidence, and
elevated the role of money in politics—particularly in the United States
—thereby distorting our search for truth and degrading our ability to
reason together.
The same is true for the news media. The one-way, advertiser-
dominated, conglomerate-controlled television medium has been
suffocating the free flow of ideas necessary for genuine self-
determination. In 2012, for example, it was nothing short of bizarre
when the United States held its quadrennial presidential election in the
midst of epic climate-related disasters—including a widespread drought
affecting more than 65 percent of the nation, historic fires spreading
across the West, and an epic hybrid hurricane and nor’easter that shut
down large portions of New York City for the second time in two years—
with not a single question about the climate crisis from any member of
the news media in any of the campaign debates.
The profit-driven blurring of the line between entertainment and
news, the growing influence of large advertisers on the content of news
programs, and the cynical distortion of news narratives by political
operatives posing as news executives have all degraded the ability of the
Fourth Estate to maintain sufficient integrity and independent judgment

to adequately perform their essential role in democracy.
The Internet offers a welcome opportunity to reverse this degradation
of democracy and reestablish a basis for healthy self-governance once
again. Although there is as yet no standard business model that yields
sufficient profit to support high-quality investigative journalism on the
Internet, the expansion of bandwidth to accommodate more and higher-
quality video on the Internet may soon make profitable business models
viable. In addition, the use of hybrid public/private models for the
support of excellence in Internet-based journalism should be vigorously
pursued.
The loss of privacy and data security on the Internet must be quickly
addressed. The emergent “stalker economy,” based on the compilation of
large digital files on individuals who engage in e-commerce, is exploitive
and unacceptable. Similarly, the growing potential for the misuse by
governments of even larger digital files on the personal lives of their
citizens—including the routine interception of private communications—
poses a serious threat to liberty and must be stopped. Those concerned
about the quality of freedom in the digital age must make new legal
protections for privacy a priority.
The new digital tools that provide growing access to the Global Mind
should be exploited in the rapid development of personalized approaches
to health care, what is now being called “precision medicine,” and of
self-tracking tools to reduce the cost and increase the efficacy of these
personalized approaches to medicine. The same Internet-empowered
precision should be applied to the speedy development of a “circular
economy,” characterized by much higher levels of recycling, reuse, and
efficiency in the use of energy and materials.
Capitalism, like democracy, must also be reformed. The priority for
those who agree that it is crucial to restore the usefulness of capitalism
as a tool for reclaiming control of our destiny should be to insist upon
full, complete, and accurate measurements of value. So-called
externalities that are currently ignored in standard business accounting
must be fully integrated into market calculations. For example, it is
simply no longer acceptable to pretend that large streams of harmful
pollution do not exist where profit and loss statements are concerned.
Global warming pollution, in particular, should carry a price. Placing
a tax on CO2 is the place to start. The revenue raised could be returned

to taxpayers, or offset by equal reductions in other taxes—on payrolls,
for example. Placing a steadily declining limit on emissions and allowing
the trading of emission rights within those limits is an alternative that
would also work. For those nations worried about the competitive
consequences of acting in the absence of global agreement, the rules of
the World Trade Organization allow the imposition of border
adjustments on goods from countries that do not put a tax on carbon
pollution.
The principles of sustainability—which are designed, above all, to
ensure that we make intelligent choices to improve our circumstances in
the present without degrading our prospects in the future—should be
fully integrated into capitalism. The ubiquitous incentives built into
capitalism—which embody the power of capitalism to unleash human
ingenuity and productivity—should be carefully designed to ensure that
they are aligned with the goals that are being pursued. Compensation
systems, for example, should be carefully scrutinized by investors,
managers, boards of directors, consumers, regulators, and all
stakeholders in every enterprise—no matter its size.
Our current reliance on gross domestic product (GDP) as the compass
by which we guide our economic policy choices must be reevaluated.
The design of GDP—and the business accounting systems derived from it
—is deeply flawed and cannot be safely used as a guide for economic
policy decisions. For example, natural resources should be subject to
depreciation and the distribution of personal income should be included
in our evaluation of whether economic policies are producing success or
failure. Capitalism requires acceptance of inequality, of course, but
“hyper” levels of inequality—such as those now being produced—are
destructive to both capitalism and democracy.
The value of public goods should also be fully recognized—not
systematically denigrated and attacked on ideological grounds. In an age
when robosourcing and outsourcing are systematically eliminating
private employment opportunities at a rapid pace, the restoration of
healthy levels of macroeconomic demand is essential for sustainable
growth. The creation of more public goods—in health care, education,
and environmental protection, for example—is one of the ways to
provide more employment opportunities and sustain economic vibrancy
in the age of Earth Inc.

Sustainability should also guide the redesign of agriculture, forestry,
and fishing. The reckless depletion of topsoil, groundwater reserves, the
productivity of our forests and oceans, and genetic biodiversity must be
halted and reversed.
In order to stabilize human population growth, we must prioritize the
education of girls, the empowerment of women, the provision of
ubiquitous access to the knowledge and techniques of fertility
management, and the continued raising of child survival rates. The
world now enjoys a durable consensus on the efficacy of these four
strategies—used in combination—to bring about the transition to smaller
families, lower death rates, lower birth rates, and stabilized population
levels. Wealthy countries must support these efforts in their own self-
interest. Africa should receive particular attention because of its high
fertility rate and threatened resource base.
Two other demographic realities should also command priority
attention: The continued urbanization of the world’s population should
be seen as an opportunity to integrate sustainability into the design and
construction of low-carbon, low-energy buildings, the use of sustainable
architecture and design to make urban spaces more efficient and
productive, and the redesign of urban transportation systems to
minimize both energy use and pollution flows. And second, the aging of
populations in the advanced economies—and in some emerging markets,
like China—should be seen as an opportunity for the redesign of health
strategies and income support programs in order to take into account the
higher dependency ratios that threaten the viability of using payroll
taxes as the principal source of funding for these programs.
With respect to the revolution in the life sciences, we should place
priority on the development of safeguards against unwise permanent
alterations in the human gene pool. Now that we have become the
principal agents of evolution, it is crucially important to recognize that
the pursuit of short-term goals through human modification can be
dangerously inconsistent with the long-term best interests of the human
species. As yet, however, we have not developed adequate criteria—
much less decision-making protocols—for use in guiding such decisions.
We must do so quickly.
Similarly, the dominance of the profit motive and corporate power in
decisions about the genetic modification of animals and plants—

particularly those that end up in the food supply—are beginning to
create unwise risks. Commonsense procedures to analyze these risks
according to standards that are based on the protection of the long-term
public interest are urgently needed.
The continued advance of technological development will bring many
blessings, but human values must be preserved as we evaluate the
deployment and use of powerful new technologies. Some advances
warrant caution and careful oversight: the proliferation of
nanomaterials, synthetic life-forms, and surveillance drones are
examples of new technologies rife with promise and potential, but in
need of review and safeguards.
There are already several reckless practices that should be
immediately stopped: the sale of deadly weapons to groups throughout
the world; the use of antibiotics as a livestock growth stimulant; drilling
for oil in the vulnerable Arctic Ocean; the dominance of stock market
trading by supercomputers with algorithms optimized for high-speed,
high-frequency trades that create volatility and risk of market
disruptions; and utterly insane proposals for blocking sunlight from
reaching the Earth as a strategy to offset the trapping of heat by ever-
mounting levels of global warming pollution. All of these represent
examples of muddled and dangerous thinking. All should be seen as test
cases for whether or not we have the will, determination, and stamina to
create a future worthy of the next generations.
Finally, the world community desperately needs leadership that is
based on the deepest human values. Though this book is addressed to
readers in the world at large, it is intended to carry a special and urgent
message to the citizens of the United States of America, which remains
the only nation capable of providing the kind of global leadership
needed.
For that reason, and for the pride that Americans ought to feel in what
the United States has represented to humanity for more than two
centuries, it is crucial to halt the degradation and decline of America’s
commitment to a future in which human dignity is cherished and human
values are protected and advanced. Two priority goals for those who
wish to take action are limiting the role of money in politics and
reforming outdated and obfuscatory legislative rules that allow a small
minority to halt legislative action in the U.S. Senate.

Human civilization has reached a fork in the road we have long
traveled. One of two paths must be chosen. Both lead us into the
unknown. But one leads toward the destruction of the climate balance
on which we depend, the depletion of irreplaceable resources that
sustain us, the degradation of uniquely human values, and the possibility
that civilization as we know it would come to an end. The other leads to
the future.

Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1841
“Ne te quaesiveris extra.”
“Man is his own star; and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune
Cast the bantling on the rocks,

Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition
in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is
of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own
thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true
for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall
be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, —
and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last
Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we
ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and
traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should
learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind
from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet

he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of
genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a
certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson
for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with
good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the
other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense
precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced
to take with shame our own opinion from another.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction
that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself
for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full
of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil
bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power
which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is
which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one
face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another
none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony.
The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that
particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine
idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate
and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his
work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has
put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done
otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver.
In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no
hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place
the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided
themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception
that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through
their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must
accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors
and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution,
but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and
advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and be-
haviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind,

that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength
and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole,
their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are
disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one
babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to
it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own
piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not
to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force,
because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice
is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his
contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors
very unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as
much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude
of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse;
independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and
facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift,
summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome.
He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an
independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you.
But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as
he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched
by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again
into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed,
observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted
innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing
affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts
into the ear of men, and put them in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and
inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy
against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock
company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread
to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The
virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not
realities and creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must

explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your
own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the
world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to
make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear
old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the
sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,
— “But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied,
“They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live
then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the
only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against
it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every
thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily
we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than
is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all
ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?
If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to
me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go
love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have
that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this
incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is
spite at home.’ Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is
handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge
to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the
counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun
father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would
write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better
than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me
not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not
tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in
good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist,
that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not
belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to
whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to
prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at
college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many
now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I

confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked
dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule.
There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as
some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation
of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or
extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a
high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live.
My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of
a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering
and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and
bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal
from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference
whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot
consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as
my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or
the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This
rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole
distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you
will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than
you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy
in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst
of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is,
that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your
character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society,
vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your
table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to
detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn
from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work,
and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman’s-buff
is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.
I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of
the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly
can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this
ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such
thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one

side, — the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a
retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation.
Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief,
and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This
conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies,
but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two
is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say
chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime
nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which
we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by
degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in
particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history;
I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in
company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does
not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low
usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most
disagreeable sensation.
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And there-
fore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look
askance on him in the public street or in the friend’s parlour. If this aver-
sation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well
go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like
their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind
blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more
formidable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for a
firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes.
Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnera-
ble themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people
is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent
brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it
needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of
no concernment.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a rever-
ence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data
for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint
them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated

in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what
then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone,
scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into
the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics
you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of
the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God
with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of
the harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has
simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on
the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak
what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing
you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is
it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and
Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton,
and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.
I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are
rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh
are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge
and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it
forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing,
contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest
thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found
symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell
of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window
should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also.
We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine
that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not
see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be
each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be
harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a
little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line
from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine

actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have
already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If
I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done
so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now.
Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is
cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What
makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills
the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories
behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as
by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham’s
voice, and dignity into Washington’s port, and America into Adams’s eye.
Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient
virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and
pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-
dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if
shown in a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency.
Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong
for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and
apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish
to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for
humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us
affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the
times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is
the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor
working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or
place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures
you, and all men, and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds
us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds
you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be
so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man
is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and
time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps
as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a
Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave
to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man.
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the
Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism,

of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called “the height of Rome”;
and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout
and earnest persons.
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let
him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a
bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in
the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which
built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these.
To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air,
much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet
they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they
will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not
to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable
of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s
house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking,
treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had
been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the
state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up,
exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination
plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vo-
cabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day’s
work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is
the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus?
Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake
depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned
steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be
transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.
The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized
the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual
reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which men
have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk
among them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and things, and
reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with honor, and represent
the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified
their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we
inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal

Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature
and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable
elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions,
if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that
source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call
Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst
all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which
analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For, the sense of being
which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from
things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and
proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also
proceed. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see
them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.
Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that
inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without
impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes
us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice,
when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to
its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that
causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can
affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and
his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a
perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that
these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions
and acquisitions are but roving; — the idlest reverie, the faintest native
emotion, command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict
as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more
readily; for, they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They
fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical,
but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of
time, all mankind, — although it may chance that no one has seen it before
me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane
to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should
communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his
voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the
present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind
is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means,
10

teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into
the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, — one as much
as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and, in
the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore,
a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the
phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another
world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness
and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast
his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries
are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space
are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where
it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an
injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my
being and becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say
‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the
blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no
reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they
exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose;
it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its
whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root
there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments
alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but
with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround
him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong
until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet
hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David,
or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts,
on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of
grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and
character they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact words they
spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had
who uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are willing to let the
words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes.
If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be
strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we
shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.
11

When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of
the brook and the rustle of the corn.
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; prob-
ably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the
intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is
this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by
any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any
other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; —
the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall ex-
clude example and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All
persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike
beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision, there
is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over
passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence
of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.
Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea, — long intervals
of time, years, centuries, — are of no account. This which I think and feel
underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my
present, and what is called life, and what is called death.
Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of
repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in
the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world
hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all
riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the
rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-
reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident
but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak
rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience
than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must
revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of
eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or
a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature
must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are
not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every
topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the
attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by
the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by
12

so much virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling,
war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as
examples of its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in
nature for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure
of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot
help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the
bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every
animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore
self-relying soul.
Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause.
Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and insti-
tutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the
shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge
them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature
and fortune beside our native riches.
But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his
genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the
internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other
men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins,
better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons
look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit.
Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child,
because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?
All men have my blood, and I have all men’s. Not for that will I adopt
their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your
isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with
emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock
at once at thy closet door, and say, — ‘Come out unto us.’ But keep thy
state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I
give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my
act. “What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the
love.”
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us
at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake
Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be
done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality
and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and
13

deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother,
O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto.
Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I
obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proxim-
ities. I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be
the chaste husband of one wife, — but these relations I must fill after a new
and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I
cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what
I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that
you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what
is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly
rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you
are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are
true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will
seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your
interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live
in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated
by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will bring us
out safe at last. — But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot
sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons
have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute
truth; then will they justify me, and do the same thing.
The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection
of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the
name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.
There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven.
You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in
the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father,
mother, cousin, neighbour, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can
upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to
myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of
duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts,
it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one imagines that
this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.
And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the com-
mon motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.
High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest
be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as
14

strong as iron necessity is to others!
If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction
society, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem
to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We
are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each
other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and
women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most
natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out
of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night
continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our
marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us.
We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength
is born.
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If
the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at
one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards
in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to
himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of
his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all
the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits
a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive
years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city
dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a
profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one
chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and
tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves;
that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is
the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should
be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself,
tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we
pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore
the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all
the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their
pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their
speculative views.
1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy
office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for
15

some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in
endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous.
Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any thing less than all good,
— is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest
point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the
spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect
a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in
nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not
beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling
in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of
his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.
Caratach, in Fletcher’s Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of
the god Audate, replies, —
“His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours;

Our valors are our best gods.”
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of
self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help
the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be
repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly,
and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and
health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication
with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome
evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are
flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with
desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need
it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he
held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because
men hated him. “To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed
Immortals are swift.”
As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease
of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, ‘Let not God speak
to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.’
Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has
shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother’s, or his
brother’s brother’s God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove
a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton,
16

a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo!
a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the
number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his
complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are
also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought
of duty, and man’s relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism,
Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every
thing to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing
a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, that the
pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master’s
mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for
the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the
system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe;
the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built.
They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see, — how you can
see; ‘It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.’ They do not yet
perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin,
even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are
honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and
low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all
young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe
as on the first morning.
2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose
idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Ameri-
cans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination
did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly
hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man
stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him
from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men
sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of
wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like
an interloper or a valet.
I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the
purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesti-
cated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than
he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does
not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among
old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and
17

dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.
Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the in-
difference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be
intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my
friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside
me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I
seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and
suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness
affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our
system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies
are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the
travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves
are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties,
lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever
they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model.
It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the
conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic
model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are
as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and
love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil,
the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the
government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves
fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every
moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the
adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.
That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man
yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the
master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could
have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great
man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could
not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do
that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.
There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the
colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses,
or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich,
all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you
18

can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same
pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide
in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt
reproduce the Foreworld again.
4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit
of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no
man improves.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the
other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is
christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration.
For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts,
and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading,
writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in
his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear,
a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare
the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost
his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a
broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck
the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He
is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine
Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Green-
wich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he
wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice
he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright
calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair
his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the
number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not
encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Chris-
tianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.
For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of
height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality
may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages;
nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth cen-
tury avail to educate greater men than Plutarch’s heroes, three or four and
twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates,
Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is re-
19

ally of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man,
and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period
are only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved
machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so
much in their fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equip-
ment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass,
discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since.
Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the
periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were intro-
duced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius
returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war
among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the
bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering
it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says
Las Casas, “without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and car-
riages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive
his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself.”
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it
is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to
the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation
to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from
themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious,
learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate as-
saults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They
measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each
is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect
for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental,
— came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not
having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there,
because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is,
does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living prop-
erty, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire,
or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man
breathes. “Thy lot or portion of life,” said the Caliph Ali, “is seeking after
thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” Our dependence on these
foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political par-
20

ties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each
new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The Democrats
from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself
stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner
the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude. Not
so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method
precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and
stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by
every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing
of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently
appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power
is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and
elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought,
instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs,
works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man
who stands on his head.
So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain
all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these
winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the
Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt
sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents,
the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other
favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for
you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing
can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
21

ON LIBERTY
1859

CHAPTER I
Introductory
THE SUBJECT of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty, of the Will, so un-
fortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity:
but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can
be legitimately exerc__ised_bysoc!ety over the individual. A question seldom
stated, and hardl_ ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly'
influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and
is likely soon to make itself recognised as the vital question of the future. It
_s so far from being new, that, in a certain sense, it has divided mankind.
almost from the remotest ages: but in the stage of pro_ess into which the
more cMlized portions of the species have now entered, it presents itself
under new conditions, and requires a different and more fundamental treat-
ment.
The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous
feature in the pomons of history with which we are earliest familiar, par-
ticularlv in that of Greece, Rome. and England. But in old times this contest
was between subjects, or some classes of subjects, and the aGovernmenta.
By liberty, was meant protection against the tvrannx of the political rulers.
The rulers were conceived (except in some of the popular governments of
Greece) as in a necessarily antagonistic position to the people whom they
ruled. They consisted of a governing One, or a governing tribe or caste, who
derived their authorit_ from inheritance or conquest, who, at all events,
did not hold it at the pleasure of the governed, and whose supremacy men
did not venture, perhaps did not desire, to contest, x_hatexer precautions
might be taken against its oppressive exercise. Thelr power w;_s regarded as
necessary, but also as highly" dangerous; as a weapon which the_ would at-
tempt to use against their subjects, no less than against external enemies. To
prevent the weaker members of the communitx from being preyed upon by
innumerable vultures, it was needful that there should be an animal of prey
stronger than the rest, commissioned to keep them down. But as the king of
the vultures would be no less bent upon preying on the flock than any of the
minor harpies, it was indispensable to be in a perpetual attitude of defence
against his beak and claws. The aim, therefore, of patriots was to set limits
a-a591,592 government

2 18 ESSAYS ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY
to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the com-
munity; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty. It was attempted
in two ways. First. by obtaining a recognition of certain immunities, called
political liberties or rights, which it was to be regarded as a breach of duty
in the ruler to infringe, and which, if he did infringe, specific resistance, or
general rebellion, was held to be justifiable. A second, and generally a later
expedient, was the establishment of constitutional checks, by which the
consent of the community, or of a body of some sort. supposed to represent
its interests, was made a necessary condition to some of the more important
acts of the governing power. To the first of these modes of limitation, the
ruling power, in most European countries, was compelled, more or less, to
submit. It was not so with the second; and, to attain this, or when already in
some degree possessed, to attain it more completely, became everywhere
the principal object of the lovers of liberty. And so long as mankind were
content to combat one enemy by another, and to be ruled by a master, on
condition of being guaranteed more or less efficaciously against his tyranny.
they did not carry their aspirations beyond this point.
A time, however, came, in the progress of human affairs, when men
ceased to think it a necessity of nature that their governors should be an
independent power, opposed in interest to themselvcs. It appeared to them
much better that the various magistrates of the State should be their tenants
or delegates, revocable at their pleasure. In that way alone, it seemed, could
they have complete security that the powers of government would never be
abused to their disadvantage. By de_ees this new demand for elective and
temporary rulers became the prominent object of the exertions of the popu-
larparty, wherever an), such part?' existed: and superseded, to a consider-
able extent, the previous efforts to limit the power of rulers. As the struggle
proceeded for making the ruling power emanate from the periodical choice
of the ruled, some persons began to think that too much importance had
been attached to the limitation of the power itself. That (it might seem)
was a resource against rulers whose interests were habitually opposed to
those of the people. What was now wanted was, that the rulers should be
identified w!th the people; that their interest and will should be the interest
and will of the nation. The nation did not need to be protected against its
own will. There was no fear of its tyrannizing over itself. Let the rulers be
effectually responsible to it. promptly removable by it. and it could afford to
trust them with power of which it could itself dictate the use to be made.
Their power was but the nation's own power, concentrated, and in a form
convenient for exercise. This mode of thought, or rather perhaps of feeling,
was common among the last generation of European lib_eralis_m,in the Conti-
nental section of which it still apparently predominates. Those who admit
any limit to what a government may do, except in the case of such govern-

ON LIBERTY 21 9
ments as they think ought not to exist, stand out as brilliant exceptions
among the political thinkers of the Continent. A similar tone of sentiment
might by this time have been prevalent in our own country, if the circum-
stances which for a time encouraged it, had continued unaltered.
But, in political and philosophical theories, as well as in persons, success
discloses faults and infirmities which failure might have concealed from
observation. The notion, that the people have no need to limit their power
over themselves, might seem axiomatic, when popular government was a
thing only' dreamed about, or read of as having existed at some distant period
of the past. Neither was that notion necessarily disturbed by such temporary"
aberrations as those of the French Revolution, the worst of which were the
work of an usurping few, and which, in an}, case, belonged, not to the
permanent working of popular institutions, but to a sudden and convulsive , "
outbreak against monarchical and aristocratic despotism. In time. however,
a democratic republic came to occupy' a large portion of the earth's surface.
and made itself felt as one of the most powerful members of the community
of nations: and elective and responsible government became subject to the
observations and criticisms which wait upon a great existing fact. It was
now perceived that such phrases as "self-government,'" and "the power of
the people over themselves," do not express the true state of the case. The
"people" who exercise the power are not always the same people with those
over whom it is exercised: and the "'self-government" spoken of is not the
government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the
people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the
most active part of the people: the majority, or those who succeed in making
themselves accepted as the majority: the people, consequently-, ram' desire
to oLef,_res___cs.
a __a.gt_Qf their number: and precautions are as much needed
against this as against any other abuse of power. The limit ation,_therefore.
of the power of government over individuals loses none of its importance
when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that
is, to the strongest party therein. This vie_ of things, recommending itself
equally' to the intelligence of thinkers and to the inclination of those impor-
tant classes in European society to whose real or supposed interests democ-
racy is adverse, has had no difficulty in establishing itself: and in political ,,
speculations "'the tyranny of the majority"I*l is now generally included
among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.
Like other tyrannies, the tvranm of the majority was at first, and is still
vulgarly,, held in dread, ch_eflx as operatin,,e throueh_ the acts of the public
authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the
tyrant--society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it--
its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the
[*See Tocqueville, De la D&nocratic cn Am_riquc. Vol. II. p 142.]

220 ESSAYS ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY
hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own
.. mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any" man-
dates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social
tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since,
though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means
of escape, penetrating much more deeply" into the details of life, and enslav-
ing the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the ma_ois-
trate is not enough" there nee_ds .protect!on _also against the tvrannv of the
prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency, of society to impose,
by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of
conduct on those who dissent from them' to fetter the development, and, if
possible, prevent the formation, of any' indiv!du_a!!t)' not in harmony with
its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model
of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opin-
ion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it
against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human af-
fairs, as protection against political despotism.
But though this proposition is not likely to be contested in general terms.
the practical question, where to place the limit--how to make the fitting ad-
justment between individual independence and social control--is a subject
on which nearly everything remains to be done. All that makes existence
valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the
actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed,
by law in the first place, and by' opinion on many things which are not fit
subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal
question in human affairs: but if we except a few of the most obvious cases,
it is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two
ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike: and the decision
of one age or country is a wonder to another. Yet the people of any given
age and country no more suspect any difficult 3, in it, than if it were a subject
on which mankind had always been agreed. The rules which obtain among
themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. This all but uni-
versal illusion is one of the examples of the magical influence of custom,
which is not only, as the proverb says, a second nature, but is continually'
mistaken for the first. The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving
respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is
all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally"
considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to
others, or by each to himself. People are accustomed to believe, and have
been encouraged in the belief by some who aspire to the character of phi-
losophers, that their feelings, on subjects of this nature, are better than
reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. The practical principle which

ON LIBERTY 22 I
guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the

feeling in each person's mind that everybody should be required to act as
he, and those with whom he sympathizes, would like them to act. No one,
indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own
liking: but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported bx reasons, can
only count as one person's preference: and if the reasons, when given, are a
mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many
people's liking instead of one. To an ordinar_ man, however, his own pret:-
erence, thus supported, is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason, but the
only one he generally has for any of his notions of morality, taste, or pro-
priety, which arc not expressly written in his religious creed: and his chief
guide in the interpretation even of that. Men's opinions, accordingly, on
what is laudable or Nameable. are affected by all the multifarious causes
which influence their wishes in regard to the conduct of others, and which
are as numerous as those which determine their wishes on any other subject.
Sometimes their reason--at other times their prejudices or superstitions:
often their socml affections, not seldom their antisocml ones. their envv or
jealousy, their arrogance or contemptuousness: but most commonly, their
desires or fears for themselves--their legitimate or illegitimate self-interest.
Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the
country emanates from its class interests, and its feelingq of class superiority.
The moralit_ between Spartans and Helots, between planters and negroes.
between princes and subject_, between nobles and roturiers, between men
and women, has been for the most part the creation of these class interests
and feelings: and the sentiments thus generated, react in turn upon the
moral fceling_ of the members of the ascendant class, m their relations
among themselves Where, on the other hand, a class, formert\ ascendant.
ha_ lo_t its ascendancy, or where its ascendancy is unpopular, the prevailing
moral sentiments frequentl_ bear the impre_s of an impatient dislike of
superiority. Another grand determining principle of the rules of conduct,
both in act and forbearance, which have been enforced bx lab or opinion.
has been the servilitx of mankind tov, ards the supposed preferences or aver-
sions of their t-dCmpo-ra-I masters, or of their gods. This servilitx, though es-
sentiaIl', selfish, Is not hypocrisy: it gives rise to perfectl 3 genuine sentiments
of abhorrence: it made men burn magicians and heretics. Among so mare
baser influences, the general and obvious interests of society, have of course
had a share, and a large one, in the direction of the mora{ sentiments: less,
however, as a matter of reason, and on their own account, than as a conse-
quence of the sympathies and antipathies which grew out of them: and
sympathies and antipathies which had little or nothing to do with the interests
of societ,,, have made themselves felt in the establishment of moralities with
quite as great force.

The lik_n_s_anddislik!ng _ of society, or of some powerful portion of it,

are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down
forgeneral observance, under the penalties of law or opinion. And in gen-
eral, those who have been in advance of society in thought and feeling, have
left this condition o(tll]ngs-u-nassailed in principle, however they may have
come into conflict with it in some of its details. They have occupied them-
selves rather in inquiring what things society ought to like or dislike, than
in questioning whether its likings or dislikings should be a law to indi-
viduals. The}" preferred endeavouring to alter the feelings of mankind on the
particular points on which they were themselves heretical, rather than make
common cause in defence of freedom, with heretics generally. The only case
in which the higher ground has been taken on principle and maintained with
consistency, by any but an individual here and there, is that of religious be-
lief: a case instructive in man}' ways, and not least so as forming a most
striking instance of the fallibility of what is called the moral sense: for the
odium theotogicum, in a sincere bigot, is one of the most unequivocal cases
of moral feeling. Those who first broke the yoke of what called itself the
Universal Church, were in general as little willing to permit difference of
religious opinion as that church itself. But when the heat of the conflict was
over. without giving a complete victory to any part}, and each church or
sect was reduced to limit its hopes to retaining possession of the ground it
already occupied; minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becoming
majorities, were under the necessity of pleading to those whom they could
not convert, for permission to differ. It is accordingly on this battle field.
almost solely, that the rights of the individual against society have been
asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claim of societ 5 to exercise
authority over dissentients, openly controverted. The great writers to whom
the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted
freedom of cgnscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that
a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural
to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious
freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where re-
ligious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theo-
logical quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. In the minds of" almost
all religious persons, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of tolera-
tion is admitted with tacit reserves. One person will bear with dissent in
matters of church government, but not of dogma; another can tolerate
everybody, short of a Papist or an Unitarian; another, every one who be-
lieves in revealed religion; a few extend their charity a little further, but
stop at the belief in a God and in a future state. Wherever the sentiment of
the majority is still genuine and intense, it is found to have abated little of
its claim to be obeyed.
In England, from the peculiar circumstances of our political history.

ON LIBERTY 223
though the yoke_of opinion is perhaps heavier, that of law is !.!ghter_:than

in most other countries of Europe: and there is considerable jealousy of
direct interference, by the legislative or the executive power, with private
conduct; not so much from any just regard for the independence of the
individual, as from the still subsisting habit of looking on the government
as representing an opposite interest to the public. The majority have not
yet learnt to feel the power of the government their power, or its opinions
their opinions. When they do so, individual liberty' will probably be as much
exposed to invasion from the government, as it already is from public
opinion. But, as vet, there is a considerable amount of feeling ready to be
called forth against an}' attempt of the law to control individuals in things
in which they have not hitherto been accustomed to be controlled bv it: and
this with very little discrimination as to whether the matter is, or is not.
within the legitimate sphere of legal control: insomuch that the feeling.
highly" salutary on the whole, is perhaps quite as often misplaced as well
grounded in the particular instances of its application. There is, in fact, no
recognised principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government
interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal
preferences. Some, whenever they see an,," good to be done, or evil to be
remedied, would willinelv instioate the eovernment to undertake the busi-
ness: while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil. rather
than add one to the departments of human interests amenable to govern-
mental control. And men range themselves on one or the other side in any
particular case, according to this general direction of their sentiments; or
according to the degree of interest which they feel in the particular thing
which it is proposed that the government shouid do, or according to the be-
hef they entertain that the government would, or would not. do it in the
manner they prefer; but very rareh' on account of an,,' opinion to _hich they
consistenth, adhere, as to what things arc fit to be done by a government.
And it seems to me that in consequence of this absence of rule or principle,
one side is at present as often wrong as the other: the interference of govern-
ment is. with about equal frequency', improperly' invoked and improperly
condemned.
The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple ,principle. as entitled
to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the wav
of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in
the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That
principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individualh'
or collectively, in interfering with the tibem of action of any of their num-
ber, is s,elf-protection. That the only" purpose for which power can be right-
fulh exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will.
is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not
a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear

,.,1,.,)
__4 ESSAYS ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY
because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier,
because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise. or even right.
These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him,
or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting
him with an) evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from
which it is desired to deter him, must be calculated to produce evil to s0me
one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable
to societx,, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns
himself, his independence is. of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own
body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
It is. perhaps, hardii,;-hece_'a_: {osav that this doctrine is meant to apply'
onh" to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking
of children, or of young persons below the age which the law max fix as
that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require
being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions
as _ell as against external injury'. For the same reason, we may le_{ye out
of consideration those backwarcl states of society in which the race itself
may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the _av of
spontaneou_ progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of mean_
for overcoming theln: and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is war-
ranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end. perhap_ other-
wise unattainable. Des,_potism is a legitmlate mode of government in dealing
with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means
justified b) actuall\ effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no apph-
cation to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have be-
come capable of being improved by free and equal discussion Until then,
there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charle-
magne, if they are so fortunate as to find one. But as soon as mankind have
attained the capacity' of being guided to their own improvement by convic-
tion or persuasion ( a period long since reached in all nations with whom wc
need here concern ourselves), compulsion, either in the direct form or in
that of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer admissible as
a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others.
It is proper to state that I forego an',' advantage which could" be derived to
my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utilit_ _.
I regard utilit\ as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions: but it must
be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man
as a i_-6)fessive being. Those interests. I contend, authorize the subjection
of individual spontaneity to external control, only in respect to those actions
of each. which concern the interest of 9t her people. If any one does an act
hurtful to others, there is a primd facie case for punishing him, by law, or,
where legal penalties are not safely applicable, b) general_ _.disapp._robqtion,.
There are also man}, positive acts for the benefit of others, which he may
r
/e Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

ON LIBERTY 225
rightfully be compelled to perform; such as. to give evidence in a court of

justice, to bear his fair share in the common defence, or in any other joint
work necessary to the interest of the society of which he enjoy s the protec-
tion: and to perform certain acts of individual beneficence, such as saving
a fellow-creature's life, or interposing to protect the defenceless against ill-
usage, things which whenever it is obviousl_ a man's dutx to do, he max
rightfull 5 be made responsible to society for not doing, A person may cause
evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case
he is justl 5 accountable to them for the injury. The latter case. it is true,
requires a much more cautious exercise of compulsion than the former.
To make anx one answerable for doing evil to others, is the rule: to make
him answerable for not preventing evil. is. comparatively speaking, the
exception. Yet there are many cases clear enou_h_ and _erave enotwh_ to
justify that exception. In all things which regard the external relations of
the individual, he i_ de lure amenable to those whose interests are con-
corned, and if need be. to societ\ as their protector. There are often good
reason, for not holding him to the responsibility: but these reasons must
arise from the special expediencies of the case: either because it is a kind
of ca,,c in which he is on the whole likely to act better, x_hen left to his own
discretion, than when controlled in anx wa; m x_h_ch societx ha\ e it in their
pox_er to control him: or because the attempt to exercise control would
produce other evils, greater than those which it would prexent. When such
re:sons as these preclude the enforcement of rcsponsibitit.x, thc con,c_encf
of the agent himself should step into the _acant judgment seat. an'g_rotect
tho,,e interests of others v,hich have no external protection: judging himself
all the more rlg_dl}, because the case does not admit of his beine made
accountable to the judgment of his fellow-creatures.
Bul there i_ a sphere of action m \_hich _ocietx. as distinguished from
the individual, has. if anx. onlx an indirect interest: comprehending all that
portion_9_l'Acpcr_on's life and conduct which affect_ ontx. hm>elf, or ff it
also affects others, onl\ with their free. voluntar\, and undeceived consent
and participation. \Vhcn I sa_ onl\ hlmsell, I mean &rectl\.. and in the first
instance: for whatever affects himself, ma\ affect others /'through _ himself:
and the objection which ma x be grounded on flus contingency, will receive
consideratton in the sequel. This. then. is the apprD2prigtg f_gi':_,no.f !?uman
libert,,. It comprises, first, the inx_ard domain of consciousness: demanding
liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense: libertx of thought
and feel!lag: absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects.
practical or spcculati',e, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of
cxpl"_ssinag.and pubhshing opinions max seem to fall under a different
principle, since it belongs to tha_ part of the conduct of an individual x_hich
/'- h591, 5 t_2 throuk, h

ON LIBERTY 227
department of human conduct, or by the spirit of Puritanism. And some of

those modern reformers who have placed themselves in strongest opposi-
tion to the religions of the past. have been noway behind either churches or
sects in their assertion of the right of spiritual domination: M. Comte. in
particular, whose social system, as unfolded in his cSv._ti'mec de Politique
PositiveJ*l aims at establishing (though b) moral more than by legal ap-
pliances) a despotism of society over the individual, surpassing anything
contemplated in the political ideal of the most rigid disciplinarian among
the ancient philosophers.
Apart from the peculiar tenets of individual thinkers, there is also in the
world at large an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of
society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that
of legislation: and as the tendency of all the changes taking place in the
_orld is to strengthen society, and diminish the power of the individual, this
encroachment is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear,
but, on the contrarx, to grow more and more formidable. The disposition of '
mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own opin-
ions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energeticalt) sup-
ported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to
human nature, that it is hardlx ever kept under restraint bx anything but
want of power: and as the power is not declining, but growing, unles_ a
strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we
must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase,
It will be convcnient for the argument, if, instead of at once entering upon
the _cn_firalthesis, we confine ourselve_ in the first instance to a single branch
of it, on which the principle here stated is. if not fullx, xet to a certain point.
recognised bx the current opinions. This one branch is the Libert\ of
Thought: from which it is impossible to separate the cognate liberty of
speaking and of writing..Although these liberties, to some considerable
amount, form part of the politJcal morality of all countrie,- which profess
religious toleration and free institutions, the grounds, both philosophical and
practical, on which they rest, arc perhaps not so familiar to the general
mind, nor so thoroughly appreciated bx. man\. even of the leaders of opinion.
as might have been expected. Those _,round,_. when nghtl) underqood, are
of much wider application than to only one division of the sub cot. and a
thorough consideration of this part of the question will be found the best
introduction to the remainder. Those to whom nothing which I am about
to say will be new, may therefore, I hope, excuse me. if on a sub ect x_hich
for now three centuries has been so often d_scussed, 1 venture on one dis-
cussion more.
[*Syvtemc dc pohtique po_ittve, ou lrait_" dc _ociolot_ic tn_tituant la Religion

de l'humanitc, 4 vols. I Paris: Mathms, 1851-54 I.]
c-c591.592 Tpam' [this pc_crcm_ t s"ml_laLcn ('omtc'_ Svstbme tv th_ work intended ]

J
CHAPTER II
Of the Liberty of"Thought and

Discussion
THE TIME. it is tO be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary
of the "liberty of the press" as one of the securities against corrupt or
tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed,
against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest
with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines
or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear. This aspect of the question,
besides, has been so often and so triumphantly enforced by: preceding writers,
that it needs not be specially insisted on in thi_ place. Though the law of
Engtand, on the subject of the press, is as servile to this day as it was in the
time of the Tudors, there is little danger of its being actuall'_ put in force
against__pplifical discussion, except during some temporary panic, when fear
of insurrection drives ministers and judges from their propriety:* and, speak-
*These words had scarcely been written, when, as if to give them an emphatic
contradiction, occurred the Government Pres_ Prosecutions of 1858. That ill-
judged interference _ith the libertx of public discussion has not, ho_ever, in-
duced me to alter a single uord in the text, nor has it at all _eakened my convic-
tion that, moments ol panic excepted, the era ot pains and penalties for political
discussion has, m our oun countrx, passed ax_ax. For, m the first place, the
prosecutions were not persisted in, and. in the second, thex were never, properly
speaking, political prosecutions The offence charged was not that of criticising
institunons, or the acts or persons of rulers, but of circulating what was deemed
an immoral doctrine, the la_ fulness of Tvrannicide.
If the arguments of the present chapter are of any validity, there ought to
exist the fullest liberty of professing and d_scussing, as a matter ol ethical convic-
tion, anx docir_n-e,-tioVa'e_,'gfirhrhdfal_t max be considered. It uould, therefore,
be irrde('ant and out of plac'g f6 -examine l_ere, whether the doctrine of Tvran-
nicide deserves that title. I shall content myself with savin,, that the subiect has
been at all times one of the open question_ of morals: that the act of a private
citizen in striking down a criminal, ,_ho, bx raising htmself above the lau. has
placed himself bexond the reach of legal punishment or control, has been ac-
counted b_ whole nations, and bx some of the best and wisest of men, not a
crime, but an act of exalted virtue:'and that, right or wrong, it is not of the natt, re
of assassination, but of civil war. As such, 1 hold that the instigation to it, in a
specific case, may be a proper subject of punishment, but only if an overt act has
folloued, and at least a probable connexion can be establisl_ed between the act
and the instigation. Even then. it is not a foreign government, but the very govern-
ment assailed. _hich alone, in the exercise of self-defence, can legitimately' pun-
ish attacks directed against its own existence.

ON LIBERTY 229
ing generally', it is not. in constitutional countries, to be apprehended, that

the government, whether completely responsibJ¢ to the people or not. will
often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so
it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public. Let us
suppose, therefore, that the government is entirel\ at one with the people,
and never thinks of exerting any" power of coercion unless in agreement with
what it conceives to be their voice, But I den}' the right of the people to
exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The
power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than
the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance
with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus
one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion.
-_i'ah-k_nd would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he,
if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an
opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner: if to be
obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injur), it would make
some difference whether the injur}' was inflicted only on a few persons or on
manx. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is,
that _t is robbing the human race: posterity as well as the existing genera-
tion: those who dissent from the opimon, snll more than those who hold it.
If the opinion i_ right, they are deprived of the opportumt.x of exchanging
error for truth: if wrong, they lose. what is almost as great a benefit, the
clearer perception and lix elier impression of truth, produced b\ it_ collision
with error.
It i_ necessary to consider separately these t_o hypotheses, each of which
has a distract branch of _hc argument corresponchng to _t. We can never be
sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion: and if
x_e were sure. stifling it would be an evil still.
First" the opinion which it is attempted to suppress bx authoritx may

possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth: '"
but the\ arc not infallible. The,, have no authority to decide the question for
all mankind, and exclude every; other person from the means of judging. To
refuse a hearing to an opinion, because the\ are sure that it is false, is to
assume that their certainty, is the same thing as abs(dute certaintx All
silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may
be allowed to rest on thi_ common argument, not the worse for being
common.
Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility
is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgment, which is always
allowed to it in theory': for while every one well knows himself to be fallible,
few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility,
or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which thex feel verx certain.

may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge them-
selves to be liable. Absolute princes, or others who are accustomed to
unlimited deference, usually feel this complete confidence in their own
opinions on nearly all subjects. People more happily situated, who some-
times hear their opinions disputed, and are not wholly unused to be set
right when they are wrong, place the same unbounded reliance only on such
of their opinions as are shared by all who surround them, or to whom they
habitually defer: for in proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own
solitar} judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the in-
fallibility of "the world" in general. And the world, to each individual.
means the part of it with which he comes in contact: his part}', his sect, his
church, his class of society: the man may be called, bv comparison, almost
liberal and large-minded to whom it means anything so comprehensive as
his own country or his own age. Nor is his faith in this collective authority at
all shaken by his being aware that other ages. countries, sects, churches,
classes, and parties have thought, and even now think, the exact reverse. He
devolves upon his own world the responsibility of being in the right against
the dissentient worlds of other people: and it never troubles him that mere
accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his
reliance, and that the same causes which make him a Churchman in London,
would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin. Yet it is as evident
in itself, as any amount of argument can make it, that ages are no more in-
fallible than individuals: every age having held many opinions which subse-
quent ages have deemed not only false but absurd: and it is as certain that
man',' opinions, now general, will be rejected bv future ages, as it is that
many, once general, are rejected by the present.
The objection likely to be made to this argument, would probably take
some such form as the following. There is no _eater assumption of infalli-
bility in forbidding the propagation of error, than in an`," other thing which
is done by public authority on its own judgment and responsibility. Judg-
ment is given to men that they may, use it. Because it may be used
erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all? To
prohibit what they think pernicious, is not claiming exemption from error,
but fulfilling the duty incumbent on them, although fallible, of acting on
their conscientious conviction. If we were never to act on our opinions, be-
cause those opinions may be wrong, we should leave all our interests uncared
for, and all our duties unperformed. An objection which applies to all con-
duct, can be no valid objection to any conduct in particular. It is the dur_, of
governments, and of individuals, to form the truest opinions they can; to
form them carefully, and never impose them upon others unless they are
quite sure of being right. But when they are sure (such reasoners may say),
it is not conscientiousness but cowardice to shrink from acting on their

ON LIBERTY 231
opinions, and allot' doctrines which they honestly think dangerous to the
welfare of mankind, either in this life or in an9Lher, to be scattered abroad
witfibut-restraint, because other people, in less enlightened times, have per-
secuted opinions now believed to be true. Let us take care, it mav be said.
not to make the same mistake: but governments and nations have made
mistakes in other things, which are not denied to be fit subjects for the
exercise of authority: the,,, have laid on bad taxes, made unjust wars. Ought
we therefore to lay on no taxes, and, under whatever provocation, make no
_ars'? Men. and governments, must act to the best of their abilit,,. There is
no such th_!.ngas absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the
purposes of human life. We may, and must, assume our opinion to be true
for the guidance of our own conduct: and it is assuming no more when we
forbid bad men to pervert society by the propagation of opinions which we
regard as false and pernicious.
I answer, that it is assumin_ ver\ much more. There is the _,reatest differ-
ence between presuming an opinion to be true. because, with every oppor-
tunity for contesting it. it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for
the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete libertx of contradict-
ing_andd!3t?ygving our opiniQn, is the very condition whicia justifies us in
assuming..
_ its_..,truth,for purposes of action', and on no other terms, can a bein_
w_th'h-ffmuman faculties have any rational assurance of being right.
When we consider either the history of opinion, or the ordinary conduct
of human hfe, to what is it to be ascribed that the one and the other are no
worse than they are? Not certainly to the inherent force of the human under-
standing: for, on any matter not self-evident, there are ninety-nine persons
totall_ incapable of judging of it, for one who is capable: and the capacity
of the hundredth person is onl; comparative: for the majorit} of the eminent
mcn of every past generation held many opinions now known to be
erroneous, and did or approved numerous things which no one will now
justify. Why is it, then, that there is on the whole a preponderance among
mankind of rational opinions and rational conduct? If there reall_ is this
preponderance--which there must be unless human affairs are. and have
alwavs been, in an almost desperate state--it is owing to a quality of the
human mind, the source of everything respectable in man either as an _.
intellectual or as a moral being, namelx, that his errors are corrigible. He is
capabl__e__ofrectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by
experience alone. There must be discussion, to shot" how experience is to
be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and
argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must
be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without
comments to bring out their meaning. The whole strength and value, then,
of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right

when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting
it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judg-
ment is really deserving of confidence, hob, has it become so? Because he
has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it
has been h_s practice to listen to all that could be said against him: to profit
by as much of it as v,'as just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to
others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt. that the onl_
way in which a human being can make some approach to knob ing the
whole of a subject, is bv hearing what can be said about it by persons of
every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked
at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in
any mode but this: nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise
in any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own
opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and
hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the onl,, stable foundation for a just
reliance on it: for. being cognisant of all that can, at least obviously, be
said against him. and having taken up his position against all gainsayers--
knowinc, that he has soueht for ob ections and difficulties, instead of avoidin_
them. and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from
an}" quarter--he has a right to think his judgment better than that of anv
person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process.
It is not too much to require that what the b'ise_t of mankind, those who
are best entitled to trust their own judgment, find necessary to warrant their
relying on it, should be submitted to by that miscellaneous collection of a
feb" wise and many foolish individuals, called the public. The most intolerant
of churches, the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonization of a
saint, admits, and listens patiently to. a "devil's advocate." The holiest of
men. it appears, cannot be admitted to posthumous honours, until all that
the devil could say against him is known and weighed. If even the
Newtonian philosophy were not permitted to be questioned, mankind could
not feel as complete assurance of its truth as they nov," do. The beliefs which
we have most warrant for, have no safeguard'to rest on. but a standing
invitation to the whole v,'orld to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is
not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from
certainty still: but we have done the best that the existing state of human
reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a
chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there
be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of
receiving it: and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such
approach to truth, as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of cer-
tainty attainable lay a fallibl¢.b..eing, and this the sole way of attaining it.
Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of tt{e arguments for free

ON LIBZRTY 233
discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme:" not seeing that
unless the reasons are good for an extreme case. they are not good for any
case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility.
when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subject`;
which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or
doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is %oa certain, that
is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call an}" proposition certain,
while there is an_ one who would deny its certainw if permitted, but who is
not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us.
are the judges of certaint,,, and judges without hearing the other side.
In the present age--which has been described as "destitute of faith, but
terrified at scepticism"I'l--in which people feel sure. not so much that their
opinions are true. as that the,, should not know what to do without them--
the claim`; of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not
so much on _ts truth , as on its importance to society. There are. it ia alleged.
certain beliefs, so useful, not to say indispensable to well-being, that it is a`;
much the duty of governments to uphold those beliefs, a_ to protect any
other of the interests of soclet',. In a case of such necessity, and so directlx
in the line of their duty. something les_ than infalhbilitx max. it i_ main-
tained, warrant, and even bind. governments, to act on their own opimon.
confirmed bx the general opinion of mankind. It is also often argued, and
still oftener thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these
_alutar\ behefs: and there can be nothing x_rong, it _s thought, in re`;training
bad men. and prohibiting what onl\ _uch men would wksh to practise. Thi,
mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion not :,,
question of the truth of doctrines, but of their u_fulness: and flatter _,itself
by that means to escape the re_pon_ibilit_, of claimin_ to be an infallible
judge of opinions. But those who thus satisf\, themselve._, do not perceixe
that the assumption of infallibihtv is merci\ shifted from one point to
another. The u_efulness of an opinion is itself matter of opinion: a`; di,,-
putable, as open to discussion, and reqmrmg di`;cus_ion as much. as the
opinion itself. There is the same need of an infallible judge of opinions to
decide an opinion to be noxious, as to decide it to be false, unless the
opinion condemned has full opportumt.x of defending itself. And it _ fll not
do to sa\ that the heretic may be allowed to maintain the utilit\ or harm-
lessness of hi,; opinion, though forbidden to maintain it.,, truth. Thc_trut_h
of an opimon is part of its utilit,,. If we would knox_ whether or not it i_
desirable that a proposition should be behe_.ed, is it possible to exclude the
consideration of whether or not it is true'? In the opinion, not of bad men.
[*Thoma_ ('arlvle. "Memoir_ of the Life of Scott." London and lt-cvtmitl_ter
Review, VI & XXVIII IJan . 1838}, 315 ]
a a591" 5q2 ,so [[_rintt't "v error o]

but of the best men, no belief which iscontrarv to truth can be really useful:
and can you prevent such men from urging that plea, when they arc charged
with culpability for denying some doctrine which thev are told is useful,
but which they believe to be false? Those who are on the side of received
opinions, never fail to take all possible advantage of this plea: you do not
find them handling the question of utility as if it could be completely ab-
stracted from that of truth: on the contrary, it is. above all. because their
doctrine is bthe "truth, ''b that the knowledge or the belief of it is held to be
so indispensable. There can be no fair discussion of the question of useful-
ness, when an argument so vital may be employed on one side, but not on
the other. And in point of fact, when law or public feeling do not permit the
truth of an opinion to be disputed, the,,' are just as little tolerant of a denial
of its usefulness. The utmost they allow is an extenuation of its absolute
necessity, or of the positive guilt of rejecting it.
In order more fully to illustrate the mischief of denying a hearing to
opinions because we, in our own judgment, have condemned them, it will
be desirable to fix down the discussion to a concrete casc: and ] choose, by
preference, the cases which are least favourable to me--in which the argu-
ment against freedom of opinion, both on the score of truth and on that of
utilitv, is considered the strongest. Let the opinions impugned be the b_efief
in a God and in a future state, or any of the commonly received doctrines
of morafitv. To fight the battle on such ground, gives a _eat advantage to
an unfair antagonist: since he will be sure to say (and many who have no
desire to be unfair will sav it internally), Are these the doctrinea which you
do not deem sufficiently certain to be taken under the protection of la_?
Is the belief in a God one of the opinions, to feel sure of which, you hold to
be assuming infallibility? But I must be permitted to observe, that it is not
the feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what it may) which I call an assump-
tion of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question for others.
without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side. And
I denounce and reprobate this pretension not the less, if put forth on the
side of my most solemn convictions. However positive any one's persuasion
mav be, not only of the falsity but of the pernicious consequences--not only
of the pernicious consequences, but (to adopt expressions which I alto-
gether condemn) the immorality' and impiety of an opinion: yet if, in pur-
suance of that private judgment, though backed by the public judgment of
his country or his cotemporaries, he prevents the opinion from being heard
in its defence, he assumes infall)bility. And so far from the assumption
being less objectionable or less dangerous because the opinion is called
immoral or impious, this is the case of all others in which it is most fatal.
These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation com-
b-b591,592. 64 "the truth,"

ON LIBERTY 235
mit those dreadful mistakes, which excite the astonishment and horror of
posterity. It is among such that we find the instances memorable in history,
when the arm of the law has been employed to root out the best men and
the noblest doctrines: with deplorable success as to the men, though some
of tffe-dOctrines have survived to be (as if in mocker3,,) invoked, in defence
of similar conduct towards those who dissent from them. or from their
received interpretation.
Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a man
named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public opinion
of his tirnei-(here took placc a memorable collision. Born in an age and
country abounding in individual _eatness. this man has been handed down
to us l_v those who best knew both him and the age, as the most virtuous
man in it: while we know him as the head and prototype of all subsequent
teachers of virtue, the source equally of the lofty inspiration of Plato and
the judicious utilitarianism of Aristotle, "i mafstri di color che sanno."[']
the two headsprmgs of ethical as of all other philosophy. This acknowledged
master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived--whose fame. still
growing after more than two thousand years, all but outweighs the whole
remainder of the names which make his native city illustrious--was put to
death by his countrymen, aftel a judicial conviction, for impiety and im-
morality. Impiety, in denying the gods recognised by the State: indeed his
accuser asserted (see the Apologia) that he believeci in no gods at all. Im-
morality, in being, by his doctrines and instructions, a "'corrupter of
vouth."I_] Of these charges the tribunal, there is every uound for believing.
honestly found him guilty, and condemned the man who probably of all
then born had deserved best of mankind, to be put to death as a criminal.
To pass from this to the onh" other instance of judicial iniquity, the
mention of which, after the condemnation of Socrates, would not be an
anti-climax: the event which took place on Calvar_ rather more thz_n
eighteen hundred years ago. The man who left on tiae memorx of those
who wimessed his life and conversation, such an impression of his moral
grandeur, that eighteen subsequent centuries have done homage to him as
the Almight_ in person, was ignominiousl 5 put to death, as what? As a
blaspTaemer. Men did not mereh mistake their benefactor: they nustook
him for the exact contrary of what he was, and treated him a_, that prodigy
of impiety, which they themselves are now held to be, for their treatment
of him. The feelings with which mankind now regard these lamentable
transactions, especially the later of the two, render them extremely unjust
['See Dante, lnlerno Canto IV. I. 131.]

[_Plato, Apoloqy, in Euthyphro, ,4poloqy. Crito, Phacdo, Phaedru_ I Greek
and English), trans. H. N. Fo_ler (London: Heinemann: Ne_ York: Macmillan,
1914), p, 90 124b-_). The accuser was Meletus.]

in their judgment of the unhappy" actors. These were, to all appearance, not
bad men--not worse than men commonly are, but rather the contrary;
men who possessed in a full, or somewhat more than a full measure, the
religious, moral, and patriotic feelings of their time and people: the very
kind of men who, in all times, our own included, have every chance of
passing through life blameless and respected. The high-priest who rent his
garments when the words were pronounced,t*l which, according to all the
ideas of his countr`", constituted the blackest guilt, was in all probability'
quite as sincere in his horror and indignation, as the generalit} of respec-
table and pious men now are in the religious and moral sentiments the`"
profess: and most of those who now shudder at his conduct, if they had
lived in his time. and been born Jews, would have acted precisely' as he did.
Orthodox Christians who are tempted to think that those who qoned to
death the first martyrs must have been worse men than the\ themselves arc.
ought to remember that one of those persecutors was Saint Paul.{q
Let us add one more example, the most striking of all, if the impressive-
ness of an error is measured by the wisdom and virtue of him who falls into
it. If ever an,,, one, possessed of power, had grounds for thinking hin>elf
the best and most enlightened among his cotemporaries, it was the Emperor
Marcus Aurelius. Absolute monarch of the whole civilized world, he pre-
served through life not only the most unblemished justice, but what was
less to be expected from his Stoical breeding, the tenderest heart The feu
failings which are attributed to him. were all on the side of indulgence: while
his writings, the highest ethical product of the ancient mind. differ scarcely
perceptibly', if the,,' differ at all, from the most characteriqic teachings of
Christ. This man. a better Christian in all but the dogmatic sense of the
word, than almost any of the ostensibly Christian sovereign_ who have
since reigned, persecuted Christianity. Placed at the summil of all the pre-
vious attainments of humanity, with an open. unfettered intellect, and a
character which led him of himself to embody in hi_, moral writings the
Christian ideal, he vet failed to see that Christianity was to be a good and
not an evil to the world, with his duties to which he was so deeply pene-
trated. Existing societ`' he knew to be in a deplorable state. But such as it
was, he saw, or thought he saw, that it was held together, and prevented
from being worse, by belief and reverence of the received divinities. As a
ruler of mankind, he deemed it his duty not to suffer society to fall in pieces:
and saw not how, if its existing ties were removed, any others could be
formed which could again knit it together. The new religion openly" aimed
at dissolving these ties: unless, therefore, it was his duty to adopt that
religion, it seemed to be his duty to put it down. Inasmuch then as the
[*Caiaphas: see Matthew, 26: 65.]
[*See Acts, 7:58-8:4.]

ON LIBERT_ 237
theology of Christianity did not appear to him true or of divine origin:

inasmuch as this strange history of a crucified God was not credible to him.
and a system which purported to rest entirely upon a foundation to him so
wholly unbelievable, could not be foreseen bv him to be that renovatin_,ee _
agency which, after all abatements, it has in fact prmed to be: the gentlest
and most amiable of philosophers and rulers, under a solemn sense of duty,
authorized the persecution of Christianitv. To my mind this is one of the
most tragical fact_ in all history. It is a bitter thought, how different a thing
the Christiamtv of the world might have been. if the Christian faith had
been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspice_ of Marcus
Aurelius instead of those of Constantine. But it would be equall._ unjust to
him and false to truth, to dem, that no one plea which can be urged for
punishing anti-Christian teaching, was wanting to Marcus Aurelius for / 7-
punishing, as he did. the propagation of Christianity. No Christian more '" :
firmly beheves that Atheism _s false, and tend_ to the dissolution of societx.
than Marcus Aurelius believed the same things of Chr_stlanitx" he who. of
all men {hen living, might have been thought the most capable of appreciat-
ing it. Unless an\ one who approves of punishment for the promulgation of
opinion_, flatters h_mself that hc i., a wiser and better man than Marcus
Aurelius--more deepl) versed in the wisdom of h_s time. more elevated in
his intellect above it--more earnest in his search for truth, or more _ingle-
minded in his devotion to it when found:--let him abstain from that a.ssump-
tlon of the joint infallibilitx, of himself and the multitude, which the great
Antonmus made x_ith so unfortunate a result.
Aware of the impossibilit 3 of defending the use of punishment for re-
straimng irreligious opinions, by an\ argument which will not ustify Marcus
Antoninus, the enemms of religiou_ freedom, when hard pressed, occasion-
all}"accept this consequence, and sax. with Dr. Johnson. that the persecutors
of Christianity were in the right:i*_ that persecution i_ an ordeal through
which truth ought to pass. and always pas_es successfullx, legal penalties
being, in the end, pm_erless against truth, though sometimes beneficially ef-
fective against mischievous errors. This is a form of the argument for
religious intolerance, sufficlentlx remarkable not to be passed wifllout notice.
A theory which maintains that truth max justifiably bc persecuted be-
cause persecution cannot possibly do it any harm. cannot be charged with
being intentionallx hostile to the reception of ncx_ truths: but we cannot
commend the generosity of its dealing with the persons to whom mankind
are indebted for them. To discover to the world something which deeply
concerns it, and of which it was previously i,,norant:> to prove to _t that it
had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is
[*See Bos_ell, Lgtc ot ,lolm,xon. Vol. 1l, p. 250 17 Ma\. 1-73 _. cI. Vol. IV,
p. 12 (1780).]

as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow-creatures,

and in certain cases, as in those of the earl), Christians and of the Reformers,
those who think with Dr. Johnson believe it to have been the most precious
gift which could be bestowed on mankind. That the authors of such splendid
benefits should be requited by martyrdom; that their reward should be to
be dealt with as the vilest of criminals, is not, upon this theory, a deplorable
error and misfortune, for which humanity should mourn in sackcloth and
ashes, but the normal and justifiable state of things. The propounder of a
new truth, according to this doctrine, should stand, as stood, in the legisla-
tion of the Locrians, the proposer of a new law. with a halter round his
neck, to be instantly tightened if the public assembly did not, on hearin_o his
reasons, then and there adopt his proposition.t*1 People who defend this
mode of treating benefactors, cannot be supposed to set much value on the
benefit; and I believe this view of the subject is mostly confined to the sort
of persons who think that new" truths may have been desirable once. but
that we have had enough of them now.
-, But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is
one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till
they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History
teems with instances of truth put down bv persecution. If not suppressed
for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious
o2inigns: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther.
and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put
down. Savonarola was put down. The AIbigeois were put down. The Vau-
dois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put
down. Even after the era of Luther. wherever persecution was persisted in,
it was successful. In Spain. Italy, Flandcrs. the Austrian empire, Protestant-
ism was rooted out; and, most likely, would have been so in England, had
Queen Mar}, lived, or Queen Elizabeth died, Persecution has always suc-
ceeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectually
persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianitv might have
been extirpated in the Roman Empire. It spread, and became predomi-
nant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short
time, and separated by long intervals of aimost undisturbed propagandism.
It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent
power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.
Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a suf-
ficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed
[*See Demosthenes. "'Against Timocrates,'" in Demosthenes against Meidias,

Androtion, Aristocrates, Timocrates. Aristogeiton (Greek and English), trans.
J. H. Vince (London: Heinemann: Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University,
Press, 1935 ), p. 463 (xxiv, 139).]

ON LIBERTY 239
in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has,
consists in this, that when an opinion is true. it may be extinguished once,
twice, or man}' times, but in the course of ages there will eoenerall,,,,be found
persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time
when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it hat
made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
It will be said. that we do not now put to death the introducers of new
opinions we are not like our fathers who slew the prophets, we even build
sepulchres to them. It is truf.:__no l_olagex_pu.t_h¢.r_ct.i.cs_.!_o,
dvath: and the
amount of penal infliction which modern feeling would probabl} tolerate,
even against the most obnoxious opinions, is not sufficient to extirpate them.
But let us not flatter ourselves that we are vet free from the stain even of
legal persecution. Penalties for opinion, or at least for its expression, still
exist by law: and their enforcement is not. even in these time_, so unex-
ampled as to make it at all incredible that they may some day be revived in
full force, In the year 18_._.,_7,at the summer assizes of the countx of Corn-
wall. an unfortunate man,* said to be of unexceptionable conduct in all
relations of life, was sentenced to twentv-one months' imprisonment, for
uttering, and writing on a gate, some offensive words concerning Christian-
itv. Within a month of the same time, at the Old Bailey, tWO persons, on
tx_o separate occasions, _ x_ere rejected as jurymen, and one of them grossl 3
insulted bx the judge and bx one of the counsel, because the\ honestlx de-
clared that they had no theological belief: and a third, a foreigner.- for the
same reason, was denied ustice against a thief. This refusal of redre_ took
place in virtue of the legal doctrine, that no person can be allowed to give
evidence in a court of justme, who does not profess belief in a God l anv
god is sufficient I and in a future state: which is equivalent to declaring such
persons to be outlaws, excluded from the protection of the tribunals: who
may not only be robbed or assaulted with impunity, if no one but them-
selves, or persons of similar opinions, be present, but an\ one else ma\ be
robbed or assaulted with impunity, if the proof of the fact depends on their
evidence. The assumption on which this is grounded, is that the oath is
worthless, of a person who does not believe in a future state: a proposition
which betokens much ignorance of history in those who assent to it (since
it is historically true that a laree_ proportion of infidels in all a,,e_e,have been
persons of distinguished inteuity and honour)' and would be maintained
by no one who had the smallest conception how many of the persons in
greatest repute with the world, both for virtues and for attainments, are
*Thomas Poolev, Bodmin Assizes, Julx 3l, 185"_.In December follo_ing, he

received a free pardon from the Crovnn.
+George Jacob Holy.oake, August 17, 1857: Edv, ard Truelove. Julx, 1857.
**Baronde Gleichen. Marlborough-street Police Court. August 4. 1857

well known, at least tq.th_¢itjnlimates, to be unbelievers. The rule, besides,

is suicidal, and cuts away its own foundation. Under pretence that atheists
must be liars, it admits the testimony of all atheists who are willing to lie,
and rejects only those who brave the obloquy of publicly, confessing a de-
tested creed rather than affirm a falsehood. A rule thus self-convicted of
absurdity so far as regards its professed purpose, can bc kept in force only
as a badge of hatred, a relic of persecution" a persecution, too, having the
peculiarity, that the qualification for undergoing it. is the being clearly
proved not to deserve it. The rule, and the theory it implies, are hardly less
insulting to believers than to infidels• For if he who does not believe in a
future state, necessarily lies. it follows that they who do believe are onl\'
prevented from lying, if prevented they are, by the fear of hell. Wc will not
do the authors and abettors of the rule the injury of supposing, that the con-
ception which they have formed of Christian virtue is drawn from their own
consciousness.
These. indeed, are but rags and remnants of persecution, and may be
thought to be not so much an indication of the wish to persecute, as an ex-
ample of that very frequent infirmity of English minds, which makes them
take a preposterous pleasure in the assertion of a bad principle, when the\
are no kruger bad enough to desire to carry it really into practice. But un-
happily there is no security in the state of the public mind, that the suspen-
sion of worse forms of legal persecution, which has lasted for about the
space of a generation, will continue. In this age the quiet surface of routine
is as often ruffled by attempts to resuscitate past evils, as to introduce new
benefits. What is boasted of at the present time as the revival.9_f r_eJigiQn,is
always, in narrow and uncultivated minds, at least as much the revival of
bigotry: and where there is the strong permanent leaven of intolerance in
the feelings of a people, which at all times abides in the middle classes of
this country, it needs but little to provoke them into actively' persecuting
those whom they have never ceased to think proper objects of persecution. _
*Ample warning max be dragon from the large infusion of the passions of a
persecutor, which mineled_ with the :,_,eneraldisplay, of the worst parts of our na-
tional character on the occasion of the Sepoy insurrection. The ravings of fanatics
or charlatans from the pulpit may be unworthx of notice, but the heads of the
Evangelical party haxe announce(t as their principle for the government of Hin-
doos and Mahomedans, thai no schools be supported by pubhc monex in which
the Bible is not taught, and by necessar_ consequence that no public employment
be given to anx but read or i_retendedChristmns. An Under-Secretarx of State
[Wilham N. Massey], in a speech delivered to his consmuents on the 12th ol
November, 1857, is reported to have said: "Toleration of their faith" (the faith
of a hundred millions of British subjects _. "the superstition ,ahich they called
religion, bx the British Government, had had the effect of retarding the ascen-
dancy of the British name, and preventing the salutary growth of Christianitx.
•.. "I:oleration _ as the great corner-stone of the rehaiou-_ liberties of this countrx :

ON LIBERTY 241
For it is this--it is the opinions men entertain, and the feelings they cherish, _ --_'_
respecting those who disown the beliefs they deem important, which makes
this c_ou__ntry not a place of mental freedom. For a long time past, the chief
mischief of the legal penalties is that- they strengthen the social stig-ma. It is
that stigma which is really effective, and so effective is it, that the_rofessi9n
of opinions which are under the ban of society is much less common in
England, than is, in many other countries, the avowal of'those which incur
risk of judicial punishment. In respect to all persons but those whose pecu-
niary circumstances make them independent of the good will of other people,
__,opinion, on this subjfst_, iis _a:_.efficacious as_!a_': men m_ght as well be im-
prisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread. Those whose
bread is already secured, and who desire no favours from men in power,
or from bodies of men. or from the public, have nothing to fear from the
open avowal of any' opinions, but to be ill-thought of and ill-spoken of. and
this it ought not to require a very heroic mould to enable them to bear.
There is no room for any appeal a,a;misericordiam in behalf of such persons.
But though we do not now inflict so much evil on those who think differently
from us. as it was formerly our custom to do. it may be that we do ourselves
as much evil as ever by our treatment of them. Socrates was put to death,
but the Socratic philosophy rose like the sun in heaven, and spread its illumi-
nation over the whole intellectual firmament. Christians were cast to the
lions, but the Christian church gre_ up a stately and spreading tree. over-
topping the older and less vigorous growths, and stifling them by its shade
Our merel 3 social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but in-
duces men to disguise them, or to abstain from anx actwe effort for their
diffusion. With us, heretical opimons do not perceptibl 3 gain, or even lose,
ground in each decade or generation: they never blaze out far and wide.
but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious
persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general
affaars of mankind with either a true or a deceptive light. And thus is kept
up a state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the
unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, _t maintains all pre-
vailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely inter-
dict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the maiadv of
but do not let them abuse that precious word toleration. As he understood it, it
meant the complete libertx to all. freedom of worship, among Christianv, who
worshipped upon the same-foundation. It meant toleration of all sects and denomi-
nation_ of Christianr who believed m the one mediation." [See The Time_, 14
Nov., 1857, p. 4.] I desire to call attention to the fact, that a man _ho has been
deemed fit to fill a high office in the government of this country, under a liberal
Ministry, maintains the doctrine that all _ho do not believe in the divinit_ of
Christ are be_ ond the pale of toleration. Who, after this imbecile display, can in-
dulge the illusion that religiou_ persecution has passed a_aav, never to return?

thought. A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and
keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. But the
,, price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the
entire moral courage of the human mind. A state of things in whicha-large
portion of the most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep
the 'genesalc principles and grounds of their convictions Within their own
breasts, and attempt, in what the}' address to the public, to fit as much as
they can of their own conclusions to premises which they' have internally.
renot_nTe'-dYcannot send forth the open, fearless characters, and loeical,
consistent intellec{s W-rioonce adorned the thinking world. The sort of men
who can be looked for under it, are either mere conformers to commonplace,
or time-servers for truth, whose arguments on all great subjects are meant
for their hearers, and are not those which have convinced themselves. Those
who avoid this alternative, do so by narrowing their thoughts and interest to
things which can be spoken of without venturing within the region of
principles, that is, to small practical matters, which would come right of
themselves, if but the minds of mankind were strengthened and enlarged,
and which will never be made effectually right until then: while that which
would strengthen and enlarge men's minds, free and daring speculation on
the highest subjects, is abandoned.
Those in whose eyes this reticence on the .p_rt of heretics is no evil, should
consider in the first place, that in consequence of it there is never any fair
and thorough discussion of heretical opinions: and that such of them as
could not stand such a-discussion, though they may be prevented from
spreading, do not disappear. But it is not the minds of heretics that are
deteriorated most, by the ban placed on all inquiry which does not end in
the orthodox conclusions. The greatest harm done is to those who are not
heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason
cowed, by the fear of heresy. Who can compute what the world loses in the
multitude of p _eromisin
. intellects
............combined with timid characters, who dare
not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, test it
should land them in something which would admit of being considered ir-
religious or immoral? Among them we may occasionally see some man of
deep conscientiousness, and subtle and refined understanding, who spends
a life in sophisticating with an intellect which he cannot silence, and exhausts
the resources of ingenuity in attempting to reconcile the promptings of his
conscience and reagb-ffwtth" 0/_hodoxy, which vet he does not, perhaps, to
the end succeed in doing. No one can be a great thinker who does not recog-
nise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever
con c!usig_ns, it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors ofone-_,'ho,
with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opin-
e-c591,592 genuine [printer's error?]

oN LIBERTY 243
ions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to
think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers, that freedom
of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much and even more indis-
pensable, to enabl e avera_ge human bein_gL.t9_gtAajrL1h.c__men/;al stature
which the)' arecat__a_ble of. There have been, and may again be. great indi-
vidual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slaver)'. But there never
has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere, an inte!lectua!!s_actiye people.
dWhen a an); people has made a temporary approach to such a character, it
has been because the dread of heterodox speculation was for a time sus-
pended. Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be dis-
puted: where the discussion of the geatest questions which can occupy
humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally
high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of histolw so
remarkable. Never when controversy avoided the subjects which are large
and important enough to kindle enthusiasm, was the mind of a people
stirred up from its foundations, and the impulse given which raised even
persons of the most ordinary intellect to something of the digxfity of think-
ing beings. Of such we have had an example in the condition of Europe
during the times immediately following the Reformation: another, though
limited to the Continent and to a more cultivated class, in the speculative
movement of the latter half of the eighteenth century: and a third, of still
briefer duration, in the intellectual fermentation of Germany during the
Goethian and Flchtean period. These periods differed widely in the par-
tzcular opinions which they developed: but were alike in this, that during
all three the voke of authorit),,was broken. In each. an old mental despotism
had been thrown off, and no new one had yet taken its place. The impulse
gwefi fi-Vffi_se three periods has made Europe what it now is. Every single
Improvement which has taken place either m the human mind or in insti-
tutions, may be traced distinctly to one or other of them. Appearances have
for some time indicated that all three impulses are well mgh spent: and we
can expect no fresh start, until we again assert our mental freedom.
Let us now pass to the second division of the argument, and dismissing
the supposition that anv of the receiv:ed 0pinions may be false, let us assume
them to be true. and examine into the worth of the manner in which ihev
are likely to be held, when their truth is not freely and openly canvassed.
However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the
possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the con-
sideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and
fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dea d dogma, not a living truth.
There is a class of persons {happily not quite so numerous as formerly)
d-d591 592, 64 Where

who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what the,,, think

true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of the opinion.
and could not make a tenable defence of it against the most superficial ob-
jections. Such persons, if they can once get their creed taught from authority.
naturally think that no good. and some harm, comes of its being allowed
to be questioned. Where their influence prevails, they make it nearly im-
possible for the received opinion to be rejected wisely and considerately.
though it may still be rejected rashly and ignorantly, for to shut out dis-
cussion entirely is seldom possible, and when it once gets in. beliefs not
_ounded on conviction are apt to give way before the slightest sem,bla.tlce_of
an argument. Waving, however, this possibility--assuming that the true
opinion abides in the mind. but abides as a prejudice, a belief independent
of, and proof against, argument--this is n otthe way in whicklntLh ought to
be held by a rational being. This is not knowin_ the truth. Truth, thus held.
is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which
enunciate a truth.
If the intellect and judgment of mankind ought to be cultivated, a thing
which Protestants at least do not deny, on what can these faculties be more
appropriately' exercised bv an',' one, than on the things which concern him
so much that it is considered necessary for him to hold opinions on them?
If the cultivation of the understanding consists in one thing more than in
another, it is surely' in learning the grounds of one's own opinions Whatever
people believe, on subjects on which it is of the first importance to believe
rightly', they ought to be able to defend against at least the common objec-
tions. But, some one may say;, "Let them be taught the grounds of their opin-
ions. It does not follow that opinions must be merely parroted because they
are never heard controverted. Persons who learn geometry' do not simply"
commit the theorems to memory, but understand and learn likewise the
demonstrations; and it would be absurd to say that they remain ignorant of
the _ounds of geometrical truths, because they never hear any one deny.
and attempt to disprove them." Undoubtedly': and such teaching suffices on a
subject like mathematics, where there is nothing at all to be said on the
wrong side of the question. The peculiarity' of the evidence of mathematical
truths is, that all the argument is on one side. There are no objections, and
no answers to objections. But on every subject on which difference of opin-
ion is possible, the truth depends on a balance to be struck between two
sets of conflicting reasons. Even in natural philosophy, there is ahvays some
other explanation possible of the same facts; some geocentric theory instead
of heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of oxygen; and it has to be shown
why that other theory cannot be the true one: and until this is shown, and
until we know how it is shown, we do not understand the grounds of our
opinion. But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals,

ON LIBERTY 245
religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life. three-fourths of

the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling the appear-
ances which favour some opinion different from it. The greatest orator.
save one,tq of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his
adversary's case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even
h_s own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to
be imitated by all who study an}' subject in order to arrive at the truth. He
who knows onlx his own side of the case, knows little of that. H_s reasons
may be good. and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is
equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so
much as know what the`" are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.
The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless
he contents himself with that, he is rather led bv authorit\, or adopts, like
the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor
is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversarms from his own
teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what thex offer as
refutations. That is not the wav to do justice to the arguments, or bring them
into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to h.car .thqm from
persons who actua!l)LbeJke_Lethh.i:rn;who defend them in earnest, and do thmr
xer`' utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and per-
suasive form" he must feel the Whole force of the difficulty which the true
view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of: else he will never realtx
possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and remove, that diffi-
cult,,'. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are m th>
condition: even of those who can argue flucntN for their opinions Their
conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything thex knox_ : the\
have never thrown themselves into the mental posinon of those who think
dlfferentl\ from them, and considered what such persons may have to sax"
and consequentl 5 the`' do not, in any proper sense of the word. know the
doctrine which thex themselves profess. Thex do not know those parts of it
which explain and justify' the remainder: the considcrationa which show
that a fact 'ahich scemingl 5 conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or
that. of two apparentl 3 strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be
preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the
judgment of a completely informed mind, the_ arc strangers to: nor is it
ever rcallx known, but to those who have attended equalt) and impartiall}
to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both m the strongest
light. So essential is this &sc_pline to a real understanding of moral and hu- ,'--_' *
man subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it i, in- -'
dispensable to imagine them. and supply them w_th the strongest arguments "'
which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up.
["D emosthenes.]

To abate the force of these considerations, an enemy of free discussion

may be supposed to sav, that there is no necessity for mankind in general to
know and understand all that can be said against or for their opinions by
philosophers and theologians. That it is not needful for common men to be
able to expose all the misstatements or fallacies of an ingenious opponent.
That it is enough if there is alwavs somebody capable of answering them. so
that nothing hkelv to mislead uninstructed persons remains unrcfuted. That
simple minds, having been taught the obvious grounds of the truths incul-
cated on them, may' trust to authority for the rest, and being aware that thex
have neither knowledgenor talent to resolve ever',' difficulty which can be
raised, may repose in the assurance that all those which have been raised
have been or can be answered, bv those who are specially trained to the task.
Conceding to this view of the subject the utmost that can be claimed for
it by those most easily satisfied with the amount of understanding of truth
"which ought to accompany the belief of it: even so, the argument for free
discussion is no way weakened. For even this doctrine acknowledges that
mankind ought to have a rational assurance that all objections have been
satisfactorily answered: and how are they to be answered if that which re-
quires to be answered is not spoken? or how can the answer be known to be
, satisfactor`,, if the objectors have no opportumty of showing that it is un-
satisfactory? If not the public, at least the philosophers and theologians who
are to resolve the difficulties, must make themselves familiar with those
difficulties in their most puzzling form: and this cannot be accomplished un-
less they are freely stated, and placed in the most advantageous light whmh
they admit of. The Catholic Church ha_ its own way of dealing with this
embarrassine problem. It makes a broad separation between those who can
be permitted to receive its doctrines on conviction, and those who must ac-
cept them on trust. Neither. indeed, are allowed any choice as to what the`,'
will accept: but the clergy, such at least as can be full',' confided in, may
admissibly and meritoriously make themselves acquainted with the argu-
ments of opponents, in order to answer them, and max'. therefore, read here-
tical books: the laity, not unless by special permission, hard to be obtained.
This discipline recognises a knowledge of the enemy's case as beneficial
to the teachers but finds means, consistent with this, of denying it to the
rest of the world' thus giving to the dlite more mental culture, though not
more mental freedom, than it allows to the mass. Bv this device it succeeds in
obtaining the kind of mental superiority which its purpose_ require: for
though culture without freedom never made a large and liberal mind, it can
make a clever nisi prius advocate of a cause. But in countries professing
Protestantism, this resource is denied: since Protestants hold, at least in
theory, that the responsibility for the choice of a religion must be borne by
each for himself, and cannot be thrown off upon teachers. Besides, in the

OYHBERTV 247
present state of the world, it is practically impossible that writings which are
read by the instructed can be kept from the uninstructed. If the teachers of
mankind are to be cognisant of all that they ought to know, everything must
be free to be written and published without restraint.
If, however, the mischievous operation of the absence of free discussion.
when the received opinions are true, were confined to leaving men ignorant
of the grounds of those opinions, it might be thought that this. if an intellec-
tual, is no moral evil, and does not affect the worth of the opinions, regarded
in their influence on the character. The fact. however, Is, that no tonl\; the
_,rounds of the o_inion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too
often the meaning of the opinion itself. The words which convey it, cease
to suggest ideas, or suggest only a small portion of those they were originally
employed to communicate. Instead of a vivid conception and a livine belief.
there remain only a fe}_zphrases retained bx rote: or, if an} part. the she!! and
husk only of the meanine is retained, the finer essence beine lost. The ereat
ch_i:_te-r-l:fihuman historY" which ibis fact_-"-""--'-'"
occupms ...........
and fills, cannot be too
earnestly studied and meclitated on.
It i,, illustrated in the experience of almo,;t all ethical doctrines and " :
relieio___uscreeds. They are all full of meaning and vitalitx to those who ..
originate them. and to the direct disciples of the originators. Their meanine
continues to be felt in undiminished strength, and is perhaps brought out
into even fuller consciousness, so long as the struggle la,ts to gix e the doc-
trine or creed an ascendancx over other creeds. At last it either prevaitq, and
becomes the _eeneral opinion, or its pro,,rcs_e
.. stops: it keeps possession of the
ground it has gained, but ceases to spread further. When either of these
results has become apparent, controvcrs_ on the subject flags, and gradual13
dies awax. The doctrine has taken it_ place, if not as a received opinion, as
one of the admitted sects or divisions of opinion: -those who hold it have
generally inheriLed_.not adopted it: and conversion from one of the_c doc-
trines to another, being now an exceptional fact. occupies little place in the
thoughts of their professors. Instead of being, a_ a[ first, constantly on the
alert either to defend themselves against the world, or to bring the x_orld
over to them, they have subsided into acquiescence, and neither listen, when
they can help it, to arguments against their creed, nor trouble dissentients cif
there be such) with arguments in its favour. From this time max usuallx bc
dated the dc.c_e__n_$_he_Jix/_.g_po?,W.r of the doctrine. XVc often hear the
teachers of all creeds lamenting the difticultv of keeping up in the mind_ of
believers a lively apprehension of the truth x_hich the\ nominally recoeni.se.
so that it may penetrate the fc_zlings, and acquire a real master) over the
conduct. No such difficulty is complained of while the creed i_ still fighting
for its existence: cvcn the weaker combatants then know and feel what they
are fighting for, and the difference between it and other doctrines: and in

that period of every creed's existence, not a few persons may be found, who
have realized its fundamental principles in all the forms of thought, have
weighed and considered them in all their important bearings, and have
experienced the full effect on the character, which belief in that creed ought
to produce in a mind thoroughly imbued with it. But when it has come to
be an hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not activelv--when the
mined _-iidlonger compelled, in the same de_ee as at first, to exercise its
vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, there is a pro_es-
sive tendencv to forget all of the belief except the formularies, or to give it a
dull and torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity
oi'-f_I_n-g iiin consciousness, or testing it by personal experience; until it
almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being.
Then are seen the cases, so frequent in this age of the world as almost to
form the majority, in which the creed remains as it were outside the mind,
incrusting and petrifying it against allother influences addressed to the
higher parts of our nature: manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh
and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart.
except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant.
To what an extent doctrines intrinsically fitted to make the deepest impres-
sion upon the mind may remain in it as dead beliefs, without being ever
realized in the imagination, the feelings, or the understanding, is exemplified
bv the manner in which the majority of believers hold the doctrines of
_hr!stianity. Bv Christianity I here mean what is accounted such i__Tall
churches and sects--the maxims and precepts contained in the New Testa-
ment. These are considered sacred, and accepted as laws, by all professing
Christians. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that not one Christian in a
thousand guides or tests his individual conduct by reference to those laws.
The standard to which he does refer it, is the custom of his nation, his class,
or his religious profession. He has thus, on the one hand, a collection of
ethical maxims, which he believes to have been vouchsafed to him by
infallible wisdom as rule_ for his government: and on the other, a set of
every-day judgments and practices_ which go a certain length with some of
those maxims, not so great a length with others, stand in direct opposition
to some, and are, on the whole, a compromise between the Christian creed
and the interests and suggestions of worldly life. To the first of these
standards he gives his homage; to the other his real allegiance, All Christians
believe that the blessed are the poor and humble, and those who are ill-used
by the world: that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eve of a needle
than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven: that the}, should judge
not, lest thev be judged: that they should swear not at all; that they should
love their neighbour as themselves: that if one take their cloak, they should
give him their coat also; that they should take no thought for the morrow:

ON LIBERTY 249
that if they would be perfect, they should sell all that they have and give it to
the poor.I*l The``" are not insincere when they sa,," that they believe these
things. The2/_do believe them, as people believe what the)' have always heard
laude,_d_.xtlldr_e.ver discussed. But in the sense of that living belief which
regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which
it is usual to act upon them. The doctrines in their integrity are serviceable
to pelt adversaries with; and it is understood that thex are to be put forward
(when possible) as the reasons for whatever people do that they think
laudable. But any one who reminded them that the maxims require an
infinit,,, of things which thex never even think of doing, would gain nothing
but to be classed among those very. unpopular characters who affect to be
better than other people. The doctrines have no hold Qn.ozdmar'i .b_lievers--
are not a power in their minds. They ha_,,ean habitual respect for the sound
of them, but no feeling which spreacts from the words to the things signified.
and forces the mind to take them in. and make them conform to the formula.
Whenever conduct is concerned, the.,, look round for Mr. A and B to direct
them how far to go in obeying Christ.
Now we ma,, be well assured that the case was not thus. but far other- :. .
wise, with the earl,," Christians. Had it been thus, Christianity never would ."
have expanded from an obscure sect of the despised Hebrews into the
religion of the Roman empire. When their enemies said. "See how these
Christians love one another"I'l t a remark not likelx to be made b\ anvbod\
now). they assuredly had a much livelier feeling of the meaning of their
creed than they have ever had since. And to this cause, probably, it is chiefl\
owing that Christianit\ nox_ makes so little progress in extending its domain,
and after mghteen centuries, is still nearl,, confined to Europeans and the
descendants of Europeans. Even with the strictl} rchgious, who are much in
earnest about their doctrines, and attach a _eater amount of meaning to
man``, of them than people in general, it commonly happens that the part
which is thu_ comparatively active in their minds is that which was made
b3 Calvin. or Knox. or some such person much nearer in character to
themselves. The savines of Christ coexist p.assivel}' in their m!nds, producing
hardly any effect bc,,ond what is caused bv mere listening to words so
amiable and bland. There are man,, reasons, doubtless, why doctrines which
are the badge of a sect retain more of their vitality than those cormnon to all
recognised sects, and why more pains are taken by teachers to keep their
meaning alive; but one reason certainly is. that the peculiar doctrines arc
more questioned, and have to be oftener defended against open gainsayers.
[*See, respectively, i.uke. 6.20-3 IcE Matthew,. 5:3ff. I. and Matthew, 19:24.
7: l, 5:341cE James, 5:12), 19:19.5:40,6:34,19:21 ]
['See Tertullian. Apoloe3 (Latin and English l. trans. T. R. Glover (London.
Heinemann: New York: Putnam's Sons. 1931 ). p. 177 Ixxxix, 7 _.]

Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no

enemy in the field.
The same thing holds true, generally speaking, of all traditional doctrines
--those of prudence and knowledge of life, as well as of morals or religion.
All languages and literatures are full of general observations on life, both as
to what it is, and how to conduct oneself in it; observations which everybody
knows, which everybody repeats, or hears with acquiescence, which are
received as truisms, yet of which most people first truly learn the meaning,
when experience, generally of a painful kind, has made it a reality to them.
How often, when smarting under some unforeseen misfortune or disappoint-
ment, does a person call to mind some proverb or common saying, familiar
to him all his life, the meaning of which, if he had ever before felt it as he
does now, would have saved him from the calamity. There are indeed
reasons for this, other than the absence of discussion: there are many truths
of which the full meaning cannot be realized, until personal experience has
brou_,ht it home. But much more of the meanine even of these would have
been understood, and what was understood would have been far more
deepl), impressed on the mind, if the man had been accustomed to hear it
argued pro and con by people who did understand it. The fatal tendencv of
mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful,
is the cause of half their errors. A cotemporary author has well spoken of
"the deep slumber of a decided opinion."
But what! (it may be asked) Is the absence of unanimity an indispensable
condition of true knowledge? Is it necessary that some part of mankind
should persist in error, to enable any to realize the truth? Does a belief cease
to be real and vital as soon as it is generally received--and is a proposition
never thoroughly understood and felt unless some doubt of it remains? As
soon as mankind have unanimously accepted a truth, does the truth perish
within them? The highest aim and best result of improved intelligence, it
has hitherto been thought, is to unite mankind more and more in the
acknowledgment of all important truths" and does the intelligence only last
as long as it has not achieved its object? Do the fruits of conquest perish bv
the very completeness of the victory?
I affirm no such thing. As mankind improve, the number of doctrines
which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increase:
and the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and
gravity of the truths which have reached the point of being uncontested. The
cessation, on one question after another, of serious controversy, is one of the
necessary incidents of the consolidation of opinion; a consolidation as
salutary in the case of true opinions, as it is dangerous and noxious when the
opinions are erroneous. But though this _adual narrowing of the bounds of
diversity of opinion is necessary in both senses of the term, being at once

ON LIBERTY 251
inevitable and indispensable, we are not therefore obliged to conclude that

all its consequences must be beneficial. The loss of so imp ortan.t _a_ aidto
the intelligent and living apprehension of a trut-K-gs-is afforded by the
necess_f_ of explaining it to, Or defending it against, opponents, though not
sufficient_ to outweigh, is no trifling drawback from, the benefit of its uni-
versal recognition. Where this advantage can no longer be had, I confess I
shoh-Id like to see the teachers of mankind endeavouring to provide a
substitute for it: some contrivance for making the difficulties of the question
as present to the learner's consciousness, as if the 5• were pressed upon him
bv a dissentient champion, eager for his conversion.
But instead of seeking contrivances for this purpose, they have lost those
they formerly had. The Socratic dialectics, so magnificentiy exemplified in
the dialogues of Plato, were a contrivance of this description. Thex were
essentiall_ a negative discussion of the great questions of philosophy and
life, directed with consummate skill to the purpose of convincing any one
who had merel_ adopted the commonplaces of received opinion, that he
did not understand the subject--that he as vet attached no definite meaning
to the doctrines he professed: in order that, becoming aware of his ignor-
ance, he might be put in the way to attain a stable belief, resting on a clear
apprehension both of the meaning of doctrines and of their evidence. The
school disputations of the middle age_ had a somewhat similar ob ect. They
were intended to make sure that the pupil understood his own opinion, and
(by necessar,, correlation ) the opinion opposed to it. and could enforce the
grounds of the one and confute those of the other. These last-mentioned con-
tests had indeed the incurable defect, that the premises appealed to were
taken from authorir_, not from reason: and, as a discipline to the mind. they
were in every respect inferior to the powerful dialectics which formed the in-
tellects of the "Socratici viri:"i'l but the modern mind owes far more to both
than it is generally willing to admit, and the present modes of education con-
tain nothing x_hich in the smallest degree supplies the place either of the one
or of the other. A person who derives all his instruction from teachers or
books, even if he escape the besetting temptation of contenting himself with
cram. is under no compulsion to hear both sides: accordingl} it is far from a
frequent accomplishment, even among thinkers, to knm_ both sides; and the
weakest part of what everybody says in defence of his opinion, is what he
intends as a reply to antagonists. It is the fashion of the present time to dis-
parage negative logic--that which points out weaknesses in theorx or
errors in practice, without establishing positive truths. Such negative
criticism would indeed be poor enough as an ultimate result; but as a means
[*See Cicero. Letters to Atticus ILatm and En,,li_h}. trans. E. O Winstedt,
3 vols. ILondon: Heinemann: New York: Macmillan, 1912_, Vol. Ill. p. 230
I xiv. 9 ) .]

to attaining any positive knowledge or conviction worthy the name, it cannot

be valued too highly: and until people are again systematically trained to it,
there will be few great thinkers, and a low general average of intellect, in
any but the mathematical and physical departments of speculation. On any
other subject no one's opinions deserve the name of knowledge, except so
far as he has either had-forded upon him by 0tlaers, or gone through of
;- himself, the same mental process which would have been required of him
in carrying on an act!yecontrgyersv - with oA?pgnents. That, therefore, which
when absent, it is so indispensable, but so difficult, to create, how worse
than absurd eit is e to forego, when spontaneously offering itself! If there are
any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or
opinion will let them. let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to
them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise
ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our
convictions, to do with much greater labour for ourselves.
• It still remains to speak of one of the principal causes which make diver-
sitv of opinion advantageous, and will continue to do so until mankind shall
have entered asq_ of_!ntellectugl advancement which at present seems at
an incalculable distance• We have hitherto considered only two possibilities:
that the received opinion may be false, and some other opinion, conse-
quently, true: or that, the received opinion being true, a conflict with the
opposite error is essential to a clear apprehension and deep feeling of its
truth. But there is a commoner case than either of these: when the conflicting
-- doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth
between them: and the nonconforming opinion is needed to suppl,,' tiae
• remajncler of the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a part.
Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are oftcn true. but
seldom or never the whole truth. They are a part of the truth; sometimes a
greater, sometimes a smaller part. but exaggerated, distorted, and disjoined
from the truths by which they ought to be accompanied and limited. Hereti-
ca/opinions, on the other hand. are generally some of these suppressed and
neglected truths, bursting the bonds which kept them down, and either
see kingreconciliation with the truth contained in the common opinion, or
fronting it as enemies, and setting themselves up, with similar exclusiveness,
as the whole truth. The latter case is hitherto the most frequent, as, in the
human mind. one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness
the exception. Hence. even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth
usually sets while another rises. Even progress, which ought to superadd, for
the most part only substitutes, one partial and incomplete truth for another:
improvement consisting chiefly in this, that the new fragment of truth is
e-e591, 592 isit

ON LIBERTY 253
more wanted, more adapted to the needs of the time, than that which it
displaces. Such being the partial character of prevailing opinions, even when
resting on a true foundation, every opinion which embodies somewhat of
the portion of truth which the common opinion omits, ought to he con-
sidered precious, with whatever amount of error and confusion that truth
may be blended. No sober judge of human affairs will feel bound to be
indignant because those who force on our notice truths which we should
otherwise have overlooked, overlook some of those which we see. Rather.
he will think that so long as popular truth is one-sided, it is more desirable " --
than otherwise that unpopular truth should have one-sided asserters too:
such being usually the most energetic, and the most likely to compel reluc-
tant attention to the fragment of wisdom which they proclaim as if it were
the whole.
Thus, in the eighteenth century, when nearly all the instructed, and all
those of the uninstructed who were led by them, were lost in admiration of
what is called civilization, and of the marvels of modern science, literature,
and philosophy, and while greatly overrating the amount of unlikeness be-
tween the men of modern and those of ancient times, indulged the belief
that the whole of the difference was in their own favour: with what a salu-
tary shock did the paradoxes of Rousseau explode like bombshells in the
midst, dislocating the compact mass of one-sided opinion, and forcing its
elements to recombine in a better form and with additional ingredients.
Not that the ciarrent opinions were on the whole farther from the truth than
Rousseau's were: on the contrary, they were nearer to it: the_ contained
more of positive truth, and very much less of error. Nevertheless there lay
in Rousseau's doctrine, and has floated down the stream of opimon along
with it, a considerable amount of exactly those truths which the popular
opinion wanted: and these are the deposit which was left behind when the
flood subsided. The superior worth of simphcity of life, the enervating and
demoralizing effect of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society,
are ideas which have never been entirely absent from cultivated minds since
Rousseau wrote: and they will in time produce their due effect, though at
present needing to be asserted as much as ever, and to be asserted bx deeds,
for words, on this subject, have nearly exhausted their power.
In politics, again, _t is almost a commonplace, that a part} of order or
stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessarx elements
of a healthy state of political life: until the one or the other shall have so
enlareed• its mental grasp as to be a party, equally, of order and of pro-ress,
knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to
be swept away. Each of these modes of thinking derives its utilitx from the
deficiencies of the other: but it is in a great measure the opposition of the
other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity. Unless opinions

favourable to democracy and to aristocracy, to property and to equality, to

co-operation and to competition, to luxury and to abstinence, to sociality
and individuality, to liberty and discipline, and all the other standing an-
tagonisms of practical life. are expressed with equal freedom, and enforced
and defended with equal talent and energy, there is no chance of both ele-
ments obtaining their due; one scale is sure to go up, and the other down.
Truth. in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the
reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds suf-
ficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach
to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle
between combatants fighting under hostile banners. On any of the great
open questions just enumerated, if either of the two opinions has a better
claim than the other, not merely to be tolerated, but to be encouraged and
countenanced, it is the one t,hich happens at the particular time and place to
be in a minority. That is the opinion which, for the time being, represents the
neglected interests, the side of human well-being which is in danger of ob-
taining less than its share. I am aware that there is not, in this country, any
intolerance of differences of opinion on most of these topics. They are ad'-
duced to shot', by admitted and multiplied examples, the universalit_ of
the fact, that only through diversity of opinion it there, in the existin_ state
of human intellect, a chance of fair play to all sides of the truth. When there
are persons to be found, who form an exception to the apparent unanimity
of the world on any subject, even if the world is in the right, it is always
probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for them-
selves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.
It mav be objected, "But some received principles, especially on the
highest and most vital subjects, are more than half-truths. The "Christian
morality, for instance, is the whole truth on that subject, and if any one
teaches a morality which varies from it, he is wholly in error." As this is
of all cases the most important in practice, none can be fitter to test the
general maxim. But before pronouncing what Christian morality is or is
not, it would be desirable to decide what is meant by Christian morality. If
it means the morality of the Net, Testament, I wonder that any one who
derives his knowledge of this from the book itself, can suppose that it was
announced, or intended, as a complete doctrine of morals. The Gospel
always refers to a pre-existing morality, and confines its precepts to the
particulars in which that morality was to be corrected, or superseded by a
wider and higher; expressing itself, moreover, in terms most general, o(ten
impossible to be interpreted literally, and possessing rather the impressive-
ness of poetry or eloquence than the precision of legislation. To extract
from it a body of ethical doctrine, has never been possible without ekin,,z
it out from the Old Testament, that is, from a system elaborate indeed, but

ON LIBERTY 255
in man), respects barbarous, and intended only for a barbarous people. St.
Paul, a declared enemy to this Judaical mode of interpreting the doctrine
and filling up the scheme of his Master, equally asst:mes a pre-existing
morality, namely that of the Greeks and Romans: and his advice to Chris-
tians is in a great measure a system of accommodation to that: even to the
extent of giving an apparent sanction to slavery.I'l What is called Christian,
but should rather be termed theoloeical, morality, was not the work of
Christ or theA'postles, but is of muchlate( Origin. having been gradually
built up b`, the Catholic church of the first five centuries, and though not
implicitly' adopted by moderns and Protestants. has been much less modi-
fied bv them than might have been expected. For the most part. indeed.
the,," have contented themselves w_th cutting off the additions which had
been made to it in the middle ages, each sect supplying the place bv fresh
additions, adapted to its own character and tendencies. That mankin d ow.e
a great debt to this morality, and to its early teachers, I should be the last
person to deny; but I do not scruple to sax of it. that it is. in man} important
points, in_cg_m_t2!et
_ and one-sided, and that unless ideas and feelings, not
sanctioned b_, it, had Contril_uted to the formation of European life and
character, human affairs would have been in a worse condition than they
now are. Christian morality' (so called) has all the characters of a reaction:
it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal isnegative rather
than positive: pass!ve rather than active: Innocence rather than Nobleness:
,Abstinence from Evil: rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts
(as has been well said) "thou shalt not" predominates undul`, over "thou
shalt.'" In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has
been graduall.`, compromised away into one of legality. It holds out the
hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate
motives to a virtuous life' in this falling far below the best of the ancients,
and doing what lies in it to give to human moralitx an essentially selfish
character,_ by disconnecting each man's feelings of duty from the interests
of his felIox_-creatures, except so far as a self-interested inducement is of-
fered to him for consulting them. It is essentially a doctrine of passive
obedience: it ;nculcates submission to all authorities found established: who
indeed are not to be actively obeyed when they command what reli_.ion
forbids, but who are not to be resisted, far less rebelled against, for an,,"
amount of wrong to ourselves. And while, in the morality of the best Pagan
nations, duty to the State holds even a disproportionate place, infringing on
the just liberty of the individual: in purely Christian ethics, that grand de-
partment of duty is scarcely noticed or acknowledged. It is in the Koran.
not the New Testament, that we read the maxim--"A ruler who appoints
an,,' man to an office, when there is in his dominions another man better
D'_ ,
[*See, e.g., ('olossians, 3:__-4.1.]

qualified for it, sins against God and against the State."m What little recog-
nition the idea of obligation to the Eubl.ic obtains in modern morality, is
derived frond Roman sources, not from Christian: as, even in
the _iy-of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity', highminded-
ness. personal dignity', even the sense of honour, is derived from the purely"
human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown
, . " nut of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly, recognised,
is that of obedience.
I am as far as any" one from pretending that these defects are necessarily
inherent in the Christian ethics, in every manner in which it can be con-
ceived, or that the many, requisites of a complete moral doctrine which it
does not contain, do not admit of being reconciled with it. Far less would
I insinuate this of the doctrines and precepts of Christ himself. I believe
that the sayings of Christ are all, that I can see any' evidence of their having
been intended to be: that they" _}re.irreconcilable with nothing which a com-
prehensive morality requires: that everything which is excellent in ethics
may be brought within them. with no greater violence to their language
than has been done to it by all who have attempted to deduce from them
any practical system of conduct whatever. But it is quite consistent with
this. to believe that they contain, and were meant to contain, on!y a part
of the truth: that many essential elements of the highest morality' a!e )mong
the things which are not provided for, nor intended to be provided for, in
the recorded deliverances of the Founder of Christianity, and which have
been entirely thrown aside in the svstem of ethics erected on the basis of
those deliverances bv the Christian Church. And this being so. I think it a
great error to persist in attempting to find in the Christian doctrine _hat
complete rule for our guidance, which its author intended it to sanction and
enforce, but only partially to provide. I believe, too, that this narrow theorx
is becoming a grave practical evil, detracting _eatlv from the value of the
moral training and instruction, which so many well-meaning persons are
now at length exerting themselves to promote. I much fear that by attempt-
ing to form the mind and feelings on an exclusively' religious type. and dis-
carding those secular standards (as for want of a better name they may be
called) which heretofore co-existed with and supplemented the Christian
ethics, receiving some of its spirit, and infusing into it some of theirs, there
will result, and is even now resulting, a low, abject, servile type of charac!er,
which, submit itself as it may to what it deems the Supreme Will. is incapaNe
of rising to or sympathizing in the conception of Supreme Goodness. I be-
lieve that other ethics than any which can be evolved from exclusively
[*The passage is not in the Koran, but see Charle_ Hamilton, 7"he Hedhva or
Guide: A Commentary on the Mussulman Laws, 4 vols. (London: Benslev,
1791), Vol. II, p. 615.]

7/ /'
ON LIBERTY 257
Christian sources, must exist side by side with Christian ethics to produce
the moral regeneration of mankind: and that the Christian system is no
exception to the rule, that in an imperfect state of the human mind, the
interests of truth require a diversity of opinions. It is not necessary that in
ceasing to-ignore the moral truths not contained in Chnstianitx, men should
ignore any of those which it does contain. Such prejudice, or oversi,,ht:.. when
it occurs, is altogether an evil: but it is one from which we cannot hope to
be always exempt, and must be regarded as the price paid for an inestimable
good. qXheexclusive pretension made by a part of the truth to be the whole,
must and ought to be protested against: and if a reactionary impulse should,
mak-e-}he protestors unjust in their turn, this one-sidedness, like the other.
may be lamented, but must be tolerated. If Christians would teach infidels ,
to be just to Christianity. they should themselves be just to infidelit}. It can
do truth no service to blink the fact, knb_;h to all who have the most ordi-
nary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest
and most valuable moral teaching has been the work, not onl\ of men who
did not kno_v, but of men who knew and rejected, the Christian faith.
I do not pretend that the most unlimited use of the freedom of enunciat-
ing all possible opinions would put an end to the evils of religious or philo-
sophical sectarianism. Every truth which men of narrow capacity are in
earnest about, is sure to be asserted, inculcated, and in many ways even
acted on, as if no other truth existed in the world, or at all events none
that could limit or qualify the first. I acknowledge that the tendencx of all
opinions to become sectarian is not cured by the freest discussion, but i,
often heightened and exacerbated thereby: the truth which oueht to have
been, but was not. seen, being rejected a[l the more violentlx because pro-
claimed by person_, regarded as opponents. But it is not on the impassioned
partisan, it is on the calmer and more disinterested bystander,, that th_s col-
lision of opinions works its salutary effect. Not the violent conflict between
parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it. is the formidable
evil: there is alwa,,s hope when people are forced to hsten to both sides: it
is when thex attend only to one that errors harden into preju&ces, and
truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by beine exaggerated into
falsehood. And since there are few mental atmbutes more rare than that
judicial faculty which can sit in intelhgcnt judgment between two sides of
a question, of which only one is represented bx, an advocate before it. truth
has no chance but in proportion as everx side of _t. cver_ opinion which
embodies any fraction of the truth, not only finds advocates, but i_ so advo-
cated as to be listened to.
We have now recognised the necessity to the mental well-being of man-

kind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion,

and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds: which

we will now briefly re_capitulate.
First. if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught
we can certainly know, be true. To den\ this is to assume our own infal-
libility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very com-
mon_? does. contain a portion of truth: and since the general or prevailing
opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the
collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance
of being supplied.
Thirdh',. even if the received opinion be not only true. but the whole
•: truth: unless it is suffered to be. and actually is, vigorously and earnestly
contested, it will. by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of
a prejudice, with little comprehension or feehng of its rational grounds.
And not only this, but, f,_our_thly,the meaning of the doctrine itself will be
in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the
character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession,
inefficacious for good. but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth
of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
Be}ore quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take some
notice of those who say, that the free expression of all opinions should be
permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the
bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing
where these supposed bounds are to be placed: for if the test be offence to
those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this of-
fence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that everx
opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer.
appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intem-
perate opponent. But this. thougl_ an important consideration in a practical
point of view. merges in a more fundamental ob ection Undoubtedly the
manner of asserting an opinion, even though it be a true one. may be very
objectionable, and may justly incur severe censure. But the principal of-
fences of the kind are such as it is mostly impossible, unless b\ accidental
self-betrayal, to bring home to conviction. The gravest of them is. to argue
sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the
case. or misrepresent the opposite opinion. But all this, even to the mosl
aggravated degree, is so continually done in perfect good faith, b\ persons
who are not considered, and in many other respects may not deserve to be
considered, ignorant or incompetent, that it is rarely possible on adequate
grounds conscmntiously to stamp the misrepresentation as morally culp-
able; and still less could law presume to interfere with this kind of con-
troversial misconduct. With regard to what is commonly meant by intem-
perate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the

ON LIBERTY 259
denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were

ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides: but it is onlx desired
to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against
the unprevailing they max not only be used without general disapproval.
but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal
and righteou, indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use. i_
greatest when they are employed against the comparativel) defenceless:
and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by an\ opinion from this
mode of asserting it. accrues almost exclusively to received opinions. The
worst offence of this kind which can be committed bx a polemic, it to
stigmatize those who hold the contrarx opinion as bad and immoral men.
To calumny of this sort. those who hold any unpopular opinion are pecu-
harly exposed, because the\ are in general few and umnfluentlal, and no-
b<_dvbut themselves feels much qnterested' in seein Gjustice done them: but
this weapon is. from the nature of the case. denied to those who attack a
prevailing opinion" the\ can neither use it with safety to themselves, nor.
if the\ could, would it do anything but recoil on their own cause. In gen-
eral. opiniol)_} con{rarv to those commonly received can only obtain a hear-
ing b)i qudic d _modcr!ttion o( language, and the most cautious avoidance of
unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slieht
degrd_\{ifhbut losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on
the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing
contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them. For the
intereq, therefore, of truth and justice, it i_ far more important to restrain
this emplo)mcnt of vituperatixe language than the other: and. for example.
if it _vcre neccssarx to choose, there would be much more need to discour-
age offensixe attacks on infidelity, than on religion. It is. houexer, obvious
that law and authorit\ have no business \_|th restraining either, xxhilc
opinion ou,,ht m ever\ instance, to determine |ts verdict bx the circum-
stances of the indzvidual ca,c: condemning excr\ one. on whichever side
of the argument he places himself, in whose mode of advocacx either v_ant
of candour, or mahgnitx, bigotr), or intolerance of feclina manifc,,t them-
_elves: but no_ inferring these v_ccs from the side which a person take,.
though it be the contrarx side of the question to our own : and g_xmg merited
honour to ever\ one, whatever opimon he nlav hold. _ he has calmness to
ace and honest\ to state what his opponents and their opinion, reallx arc.
exaggerating nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which tells
or can be supposed to tell, in their favour. This 1).the real moraht_ of public
d_scussion: and if often violated. I am happ)' to think that there are man\
controversialists who to a great extent observe it, and a still greater number
who conscientiously strive towards it.
_-_qg_5o2 interest

CHAPTER III
Of Individuality, as One of the

Elements of Well-Being
SUCH BEING THE RE4SONS which make it imperative that human beings
should be free to form opinions, and to express their opinions without re-
serve: and such the baneful consequences to the intellectual, and through
that to the moral nature of man, unless this liberty is either conceded, or
asserted in spite of prohibition: let us next examine whether the same
reasons do not require that men should be free to act upon their opinions--,_
to carry these out in their lives, without hindrance, either physical or moral,
from their fdlow-mdn,so iong as it is at their own risk and peril. This last
proviso is of course indispensable. No one pretends that acnons should be
as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity,
when the circumstances in which they. are expressed are such as to consti-
tute their expression a positive instieation to some mischievous act. An
opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property
is robber},, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the
press, but may' justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited
mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about
among the same mob in the form of a placard. Acts. of whatever kind,
which, without justifiable cause, do harm to others, may be, and in the
more important cases absolutely require to be, controlled b}' ths? unfavour-
able sentiments, and, when needful, bv the active interference of mankind.
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make
himself a nuisance to other people. But if he refrains from molesting others
in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and
judgment in things which concern himself, the same reasons which show
that opinion should be free, prove also that he should be allowed, without
F-" molestation, to carry his opinions into practice at his own cost. That man-
kind are not infallible; that their truths, for the most part, are only' half-
truths; that unity of opinion, unless resulting from the fullest and freest
comparison of opposite opinions, is not desirable, and diversity not an evil.
but a good, until mankind are much more capable than at present of recog-
nising all sides of the truth, are principles applicable to men's modes of
action, not less than to their opinions. As it is useful that while mankind are
imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be

ON LIBERTY 261
different ex_er!ments of living: that free scope should be given to varieties

of character, short of injury" to others: and that the worth of different modes
of life should be proved practical])', when an,,' one thinks fit to try them.
It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others.
_dividuality should assert itself. Where, not the person's own character, but
the traditzons or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there i_
wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the
chief ingredient of individual and social pro_ess.
In maintaining this principle, the greatest difficulty to bc encountered
does not lie in the appreciation of means towards an acknowledged end. but
in the indifference of persons in general to the end itself. If it were felt that
the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-
being: that it is not only a co-ordinate element with all that is designated by
the terms civilization, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a neces-
sary part and condition of all those things: there would be no danger that
liberty should be undervalued, and the adjustment of the boundaries be-
tween it and social control would present no extraordinary difficulty, But
the evil is. that individual spontaneity is hardly recognised by the common
modes of thinking, as having any intrinsic worth, or deserving an\ regard
on its own account. The majority-, being satisfied with the ways of mankind
as the\ now are _for it is they who make them what they are). cannot
comprehend why those ways should not be good enoueh for everybody:
and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of
moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy-, as a
troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance
of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for
mankind. Few persons, out of Germany, even comprehend the meaning of
the doctrine whrch \Vilhelm Von Humboldt. so eminent both as a savant
and as a politician, made the text of-a trf{tise--that "the end of man. or
that u hich is prescribed bx the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and
not suggested bv vague and transient desires, is the highest and most har-
monious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole:"
that, therefore, the object "towards which every human being must cease-
lcsslv direct his efforts, and on which especially those who design to influence
their fellow-men must ever keep their eves, is the indlviduahtv of power
and development;" that for this there are two requisites. "'freedom, and
variety of situations:" and that from the union of these arise "'individual
vigour and manifold diversity,'" which combine themselves in "'originality.""
Little, however, as people are accustomed to a doctrine like that of \on
*The Sphere and Dutwv of Government. from the German of Baron Wilhelm
yon Humboldt, pp. 11. 13.
aSource,592. 592 ,q

262 ESSA_ S ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY
Humboldt, and surprising as it may be to them to find so high a value at-

tached to individuality, the question, one must nevertheless think, can only
be one of degree. No one's idea of excellence in conduct is that people should
do absolutely nothing but cop)' one another. No one would assert that
people ought not to put into their mode of life, and into the conduct of
their concerns, an,," impress whatever of their own judgment, or of their
own individual character. On the other hand. it would be absurd to pretend
that people ought to live as if nothing whatever had been known in the
world before they came into it: as if experience had as vet done nothing
towards showing that one mode of existence, or of conduct, is preferable
to another. Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in
youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human exper-
ience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived
at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own
wax'. It is for iaim to find out what part of recorded experience is properly
applicable to his own circumstances and character. The traditions and
customs of other people are. to a certain extent, evidence of what their
experience has taught them: presumptive evidence, and at such. have a
clai_ to his deference: but. in the first place, their experience may be too
narrow; or-they may not have interpreted it rightly. Secondly, their interpre-
tation of experience may be correct, but unsuitable to him. Customs are
made for cuqomarv circumstances, and customary" characters: and his cir-
cumstances or his character may be uncustomarv. Thirdh'. though the cus-
toms be both good as customs, and suitable to him, vet to conform to
custom, merely as custom, does not educate or deve!ope in him any of the
qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human
facultie_ of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity,
and even moral preference, are exercised onh in making a choice. He who
does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.-He gains no
practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and
moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The
faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merel; because othert
do it, no more than by believing a tl_ing only because others believe it. If
the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person's own reason.
his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened, bv hit
adopting it: and if the inducements to an act are not such as are consen-
taneous to his own feelings and character (where affection, or the rights of
others, are not concerned) it is so much done towards rendering his feelings
and character inert and torpid, instead of active and energetic.
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life
for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imita-
tion. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He

ON LIBERT_ 263
must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to

gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has
decided, firnmess and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And
these qualities he rcquire,_ and exercises exactly in proportion as the part
of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgn_nent and
feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good
path. and kept out of harm's wax,, without any of these things. But what
will be his comparatwe worth as a human being? It really is of importance,
not only what men do, but also what manner of men the) are that do it.
Among the works of man. which human life is rightIy employed in per-
fecting and beautifying, the first in importance surelx is man himself. Sup-
posing it were pos,sible to get houses built corn grown, battles fought.
causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinerv--
bx automatons in human form--it would be a considerable lo_s to exchange
for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the
more civilized parts of the world, and who assuredlx are but starved speci-
mens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine
to be built after a model, and set to do exactl_ the work preacribed for it,
but a tree, ahich requires to grow and develope itself on all side_, accord-
ing to the tendencx of the inward force_ which make it a living thing.
It will probabl) be conceded that it is desirable people should exercise
their understandings, and that an intelligent following of custom, or even
occaslonallx an intelligent deviation from custom, is better than a blind and
s,mpl} mechanical adhesion to it. To a certain extent it is admitted, that
our understanding should be our own: but there is not the same willing-
ness to admit that our desires and impulses should be our own hkewise: or
that to possess impulses of our own, and of anx strength, i_ anything but
a peril and a snare. Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a per-
fect human being, as beliefs and restraints: and strone lmpul,e., are only
perilous when not properly balanced: when one set of aims and inclinations
_s developed rote strength, while others, which ought to co-exi,t with them,
remain weak and reactive. It is not because men's desire., are strong that
they act ill: it is because their conscience, are weak. There is no natural
connexion between strong impulses and a _eak conscience. The natural
connexion is the other wax. To say that one person's desires and feeling.,
are stronger and more various than those of another, is merely, to say that
he has more of the raw material of human nature, and is therefore capable.
perhaps of more evil, but certainly of more good. Strong impulses are but
another name for energy. Energy" may be turned to bad uses: but more
good may, always be made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent and
impassive one. Those who have most natural feeling, are always those whose
cultivated feelings may be made the strongest. The same strong suseep-

264 ESSAY'S ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY
tibilities which make the personal impulses vivid and powerful, are also the
_ource from whence are generated the most passionate love of virtue, and
the sternest self-control. It is through the cultivation of these, that society
both does its duty and protects its interests: not by rejecting the stuff of
which heroes are made, because it knows not how to make them. A person
whose desires and impulses are his own--are the expression of his own
nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture--is said
to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own. has
no character_ no more than a steam-engine has a character. If. in addition
to being his own, his impulses are strong, and are under the government of
a strong will, he has an energetic character. Whoever thinks that individu-
ality of desires and impulses should not be encouraged to unfold itself,
must maintain that society has no need of strong natures--is not the better
for containing many persons who have much character--and that a high
general average of energy is not desirable.
In some early states of societ\', these forces might be. and were. too
much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and
controlling them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity
and individuality was in excess, and the social principle had a hard struggle
with it. The difficult._ then was, to induce men of strong bodies or minds
to pay obedience to any rules which required them to control their im-
pulses. To overcome this difficulty', law and discipline, like the Popes
struggling against the Emperors. asserted a power over the whole man,
claiming to control all his life in order to control his character--which
society had not found any other sufficient means of binding. But society has
now fairly got the better of individuality: and the danger which threatens
human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and
preferences. Things are vastly changed, since the passions of those who
were strong by station or by personal endowment were in a state of habitual
rebellion against laws and ordinances, and required to be rigorously chained
up to enable the persons within their reach to enjoy any particle of security.
In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one
lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what
concerns-others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or
the family do not ask themselves--what do I prefer? or. what would suit
my character and disposition? or. what would allow the best and highest
in me to have fair play, and enable it to Uow and thrive? They ask them-
selves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of
my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually
done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not
mean that thev choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their
own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except

ON LIBERTY 265
for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in
what people do for pleasure, conformity-is the first thing thought of; they
like in crowds; thev exercise choice only among things commonly done:
pecul_iarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally' with _"
crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature
to f_._ollow:their human capacities are withered and starved: they-become
incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally with-
out either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now
is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature?
It is so. on the Calvinistic theorv. According to that. the one great of-
fence of man is _'self-wilP. All the good of which humanity is capable, is
comprised in 'obedience C.You have no choice; thus you must do, and no
otherwisc: "whatever is not a dutx, is a sin." Human nature being radically
corrupt, there is no redemption for any one until human nature is killed
_ithin him. To one holding this theory of life, crushing out any of the
human faculties, capacities, and susceptibilities, is no evil' man needs no
capacity, but that of surrendering himself to the will of God: and if he uses
any of his faculties for any other purpose but to do that supposed will more
effectuallv, he is better without them. dThis d is the theory of Calvinism"
and it is held, in a m_tigated form, bx many who do not consider themselves
Calvinists: the mitigation consisting in giving a less ascetic interpretation to
the alleged will of God; asserting it to be his will that mankind should gratify
some of their inclinations; of course not in the manner thev themselves
prefer, but in the way of obedience, that is, in a way prescribed to them bx
authority: and, therefore, by the necessarx conditions of the case. the same
for all.
In some such insidious form there is at present a strong tendency to this
narrow theor 3 of life, and to the pinched and hidebound type of human
character which it patronizes. Many' persons, no doubt, sincerely think that
human beings thus cramped and dwarfed, are as their Maker designed them
to be: just as many have thought that trees are a much finer thing when
clipped into pollards, or cut out into figures of animals, than as nature made
them. But if it be any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good
_Being _. it is more consistent with that faith to believe, that this Being gave
all human faculties that the} might be cuhivated and unfolded, not rooted
out and consumed, and that he takes delight in every nearer approach made
by his creatures to the ideal conception embodied in them. every increase in
any of their capabilities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment. There
is a different type of human excellence from the Calvinistic: a conception of
humanity' as having its nature bestowed on it for other purposes than merel_
b-b50_. 5() 2 Self-will ,-c59t, 502 Obedience
d-d591, 592 That e-"5Ol, 592 being

to be abnegated. "Pagan seff-assenion"_ is one of the elements of human

worth, as well as "Christian self-denial.'"* There is a Greek ideal of self-
development, which the Platonic and Christian ideal of self-government
blends with, but does not supersede. It may be better to be a John Knox than
an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either: nor would a
Pericles, if wc had one in these days, be without anything good which be-
longed to John Knox.
It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that i_ individual in them-
selves, but b,,, cultivating it and calling it forih, within the limib imposed by
the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and
beautiful obiect of contemplation: and as the works partake the character
of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich,
diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high
thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every
individual to the race, by makinc, the race infinitely better worth beloneine to.
In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes
more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to
others. There is a greater fulness of life about his own existence, and when
there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of
them. As much compression as is necessary to prevent the stronger speci-
mens of human nature from encroaching on the rights of others, cannot be
dispensed with: but for this there is ample compensation even in the point of
view of human development. The means of development which the in-
dividual loses by being prevented from gratifying his inclinations to the
injury of others, are chiefly obtained at the expense of the development of
other people. And even to himself there is a full equivalent in the better
development of the social part of his nature, rendered possible by the
restraint put upon the selfish part. To be held to rigid rules of justice for the
sake of others, developes the feelings and capacities which have the good
of others for their object. But to be restrained in things not affecting their
good. by their mere displeasure, developes nothing valuable, except such
force of character as may unfold itself in resisting the restraint. If acquiesced
in, it dulls and blunts the whole nature. To give any fair play to the nature
of each. it is essential that different persons should be allowed to lead differ-
ent lives. In proportion as this latitude has been exercised in any age, has that
age been noteworthy to posterity. Even despotism does not produce its worst
effects, so long as lindividualitv t exists under it: and whatever crushes in-
dividuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it
professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
"[John] Sterling's E,_savs. ["Simonides,'" in E_vav_ arid Tales, ed. Julius Charles
Hare. 2 vols ¢London: 1Sarker, 1848 ), Vol. I, p. 190.]
_-1591.592 Individuality

ON LIBERTY 267
Having said that Individuality is the same thing with development, and
that it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can pro-
duce, well-developed human beings, I might here close the argument: for
what more or better can be said of any' condition of human affairs, than
that it brings human beings themselves nearer to the best thing they can
be? or what worse can be said of any obstruction to good, than that it pre-
vents this? Doubtless. however, these considerations will not suffice to con-
vince those who most need convincing: and it is necessary further to show,
that these developed human beings are of some use to the undeveloped--
to point out to those who do not desire liberty, and would not avail them-
selves of it, that they may be in some intellMble manner rewarded for
allowing other people to make use of it without hindrance.
In the first place, then, I would suggest that they might possibl 3 learn
something from them. It x_ill not be denied by' anybod.v, that o r!ginality is a
valuable element in human affair_. There is always need of persons not
only to discover new ...... truths, and point out }_;he.n_
what were qncetruths are
tr.ue no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example
of more enlightened conduct, and be{ier taste andsense in human life. This
cannot well be gainsaid by anvbodx who does not believe that the world
has already attained perfection in all its ways and practices. It is true that
this benefit is not capable of being rendered bx everybody alike" there are
but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experi-
ments, if adopted by others, would be likelx to be an', improvement on
established practice. But these few arc the salt of the earth: without them.
human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who intro-
duce _°°d thin,,sa,,which did not before exist: it is they who keep the life in
those which already existed. If there were nothing new to be done, would
human intellect cease to be necessary? Would it be a reason why those who
do the old thines should for_,et why the\ are done, and do them like cattle,
not like human beings? There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs
and practmes to degenerate into the mechanical: and unles_ there were a
succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds
of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead
matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything reallx alive, and
there would be no reason why civilization should not die out, as in the
Byzantine Empire. Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likel\
to be, a small minority: but in order-to have them, it is necessary to preserve
the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere
of freedom. Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any
other people--less capable, consequently', of fitting themselves, without
hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society
provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own

character. If from timidity the), consent to be forced into one of these

'_ moulds, and to let all that part of themselves which cannot expand under
the pressure remain unexpanded, society will be little the better for their
¢j .- genius. If they are of a strong character, and break their fetters, the`,, be-
come a mark for the society which has not succeeded in reducing them to
commonplace, to point at with solemn warning as "wild,'" "'erratic," and
the like: much as if one should complain of the Niagara river for not flow-
ing smoothly between its banks like a Dutch canal.
I insist thus emphatically on the importance of_enius, and the necessity
of allowing it to unfold itself freely both in tho_ugbt and - !.n prz4ct!ce, being
well aware that no one will den`, the position in theory, but knowing also
that almost ever,," one, in reality, is totally indifferent to it. People think
genius a fine thing if it enables a man to write an exciting poem, or paint a
picture, But in its true sense, that of originality in thought and action.
though no one says that it is not a thing to be admired, nearlY: _{il,"at lleart,
think that the`,, can do very well without it. Unhappil 3 this is too natural _o
be wondered at. Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot
feel the use of. The`," cannot see what it is to do for them: how should the','?
If the`,- could see wl_at it would do for them, it would not be originality. The
first service which originality has to render them, is that of opening_their
eves" which being once full`,' done, the`,, would have a chance of being them-
' selves original. Meanwhile, recollecting that nothing was evcr vet done
which some one was not the first to do, and that all good things which exist
arc the fruits of originality, let them be modest enough to believe that there
is something still left for it to accomplish, and assure themselves that thex
are more in need of originality, the less the`," are conscious of the want.
In sober truth, whatever homage may be professed, or even paid. to
real or supposed mental superiority, the general tendency of things through-
out the workt is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
In ancient history, in the mi-d_e-a-ges, and in a diminishing degree through
the long transition from feudalitv to the present time, the individual was a
power in himself: and if he had either great talents or a high social position,
he was a considerable power. At present individuals are lost in the crowd.
In politics it is almost a triviality to s-@-{h-at Public opinion now rules the
world. The only' power deserving the name is that of masses, and of govern-
ments while the`, make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts
of masses. This is as true in the moral and social relations of private life as
in public transactions. Those whose opinions go by the name of public opin-
ion, are not always the same sort of punic: in America the`,' are the whole
white population: in England, chiefly the middle class. But they are always
a mass, that is to sa`,', collective mediocrity. And what is a still ereater nov-
elty, the mass do not now take their opinions from dignitaries in Church or

ON ElBERTa" 269
State, from ostensible leaders, or from books. Their thinking is done for
them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their
name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers. I am not com-
plaining of all this. I do not assert that anything better is compatible, as a
general rule, with the present low state of_ the human mind. But that does
not hinder the government of mediocrity from being mediocre government.
No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its "'"
political acts or in the o"-p;nl-_on--_s
qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters,
ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as thc sovereign
Man,,' have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always
have done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and in-
structed One or Few. The initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and
must come from indMduals; ,,enerall,,' at first from some one indMdual.
The honour and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following
that initiative: that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and
be led to them with his eves open. I am not countenancing the sort of "hero-
worship'" which applauds the stron_ man of genres for forcibl) seizing on the
government of the world and making it do his bidding in spite of itself, t*_
All he can claim is, freedom to point out the wax'. The power of compelling
others into it, is not only inconsistent with the freedom and development
of all the rest, but corrupting to the strong man himself. It does seem. how-
ever, that when the opinions of masses of merely average men are evera-
where become or becoming the dominant power, the counterpoise and cor-
rective to that tendency would be. the more and more pronounced indivi-
duality of those who stand on the higher eminences of thought. It is in these
circumstances most especially, that exceptional indMduals, instead of being
deterred, should be encouraged in acting differenth from the mass. In other
times there was no advantage in their doing so, unless they acted not only
differently, but better. In this age. the mere example of nonconformity, the
mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a servlce._reciselv because
the tvrann', of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is de-
sirable, in order to break throu,,h that tyranny, that people should be eccen-
tric. Eccentriciw has always abounded when and where strengt) of char-
acter has abounded: and the amount of eccentricity m a society has generall)
been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral cour-
age which it containea. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the
chief danger of the time.
I have said that it is important to give the freest scope possible to uncus-
tomary things, in order that it may in time appear which of these are fit to
be converted into customs. But independence of action, and disregard of
[*Undoubtedl) a reference to Thomas Carlvle, On Heroes. Hero-Worship,
and the Heroic m Hi.vtorv I London: Fraser. 18J,l ) ]

270 ESSAYSON POLITICS AND SOCIETY
custom, are not solely deserving of encouragement for the chance the)'
afford that better modes of action, and customs more worthy of general adop-
tion, may be struck out: nor is it only persons of decided mental superiority
who have a just claim to carry on their lives in their own way. There is no
reason that all human gexistence g should be constructed on some one or
some small number of patterns. If a person possesses an), tolerable amount
of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence
is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.
Human beings are not like sheep: and even sheep are not undistinguishably
alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are
either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from:
and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings
more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation
than in the shape of their feet? If it were only that people have diversities of
taste, that is reason enough for not a[tempting to shape them all after 9n¢
model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiri-
tual development: and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than
all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.
The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his
higher nature, are hindrances to another. The same mode of life is a health)'
excitement to one, keeping all his faculties of action and enjoyment in their
best order, while to another it is a distracting burthen, which suspends or
crushes all internal life. Such are the differences among human beings in
their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on
them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corres-
ponding diversity in their modes of life, the)' neither obtain their fair share of
happiness, nor Row up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which
their nature is capable. Why then should tolerance, as far as the public senti-
ment is concerned, extend only to tastes and modes of life which extort
acquiescence by the multitude of their adherents? Nowhere (except in some
monastic institutions) is diversity of taste entirely unrecognised; a person
may. without blame, either like or dislike rowing, or smoking, or music, or
athletic exercises, or chess, or cards, or stud)', because both those who like
each of these things, and those who dislike them, are too numerous to be put
down. But the man, and still more the woman, who can be accused either of
doing "what nobody does." or of not doing "what everybody does," is the
subject of as much depreciator), remark as if he or she had committed some
grave moral delinquency. Persons require to possess a title, or some other
badge of rank, or of the consideration of people of rank, to be able to indulge
somewhat in the luxury of doing as the), like without detriment to their esti-
mation. To indulge somewhat, I repeat: for whoever allow themselves much
v-e59L 592 existences

ON LIBERTY 271
of that indulgence, incur the risk of something worse than dispara_ng

speeches--they are in peril of a commission de lunatico, and of having their
property" taken from them and given to their relations,*
There is one characteristic of the present direction of public opinion, pe-
culiarly calculated to make it intolerant of any marked demonstration of
individuality. The general average of mankind are not only moderate in in-
tellect, but also moderate in inclinations: they have no tastes or wishes
strong enough to incline-the-mt-o--clo-anything unusual, and they consequently
do not understand those who have, and class all such with the wild and in-
temperate whom they are accustomed to look down upon. Now, in addition
to this fact which is general, we have only to suppose that a strong move-
ment has set in towards the improvement of morals, and it is evident what
we have to expect. In the_e days such a movement has set in; much has
actually been effected in the way of increased regularity of.,conduct, and
discouragement of e_xce_sses; and there is a philanthropic spirit abroad, for
the exercise of which there is no more invitingtield than the moral and
prudential improvement of our fellow-creatures. These tendencies of the
times cause the public to be more disposed than at most former periods to
prescribe ge.neral rules of conduct, and endeavour to make every" one con-
form to the approved standard. And that standard, express or tacit, is to
desire nothing strongly'. Its ideal of character is to be without any marked
character: to maim by' compression, like a Chinese lady's foot, every part of
*There is something both contemptible and frightful in the sort of evidence

on which, of late years, an) person can be judicially declared unfit for the man-
agement of his affairs: and after his death, his disposal of his property can be set
aside, if there is enough of it to pay the expenses of litigation--_ hich are charged
on the property itself. All the minute details of his dailx life are pried into. and
whatever is found which, seen through the medium of- the percelving and des-
cribing faculties of the lowest of the tow, bears an appearance unlike absolute
commonplace, is laid before the jury as evidence of insaniI}, tii-id-oTte6 i._:_t-la-
suc-
cess: the jurors being little, if at all, less vulgar and ignorant than the witnesses:
hile the judges, with that extraordinary want of knowledge of human nature
and life which continually astonishes us'in English lawyers, often help to mis-
lead them. The_e trials speak xolumes a_ to the state of feeling and opinion
among the vulgar _ ith regard to human liberty. So far from setting any value on
individuality--so far from respecting the hrighff' of each individualto act. in
things indifferent, as seems good to his own judgment and inclinations, judges
and juries cannot even conceive that a person in a state of sanit_ can desire such
freedom. In former davs. when it was proposed to burn atheists, charitable people
used to suggest putting them in a mad-house instead: it would be nothing sur-
prising now-a-days were we to see this done, and the doers applauding them-
selves, because, instead of persecuting for religion, they had adopted so humane
and Christian a mode of treating these unfortunates, not without a silent satis-
faction at their having thereby obtained their deserts.
h-h591, 59-_ rights

human nature which stands out prominently, and tends to make the person
markedly dissimilar in outline to commonplace humanity.
As is usually the case with ideals which exclude one-half of what is desir-
able, the present standard of approbation produces only an inferior imitation
of the other half. Instead of great energies guided by vigorous reason, and
strong feelings strongly controlled by a conscientious will, its result is weak
feelings and weak energies, which therefore can be kept in outward con-
formitv to rule without any strength either of will or of reason. Already
energetic characters on any large scale are becoming merely traditional.
There is now scarcely any outlet for energy in this country except business.
The energy expended in _this' may still be regarded as considerable. What
little is left from that employment, is expended on some hobby: which may
be a useful, even a philanthropic hobby, but is always some one thing, and
generally a thing of small dimensions. The greatness of England is now all
collective: individually small, we only appear capable of anything great by
our habit of combining: and with this our moral .......and relioiouse:_
_ pihilanthrop_.ists
are perfectly contented. But it was men of another stamp than this that made
England what it has been: and men of another stamp will be needed to
prevent its decline.
The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human
advancemen't, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at
something bettcr than customarv, which is called, according to circumstances,
the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement. The spirit of im-
provement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improve-
ments on an unwilling people: and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists
such attempts, may all}' itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of
improvement: but the only .unfailing and permanent source of improvement
. is liberty, since bv it there are as many possible independent centres of im-
provement as there are individuals. The pro_ressive__rrinciple, however, in
either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic
to the sway of Custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke: and
:. the-_6idtSe-sI-betvkeen the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of
mankind. The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history,
because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole
East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal: justice and right mean
conformity to custom: the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant
intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those
nations must once have had originality: they did not start out of the ground
populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life: thev made them-
selves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations iofJ the
_-i591.592 that
1-J591, 592 in

ON LIBERTY 273
world. What are they now? The subjects or dependents of tribes whose fore-
fathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and
gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with
liberty and progress. A people, it appears, may be progressive for a certain
length of time, and then stop: when does it stop? When it ceases to possess
individuality. If a similar change should befall the nations of Europe, it will ,,
not be in exactly the same shape: the despotism of custom with which these "
nations are threatened is not precisely stationariness. It proscribes singu- -
larity, but it does not preclude change, provided all change together. We have '_
discarded the fixed costumes of our forefathers; every one must still dress
like other people, but the fashion may change once or twice a vear. We thus
take care that when there is change it shall be for change's sake, and not from
any idea of beauty or convenience; for the same idea of beauty or conveni-
ence would not strike all the world at the same moment, and be simultane-
ously thrown aside by all at another moment. But we are progressive as well
as changeable: we continually make new inventions in mechanical things,
and keep them until they are again superseded by better: we are eager for
improvement in politics, in education, even in morals, though in this last our
idea of improvement chiefly consists in persuii_ng or forcing other people
to be as good as ourselves. It is not progress that we object to; on the con-
trary, we flatter ourselves that we are the most progressive people who ever
lived. It is individuality that we war against: we should think we had done
wonders if we had made ourselves all alike; forgetting that the unlikeness of
one person to another is generally the first thing which draws the attention
of either to the imperfection of his own type, and the superiority of another,
or the possibility, by combining the advantages of both, of producing some-
thing better than either. We have a warning exammp_e in Ch.ina--a nation of
much talent, and, in some respects, even wisdom, owing to the rare good for-
tune of having been provided at an early period with a particularly good set
of customs, the work, in some measure, of men to whom even the most en-
lightened European must accord, under certain limitations, the title of sages
and philosophers. They are remarkable, too, in the excellence of their ap-
paratus for impressing, as far as possible, the best wisdom they possess upon
every mind in the community, and securing that those who have appropriated
most of it shall occupy the posts of honour and power. Surely the people who _ _.
did this have discovered the secret of human progressiveness, and must have
kept themselves steadily at the head of the movement of the world. On the
contrary, they have become stationary--have remained so for thousands of
years: and if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners.
They have succeeded beyond all hope in what E_12hi!anthr£_ist_s areso
industriousl working at--in making a people all alike, all _overnine their
thoughts and conduct by the same maxims_and rules: and these are the

fruits. The modern rdgime of public opinion is, in an unorganized form,

what the Chinese educational and political systems are in an organized: and
unless individuality shall be able successfully; to assert itself against this yoke,
Europe. notwithstanding its noble antecedents and its professgd Christia_n!t5,
will tend to become another China.
What is it that has hitherto preserved Europe from this lot? What has
made the European family' of nations an improving, instead of a stationary,
portion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, when it
exists, exists as the effect, not as the cause: but their remarkable dive rsjty_ of
character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely, un-
like one another: they' have struck out a great variety' of paths, each leading
to something valuable; and although at every period those who travelled in
different paths have been intolerant of one another, and each would have
thought it an excellent thing if all the rest could have been compelled to travel
his road, their attempts to thwart each other's development have rareh' had
any permanent success, and each has in time endured to receive the good
which the others have offered. Europe is, in my" judgment, wholly indebted
to this plurality' of paths for its pro_essive and many-sided development.
But it already' begins to possess this benefit in a considerably less degree. It
is decidedly, advancing towards the Chinese ideal of making all people alike.
M. de Tocqueville, in his last important work, remarks how much more the
Frenchmen of the present day resemble one another, than did those even of
the last generationJ*l The same remark might be made of Englishmen in a
far greater degree. In a passage already quoted from Wilhelm yon Hum-
boldt,{q he points out two things as necessarx conditions of human develop-
ment, because necessary to render people unlike one another: namely, free-
dom, and variety of situations. The second of these two conditions is in this
country every day diminishing. The circumstances which surround different
classes and individuals, and shape their characters, are dailx becoming more
assimilated. Formerly, different ranks, different neighbourhoods, different
trades and professions, lived in what might be called different worlds: at
present, to a great degree in the same. Comparatively speaking, they now
read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the
same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have
the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them. Great as
are the differences of position which remain, they are nothing to those which
have ceased. And the assimdation is still proceeding. All the po!!tica! changes
of the age promote it, since they' all tend to raise the low and to lower the
high. Every extension of education promotes it, because education brings
people under common influences, and gives them access to the general stock
[*See Alexis de Tocqueville. L'Ancien regime (Paris. L_v_. 1856 I, p 119.1
l'See above, p. 261 .]

ON I_IBERTY 275
of facts and sentiments. Improvements in the means of communication pro-

mote it, by bringing the inhabitants of distant places into personal contact,
and keeping up a rapid flow of changes of residence between one place and
another. The increase of commerce and manufactures promotes it, by dif-
fusing more w_deIv the advantages of easy circumstances, and opening all
objects of ambition, even the highest, to general competition, whereby the
desire of rising becomes no longer the character of a particular class, but of
all classes. A more powerful agency than even all these, in bringing about a
general similari!y among mankind, is the complete establishment, in this and
other free countries, of the ascendancy of public opinion in the State. As the
various social eminences which enabled persons entrenched on them to
disregard the opinion of the multitude, graduall) become l_evelled: as the
very idea of resisting the will of the public, when it is positively known that
the)" have a will, disappears more and more from the minds of practical
politicians: there c ease.sto be a.n_' social sup_,9ort for nonconformity--any
substantive power in society, which, itself opposed to the ascendancy of
numbers, is interested in taking _under its protection opinions and tendencies
at varian, c_ewith those of the public.
The combination of all these causes forms so _eat a mass of influences
hostile t_yiduality, that it is not easy to see how it can stand its _ound.
It will do so with increasing difficulty, unless the intelligent part of the public
can be made to feel its value--to see that it is good there should be differ-
ences, even thoueh_ not for the better, even thour,he, as it may, appear to them,
some should be for the worse. If the claims of Individuality are ever to be
asserted, the time is now, while much is still wanting to complete the
enforced assimilation. It is only in the earlier stages that any stand can be
su-cce-ssfu)l_};made against the encroachment. The demand that all other
people shall resemble ourselves, grows by what it feeds on. If resistance waits
till life is reduced nearh" to one uniform type, all deviations from that type
will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary
to nature. Mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity, when they
have been for some time unaccustomed to see it.

CHAPTER IV
Of the Limits to the Authority of

Society over the Individual
WHAT, THEN, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over
himself? Where does the authority'__'.......
of societ_ _begin? How much of human
life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?
Each will receive its proper share, if each has that which more particularly
concerns it. To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is
chiefl_.__the individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly.
, interests sqciety.
Though society is nqt fgundedon a_contract, and though no good purpose
is answered by inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations
from it, every_one who receives the protecti0n of society owes a return for
the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each
should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This
conduct consists first, in not injuring the interests of one another: or rather
certain interests, which, either by express legal provision or by tacit under-
standing, oughtto be cQ.nsidered as rights; and secondly, in each person's
bearing his share (to be fixed on some equitable principle) of the labours
and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury
and molestation. These conditions society is justified in enforcing at all costs
to those who endeavour to withhold fulfilment. Nor is this all that society
, may do. The acts of an individual may be hurtful to others, or wanting in
due consideration for their Welfare, without going the length of violating
any of their constituted riKhts. The offender may then be justly punished by
opinion, though not by law. As soon as an), part of a person's conduct affects
prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the
question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by inter-
fering with it, becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for enter-
taining any such question when a person's conduct affects the interests of no
persons besides himself, or needs not affect them unless they like (all the
persons concerned being of full age, and the ordinary amount of under-
standing). In all such cases there should be perfect freedom, legal and
social, to do the action and stand the consequences.
I"--Twould be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that
it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no

¢ 03227720772
ON LIBERTY 277
business with each other's conduct in life, and that they should not concern
themsclve_ about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless their
own interest is involved. Instead of any diminution, there is ne_ecl_.of_agreat
increase o_f__d_isin_terestedexertion to promoJ:_ the .good_.pf_,gthers. But dis-
interested bencvolence can find other instruments to persuade people to
their good. than whips and scourges, either of the literal or the metaphorical
sort. I am the last person to undervalue the self-regarding virtues: the\' are
(Tnlv second in importance, if even second, to the social. It in equally the
business of education to cultivate both. But even education works b\ con-
viction and persuasion a_ well as by compulsion, and it is by the former
only that, when the period of education is past, the self-regarding virtues
should be inculcated. Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish
the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former and
avoid the latter. They should be for ever stimulating each other to increased
exercise of their higher f:.culties, and increased direction of their feeling_
and a_ms towards w_sc instead of foolish, elevating instead of degraCling,
objects and contemplations. But neither one person, nor any number of
persons, is warranted m saying to another human creature of ripe }'ears,
that he shall not do x_ith his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do
with it He is the person most interested in his own well-being: the intere,;t
which anx other person, except in cases of strong personal attachment, can
have in it, is trifling, compared with that which he himself has: the interest
which society has in him indwiduall\' (except as to his conduct to others)
is fr-ac-t-ion-al[and aitogether indirect: while, with respect to his own feelings
a"i_dcirchmstances, the most ordinarx man or woman has means of knowl-
edge immeasurably surpassing those that can be posse>sed bx any one else.
The interference of society to overrule his judgment and purposes in what
only regards himself, must be grounded on general presumptions: which
max be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be mis-
applied to individual cases, by persons no better acquainted with the cir- -.
cumstances of such cases than those are who look at them merely from
without. In this department, therefore, of human affairs, Individualitx has its
proper field of action. In the conduct of human beings towards one another.
it is necessary that general rules should for the most part be observed, in
order that people ma,, k-nov.- what the) hqve to expect: but in each person's
own concerns, his individual spontaneity is entitled to free exercise. Con-
siderations to aid his judgment, exhortations t_ streng!!_en his will, may be
offered to him, even obtruded on him, by others; but he himself _s the final
judge. All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning,
are far outwcighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what
they deem his good.
i do not mean that the feelings with which a person is regarded by others,

_0.78 ESSAYS ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY
ought not to be in any way affected by his self-regarding qualities or

deficiencies. This is neither possible nor desirable. If he is eminent in any
of the qualities which conduce to his own good, he is. so far. a proper object
of admiration. He is so much the nearer to the ideal perfection of human
nature. If he is grossl 3 deficient in those qualities, a sentiment the opposite
of admiration will follow. There is a degree of folly, and a degree of what
may be called (though thc phrase is not unobjectionable) lowness or
depravation of taste, which, though it cannot justify doing harm to the
person who manifests it, renders him necessarily and properly a subject of
distaste, or, in extreme cases, even of contempt: a person could not have
the opposite qualities in due strength without entertaining these feelings.
Though doing no wrong to an,," one, a person may so act as to compel us to
judge him, and feel to him, as a fool, or as a bcinz_ of an inferior order: and
since this judgment and feeling are a fact which he would-prefer to avoid,
it is doing him a service to warn him of it beforehand, as of any other dis-
agreeable consequence to which he exposes himself. It would be well, indeed,
if this good office were much more freely rendered than the common notions
of politeness at present permit, and if one person could honestly point out
to another that he thinks him in fault, without being considered unmannerh'
or presuming. We have a r!ght, also. in various ways, to act upon our
unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individualitv,
but m the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his
society: we have a right to avoid it (thoUgh not to parade the avoid_mce),
for we have a right to choose the societ) most acceptable to us. We have a
rig_ht, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his
example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with
whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional
good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various
modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for
faults which directly concern only himself: but he suffers these penalties only
in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous conse-
quences of the faults themselves, not because the)," tire purposely inflicted on
him for the sake of punishment. A person who shows rashness, obstinacy,
self-conceit--who cannot live within moderate means--who cannot restrain
himself from hurtful indulgences--who pursues animal pleasures at the
expense of those of feeling and intellect--must cxpect to be lowered in the
opinion of others, and to have a less share of their favourable sentiments;
but of this he has no right to complain, unless he has merited their favour
by special excellence in his social relations, and has thus established a title
to their good offices, which is not affected by his demerits towards himself.
What I contend for is, that the inconveniences which are strictly
inseparable from the unfavourable judg'-ment of others, are the only ones

ON LIBERTY 279
to which a person should ever be subjected for that portion of his conduct
and character which concerns his own good. but which does not affect the
interests of others in their relations with him. Acts injurious to others
require a totally, d!fferent treatment. Er, croachment on their rights: infliction
on them of any loss or damage not justified by his own rights: falsehood or
duplicity in dealing with them; unfair or ungenerous use of advantages over
them: even selfish abstinence from defending them against injury--these are
fit objects of moral reprobation, and, in grave cases, of moral retribution and-
punishment. And not only these acts, but the dispositions _'hich lead to
them, are pr0perl,;-iiiigabi'gI_' fih_dfit subjects of disapprobation which may
rlse to abhorrence. Cruelty of disposition: malice and ill-nature: that most
anti-social and odious of all passions, envy; dissimulation and insincerity:
irascibility on insufficient cause, and resentment disproportioned to the
provocation: the love of domineering over others: the desire to en_oss more
than one's share of advantages (the _raeove£ta of the Greeks I" the pride
which derives gratification from the abasement of others: the egotism which
thinks self and its concerns more important than everything else, and decides
all doubtful questions in its own favour:--these a_remor?l vices, andjo.nsti-
tute a bad and odious moral character: unlike the self-re_ardi_ngf_aults pre-
viously mentioned, which are not properly' immoralities, and to whatever
pitch they may be carried, do not constitute wickedness. They may be proofs
of any amount of folly, or want of personal dignity' and self-respect: but they
are only a subject of moral reprobation when they involve a breach of duty
to others, for whose sake the individual i_ bound to have care for himself.
What are called duties to ourselves are not socially obligatory, unless cir-
cumstances render them at the same time duties to others. The term duty to
oneself, when it means anything more than prudence, means self-respect or
self-development: and for none of these is an_ one accountable to his fellow
creatures, because for none of them is it for the good of mankind that he be
held accountable to them.
The distinction between the loss of consideration which a person may
rightly incur by defect of prudence or of personal dignity, and the reproba-
tion which is due to him for an offence against the rights of others, is not a
merely nominal distinction. It makes a vast difference both in our feelings
and in our conduct towards him, whether he displeases us in things in which
we think we have a right to control him, or in things in which we know that
we have not. If he displeases us, we may express our distaste, and we may
stand aloof from a person as well as from a thing that displeases us: but we
shall not therefore feel called on to make his life uncomfortable. We shall
reflect that he already bears, or will bear. the whole penalty" of his error; if
he spoils his life by"mismanagement, we shall not, for that reason, desire to
spoil it still further: instead of wishing to punish him, we shall rather

endeavour to alleviate his punishment, by showing him how he may avoid or

cure the evils his conduct tends to bring upon him. He may' be to us an object
of pity, perhaps of dislike, but not of anger or resentment; we shall not treat
him like an enemy' of socmtv: the worst we shall think ourselves jus-tified in
doing is leaving him to himself, if we do not interfere benevolently by show-
ing interest or concern for him. It is far otherwise if he has infringed the
rules necessary, for the protection of his fellow-creatures, individually' or
collectively. The evil consequences of his acts do not then fall on himself,
but on others; and society, as the protector of all its members, must retaliate
on him: must inflict pain on him for the express purpose of punishment, and
must take care that it be sufficiently severe. In the one case, he is an offender
at our bar, and we are called on not only to sit in judgment on him, but, in
one shape or another, to execute our own sentence: in the other case. it is
not OUr part to inflict any suffering on him, except what may incidentally'
follow from our using the same liberty in the regulation of our own affairs,
which we allow to him in his. _
The distinction here pointed out between the part of a person's life which
concerns only himself, and that which concerns others, man}' persons will
refuse to admit. How (it may be asked) can any part of the conduct of a
member of society be a matter of indifference to the other members? No
person is an entirely, isolated being; it is impossible for a person to do any-
thing seriously or permanently hurtful to himself, without mischief reaching
at least to his near connexions, and often far beyond them. If he iniures his
property, he does harm to those who directly or indirectlx derived support
from it, and usually diminishes, by. a greater or less amount, the general
resources of the community-. If he deteriorates his bodily or mental faculties.
he not only brings evil upon all who depended on him for any portion of
their happiness, but disqualifies himself for rendering the services which he
owes to his fellow-creatures generally; perhaps becomes a burthen on their
affection or benevolence; and if such conduct were very frequent, hardly'
any offence that is committed would detract more from the general sum
of good. Finally', if by' his vices or follies a person does no direct harm to
others, he is nevertheless (it may be said) injurious by his example; and
ought to be compelled to control himself, for the sake of those whom the
sight or knowledge of his conduct might corrupt or mislead.
And even (it will be added) if the consequences of misconduct could be
confined to the vicious or thoughtless individual, ought society to abandon
to their own guidance those who are manifestly unfit for it? If protection
against themselves is confessedly due to children and persons under age, is
not society equally bound to afford it to persons of mature years who are
equally incapable of self-government? If gambling, or drunkenness, or
incontinence, or idleness, or uncleanliness, are as injurious to happiness,

ON LIBERTY 281
and as great a hindrance to improvemenL as man)' or most of the acts pro-

hibited by law, why (it may be asked) should not law, so far as is consistent
with practicability and social convenience, endeavour to repress these also?
And as a supplement to the unavoidable imperfections of law. ought not
opinion at least to organize a powerful police against these vices, and visit
rigidly with social penalties those who are known to practise them? There is
no question here tit max be said) about restricting individuality, or impeding
the trial of new and original experiments in living. The only things it is
sought to prevent are things which have been tried and condemned from
the beginning of the world until now: things which experience has shown
not to be useful or suitable to an}" person's individuality. There must be
some length of time and amount of experience, after which a moral or
prudential truth may be regarded as established: and it is mereh" desired to
prevent generation after generation from falling over the same precipice
which has been fatal to their predecessors.
I fully admit that the mischief which a person does to himself may serioustx
affect, both through their sympathies and their interests. /hose nearly '
connected with him, and in a minor degree, society at large. When. by con-
duct of thl.,, sort. a person is led to violate a distinct and assignable obligation
to any other person or persons, the case is taken out of the self-regarding
class, and becomes amenable to moral disapprobation in the proper sense
of the term. If, for example, a man, through intemperance or extrava-
gance, becomes unable to pay h_s debts, or, having undertaken the moral
responsibility of a family, becomes from the same cause incapable of sup-
porting or educating them. he i_ deservedly reprobated, and might be justl,v
punished: but it is for the breach of duty to his family or creditors, not for
the extravagance ]f the resources which ought to have been devoted to
them, had been diverted from them for the most prudent investment, the
moral culpabilit 3 would have been the same. George Barnwell murdered his
uncle to get money for his mistress, but if he had done it to set himself up in
business, he would cquall} have been hanged.I*l Again. in the frequent case
of a inan who causes grief to his famllx bx addiction to bad habits, he
deserve,_ reproach for his unkindness or ingratitude: but so hc max. for cul-
tivating habits not in themseh, es vicious, if they are painful to those with
whom he passes his life, or who from personal ties are dependent on him for
their comfort. Whoever fails in the consideration generally due to the
interests and feelings of others, not being compelled b,, some more impera-
tive duty. or justified by allowable self-preference, is a sub ect of moral
disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it, nor for the errors,
mereh" personal to himself, which may have remoteh led to it. In like
[*See George Lillo, The London :_erchant or, the Histor_ of George Barnwel/
t London" Gra_, 1731 ) .]

manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding,

from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public.
he is guilty of a social offence. No person ought to be punished simply for
being drunk; but a soldier or a po!iceman should be punished for being
drunk on duty. Whenever, in short, there is a definite damage, or a definite
risl_-of damage, either to an individual or to the put_]ic, the case is taken out
of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law.
But with regard to the merely contingent, or, as it may be called, construe-......
tive injur), which a person causes to society, by conduct whichneither
violates any specific duty to the public, nor occasions perceptible hurt to any
assignable individual except himself; the inconvenience is one which society
can afford to bear, for the sake of the ueater good of human freedom. If
grown persons are to be punished for not taking proper care of thcmselves,
. I would rather it were for their own sake, than under pretence of preventing
them from impairing their capacity of rendering to society benefits which
society does not pretend it has a right to exact. But I cannot consent to argue
the point as if society had no means of bringing its weaker members up to its
ordinary standard of rational conduct, except waiting till they do something
irrational, and then punishing them, legally or morally, for it. Society has
had absolute power over them during all the early portion of their existence:
it has had the whole period of childhood and nonage in which to t_ whether
it could make them capable of rational conduct in life. The existin$__genera-
tion is master both of the training and the entire circumstances of the genera-
tion to come: it cannot indeed make them perfectly wise and good. because
it is _tself so lamentably deficient in goodness and wisdom: and its best effo_§
are Opt alw_aF/s,in individual cases, its most successful ones" but it is perfectly
well able to make the rising generation, as a whole, as good as. and a little
better than, itself. If society lets any considerable number of it_ members
grow up mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration
of distant motives, society has itself to blame for the consequences. Armed
not only with all the powers of education, but with the ascendancy which
the authority of a received opinion always exercises over the minds who are
least fitted to judge for themselves; and aided by _the natural penalties which
cannot be prevented from falling on those who incur the distaste or the
contempt of those who know them; let not society pretend that it needs.
besides all this, the power to issue commands and enforce obedience in the
personal concerns of individuals, in which, on all principles of justice and
policy, the decision ought to rest with those who are to abide the conse-
quences. Nor is there anything which tends more to discredit and frustrate
the better means of influencing conduct, than a resort to the worse. If there
be among those whom it is attempted to coerce into prudence or temperance,
any of the material of which vigorous and independent characters are made,

ON LIBERTY 283
they will infallibly rebel against the yoke. No such person will ever feel that
others have a right to control him in his concerns, such as they' have to
prevent him from injuring them in theirs: and it easily" comes to be con-
sidered a mark of spirit and courage to flv in the face of such usurped
authority, and do with ostentation the exact opposite of what it enjoins; as
in the fashion of grossness which succeeded, in the time of Charles II, to the
fanatical moral intolerance of the Puritans. With respect to what is said of
the necessity of protecting society from the bad example set to others by the ,.
vicious or the self-indulgent: it is true that bad example may have a perni-
cious effect, especially, the example of doing wrong to others with impunity
to the wrong-doer. But we are no_ speaking of conduct which, while it does
no wrong to others, is supposed to do great harm to the agent himself: and :,
I do not see how those who believe this, can think otherwise than that the
example, on the whole, must be more salutary than hurtful, since, if it dis-
play,s the misconduct, it displays also the painful or degrading consequences
which, if the conduct is justly censured, must be supposed to be in all or
most cases attendant on it. '"
But the stronc,est_ of all the areuments_ against the interference of the
public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds
are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place. On questions of_social
morality, Qf duty to others, the opimon of the public, that is, of an over-
ruling majority, though often wrong, is likely to be still oftener right:
because on such questions they are only required to judge of_e]r own
interests; of the manner in which some mode of conduct, if allowed to be
practised, would affect themselves. But the opimon of a similar majorit}.
imposed as a law on the minority, on questions of self-regarding conduct, is
quite as likely to be wron&_[s right: for in these cases public opinion means,
at the best, some people's opinion of what is good or bad for other people;
while very' often it does not even mean that; the public, with the most perfect
indifference, passing over the pleasure or convenience of those whose con-
duct they censure, and considering only their own preference. There are
many who consider as an injury" to themselves any conduct which they have
a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings: as a religious bigot,
when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been
known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their
abominable worship or creed. But there is no parity' between the feeling of a
person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at
his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse,
and the desire of the right owner to keep it. And a person's taste is as much
his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse. It is easy" for any' one
to imagine an ideal public, which leaves the freedom and choice of
individuals in all uncertain matters undisturbed, and only requires them to

abstain from modes of conduct which universal experience has condemned.

But where has there been seen a public which set any such limit to its censor-
ship? or when does the public trouble itself about universal experience: In
its interferences with personal conduct it is seldom thinking of anything but
the enormity of acting or feeling differently from itself: and this standard of
judgment, thinly disguised, is held up to mankind as the dictate of religion
and philosophy, b_ nine-tenths of all moralists and speculative writers. These
teach that things are right because the,,' are right: because we feel them to
be so. The}" tell us to search in our own minds and hearts for laws of conduct
binding on ourselves and on all others. What can the poor public do but
apply these instructions, and make their own personal feelings of good and
evil, if the}" are tolerably unanimous in them, obligatory on all the world?
The evil here pointed out is not one which exists only in theor\: and it
may perhaps be expected that I should specify the instances in which the
public of this age and country improperly invests its own preferences with
the c h,_racter_ol_ moral laws. I am not writing an essay on the aberrations
•-"_o--f-existing moral feeling, That i_ too weight} a sub)ect to be discussed
parenthetically, and by way of illustration. Yet examples are necessary, to
show that the principle I maintain is of serious and practical moment, and
that I am not endeavouring to erect a barrier against _[ififig]nary cvils. And
it is not difficult to show. b} abundant instances, that to extend the bounds
, . of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unques-
tionably legitimate libert2(_of the individual, is one of the most universal of
all human propensities.
As a first instance, consider the antipathies which men cherish on no
better grounds than that persons whose religious opinions are different from
theirs, do not practise their religious observances, especiall} their religious
abstinences. To cite a rather trivial example, nothing in the creed or practice
of Christians does more to envenom the hatred of Mahomedans against
them, than the fact of their eating pork. There are few acts which Christians
and Europeans regard with more unaffected disgust, than Mussulmans
regard this particular mode of satisfying hunger. It is, in the first place, an
offence against their religion: but this circumstance by no means explains
either the degree or the kind of their repugnance: for wine also is forbidden
by their religion, and to partake of it is by all Mussulmans accounted wrong,
but not disgusting. Their aversion to the flesh of the "unclean beast" is. on
the contrary, of that peculiar character, resembling an instinctive antipathy,
which the idea of uncleanness, when once it thoroughly sinks into the feel-
ings. seems always to excite even in those whose personal habits are any-
thing but scrupulously cleanly, and of which the sentiment of religious
impurity, so intense in the Hindoos. is a remarkable example. Suppose now
that in a people, of whom the majority were Mussulmans, that majority

ON LIBERTY 285
should insist upon not permitting pork to be eaten within the limits of the
country. This would be nothing new in Mahomedan countries.' Would it be
a legitimate exercise of the moral authority of public opinion? and if not,
wh``' not? The practice is really revolting to such a public. The``" also sincerely
think that it is forbidden and abhorred bv the Deit``. Neither could the pro-
hibition be censured as religious persecution. It mi,,ht be religious in its
origin, but it would not be persecution for religion, since nobod``'s religion
makes it a dut\ to cat pork. The only tenable _oround of condemnation would
be. that with the personal tastes and self-regarding concerns of individuals
the public has no business to interfere.
To come somewhat nearer home: the majorit} of Spaniards consider it a
gross impiet,,, offensive in the highest degree to the Supreme Being. to
worship him in any other manner than the Roman Catholic; and no other
public worship is lawful on Spanish soil The people of all Southern Europe
look upon a married clergy a_ not onh' irrehglous, but unchaste, indecent.
gross, disgusting. What do Protestants think of these perfectly sincere feel-
ings. and of the attempt to enforce them a_,amst non-Catholics? Yet. if man-
kind are justified in interfering with each other's libert\ m thines which do
not concern the interests of others, on what principle is it possible consis-
tently to exclude these cases? or who can blame people for desiring to _up-
press what the``" reeard a', a scandal in the si,,ht of God and man? No _troneer
case can be shown for prohibiting anything which is regarded as a per,onal
immoralitx, than is made out for suppressing these practice_ in the exes of
those who regard them as impieties: and unless we are willing to adopt the
lo,,ic_ of persecutors, and to say that we ilia,, persecute other,,, bccau,,e we
arc right, and that the``" must not persecute us because the``' are wrong, we
must beware of admitting a pri_nciple of which we should re_ent a_ a gross
injustice_the _tpplication to ourselves.
The preceding instances may be objected to. although unreasonably, a,
drawn from contineencies_ impossible amon,,_ u_: opinion, in this countr\.
not being likely to enforce abstinence from meats, or to interfere with peo-
ple for worshipping, and for either marrying or not marrying, according to
*The case of the Bomba\ Parsecs i', a curious instance in point When this
industriou', and enterprising-tribe, the de,,cendants ot the Persian fire-wor,,hippers,
fl}mg from thmr nanve countrx before the (aliphs. arrJxcd m We,,tern India.
they were admmed to tolera{am b\ the Hmdoo sovereign,,, on con&tion
of not eating heel When those region.,, afterwards fell under the dominion of
Mahomedan conquerors, the Parsee> obtained from them a continuance of
indulgence, on condition of refraining from pork. What ,aa,, at first obedience
to authorit\ became a second nature, and the Parsecs to th_s dax abstain both
from beef and pork. Though not required by their religion, the double ab';tinence
has had time to grow into a custom of the{r tribe: and custom, in the Fast. is a
religion.

their creed or inclination. The next example, however, shall be taken from
an interference with liberty which we have by no means passed all danger
of. Wherever the Puritans have been sufficiently powerful, as in New Eng-
land, and in Great Britain at the time of the Commonwealth, they have
endeavoured, with considerable success, to put down all public, and nearly
all private, amusements: especially music, dancing, public games, or-other
assemblages for purposes of diversion, and the theatre. There are still in
this country large bodies of persons by whose notions of morality and
religion these recreations are condemned; and those persons belon_ng
chiefly to the middle class, who are the ascendant power in the p re_sent
social and political condition ofthe kingdom, it is by no means impossible
that persons of these sentiments may at some time or other command a
majority in Parliament. How will the remaining portion of the community
like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by
the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists?
Would they not. with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusiye!y
pious m.embers of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what
sY46_uicibe said to ever} government and every public, who have the preten-
sion that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong. But
if the principle of the pretension be admitted, no one can reasonably object
to its being acted on in the sense of the majority, or other preponderating
power in the country: and all persons must be ready to conform to the idea
of a Christian commonwealth, as understood by the early settlers in New
England. if a religious profession similar to theirs should ever succee d in
regaining its lost ground, as religions supposed to be declining have so often
been known to do.
To imagine another contingency, perhaps more likely to be realized than
the one last mentioned. There is confessedly a strong tendency in the modern
; world towards a democratic constitution of society, accompanied or not by
popular political institutions. It is affirmed that in the country where this
tendency is most completely realized--where both society and the govern-
ment are most democratic--the United States--the feeling of the majority,
to whom any appearance of a more showv or costly style of living than they
can hope to rival is disagreeable, operates as a tolerably effectual sumptuary
law, and that in many parts of the Union it is really difficult for a person
possessing a very large income, to find any mode of spending it. which will
not incur popular disapprobation. Though such statements as these are
doubtless much exaggerated as a representation of existing facts, the state
of things they describe is not only a conceivable and possible, but a probable
result of democratic feeling, combined with the notion that the public has a
right to a veto on the manner in which individuals shall spend their incomes.
We have only further to suppose a considerable diffusion of Socialist opin-

ON LIBERTY 287
ions, and it may' become infamous in the eves of the majority to possess
more property than some very" small amount, or any income not earned by
manual labour, Opinions similar in principle to these, already' prevail widely
among the artizan class, and weigh oppressively on those who are amenable
to the opinion chiefly of that class, namely, its own members. It is known
that the bad workmen who form the majority" of the operatives in many
branches of industry, are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to
receive the same wages as good, and that no one ought to be allowed,
through piecework or otherwise, to earn by superior skill or industry more
than others can without it. And they' employ a moyal_291ice, which occasion-
all`, becomes a physical one. to deter skilful workmen from receiving, and
employers from giving, a larger remuneration for a more useful service..If
the public-'have-any jurisdiction over private concerns, I cannot see that
these people are in fault, or that any individual's particular public can be
blamed for asserting the same authority over his individual conduct, which
the general public asserts over people in general.
But, without dwelling upon supposititious cases, there are. in our own
dav, gross)_surpations upon the liberty of private life actually practised,
and still greater ones threatened with some expectation of success, and
opinions Opropoundcd a wh]ch assert an unlimited right in the public not
only to prohibit by law everything which it thinks wrong, but in order to
get at what it thinks wrong, to prohibit any number of things which it ad-
mits to be innocent.
Under the name of prev cm]lag intemperance, the people of one English
colony, and of nearly half the United States, have been interdicted b\ law
from making any use whatever of fermented drinks, except for medical
purposes: for prohibition of their sale _s in fact, as it is intended to be,
prohibition of their use. And though the impracticability of executing the
law has caused its repeal in several of the States which had adopted it, in-
cluding the one from which it derives its name. an attempt has notwith-
standing been commenced, and is prosecuted with considerable zeal by
man,, of the professed philanthropists, to agitate for a similar law in this
country. The association, or "Alliance" as it terms itself, which has been
formed for this purpose, has acquired some notoriety through the publicity
given to a correspondence between its Secretary and one of the verx few
English public men who hold that a politician's opinions ought to be founded
on principles.I*J Lord Stanlev's share in this correspondence is calculated
to strengthen the hopes already built on him, by" those who know how rare
such qualities as arc manifested in some of his public appearances, un-
[*See "Lord Stanlex, M.P., and The United Kingdom Alliance." The Times,
2 Oct., 1856, pp. 9-16.]
a-a591, 5q 2 proposed

2_8 ESSAYS ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY
happily are among those who figure in political life. The organ of the Al-
liance, who would "deeply deplore the recognition of any principle which
could be wrested to justify bigotry and persecution," undertakes to point
out the "'broad and impassable barrier" which divide_ such principles from
those of the association. "All matters relating to thought, opinion, conscience,
appear to me." he says, "to be x_ithout the sphere of le_,islation: all pertain-
in,,_to _ocial act, habit, relation, subject only to a discretionary, power vested
m the State itself, and not in the individual, to be within it." No mention is
made of a third class, different from either of these, viz. acts and habits
which are not social, but individual: although it is to thi,, class, surely,, that
the act of drinking fermented liquors belongs. Selling fermented liquors.
however, i, trading, and trading is a social act. But the infringc n)ent ,c0m-
plained of is not on the liberty of the seller, but on that of the buyer and
consumer; since the State might just as welt forbid him to drink wine. a_
purposely make it impossible for him to obtain it. The Secretarx. however.
_avs. "'1 claim, as a citizen, a right to legislate whenever m\ social rights are
invaded by the social act of another." And now for the definition of these
"'social riehts.'" "If anything invades nw social rights, certainly the traffic in
strong drink does. It destroys, my primary right of securit\, by constantlx
creating and stimulating social disorder. It invadea my right of equalit>, by
deriving a profil from the creation of a misery I am taxed to support, it
impedes my right to free moral and intellectual development, bx surround-
ing m.v path with dangers, and b\ weakening and demoralizing socieW, from
,ahich 1 have a right to claim mutual aid and intercourse."I*l A theory of
"social rights," the like of which probably never before found its way into
db;tinct language: being nothing short of this--that it is the absolute social
rieht of everx individual, that every other individual shall act in every re-
,,pect exacth as he ought" that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest par-
ticular, violates my social right, and entitle_ me to demand from the legis-
lature the removal of the grievance. So monstrou_ a principle i_ far morc
dangerous than any single interference with liberty: there is no violation of
liberty which it would not justify: it acknowledges no right to any freedom
whatever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever
disclosing them. for, the moment an opinion which I consider noxious
passes any one's lips, it invades all the "social rights" attributed to me by
the Alliance. The doctrine ascribes to all mankind a vested interest in each
other's mora!, intellectual, and even physical perfection, to be defined by
each claimant according to his own standard.
Another important example of illegitimate mterference with the rightful
liberty of the individual, not simply" threatened, but long since carried into
[*Samuel Pope. letter to Lord Stanley, ihid., p. 9.1

ON LIBERTY 289
triumphant effect, is Sabb_a_tari!m je_tion.[*l Without doubt, abstinence j

on one day m the week. so far as the exigencies of life permit, from the
usual daih,, occupation, thou,oh_ in no respect relieiouslv_, bindin,,e on any
except Jews. is a highly beneficial custom. And inasmuch as this custom
cannot be observed without a general consent to that effect among the in-
dustrious classes, therefore, in so far as some persons b,, working ma\
impose the same necessity on others, it may be allowable and right that the
la_ should guarantee to each the observance by others of the custom, by
suspending thc greater operations of industry on a particular day. But this
justification, grounded on the direct interest which others have m each
indivldual'_ observance of the practice, does not apply to the self-chosen
occupations in which a person may think fit to employ his leisure" nor does
it hold good. in the _mallest degree, for legal restrictions on amusements. It
is true that the amusement of some is the da\'s work of others: but the
pleasure, not to say the useful recreation, of man\, is worth the labour of a
few, provided the occupation i_ freeb; chosen, and can be freeh resigned.
The operam'es are perfectly right in thinking that if all worked on Sunday,
seven davs" work would have to be given for six days" wages: bur so long
as the great ma_s of employments are suspended, the small number who for
the enjoyment of others must still work. obtain a proportional increase of
earnings: and thc_ are not oblb,ed to follow those occupations, if they prefer
leisurc to emolument. If a further remedy is sought, it might be found in the
estabhshmcnt by custom of a holida_ on some other da\ of the week for
those particular classes of persons. The only ground, therefore, on which
restrictions on Sunday amusements can be defended, must be that the\ are
rch_iouslv wrong: a moti_ e of lc_oislation which never can be too earnestl\
_rotested against. "'Deorum injurice Dfis cur_c. "'I_ It remains to be proved
that socictx or any of its officers holds a commi,ssion from on high to avenge
any supposed offence to Omnipotence, which is not also a wrong to our fel-
low creatures The notion that it is one man's dut) that another should be
religious, was the foundation of all the religious persecutions ever perpe-
trated, and if admitted, would full}' justify them. Though the feeling which
breaks out in the repeated attempts to stop railway travelling on Sunday, in
the resistance to the opening of Museums, and the like. has not the cruelty
of the old persecutors, thc state of mind indicated bx it is fundamentalh- the
same. It is a determination not to tolerate others in doing what is permitted
by their religion, because it is not permitted by the persecutor's religion. It
is a belief that God not only abominates the act of the misbeliever, but will
not hold us guiltless if we leave him unmolested.
[*See, e.g., 13 & 14 Victoria, c. 23 ( 1850 ) ]
['*Tacitus, Thc Annals. Vol. 1, p. 368 (I, lxxui ).]

I cannot refrain from adding to these examples of the little account com-
monly made of human libertv, the language of downright persecution which
breaks out from the press of this country, whenever it feels called on to
notice the remarkable phenomenon of Mormonism. Much might be said on
the unexpected and instructive fact, that an alleged new revelation, and a
religion founded on it. the product of palpable imposture, not even supported
by the prestige of extraordinary qualities in its founder, is believed by hun-
dreds of thousands, and has been made the foundation of a society, in the
age of newspapers, railways, and the electric telegraph. What here concerns
us is, that this religion, like other and better religions, has its martyrs: that
its prophet and foundert*l _as, for his teaching, put to death by a mob: that
others of its adherents lost their lives by the same lawless violence: that they'
were forcibly expelled, in a body, from the country in which they first grew
up: while, now that the',' have been chased into a solitary recess in the midst
of a desert, many in this country openly" declare that it would be right (only
that it is not convenient) to send an expedition against them, and compel
them by force to conform to the opinions of other people. The article of
the Mormonite doctrine which is the chief provocative to the antipathy
which thus breaks through the ordinary restraints of religious tolerance, is
its sanction of pol£gamy; which, though permitted to Mahomedans, and
Hindoos, and Chinese, seems to excite unquenchable animosity when_t2rac-
tised by persons who speak English, and profess to be a kind of Christians.
No one has a deeper disapprobation than I have of this Mormon institution;
both for other reasons, and because, far from being in an)" way counte-
nanced by the principle of liberty, it is a direct infraction of that principle,
being a mere rivetting of the chains of one-half of the community, and an
emancipation of the other from rec_i_rocity-of obligation towards them.
Still, it must be remembered that this relation is as much voluntary on the
part of the women concerned in it, and who may be deemed the sufferers
by it. as is the case with an,," other form of the marriage institution: and
however surprising this fact may appear, it has its explanation in the com-
mon ideas and customs of the world, which teaching women to think mar-
riage the one thing needful, make it intelligible that many a woman should
prefer being one of several wives, to not being a wife at all. Other countries
are not asked to recognise such unions, or release any portion of their inhabi-
tants from their own laws on the score of Mormonite opinions. But when
the dissentients have conceded to the hostile sentiments of others, far more
than could justly be demanded; when they have left the countries to which
their doctrines were unacceptable, and established themselves in a remote
corner of the earth, which the}, have been the first to render habitable to
human beings; it is difficult to see on what principles but those of tyranny
[*Joseph Smith.]

ON LIBERTY 291
they can be prevented from living there under what laws they' please, pro-
vided they commit no aggression on other nations, and allow perfect free-
dom of departure to those who are dissatisfied with their ways. A recent
writer, in some respects of considerable merit, proposes (to use his own
words) not a crusade, but a civilizade, against this polygamous community,
to put an end to what seems to him a retrograde step in civilization. It also
appears so to me, but I am not aware that any community' has a right to
force another to be civilized. So long as the sufferers by the bad law do not
invoke assistance from other communities, I cannot admit that persons
entirely unconnected with them ought to step in and require that a condi-
tion of things with which all who are directly interested appear to be satis-
fied, should be put an end to because it is a scandal to persons some thou-
sands of miles distant, who have no part or concern in it. Let them send
missionaries, if they" please, to preach against it: and let them, by any fair
means (of which silencing the teachers is not one,) oppose the progress of
similar doctrines among their own people. If cMlization hat got the better
of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to pro-
fess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly eot under, should
revive and conquer civilization. A cM!ization that can thus succumb to its
vanqmshed enemy, must first have become so degenerate, that neither its
appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody' else, has the capacity, or will
take the trouble, to stand up for it. If this be so. the sooner such a cMliza-
tion receives notice to quit, the better. It can only go on from bad to worse.
until destroyed and regenerated (like the Western Empire) by energetic
barbarians.

CHAPTER V
Applications
THE PRINCIPLES asserted in these pages must be more generally admitted as

the basis for discussion of details, before a consistent application of them
to all the various departments of government and morals can be attempted
with an,, prospect of advantage. The few observations I propose to make
on questions of detail, arc designed to illustrate the principles, rather than
to follow them out to their consequences. I offer, not so much applications.
as specimens of application: which max serve to bring into greater clearness
the meaning and limit_ of thet_wo max!ip_s which together form the _.ntire
doctrine of. thi_ Essay and to assist the judgment in holding the balance
between them, in the cases where it appears doubtful which of them is
applicable to the case.
The maxims are, first, that the individual is not accountable to society
for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but him-
self. Advice, instruction, persuasion, and avoidance by other people if
thought necessary by them for their oxen good. are the only measures by
which society can justifiabl} express its dislike or disapprobation of his
conduct. Secondl,,. that for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests
of others, the individual is accountable, and may. be subjected either to
social or to legal _punishment a, if societx is of opinion that the one or the
other is requisite for its protection.
In the frst place, it must by no means be supposed, because damage, or
probability of damage, to the interests of others, can ahmc justify the inter-
ference of society, that therefore it always does justify such interference. In
man.,,' cases, an individual, in pursuing a legitimate object, necessarily and
therefore legitimately causes pain or loss to others, or intercepts a good
which they had a reasonable hope of obtaining. Such oppositions of interest
between individuals often arise from bad social institutions, but are un-
avoidable while those institutions last: and some would be unavoidable
under any institutions. Whoever succeeds in an overcrowded profession, or
in a competitive examination; whoever is preferred to another in any con-
test for an object which both desire, reaps benefit from the loss of others,
from their wasted exertion and their disappointment. But it is, by common
a a591592 punishment_

ON LIBERTY 293
admission, better for the general interest of mankind, that persons should
pursue their objects undeterred by this sort of consequences. In other words,
society admits no right, either legal or moral, in the disappointed competi-
tors, to immunity, from this kind of suffering; and feels called on to interfere,
only when means of success have been employed which it is contrary' to the
general interest to permit--namely, fraud or treachery', and force.
Again, trade is_a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any' description
of goods to'the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and f
of society' in general; and thus his conduct, in principle, comes with!n the
jurisdict!on..of society: accordingly, it was once held to be the duty of
governments, in all cases which were considered of importance, to fix prices,
and regulate the processes of manufacture. But it is now recognised, though
not till after a long struggle, that both the cheapness and the good quality
of corarBodities are most effectually provided f0rby Ieaving the producers
and sellers perfectly free, under the sole check of equal freedom to the
buyers for supplying themselves elsewhere. This is the so-called doctrine
of Free Trade, which rests on grounds different from, though equally solid
with, the principle of individual liberty asserted in this Essay. Restrictions
on trade, or on production for purposes of trade, are indeed restraints; and
all rest(ainL_qud restraint, is an evil: but the restraints in question affect
only that part of conduct which society is competent to restrain, and are
wrong solely" because they do not really produce the results which it is
desired to produce by them. As the principle of individual liberty' is not
involved in the doctrine of Free Trade, so neither is it in most of the ques-
tions-_v3rilch arise respecting the limits of that doctrine; as for example,
what amount of public control is admissible for the prevention of fraud by
adulteration; how far sanitary precautions, or arrangements to protect
workpeople employed in dangerous occupations, should be enforced on
employers. Such questions involve considerations of liberty, only' in so
far as leaving people to themselves is always better, cceteris paribus, than
controlling them: but that they may be legitimately, controlled for these
ends, is in principle undeniable. On the other hand, there are questions relat-
ing to interference with trade, which are essentially' questions of liberty: such
as the Maine Law, already' touched upon; the prohibition of the importa-
tion of opium into China; the restriction of the sale of poisons: I*l all cases,
in short, where the object of the interference is to make it impossible or
difficult to obtain a particular commodity'. These interferences are objec-
tionable, not as infringements on the liberty of the producer or seller, but
on that of the buyer.
One of these examples, that of the sale of poisons, opens a new question:
the proper hmits of what may be called the functions of police: how far
[*See 14 & 15 Victoria. c. 13 (1851 ).]

liberty may legitimately be invaded for the prevention of crime, or of

accident. It is one of the undisputed functions of government to take pre-
cautions against crime before it has been committed, as well as to detect
and punish it afterwards. The preventive function of government, however.
is far more liable to be abused, to the prejudice of liberty, than the punitory
function: for there is hardly any' part of the legitimate freedom of action of
a human being which would not admit of being represented, and fairly too.
as increasing the facilities for some form or other of delinquency. Neverthe-
less, if a public authority, or even a private person, sees any one evidently
preparing to commit a crime, the}' are not bound to look on inactive until
the crime is committed, but may interfere to prevent it. If poisons were
never bought or used for any purpose except the commission of murder, it
would be right to prohibit their manufacture and sale. They may, however,
be wanted not only for innocent but for useful purposes, and restrictions
cannot be imposed in the one case without operating in the other. Again,
it is a proper office of public authority to guard against accidents. If either
a public officer or any one else saw a person attempting to cross a bridge
which had been ascertained to be unsafe, and there were no time to warn
him of his danger, they might seize him and turn him back, without any real
infringement of his liberty: for liberty consists in doing what one desires,
and he does not desire to fall into the river. Nevertheless, when there is not
a certainty, but only a danger of mischief, no one but the person-ll+imself can
judge of the sufficiency of the motive which may prompt him to incfa?-the
risk: in this case. therefore, (unless he is a child, or delirious, or in some
state of excitement or absorption incompatible with the full use of the re-
flecting faculty) he ought, I conceive, to be only+warned of the danger: not
forcibly prevented from exposing himself to it. Similar considerations_ ap-
plied to such a question as the sale of poisons, max; enable us to decide
which among the possible modes of regulation are or are not contrary to
principle. Such a precaution, for example, as that of labelling the drug with
some word expressive of its dangerous character, may be enforced without
violation of liberty: the buyer cannot wish not to know that the thing he
possesses has poisonous qualities. But to require in all cases the certificate
of a medical practitioner, would make it sometimes impossible, always ex-
pensive, to obtain the article for legitimate uses. The only mode apparent
to me, in which difficulties may be thrown in the way of crime committed
through this means, without any infringement, worth taking into account,
upon the liberty of those who desire the poisonous substance for other
purposes, consists in providing what, in the apt language of Bentham, is
called "preappointed evidence."E*l This provision is familiar to every one
[*See, e.g., An Introductory View o] the Rationale of Evidence, in Works,
Vol. VI, p. 60.]

ON LIBERTY 295
in the case of contracts• It is usual and right that the law, when a contract
is entered into, should require as the condition of its enforcing performance,
that certain formalities should be observed, such as signatures, attestation of
witnesses, and the like, in order that in case of subsequent dispute, there
may be evidence to prove that the contract was really entered into, and that
there was nothing in the circumstances to render it legally invalid: the effect
being, to throx_, great obstacles in the way of fictitious contracts, or con-
tracts made in circumstances which, if known, would destroy their validity.
Precautions of a similar nature might be enforced in the sale of articles
adapted to be instruments of crime. The seller, for example, might be re-
quired to enter in a register the exact time of the transaction, the name and
address of the buyer, the precise quality and quantity sold: to ask the pur-
pose for which it was wanted, and record the answer he received. When
there was no medical prescription, the presence of some third person might
be required, to bring home the fact to the purchaser, in case there should
afterwards be reason to believe that the article had been applied to criminal
purposes. Such regulations would in general be no material impediment to
obtaining the article, but a very considerable one to making an improper use
of it without detection.
The right inherent in society, to ward off crimes against itself by ante-
cedent precautions, suggests the obvious limitations to the maxim, that
purely' self-regarding misconduct cannot properly" be meddled with in the
way of prevention or punishment. Drunkenness, for example, in ordmar\.
cases, is not a fit subject for l_ve interference: but I should deem it
perfectl 3 legitimate that a person, who had once been convicted of any act
of violence to others under the influence of drink, should be placed under
a special legal restriction• personal to himself: that if he were afterwards
found drunk, he should be hable to a penalty, and that if when m that state
he committed another offence, the punishment to which he would be liable
for that other offence should be increased in severitx. The making himself
drunk, in a person whom drunkenness exmtes to do harm to others, is a
crime against others. So, again, idleness, except in a person receiving sup-
port from the public, or except when it constitutes a breach of contract,
cannot without tyranny be made a subject of legal punishment: but if, either
from idleness or from any other avoidable cause, a man fails to perform his
legal duties to others, as for instance to support his children, it _s no tyranny
to force him to fulfil that obligation, by compulsory labour, if no other
means are available.
Again, there arc many' acts which, being directly iniurious only to the
agents themselves, ought not to be legally interdicted, but which, if done
publicly', are a violation of good manners, and coming thus within the cate-
gory of offences against others, may ric,htfulh be prohibited. Of this kind

are offences against decency; on which it is unnecessary to dwell, the rather

as they are only connected indirectly with our subject, the objection to
publicity being equally strong in the case of many actions not in themselves
condemnable, nor supposed to be so.
There is another question to which an answer must be found, consistent
with the principles which have been laid down. In cases of personal conduct
supposed to be blameable, but which respect for liberty precludes society
,from preventing or punishing, because the evil directly resulting falls wholly
on the agent: what the agent is free to do, ought other persons to be equally
free to counsel or instigate? This question is not free from difficult},. The
case of a person who solicits another to do an act, is not strictly a case of
self-regarding conduct. To give advice or offer inducements to any one, is
a social act, and may. therefore,-like actions in-general which affect others,
be supposed amenable to social control. But a little reflection corrects the
first impression, by showing that if the case is not strictly within the defini-
tion of individual liberty, yet the reasons on which the principle of indi-
vidual liberty is grounded, are applicable to it. If people must be allowed,
in whatever concerns only themselves, to act as seems best to themselves at
their own peril, they must equally be free to consult with one another about
what is fit to be so done; to exchange opinions, and give and receive sug-
gestions. Whatever it is permitted to do, it must be permitted to advise to do.
The question is doubtful, only when the instigator derives a personal benefit
from his advice; when he makes it his occupation, for subsistence or pecu-
niary gain, to promote what society and the bStateb consider to be an evil.
Then, indeed, a new element of complication is introduced: namely, the
existence of classes of persons with an interest opposed to what is con-
_ sidered as the public weal, and whose mode of living is grounded on the
counteraction of it. Ought this to be interfered with, or not? Fornication.
f0rexample, must be tolerated_ and so must gambling: but should a person
be freeto be a pimp, or to keep a gambling-house? The case is one of those
which lie on th.e exact boundary line between two principles, and it is not
at once apparent to which of the two it properly belongs. There are argu-
ments on both sides. On the side of toleration it may be said, that the fact
of following anything as an occupation, and living or profiting by the prac-
tice of it, cannot make that criminal which would otherwise be admissible;
that the act should either be consistently permitted or consistently pro-
hibited: that if the principles which we have hitherto defended are true,
society has no business, as society, to decide anything to be wrong which
concerns only the individual; that it cannot go beyond dissuasion, and that
one person should be as free to persuade, as another to dissuade. In opposi-
tion to this it may be contended, that although the public, or the State, are
b-b591 state

oN LmER'rV 297
not warranted in authoritatively deciding, for purposes of repression or

punishment, that such or such conduct affecting only the interests of the
individual is good or bad. they are fully justified in assuming, if they regard
it as bad, that its being so or not is at least a disputable question: That, this
being supposed, they cannot be acting wrongly in endeavouring to exclude
the influence of solicitations which are not disinterested, of instigators who
cannot possibly be impartial--who have a direct personal interest on one
side. and that side the one which the State believes to be wrong, and who
confessedly promote it for personal objects only. There can surely, it may
be urged, be nothing lost, no sacrifice of good, by so ordering matters that
persons shall make their election, either wisely or foolishly, on their own
prompting, as free as possible from the arts of persons who stimulate their
inclinations for interested purposes of their own. Thus (it may be said)
though the statutes respecting unlawful games are utterly indefensible--
though all persons should be free to gamble in their own or each other's
houses, or in any place of meeting established by their own subscriptions,
and open only to the members and their visitors--vet public gambling-
houses should not be permitted. It is true that the prohibition is never ef-
fectual, and that, whatever amount of tyrannical power 'may be c given to
the police, gambling-houses can always be maintained under other pre-
tences: but they may be compelled to conduct their operations with a cer-
tain degree of secrecy and mystery, so that nobody knows anything about
them but those who seek them: and more than this, society ought not to
aim at. There is considerable force in these darguments. Ia will not venture
to decide whether they are sufficient to iustify th_emoral anomaly of punish-
ing the accessary, when the principal is (.and must be) allowed to go free:
of fining or imprisoning the procurer, but not the formcator, the gambling-
house keeper, but not the gambler. Still less ought the common operations
of buying and selling to be interfered with on analogous grounds. Almost
ever}' article which is bought and sold mav be used in excess, and the sellers
have a pecuniary interest in encouraging that excess; but no argument can
be founded on this, in favour, for instance, of the Maine Law: because the
class of dealers in strong drinks, though interested in their abuse, are indis-
pensably required for the sake of their legitimate use. The interest, however,
of these dealers in promoting intemperance is a real evil, and justifies the
State in imposing restrictions and requiring guarantees which, but for that
justification, would be infringements of legitimate liberty.
A further question is, whether the State, while it permits, should never-
theless indirectly discourage conduct which it deems contrary to the best
interests of the agent: whether, for example, it should take measures to
c-c591.592 is
d-d591 arguments; I

render the means of drunkenness more costly, or add to the difficulty of

procuring them by limiting the number of the places of sale. On this as on
most other practical questions, many distinctions require to be made. To
tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be
obtained, is a measure differing only, in degree from their entire prohibition;
and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable. Every increase of cost
is a prohibition, to those whose means do not come up to the augmented
price: and to those who do, it is a penalty laid on them for gratifying a par-
ticular taste. Their choice of pleasures, and their mode of expending their
income, after satisfying their legal and moral obligations to the State and to
individuals, are their own concern, and must rest with their own judgment.
These considerations may' seem at first sight to condemn the selection of
stimulants as special subjects of taxation for purposes of revenue. But it
must be remembered that taxation for fiscal purposes is absolutely in-
evitable; that in most countries it is necessary that a considerable part of
that taxation should be indirect; that the State, therefore, cannot help im-
posing penalties, which to some persons may be prohibitory', on the use of
some articles of consumption. It is hence the duty. of the State to consider,
in the imposition of taxes, what commodities the--cbnsumers can best spare;
and h fortiori, to select in preference those of which it deems the use, beyond
a very, moderate quantity, to be positively injurious. Taxation, therefore, of
stimulants, up to the point which produces the largest amount of revenue
(supposing that the State needs all the revenue which it yields) is not only
admissible, but to be approved of.
The question of making the sale of these commodities a more or less
exclusive privilege, must be answered differently,, according to the purposes
to which the restriction is intended to be subservient. All places of public
resort require the restraint of a police, and places of this kind peculiarly,
because offences against society are especially apt to originate there. It is,
therefore, fit to confine the power of selling these commodities (at least for
consumption on the spot) to persons, of known or vouched-for respect-
ability of conduct; to make such regulations respecting hours of opening
and closing as may be requisite for public surveillance, and to withdraw the
licence if breaches of the peace repeatedly take place through the con-
nivance or incapacity of the keeper of the house, or if it becomes a rendez-
vous for concocting and preparing offences against the law. Any further
restriction I do not conceive to be, in principle, justifiable. The limitation in
number, for instance, of beer and spirit houses, for the express purpose of
rendering them more difficult of access, and diminishing the occasions of
temptation, not only exposes all to an inconvenience because there are
some bv whom the facility would be abused, but is suited only to a state of
society in which the labouring classes are.avowedly treated as children or

oN LIBERTY 299
savages, and placed under an education of restraint, to fit them for future
admission to the privileges of freedom. This is not the principle on which
the labouring classes are professedly governed in any free country; and no
person who sets due value on freedom will give his adhesion to their being
so governed, unless after all efforts have been exhausted to educate them
for freedom and govern them as freemen, and it has been definitively proved
that they can only be governed as children. The bare statement of the
alternative shows the absurdity of supposing that such efforts have been
made in anv case which needs be considered here. It is only because the
institutions of this country are a mass of inconsistencies, that things find
admittance into our practice which belong to the system of despotic, or
what is called paternal, government, while the general freedom of our insti-
tutions precludes the exercise of the amount of control necessary to render
the restraint of an}"real efficacy as a moral education.
It was pointed out in an early part of this Essay,_*] that the liberty of
the individual, in things wherein the individual is alone concerned, implies
a corresponding liberty in any number of individuals to regulate by mutual
agreement such things as regard them jointly, and regard no persons but
themselves, This question presents no difficulty, so long as the will of all
the persons implicated remains unaltered; but since that will may change.
it is often necessary, even in things in which they alone are concerned, that
they should enter into engagements with one another: and when they do, it
is fit, as a general rule, that those engagements should be kept. Yet. in the
laws, probably, of every country, this general rule has some exceptions.
Not only persons are not held to engagements which violate the rights of
third parties, but it is sometimes considered a sufficient reason for releasing
them from an engagement, that it is injurious to themselves. In this and
most other civihzed countries, for example, an engagement by which a
person should sell himself, or allow himself to be_s_old. _ a slave, would be
null and void: neither enforced by law nor by opinion. The ground for thus
limiting his power of voluntarily disposing of his own lot in life. is apparent,
and is very clearly seen in this extreme case. The reason for not interfering,
unless for the sake of others, with a person's voluntary acts, is considera-
tion for his liberty. His voluntary choice is evidence that what he so chooses
is desirable, or at the least endurable, to him, and his good is on the whole
best provided for by allowing him to take his own means of pursuing it.
But by selling himself for a slave, he abdicates his liberty; he foregoes any
future use of it beyond that single act. He therefore _]efeats, in his own case,
the very purpose which is the justification of allowing him to dispose of
himself. He is no longer free; but is thenceforth in a position which has no
longer the presumption in its favour, that would be afforded bv his volun-
[*See p. 226 above.]

tarily remaining in it. The principle of freedom cannot require that he

should be free not to be free. It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his
freedom. These reasons, the force of which is so conspicuous in this peculiar
case. are evidently of far wider application; yet a limit is everywhere set to
them by the necessities of life, which continually require, not indeed that we
should resign our freedom, but that we should consent to this and the other
limitation of it. The principle, however, which demands uncontrolled free-
dom of action in all that concerns only the agents themselves, requires that
those who have become bound to one another, in things which concern no
third party, should be able to release one another from the engagement: and
even without such voluntary release, there are perhaps no contracts or
engagements, except those that relate to money or money's worth, of which
one can venture to say that there ought to be no liberty whatever of retrac-
ration. Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, in the excellent essay from which I
have already quoted, states it as his conviction, that engagements which
involve personal relations or services, should never be legally binding be-
yond a limited duration of time; and that the most important of these
engagements, marriage, having the peculiarity that its objects are frustrated
unless the feelings of both the parties are in harmony with it, should require
nothing more than the declared will of either party to dissolve it.l*l This
subject is too important, and too complicated, to be discussed in a paren-
thesis, and I touch on it only so far as is necessary for purposes of illus-
tration. If the conciseness and generality of Baron Humboldt's dissertation
had not obliged him in this instance to content himself with enunciating his
conclusion without discussing the premises, he would doubtless have recog-
nised that the question cannot be decided on grounds so simple as those to
which he confines himself. When a person, either by express promise or bv
conduct, has encouraged another to rely upon his continuing to act in a
certain way--to build expectations and calculations, and stake any part of
his plan of life upon that supposition--a new series of moral obligations
arises on his part towards that person, whicl:(ma), possibly be overruled,
but cannot be ignored. And again, if the relation between two contracting
parties has been followed by consequences to others; if it has placed third
parties in any peculiar posiuon, or, as in the caseof.marriage, has even called
third parties iato .existence. obligations arise on the part of both the contract-
ing parties towards those third persons, the fulfilment of which, or at all
events the mode of fulfilment, must be greatly affected by the continuance or
disruption of the relation between the original parties to the contract. It does
not follow, nor can I admit, that these obligations extend to requiring the
fulfilment of the contract at all costs to the happiness of the reluctant party;
but they are a necessary element in the question; and even if, as Von Hum-
[*The Sphere and Duties o] Government. p. 34.]

ON LIBERTY 301
boldt maintains, they ought to make no difference in the legal freedom of

the parties to release themselves from the engagement (and I also hold that
they ought not to make much difference), the'," necessarily make a _eat
difference in the moral freedom. A person is bound to takeall these circum-
stances into account, before resolving on a step which may affect such im-
portant interests of others; and if he does not allow proper weight to those "
interests, he is moral!_ I responsible for the wrong. I have made these obvious
remarks for the better illustration of the general principle of liberty, and
not because they are at all needed on the particular question, which, on the
contrary, is usually discussed as if the interest of children was everything,
and that of grown persons nothing.
I have alread\ observed that, owing to the absence of any recognised
general principles, liberty is often _anted where it should be withheld, as
well as withheld where it should be granted: and one of the cases in which,
in the modern European world, the sennment of liberty is the strongest, is a
case where, in m\ view. it is altogether misplaced. A person should be free
to do as he likes in his own concerns: but he ought not to be free to do as he
likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of ethe other _ are
his own affairs. The State, while it respects the liberw of each in what speci-
ally res_ards himself, is bound to maintain a vigilant control over his exercise
of any power which it allows him to possess over others. This obligation is
almost entirely disregarded in the case of the famil£ re l_atipns, a case. in its
direct influence on human happiness, more _mportant than all others taken
together. The almost despotic.... power of husbands over wives needs not be
enlarged upon fierc, because nothing more is needed for the complete re-
moval of the evil, than that wives should have the same rights, and should
receive the protection of law in the same manner, as all other persons: and
because, on this subject, the defenders of established injustice do not avail
themselves of the plea of liberty, but stand forth openly as the champions of
power. It is in the case of children, that misapplied notions of liberty are a
real obstacle to the fulfilment by the State of its duties. One would almost
think that a man's children were supposed to be literally, and not metaphori-
call,,', a part ot himself, so jealous is opinion of the smallest interference of
law with his absolute and exclusive control over them: more jealous than of
almost an)' interference with his own freedom of action: so much less do the
generality of mankind value liberty than power. Consider. for example, the
case of education. Is it not almost a self-evident axiom, that the State should
require and compel the education, up to a certain standard, of every human
being who is born its cinzen? Yet who is there that is not afraid to recognise
and assert this truth'? Hardly an} one indeed will deny that it is one of the
most sacred duties of the parents (or, as law and usage now stand, the
e-e591,592 another

302 ESSAYSON POLITICS AND SOCIETY
father), after summoning a human being into the world, to give to that being
an education fitting him to perform his part well in life towards others and
towards himself. But while this is unanimously declared to be the father's
duty, scarcely anybody, in this country, will bear to hear of obliging him to
perform it. Instead of his being required to make an)' exertion or sacrifice for
securing education to the child, it is left to his choice to accept it or not
when it is provided gratis! It still remains unrecognised, that to bring a child
into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food
for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crj_me, both
against the unfortunate offspring and agai,nst society; and that if the parent
does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge,
as far as possible, of the parent.
Were the duty of enforcing universal education once admitted, there
would be an end to the difficulties about what the State should teach, and
how it should teach, which now convert the subject into a mere battle-field
for sects and parties, causing the time and labour which should have been
spent in educating, to be wasted in quarrelling about education. If the gov-
ernment would make up its mind to require for every child a good education,
it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parentsto
obtain the education where and how the)' pleased, and content itself with
: helping to pay the school fees of the poorer rclasses! of children, and defray-
ing the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them.
The objections which are urged with reason against State education, do not
e apply to the enforcement of education by the State, but to the State's taking
upon itself to direct that education: which is a totally different thing. That
the whole or any large part of the education of the people should be in State
hands, I go as far as any one in deprecating, All that has been said of the
importance of individ-ualitv of character, and diversity in opinion_ and modes
of conduct, involves, as of the same unspeakable importance, diversity of
education. A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding
people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts
them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government,
whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of
the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it estab-
lishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over
the body. An education established and controlled by the State should onh,
exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on
for the purpose of example and stimulus, to ke_p" [he others up to a certain
standard of excellence. Unless, indeed, when society in general is in so back-
ward a state that it could not or would not provide for itself any proper in-
stitutions of education, unless the government undertook the task: then,
Y-t5Ol class

ON LIBERTY 303
indeed, the government may, as the less of two great evils, take upon itself
the business of schools and universities, as it may that of joint stock com-
panies, when private enterprise, in a shape fitted for undertaking great works
of industry, does not exist in the country. But in general, if the country con-
tains a sufficient number of persons qualified to provide education under
government auspices, the same persons would be able and willing to give an
equally good education on the voluntary principle, under the assurance of
remuneration afforded by a law rendering education compulsory, combined
with State aid to those unable to defray the expense.
The instrument for enforcing the law could be no other than public ex-
aminations, extending to all children, and beginning at an early age. An _ - _""
age might be fixed at which every child must be examined, to ascertain if he
(or she) is able to read. If a child proves unable, the father, unless he has
some sufficient ground of excuse, might be subjected to a moderate fine, to be
worked out, if necessary, bv his labour, and the child might be put to school -"
at his expense. Once in ever}, }'ear the examination should be renewed, with
a gradually extending range of subjects, so as to make the universal acquisi-
tion, and what is more, retention, of a certain minimum of general knowl-
edge, virtually compulsory. Beyond that minimum, there should be volun-
tary examinations on all subjects, at which all who come up to a certain
standard of proficiency might claim a certificate. To prevent the State from
exercising, through these arrangements, an improper influence over opinion,
the knowledge required for passing an examination (beyond the merely in-
strumental parts of knowledge, such as languages and their use ) should, even
in the higher eclassesz of examinations, be confined to facts and positive
science exclusively The exa-m-_mStions c!n relitfion, politics, or other dis-
puted topics, should not turn on the truth or falsehood of opinions, but on
the matter of fact that such and such an opinion is held, on such grounds, by
such authors, or schools, or churches. Under this system, the rising genera-
tion would be no worse off in regard to all disputed truths, than they are at
present: the}' would be brought up either churchmen or dissenters as they
now arc, the hStateh merelyS-a-kqri_dffri: t-lqatthe('should be instructed church-
men, or instructed dissenters. There would be nothing to hinder them from
being taught religion, if thmr parents chose, at the same schools where they
were taught other things. All attempts bx the 'State' to bias the conclusions
of its citizens on disputed subjects, are evil: but it may ver} properly offer
to ascertain and certify that a person possesses the knowledge, requisite to
make his conclusions, on any" given subject, worth attending to. A student
of philosophy would be the better for being able to stand an examination
_e-g591,592 class
h-h591,592 state
1-1591,592 state

both in Locke and in Kant, whichever of the two he takes up with, or even if
with neither: and there is no reasonable objectio n to examining an atheist in
the evidences of Christianity, provided he is not required to profess a belief
in them. The examinations, however, in the higher branches of knowledge
sllould, I conceive, be entirely voluntary. It would be giving too dangerous a
power to governments, were the\, allowed to exclude anv one from profes-
sions, even from the profession of teacher, for alleged deficiency of qualifi-
cations: and I think, with Wilhelm von Humboldt,t*l that degrees, or other
public certificates of scientific or professional acquirements, should be given
to all who present themselves for examination, and stand the test: but that
such certificates should confer no advantage over competitors, other than
the weight which mav be attached to their testimony by public opinion.
It is not in the matter of education only, that misp!aced notions of liberty
prevent moral obligations on the part of parents from being recognised, and
legal obligations from being imposed, where there are the strongest _ounds
for the former always, and in many cases for the latter also. The fact itself,
of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible
actions in the range of human life. To undertake this responsibility--to
bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing--unless the being on
: whom it is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desir-
able existence, is a crime against that being. And in a country either over-
peopled, or threatened with being so, to produce children, beyond a very
small number, with the effect of reducing the reward of labour by their com-
petition, is a serious offence against all who live by the remuneration of their
labour. The laws which, in many countries on the Continent, forbid marriage
unless the parties can show that they have the means of supporting a family,
do not exceed the legitimate powers of the JStatei: and whether such laws be
expedient or not (a question mainly dependent on local circumstances and
feelin,,s)_ . they are not objectionable as violations of liberty. Such laws are in-
terferences of the kStatek to prohibit a mischievous act--an act injurious to
others, which ought - to be a subject of reprobation, and social stigma, even
when it is not deemed expedient to superadd legal punisfiment. Yet t_ cur-
rent ideas of liberty, which bend so easHv to real infringements of the free-
dom of the individual in things which concern only himself, would repel the
attempt to put any restraint upon his inclinations when the consequence of
their indulgence is a life or lives of wretchedness and depravity to the off-
spring, with manifold evils to those sufficiently within reach to be in an,,, way
affected by their actions. When we compare the strange respect of mankind
for liberty, with their strange want of respect for it, we might imagine that a
[*See The Sphere and Duties o/Government, p. 123.]
t-1591,592 state
k-k591,592 state

ON LIBERTY 305
man had an indispensable right to do harm to others, and no right at all to

please himself without giving pain to any one.
I have reserved for the last place a large class of questions respecting the
limits of government interference, which, though closely connected with the
subject of this Essay, do not, in strictness, belong to it. These are cases in
which the reasons against interference do not turn upon the principle of
liberty: the question is not about restraining the actions of individuals, but
about helping them: it is asked whether the g,o_vernment should do. or cause
to be done, something for their benefit, instead of leaving it to be done by
themselves, individually, or in voluntary combination.
The objections to goyernment in_grference, when it is not such as to involve
infringement of liberty, may be of three kind_.
The first is, when the thing to be done is likely to.be bett_r done by indi-
viduals t_an bv the government. Speaking generally, there is no one so fit to
conduct any business, or to determine how or by whom it shall be conducted.
as those who are personally interested in it. This principle condemn_ the in-
terferences, once so common, of the legislature, or the officers of govern-
ment, with the ordinary processes of industry. But this part of the subject
has been sufficiently enlarged upon by political economists, and is not par-
ticularlv related to the principles of this Essay.
The second objection is more nearly allied to our subject. In many caseq.
though individuals may not do the particular thing so well. on the average.
as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be
done bx them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental
education--a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their
judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledgc of the subjects with which
the,, are thus left to deal. This is a principal, though not the sole. recommen-
dation of jury trial (in cases not political ) : of free and popular local and
municipal institutions: of the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enter-
prises by voluntarx associations. These are not questions of liberty, and are
connected with that subject only by remote tendencies: but thex are ques-
tions of development. It belongs to a different occasion from the present to
dwell on these things as parts of national education; as being, in truth, the
peculiar training of a citizen, the practical part of the political education of a
free people, /ak]ng them out of the narrow circle of personal and family
selfishness, and accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests,
the management of joint concerns habituating them to act from public or
semi-public motives, and guide their conduct by aims which unite instead of
isolating them from one another. Without these habits and powers, a free
constitution can neither be worked nor preserved: as is exemplified by the
too-often transitory nature of political freedom in countries where it does
not rest upon a sutkicient basis of local liberties. The management of purel}

local business by the localities, and of the _eat enterprises of industry by

the union of those who voluntarily supply the pecuniary means, is further
recommended by all the advantages which have been set forth in this Essay,
as belonging to individuality, of development, and diversity of modes of
action. Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals
and vo!untary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments,
and endless diversity of experience. What the State can usefully do, is to
make itself a central depositor},, and active circulator and diffuser, of the ex-
perience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experi-
mentalist to benefit bv the experiments of others: instead of tolerating no
experiments but its own.
The third, and most cogent reason for restricting the interference of gov-
crnmen{,'is the great e_il_ of addin_o unnecessarily to its power. Every func-
tion superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its in-
fluence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more
and more. the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the
government, or of some part}' which aims at becoming the government. If
the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock
companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them
branches of the government" if. in addition, the municipal corporations and
local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of
the central administration: if the employds of all these different enterprises
were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government
for ever,,' rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution
of the legislature would make this or an,,' other country free otherwise than
in namc. And the evil would be ueater, the more efficiently and scientifically
the administrative machinery was constructed--the more skilful the arrange-
ments for obtaimng the best qualified hands and heads with which to work it.
In England it has of late been proposed that all the members of the civil
service of government should be selected bv competitive examination, to
obtain for those employments the most intelligent and instructed persons
procurable: and much has been said and written for and against this pro-
posalJ*l One of the arguments most insisted on by' its opponents, is that the
occupation of a permanent official servant of the State does not hold out
sufficient prospects of emolument and importance to attract the highest
talents, which will always be able to find a more inviting career in the pro-
fessions, or in the service of companies and other public bodies. One would
not have been surprised if this argmment had been used by the friends of the
proposition, as an answer to its principal difficulty. Coming from the oppon-
ents it is strange enough. What is urged as an objection is the safety-valve
of the proposed svstem. If indeed all the high talent of the country' could be
[*See. e.g., J. S. Mill, "'Reform of the Civil Service.'" pp. 205-1 l above.]

ON LIBERTY 307
drawn into the service of the government, a proposal tending to bring about
that result might well inspire uneasiness. If every part of the business of
society which required organized concert, or large and comprehensive views,
were in the hands of the government, and if government offices were uni-
versally filled b,, the ablest men, all the enlarged culture and practised in-
telligence in the country, except the purely speculative, would be concen-
trated in a numerous bureaucr_.cy, to whom alone the rest of the com-
munity would look for all things: the multitude for direction and dictation
in all they had to do: the able and aspiring for personal advancement. To be
admitted into the ranks of this bureaucracy, and when admitted, to rise
therein, would be the sole objects of ambition. Under this r6gime, not only is
the outside public ill-qualified, for want of practical experience, to criticize
or check the mode of operation of the bureaucracy, but even if the accidents
of despotic or the natural working of popular institutions occasionally raise
to the summit a ruler or rulers of reforming inclinations, no reform can be
effected which is contrary to the interest of the bureaucracy. Such is the
melancholy condition of the Russian empire, as i shown in the accounts of
those who have had sufficient opportunity of observation. The Czar himself
is powerless against the bureaucratic body: he can send an',, one of them
to Siberia, but he cannot govern without them, or against their will. On every
decree of his they have a tacit veto, by merely refraining from carrying it into
effect. In countries of more advanced civilization and of a more insurrec-
tionary spirit, the public, accustomed to expect everything to be done for
them by the State. or at least to do nothing for themselves without asking
from the State not only leave to do it, but even how it is to be done. naturally
hold the State responsible for all evil which befals them. and when the evil
exceeds their amount of patience, they rise against the government and make
what is called a revolution: whereupon somebody else, with or without
legitimate authority from the nation, vaults into the seat, issues his orders to
the bureaucracy, and everything goes on much as it did before: the bureau-
cracy being unchanged, and nobod_ else being capable of taking their place.
A very different spectacle is exhibited among a people accustomed to
transact their own business. In France. a large part of the people having been
engaged in military service, many of whom have held at least the rank of
non-commissioned officers, there are in ever_ popular resurrection several
persons competent to take the lead, and improvise some tolerable plan of
action. What the French are in military affairs, the Americans are in every
kind of civil business: let them be left without a government, ever\, body of
Americans is able to improvise one, and to carry on that or any other public
business with a sufficient amount of intelligence, order, and decision. This is
what every free people ought to be: and a people capable of this is certain to
/591,592 is

be free: it will never let itself be enslaved bv anv man or body of men because
these are able to seize and pull the reins of the central administration. No
bureaucracy can hope to make such a people as this do or undergo anything
that the',' do not like. But where everything is done through the bureaucracy,
nothing to which the bureaucracx is really adverse can be done at all. Tile
constitution of such countries is an organization of the experience and prac-
tical ability of the nation, into a disciplined body for the purpose of govern-
ing the rest: and the more perfect that organization is in itself, the more suc-
cessful in drawing to itself and educating for itself the persons of greatest
capacity from all ranks of the community, the more complete is the bond-
a,,e of all, the members of the bureaucracy included, For the eovernorq are
as much the slaves of their organization and discipline, as the governed are of
the governors. A Chinese mandarin is as much the tool and creature of a
despotism as the humblest cultivator. An individual Jesuit is to the utmost
degree of abasement the slave of his order, though the order itself exists for
the collective power and importance of its members.
It is not, also, to be forgotten, that the absorption of all the principal ability
of the country into the governing bod\ is fatal, sooner or later, to the mental
activity and progressiveness of the body itself. Banded together as the,, are--
workmg a system which, like all systems, necessarily proceeds in a great
measure by fixed rules--the official body are under the constant temptation
of sinking into indolent routine, or, if they now and then desert that mill-
horse round, of rushing into some half-examined crudity which has struck
the fancy of some leading member of the corps: and the sole check to these
closely allied, though seemingly opposite, tendencies, the only stimulus which
can keep the ability of the body itself up to a high standard, is hability to the
' watchful criticism of equal ability outside the body. It is indispensable.
therefore, that the means should exist, independently of the government, of
forming such ability, 5-fictTfil:nisl_in-git with the opportunities and experience
necessary for a correct judgment of great practical affairs. If we would
possess permanently a skilful and efficient hod}' of functionaries--above all,
a body able to originate and willing to adopt improvements: if we would not
have our bureaucracy degenerate into a pedantocracy, this body must not
engros_s _! th_e_gccupations which form and cultivate the faculties required
for the _overnment of mankind.
To determine the point at which evils, so formidable to human freedom
and advancement, begin, or rather at which they begin to predominate over
the benefits attending the collective application of the force of society', under
its recognised chiefs, for the removal of the obstacles which stand in the
way of its well-being: to secure as much of the advantages of centralized
power and intelligence, as can be had without turning into governmental
channels too great a proportion of the general activity--is one of the most

ON LIBERTY 309
difficult and complicated questions in the art of government. It is, in a great

measure, a question of detail, in which many and various considerations
must be kept in view, and no absolute rule can be laid down. But I believe
that the practical principle in which safety resides, the ideal to be kept in
view, the standard by which to test all arrangements intended for overcom-
in_ the difficulty, may be conveyed in these words" the greatest dissemination
of power consistent with efficiency: but the greates[ possible centralization
of information, and diffusion of it from the centre. Thus, in municipal ad-
ministration, there would be, as in the New England States, a very minute
division among separate officers, chosen by the localities, of all business
which is not better left to the persons directly interested: but besides this.
there would be, in each department of local affairs, a central superinten-
dence, forming a branch of the general government. The organ of this
superintendence would concentrate, as in a focus, the variety of informa-
tion and experience derived from the conduct of that branch of public busi-
ness in all the localities, from everything analogous which iq done in foreign
countries, and from the general principles of political science. This central
or_an_ should have a ri,_htvto kno_ all that is done, and its specml dut\ should
be that of making the knowledge acquired in one place available for others.
Emancipated from the petty prejudices and narrow views of a locality by its
elevated position and comprehensive sphere of observation, its advice _ ould
naturally carry much authorit;: but it_ actual power, as a permanent insti-
tution, should, I conceive, be limited to compelling the local officers to obey
the laws laid dox_n for their guidance. In all things not provided for b\
general rules, those officer_ should be left to their own judgment, under
responsibility to their constituents. For the violation of rules, the_ should be
responsible to lax_. and the rules themselves should be laid dox_n b\ the
lcgistatt, re: the central administrative authorit\ onlx _atching over their
execution, and if the\ were not properly carried into effect, appealing,
according to the nature of the ca,,e, to the "'tribunals ''_to enforce the law. or
to the constltuencms to dlsmis,, the functionaries \_ho had not executed it
according to its spirit. Such. in its general conception, is the central super-
intendence which the Poor Law Board i,, mtcnded to exercise over the
administrators of the Poor Rate throughout the country. Whatever powers
the Board exercises beyond this hin_t, were right and necessarx in that
peculiar case. for the cure of rooted habit_ of maladministration in matters
deeply affecting not the localities mcreh, but the whole commumtx: since
no localit,, has a moral right to make itself bx m_smanagement a nest of
pauperism, necessaril\ overflowing into other iocalities, and impairing the
moral and physical condition of the whole labouring community. The powers
of administrative coercion and subordinate legi.,lation possessed bx the
m-m591.S92 tribunal

31 0 ESSAYSON POLITICSANDSOCIETY
Poor Law Board (but which, owing to the state of opinion on the subject,
are very scantily exercised by them), though perfectly justifiable in a case
of first-rate national interest, would be wholly out of place in the super-
intendence of interests purely local. But a central organ of information and
instruction for all the localities, would be equally valuable in all departments
of administration. A government cannot have too much of the kind of activity
which does not impede, but aids and stimulates, individual exertion and
development. The mischief begins when, instead of calling forth the activity
and powers of individuals and bodies, it substitutes its own activit 5 for
theirs: when, instead of informing, advising, and, upon occasion, denouncing,
it makes them work in fetters, or bids them stand aside and does their work
instead of them. The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the
individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their
mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or
of that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business: a
State which dwarfs its men, in order that thex may be more docile instru-
ments 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.

The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill 1: The question can be raised
CHAPTER 1
The question can be raised
The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I can the many factors giving intensity and deep roots to the feelings
reasons for following proposition: connected with our present subject—making them more
The principle that regulates the existing social rela- intense and deeper-rooted than the feelings that gather pro-
tions between the two sexes—the legal subordination tectively around •other old institutions and customs—that
of one sex to the other—is wrong itself, and is now one we shouldn’t be surprised to find those feelings to be less
of the chief obstacles to human improvement; and •it undermined and loosened than any of the •others by the
ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality progress of the great modern spiritual and social transition;
that doesn’t allow any power or privilege on one side nor should we suppose that the barbarisms to which men
or disability on the other. cling longest must be less barbaric than the ones they shake
·For convenience I’ll call this ‘the Opinion’·. I have accepted off earlier.
the Opinion from the earliest time when I had any views on Those who attack an almost universal opinion are faced
social political matters; and instead of being weakened or with difficulties all the way. They have to be very lucky and
modified ·through the years· it has grown steadily stronger unusually able if they are to get a hearing at all. It is harder
·in my mind· through reflection and my experience of life. for them to obtain a •trial than it is for any other litigants to
The task I am undertaking here will be hard work. . . . But obtain a •verdict. And if they do get a hearing, it subjects
don’t think that the difficulty must come from the scarcity them to a set of logical requirements totally different from
or obscurity of solid reasons for the Opinion. Rather, the the ones imposed on other people. (1) In all other cases,
difficulty is one that exists whenever something is being the burden of proof is supposed to lie with the affirmative:
defended against a mass of feeling. Just because the oppos- if someone is accused of murder, it’s up to his accusers to
ing view is strongly rooted in feelings, it is ·psychologically· prove his guilt, not for him to prove his innocence. If there’s a
strengthened rather than weakened by having the weight difference of opinion about the reality of an alleged historical
of argument go against it. If it were accepted as a result of event that doesn’t involve strong feelings in anyone—the
argument, counter-arguments might shake the solidity of the Siege of Troy, for example—those who say that it did happen
conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, ·arguments are expected to produce their proofs before the other side
against it don’t shake it at all·: the worse it fares in the can be required to say anything; and the most they are ever
clash of arguments, the more convinced its adherents are required to do is to show that the evidence produced by their
that their feeling must have some deeper basis that the opponents is of no value. (2) Again, in practical matters
arguments don’t reach! And while the feeling remains, it [i.e. in moral, social and political matters] the burden of proof is
keeps erecting fresh walls of argument to repair the gaps supposed to be with those who are against liberty—those
that have been made in the old ones. And there are so who contend for. . . .•any limitation of the general freedom
1
of human action or •anything that denies to one person pro-discrimination· side, I’ll be called upon for invincible pos-
or kind of person any privilege or advantage that others itive arguments to prove a negative. And even if I could leave
have. The a priori presumption is in favour of freedom and the opposite party with a host of unanswered arguments
impartiality. It is held that there should be no restraint against them, and not a single unrefuted argument on their
except what is required by the general good, and that the side, this wouldn’t be regarded as much of an achievement;
law should. . . .treat everyone alike except where dissimilarity because a cause supported by universal usage and by such
of treatment is required by positive reasons of justice or of a great weight of popular sentiment is supposed to have a
policy. [To say that there is a ‘presumption’ in favour of a practice is presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction that
to say that the practice should be regarded as justifiable unless a case an appeal to reason can produce in intellects other than
is made against its being so; the stronger the presumption, the stronger those of a high class. [In Mill’s day a ‘sentiment’ could be a feeling,
the counter-case has to be.] or a belief, or a practical attitude. In this version the word will be left
But none of these rules of evidence will be allowed to unaltered. Decide for yourself what he means by each occurrence of it.]
benefit those who maintain the Opinion that I shall defend. I am not complaining about these difficulties. It would
It is useless for me to say: be useless to do so, because they are inevitable when one
Those who maintain that men have a right to has to argue through •people’s understandings against the
command and women an obligation obey, or that men hostility of •their feelings and practical tendencies. I am up
are fit for government and women unfit, are on the against
affirmative side of the question, and are bound to practical principles in which people have been born
show positive evidence for their position or accept and bred, and which are the basis of much existing
that it has been defeated. order of the world;
It is equally unavailing for me to say: I can hardly expect them to
Those who deny to women any freedom or privilege surrender at the first argumentative attack that they
that is rightly allowed to men are opposing freedom aren’t capable of logically resisting.
and recommending partiality, so there is a double That would require them to rely on their own power of
presumption against them; and they should be held estimating arguments, and that can’t happen until the
to the strictest standards of proof, with the judgment understandings of the majority of mankind are much better
going against them unless they argue successfully developed than they ever have been. So I am quarreling with
enough to exclude all doubt. my opponents not for having •too little faith in argument but
These would be regarded as good pleas in any ordinary for having •too much faith in custom and the general feeling.
case—but not in this one! Before I could hope to make
any impression ·on the other side· I would be expected not Reason versus ‘instinct’
only to answer everything ever said by the opposition, but
to imagine everything that could be said by them. . . . And The eighteenth century is supposed to have regarded the
besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative ·anti-liberty reasoning elements in human nature as infallible; in reaction
2
against that, the nineteenth century attributes infallibility the two, and other such mixed and divided structures
to the unreasoning elements. We have replaced the god-like of government; and
status of •Reason by a god-like status for •Instinct; and we •people’s experience of those convinced them that the
label as ‘instinct’ anything that we find in ourselves and can’t best arrangement for producing the happiness and
find any rational foundation for. This idolatry is infinitely well-being of both women and men was the one in
more degrading than the other; of all the false worships of the which women are wholly under the rule of men, having
present day, this one is the worst and is the main support of no share at all in public concerns, and each in private
all the others. It probably won’t be dislodged until a sound being legally obliged to obey the man with whom she
psychology lays bare the real root of much that people now has associated her destiny
bow down to as ‘intended by Nature’ and ‘commanded by —if that were the case (I repeat), that would provide some
God’. As regards the present question, I shall accept. . . .that evidence that when the subjection of women was first
established custom and general feelings should be regarded adopted it was the best (though even then the social facts
as conclusive against me, unless this custom and feeling that recommended it may have since then ceased to be facts).
can be shown to have •owed their existence down through But the state of the case is in every respect the reverse of this.
the ages to causes other than their soundness, and to have (1) The opinion in favour of the present system. . . .rests on
•derived their power from the worse rather than the better theory only, for no other system has been tried; so that
parts of human nature. Let the judgment go against me experience, as contrasted with theory, can’t be claimed
unless I can show that the judge ·in this case· has been to have pronounced any verdict. (2) The adoption of this
tampered with! This is a smaller concession than you system of inequality never was the result of deliberation, or
might think, because proving this—·i.e. proving that there’s forethought, or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of
something bad and wrong about the causes of the feelings what would be best for humanity or the good order of society.
that oppose me·—is by far the easiest part of my task. It arose simply from the fact that from the dawn of human
If a practice is very general, this sometimes creates a society every woman was in a state of bondage to some
strong presumption that it is—or at any rate was—conducive man, because •she was of value to him and •she had less
to praiseworthy ends. This is the case when the practice muscular strength than he did. Laws and political systems
was first started (or later kept up) as a means to such ends, always begin by recognising the relations they find already
and was based on experience of how the ends could be most existing between individuals, converting a mere physical fact
effectively be achieved. If the following were the case— into a legal right, giving it the sanction of society; their main
•When the authority of men over women was first aim is to replace
established, that was the result of conscientiously the assertion and protection of these rights by irregu-
comparing different ways of structuring the govern- lar and lawless conflict of physical strength
ment of society; by
•various other types of social organisation were tried— the assertion and protection of these same rights by
the government of women over men, equality between public and organised means.
3
In this way, those who had already been compelled to obey the improvement of mankind’s moral sentiments [see note
became legally bound to obey. Slavery, at first a mere on page 2].We now live—i.e. one or two of the world’s most
affair of force between the master and the slave, came to advanced nations now live—in a state in which the law of the
be governed by rules, and to be a matter of agreement strongest seems to be entirely abandoned as the regulating
among the masters: binding themselves to one another principle of the world’s affairs: nobody proclaims it, and
for common protection, the masters guaranteed by their in most contexts nobody is permitted to practise it. When
collective strength the private possessions of each, including anyone succeeds in doing so, he disguises it through the
his slaves. In early times, most males were slaves, as well as pretence that he has some general social interest on his
all females. And many centuries passed—some of them times side. This being the apparent state of things, people flatter
of high cultivation—before any thinker was bold enough to themselves that the rule of mere force is ended; that the
ask ‘Is it right? Is it absolutely socially necessary?’ about law of the strongest can’t be the reason for the existence
either of these slaveries. Gradually such thinkers did arise; of anything that has remained in full operation down to
and. . . .at last the slavery of the male sex has been abolished the present time. They think: ‘However any of our present
in all the countries of Christian Europe; and. . . .the slavery institutions may have •begun, no institution can have been
of the female sex has been gradually changed into a milder •preserved into this period of advanced civilisation except
form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists at by a well-grounded feeling that it fits human nature and is
present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start conducive to the general good.’ They don’t understand
from considerations of justice and social expediency—it is •the great vitality and durability of institutions that
the primitive state of slavery lasting on through a series place right on the side of might;
of weakenings brought about by the same causes that •how intensely they are clung to;
have softened all kinds of conduct and brought all human •how the good as well as the bad propensities and
relations more under the control of justice and the influence sentiments of those who have power in their hands
of humanity. The subjection of women hasn’t lost the taint become identified with retaining it;
of its brutal origin. So the mere fact of its existence doesn’t •how slowly these bad institutions give way, one at a
create any presumption in its favour. Anyone who wants time, the weakest first. beginning with those that are
there to be a presumption in its favour had better try to get least interwoven with the daily habits of life; and
it from the fact that the subjection of women has survived, •how very rarely those who have obtained legal power
while many products of the same odious source have been because they first had physical power have ever lost
done away with. And that fact is what makes the statement their hold of it until the physical power had passed
‘The inequality of rights between men and women has no over to the other side.
other source than the law of the strongest’ sound strange to That shifting of the physical force didn’t happen in the case of
ordinary ears. women; and this fact, combined with all the special features
That this statement should sound like a paradox is in of this particular case, made it certain from the outset that
some respects creditable to the progress of civilisation and this branch of the system of right founded on might would be
4
the very last to disappear (though its most atrocious features human beings could inflict. [A tiny change came about
were softened earlier than several of the others). . . . So it when masters found it convenient to make promises to their
isn’t surprising that the subjection of women, as long as it slaves, Mill says, but such promises were lightly regarded
doesn’t proclaim its own origin and there is no discussion and not very effective. Then:] The ancient republics provided
bringing to light its true character, isn’t felt to jar with the first examples of a portion of human relations fenced
modern civilisation, any more than domestic slavery among around and governed by something other than the law of
the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free force; that is because they were from the outset based on
people. some kind of agreement, or at any rate were created by a
union of persons with about the same amount of power. The
original •law of force remained in full operation between them
Modern changes of attitude
and their slaves, and also (except when limited by explicit
The truth is that people of the present and the last two or agreements) between a commonwealth and its subjects or
three generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive other independent commonwealths; but still •its banishment
condition of humanity. The only ones who can form any even from such a narrow domain as that of relations among
mental picture of what society was like in ancient times are the powerful started the regeneration of human nature. It did
the few who have •studied history or have •spent much time this by giving birth to sentiments of which experience soon
in parts of the world occupied by the living representatives demonstrated the immense value, even for material interests,
of ages long past. People don’t now realize how entirely, in and which from then on only needed to be enlarged, not
former ages, the •law of superior strength was the •rule created. Although slaves were not part of the commonwealth,
of life, and how publicly and openly it was proclaimed. it was in the free states [Mill’s phrase] that slaves were first felt
(·Note the adverbs I have chosen·. I don’t say ‘cynically’ or to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe,
‘shamelessly’, because those words imply a feeling that there the first—except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an
was something in it to be ashamed of, and in those earlier exception—who taught as a part of morality that men had
ages only a philosopher or a saint could have room in his moral obligations to their slaves. After Christianity became
mind for any such notion.) History gives a cruel experience ascendant, no-one could ever again have been a stranger
of human nature, in showing •that the regard due to the life, to this belief, in theory; and after the rise of the Catholic
possessions, and entire earthly happiness of any category of Church there were always people who stood up for it. Yet
people was measured precisely by what they had the power enforcing it was the hardest task that Christianity ever had
of enforcing; and •that all who in any way resisted authorities to perform. For more than a thousand years the Church
that had power, however dreadful might be the provocation, kept up the contest, with hardly any perceptible success. It
were opposed not only by the law of force but also by all wasn’t for lack of power over men’s minds. The Church’s
other laws and all the notions of social duty; and were power was prodigious. It could make kings and nobles hand
regarded by those whom they resisted as being guilty. . . .of over their most valued possessions to enrich the Church. It
the worst of all crimes, deserving the cruellest punishments could make thousands of people. . . .shut themselves up in
5
convents to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting, and living; and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America, three or four
prayer. It could send hundreds of thousands across land and years ago, not only did slavery exist but the slave-trade and
sea, Europe and Asia, to give their lives for the deliverance of the breeding of slaves expressly for that trade was a general
the Holy Sepulchre [this is a reference to the Crusades]. . . . All this practice between slave states. Yet not only was there more
it did; but it couldn’t make men fight less with one another, sentiment [see note on page 2] against it but (in England at
or be less cruel in their tyranny over the serfs and (when least) less feeling or interest in favour of it than of any other
they could) over ordinary citizens. . . . Only by the growing of the customary abuses of force; because the motive for
power of kings was an end put to fighting (except between it was nakedly commercial, those who profited by it were
kings or competitors for kingship); only by the growth of a a very small minority, and the natural feeling of all those
wealthy and warlike bourgeoisie in the fortified towns, and of who weren’t personally getting anything from it was absolute
a peasant infantry that proved more powerful in battle than loathing. . . . Then consider the long duration of absolute
undisciplined knights on horseback, were some limits set to monarchy, ·i.e. monarchy with no legal controls or limits on
the insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and how the monarch can behave or what laws he can pass·. [Mill
peasantry. •This tyranny was persisted in until long after in his next sentence equates that with ‘military despotism’, presumably
the oppressed had acquired enough power to be able, often, on the grounds that no monarch could have absolute powers if he didn’t
to get conspicuous revenge; and on the Continent much of •it In England at present almost
have control of the country’s army.]
continued up to the time of the French Revolution, though in everyone sees military despotism as a case of the law of
England the earlier and better organisation of the democratic force, having no origin or justification but that. Yet in all the
classes put an end to it sooner, by establishing equal laws other great nations of Europe it still exists, or ceased to exist
and free national institutions. only recently; and even now it is favoured by many people,
especially but not exclusively by people with high social
status and importance. [Mill’s point here, he explains, is
Slavery and absolute monarchy
that absolute monarchy has proved to be remarkably durable
. . . .People mostly don’t remember or bear in mind how despite two features that might be expected to weaken it:
institutions and customs that never had any basis but the (1) Plenty of countries don’t have it. And at most times
law of force last on into ages and states of general opinion in history there have been spectacularly prosperous
that would never have permitted them to be established. and successful countries that were governed in other
Less than forty years ago Englishmen could still by law hold ways.
human beings in bondage as saleable property; within the (2) The immediate beneficiary of an absolute monarchy is
present century they could kidnap them and work them the monarch, that one person; for everyone else this
literally to death. This absolutely extreme case of the law of system is ‘naturally and necessarily humiliating’.
force, condemned ·even· by those who can tolerate almost In contrast with this, the system of the subjection of women
every other form of arbitrary power. . . .was the law of civilised (1) is universal; there are no vivid examples of prosperous
and Christian England within the memory of persons now rejections of it; and
6
(2) is immediately gratifying to half of the human the one that is most deeply rooted had yet been perceptibly
race, namely the male half: ‘The clodhopper shaken anywhere. . . .
exercises. . . .his share of the power equally with the
highest nobleman’.
Natural?
And it has a third feature that favours its survival over
absolute monarchy, namely: Some will object that it’s not fair to compare •the government
(3) Anyone who is empowered by the subjection of women of the male sex with •the other forms of unjust power that
gets power over the person who is closest to him, I have discussed, because it is natural while the others are
and. . . ] arbitrary and brought about by mere usurpation. But was
. . . everyone who desires power desires it most over those there ever any domination that didn’t appear natural to those
who are nearest to him, with whom his life is passed, with who possessed it? There was a time when the division of
whom he has most concerns in common and in whom any mankind into a small class of masters and a large class
independence of his authority is oftenest likely to interfere of slaves appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to
with his individual preferences. . . . Also, the possessors of be the only natural condition of the human race! Aristotle,
the power provided by the subjection of women are better with his great intellect and his great contributions to the
placed than any absolute monarch to prevent any uprising progress of human thought, held this opinion without doubt
against the system. Every one of the subjects lives under or misgiving; and his reason for it was the reason usually
the very eye. . . .of one of the masters, in closer intimacy with given for the dominion of men over women, namely that there
him than with any of her fellow-subjects; with no means are different natures among mankind, free natures and slave
of combining against him, no power of even locally over- natures; that the Greeks were of a free nature, the barbarian
mastering him; and with the strongest motives for seeking races of Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. [And, Mill
his favour and avoiding giving him offence. In struggles for continues, the same was said by the slave-owners of the
political emancipation, we all know how often its champions southern United States.] Again, the theorists of absolute
are bought off by bribes, or daunted by terrors. In the monarchy have always claimed it to be the only natural form
case of women, each individual of the subject-class is in a of government, descending ultimately from the authority of a
permanent state of bribery and intimidation combined. . . . father over his family,. . . .which is older and more basic than
If ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had society itself and, they contend, the most natural authority
its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are kept of all. Indeed the law of force itself has always seemed the
down by it, this has. I haven’t yet shown that it is a wrong most natural of all grounds for the exercise of authority—has
system: but anyone who can think about this must see that seemed so, I mean, to those who haven’t been able to find any
even if it is wrong it was certain to outlast all other forms other basis ·for their favoured form of tyranny·. Conquering
of unjust authority. And when some of the grossest of the races hold it to be Nature’s own dictate that the feebler
other forms still exist in many civilised countries, and have and more unwarlike races should submit to the braver and
only recently been got rid of in others, it would be strange if more manly, or, to put it more bluntly, that the conquered
7
should obey the conquerors. The smallest acquaintance with suggested to Plato, among many other of his doctrines, that
human life in the middle ages shows •how supremely natural of the social and political equality of the two sexes.
the dominion of the feudal nobility over men of low condition
appeared to the nobility themselves, and •how unnatural the
Complaints
conception seemed, of a person of the inferior class claiming
equality with them or exercising authority over them. And it It will be said that •the rule of men over women differs from
seemed almost as natural to the class held in subjection: the all these others in not being a rule a rule of force, •that it
emancipated serfs and citizenry, even in their most vigorous is accepted voluntarily, •that women don’t complain, and
struggles, never claimed a share of authority; they only are consenting parties to it. Well, the first point to make is
demanded some limitation to the power of tyrannising over that a great number of women do not accept it. Ever since
them. So true is it that ‘unnatural’ generally means only there have been women able to make their sentiments known
‘uncustomary’, and that whatever is usual appears natural. by their writings (the only form of going-public that society
The subjection of women to men is a universal custom, so permits to them), increasingly many of them have protested
any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural!. . . . against their present social condition; and recently many
When people in distant parts of the world first learn anything thousands of them, headed by the most eminent women
about England, they are astonished to be told that England known to the public, petitioned Parliament to allow them
is under a queen; that seems to them so unnatural as to the vote. The claim of women to be educated as well and as
be almost incredible. To Englishmen it doesn’t seem at all broadly as men as men is urged with growing intensity and
unnatural, because they are used to it; but they do feel with a great prospect of success; while the demand for their
it unnatural that women should be soldiers or members admission into professions and occupations that have so far
of parliament. In the feudal ages, on the other hand, war been closed to them becomes more urgent every year. [Mill
and politics were not thought unnatural to women, because speaks of movements along these lines in the USA and in
they were not unusual; it seemed natural that women of the some European countries. Then:] We can’t possibly know
privileged classes should be of manly character, inferior in how many more women there are who silently have such
nothing but bodily strength to their husbands and fathers. hopes, but there are plenty of signs of how many would have
The independence of women seemed rather less unnatural to them if they weren’t so strenuously taught to repress them
the Greeks than to other peoples in ancient times, because of as improper for their sex. ·It may have occurred to you that
the mythical Amazons (whom they believed to be historical), these examples concern only certain parts or aspects of the
and the partial example of the women of Sparta, who, though subjection of women, not the whole thing. Nothing much
they were •by law just as subordinate to men as the women follows from that, however·. No enslaved class ever asked for
in other Greek states, were more free •in fact; they were complete liberty at once. [The next sentence refers to a 13th-century
trained to bodily exercises in the same way as the men, rebel who during his brief time of power established a parliament that
giving ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified When Simon de
included representatives of the common people.]
for them. There can be little doubt that Spartan experience Montfort called the representatives of the common people to
8
sit for the first time in Parliament, did any of them dream connected with them, not a •forced slave but a •willing
of demanding that such an assembly. . . .should make and one, not a slave merely but a favourite. So they have
destroy ministries, and dictate to the king in affairs of State? done everything they could to enslave women’s minds. The
No such thought entered into the imagination of the most masters of all other slaves get obedience through fear, either
ambitious of them. The nobility were already claiming such of themselves or of some religious punishment. The masters
powers; the common people claimed only to be exempt from of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they
arbitrary taxation and from the gross individual oppression turned the whole force of education to get what they wanted.
of the king’s officers. It is a political law of nature that those All women are brought up from their earliest years to believe
who are subjected to any power of very long standing that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that
never begin by complaining of the power itself, but only of men: not self-will and government by self-control, but
of the oppressive use of it. There’s never any shortage submission and accepting control by someone else. All the
of women who complain of ill-usage by their husbands. moralities tell them that it is their duty, and all the current
There would be infinitely more if complaints weren’t apt ideas about feelings tell them that it is their nature, to live
to provoke the husbands to repeat and increase the ill-usage. for others—to set aside their own wishes and interests and
That is what frustrates all attempts to •maintain the power have no life but in their affections. And by ‘their affections’
but •protect the woman against its abuses. In no other are meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to
case (except that of a child) is a person who has been the men with whom they are connected, or to the children
proved judicially to have suffered an injury put back into the who constitute an additional and unbreakable tie between
physical power of the culprit who inflicted it! That is why them and a man. When we put together these three things—
wives, even in the most extreme and long-drawn-out cases (1) the natural attraction between opposite sexes;
of bodily ill-usage, hardly ever dare make use of the laws (2) the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, with
that have been made for their protection; and if a woman is every privilege or pleasure that she has being either
induced to do so—in a moment of irrepressible indignation, his gift or depending entirely on his will;
or through the interference of neighbours—all she does from (3) the fact that it is only through the man that the
there on is to reveal as little as possible and to beg off her woman can seek or obtain the principal object of
tyrant from the punishment he deserves. human pursuit, namely consideration, or any objects
of social ambition;
Affection —it would be a miracle if the objective of being attractive to
men had not become the polar star of feminine education
. . . .Women are in a different position from all other subject and formation of character. And once men had acquired
classes in this: their masters require more from them than this great means of influence over the minds of women, an
actual service. Men want not only the obedience of women instinct of selfishness made them avail themselves of it to
but also their sentiments [see note on page 2]. All but the most the utmost as a means of keeping women in subjection, by
brutish of men want to have, in the woman most nearly telling them that an essential part of sexual attractiveness
9
is meekness, submissiveness, and delivering all individual some were born patricians, others plebeians; some were
will into the hands of a man. [Mill goes on to say that if born feudal nobles, others commoners and serfs. A slave or
this kind of oppression-through-feelings had been built into serf could never make himself free; his only route to freedom
other systems of servitude, they would have lasted longer, was through the will of his master. [Mill continues with this
and would now be regarded as being just as ‘natural’ as the theme: the centuries through which commoners couldn’t
subjection of women, and would be challenged only by ‘a become nobles; a noble father couldn’t disinherit his eldest
thinker here and there’.] son; a worker couldn’t be a shoemaker or tailor or carpenter
or the like unless he was born into the guild controlling
that trade or was admitted into the guild by its members;
The course of history
every activity regarded as important had to be conducted
What I have said up to here is quite enough to show that according to officially dictated rules; manufacturers were
custom, however universal it may be, doesn’t create any pre- punished for introducing new and improved methods for
sumption. . . .in favour of the arrangements that put women their business. Then:] In modern Europe, especially in
in social and political subjection to men. But I go further, the parts of it that have gone furthest in all other modern
and maintain that the course of history and the tendencies improvements, diametrically opposite doctrines now prevail.
of progressive human society create a strong presumption Law and government don’t prescribe who can and who
against this system of inequality of rights; and that if we can can’t conduct any social or industrial operation, or what
infer anything from the whole course of human improvement procedures for conducting them shall be lawful. These
up to now—the whole stream of modern tendencies—it is things are left to the free choice of individuals. Even the
that this relic of the past is out of tune with the future and laws requiring workmen to serve an apprenticeship have
must necessarily disappear. been repealed in England, on the grounds that wherever
What is the special character of the modern world—the an apprenticeship is necessary its necessity will force it
difference that chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, to happen. The old theory was that as little as possible
modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times should be left to the choice of the individual, and that as
long past? It is that human beings are no longer born to their far as was practicable his conduct should be laid down for
place in life, and chained down by an unbreakable bond to him by superior wisdom. Left to himself he was sure to go
the place they are born to, but are free to use their talents wrong. The modern conviction, based on a thousand years
and any good luck that comes their way to have the kind of experience, is that things that directly involve a person’s
of life that they find most desirable. Human society was for interests never go right except when they are left to his own
ages constituted on a very different principle. All were born discretion; and that any regulation of them by authority,
to a fixed social position, and were mostly kept in it by law except to protect the rights of others, is sure to do harm.
or debarred from any means by which they could emerge This conclusion was slowly arrived at, and not adopted until
from it. As some men are born white and others black, almost every possible application of the contrary theory had
so some were born slaves and others freemen and citizens; been made with disastrous result; but now the part of it that
10
concerns work prevails in all the most advanced countries principle is true, we ought to act as if we believed it. We do
and in most of the others that have any claim to any sort of accept that someone’s being
advancement. The thesis is not:
All processes are equally good, and all persons are born black instead of white, or
equally qualified for every task or trade; born a commoner instead of a nobleman,
but rather: shouldn’t fix his position throughout life, barring him from
Freedom of individual choice is the only thing that all the more elevated social positions and from nearly all
leads to the adoption of the best processes, and puts respectable occupations. Well, we should accept the same
each operation into the hands of those who are best thing regarding someone’s being
qualified for it. born a girl instead of a boy.
Nobody thinks it necessary to make a law that only a Let us apply this to the legal requirement that a Member of
strong-armed man shall be a blacksmith. Freedom and Parliament must be a man. Even if we accept the strongest
competition suffice to make blacksmiths strong-armed men, claims that are ever made about the superior fitness of
because others can earn more in occupations for which men for this role, the legal requirement is still wrong. If
they are more fit. In line with this doctrine, it is felt to it happens only once in a dozen years that this law excludes
be improper to adopt a general presumption that certain a woman who is fit to be an M.P., that exclusion is a real
·classes of· persons are not fit to do certain things. Everyone loss ·to society·, whereas the exclusion of thousands of unfit
now knows and admits that if some such presumptions do persons is no gain. If the electors are disposed to choose
exist, none of them are infallible. Even if a presumption unfit persons as M.P.s, there are always plenty of those to
is well grounded in a majority of cases (which it probably choose from! For any difficult and important job, there is
isn’t!), there will be a minority of exceptional cases where it always a need for more people who could do it well than are
doesn’t hold: and in those cases it is unjust to the individuals actually available, even with the most unrestricted field of
and harmful to society to put barriers in the way of their choice: and any limitation of the field of selection deprives
using their abilities for the benefit of themselves and others. society of some chances of being served by the competent,
And in the cases where the unfitness is real, the ordinary without ever saving it from the incompetent.
motives of human conduct will usually suffice to prevent the At present, in the more improved countries, the disabili-
incompetent person from making or from persisting in the ties of women are the only case but one in which laws and
attempt. institutions take persons at their birth and ordain that they
If this general principle of social and economic science is shall never in all their lives be allowed to compete for certain
not true—if individuals, perhaps with help from the opinion things. The one exception is that of royalty. [Mill says that
of those who know them, aren’t better judges of their own the status of royalty, as something one has to be born into,
capacities and vocation than the government is—then the is felt by everyone to be an exception; the case for it appeals
world should immediately abandon this principle and return to customs and traditions, which are given different weights
to the old system of regulations and disabilities. But if the in different countries; and he emphasizes that in the modern
11
world monarchs don’t really do anything significant: what in ·social· improvement has been accompanied by a step
is ostensibly the work of the monarch is done by the prime made in raising the social position of women; and this has
minister, who isn’t qualified for his role by birth, though he happened so invariably that historians and philosophers
would have been disqualified for it if he were female. Mill have been led to measure •the civilisation of a people or an
sums up:] So the disabilities to which women are subject age by •the status that it give to women. . . . This does not
from the mere fact of their birth are the only examples of of itself prove that the assimilation must go on to complete
the kind in modern legislation. In no instance except this, equality; but it surely creates some presumption that such
which takes in half the human race, are the higher social is the case.
functions closed against anyone by the sheer fact of birth
which no exertions, and no change of circumstances, can
The ‘nature’ of women
overcome. . . . [Mill uses the phrase ‘the higher social functions’ to
refer to political office (e.g. being a Member of Parliament), high positions And it’s no use saying that the nature of the two sexes fits
in the civil service, and so on. The word ‘function’ occurs very often in them for their present functions and positions. . . . Standing
chapter 3, and will be left unaltered there.] on the ground of common sense and the constitution of
The social subordination of women thus stands out as the human mind, I deny that anyone can know the nature
an isolated fact in modern social institutions—a solitary of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in
infringement of what has become their fundamental law, a their present relation to one another. . . . What is now called
single relic of an old world of thought and practice. . . . This ‘the nature of women’ is an artificial thing—the result of
entire discrepancy between one social fact and all the others forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation
that accompany it, and the radical opposition between its in others. . . . A hot-house and stove cultivation has always
nature and the progressive movement that is the boast of the been provided for some of women’s capabilities, for the bene-
modern world. . . ., provides something to be thought about fit and pleasure of their masters. These sprout luxuriantly
seriously by any conscientious observer of human tendencies. in this heated atmosphere and with active cultivation and
It raises a prima facie presumption on the unfavourable side, watering; while other shoots from the same root, left outside
far outweighing any presumption that custom and usage in the wintry air with ice purposely heaped all around them,
could create on the favourable side. It should be enough, at have a stunted growth, and some are burnt off with fire and
least, make this an issue with two sides to it—like the issue disappear; and men—with that inability to recognise their
between republicanism and royalty. own work that distinguishes the unanalytic mind—lazily
[Mill goes on to demand a real and fair discussion of believe that the tree grows •of itself in the way •they have
the issue over the subjection of women. He warns against made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it weren’t
invalid appeals to experience. ‘Experience can’t possibly kept in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow.
have decided between two courses of action when there has What is now the biggest obstacle to the progress of
been experience of only one.’ But experience can tell us thought and the forming of well-grounded opinions about
something relevant:] Experience does say that every step life and social arrangements is mankind’s unspeakable
12
inattention to the influences that form human character. . . . difference •is natural from evidence that it •can’t possibly
•Because a peasant deeply in arrears to his landlord is be artificial. Natural differences will be what is left behind
not industrious, some people think that the Irish are after setting aside every characteristic of either sex that
naturally idle. can be explained through external circumstances. To be
•Because constitutions can be overthrown when the entitled to affirm that there is any difference between the
authorities appointed to serve them turn their arms two sexes considered as moral and rational beings—let alone
against them, some people think the French incapable to say what the difference is—one must have the profoundest
of free government. knowledge of the laws of the formation of character; and
•Because the Greeks •cheated the Turks whereas the since no-one yet has that knowledge no-one is yet entitled
Turks only •plundered the Greeks, some people think to any positive opinion about this topic. Regarding the lack
that the Turks are naturally more sincere. of that knowledge: there is hardly any subject which, in
•Because women (they say) don’t care about politics proportion to its importance, has been so little studied!. . . .
excerpt for an interest in politicians, the general good Indeed we have only rough and incomplete knowledge
is thought to be naturally less interesting to them of what the differences between the sexes now are, never
than to men. mind how they came to be that way. Medical practitioners
History, which is now so much better understood than and physiologists have discovered some of the differences in
it used to be, teaches another lesson, if only by show- bodily constitution. . . .but they have no special qualifications
ing how enormously open human nature is to external for learning about the mental characteristics of women.
influences, and how variable are human characteristics that That is a subject on which nothing final can be known,
are supposed to be most universal and uniform. But in so long as the only people who can really know it—women
history, as in travelling, men usually see only what they themselves—have little to say about it and the little that they
already had in their own minds. . . . do say is mostly suborned, ·by which I mean that women
What are the natural differences between the two sexes? are usually under pressure not to tell the truth about their
In the present state of society we can’t get a complete own mental abilities·. It is easy to know stupid women:
and correct answer to this; yet almost everybody dogma- stupidity is much the same all the world over; a stupid
tises about it, hardly anyone attends seriously to the only person’s notions and feelings will be simply the ones that
source for even a partial answer. The source I’m refer- are prevalent in the social circles he or she moves in. It’s
ring to is an analytic study of the most important topic a different story with people whose opinions and feelings
in psychology, namely the laws governing the influence come from their own individual nature and faculties. It’s a
of circumstances on character. ·Why the emphasis on rare man who has any significant knowledge of the character
laws?· Because however great and apparently ineradicable even of the women of his own family. I don’t mean knowledge
the moral and intellectual differences between men and of •their capabilities (nobody knows what those are, not
women might be, the only evidence we can have for there even women themselves, because most of their abilities have
being natural differences is negative: inferring that a given never been called upon); I’m talking about •their actual
13
thoughts and feelings. Many a man thinks he perfectly must be when one of the two is not only under the other’s
understands women because he has had romantic relations authority but has had it drummed into her that it’s her duty
with several of them, perhaps with many of them. If he is to subordinate everything to his comfort and pleasure, and to
a good observer and his experience has been of the right speak and act only in ways that are agreeable to him! These
kind, he may have learned something about one narrow part are obstacles to a man’s getting thorough knowledge of the
of women’s nature—an important part, no doubt, but then only woman he has sufficient opportunity of studying. Add to
there is all the rest. . . . In general a man’s best chance of this the fact that to understand one woman is not necessarily
studying the character of a woman is by attending to his to understand any other woman; that even if a man studies
own wife. . . .and this is in fact the source from which any many women of one social level or of one country, that won’t
knowledge worth having on the subject has generally come. enable him to understand women at other levels or in other
But most men have had the opportunity of studying only countries; and even if he did that, those are still only the
one woman in this way, so that usually one can infer what a women of a single period of history. It is safe to say that the
man’s wife is like from his opinions about women in general! knowledge men can acquire of women, even as they have
To make even this one case yield any result, it has to be the been and are—never mind what they could be—is wretchedly
case that incomplete and superficial, and that it always will be so until
•the woman is worth knowing, women themselves have told all that they have to tell.
•the man is a competent judge, and
•the man can. . . .read her mind by sympathetic And this time has not come, and if it does come it will do
intuition or has nothing in his character that makes so gradually. Only very recently have women been qualified
her shy of disclosing it. by literary accomplishments and permitted by society to tell
This, I believe, is an extremely rare conjunction. It often the general public anything. And very few of those have dared
happens that a husband and wife have complete unity of feel- to tell anything that men, on whom their literary success
ing and community of interests with respect to all external depends, are unwilling to hear. If you remember how even a
things, yet neither has any more admission into the internal male author’s expression of uncustomary opinions or what
life of the other than if they were mere acquaintances. Even were regarded as eccentric feelings used to be (and some-
when there is true affection, authority on the one side times still is) received, you’ll get some faint conception of
and subordination on the other prevent perfect confidence. how hard it is for a woman, having been brought up to think
Though nothing may be intentionally withheld, much is not custom and opinion her sovereign rule, to express in books
shown. [Mill likens this to relations between a father and a anything drawn from the depths of her own nature. The
son: even when there is real affection on both sides, there’s greatest woman who has left writings behind her sufficient
a lot about a son’s character that his father doesn’t know. to give her an eminent rank in the literature of her country
Mill takes this to illustrate the general thesis that] for two thought it necessary to prefix this motto to her boldest
people to know one another thoroughly, they need to be work Un homme peut braver l’opinion; une femme doit s’y
not only intimates but equals. How much more true this soumettre—·A man can openly defy public opinion; a woman
14
has to submit to it·.1 Most of what women write about women their experience and the use of their faculties. . . .
is mere sycophancy to men. In the case of unmarried women, One thing we can be certain of—that if something is
much of it seems only intended to increase their chance contrary to women’s nature you won’t get them to do it by
of getting a husband. . . . Literary women are becoming giving their nature free play! There is no reason whatsoever
more free-spoken, and more willing to express their real for mankind to interfere on nature’s behalf for fear that
sentiments. Unfortunately, in this country especially, they nature won’t succeed in carrying out its purpose. . . . If
are themselves such artificial products that their sentiments there’s something they can do but not as well as the men who
are made up of a small dose of individual observation and are their competitors, competition will exclude them from it;
consciousness and a very large one of acquired associations. because what is being asked for is not protective duties and
This will be less and less the case, but it will remain true tariffs in favour of women, but only that the present tariffs
to a great extent as long as social institutions don’t allow and protective duties in favour of men should be recalled.
to women the same free development of originality that is If women have a greater natural inclination for x than for
possible for men. When that time comes, and not before, we y, there’s no need for laws or social indoctrination to make
shall see, and not merely hear, as much as it is necessary to most of them do x in preference to y. Whatever women’s
know of the nature of women, and the adaptation of other services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will
things to it. [That last sentence is exactly as Mill wrote it. You might hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake. . . .
care to think about what he was getting at when he wrote ‘. . . see, and
not merely hear. . . ’.] The ‘need’ for compulsion
I have dwelt so much on the present obstacles to men’s The general opinion of men is supposed to be that a woman’s
knowing the true nature of women because in this as in natural vocation is that of a wife and mother. I say ‘is sup-
so many other things opinio copiae inter maximas causas posed to be’ because judging from the present constitution
inopiae est, ·i.e. one of the great causes of ignorance is of society one might think that their opinion was the exact
believing that one knows a lot·; and there’s not much chance opposite. Perhaps this is what they think:
of reasonable thinking on this topic while people flatter them- The natural vocation of women is of all things the
selves that they perfectly understand a subject of which most most in conflict with their nature: if. . . .any other job
men know absolutely nothing. Among other things, it is at or pastime is open to them that has any chance of
present impossible for any man, or all men taken together, to appearing desirable to them, there won’t be enough
have knowledge that would qualify them to dictate to women of them who will be willing ·to be wives and mothers·,
what is their vocation and what isn’t. Fortunately, no such i.e. to accept the condition that is said to be natural
knowledge is required for any practical purpose connected to them.
with women’s relation to society and to life, because. . . .that If this really is what men in general believe, they should say
question rests with women themselves—to be decided by so out loud. I would like to hear somebody openly expressing
1
From the title-page of Delphine, a novel by Madame de Staël, ·a French romantic writer who died in 1817·.
15
the doctrine (it is already implied in much that is written on to. Those who try to force women into marriage by closing all
the subject): other doors against them are open to a similar response. If
‘Society needs women to marry and produce children. they mean what they say, they must believe that men don’t
They won’t do so unless they are compelled. Therefore make the married condition attractive enough to women to
it is necessary to compel them.’ induce them to accept it for its own sake. . . . And here, I
The merits of the case would then be clearly defined. It would believe, is the clue to the feelings of men who really dislike
be exactly the same as the case of the slave-holders of South the idea of equal freedom for women: the outcome they
Carolina and Louisiana: are afraid of isn’t women •being unwilling to marry (I don’t
‘It is necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown. think anyone really has that fear), but women •insisting that
White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not, marriage be on equal conditions. They are afraid that all
for any wages that we choose to give. Therefore, they women of spirit and capacity might prefer •doing almost any-
must be compelled.’ thing else that they don’t regard as degrading to •marrying,
An example closer to home is that of impressment: when by marrying they’ll be providing themselves with a
‘Sailors absolutely must be had to defend the country. master—of themselves and of all their earthly possessions.
It often happens that they won’t voluntarily enlist. And indeed if marriage had to be like that, their fears would
Therefore there must be the power of forcing them.’ be very well founded. I agree with them that few women who
[That is how the British navy used to acquire sailors: official ‘press gangs’ are capable of anything else would, voluntarily and knowing
would kidnap men and force them into the service of the navy. The laws what they were doing, choose such a fate as that kind of
permitting this were still on the books in Mill’s time, though the practice marriage if they had any other way of filling a conventionally
had died out.] How often has this logic been used! and it would honourable place in life. If men are determined to have a
have been successful up to this day if it didn’t have one flaw, despotic law of marriage, they are quite right—as a matter of
namely being open to the response: mere policy—to leave women no choice about it. But in that
‘First pay the sailors the honest value of their labour. case, everything that has been done in the modern world to
When you have made it as well worth their while to loosen the chain on the minds of women has been a mistake.
serve you as to work for other employers, you’ll have They never should have been allowed to become literate:
no more difficulty than anyone else in obtaining their women who read, and even more women who write, are as
services.’ things now stand a contradiction and a disturbing element:
The only logical answer to this is ‘I will not’; and impressment and it was wrong to bring women up with any skills except
is no longer defended, because people now don’t want to rob those of a sex-slave or of a domestic servant.
the labourer of his wages—don’t want to, and are ashamed
16
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill 2: The laws governing marriage
CHAPTER 2
The laws governing marriage
Let us consider. . . .the conditions that the laws of this and all they had long ceased to be practised), men suppose that all
other countries annex to the marriage contract. Given that is now as it should be in regard to the marriage contract;
marriage is •the destination assigned to women by society, and we are continually told that civilisation and Christianity
•the prospect they are brought up to, and •the objective they have restored to the woman her just rights. And yet the wife
are intended to pursue (except for those who aren’t attractive is the actual bond servant of her husband: so far as the
enough to be chosen by any man as his companion), one law is concerned, she is as subordinate to him as slaves,
might have expected that everything possible would have commonly so called, are to their masters. She promises
been done to make this condition one that they would like life-long obedience to him at the altar, and is legally held
enough to have no cause for regret that they were denied the to that all through her life. . . . She can do no act whatever
option of any other. Society has moved to a fairer approach without his at least tacit permission. She can acquire no
in some of the relevant matters—·e.g. slavery and service in property for herself: the instant something becomes hers,
the navy·—but in this one matter of marriage laws society even if by inheritance, it automatically becomes his. In
has persisted right up to today in getting what it wants by this respect the wife’s position under the common law of
foul means rather than fair. ·The means used today are not England is worse than that of slaves in the laws of many
as bad as they used to be·. Originally women were taken by countries. [Mill gives examples. He goes on to report the
force, or regularly sold by their father to the husband. Until legal devices whereby fathers in ‘the higher classes in this
fairly recently the father could dispose of his daughter in country’ try to protect their daughters’ property from their
marriage at his own will and pleasure, without any regard husbands, and comments on how little protection can be
to hers. The Church was faithful to a better morality in that achieved even by ‘the most powerful nobleman’. Then:] The
it required a formal ‘yes’ from the woman at the marriage two are called ‘one person in law,’ for the purpose of inferring
ceremony; but there was nothing to show that the consent that whatever is hers is his, but the parallel inference is
was freely given, and it was practically impossible for the never drawn that whatever is his is hers; the maxim is not
girl to refuse if the father persisted, except perhaps when applied against the man, except to make him responsible
she could get the protection of religion by becoming a nun. to third parties for her acts, as a master is for the acts of
[Before Christianity, Mill says, a husband had the power of his slaves or of his cattle. I’m not claiming that wives are
life and death over his wife; and for many years in England in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is a
things weren’t much better. For example. a woman who slave to the same extent and in a full a sense of the word
killed her husband was guilty of ‘treason’ and was burned to as a wife is. Hardly any slave. . . .is a slave at all hours and
death. Then:] Because these atrocities have fallen into disuse all minutes; in general he has his fixed task, and when it
(for most of them were formally abolished, if at all, only after is done he disposes up to a point of his own time and has
17
a family life into which the master rarely intrudes. ‘Uncle cruelty.] And yet people complain that legal separation is
Tom’ under his first master had his own life in his ‘cabin’, granted too easily! Surely, if a woman is denied any prospect
almost as much as any man whose work takes him away for her life except that of being the personal body-servant of
from home is able to have in his own family. But it can’t be a despot, and must stake everything on the chance of finding
so with the wife. Above all, in Christian countries a female one who will make a •favourite of her instead of merely a
slave has an admitted right—and is thought to have a moral •drudge, to allow her to try this chance only once is a very
obligation—to refuse to her master the last familiarity [Mill’s cruel worsening of her fate. The natural upshot of the state of
phrase, referring to sexual intercourse]. Not so the wife: however affairs I have described things would be that since everything
brutal a tyrant her husbandslave is—even if she knows that in the woman’s life depends on her obtaining a good master,
he hates her, and/or it is his daily pleasure to torture her, she should be allowed to change again and again until she
and/or she finds it impossible not to loathe him—he can finds one. I’m not saying that she ought to be allowed this
claim from her and ·legally· enforce the lowest degradation privilege. That is a totally different consideration: my present
of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an purposes don’t require me to get into the question of ‘divorce’
animal function contrary to her inclinations. . . . What is in the sense in which this involves liberty of remarriage.
her position in regard to the children in whom she and her All I’m saying here is that to those to whom nothing but
master have a joint interest? They are by law his children. He servitude is allowed, the only lightening of the burden (and
alone has any legal rights over them. She can’t do anything a most insufficient one at that) is to allow a free choice of
for them or in relation to them except what he has instructed servitude. Refusing this completes the assimilation of the
or allowed her to do. Even after he is dead she isn’t their wife to the slave—and not even the slave under the mildest
legal guardian, unless his will has made her so. . . . This is form of slavery, for in some slave codes the slave could,
her legal condition, and she has no means of getting out of under certain circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the
it. If she leaves her husband, she can’t take anything with master to sell him. But no amount of ill usage, without
her—not her children or anything that is rightfully her own. adultery thrown into the mix, will in England free a wife from
The husband can if he chooses compel her to return, by law her tormentor.
or by physical force; or he may settle for merely seizing for
his own use anything that she may earn or be given by her
Judging by the best instances
relatives. It is only legal separation ordered by a court of
justice that •entitles her to live apart, without being forced I don’t want to exaggerate—and I don’t need to! I have been
back into the custody of an angry jailer, and •enables her to describing the wife’s legal position, not her actual treatment.
spend her earnings in her own way, without fear that a man The laws of most countries are far worse than the people
whom perhaps she hasn’t seen for twenty years will pounce who carry them out, and many of them couldn’t remain
on her some day and carry all off. [Such legal separation, laws if they were often enforced. If married life were just
Mill says, was until recently too expensive for most people; what might be expected from looking at the laws governing
and it is still granted only in cases of desertion or of extreme it, society would be a hell on earth. Fortunately, there
18
are feelings and interests that in many men •exclude (and these intense individual feelings rise to their greatest height
in most of the others at least •mitigate) the impulses and under the most atrocious institutions. It’s part of the irony
propensities that lead to tyranny. In a normal state of things, of life that human beings have their strongest feelings of
the tie that connects a man with his wife provides by far devoted gratitude towards those who voluntarily refrain from
the strongest example of such feelings. The only thing that using their power entirely to crush their earthly existence!
comes anywhere near it is the tie between a man and his How big a place does this sentiment have in the minds of
children, and this nearly always tends to strengthen the most men, even in their religious devotion? That is a cruel
other tie. Because this is true—because men in general question, ·and I shan’t answer it here; but· we daily see how
don’t inflict (and women don’t suffer) all the misery that much people’s gratitude to God appears to be stimulated by
could be inflicted (and suffered) if men used the full power the thought of fellow-creatures to whom he has been less
of tyranny that the laws allow them—the defenders of the merciful.
existing form of the institution ·of marriage· think that all When we are thinking about slavery, or political abso-
its wickedness is justified, and that those who complain are lutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are
merely quarrelling with the evil that is the price paid for always expected to judge it by its best instances; and we
every great good. But the loosenings in •practice—which are are shown pictures of loving exercise of authority on one
compatible with maintaining in full •legal force the marriage side, loving submission to it on the other—superior wisdom
tyranny—don’t serve as any kind of excuse for this despotism ordering all things for the greatest good of the dependents,
(and all of this goes for any kind of tyranny). The loosenings and surrounded by their smiles and benedictions. All this
only serve to show human nature’s power to react against is simply irrelevant. . . . Who doubts that there may be
the vilest institutions, and to show how energetically the great goodness, happiness, and affection under the absolute
seeds of good as well as those of evil in human character government of a good man? But laws and institutions should
spread and propagate themselves. Not a word can be said be adapted not to good men but to bad. Marriage is not an
for despotism in the family that can’t be said for political institution designed for a select few. Men are not required,
despotism. Not every absolute king sits at his window to as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by
enjoy the groans of his tortured subjects, or strips them of testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise
their last rag and turns them out to shiver in the road. The of absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a
despotism of Louis XVI was not as bad as those of some wife and children is very strong in men whose general social
others [Mill cites three, including Caligula], but it was bad enough feelings are strong, and in many who don’t have much sense
to justify the French Revolution and to palliate [= ‘somewhat of any other social ties. But a man’s social feelings can come
excuse’] even its horrors. What about the intense attachments anywhere on a long scale of degrees of intensity, right down
that ·sometimes· exist between wives and their husbands? to the level of men who aren’t bound by any ties and on
They have also existed ·sometimes· in domestic slavery. It whom society has no grip except through the threat of legal
wasn’t unusual in Greece and Rome for slaves to submit to punishment. At every level on this descending scale there
death by torture rather than betray their masters. . . . In fact are men who are given all the legal powers of a husband.
19
The vilest malefactor has tied to him some wretched woman thing appalling. Yet these are only the extreme cases, the
against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing lowest abysses; on the way down the scale to them, there is a
her—and with a little care he can do even that without much sad succession of depth after depth ·with misery increasing
danger of the legal penalty. Among the lowest classes in every all the way·. When we are considering domestic or political
country, there are thousands of men who fit this description: tyranny, the main point of attending to absolute monsters
He is not in a legal sense a malefactor in any other way, is to bring out the fact that there is scarcely any horror that
because everywhere except in his marriage his aggres- can’t occur under this tyranny if the despot pleases, which
sions meet with resistance. So the physical violence sets in a strong light what must be the terrible frequency of
that is habitual in him is exercised on his unhappy things that are only a little less atrocious. Absolute fiends
wife, who is the only adult person who can’t block his are as rare as angels, perhaps rarer; but •ferocious savages
brutality or escape from it. Her dependence on him with occasional touches of humanity are common; and in
doesn’t fill him with a generous forbearance, making the wide interval that separates •these from any worthy
it a point of honour to behave well to one whose life representatives of the human species, there is room for many
situation is entrusted entirely to his kindness; rather, forms and degrees of animality and selfishness. People whose
it gives him the notion that the law has handed her nature lies in that interval often exist under an outward
over to him as his, to be used at his pleasure, and that varnish of civilisation and even of culture, living at peace
he isn’t expected to practise the consideration towards with the law and maintaining a creditable appearance to all
her that is required from him towards everybody else. who are not under their power, and yet make the lives of all
Until recently the law left even these atrocious extremes who are under their power a torment and a burden. [Mill
of domestic oppression practically unpunished; within the reminds us of the commonplace cliché about men in general
past few years it has made some feeble attempts to repress being unfit for power, and remarks that it is seldom thought
them. But these attempts haven’t achieved much, and can’t of in connection with the power that is given to every man,
be expected to do so, because it is contrary to reason and however base and ferocious. He repeats the point that a
experience to suppose that there can be any real barrier man’s conduct outside his home is not a basis for predicting
to brutality when the victim is left still in the power of the how he treats his wife:] Even the commonest men reserve
executioner. Until a conviction for personal violence (or at the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of their
least for a second offence) automatically entitles the woman character for those who have no power to withstand it. And
to a divorce or at least to a judicial separation, the use of their ability to do this doesn’t just provide an outlet for
legal penalties to repress these ‘aggravated assaults’ will fail violence, selfishness etc.; it is also the hothouse in which
for lack of a prosecutor or for lack of a witness. these vices grow and flourish. A man who is morose or
When we consider how many men are little higher than violent to his equals is sure to be one who has lived among
brutes, and that this never prevents them from being able inferiors—·meaning people who have less power·—whom he
through the marriage law to obtain a victim, the breadth and could frighten or worry into submission. . . . We know that
depth of human misery caused in this way swells to some- the bad tendencies in human nature are kept within bounds
20
only when they are allowed no scope for their indulgence. the amount of good that we actually see ·in many marriages·?
We know that almost everyone to whom others yield goes Mere feminine blandishments [= (roughly) ‘flirtatious flattery’],
on encroaching on them until a point is reached at which though very effective in •individual instances, don’t do much
they are compelled to resist; when this encroachment doesn’t to modify the •general tendencies of the situation; because
come from deliberate purpose, it comes from impulse and their power lasts only for as long as the woman is young
habit. Because this is the common tendency of human and attractive, often only while her charm is new and not
nature, the almost unlimited power that present social dimmed by familiarity; and on many men they haven’t much
institutions give to a man over his wife. . . .seeks out and influence at any time. The real mitigating causes are ·four in
encourages the latent seeds of selfishness in the remotest number·: (1) the husband’s affection for his wife that grows
corners of his nature,. . . .giving him freedom to indulge the up in the course of time, to the extent that he is capable of
parts of his basic character that in all other relations he it and her character is sufficiently like his to arouse it; (2)
would have found it necessary to repress and conceal, and their common interests as regards the children. . . .; (3) the
the repression of which would in time have become a second wife’s real importance to the husband’s daily comforts and
nature. I know that there’s another side to the question: if enjoyments, and the value he consequently attaches to her
the wife can’t effectively •resist, she can at least •retaliate; on his account, which (if he is capable of feeling for others)
she can make the man’s life extremely uncomfortable, and prepares the way for him to care about her on her account;
that power of hers enables her to prevail in many matters (4) the influence that most human beings naturally acquire
where she ought to prevail, and many where she ought not. over others who are personally near to them and whom
But this instrument of self-protection—which may be called they don’t outright dislike. Such influence can be exercised
the power of the scold. . . .—has a fatal defect: it is most through direct entreaties, and through the imperceptible
effective against the least tyrannical superiors and in favour contagion [see note on page 51] of the woman’s feelings and
of the least deserving dependents. It is the weapon of irritable dispositions. These factors and devices, unless counteracted
and self-willed women, ones who would make the worst use by some equally strong personal influence ·going in the other
of power if they themselves had it, and who generally turn direction·, can enable a woman to get an altogether excessive
this power—·the power of the scold·—to a bad use. . . . And and unreasonable degree of command over the conduct of
on the other hand, the husbands against whom it is used her husband, her superior.
most effectively are the gentler and more inoffensive, the Through these various means the wife frequently
ones who even when provoked can’t bring themselves to exercises power (sometimes even too much power) over the
resort to any very harsh exercise of authority. The wife’s husband; she can affect his conduct in matters where she
power to be disagreeable usually serves only to establish a may not be qualified to influence it for good. . . .and where he
counter-tyranny, its victims being chiefly the husbands who would act better if left to his own devices. (But in families,
are least inclined to be tyrants. as in states, •power is not a compensation for •the loss of
Well, then, what is it that in fact tones down the freedom. Her power often gives her what she has no right to,
corrupting effects of the ·husband’s· power so as to allow for but doesn’t enable her to assert her own rights. A Sultan’s
21
favourite slave has slaves under her,. . . .but the desirable determine which of them it shall be. The commonest kind
thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor of voluntary association other than marriage is partnership
be a slave.) By •entirely sinking her own existence in her in business; and no need has been found for a law dictating
husband, by •having no will (or persuading him that she has that in every partnership one partner shall have entire
no will) but his in anything concerning their relationship, control over the concern and the others will have to obey
and by •making it the business of her life to work on his his orders. No-one would enter into partnership on terms
sentiments [see note on page 2], a wife can influence and prob- that would subject him to the responsibilities of an executive
ably pervert her husband’s conduct in matters outside the while giving him only the powers and privileges of a clerk or
family that she has never qualified herself to judge of, or in salesman. . . . The law never does anything like this in regard
which she is influenced by some personal or other bias or to business partnerships; but if it did, this wouldn’t pose
prejudice. Accordingly, as things now are, the husbands who as much danger to the rights and interests of the inferior
act most kindly to their wives are as likely to be made worse as is posed by law governing marriage. A junior business
as to be made better by the wife’s influence in all matters partner would still be free to cancel the power—·i.e. the
extending beyond the family. She is taught that she has absolute power that the senior partner has over him·—by
no business with such matters, and accordingly she seldom withdrawing from the partnership. A wife has no such power;
has any honest and conscientious opinion on them; so she and even if she had, it would almost always be desirable that
hardly ever gets involved in them for any legitimate purpose, she should avail herself of it only as a last resort.
but generally for a ·self-·interested one. She doesn’t know or It’s quite true that things that have to be decided right
care which is the right side in politics, but she knows what away, and can’t adjust themselves gradually or wait for a
will bring in money or invitations, give her husband a title, compromise, ought to be decided by just one person. But it
her son a government job, or her daughter a good marriage. doesn’t follow that this should always be the same person.
The natural arrangement is a division of powers between
The need for decisions the two, with each being absolute in the executive branch
of their own department, and any change of system and
You might want to say this: principle requiring the consent of both. [That sentence is as
‘How can any society exist without government? In Mill wrote it.] The division ·of powers· can’t and shouldn’t
a family as in a state some one person must be the be pre-established by the law, because it must depend on
ultimate ruler. When married people differ in opinion, individual capacities and suitabilities. If the two persons
who is to decide? They can’t both have their way, but chose, they might pre-appoint ·the division of powers· in
a decision one way or the other must be reached.’ the marriage contract, as financial arrangements are now
[This is one of the few places in this work where Mill uses ‘society’ in often pre-appointed. There would seldom be any difficulty in
such a way that a married couple constitute a society.] It is not true deciding such things by mutual consent, unless the marriage
that in any voluntary association between two people one of was one of those unhappy ones where everything, including
them must be absolute master; still less that the law must this, becomes a subject of bickering and dispute. The
22
division of rights would naturally follow the division of duties dispute were put in the hands of the law; but that isn’t
and functions. . . . the case in marriages, where the law always favours the
[When in this next paragraph Mill speaks of what ‘will’ be the case, he husband. The power the law gives him may incline the
evidently means what will be the case after the law governing marriage wife to settle for a compromise, but it won’t incline the
Whoever gets the legal
is amended in the way he is arguing for.] husband to do so! He continues:] There is always among
authority, the actual making of decisions will largely depend— decent people a practical compromise, though one of them
as it does now—on comparative qualifications. The husband is under no physical or moral necessity of making it; and
is usually the older, and that fact alone will in most cases this fact shows that (except in unfavourable cases) marriage
give him more of the decision-making power, at least until partners are led by natural motives to voluntarily adjust their
the couple have reached a time of life when the difference behaviour in ways that are acceptable to both. This situation
in their ages doesn’t matter. A more powerful voice will is certainly not improved by having laws which ordain that
naturally also be given to the spouse, whether husband this superstructure of free government is to be built on a
or wife, who brings in the income that the family live on. legal foundation of despotism on one side and subjection on
Inequality from this source doesn’t depend on the law of the other, so that the despot can—on a whim, and without
marriage, but on the general conditions of human society as warning—rescind any concession he has made. No freedom
now constituted. The influence of mental superiority, either is worth much when held on such a precarious tenure; and
general or special, is bound to carry much weight, as will anyway it is not likely to work in a fair way when the law
superior decisiveness of character; just as they always do at throws so much weight into one scale. . . .
present. And this fact shows how little reason there is to fear
that the powers and responsibilities of partners in life (as Would liberated women be fair?
of partners in business) can’t be satisfactorily divided up by
agreement between themselves. They always are divided up A stubborn opponent with his back to the wall may say this:
like that, except in cases in which the marriage institution Husbands indeed are willing to be reasonable, and to
is a failure. Decision-making never comes down to •all the make fair concessions to their partners without being
power on one side and •sheer obedience on the other, except forced to; but wives are not. If wives are allowed any
where the marriage has been a total mistake and it would rights of their own, they won’t acknowledge rights for
be a blessing to both parties to be relieved from it. You may anyone else, and they’ll never give way on anything
think this: ‘What makes a peaceful settlement of differences unless they are compelled by the man’s mere authority
possible is the power of legal compulsion that both sides to give way on everything.
know to be in reserve; just as people submit to arbitration Many people would have said this some generations ago,
because in the background there’s a court of law that they when satires on women were fashionable and men thought it
know they can be forced to obey.’ [What makes this work clever to insult women for being what men made them. But
in matters other than marriage, Mill goes on to say, is its it won’t be said now by anyone who is worth replying to. The
not being known in advance which side would win if the currently fashionable doctrine is not that women are less
23
where every individual is either above or below his nearest and because no-one is now left out, an equal measure ·of
neighbour, and wherever he doesn’t command he must fellow-feeling· is extended to all. It’s well known that human
obey. So existing moralities are mainly fitted to a relation beings don’t clearly foresee their own changes, and that
of command and obedience. But command and obedience their sentiments are adapted to past ages rather than to
are merely unfortunate necessities of human life; society future ones. To see the future of the species has always
in equality is its normal state. Already in modern life, and been the privilege of the intellectual élite, or of those who
increasingly so as it progressively improves, •command and have learned from them; to have the feelings that mankind
obedience become special cases whereas •equal association will have in the future has been the distinction—and usually
is the general rule. The morality of the first ages [Mill’s phrase] the martyrdom—of a still rarer élite. Institutions, books,
rested on (1) the obligation to submit to power; and the education, society, all go on training human beings for the
morality of the ages next following rested on (2) the right old ·way of looking at things· even while the new one is
of the weak to the forbearance and protection of the strong. coming, and long after it has actually come. But the true
How much longer is one form of society and life to content virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals;
itself with the morality made for another? We have had (1) claiming nothing for themselves except what they freely
the morality of submission, and (2) the morality of chivalry concede to everyone else; regarding command of any kind
and generosity; the time has now come for (3) the morality of as an exceptional and temporary necessity; and preferring
justice. Whenever in earlier times any approach was made to the society of those who are willing to take turns leading
society in equality, justice was claimed to be the foundation and following. Life as at present constituted does not help
of virtue. That is how it was in the free republics of antiquity; to develop these virtues by allowing them to be practised.
but even in the best of these, the equals were limited to the The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues of
free male citizens; slaves, women, and residents without a despotism, but also its vices, are nourished. Citizenship in
vote were under the law of force. The joint influence of Roman free countries is partly a school of society in equality; but
civilisation and of Christianity obliterated these distinctions, citizenship fills only a small place in modern life and comes
and in theory (if only partially in practice) declared the claims nowhere near to people’s daily habits or inmost sentiments.
of the human being as such to outrank the claims of sex, If the family were justly constituted, it would be the real
class, or social position. The barriers that had begun to be school of the virtues of freedom. It is sure to be a good
levelled were raised again by the northern conquests [Mill’s enough school for everything else: it will always be a school
phrase]; and the whole of modern history consists of the slow of obedience for the children and of command for the parents.
process of grinding them down again. We are now entering What is needed is for the family to be a school of sympathy
into an order of things in which justice will again be the in equality, of living together in love, without power on one
primary virtue, based as before on association of equals but side or obedience on the other. That’s what it ought to be
now also on association of sympathy [here = ‘fellow feeling’]. between the parents. It would then be an exercise of those
Justice is no longer rooted in •the instinct of equals for self virtues that each spouse requires to fit him or her for all
protection, but in •a cultivated sympathy between equals; other relationships; and it would be a model to the children
25
of the feelings and conduct that could become habitual and uneducated part of the lower classes, the legal slavery of the
therefore natural to them—that being the intended end-point wife and something in her merely physical subjection to the
of their temporary training by means of obedience. [Mill goes husband’s will (her role as his instrument) causes him to feel
on to say that ’the moral training of mankind’ will never a disrespect and contempt towards her that he doesn’t feel
be satisfactory until it has as a basis a morally satisfactory towards any other woman—or any other human being—with
family structure.] whom he comes in contact; and this makes her seem to him
Even under the present law, many married people (in an appropriate subject for any kind of indignity. . . .
the higher classes of England probably a great majority of Perhaps we’ll be told that religion imposes the duty of
them) live in the spirit of a just law of equality. I readily obedience ·on women·—as every established fact that is too
admit this; indeed it is the very foundation of my hopes. bad to be defended in any other way is said to be required
Laws never would be improved if there weren’t many people by religion. Indeed the church does enjoin obedience in
whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws. her marriage rituals, but it would be hard to derive any
Such people ought to support the position I am advocating such command from Christianity. We are told that St. Paul
here, because its only objective is to make all other married said, ‘Wives, obey your husbands’, but he also said, ‘Slaves,
couples similar to what they are now. But even persons obey your masters.’ His business was the propagation of
of considerable moral worth, unless they are also thinkers, Christianity, and it wouldn’t help him in that to incite anyone
are very ready to believe that laws or practices from which to rebel against existing laws. His acceptance of all social
they haven’t personally suffered any harm •don’t do harm institutions as he found them doesn’t express a disapproval
to anyone, •probably do good (if they seem to be generally of attempts to improve them at the proper time, any more
approved of), and •ought not to be objected to. The legal than his declaration ‘The powers that be are ordained by God’
conditions of the marriage tie may not occur to the thoughts implies support for military despotism as the only Christian
of such people once in a year, and they live and feel in every form of political government. . . . To claim that Christianity
way as though they were legally equals; but they would be was intended to freeze existing forms of government and
making a great mistake if they supposed that the same is society, protecting them against change, is to reduce it to the
the case with all other married couples (or anyway with all level of Islamism or of Brahminism. It is precisely because
in which the husband is not a notorious ruffian). . . . In Christianity has not done this that it has been the religion
fact, the less fit a man is for the possession of power—the of the •progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism and
less likely to be allowed to exercise it over anyone with that the rest have been the religions of the •stationary portions,
person’s voluntary consent—the more he •soothes himself or rather of the •declining portions (because there’s no such
with the awareness of the power the law gives him, •exercises thing as a really stationary society). Throughout the history
that power to the utmost point that custom (the custom of of Christianity there have been plenty of people trying to
men like himself!) will tolerate, and •enjoys using the power make it something of the same kind, converting us into a sort
as a way of enlivening his agreeable sense of possessing of Christian Moslems with the Bible for a Koran, prohibiting
it. Furthermore: in the naturally most brutal and morally all improvement. These people have been powerful, and
26
resistance to them has cost many other people their lives. her situation in the marriage relation by leaving her one
But they have been resisted; the resistance has made us instrument of power that she hasn’t signed away; and it also
what we are; and will yet make us what we are to be. [That prevents the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution
last clause is as Mill wrote it. You might care to think about what he in which a man traps a girl into marrying him without
might mean by ‘what we are to be’.] a settlement, purely so as to get her money. When the
support of the family depends on earnings, the common
arrangement in which •the man earns the income and •the
Property rights
wife superintends the domestic expenditure seems to me in
After what I have said about the ·general· obligation of general the most suitable division of labour between them.
obedience, it is almost superfluous to say anything about the Given that the wife has
more specific topic of a woman’s right to her own property. . . . •the physical suffering of bearing children,
The rule is simple: whatever would be the wife’s if she •the whole responsibility of their care and education in
were not married should be under her exclusive control early years, and
during marriage, and similarly for the husband. This still •the careful use of the husband’s earnings for the
leaves them free to tie up property by settlement, in order to general comfort of the family,
preserve it for children. Some people are shocked by the idea she does not only her fair share but usually the larger share
of a wife and a husband having separate interests in money of the bodily and mental exertion required by their joint
matters; this, they sentimentally think, is inconsistent with existence. If she takes on any further share ·by having
the ideal fusion of two lives into one. ·They are (a) right about paid employment outside the family·, it seldom relieves her
the ideal, (b) wrong about the practice·. Speaking for myself: from this [meaning: ‘from care of the children and management of the
I strongly support (a) community of goods when this results household’] but only prevents her from doing it properly. ·And
from a complete unity of feeling among the owners, but I that is very serious, because· the care that she now can’t
have no taste for a (b) community of goods that relies on the take of the children and the household isn’t taken by anyone
doctrine that what is mine is yours but what is yours is not else; the survivors among the children have to grow up as
mine; and I would choose not to entire into such a contract they best can, and the management of the household is likely
with anyone, even if I were the person to profit by it. to be so bad as to cancel much of the monetary value of the
This particular injustice and oppression to women is to wife’s earnings. In a just state of things, I don’t think it
the casual observer more obvious than all the rest; and is desirable that the wife should usually contribute by her
it could be remedied without interfering with any other labour to the income of the family. In an unjust state of
mischiefs, and there can’t be much doubt that it will be one things ·such as we now have·, her doing so may be useful
of the first to be remedied. Many states in the USA have gone to her by increasing her value in the eyes of the man who
so far as to put into their written Constitutions provisions is legally her master; but against that it also enables him
that guarantee women equality of rights in this respect. At to abuse his power still further by forcing her to work and
least for a woman who has property, this materially improves provide the family’s entire financial support, while he spends
27
most of his time in drinking and idleness. If a woman doesn’t of a household and the bringing up of a family as the first
have independent property, the power to earn is essential to call upon her exertions, for as many years as may be needed
her dignity. But if for this purpose; and to be •renouncing all other objects
•marriage were an equal contract, not implying the and occupations that are not consistent with this. On
obligation of obedience; if that basis, regular occupations outside the home would
•the marriage tie were no longer enforced on those who be practically ruled out for most married women. But it
are oppressed by it, so that a separation on fair terms should be thoroughly possible to adapt the general rules
(I’m not talking here about divorce) could be obtained to fit individual cases: if a woman has abilities that are
by any woman who was morally entitled to it; and if exceptionally adapted to some other occupation, she should
•she then found all honourable employments as freely be allowed to pursue that despite being married; as long as
open to her as to men, arrangements are made to fill any gap that this might make
she wouldn’t need for her own protection to make this in her performance of the ordinary functions of mistress of a
particular use of her abilities during marriage. Like a man family. These things might with perfect safety be left to be
when he chooses a profession, so a woman who marries can regulated by opinion, without any interference of law, once
in general be understood to be •choosing the management public opinion has been rightly directed on the subject.
28
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill 3: Occupations for women outside marriage
CHAPTER 3
Occupations for women outside marriage
If you agree with me about •the equality of women in the not •women’s unfitness but rather •the interests of society,
family, I don’t expect to have much trouble convincing you meaning the interests of men; just as the most wicked crimes
about the other aspect of the just equality of women, namely were thought to be explained and excused by the raison d
their admissibility to all the functions and occupations that ’état, meaning the convenience of the government and the
have until now been the monopoly of the stronger sex [Mill’s support of existing authority. These days power speaks
phrase]. Why have women’s disabilities outside the home with a smoother tongue: when it oppresses people it always
been clung to? ·I mean, of course: why have men clung to claims to do so for their own good. Thus, when any activity
their belief in the disabilities of women outside the home·? I is forbidden to women, it is thought necessary to say (and
think it has been in order to maintain their subordination in desirable to believe) that they are incapable of doing it, and
domestic life, because the general run of the male sex still that in aiming for it they are leaving their real path of success
can’t tolerate the idea of living with an equal. If it weren’t for and happiness. But to make this reason plausible (I don’t say
that, I think that almost everyone—given the actual state of valid!), those who offer it must be prepared to push it much
opinion in politics and economics—would admit the injustice further than anyone ventures to do in the face of present
of excluding half the human race from most money-earning experience. It’s not enough for them to maintain that
occupations, and from almost all high social functions [see (1) Women on average are less gifted than men on
note on page 12], decreeing from their birth that either average, in certain of the higher mental faculties that
•they aren’t, and can’t possibly become, fit for employ- are needed for higher social functions.
ments that are legally open to the stupidest and lowest What they have to maintain is that
of the other sex, or else (2) No women at all are fit for those functions; the
•however fit they may be, those employments will be most eminent women are the intellectual inferiors of
barred to them and reserved for the exclusive benefit the most mediocre of the men who currently fulfill
of males. those functions.
In the last two centuries, when it was thought necessary (it ·You may at first think that (2) is wildly extravagant; but·
usually wasn’t!) to justify the exclusion of women from those think about (1)’s short-fall from what is needed to defend the
functions and occupations, this wasn’t often done in terms status quo. All you can get from (1) is
of their inferior mental capacity. (Actually, no-one back then (3) fewer women than men are fit for occupations and
really believed in that, because in those times the struggles functions of the highest intellectual character.
of public life sometimes provided a real test of personal If that is as far as we can go, then if the performance of a
abilities, a test in which women sometimes took part.) The given important function is decided by competition or in any
reason given for the exclusion of women in those days was other way that respects the interests of the public, there’s
29
no need to fear its falling into the hands of women inferior who might benefit by their services. To ordain that no-one of
to average men, or to the average of their male competitors. a certain kind may be a physician, or a lawyer, or a Member
The only result will be that there will be fewer women than of Parliament, is to injure not only persons of that kind but
men in such employments; and that is bound to happen in also anyone who employs physicians or lawyers, or elects
any case, if only because most women are likely to prefer Members of Parliament. . . .
the one vocation in which there’s nobody to compete with
them. Now, ·no-one will now support (2), not even the
Women as governors
most determined depreciator of women·. Down through
the years, women—many women—have shown themselves Perhaps it will be enough if in the details of my argument I
to be capable of everything that men do, and of doing it confine myself to functions of a public nature: if I succeed
successfully and creditably. The most that can be said is regarding those, it will probably be readily granted that
that there are many things that no woman has succeeded in women should be admissible to any occupation where it
doing as well as they have been done by some men—many in matters whether they are admitted or not. Let me begin
which women have not reached the very highest rank. But by selecting one function. . . .their right to which is entirely
there are extremely few activities depending only on mental independent of any thesis about their abilities. I mean the
skills in which women haven’t attained the second-to-highest vote, both parliamentary and municipal. The •right to share
rank. Isn’t this more than enough to make the refusal to let in the choice of those who are to exercise a public trust
them compete with men for these roles a tyranny to them and is utterly distinct from the •right to compete for the trust
a detriment to society? Isn’t it a mere truism to say that such itself. If to vote for a Member of Parliament one had to be
functions are often filled by men who •are far less fit for them fit to be a candidate, the government would be a narrow
than plenty of women and •would be beaten by women in any oligarchy indeed! To have a voice in choosing those by whom
fair competition? ‘Perhaps there are some, fully employed in one is to be governed is a means of self-protection that
other ways, who are even better qualified for the functions in everyone should have, even ones who are for ever excluded
question than these women.’ What of it? Isn’t this the case from the function of governing; and that includes women.
in all competitions? Is there such a surplus of men fit for They must be thought fit to have such a choice, because the
high duties that society can afford to reject the service of any law already gives to a woman the most important choice of
competent person? Finding a man who is just right for some all—the choice of the man who is to govern her throughout
duty or function of social importance that falls vacant—are her life, which is always supposed to be voluntarily made
we always so sure we can do this that we lose nothing by by herself. . . . There’s not a shadow of justification for not
ruling out half of mankind, refusing in advance to make any allowing women the vote under whatever conditions, and
use of their abilities, however distinguished they may be? within whatever limits, men are allowed it. The majority of
And even if we could do without them, would it be just to women of any class are unlikely to differ in political opinion
refuse to them their fair share of honour and distinction. . . .? from the majority of the men of the same class, unless the
And the injustice isn’t confined to them: it is shared by all issue somehow involves the interests of women as such; and
30
in that case women require the votes as their guarantee Anything that they have done at least proves that they can
of just and equal consideration. This ought to be obvious do that! When we consider how carefully they are all trained
even to those who reject every other doctrine I have been away from (rather than towards) any of the occupations or
arguing for: even if every woman were a wife, and every wife objects reserved for men, it becomes evident that I am taking
ought to be a slave, these slaves would stand in need of legal a very humble ground for them [Mill’s phrase] when I base
protection, and we know what legal protection slaves have their case on what they have actually achieved, because in
when the laws are made by their masters. this matter negative evidence is worth little, whereas any
With regard to women’s fitness not only to participate positive evidence is conclusive. No woman has yet actually
in elections but themselves to hold offices or practise pro- produced works comparable to those of Homer, Aristotle,
fessions involving important public responsibilities: I have Michelangelo, or Beethoven, but it doesn’t follow from this
already remarked that this consideration isn’t essential to that that no woman can attain any such height as they did.
the practical question under discussion, because any woman The negative fact merely leaves the question uncertain, and
who succeeds in an open profession thereby proves that she open to psychological discussion. On the other hand, it is
is qualified for it. As for public offices: if the country’s quite certain that a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth or a
political system excludes unfit men, it will equally exclude Deborah or a Joan of Arc, because this is not inference but
unfit women; and if it doesn’t, there is no additional evil in fact. [Deborah was a judge and had command of an army in ancient
the fact that the unfit persons whom the system admits may Israel. See Judges 4–5.] It’s an odd thing that the only things
be either women or men. Thus, as long as it is admitted that the existing law excludes women from doing are the very
even •a few women may be fit for these duties, the laws that ones that they have proved they can do! There is no law
shut the door on those exceptions can’t be justified by any to prevent a woman from having written all the plays of
opinion that can be held regarding the abilities of •women in Shakespeare, or composed all the operas of Mozart. But if
general. But though this last consideration is not essential, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria had not inherited the
it is far from being irrelevant. An unprejudiced view of throne they couldn’t have been entrusted with the smallest
women’s competence strengthens the arguments against political duties—the sort of duties in which Queen Elizabeth
their subjection, reinforcing them by high considerations of showed herself to be supreme.
practical benefit. If anything conclusive could be inferred from empirical
Let us start by entirely setting aside all psychological data without psychological analysis, it would be that the
considerations tending to show that any of the mental things women aren’t allowed to do are the very ones for which
differences supposed to exist between women and men they are specially qualified. Their aptitude for government
are only effects of differences in their •education and cir- has become conspicuous through the very few opportunities
cumstances, and don’t indicate any radical difference—let they have been given; whereas in lines of distinction that
alone any radical inferiority—of •nature. Let us consider apparently were freely open to them they have by no means
women only as they actually are or are known to have been, so eminently distinguished themselves.
and the abilities that they have already shown in practice.
31
History presents us with far fewer reigning queens than two kings who chose to have affairs directed for many years
kings, but a talent for ruling has been shown by a higher by a woman—one to his sister, the other to his mother. One
proportion of the queens than of the kings—despite the fact of them, Charles VIII, was a mere boy, but in giving power to
that many of the queens have occupied the throne in difficult his sister he was following the intentions of his father Louis
periods. XI, the ablest monarch of his age. The one whose mother was
It is remarkable too that they have often been distin- powerful in his reign was ·Louis IX, since canonized and now
guished by merits flatly opposite to the imaginary and known as· Saint Louis. He was the best and one of the most
conventional character of women: they have been noted vigorous rulers since the time of Charlemagne. Both of these
for their rule’s firmness and vigour as much as for its princesses—·Charles’s sister and Louis’s mother·—ruled
intelligence. When to queens and empresses we add regents in a manner hardly equalled by any prince among their
and viceroys of provinces, the list of eminent women rulers contemporaries. The Emperor Charles V, the most politic
swells to a great length.2 This is so clearly the case that prince of his time, •had as many able men in his service as
someone once tried to run the argument in reverse, turning a ruler ever had, and •was utterly unlikely to sacrifice his
the admitted truth into an additional insult by saying that interests to personal feelings; yet he made two princesses of
queens are better than kings because under kings women his family successive governors of the Netherlands. . . . Both
govern, but under queens men do. ruled very successfully, and one of them, Margaret of Austria,
It may seem a waste of reasoning to argue against a bad was one of the ablest politicians of the age. So much for one
joke; but such things do affect people’s minds, and I have side of the joke. As for the other: When it is said that under
heard men quote this saying in a manner suggesting that queens men govern, is this meant to be taken in the same
they thought there is something in it. Anyway, it will serve way as the statement that kings are governed by women? Is
well enough as a starting-point for my discussion. So: it is it meant that queens choose the associates of their personal
not true that under kings women govern. Such cases are pleasures as their instruments of government? The case is
entirely exceptional, and weak kings have governed badly rare even with queens who are as unscrupulous in their love
through the influence of male favourites as often as of female. affairs as Catherine II [Catherine the Great, of Russia]: and we
When a king is governed by a woman merely because of his won’t find in these ·rare· cases the good government that
love relationships, good government is not probable, though is supposed to arise from male influence on queens. So if
even then there are exceptions. But French history counts it is true that the administration ·of a country· is in the
2
Especially if we bring in Asia as well as Europe. If a Hindu principality is strongly, vigilantly, and economically governed; if order is preserved without
oppression; if the people are prosperous and culture is growing among them, three times out of four that principality is under a woman’s rule. [The
bit about ‘culture’ replaces Mill’s ‘cultivation is extended’, which could mean something more like ‘agriculture is thriving’.] I have gathered this
surprising fact from a long knowledge of Hindu governments. There are many examples of this; for although Hindu institutions won’t let a woman
reign, she is the legal regent of a kingdom while the heir to the throne is a minor; and minorities are frequent ·in India· because male rulers there
often die young through the effect of inactivity and sensual excesses. Bear in mind that these princesses •have never been seen in public, •have never
conversed with any man not of their own family except from behind a curtain, •don’t read, and if even they did there’s no book in their languages
that could give them the slightest instruction on political affairs—they provide a very striking example of women’s natural capacity for government.
32
hands of better men under a queen than under an average interest that is natural to any cultivated human being in
king, it must be that queens are better able to choose good the great events occurring around them, events in which
men; and women must be better qualified than men both to they might be called on to take a part. The only women
be sovereign and to be Prime Minister, because the Prime who are allowed the same range of interests and freedom of
Minister’s principal business is not to govern in person but development as men are the ladies of reigning families, and it
to find the fittest people to run every department of public is precisely in their case that no inferiority is found. Women’s
affairs. . . , But actually most great queens have been great capacities for government have been found adequate in every
by their own talents for government ·more than by their place where they have been tried, and to the extent that they
talent for picking good ministers·. . . . They kept the supreme have been tried.
direction of affairs in their own hands; and if they listened to
good advisers, that was itself the strongest proof that their
Practice versus theory
judgment fitted them for dealing with the great questions of
government. This fact fits with the best general conclusions that our
Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the imperfect experience seems to suggest concerning the special
greater functions of politics can’t qualify themselves for the tendencies and aptitudes that are typical of women, as
less? We know this: women have hitherto been. I don’t say ‘. . . as they will
(1) The wives and sisters of monarchs, when they continue to be’ because (I repeat) it would be presumptuous
are called on, are found to be as competent as the to make claims about what women are or are not, can
monarchs themselves in the business ·of royalty·. or cannot be, by their natural constitution. They have
There is no reason in the nature of things why this shouldn’t always been kept in such an unnatural state (as regards
also be true: spontaneous development) that their nature must have been
(2) The wives and sisters of statesmen, administra- greatly distorted and disguised; and no-one can safely assert
tors, company directors, and managers of public that any significant difference would show up between men’s
institutions are capable of doing what is done by their and women’s characters and capacities if women’s nature
brothers and husbands. were left to choose its direction as freely as men’s. . . . I’ll show
·If in fact (2) is not true, the reason for that doesn’t lie in later on that even the most undeniable differences that now
the nature of things·. The real reason ·why wives etc. of exist ·between the sexes· may have been produced merely by
kings have done better than we would expect the wives etc. circumstances, without any difference of natural capacity.
of business men to do· is plain enough. It has to do with Still, looking at women as they are known in experience, we
how princesses have related to the common run of men; can say (with more truth than most generalisations about
their rank has put them above men to a greater extent than women possess) that the general bent of their talents is
their sex has put them below them. So they haven’t been towards the practical. This statement is consistent with all
taught that it was improper for them to concern themselves the public history of women, past and present. It is also
with politics; but have been allowed to feel the wide-ranging confirmed by common and daily experience. The mental
33
capacities that are most characteristic of a woman of talent such a dominant place in her abilities that she is especially
are all of a kind that fits them for practice, and makes them apt to form rash generalisations on the basis of her own
tend towards it. What is meant by a woman’s being good at observation; though she is equally ready to correct those
intuitive perception? It means rapid and correct insight into generalisations when her range of data widens. But the
present fact. It has nothing to do with general principles: corrective to this defect is •access to the experience of the
nobody ever perceived a scientific law of nature by intuition, human race, i.e. •general knowledge, which is exactly the
or reached a general rule of duty or prudence by it. These thing that education can best provide. A woman’s mistakes
·laws and rules· are results of slow and careful collection and are like those a clever self-educated man, who often •sees
comparison of empirical data, and ‘intuitive’ people—men things that are overlooked by men who have been through
or women—don’t usually shine in this department, unless training-drills, but •falls into errors through ignorance of
they can acquire the needed experience by themselves. ·That things that have long been known. . . .
‘unless. . . ’ condition is crucial·, because their so-called Women’s minds, then, are drawn to the present, to the
‘intuitive’ insight makes them especially good at arriving at real, to actual fact; this can be a source of errors because
such general truths as can be collected from their individual of what it leaves out, but it is also a useful antidote to
observations. So when they happen to be as well provided the contrary error. Where theorising minds primarily and
as men are with the results of other people’s experience, by typically go wrong is through having too little of this lively
reading and education, women are better equipped than men perception and ever-present sense of objective fact. [Mill says
generally are with what is needed for practical success. (I this about ‘speculative minds’. In this version, his uses of ‘speculation’
say happen to be, because ·it won’t be a result of anyone’s For
and its cognates will be replaced by ‘theorising’ and its cognates.]
designs·; in respect of the knowledge that tends to fit them lack of this they often overlook conflicts between outward
for the greater concerns of life, the only educated women are facts and their theories, and also
self-educated.) Highly educated men are apt to be deficient in lose sight of the legitimate purpose of theorising in the
the sense of present fact; in the facts they have to deal with first place, and let their theory-building skills stray
they don’t see •what is really there but •what they have been into regions that are populated
taught to expect. This is seldom the case with women of any not by real beings, animate or inanimate or
ability: their capacity for ‘intuition’ preserves them from it. even idealised, but by personified shadows
When a man and a woman are equal in what experience they created by the illusions of metaphysics or by
have had and in general intellectual level, she will usually see the mere entanglement of words,
much more of what is immediately before them than he will; and think these shadows are the proper objects of the
and this awareness of the present is the main quality that is highest philosophy.
needed for practical (as distinct from theoretical) ability. . . . For a theorist who is engaged not in •collecting empirical
Of course there can be no good practice without principles; data but in •working data up by processes of thought into
and I admit ·another drawback in this aspect of a woman’s comprehensive truths of science and laws of conduct, hardly
abilities, namely· that her quickness of observation has anything can be of more value than to do this work with a
34
really superior woman as a companion and critic. There’s greater quickness on the uptake; isn’t this pre-eminently a
nothing comparable to this for keeping his thoughts within quality that fits a person for practice? In •action, everything
the limits of real things and the actual facts of nature. . . . constantly depends on prompt decisions; in •theorising
A woman’s mind is always directed towards dealing with nothing does. [In reading on, remember that in Mill’s day ‘philosophy’
things as individuals rather than in groups, and—closely was still used to cover science. A magazine of that day includes an
connected with that—to having a more lively interest ·than A mere
advertisement for ‘a more philosophical way of making coffee’.]
a man does· in the present feelings of persons; and this thinker can wait, take time to consider, collect more evidence;
aspect of her mind determines how she approaches anything he isn’t under pressure to complete his philosophy at once so
that claims to have practical applications. For her the first as not to miss his opportunity. [Mill says that the theorising
question is always ‘How will individual people be affected ‘philosopher’ may be helped by an ability to draw plausible
by this?’ So she is extremely unlikely to put faith in any conclusions from inadequate data; but that is a side-help
theory that loses sight of individuals and (a) deals with things to his work, not at the centre of it; and anyway the theorist
as if they existed for the benefit of some imaginary entity, doesn’t have to do it in a hurry; he can slog away slowly
some mere creation of the mind that doesn’t (b) boil down ‘until a conjecture has become a theorem’. Mill continues
to the feelings of living beings. [Mill has in mind here (perhaps the contrast thus:] For those whose business is with the
among other things) the difference between two views of morality: (a) in fleeting and perishable—with individual facts, not kinds of
one kind, questions like ‘Was that action wrong?’ and ‘Would that be facts—speed of thought is second only to power of thought
a good outcome?’ are somehow basic; (b) in the other, such questions in importance. If someone dealing with the contingencies of
are mere conceptual vehicles for really basic questions such as ‘Did that action doesn’t have his faculties under immediate command,
hurt anyone?’ and ‘Is that something we would try to bring about?’ In he might as well not have them! He may be fit to criticise,
the last chapter of Utilitarianism Mill tries to explain the (a) notion of but he isn’t fit to act. Now, this is what women are agreed
justice in terms of (b) facts about how people think and feel and act.] to excel at—women and men who are most like women. The
Women’s thoughts are thus as useful in giving reality to other sort of man, however able he may be, arrives slowly
thinking men’s thoughts as men’s thoughts are in giving at complete command of his faculties: rapidity of judgment
breadth and scope to women’s. In depth, as distinguished and promptness of judicious action, even in the affairs he
from breadth, I strongly suspect that women, even now, do knows best, are the gradual and late result of strenuous
as well as men. effort grown into habit.
If it’s true that women’s existing mental characteristics
are valuable aids even in •theorising, they are still more ‘Nervous temperament’
important in •applying theories to the world. I have explained
why women are less likely than men to fall into the error It may be said that women’s greater nervous susceptibility
of sticking to a rule in a case whose special features make disqualifies them for any practical activities except domestic
the rule inapplicable or require it to be specially modified. ones, by making them
Another of the admitted superiorities of clever women is
35
of nervous sensibility as a feature of their constitution, a

•mobile, feature which they have so strongly that it has more influence
•changeable, than anything else does over every aspect of their health. Like
•too intensely under the influence of the moment, other aspects of one’s physical constitution, this so-called
•incapable of dogged perseverance, ‘nervous temperament’ is hereditary, and is transmitted to
•uneven and uncertain in their command of their sons as well as daughters; but it could be—and apparently
faculties. is—inherited by more women than men. Assuming that this
Those phrases, I think, sum up most of the objections com- is so, let us ask: Are men with the nervous temperament
monly made to women’s fitness for the higher class of serious found to be unfit for the duties and pursuits usually followed
business. ·In so far as the phrases apply·, much of this is by men? If not, why should women of the same temperament
the mere overflow of nervous energy run to waste, and would be unfit for them? Peculiarities of temperament are, within
cease when the energy was given a definite purpose. Much certain limits, obstacles to success in some employments
is also the result of conscious or unconscious cultivation though aids to success in some others. Men of high nervous
[i.e. results from social leads and pressures]; as we see from the sensibility have succeeded brilliantly in occupations that
almost total disappearance of ‘hysterics’ and fainting-fits are suitable to that temperament—and sometimes even in
since they have gone out of fashion. Moreover, when people one’s that aren’t. The main way in which the temperament
are brought up as. . . .a kind of hot-house plants, shielded contributes to a man’s practical success is this:
from the wholesome ups and downs of air and temperature, Because he is susceptible of a higher degree of excite-
and not trained in any of the occupations that make the blood ment than people with a different physical constitu-
flow and strengthen the muscles, while the emotional part of tion, the difference between •his powers when they
their nervous system is kept in unnaturally active play, it’s and he are aroused and •his powers at other times
no wonder if those of them who don’t die of consumption [= is greater than the corresponding difference in other
‘tuberculosis’] grow up with constitutions that are liable to be people. In his excited state he is raised above himself,
upset by slight causes, both internal and external, without as it were, and easily does things that he couldn’t
the stamina to keep up any physical or mental task requiring possibly do at other times.
continuity of effort. But women brought up to work for their This lofty excitement is usually not a mere flash that •leaves
livelihood show none of these morbid characteristics, unless no permanent traces and •is incompatible with persistent
indeed they are chained to sedentary work in small un- and steady pursuit of an objective. It is typical of the nervous
healthy rooms. Women who in their early years have shared temperament to be capable of sustained excitement that
in the healthy physical upbringing and bodily freedom of holds out through long-continued efforts. It is what is
their brothers, and who have enough pure air and exercise in meant by ‘spirit’. It is what makes the high-bred racehorse
adult life, rarely have excessively fragile nervous systems that maintain his speed till he drops down dead. It is what
would disqualify them for active pursuits. There are indeed has enabled so many delicate women to maintain the most
some people—men and women—who have an unusual degree sublime constancy. . . .through lengthy mental and bodily
36
tortures. People with this temperament are particularly southern people, the ancient Romans probably had the same
well suited for the executive department of the leadership native temperament: but the stern character of their national
of mankind. They are the material of great orators, great discipline, like that of the Spartans, made them an example
preachers, impressive spreaders of moral influences. You of the opposite type of national character. The main way in
might think that their constitution makes them less suitable which the strength of their natural feelings showed up was
for the role of a statesman in the cabinet, or of a judge; and in the intensity with which they worked on replacing their
so it would, if it were the case that people who are excitable natural temperament with an artificial one. If these cases
must always be in a state of excitement. But this is wholly a show what a naturally excitable people can be turned into,
question of training. Strong self-control can •grow out of and the Irish Celts provide a fine example of what such people
•contain strong feeling, but strong feeling has to be trained are when left to themselves (if they can be said to be ‘left to
to go that way. When it is, it creates not only the heroes of themselves’, given centuries of indirect influence from bad
impulse but also the heroes of self-conquest. History and government and the direct influence of Catholic teaching and
experience prove that the most passionate characters are of a sincere belief in the Catholic religion). The Irish character
the most fanatically rigid in their feelings of duty, when their must be considered as an unfavourable case, ·i.e. a naturally
passion has been trained to act in that direction. The judge excitable people who have not as a race achieved anything
who gives a just decision in a case where his feelings draw great·. But whenever the circumstances of individual Irish
him strongly to the other side gets from that same strength of Celts have been at all favourable, what people have shown
feeling the fixed sense of the obligation of justice that enables greater capacity for the most varied individual excellence?
him to win this victory over himself. [And the fine things that Like
such a person achieves in states of high excitement, Mill says, the French compared with the English,
come to affect his character in general, providing standards the Irish compared with the Swiss,
that he sets for himself at other times. Then:] The thesis the Greeks or Italians compared with the Germans,
that people with excitable temperaments are on average less so also
fit than others for theory or for practice is shown empirically women compared with men
to be false not only of individuals but also of races. The may be found on average to do the same things, though
French, and the Italians, are undoubtedly by nature more with some variety in the details. I don’t see the smallest
nervously excitable than the Teutonic races; their habitual reason to doubt that they would do them every bit as well if
daily emotional life is a richer affair than that of the English, their education and development were adapted to correcting
at least. But have they been less great ·than the English· in instead of worsening the infirmities that their temperament
science, in public business, in legal and judicial eminence, brings.
or in war? There is abundant evidence that the Greeks Suppose ·for purposes of argument· that all this is true:
of ancient times, like their descendants today, were one Women’s minds are naturally more mobile than men’s,
of the most excitable of the races of mankind, and they less able to persist for long in one continuous effort,
excelled in every kind of human achievement. As an equally more fitted for dividing their abilities among many
37
things than for travelling a single path to the highest may be occupied only with small things, can seldom permit
point that can be reached by it;. . . .which is why they itself to be vacant, as a man’s mind so often is when he isn’t
have climbed as high as the best men in precisely the engaged in what he chooses to consider the business of his
endeavours that seem to need most of this absorption life. . . .
of the whole mind in one set of ideas and occupations.
[Mill speaks of ‘supposing’ that to be true, but he crams two qualifica- The size and quality of brains
tions into his ‘supposition’: it only concerns ‘women as they now are’,
and there are ‘great and numerous exceptions’ to it. With those two This is sometimes said: ‘There is anatomical evidence that
qualifications, it seems, the indented passage expresses something that men’s mental capacity is superior to women’s: they have a
Still, this difference ·between women
he thinks probably is true.] larger brain.’ In fact, it is by no means established that a
and men· can only affect what sort of excellence and achieve- woman’s brain is smaller than a man’s. . . . The size of the
ment each has, not how excellent it is or how practically brain in human beings, anatomists say, varies much less
valuable it is. ·And the underlying hint in all this that the than the size of the body or even of the head, and the one
man’s kind of mind is somehow primary, central, optimal, can’t be at all inferred from the other. Some women certainly
should be challenged·. This exclusive working of a part of the have as large a brain as any man. I know of a man who
mind, this absorption of the whole thinking faculty in a single weighed many human brains and said that the heaviest he
subject and concentration of it on a single work—is this the knew of. . . .was that of a woman. Furthermore, the precise
normal and healthful condition of the human faculties? It relation between the brain and the intellectual powers is a
hasn’t been shown to be so, even in theorising activities. controversial matter that isn’t yet well understood. We can’t
What this concentration gains in specialised projects is lost, doubt that there is a very close relation. The brain is certainly
I believe, in the capacity of the mind for the other purposes of the material organ of thought and feeling (never mind the
life; and even in abstract ·theorising·, I am firmly convinced, ongoing controversy about which mental abilities correspond
the mind achieves more by frequently returning to a difficult to which parts of the brain); and it would be anomalous—an
problem than by sticking to it without interruption. Anyway, exception to everything we know of the general laws of life
in practical projects, great and small, the ability to pass and organisation—if brain-size didn’t contribute something
promptly from one thing to another without letting the active to mental power. But it would be an equally anomalous
spring of the intellect lose energy between the two is a much exception if the brain influenced thought only through its
more valuable power ·than the ability to stick at a problem size. In all nature’s more delicate operations—of which the
without any breaks·; and this more valuable power is one physiology of living things are the most delicate, and the
that women pre-eminently possess because of that very workings of the nervous system by far the most delicate
‘mobility’ of which they are accused. . . . People have often of these—differences in the effect depend on differences of
noticed women’s ability to do their thinking in circumstances •quality in the physical agents as much as on their •quantity;
and at times that almost any man would make an excuse to and if we judge by outputs, the level of fineness of quality
himself for not even trying; and a woman’s mind, though it in the brains and nervous systems of women is higher on
38
average than that of men. Never mind abstract difference belittling those who explain these differences in terms of the
of quality, which is hard to verify. We know that an organ’s different ways in which human beings relate to society and
efficiency depends not only on its •size but on its •activity: to life.
and we can get a rough measure of this in how energetically
the blood circulates through the organ, because the organ’s
Different nations, different views
activities and its ability to repair itself depend mainly on
blood-circulation. The differences that we see between the People’s views about the nature of women are mere empirical
mental operations of the two sexes suggest that men on the generalisations, formed on the basis of the first instances
average have the advantage in the size of the brain, and that present themselves, with no help from philosophy or
women in the activity of blood in the brain. That conjecture analysis. This is so true that the popular idea of women’s
about difference of brain-organisation, based on analogy, nature differs in different countries, according to how women
suggests differences in output of kinds that we do most have been shaped by the opinions and social circumstances
commonly see. ]Mill goes into this a little, along lines already of the country in question. An oriental thinks that women
developed. Women are quicker in having thoughts and are by nature peculiarly voluptuous. . . . An Englishman
feelings, but less apt to stay with a given line of thought usually thinks that they are by nature cold. The sayings
or activity after it has become tiring. In the first place, about women’s fickleness are mostly French. . . . The English
men’s mental operations might be expected to be slower commonly remark on how much more constant women are
than women’s; men wouldn’t be as prompt as women in than men. The attitude that inconstancy is discreditable to a
thinking, or as quick to feel. Mill suggests (though he doesn’t woman has been prevalent in England for much longer than
explicitly state it) a comparison with wheels: small ones are in France; besides which Englishwomen are in their inmost
easier to start going but also easier to stop. Then:] This nature much more subdued to opinion ·than Frenchwomen
speculation is entirely hypothetical; all it does is to suggest a are·. Incidentally; Englishmen are especially poorly placed
line of inquiry. I repeat that we don’t yet know for sure that to judge what is or isn’t natural—to women, or to men,
there is any natural difference in the average strength or or to human beings altogether—if they have only English
direction of the mental capacities of the two sexes. And this experience to go on; because there is no place where human
can’t be known when •the psychological laws of the formation nature shows so little of its basic structure as it does in
of character have been so little studied. . . .and when •the England. For better and for worse, the English are further
most obvious external causes of difference of character are from a state of nature than any other modern people; more
habitually disregarded—left unnoticed by the observer, and than any other people, they are a product of civilisation
looked down on with haughty contempt by the prevalent and discipline. England is the country in which social
schools of natural history and of mental philosophy. Those discipline has most succeeded not so much in •conquering
schools disagree about what the source is of what mainly as in •suppressing whatever is liable to conflict with it. The
distinguishes human beings from one another—disagree English, more than any other people, not only act according
about whether it is material or spiritual—but they agree in to rule but feel according to rule. In other countries, the
39
taught opinion or the social requirement may be the stronger Women in the arts and sciences
power, but the promptings of the individual nature are
always visible under it, and often resisting it: rule may be The first point is that we don’t have enough empirical ev-
stronger than nature, but nature is still there. In England, idence to support an induction. With a very few excep-
rule has largely replaced nature. [Mill develops this line tions, women didn’t begin to try their abilities in philosophy,
of thought: an Englishman will get human nature wrong science, or art until the past three generations. Only in
because he doesn’t see it; a Frenchman sees it, but only in a England and France have many made the attempt even
form distorted by civilisation, so that he gets it wrong too.] today. Calculating the probabilities, was it to be expected
that a mind having the requisites of first rate eminence in
•theorising or creative work would have shown up during
I have said that we can’t now know ·for sure· how much that ·rather short· period of time among the women whose
of the existing mental difference between men and women tastes and social situation allowed them to devote themselves
is natural and how much artificial, or whether there are to •these pursuits? In every kind of activity that there has
any natural differences at all, or what they are if there are been time for, women have done quite as much (at all but
any. . . . But where certainty can’t be had, there may be ways the very highest ranks in the scale of excellence), and have
of arriving at some degree of probability. The first question obtained as many high prizes as could be expected, given
to tackle, and one we have the best chance of answering, is: the length of time and the number of competitors. This is
What is the origin of the differences between women and men especially true in the art in which they have been active for
that we actually observe? I’ll explore for the answer to this the longest, namely literature—both prose and poetry. If we
along the only path by which it can be reached, namely by go back to the time when very few women even tried, some of
tracing the mental consequences of external influences. We those few were highly successful. The Greeks always counted
can’t isolate a human being from his ·social· circumstances, Sappho among their great poets; and we may well suppose
so as to learn experimentally what he would have been by that Myrtis, who is said to have been •Pindar’s teacher, and
nature; but we can consider •what his circumstances have Corinna, who five times defeated him in the competition for
been, and •what he is, and whether one could have produced the poetry prize, must at least have been good enough poets
the other. to be compared with •that great name. Aspasia did not leave
any philosophical writings; but it’s an acknowledged fact
that Socrates went to her for instruction and reports that he
So let us consider the only conspicuous example we can obtained it.
see of apparent inferiority of women to men, apart from If we consider women’s works in modem times, and
the merely physical one of bodily strength. No top-ranking contrast them with men’s, either in literary or in the ·fine·
production in philosophy, science, or art has been the work arts, the inferiority that we can see boils down to one thing—a
of a woman. Can we explain this without supposing that very significant thing—namely a lack of originality. Not a
women are naturally incapable of producing them? total lack; for any production that has any substantive value
40
has an originality of its own—is a conception of the mind know how great a capacity for theory-building may have
that produced it, not a copy of something else. The writings been lost to mankind by the misfortunes of her life. [Héloise,
of women abound in thoughts that are ‘original’ in the sense as she is usually named these days, was a notable scholar of the 12th
of being not borrowed but derived from the thinker’s own century; the ‘misfortunes of her life’ refer to troubles arising from her
observations or intellectual processes. But women haven’t being the lover of Abelard].
And in the times when a significant
yet produced any of •the great and luminous new ideas that number of women have began to cultivate serious thought,
form an era in thought, or any of the •fundamentally new originality has never been easy to achieve. Nearly all the
conceptions in art that open a vista of possible effects not thoughts that can be reached by mere strength of basic
before thought of, and found a new school. Their composi- intellect were reached long ago; and originality in any high
tions are mostly based on the existing fund of thought, and sense of that word is now scarcely ever attained except by
their creations don’t deviate far from existing types. This is minds that have undergone elaborate discipline, and are
the sort—·the only sort·—of inferiority that their works do deeply versed in the results of previous thinking. Someone
manifest. There is no inferiority in execution, the detailed remarked regarding the present age that its most original
application of thought, the perfection of style. In respect of thinkers are those who have known most thoroughly what
composition and the management of detail, our best novelists their predecessors had thought: and this will always be the
have mostly been women; and modern literature doesn’t case. Every fresh stone in the structure has to be placed on
contain a more eloquent vehicle of thought than the style the top of so many others that anyone who wants to take a
of Madame de Staël, or a finer specimen of purely artistic share in the present stage of the work has to go through a
excellence than the prose of Madame Sand, whose style long climb, carrying up materials. How many women have
acts on the nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or gone through any such process? Mrs. Somerville may be the
Mozart. What is mainly lacking, I repeat, is high originality only woman who knows as much mathematics as is needed
of conception. Let me consider how we might explain this for making any considerable mathematical discovery; she
deficiency. happens not to be one of the two or three persons who in
Let us remember. . . .that her lifetime have been associated with some striking advance
during all the period in the world’s existence and in mathematics; is this a proof that women are inferior?
development of civilisation in which great and fruitful Since economics became a science, two women have known
new truths could be arrived at by sheer force of enough of it to write usefully on the subject; countless men
intellect, with little previous study and accumulation have written on economics during the same time—of how
of knowledge many of those can we claim more ·than that they have
women didn’t concern themselves with theorising at all. written usefully·? If no woman, so far, has been a great
From the days of Hypatia [a famous mathematician, astronomer historian, what woman has been learned enough for that?
and philosopher, 4th century] to those of the Reformation, the If no woman is a great philologist, what woman has studied
illustrious Heloisa is almost the only woman for whom such Sanscrit and Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulphila and the Persic
an achievement might have been possible; and we don’t of the Zendavesta? Even in practical matters we all know
41
how little value the originality of untaught geniuses has. It have had a literature of their own. As it is, they haven’t
means re-inventing in a rudimentary form something already created one, because they found a highly advanced literature
invented and improved on by many successive inventors. already created. If the knowledge of antiquity hadn’t been
When women have had the preparation that all men now in abeyance for several centuries, or if the Renaissance had
need to be importantly original, then we’ll be in a position to occurred before the Gothic cathedrals were built, they never
begin judging by experience their capacity for originality. would have been built ·because the builders would have
No doubt it often happens that someone who •hasn’t had models in mind—ancient Greek temples or Renaissance
widely and carefully studied the thoughts of others on a buildings—which would have deprived them of the freedom
subject has through natural intelligence a bright idea which to be original·. We see that in France and Italy imitation of
he can suggest but can’t prove, but which when matured may ancient literature stopped original development even after it
be an important addition to knowledge. But justice can’t had started. All women who write are pupils of the great
be done to it until someone who •does have the required male writers. A painter’s early pictures, even if he is a
knowledge takes it in hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or Raphael, are indistinguishable in style from his master’s.
practical form, and fits it into its place among the existing Even a Mozart doesn’t display his powerful originality in
truths of philosophy or science. Does anyone think that his earliest pieces. What years are to a gifted individual,
women don’t have such ideas? They occur by the hundreds generations are to a mass. If women’s literature is ever to
to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly lost for lack have a different collective character from men’s because of
of a husband or friend who has the knowledge that enables differences in their natural tendencies, it will need much
him to value them properly and bring them before the world; more time than it has had so far before it can free itself from
and even when that happens, they usually appear as his the influence of accepted models and guide itself by its own
ideas, not their real author’s. Who can tell how many of impulses. I don’t think that there will turn out to be any
the most original thoughts put out by male writers belong natural tendencies common to women that distinguish their
to a woman by •suggestion, to the man only by •verifying highest intellectual capacities from those of men; but even
it and working it out? If I may judge by my own case, a if that is right, every individual woman writer has her own
very large proportion indeed! [See the last four lines of the editorial individual tendencies, which at present are still subdued by
introduction to this text.] the influence of precedent and example; and it will require
If we turn from pure theory-building to •literature in the generations more before their individuality is well enough
narrow sense of the term and •the fine arts, there is a very developed to make headway against that influence.
obvious reason why women’s literature is broadly. . . .an It is in the fine arts, properly so-called, that the prima
imitation of men’s. Why is Roman literature, as critics facie evidence of inferior original powers in women is the
proclaim until we are sick of it, not original but an im- strongest, because (it may be said) opinion doesn’t exclude
itation of Greek literature? Simply because the Greeks them from these but rather encourages them, and in the
came first. If women lived in a different country from affluent classes the education of women is mainly composed
men, and had never read any of their writings, they would of training in the fine arts. [In that sentence as Mill wrote it,
42
there is a charming triple dose of caution: ‘. . . the (i) prima facie evidence grandest things in which a human being could excel; and
Yet the gap
(etc.) (ii) at first sight (iii) appears to be the strongest’.] through it men became the companions of sovereigns and the
between the best that women have done and the highest equals of the highest nobility—which they can’t become these
eminence attained by men has been greater in this line of days by anything but political or military distinction. In the
activity than in many others. What explains this, however, present age, men of anything like that calibre seek to become
is the familiar fact—more universally true in the fine arts famous and useful to the world by something more important
than anywhere else—that professionals are vastly superior than painting: and it is only now and then that a Reynolds
to amateurs. Nearly all women in the educated classes are or a Turner (of whose relative rank among eminent men I
taught a certain amount of some branch of the fine arts, don’t offer an opinion) applies himself to that art. Music
but not so that they can earn their living or their social belongs to a different order of things; it doesn’t require the
consequence by it. Women artists are all amateurs. The only same general powers of mind, and seems to depend more
exceptions to this confirm the general truth: women. are on a natural gift; and it may be thought surprising that
taught music, but only as performers, not as composers; no great musical composer has been a woman. But even
and accordingly men are superior to women in music only this natural gift can’t be made available for great creations
as composers, not as performers. The only one of the fine without study and professional devotion to the pursuit. [The
arts that women do seriously follow as a profession and an only first-rate composers, Mill says, have been German or
occupation for life is the theatrical; and it is commonly agreed Italian; and those are countries where the development of
that in that they are as good as men if not better. To be fair women’s intellects is grossly neglected, far worse than France
about this, we should compare the productions of women and England. And he adds another point about Germany
in any branch of art with those of men who don’t follow and Italy: there have probably been thousands of men who
it as a profession. Women have surely produced musical have learned ‘the principles of musical composition’ and
compositions, for example, that are every bit as good any barely scores of women who have done so. From this guess,
produced by male amateurs. There are now a few women, a Mill does the math:] On the doctrine of averages, we can’t
very few, who practise painting as a profession, and these are reasonably expect to see more than one eminent woman to
already beginning to show quite as much talent as could be fifty eminent men; and the last three centuries have not
expected. Even male painters (pace Mr. Ruskin) haven’t done produced fifty eminent male composers either in Germany
anything very remarkable in the last few centuries, and it will or in Italy.
be long before they do so. The reason why the old painters There are other reasons, too, that help to explain why
were so greatly superior to the modern is that a greatly women remain behind men even in the pursuits that are
superior class of men took up painting. In the 14th and 15th open to both. For one thing, very few women have time for
centuries the Italian painters were the most accomplished them. This may seem a paradox, but it is an undoubted
men of their age. The greatest of them had encyclopaedic social fact. (1) The superintending of the family and the
skills and powers, like the great men of ·ancient· Greece. But domestic expenditure which occupies at least one woman
in their times fine art was felt and thought to be among the in every family, usually the one of mature years and long
43
experience; unless the family can afford to hire domestic no-one is offended if he devotes his time to some pursuit
help, opening the door to waste and dishonesty. Even that he has chosen; ‘I am busy’ is accepted as a valid excuse
when the superintending of a household isn’t laborious for not responding to every casual demand that may be
in other ways, it’s a very heavy burden on the thoughts; made on him. Are a woman’s occupations, especially the
it •requires incessant vigilance, an eye that catches every ones she chooses, ever regarded as excusing her from any
detail, and it •constantly presents inescapable problems to be of the demands of society? Even her most necessary and
solved. If a woman has the rank and wealth to be somewhat recognised duties are barely allowed as exempting her. To
relieved from these cares, she still has on her shoulders the be entitled to give precedence to her own •business over
management of the family’s relations with other families—its other people’s •amusement [those are Mill’s nouns], she needs
relations with ‘society’, as it is called—and the less she has an illness in the family or something else out of the common
to do on the domestic side, the greater becomes the ‘social’ way. . . . Is it surprising, then, if she doesn’t reach the highest
task: dinner parties, concerts, evening parties, morning eminence in activities that require unbroken attention and
visits, letter-writing, and all that goes with them. In addition have to be focussed on as the chief interest of life? Such is
to all this, society imposes on women, and only on them, philosophy, and such above all is art, in which besides the
the engrossing duty of making themselves charming. A devotion of •the thoughts and feelings •the hand must also
clever woman of the higher ranks finds her talents being be kept constantly at work to attain high skill.
exercised almost to the full by her development of graces
of manner and the arts of conversation. Let us look just at [Mill now has a paragraph about what is required for ‘the
the outward side of the subject. Any woman who attaches great productions that immortalise a name’—far more than
any value to dressing well (I don’t mean expensively, but what’s needed to earn a living as a professional artist. That
with taste and awareness of what is naturally and socially higher level requires a passionate desire for fame, which
appropriate) must give to her own clothes and perhaps those carries the person through years of drudgery; and Mill
of her daughters an amount of time and thought that would continues:] Women seldom have this eagerness for fame. . . .
go a great way towards achieving respectable results in art, The influence they seek is over those who immediately
or science, or literature3 . . . . And there is another burden. surround them. They want to be liked, loved, or admired
Independently of the regular domestic and social duties that by those whom they see, and they usually settle for the
are laid on a woman, she is expected to have her time and level of proficiency in knowledge, arts etc. that suffices for
abilities always at the disposal of everybody. Even if a man that. [This fact about women, Mills says, is a product of
doesn’t have a profession to exempt him from such demands, the circumstances in which society has placed them; it isn’t
part of their nature; but it is real, and shouldn’t be forgotten.
3
‘The sound turn of mind that enables a man to acquire a just idea of what is right in •ornaments seems to be the same as what gives him good
judgment in •the more stable principles of art. Ornamentation has the same centre of perfection as the more serious arts; it’s just that it is the
centre of a smaller circle.—To illustrate this by fashion in dress, in which there is agreed to be a good or bad taste. . . . He who invents with the most
success, or dresses in the best taste, if he had employed his skills and insight to greater purposes, would probably have revealed himself to have just
as much skill—i.e. to have formed the same correct taste—in the highest labours of art.’—Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, Disc. vii.
44
Also, men are encouraged to seek fame, whereas for women] example of this than men’s silly. . . .hymns of praise to the
the desire of fame is considered daring and unfeminine. . . . If moral, nature of women.
you have any ability to estimate •the influence on the mind The complimentary dictum about women’s moral superi-
of the entire domestic and social position and the whole habit ority might be paired off with the disparaging one about their
of a life, you’ll see that •that influence completely explains greater liability to moral bias. Women, we are told, can’t
nearly all the apparent differences between women and men, resist their personal partialities: their judgment in serious
including all that imply inferiority ·on the part of women·. affairs is warped by their sympathies and antipathies. Even
if this is so, it is still to be proved that women are oftener
Moral differences misled by their personal •feelings than men are by their
personal •interests. The chief difference there seems be that
As for moral—as distinct from intellectual—differences, it men are led from the course of duty and public interest by
is commonly said that women are ‘better than men’. This their concern for •themselves, whereas women (not being
empty compliment will provoke a bitter smile from every allowed to have private interests of their own) are led astray
woman of spirit, because it implies that the situation of by their regard for somebody else. Bear in mind also that
women is unique: there’s no other context in which it is all the education that women get from society •instills in
regarded as natural and suitable that the better should obey them the feeling that the only duty of care that they owe is to
the worse! If this piece of idle talk is good for anything it individuals who are ·personally· connected with them, and
is only as men’s admission that power corrupts; because •doesn’t introduce them to the ideas—even the elementary
that is the only truth that is proved or illustrated by the fact, ideas—that are involved in any intelligent concern for larger
if it is a fact, that women are better. And ·it may indeed interests or higher moral objects. The complaint against
be a fact, because· it is true that servitude, except when it them resolves itself merely into this, that they fulfill only too
actually brutalises, is less corrupting to the slaves than to faithfully the only duty they are taught, which is also almost
the slave-masters. Of these two situations: the only one that they are allowed to practise.
•being restrained, perhaps by arbitrary power, When the privileged make any concession to the unpriv-
•being allowed to exercise arbitrary power without ileged, it is nearly always because the unprivileged have
restraint, had the power to extort those changes. This is so much
it is the former that is more wholesome for one’s moral so that no arguments against the subjection of women are
nature. Far fewer women than men commit crimes, it is likely to be attended to by people in general as long as they
said, and no doubt far fewer slaves than free men do so. can tell themselves that ‘women don’t complain of it’. [See
Those who are under the control of others cannot often also the section starting on page 8.] That fact certainly enables
commit crimes, unless commanded by their masters and men to retain their unjust privilege some time longer, but it
serving their purposes. The world, including the herd of doesn’t make it less unjust. . . . Actually, women do complain
studious men, blindly ignore and pass over all the influences of the general lot of women; plaintive elegies on that are
of social circumstances; and I don’t know of any more blatant very common in the writings of women, and were still more
45
so back when the lamentations couldn’t be suspected of own consent; but they would have thought it very pre-
having any practical objective. ·But· their complaints are sumptuous [= ’thoroughly] out of line’ to claim any share in
like men’s complaints about the general unsatisfactoriness the king’s sovereign authority. The only rebellion against
of human life; they aren’t meant to imply blame or to plead established rules that is viewed in that way today is that
for change. But though women don’t complain about the of women against their subjection. A woman who joins in
power of husbands, each complains about her own husband, any movement that her husband disapproves, makes herself
or the husbands of her friends. It is the same in all other a martyr, without even being able to be an apostle, for the
cases of servitude, at least at the start of the movement husband can legally put a stop to her apostleship. Women
towards liberation. The serfs at first complained not about can’t be expected to devote themselves to the emancipation
the power of their lords but only about their tyranny. The of women until considerable numbers of men are prepared
commoners began by claiming a few municipal privileges; to join with them in the undertaking.
then they asked to be freed from being taxed without their
46
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill 4: What good would reform do?
CHAPTER 4
What good would reform do?
There remains a question that is as important as those another human being, in the hope—yes, really—that this
I have discussed—a question that will be asked with the other will use the power solely for the good of the person
most persistent vigour by opponents whose conviction is subjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known
somewhat shaken on the main point—namely: to our law. There are no longer any legal slaves except the
What good are we to expect from the changes you mistress of every house.
propose in our customs and institutions? Would So the question Cui bono? [Latin = ‘Who will benefit from this?]
mankind be better off if women were free? If not, is not likely to be asked regarding the reform of the marriage
why disturb their minds and try to make a social law. We may be told that the evil ·of such reform· would
revolution in the name of an abstract right? outweigh the good, but there can be no denying that there
This question isn’t likely to be asked regarding the proposed would be good results. In regard to the larger question,
change in the condition of women in marriage. The countless however—
instances of suffering, immorality, evils of all sorts that come •removing women’s disabilities,
from the subjection of individual women to individual men •recognising them as the equals of men in every aspect
are far too terrible to be overlooked. Thoughtless or dishonest of citizenship,
people who attend only to cases that are extreme or that •opening up to them all honourable employments, and
receive publicity may say that these evils are ‘exceptional’; •allowing them to have the training and education that
but no-one can be blind to their existence or (often) to their would qualify them for those employments
intensity. And it is perfectly obvious that •the abuse of the —for many people it isn’t enough that this inequality has
power can’t be lessened very much while •the power remains. no just or legitimate defence; they demand to know what
This power is given or offered not to good men or to decently definite positive •advantage would come from abolishing it.
respectable men, but to all men, including the most brutal
and the most criminal. The only constraint is that of opinion, The moral education of males
and such men are usually unaffected by any opinion except
that of men like themselves. . . . The law of servitude in My first answer is: the •advantage of having the most univer-
marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of sal and pervading of all human relations regulated by justice
the modern world, and to all the experience through which instead of injustice. That bare statement will tell anyone
those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. who attaches a moral meaning to words what a vast gain
Now that negro slavery has been abolished, marriage is the this would be for the human condition; it’s hardly possible
only institution in which a human whose faculties are all to make it any stronger by any explanation or illustration.
in excellent order is delivered up to the tender mercies of All of mankind’s selfish propensities, the self-worship, the
47
unjust self-preference, are rooted in and nourished by the his strength;

present constitution of the relation between men and women. •how schoolboys inject it into one another;
Think what it does to a boy to grow up to manhood in the •how early the youth thinks himself superior to his
belief that—without any merit or any exertion of his own, mother, owing her patience but no real respect; and
though he may be the most frivolous and empty or the most •how lofty and sultan-like a sense of superiority he
ignorant and stolid of mankind—by the mere fact of being feels over the woman whom he honours by admitting
born a male he is by right the superior of every one of half her to a partnership of his life.
the human race. That ‘inferior’ half probably includes some Isn’t it obvious that all this perverts the whole manner of
whose real superiority to himself he has daily or hourly existence of the man, both as an individual and as a social
occasion to feel! But even if his whole conduct is guided being? It matches a hereditary king’s feeling that he is
by a woman ·governess or teacher·, if he is a fool he thinks excellent above others because he was born a king, or a noble
that of course she isn’t and can’t be his equal in ability and because he was born a noble. The relation between husband
judgment; and if he isn’t a fool he does worse—he sees that and wife is like that between lord and vassal, except that the
she is superior to him, and believes that still he is entitled wife is held to more unlimited obedience than the vassal was.
to command and she is bound to obey. What effect on his The vassal’s character may have been affected for better and
character will this lesson have? And men of the cultivated for worse by his subordination, but it is obvious that the
classes are often not aware how deeply the lesson sinks into lord’s character was affected greatly for the worse. If he came
most male minds. That is because among right-feeling and to believe that his vassals were really superior to himself, or
well-bred people the inequality is kept out of sight as much to feel that he was given command over people as good as
as possible—especially out of sight of the children. Boys are himself, through no merits or labours of his own but merely
required to be as obedient to their mother as to their father; for having. . . .taken the trouble to be born, ·still the situation
they aren’t allowed to domineer over their sisters, and aren’t will have harmed his character·. The self-worship of the
accustomed to seeing their sisters made subordinate to them; monarch or of the feudal lord is matched by the self-worship
on the contrary, feelings of chivalry towards females are of the male. Anyone who grows up from childhood with
highlighted, while the servitude that requires those feelings unearned distinctions is bound to become conceited and
is kept in the background. Well brought up youths in the self-congratulatory about them, this being the worst sort of
higher classes thus often escape the bad influences of the pride. . . . And when the feeling of being raised above the
subordination of women in their early years, and experience whole of the other sex is combined with personal authority
them only when they arrive at manhood and fall under the over one woman, the situation ·may be ‘educational’ in
dominion of facts as they really exist. Such people are little either of two ways·. (1) To men whose strongest points
aware, regarding a boy who is differently brought up, of of character are conscience and affection, the marriage may
•how early the notion of his inherent superiority to a be •a school of conscientious and affectionate gentleness
girl arises in his mind; and patience, but (2) to men of a different sort it will be •a
•how it grows with his growth and strengthens with regularly constituted College for training them in arrogance
48
and overbearingness. . . . other human beings have, would be doubling the supply of
Basing domestic existence on a relation that conflicts abilities available for the higher service of humanity. Where
with the first principles of social justice—think about the there is now one person qualified to benefit mankind. . . .as a
example this sets and the education that it gives to the public teacher or an administrator of some branch of public
sentiments! The very nature of man ensures that it will or social affairs, there would then be a chance of two. As
have such an enormous perverting influence that we can things now stand, there is a terrific shortage of people who
hardly even imagine the enormous improvement that would are competent to do excellently anything that needs any
come about if the unjust basis for marriage were removed. significant amount of ability to do; so that the world suffers
Everything that education and civilisation are doing to erase a serious loss by refusing to make use of half the talent it
the influences on character of the law of force, and replace possesses. It’s true that this amount of mental power isn’t
them by influences of the law of justice, remains merely on totally lost: much of it is employed, and would in any case
the surface as long as the enemy’s stronghold is not attacked. be employed, in domestic management and in the few other
The principle of the modern movement in morals and politics occupations open to women; and the personal influence of
is that what entitles someone to respect is his conduct and individual women over individual men brings some indirect
nothing else; that men’s claim to deference comes not from benefit to other activities. But these benefits are partial; their
what they are but from what they do; that (above all) the only range is extremely narrow; and if you insist on •deducting
rightful claim to power and authority comes from merit, not them from the total amount of fresh social power that would
birth. If no human being were given permanent authority be gained by liberating women, then you must •add to that
over any other, society wouldn’t be employed in building up total the benefit of the stimulus that men’s intellects would
with one hand character-traits that it has to curb with the get from the competition ·posed by liberated women·. . . .
other. For the first time in man’s existence on earth, the child This great gain for the intellectual power of our
would really be trained in the way he should go, and when species. . . .would come partly through better and more com-
he grew up there would be a chance of his staying on that plete intellectual education of women, which would then
path. But so long as •the right of the strong to have power improve in step with the improvement of men’s. Women
over the weak rules in the very heart of society, the attempt in general would be brought up with the same ability to
to get people’s conduct to be guided by •the principle of equal understand business, public affairs, and the higher matters
rights for the weak will always be an uphill struggle. . . . of theorising as men in the same class of society; and
the select few of either sex who were qualified not only to
Doubling the brain pool understand the work and thought of others but to think or do
something considerable themselves would get the same help
The second benefit to be expected from giving to women the in improving and training their capacities. In this way, the
free use of their abilities by leaving them free to choose their widening of women’s sphere of action would operate for good,
employments and opening up to them the same range of by raising their education to the level of men’s and making
occupation and the same rewards and encouragements as it share in all improvements made men’s education. But
49
independently of all this, merely breaking down the barrier great Hector acknowledged being powerfully motivated by his
would have an educational virtue of the highest worth. The concern for how he would appear to the Trojan women. [Mill
mere getting rid of the idea that says this by quoting a line from Homer’s Greek.] The moral influence
all the wider subjects of thought and action, all the of women has worked in two ways. (i) It has been a softening
things that are of general and not solely of private influence. Those who were most liable to be the victims
interest, are men’s business from which women are of violence have naturally tended as much as they could
to be warned off—positively debarred from most of it towards limiting its scope and cutting back its excesses.
and coldly tolerated in the little that is allowed them— Those who were not taught to fight have naturally tended to
the mere consciousness a woman would then have of being a favour any way of settling differences other than fighting. In
human being like any other, entitled to choose her pursuits, general, those who have suffered most from others’ giving
urged or invited. . . .to interest herself in whatever is inter- free rein to their selfish passions have ·naturally· been the
esting to human beings, entitled to have her opinion (like most earnest supporters of any moral law that offered a
any other) taken account of in human concerns, whether way of controlling passion. Women were powerfully instru-
or not she tried to participate in them—this alone would mental in inducing the northern conquerors to adopt the
enormously expand women’s faculties while also broadening creed of Christianity, a creed so much more favourable to
the range of their moral sentiments. women than any that preceded it. The conversion of the
Anglo-Saxons and of the Franks may be said to have been
begun by the wives of Ethelbert and Clovis. (2) Women’s
The moral influence of women: chivalry opinions have conspicuously given a powerful stimulus to
So the liberation of women would double the amount of the qualities in men that women needed their protectors
individual talent available for the conduct of human affairs, to have because they weren’t themselves trained in them.
which certainly aren’t at present so rich in able guidance that Courage and the other military virtues have always been
they can afford to do without half of what nature offers! The greatly indebted to men’s wish to be admired by women; and
result of that would be that women’s opinions would have a this mechanism works for far more than just this one class
more beneficial influence than they now do on the general of eminent qualities, because. . . .being thought highly of by
mass of human belief and sentiment. A ‘more beneficial’ men has always been the best passport to the admiration
rather than a ‘greater’ influence? Yes, because women’s and favour of women.
influence over the general tone of opinion has always—or at The combination of (1–2) those two kinds of moral in-
least from the earliest known period—been very considerable. fluence by women gave birth to the spirit of chivalry, the
•Mothers’ influence on the early character of their sons, and special feature of which is that it aims at combining the
the •desire of young men to be liked by young women, have highest standard of (2) the warlike qualities with (1) the
throughout history been important factors in the formation development of gentleness, generosity, and self-denial to-
of character, and have determined some of the chief steps wards the non-military and defenseless classes generally,
in the progress of civilisation. Even in the Homeric age, the with a special submission and worship directed towards
50
women. What distinguished women from the other defence- of the moral life of modern times must be
less classes was their power to give high rewards to those •justice: each person’s respect for the rights of every
who tried to earn their favour rather than forcing them into other person, and
obedience. The practice of chivalry fell sadly short of its •prudence: each person’s ability to take care of himself.
theoretical standard—even more than practice generally falls Chivalry didn’t erect legal barriers to any of the forms of
below theory!—and yet it remains one of the most precious wrong that reigned unpunished throughout society; the most
monuments of humanity’s moral history. It was a remarkable it achieved in that line was to steer the instruments of praise
example of an organised joint effort by a most disorganised and admiration in such a way as to encourage a few men
and distracted society to raise up and act on a moral ideal to do right in preference to wrong. But what morality must
greatly in advance of its social condition and institutions. It really depend on are its penal sanctions—its power to deter
was indeed so far in advance that it was completely frustrated people from acting badly. The security of society cannot
in the main objective; and yet it was never entirely ineffective, rest merely on honouring right behaviour: that is a relatively
and has left its mark—a very detectable and (for the most weak motive in most people, and in some it has no force at all.
part) highly valuable mark—on the ideas and feelings of all Modern society can repress all kinds of wrong conduct by an
subsequent times. appropriate use of the superior strength that civilisation has
The chivalrous ideal is the high point of women’s given it, and thus make life tolerable for the weaker members
influence on the moral development of mankind; and if of society (who are no longer defenseless but protected by
women are to remain in subjection it is lamentable that the law), doing this without having to rely on the chivalrous
chivalrous standard has passed away, because it’s the only feelings of those who are in a position to tyrannise. The
standard that has any power to alleviate the demoralising beauties and graces of the chivalrous character are still what
influences of the subjection of women. But changes in they always were, but the rights of the weak and the general
the general state of mankind made it inevitable that the comfort of human life now rest on a far surer and steadier
chivalrous ideal of morality would be replaced by a totally support. Or, rather, they do so in every relation of life except
different one. Chivalry tried to infuse moral elements into the marriage relation.
a state of society in which everything depended for good or
evil on •individual strength and skill, under the softening The moral influence of women: charity
influences of •individual delicacy and generosity. In modern
societies everything. . . .is settled not by individual effort but The moral influence of women these days is just as real as
by the combined operations of many people, and society’s it used to be, but it is no longer so marked and definite: it
main occupation has changed from fighting to business, has moved nearer to being merged in the general influence
from military to industrial life. The demands of this new life of public opinion. [Regarding the phrase ‘the contagion of sympathy’:
don’t rule out the virtues of generosity, any more than the The root meaning of ‘sympathy’ is ’feeling with’; in early modern times
demands of the old life did, but the new life doesn’t entirely the word covered kinds of going-along-with that didn’t involve feelings
depend on them ·as the old life did·. The main foundations at all—e.g. a violin’s G-string starts vibrating because another nearby
51
G-string has been plucked. Mill is thinking about feelings, of course, but often anything but favourable to public virtue.
not only feeling for people’s misfortunes: in his day someone’s sharing But they do today have some influence in setting the
a friend’s pleasure could be called ‘sympathy’. You can see why he tone for public moralities; that has been the case since
used ‘contagion’; he wasn’t implying that there is anything wrong with their sphere of action has been a little widened and a good
sympathy.] Both through the contagion of sympathy, and many of them have worked to promote objectives that stretch
through men’s wish to shine in the eyes of women, the beyond their own family and household. The influence of
feelings of women have great effect in keeping alive what women counts for a great deal in two of the most marked
remains of the chivalrous ideal—in encouraging the feelings features of modern European life—its aversion to war, and
and continuing the traditions and spirit of generosity. In its addiction to philanthropy. Excellent characteristics both;
these aspects of character, women’s standard is higher than but unfortunately the influence of women, while it is valuable
men’s; in the quality of justice, it is somewhat lower. As in encouraging these feelings in general, does at least as
regards the relations of private life, the influence of women much harm as good in the directions in which it steers them.
is—broadly speaking, but with some individual exceptions— On the philanthropic side more particularly, the two areas
encouraging to the softer virtues, discouraging to the sterner chiefly cultivated by women are •religious missionary-work
ones. Virtue’s biggest trials in the concerns of life involve and •charity. Religious missions at home are merely ways of
•the conflict between interest and principle; and women’s making religious animosities even more bitter; and foreign
influence •in these is of a very mixed character. When missions usually involve blindly running at an object without
the principle involved happens to be one of the very few either knowing or caring about the fatal harms—fatal to the
that women’s religious or moral education has strongly religious purpose itself as well as to any other desirable
impressed on them, they are powerful aids to virtue; and purpose—which may be produced by the means the mission-
their husbands and sons are often prompted by them to acts aries employ. As for charity: that is an affair in which •the
of self-denial that they couldn’t have performed without that immediate effect on the persons directly concerned are apt
stimulus. But the moral principles that have been impressed to be completely at war with •the ultimate consequence to
on women, given their present education and position, cover the general good; and women can’t see and are unwilling to
only a small proportion of the field of virtue, and they are admit the ultimately harmful tendency of any form of charity
principally negative—forbidding particular acts but having or philanthropy that commends itself to their sympathetic
little to do with the ·positive· direction of thoughts and pur- feelings. This is result of •their education—which educates
poses. I’m afraid it must be said that women’s influence does their feelings rather than their understanding—and of •the
little to encourage or support the devotion of the energies to habit that their whole life has instilled in them of looking
purposes that don’t promise private advantages to the family. to immediate effects on individuals and not to more distant
It is small blame to them that they discourage projects of effects on classes of people. The large and growing mass of
which they haven’t learnt to see the advantage, and which unenlightened and shortsighted benevolence, which,
take their men away from them and from the interests of the by taking the care of people’s lives out of their own
family. But the consequence is that women’s influence is hands and relieving them from the disagreeable conse-
52
quences of their own acts, undermines the very foun- experience of the things that their opinions influence; and
dations of the self-respect, self-help, and self-control the points I have been making show that those changes
that are essential both for individual prosperity and would improve the part that women take in the formation of
for social virtue general opinion. ·I now go on to argue that· an even more
—this waste of resources and of benevolent feelings in doing remarkable improvement would be made in the influence
harm instead of good, is immensely increased by women’s each woman has within her own family.
contributions and stimulated by their influence. This mis-
take isn’t likely to be made by women who have the practical
The moral influence of wives on husbands
management of projects for helping people. It sometimes
happens that women who administer public charities recog- It is often said that in the classes that are most exposed
nise clearly the demoralising influence of the help that is to temptation, a man’s wife and children tend to keep him
given, and could give lessons on this to many a male political honest and respectable—through his wife’s direct influence
economist. (They are brought to this recognition by an ability and his concern for the family’s future welfare. No doubt
that women usually have more than men do, namely insight this is often the case, with men who are more weak than
into present fact, and especially into the minds and feelings wicked; and this beneficial influence would be preserved
of those with whom they are in immediate contact.) But and strengthened under laws that put the wife on a level
women who only give their money, and aren’t brought face to with her husband. . . . But when we go higher in the ·social·
face with the effects it produces—how can they be expected scale, we encounter a totally different set of moving forces.
to foresee the effects? If a woman is born to the present lot The wife’s influence tends. . . .to prevent the husband from
of women, and is content with it, how is she to appreciate •falling below the country’s common standard of approval;
the value of self-dependence? She is not self-dependent; and it tends quite as strongly to hinder him from •rising
she is not taught self-dependence; her destiny is to receive above it. The wife is the assistant of common public opinion.
everything from others, and why should what is good enough A man who is married to a woman who is his inferior in
for her be bad for the poor? The notions of good that she intelligence finds her a perpetual dead weight—or, even
is familiar with are of blessings descending from a superior. worse, a drag—on every active wish he has to be better than
She forgets that •she isn’t free and that the poor are; that public opinion requires him to be. It is hardly possible for
•if what they need is given to them unearned, they can’t be someone who is in these bonds to achieve a really high level
compelled to earn it; that •everybody can’t be taken care of of virtue. If a man differs in his opinion from the mass—if
by everybody, but people need some motive to take care of he sees truths that haven’t yet dawned on them, or if he
themselves; and that •the only charity that turns out in the would like to act more conscientiously than most people do
long run to be charity is: helping people to help themselves on truths that they all nominally recognise but don’t feel in
if they are physically able to do so. their hearts as he does—to all such thoughts and desires
If women were socially and politically emancipated, they marriage is the heaviest of drawbacks, unless the lucky man
would be better educated and would have more practical has a wife who is as much above the common level as he is.
53
One reason for this is that there is always some sacrifice childishness in their character, but that is surely most unfair.
of personal interest required, either of social status or of Society makes the whole life of a woman in the easy classes
money, perhaps even a risk to the means of subsistence. A [Mill’s phrase] a continual self-sacrifice; it exacts from her
man may be willing to confront these sacrifices and risks for an unceasing restraint of all her natural inclinations; and
himself, but he will hesitate to impose them on his family. the only return it makes to her for what often amounts to
In this context, ‘his family’ refers to his wife and daughters; a martyrdom is consideration [= ‘social acceptance and respect’].
for he always hopes that his sons will feel as he does, and Her consideration is inseparably tied to her husband’s;
that anything he can do without they will also do without, and after paying the full price for it she finds that she is
willingly, in the same cause. But his daughters ·are in a threatened with losing it for no reason that she can feel to
different situation·: their marriage may depend on it. And if be valid. Having sacrificed her whole life to it, she’s not
his wife going to let her husband sacrifice it to a whim, a caprice,
•can’t enter into or understand the objectives for which an eccentricity—something not recognised or allowed for
these sacrifices are made, by the world, and which the world will agree with her in
•if she thought them worth any sacrifice, would think thinking to be at best a folly. This dilemma is hardest on
so solely for his sake and taking his word for it, and the very meritorious man who doesn’t have talents that
•couldn’t join in any of the enthusiasm or self-approval qualify him to be prominent among those whose opinion he
that he may feel, when the things that he is disposed shares, but who holds his opinion from conviction and feels
to sacrifice are everything to her, bound in honour and conscience to serve it by professing
won’t the best and most unselfish man be the most reluctant his belief and giving his time, labour, and means to anything
to bring this consequence down on his wife? And if what undertaken on its behalf. It is hardest of all when such
is at stake is not the comforts of life but only social status, a man happens to be of a rank and position that doesn’t
the burden on his conscience and feelings is still very severe. automatically include him in what is considered the best
Anyone who has a wife and children has given hostages society but does debar him from it either. His admission to
to •Mrs. Grundy [a character in an 18th century play, embodying the best society depends mainly on what people think of him
the thoughts and feelings of conventional society, especially attitudes personally—and his being identified with opinions and public
The approval of •that potentate may
of prudish disapproval]. conduct unacceptable to those who set the tone for society
not matter to him but it is of great importance to his wife. would operate as an effective barrier. Many a woman soothes
The man may be above that sort of thing, or he may feel herself with the thought (nine times out of ten a wrong
sufficiently compensated by the approval of those of his thought) that nothing prevents her and her husband from
own way of thinking. But he has no compensation to offer moving in the highest society of her neighbourhood—society
the women connected with him. The almost invariable in which others well known to her, and in the same class of
tendency of the wife to throw the weight of her influence life, mix freely—except that her husband is unfortunately a
on the side of social status is sometimes made a reproach dissenter [= ’a non-Anglican protestant’], or has the reputation of
to women, and represented as a streak of weakness and mingling in low radical politics. . . . With such an influence
54
in every house, either exerted actively or operating all the the husband’s authority, and •raises up a revolt against
more powerfully for not being asserted, is it any wonder his infallibility. . . . When there is no difference of ·moral
that people in general are kept down to the middling level of or religious· opinion, mere differences of taste can detract
respectability that is becoming a marked feature of modern greatly from the happiness of married life. [Differences of
times? taste, Mill says, are created by differences in education.
Girls are trained in music, dancing etc. rather than (he
implies) spending that time and energy on an education
The moral effects of difference
more like their brothers’; and although that may ‘stimulate
Let us look now not at women’s disabilities directly but at the amatory propensities of men’ it creates differences that
the broad line of difference those disabilities create between aren’t conducive to married happiness. He continues:] If the
a woman’s education and character and a man’s. The differ- married pair are well-bred and well-behaved, they tolerate
ence has very harmful consequences; indeed, nothing can be each other’s tastes; but is mutual toleration what people look
more unfavourable to the union of thoughts and inclinations forward to when they enter into marriage? These differences
that is the ideal of married life. An intimate relation between of inclination will naturally make their wishes different, if
people who are radically unlike one another?—that is an idle not restrained by affection or duty, with regard to almost all
dream! Unlikeness may attract, but likeness is what retains; domestic questions that arise. What a difference there must
and the more alike a couple are the better fitted they are to be in the society the spouses will wish to frequent! Each will
give each other a happy life. While women are so unlike men, want associates who share his or her own tastes; the persons
it’s not surprising that selfish men should feel the need to agreeable to one will be indifferent or positively disagreeable
have arbitrary power in their own hands, to stop a life-long to the other; yet all their associates must be common to both,
conflict of inclinations before it gets started, by deciding because married people these days don’t live in different
every issue on the side of their own preference. When people parts of the house and have totally different visiting lists. . . .
are extremely unalike, they can’t have any real identity of They can’t help having different wishes about the upbringing
interest. Very often a married couple have a conscientious of the children: each will want to see reproduced in the
difference of opinion concerning the highest points of duty. children his or her own tastes and sentiments; and either
Is there any reality in the marriage union where this is the there is a compromise, giving only half satisfaction to each,
case? Yet it is common enough wherever a married woman or the wife has to yield—often with bitter suffering. . . .
has any earnestness of character; and it is very common It would of course be foolish to suppose that these
in Catholic countries, when the wife is supported in her differences of feeling and inclination exist only because
dissent by the only other authority to which she is taught women are brought up differently from men. Obviously there
to bow, the priest. With the usual barefacedness of power would be some differences of taste under any imaginable
that isn’t used to being challenged, the influence of priests circumstances. But it isn’t foolish to say that the difference
over women is attacked by Protestant and Liberal writers, in upbringing immensely increases those differences and
less for being bad in itself than because •it is a rival to makes them wholly inevitable. While women are brought up
55
as they are, a man and a woman will rarely find themselves objectives, and help and encourage each other in anything
in real agreement of tastes and wishes regarding daily life. concerning these, the minor matters on which their tastes
They will generally have to give up as hopeless the attempt may differ are not all-important to them; and there’s a basis
to have in their private daily life the idem velle, idem nolle for solid friendship of an enduring character, more likely
[Latin = ‘same desires, same dislikes’] which is the recognised bond than anything else to make it a lifelong greater pleasure for
of any society that really is a society. [See note on ‘society’ on each to give pleasure to the other than to receive it.
page 22.] Or the man succeeds in obtaining it by choosing a
woman who is so complete a •nullity that she has no velle or
The moral effects of inferiority
nolle at all, and is as ready to go along with one thing as with
another if anybody tells her to do so. Even this calculation So much for the effects of mere unlikeness between the
·of the man’s· is apt to fail; dullness and lack of spirit are not wife and the husband on the pleasures and benefits of
always a guarantee of the submission that is so confidently marriage; but the power for bad is vastly increased when
expected from them. But even if they were, is this the ideal the •unlikeness is •inferiority. When unlikeness is merely
of marriage? What in this case does the man get by marriage difference of good qualities, it may be more a benefit in the
except an upper servant, a nurse, or a mistress? On the other way of mutual improvement than a drawback from comfort.
hand, when each of two persons instead of being a •nothing is When each spouse wants and tries to acquire the other’s
a something; when they are attached to one another and are special qualities, the difference ·between them· doesn’t drive
not too unalike to begin with; the constant shared experience their interests apart but rather pulls them together, making
of the same things, assisted by their sympathy [see note on each spouse still more valuable to the other. But when
page 51], draws out the latent capacities of each for being one of them has much less mental ability and cultivation
interested in the things that were at first interesting only than the other, and isn’t actively trying with the other’s
to the other. This produces a gradual assimilation of their aid to rise to the other’s level, this marriage will have a
tastes and characters to one another, partly by the gradual wholly bad influence on the mental development of abler
modification of each but more by a real enriching of the of the two; and even more in a reasonably happy marriage
two natures, each acquiring the tastes and capacities of the than in an unhappy one. Someone who shuts himself up
other in addition to its own. This often happens between with an inferior, choosing that inferior as his one completely
two friends of the same sex who are much in one another’s intimate associate, is doing himself harm. Any society that
company in their daily life: and it would be common in isn’t improving is deteriorating: and the closer and more
marriage if it weren’t that the totally different bringing familiar it is, the more it deteriorates. Even a really superior
up of the two sexes make it nearly impossible to form a man, in nearly all cases, begins to deteriorate when he is
really well-suited union. If this were remedied, whatever habitually (as the phrase is) ‘king of his company’, and
differences there might still be in individual tastes, there someone whose habitual ‘company’ is a wife who is inferior
would usually be complete unity and unanimity regarding to him is always ‘king’ of it. While his self-satisfaction is
the great objectives of life. When spouses both care for great constantly ministered to on the one hand, on the other he
56
unconsciously acquires the ways of feeling and of looking can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and
at things that belong to a more ordinary or a more limited they can take turns in the pleasure of leading and the
mind than his own. [Mill goes on to say that this ‘evil’ in pleasure of being led in the path of development
marriages, unlike many others that he has discussed, is —I shan’t try to describe what that marriage will be like.
becoming worse, because men are increasingly pulling away Those who can conceive it don’t need my description; those
from ‘the rough amusements and convivial excesses that who can’t conceive it would brush off my description as the
formerly occupied most men in their hours of relaxation’ and raving of a fanatic. But I am deeply convinced that that this,
spend correspondingly more time with ‘the home and its and only this, is the ideal of marriage; and that all opinions,
inmates’. He continues:] The improvement that has been customs, and institutions that favour any other notion
made in women’s education has made them in some degree of marriage, or turn the ideas and aims connected with
capable of being men’s companions in ideas and mental marriage into any other direction. . . .are relics of primitive
taste, but it still leaves most women hopelessly inferior to barbarism. The moral renewal of mankind won’t really start
their spouses. What generally happens, then, is that the until the most basic of all social relations is placed under
husband’s desire for mental communion is satisfied by a the rule of equal justice, and human beings learn to develop
communion from which he learns nothing. An unimproving their strongest sympathy with someone who is their equal in
and unstimulating companionship is substituted for (what rights and in cultivation.
he might otherwise have been forced to seek) the society of
men whose abilities equal his and who share his interest
in the higher pursuits. Thus, we see that very promising
Benefits to the individual woman
young men usually stop improving as soon as they marry, Up to here I have discussed the social rather than the
and when they don’t improve they inevitably degenerate. If individual benefits that would come from abolishing the
the wife doesn’t push the husband forward, she always holds subjection of women;. . . .but it would be a grievous under-
him back. He stops caring for what she doesn’t care for; he statement of the case to omit the most direct benefit of
no longer wants—and eventually he dislikes and avoids—the all, the indescribably great gain in the private happiness of
company of people who share his former aspirations. . . ., and members of the liberated half of the species [Mill’s phrase]—the
his higher faculties of mind and of heart are no longer called difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of
into activity. This change coincides with the new and selfish others and a life of rational freedom. After the basic needs
interests that are created by the family, so that after a few for food and clothing, freedom is the first and strongest want
years he doesn’t differ significantly from those who never did of human nature. While mankind are lawless, they want
have any higher aspirations. lawless freedom. When they have learned to understand
When two persons of high ability, identical in opinions the meaning of •duty and the value of •reason, they are
and purposes, have the best kind of equality— increasingly inclined to be guided and restrained by •these
similarity of powers and capacities, with each being in the exercise of their freedom; but that doesn’t mean that
superior to the other in some things, so that each they desire freedom less; they don’t become disposed to
57
accept the will of other people as the representative and than his country now has·—his feelings about the rough
interpreter of those guiding principles ·of duty and reason·. and imperfect handling of public affairs is compensated for
On the contrary, the communities in which reason has been by his sense that he and his fellow-citizens are working out
most cultivated and the idea of social duty has been most their own destiny under their own moral responsibility. Well,
powerful are the very ones that have most strongly asserted whatever he feels about this, he can be sure that women feel
the freedom of action of the individual—the liberty of each it just as much. Whatever has been said or written, from the
person to govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and time of Herodotus [the first historian] to the present, about the
by such laws and social restraints as his own conscience enobling influence of free government—
can subscribe to. •the nerve and spring that it gives to all the faculties,
Anyone who wants a sound sense of the worth of personal •the larger and higher objectives that it presents to the
independence as an ingredient in happiness should consider intellect and feelings,
how he values it as an ingredient in his own happiness. •the more unselfish public spirit, and calmer and
What a man judges for himself on this subject—as much broader views of duty, that it creates, and
as on any subject—differs from what he judges for other •the higher platform on which it elevates the individual
people. When he hears others complaining that they aren’t as a moral, spiritual, and social being
allowed freedom of action—that their own will has too little —is every bit as true of women as of men. Aren’t these things
influence in the regulation of their affairs—he is inclined an important part of individual happiness? Let any man
to ask: ‘What are their grievances?’ ‘What positive damage recall what he felt on emerging from boyhood—from the
are they suffering?’ ‘How do they think their affairs are tutelage and control of even loved and affectionate elders—
mismanaged?’; and if they can’t answer these questions in a and entering on the responsibilities of manhood. Wasn’t
way that seems to him to be adequate, he turns a deaf ear, it like the physical effect of taking off a heavy weight. . . .?
and regards their complaint as the fanciful querulousness Didn’t he feel twice as alive, twice as much a human being,
of people whom nothing reasonable will satisfy. But he has as before? And does he imagine that women have none of
a quite different standard of judgment when he is deciding these feelings? [Mill goes on to say that personal pride is
for himself. In that case, faultless administration of his all-important to men although they don’t take it seriously
interests by a tutor who has been set over him doesn’t satisfy in others. Women have their pride also, and when it is
his feelings: the sheer fact of his personal exclusion from the thwarted the energies behind it flow in other directions:] An
deciding authority is the greatest grievance of all, removing active and energetic mind, if denied •liberty, will seek •power;
any need to go into the question of mismanagement. It is refused the command of itself, it will assert its personality
the same with nations. What citizen of a free country would by trying to control others. To allow to any human beings
listen to any offers of good and skilful government in return no existence of their own except what depends on others is
for the abdication of freedom? Even if he believed •that good motivating them to bend others to their purposes. Where
and skilful administration can exist among a people ruled liberty can’t be hoped for, and power can, power becomes the
by a will not their own—·better and more skillful, indeed, grand object of human desire. . . . Hence women’s passion for
58
personal beauty, and dress and display, and all the evils that are deserted by the only occupation they have fitted them-
flow from that. . . . The love of power and the love of liberty selves for, and are left with undiminished activeness but with
are in eternal antagonism. Where there is least liberty, the no use to make of it, unless perhaps a daughter or daughter-
passion for power is the most ardent and unscrupulous. The in-law is willing to let them do the same work in her own
desire for power over others can’t cease to be a depraving younger household. . . . For women like these, and for others
agency among mankind until each individual human being who have never had this task. . . .the only resources, speaking
can do without it, and that can’t happen until respect for generally, are religion and charity. But their religion, though
each person’s liberty is an established principle. it may be one of feeling and of ceremonies, can’t be a religion
But it is not only through the sense of personal dignity of action except in the form of charity. Many of these
that the free direction and disposal of their own faculties women are by nature admirably fitted for charitable work;
is a source of individual happiness, and to be fettered and but to practise charity usefully—indeed, to practise charity
restricted in it is a source of unhappiness, to human beings, without doing harm—one needs the education, the skills, the
and not least to women. Apart from disease, extreme poverty. knowledge and the thinking powers of a skilful administrator.
and guilt, nothing is as fatal to the pleasurable enjoyment Anyone who is fit to do useful charitable work could performs
of life as the lack of something worthwhile to do. While almost any of the administrative functions of government.
a woman has the care of a family, that provides an outlet In this as in other cases (notably the education of children),
for her active faculties, and usually that is enough. But the duties permitted to women can’t be performed properly
what about the ever-increasing number of women who have unless they are trained for duties that (to the great loss of
had no opportunity of exercising the vocation that they are society) they aren’t allowed to perform.
mocked by telling them is their proper one [i.e. women who have Let me point out here the strange way in which the
no families]? What about the women whose children •have question of women’s disabilities is often presented by people
been lost to them by death or distance, or •have grown up, who, confronted by the prospect of something they don’t like,
married, and formed homes of their own? There are many find it easier to draw a ludicrous picture of it than to answer
examples of men who after a life taken up by business retire the arguments for it. When it is suggested that women’s
with a pension. . . .and find that their change to a life of executive capacities and prudent advice might sometimes
inactivity brings boredom, depression, and premature death; be valuable in affairs of State, these lovers of fun hold up
their trouble being their inability to acquire new interests to the ridicule of the world a picture of girls in their teens
and excitements to replace the old. Yet no-one thinks of the or young wives in their early twenties being transported
parallel case of so many worthy and devoted women, who, bodily, exactly as they are, from the drawing-room to the
•having paid what they are told is their debt to society, House of Commons or the Cabinet room. They forget that
•having brought up a family blamelessly to manhood males aren’t usually selected at this early age for a seat in
and womanhood, Parliament or for responsible political functions. Common
•having kept house as long as they had a house need- sense, ·if they had any·, would tell them that if such trusts
ing to be kept, were confided to women it would be to •women with no
59
special vocation for married life, •or women who choose But on women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and by
some other employment of their abilities,. . . .or more often customs equivalent to law. What in unenlightened societies
perhaps •widows or wives of forty or fifty who could, with the colour, race, religion, or nationality are to some men, sex is to
aid of appropriate studies, make available to the wider world all women—an abrupt exclusion from almost all honourable
the knowledge of life and skill in government that they have occupations except ones that others can’t perform or aren’t
acquired in their families. In every European country the willing to perform. Sufferings arising from this cause usually
ablest men have often experienced and keenly appreciated meet with so little sympathy that few people realize how
the advice and help of clever and experienced women of the much unhappiness is produced, even now, by the feeling of
world, in achieving both private and of public objectives; a wasted life. This will happen even more frequently when
and there are important aspects of public administration increased cultivation [Mill’s word] creates a greater and greater
in which few men are as competent as such women—e.g. disproportion between women’s ideas and abilities and the
the detailed control of expenditure. But my present topic is scope that society allows for their activity.
not society’s need for women’s services in public business, When we consider the positive evil caused to the dis-
but the dull and hopeless life it condemns them to by qualified half of the human race. . . .first in the loss of •the
forbidding them to exercise the practical abilities that many most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment,
of them are conscious of having, in any wider field than and then in the weariness, disappointment, and profound
one that is now closed to some of them and to others was dissatisfaction with life that are so often the substitute for •it,
never open. If there is anything vitally important to the one feels that among all the lessons that men [here = ‘human
happiness of human beings it is that they should like what beings’] need to learn for carrying on the struggle against
they habitually do. This requirement for an enjoyable life is the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, no lesson
very imperfectly granted, or entirely denied, to a large part is more needed than not to add to the evils that nature
of mankind; and because of the lack of it many a life that inflicts by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on
seems to have everything needed for success is actually a one another. Their stupid fears only substitute other and
failure. But if such failures are often inevitable now, because worse evils for the ones that they are lazily anxious about;
of •circumstances that society isn’t yet skilful enough to while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their
overcome, society needn’t itself inflict •them! Many men human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them
spend their lives doing one thing reluctantly and badly when responsible for any evil actually caused by their conduct)
they could have done other things happily and well; this may does its bit towards drying up the principal fountain of
come about through bad choices by parents, or a youth’s human happiness, and leaves our species less rich. . . .in
own inexperience, or the absence of opportunities for the all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.
congenial vocation and their presence for an uncongenial one.
60
POLITICS
Words and Behavior
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. Without them we should live spasmodically
and intermittently. Hatred itself is not so strong that animals will not forget it, if distracted, even in the presence of
the enemy. Watch a pair of cats, crouching on the brink of a fight. Balefully the eyes glare; from far down in the
throat of each come bursts of a strange, strangled noise of defiance; as though animated by a life of their own, the
tails twitch and tremble. With aimed intensity of loathing! Another moment and surely there must be an explosion.
But no; all of a sudden one of the two creatures turns away, hoists a hind leg in a more than fascist salute and, with
the same fixed and focused attention as it had given a moment before to its enemy, begins to make a lingual toilet.
Animal love is as much at the mercy of distractions as animal hatred. The dumb creation lives a life made up of
discreet and mutually irrelevant episodes. Such as it is, the consistency of human characters is due to the words
upon which all human experiences are strung. We are purposeful because we can describe our feelings in
rememberable words, can justify and rationalize our desires in terms of some kind of argument. Faced by an enemy
we do not allow an itch to distract us from our emotions; the mere word "enemy" is enough to keep us reminded of
our hatred, to convince us that we do well to be angry. Similarly the word "love" bridges for us those chasms of
momentary indifference and boredom which gape from time to time between even the most ardent lovers. Feeling
and desire provide us with our motive power; words give continuity to what we do and to a considerable extent
determine our direction. Inappropriate and badly chosen words vitiate thought and lead to wrong or foolish
conduct. Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced
it to be, a sin. For, consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand
-- because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and
responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do. Our
egotisms are incessantly fighting to preserve themselves, not only from external enemies, but also from the assaults
of the other and better self with which they are so uncomfortably associated. Ignorance is egotism's most effective
defense against that Dr. Jekyll in us who desires perfection; stupidity, its subtlest stratagem. If, as so often happens,
we choose to give continuity to our experience by means of words which falsify the facts, this is because the
falsification is somehow to our advantage as egotists.
Consider, for example, the case of war. War is enormously discreditable to those who order it to be waged
and even to those who merely tolerate its existence. Furthermore, to developed sensibilities the facts of war are
revolting and horrifying. To falsify these facts, and by so doing to make war seem less evil than it really is, and our
own responsibility in tolerating war less heavy, is doubly to our advantage. By suppressing and distorting the truth,
we protect our sensibilities and preserve our self-esteem. Now, language is, among other things, a device which
men use for suppressing and distorting the truth. Finding the reality of war too unpleasant to contemplate, we
create a verbal alternative to that reality, parallel with it, but in quality quite different from it. That which we
contemplate thenceforward is not that to which we react emotionally and upon which we pass our moral
judgments, is not war as it is in fact, but the fiction of war as it exists in our pleasantly falsifying verbiage. Our
stupidity in using inappropriate language turns out, on analysis, to be the most refined cunning.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and
that these individual human beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be
murdered in quarrels not their own, to inflict upon the innocent and, innocent themselves of any crime against their
enemies, to suffer cruelties of every kind.
The language of strategy and politics is designed, so far as it is possible, to conceal this fact, to make it
appear as though wars were not fought by individuals drilled to murder one another in cold blood and without
provocation, but either by impersonal and therefore wholly non-moral and impassible forces, or else by personified
abstractions.
Here are a few examples of the first kind of falsification. In place of "cavalrymen" or "foot-soldiers"
military writers like to speak of "sabres" and "rules." Here is a sentence from a description of the Battle of
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Marengo: "According to Victor's report, the French retreat was orderly; it is certain, at any rate, that the regiments
held together, for the six thousand Austrian sabres found no opportunity to charge home." The battle is between
sabres in line and muskets in Echelon -- a mere clash of ironmongery.
On other occasions there is no question of anything so vulgarly material as ironmongery. The battles are
between Platonic ideas, between the abstractions of physics and mathematics. Forces interact; weights are flung
into scales; masses are set in motion. Or else it is all a matter of geometry. Lines swing and sweep; are protracted
or curved; pivot on a fixed point.
Alternatively the combatants are personal, in the sense that they are personifications. There is "the enemy,"
in the singular, making "his" plans, striking "his" blows. The attribution of personal characteristics to collectivities,
to geographical expressions, to institutions, is a source, as we shall see, of endless confusions in political thought,
of innumerable political mistakes and crimes. Personification in politics is an error which we make because it is to
our advantage as egotists to be able to feel violently proud of our country and of ourselves as belonging to it, and to
believe that all the misfortunes due to our own mistakes are really the work of the Foreigner. It is easier to feel
violently toward a person than toward an abstraction; hence our habit of making political personifications. In some
cases military personifications are merely special instances of political personifications. A particular collectivity,
the army or the warring nation, is given the name and, along with the name, the attributes of a single person, in
order that we may be able to love or hate it more intensely than we could do if we thought of it as what it really is:
a number of diverse individuals. In other cases personification is used for the purpose of concealing the
fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war. What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no
personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood. By personifying opposing armies or
countries, we are able to think of war as a conflict between individuals. The same result is obtained by writing of
war as though it were carried on exclusively by the generals in command and not by the private soldiers in their
armies. ("Rennenkampf had pressed back von Schubert.") The implication in both cases is that war is
indistinguishable from a bout of fisticuffs in a bar room. Whereas in reality it is profoundly different. A scrap
between two individuals is forgivable; mass murder, deliberately organized, is a monstrous iniquity. We still
choose to use war as an instrument of policy; and to comprehend the full wickedness and absurdity of war would
therefore be inconvenient. For, once we understood, we should have to make some effort to get rid of the
abominable thing. Accordingly, when we talk about war, we use a language which conceals or embellishes its
reality. Ignoring the facts, so far as we possibly can, we imply that battles are not fought by soldiers, but by things,
principles, allegories, personified collectivities, or (at the most human) by opposing commanders, pitched against
one another in single combat. For the same reason, when we have to describe the processes and the results of war,
we employ a rich variety of euphemisms. Even the most violently patriotic and militaristic are reluctant to call a
spade by its own name. To conceal their intentions even from themselves, they make use of picturesque metaphors.
We find them, for example, clamoring for war planes numerous and powerful enough to go and "destroy the
hornets in their nests" -- in other words, to go and throw thermite, high explosives and vesicants upon the
inhabitants of neighboring countries before they have time to come and do the same to us. And how reassuring is
the language of historians and strategists! They write admiringly of those military geniuses who know "when to
strike at the enemy's line" (a single combatant deranges the geometrical constructions of a personification); when
to "turn his flank"; when to "execute an enveloping movement." As though they were engineers discussing the
strength of materials and the distribution of stresses, they talk of abstract entities called "man power" and "fire
power." They sum up the long-drawn sufferings and atrocities of trench warfare in the phrase, "a war of attrition";
the massacre and mangling of human beings is assimilated to the grinding of a lens.
A dangerously abstract word, which figures in all discussions about war, is "force." Those who believe in
organizing collective security by means of military pacts against a possible aggressor are particularly fond of this
word. "You cannot," they say, "have international justice unless you are prepared to impose it by force." "Peace-
loving countries must unite to use force against aggressive dictatorships." "Democratic institutions must be
protected, if need be, by force." And so on.
Now, the word "force," when used in reference to human relations, has no single, definite meaning. There is
the "force" used by parents when, without resort to any kind of physical violence, they compel their children to act
or refrain from acting in some particular way. There is the "force" used by attendants in an asylum when they try to
prevent a maniac from hurting himself or others. There is the "force" used by the police when they control a crowd,
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and that other "force" which they used in a baton charge. And finally there is the "force" used in war. This, of
course, varies with the technological devices at the disposal of the belligerents, with the policies they are pursuing,
and with the particular circumstances of the war in question. But in general it may be said that, in war, "force"
connotes violence and fraud used to the limit of the combatants' capacity.
Variations in quantity, if sufficiently great, produce variations in quality. The "force" that is war,
particularly modern war, is very different from the "force" that is police action, and the use of the same abstract
word to describe the two dissimilar processes is profoundly misleading. (Still more misleading, of course, is the
explicit assimilation of a war, waged by allied League-of-Nations powers against an aggressor, to police action
against a criminal. The first is the use of violence and fraud without limit against innocent and guilty alike; the
second is the use of strictly limited violence and a minimum of fraud exclusively against the guilty.)
Reality is a succession of concrete and particular situations. When we think about such situations we should
use the particular and concrete words which apply to them. If we use abstract words which apply equally well (and
equally badly) to other, quite dissimilar situations, it is certain that we shall think incorrectly.
Let us take the sentences quoted above and translate the abstract word "force" into language that will render
(however inadequately) the concrete and particular realities of contemporary warfare.
"You cannot have international justice, unless you are prepared to impose it by force." Translated, this
becomes: "You cannot have international justice unless you are prepared, with a view to imposing a just settlement,
to drop thermite, high explosives and vesicants upon the inhabitants of foreign cities and to have thermite, high
explosives and vesicants dropped in return upon the inhabitants of your cities." At the end of this proceeding,
justice is to be imposed by the victorious party -- that is, if there is a victorious party. It should be remarked that
justice was to have been imposed by the victorious party at the end of the last war. But, unfortunately, after four
years of fighting, the temper of the victors was such that they were quite incapable of making a just settlement. The
Allies are reaping in Nazi Germany what they sowed at Versailles. The victors of the next war will have undergone
intensive bombardments with thermite, high explosives and vesicants. Will their temper be better than that of the
Allies in 1918? Will they be in a fitter state to make a just settlement? The answer, quite obviously, is: No. It is
psychologically all but impossible that justice should be secured by the methods of contemporary warfare.
The next two sentences may be taken together. "Peace-loving countries must unite to use force against
aggressive dictatorships. Democratic institutions must be protected, if need be, by force." Let us translate. "Peace-
loving countries must unite to throw thermite, high explosives and vesicants on the inhabitants of countries ruled
by aggressive dictators. They must do this, and of course abide the consequences, in order to preserve peace and
democratic institutions." Two questions immediately propound themselves. First, is it likely that peace can be
secured by a process calculated to reduce the orderly life of our complicated societies to chaos? And, second, is it
likely that democratic institutions will flourish in a state of chaos? Again, the answers are pretty clearly in the
negative.
By using the abstract word "force," instead of terms which at least attempt to describe the realities of war as
it is today, the preachers of collective security through military collaboration disguise from themselves and from
others, not only the contemporary facts, but also the probable consequences of their favorite policy. The attempt to
secure justice, peace and democracy by "force" seems reasonable enough until we realize, first, that this
noncommittal word stands, in the circumstances of our age, for activities which can hardly fail to result in social
chaos; and second, that the consequences of social chaos are injustice, chronic warfare and tyranny. The moment
we think in concrete and particular terms of the concrete and particular process called "modern war," we see that a
policy which worked (or at least didn't result in complete disaster) in the past has no prospect whatever of working
in the immediate future. The attempt to secure justice, peace and democracy by means of a "force," which means,
at this particular moment of history, thermite, high explosives and vesicants, is about as reasonable as the attempt
to put out a fire with a colorless liquid that happens to be, not water, but petrol.
What applies to the "force" that is war applies in large measure to the "force" that is revolution. It seems
inherently very unlikely that social justice and social peace can be secured by thermite, high explosives and
vesicants. At first, it may be, the parties in a civil war would hesitate to use such instruments on their fellow-
countrymen. But there can be little doubt that, if the conflict were prolonged (as it probably would be between the
evenly balanced Right and Left of a highly industrialized society), the combatants would end by losing their
scruples.
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The alternatives confronting us seem to be plain enough. Either we invent and conscientiously employ a
new technique for making revolutions and settling international disputes; or else we cling to the old technique and,
using "force" (that is to say, thermite, high explosives and vesicants), destroy ourselves. Those who, for whatever
motive, disguise the nature of the second alternative under inappropriate language, render the world a grave
disservice. They lead us into one of the temptations we find it hardest to resist -- the temptation to run away from
reality, to pretend that facts are not what they are. Like Shelley (but without Shelley's acute awareness of what he
was doing) we are perpetually weaving
A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun

Of this familiar life.
We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality
we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the
alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and
tolerate the most monstrous crimes:
The poor wretch who has learned his only prayers

From curses, who knows scarcely words enough
To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute
And technical in victories and defeats,
And all our dainty terms for fratricide;
Terms which we trundle smoothly o'er our tongues
Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which
We join no meaning and attach no form!
As if the soldier died without a wound:
As if the fibers of this godlike frame
Were gored without a pang: as if the wretch
Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds,
Passed off to Heaven translated and not killed;
As though he had no wife to pine for him,
No God to judge him.
The language we use about war is inappropriate, and its inappropriateness is designed to conceal a reality so
odious that we do not wish to know it. The language we use about politics is also inappropriate; but here our
mistake has a different purpose. Our principal aim in this case is to arouse and, having aroused, to rationalize and
justify such intrinsically agreeable sentiments as pride and hatred, self-esteem and contempt for others. To achieve
this end we speak about the facts of politics in words which more or less completely misrepresent them.
The concrete realities of politics are individual human beings, living together in national groups. Politicians
-- and to some extent we are all politicians -- substitute abstractions for these concrete realities, and having done
this, proceed to invest each abstraction with an appearance of concreteness by personifying it. For example, the
concrete reality of which "Britain" is the abstraction consists of some forty-odd millions of diverse individuals
living on an island off the west coast of Europe. The personification of this abstraction appears, in classical fancy-
dress and holding a very large toasting fork, on the backside of our copper coinage; appears in verbal form, every
time we talk about international politics. "Britain," the abstraction from forty millions of Britons, is endowed with
thoughts, sensibilities and emotions, even with a sex -- for, in spite of John Bull, the country is always a female.
Now, it is of course possible that "Britain" is more than a mere name -- is an entity that possesses some
kind of reality distinct from that of the individuals constituting the group to which the name is applied. But this
entity, if it exists, is certainly not a young lady with a toasting fork; nor is it possible to believe (though some
eminent philosophers have preached the doctrine) that it should possess anything in the nature of a personal will.
One must agree with T. H. Green that "there can be nothing in a nation, however exalted its mission, or in a society
however perfectly organized, which is not in the persons composing the nation or the society. . . We cannot
suppose a national spirit and will to exist except as the spirit and will of individuals." But the moment we start
resolutely thinking about our world in terms of individual persons we find ourselves at the same time thinking in
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terms of universality. "The great rational religions," writes Professor Whitehead, "are the outcome of the
emergence of a religious consciousness that is universal, as distinguished from tribal, or even social. Because it is
universal, it introduces the note of solitariness." (And he might have added that, because it is solitary, it introduces
the note of universality.) "The reason of this connection between universality and solitude is that universality is a
disconnection from immediate surroundings." And conversely the disconnection from immediate surroundings,
particularly such social surrounding as the tribe or nation, the insistence on the person as the fundamental reality,
leads to the conception of an all-embracing unity.
A nation, then, may be more than a mere abstraction, may possess some kind of real existence apart from its
constituent members. But there is no reason to suppose that it is a person; indeed, there is every reason to suppose
that it isn't. Those who speak as though it were a person (and some go further than this and speak as though it were
a personal god) do so, because it is to their interest as egotists to make precisely this mistake.
In the case of the ruling class these interests are in part material. The personification of the nation as a
sacred being, different from and superior to its constituent members, is merely (I quote the words of a great French
jurist, Léon Duguit) "a way of imposing authority by making people believe it is an authority de jure and not
merely de facto." By habitually talking of the nation as though it were a person with thoughts, feelings and a will of
its own, the rulers of a country legitimate their own powers. Personification leads easily to deification; and where
the nation is deified, its government ceases to be a mere convenience, like drains or a telephone system, and,
partaking in the sacredness of the entity it represents, claims to give orders by divine right and demands the
unquestioning obedience due to a god. Rulers seldom find it hard to recognize their friends. Hegel, the man who
elaborated an inappropriate figure of speech into a complete philosophy of politics, was a favorite of the Prussian
government. "Es ist," he had written, "es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, das der Staat ist." The decoration
bestowed on him by Frederick William III was richly deserved.
Unlike their rulers, the ruled have no material interest in using inappropriate language about states and
nations. For them, the reward of being mistaken is psychological. The personified and deified nation becomes, in
the minds of the individuals composing it, a kind of enlargement of themselves. The superhuman qualities which
belong to the young lady with the toasting fork, the young lady with plaits and a brass soutien-gorge, the young
lady in a Phrygian bonnet, are claimed by individual Englishmen, Germans and Frenchmen as being, at least in
part, their own. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. But there would be no need to die, no need of war, if it had
not been even sweeter to boast and swagger for one's country, to hate, despise, swindle and bully for it. Loyalty to
the personified nation, or to the personified class or party, justifies the loyal in indulging all those passions which
good manners and the moral code do not allow them to display in their relations with their neighbors. The
personified entity is a being, not only great and noble, but also insanely proud, vain and touchy; fiercely rapacious;
a braggart; bound by no considerations of right and wrong. (Hegel condemned as hopelessly shallow all those who
dared to apply ethical standards to the activities of nations. To condone and applaud every iniquity committed in
the name of the State was to him a sign of philosophical profundity.) Identifying themselves with this god,
individuals find relief from the constraints of ordinary social decency, feel themselves justified in giving rein,
within duly prescribed limits, to their criminal proclivities. As a loyal nationalist or party-man, one can enjoy the
luxury of behaving badly with a good conscience.
The evil passions are further justified by another linguistic error -- the error of speaking about certain
categories of persons as though they were mere embodied abstractions. Foreigners and those who disagree with us
are not thought of as men and women like ourselves and our fellow-countrymen; they are thought of as
representatives and, so to say, symbols of a class. In so far as they have any personality at all, it is the personality
we mistakenly attribute to their class -- a personality that is, by definition, intrinsically evil. We know that the
harming or killing of men and women is wrong, and we are reluctant consciously to do what we know to be wrong.
But when particular men and women are thought of merely as representatives of a class, which has previously been
defined as evil and personified in the shape of a devil, then the reluctance to hurt or murder disappears. Brown,
Jones and Robinson are no longer thought of as Brown, Jones and Robinson, but as heretics, gentiles, Yids,
niggers, barbarians, Huns, communists, capitalists, fascists, liberals -- whichever the case may be. When they have
been called such names and assimilated to the accursed class to which the names apply, Brown, Jones and
Robinson cease to be conceived as what they really are -- human persons -- and become for the users of this fatally
inappropriate language mere vermin or, worse, demons whom it is right and proper to destroy as thoroughly and as
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painfully as possible. Wherever persons are present, questions of morality arise. Rulers of nations and leaders of
parties find morality embarrassing. That is why they take such pains to depersonalize their opponents. All
propaganda directed against an opposing group has but one aim: to substitute diabolical abstractions for concrete
persons. The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
By robbing them of their personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral obligation. Mere symbols can have no
rights -- particularly when that of which they are symbolical is, by definition, evil.
Politics can become moral only on one condition: that its problems shall be spoken of and thought about
exclusively in terms of concrete reality; that is to say, of persons. To depersonify human beings and to personify
abstractions are complementary errors which lead, by an inexorable logic, to war between nations and to idolatrous
worship of the State, with consequent governmental oppression. All current political thought is a mixture, in
varying proportions, between thought in terms of concrete realities and thought in terms of depersonified symbols
and personified abstractions. In the democratic countries the problems of internal politics are thought about mainly
in terms of concrete reality; those of external politics, mainly in terms of abstractions and symbols. In dictatorial
countries the proportion of concrete to abstract and symbolic thought is lower than in democratic countries.
Dictators talk little of persons, much of personified abstractions, such as the Nation, the State, the Party, and much
of depersonified symbols, such as Yids, Bolshies, Capitalists. The stupidity of politicians who talk about a world of
persons as though it were not a world of persons is due in the main to self-interest. In a fictitious world of symbols
and personified abstractions, rulers find that they can rule more effectively, and the ruled, that they can gratify
instincts which the conventions of good manners and the imperatives of morality demand that they should repress.
To think correctly is the condition of behaving well. It is also in itself a moral act; those who would think correctly
must resist considerable temptations.
(From The Olive Tree)
Decentralization and Self-Government
The Anarchists propose that the state should be abolished; and in so far as it serves as the instrument by
means of which the ruling class preserves its privileges; in so far as it is a device for enabling paranoiacs to satisfy
their lust for power and carry out their crazy dreams of glory, the state is obviously worthy of abolition. But in
complex societies like our own the state has certain other and more useful functions to perform. It is clear, for
example, that in any such society there must be some organization responsible for co-ordinating the activities of the
various constituent groups; clear, too, that there must be a body to which is delegated the power of acting in the
name of the society as a whole. If the word "state" is too unpleasantly associated with ideas of domestic oppression
and foreign war, with irresponsible domination and no less irresponsible submission, then by all means let us call
the necessary social machinery by some other name. For the present there is no general agreement as to what that
name should be; I shall therefore go on using the bad old word, until some better one is invented.
No economic reform, however intrinsically desirable, can lead to desirable changes in individuals and the
society they constitute, unless it is carried through in a desirable context and by desirable methods. So far as the
state is concerned, the desirable context for reform is decentralization and self-government all round. The desirable
methods for enacting reform are the methods of non-violence.
Passing from the general to the particular and the concrete, the rational idealist finds himself confronted by
the following questions. First, by what means can the principle of self-government be applied to the daily lives of
men and women? Second, to what extent is the self-government of the component parts of a society compatible
with its efficiency as a whole? And, thirdly, if a central organization is needed to coordinate the activities of the
self-governing parts, what is to prevent this organization from becoming a ruling oligarchy of the kind with which
we are only too painfully familiar?
The technique for self-government all round, self-government for ordinary people in their ordinary
avocation, is a matter which we cannot profitably discuss unless we have a clear idea of what may be called the
natural history and psychology of groups. Quantitatively, a group differs from a crowd in size; qualitatively, in the
kind and intensity of the mental life of the constituent individuals. A crowd is a lot of people; a group is a few. A
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crowd has a mental life inferior in intellectual quality and emotionally less under voluntary control than the mental
life of each of its members in isolation. The mental life of a group is not inferior, either intellectually or
emotionally, to the mental life of the individual composing it and may, in favorable circumstances, actually be
superior.
The significant psychological facts about the crowd are as follows. The tone of crowd emotion is essentially
orgiastic and dionysiac. In virtue of his membership of the crowd, the individual is released from the limitations of
his personality, made free of the sub-personal, sub-human world of unrestrained feeling and uncriticized belief. To
be a member of a crowd is an experience closely akin to alcoholic intoxication. Most human beings feel a craving
to escape from the cramping limitations of their ego, to take periodical holidays from their all too familiar, all too
squalid little selves. As they do not know how to travel upwards from personality into a region of super-personality
and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfill the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of
self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending road, the road that leads down from personality to the
darkness of sub-human emotionalism and panic animality. Hence the persistent craving for narcotics and
stimulants, hence the never failing attraction of the crowd. The success of the dictators is due in large measure to
their extremely skillful exploitation of the universal human need for escape from the limitations of personality.
Perceiving that people wished to take holidays from themselves in sub-human emotionality, they have
systematically provided their subjects with the occasions for doing so. The Communists denounce religion as the
opium of the people; but all they have done is to replace this old drug by a new one of similar composition. For the
crowd round the relic of the saint they have substituted the crowd at the political meeting; for religious processions,
military reviews and May Day parades. It is the same with Fascist dictators. In all the totalitarian states the masses
are persuaded, and, even compelled, to take periodical holidays from themselves in the sub-human world of crowd
emotion. It is significant that while they encourage and actually command the descent into sub-humanity, the
dictators do all they can to prevent men from taking the upward road from personal limitation, the road that leads
toward non-attachment to the "things of this world" and attachment to that which is super-personal. The higher
manifestations of religion are far more suspect to the tyrants than the lower -- and with reason. For the man who
escapes from egotism into super-personality has transcended his old idolatrous loyalty, not only to himself, but also
to the local divinities -- nation, party, class, deified boss. Self-transcendence, escape from the prison of the ego into
union with what is above personality, is generally accomplished in solitude. That is why the tyrants like to herd
their subjects into those vast crowds, in which the individual is reduced to a state of intoxicated sub-humanity.
It is time now to consider the group. The first question we must ask ourselves is this: when does a group
become a crowd? This is not a problem in verbal definition; it is a matter of observation and experience. It is found
empirically that group activities and characteristic group feeling become increasingly difficult when more than
about twenty or less than about five individuals are involved. Groups which come together for the purpose of
carrying out a specific job of manual work can afford to be larger than groups which meet for the purpose of
pooling information and elaborating a common policy, or which meet for religious exercises, or for mutual
comfort, or merely for the sake of convivially "getting together." Twenty or even as many as thirty people can
work together and still remain a group. But these numbers would be much too high in a group that had assembled
for the other purposes I have mentioned. It is significant that Jesus had only twelve apostles; that the Benedictines
were divided into groups of ten under a dean (Latin decanus from Greek ten); that ten is the number of
individuals constituting a Communist cell. Committees of more than a dozen members are found to be
unmanageably large. Eight is the perfect number for a dinner party. The most successful Quaker meetings are
generally meetings at which few people are present. Educationists agree that the most satisfactory size for a class is
between eight and fifteen. In armies, the smallest unit is about ten. The witches' "coven" was a group of thirteen.
And so on. All evidence points clearly to the fact that there is an optimum size for groups and that this optimum is
round about ten for groups meeting for social, religious or intellectual purposes and from ten to thirty for groups
engaged in manual work. This being so, it is clear that the units of self-government should be groups of the
optimum size. If they are smaller than the optimum, they will fail to develop that emotional field which gives to
group activity its characteristic quality, while the available quantity of pooled information and experience will be
inadequate. If they are larger than the optimum, they will tend to split into sub-groups of the optimum size or, if the
constituent individuals remain together in a crowd there will be a danger of their relapsing into the crowd's sub-
human stupidity and emotionality.
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The technique of industrial self-government has been discussed with a wealth of concrete examples in a
remarkable book by the French economist Hyacinthe Dubreuil, entitled, A Chacun sa Chance. Among the writers
on industrial organization Dubreuil occupies a place apart; for he is almost the only one of them who has himself
had experience of factory conditions as a workman. Accordingly, what he writes on the subject of industrial
organization carries an authority denied to the utterances of those who rely on second-hand information as a basis
for their theories. Dubreuil points out that even the largest industries can be organized so as to consist of a series of
self-governing, yet co-ordinated, groups of, at the outside, thirty members. Within the industry each one of such
groups can act as a kind of sub-contractor, undertaking to perform so much of such and such a kind of work for
such and such a sum. The equitable division of this sum among the constituent members is left to the group itself,
as is also the preservation of discipline, the election of representatives and leaders. The examples which Dubreuil
quotes from the annals of industrial history and from his own experience as a workman tend to show that this form
of organization is appreciated by the workers, to whom it gives a measure of independence even within the largest
manufacturing concern, and that in most cases it results in increased efficiency of working. It possesses, as he
points out, the further merit of being a form of organization that educates those who belong to it in the practice of
co-operation and mutual responsibility.
Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some
cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded of the workers, who
are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory, they may be the subjects of a
democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant.
Dubreuil's scheme, if it were generally acted upon, would introduce genuine democracy into the factory. And if
some such scheme is not acted upon, it is of small moment to the individual whether the industry in which he is
working is owned by the state, by a co-operative society, by a joint stock company or by a private individual.
Passive obedience to officers appointed from above is always passive obedience, whoever the general in ultimate
control may be. Conversely, even if the ultimate control is in the wrong hands, the man who voluntarily accepts
rules in the making of which he has had a part, who obeys leaders he himself has chosen, who has helped to decide
how much and in what conditions he himself and his companions shall be paid, is to that extent the free and
responsible subject of a genuinely democratic government, and enjoys those psychological advantages which only
such a form of government can give.
Of modern wage-slaves, Lenin writes that they "remain to such an extent crushed by want and poverty that
they 'can't be bothered with democracy,' have 'no time for politics,' and in the ordinary peaceful course of events,
the majority of the population is debarred from participating in public political life." This statement is only
partially true. Not all those who can't be bothered with democracy are debarred from political life by want and
poverty. Plenty of well-paid workmen and, for that matter, plenty of the wealthiest beneficiaries of the capitalistic
system, find that they can't be bothered with politics. The reason is not economic, but psychological; has its source,
not in environment, but in heredity. People belong to different psycho-physiological types and are endowed with
different degrees of general intelligence. The will and ability to take an effective interest in large-scale politics do
not belong to all, or even a majority of, men and women. Preoccupation with general ideas, with things and people
distant in space, with contingent events remote in future time, is something which it is given to only a few to feel.
"What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?" The answer in most cases is: Nothing whatsoever. An improvement in
the standard of living might perceptibly increase the number of those for whom Hecuba meant something. But even
if all were rich, there would still be many congenitally incapable of being bothered with anything so far removed
from the warm, tangible facts of everyday experience. As things are at present, millions of men and women come
into the world disfranchised by nature. They have the privilege of voting on long-range, large-scale political issues;
but they are congenitally incapable of taking an intelligent interest in any but short-range, small-scale problems.
Too often the framers of democratic constitutions have acted as though man were made for democracy, not
democracy for man. The vote has been a kind of bed of Procrustes upon which, however long their views, however
short their ability, all human beings were expected to stretch themselves. Not unnaturally, the results of this kind of
democracy have proved disappointing. Nevertheless, it remains true that democratic freedom is good for those who
enjoy it and that practice in self-government is an almost indispensable element in the curriculum of man's moral
and psychological education. Human beings belong to different types; it is therefore necessary to create different
types of democratic and self-governing institutions, suitable for the various kinds of men and women. Thus, people
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with short-range, small-scale interests can find scope for their kind of political abilities in self-governing groups
within an industry, within a consumer or producer cooperative, within the administrative machinery of the parish,
borough or county. By means of comparatively small changes in the existing systems of local and professional
organization it would be possible to make almost every individual a member of some self-governing group. In this
way the curse of merely passive obedience could be got rid of, the vice of political indolence cured and the
advantages of responsible and active freedom brought to all. In this context it is worth remarking on a very
significant change which has recently taken place in our social habits. Materially, this change may be summed up
as the decline of the community; psychologically, as the decline of the community sense. The reasons for this
double change are many and of various kinds. Here are a few of the more important.
Birth control has reduced the size of the average family and, for various reasons which will be apparent
later, the old habits of patriarchal living have practically disappeared. It is very rare nowadays to find parents,
married children, and grandchildren living together in the same house or in close association. Large families and
patriarchal groups were communities in which children and adults had to learn (often by very painful means) the
art of co-operation and the need to accept responsibility for others. These admittedly rather crude schools of
community sense have now disappeared.
New methods of transport have profoundly modified the life in the village and small town. Up to only a
generation ago most villages were to a great extent self-sufficing communities. Every trade was represented by its
local technician; the local produce was consumed or exchanged in the neighborhood; the inhabitants worked on the
spot. If they desired instruction or entertainment or religion, they had to mobilize the local talent and produce it
themselves. Today all this is changed. Thanks to improved transport, the village is now closely bound up with the
rest of the economic world. Supplies and technical services are obtained from a distance. Large numbers of the
inhabitants go out to work in factories and offices in far-off cities. Music and the drama are provided, not by local
talent, but over the ether and in the picture theater. Once all the members of the community were always on the
spot; now, thanks to cars, motor cycles and buses the villagers are rarely in their village. Community fun,
community worship, community efforts to secure culture have tended to decline for the simple reason that, in
leisure hours, a large part of the community's membership is always somewhere else. Nor is this all. The older
inhabitants of Middletown, as readers of the Lynds' classical study of American small-town life will remember,
complained that the internal combustion engine had led to a decline of neighborliness. Neighbors have Fords and
Chevrolets, consequently are no longer there to be neighborly; or if by chance they should be at home, they content
themselves with calling up on the telephone. Technological progress has reduced the number of physical contacts,
and thus impoverished the spiritual relations between the members of a community.
Centralized professionalism has not only affected local entertainment; it had also affected the
manifestations of local charity and mutual aid. State-provided hospitals, state-provided medical and nursing
services are certainly much more efficient than the ministrations of the neighbors. But this increased efficiency is
purchased at the price of a certain tendency on the part of neighbors to disclaim liability for one another and throw
their responsibilities entirely upon the central authority. Under a perfectly organized system of state socialism
charity would be, not merely superfluous, but actually criminal. Good Samaritans would be prosecuted for daring
to interfere in their bungling amateurish way with what was obviously a case for state-paid professionals.
The last three generations have witnessed a vast increase in the size and number of large cities. Life is more
exciting and more money can be earned in the cities than in villages and small towns. Hence the migration from
country to city. In the van of this migrating host have marched the ambitious, the talented, the adventurous. For
more than a century, there has been a tendency for the most gifted members of small rural communities to leave
home and seek their fortune in the towns. Consequently what remains in the villages and country towns of the
industrialized countries is in the nature of a residual population, dysgenically selected for its lack of spirit and
intellectual gifts. Why is it so hard to induce peasants and small farmers to adopt new scientific methods? Among
other reasons, because almost every exceptionally intelligent child born into a rural family for a century past has
taken the earliest opportunity of deserting the land for the city. Community life in the country is thus impoverished;
but (and this is the important point) the community life of the great urban centers is not correspondingly enriched.
It is not enriched for the good reason that, in growing enormous, cities have also grown chaotic. A metropolitan
"wen," as Cobbett was already calling the relatively tiny London of his day, is no longer an organic whole, no
longer exists as a community, in whose life individuals can fruitfully participate. Men and women rub shoulders
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with other men and women; but the contact is external and mechanical. Each one of them can say, in the words of
the Jolly Miller of the song, "I care for nobody, no, not I, and nobody cares for me." Metropolitan life is atomistic.
The city, as a city, does nothing to correlate its human particles into a pattern of responsible, communal living.
What the country loses on the swings, the city loses all over again on the roundabouts.
In the light of this statement of the principal reasons for the recent decline of the community and of the
community sense in individuals, we can suggest certain remedies. Schools and colleges can be transformed into
organic communities and used to offset, during a short period of the individual's career, the decay in family and
village life. (A very interesting experiment in this direction is being made at Black Mountain College in North
Carolina.) To some extent, no doubt, the old, "natural" life of villages and small towns, the life that the economic,
technological and religious circumstances of the past conspired to impose upon them, can be replaced by a
consciously designed synthetic product -- a life of associations organized for local government, for sport, for
cultural activities and the like. Such associations already exist, and there should be no great difficulty in opening
them to larger numbers and, at the same time, in making their activities so interesting that people will wish to join
them instead of taking the line of least resistance, as they do now, and living unconnected, atomistic lives,
passively obeying during their working hours and passively allowing themselves to be entertained by machinery
during their hours of leisure. The existence of associations of this kind would serve to make country life less dull
and so do something to arrest the flight toward the city. At the same time, the decentralization of industry and its
association with agriculture should make it possible for the countryman to earn as much as the city dweller. In spite
of the ease with which electric power can now be distributed, the movement toward the decentralization of industry
is not yet a very powerful one. Great centers of population, like London and Paris, possess an enormous power of
attraction to industries. The greater the population, the greater the market; and the greater the market, the stronger
the gravitational pull exercised upon the manufacturer. New industries establish themselves on the outskirts of
large cities and make them become still larger. For the sake of slight increased profits, due to lower distributing
costs, the manufacturers are busily engaged in making London chaotically large, hopelessly congested, desperately
hard to enter or leave, and vulnerable to air attacks as no other city of Europe is vulnerable. To compel a rational
and planned decentralization of industry is one of the legitimate, the urgently necessary functions of the state.
Life in the great city is atomistic. How shall it be given a communal pattern? How shall the individual be
incorporated in a responsible, self-governing group? In a modern city, the problem of organizing responsible
community life on a local basis is not easily solved. Modern cities have been created and are preserved by the
labors of highly specialized technicians. The massacre of a few thousands of engineers, administrators and doctors
would be sufficient to reduce any of the great metropolitan centers to a state of plague-stricken, starving chaos.
Accordingly, in most of its branches, the local government of a great city has become a highly technical affair, a
business of the kind that must be centrally planned and carried out by experts. The only department in which there
would seem to be a possibility of profitably extending the existing institutions of local self-government is the
department concerned with police-work and the observance of laws. I have read that in Japan, the cities were, and
perhaps still are, divided into wards of about a hundred inhabitants apiece. The people in each ward accepted a
measure of liability for one another and were to some extent responsible for good behavior and the observance of
law within their own small unit. That such a system lends itself to the most monstrous abuses under a dictatorial
government is obvious. Indeed, it is reported that the Nazis have already organized their cities in this way. But
there is no governmental institution that cannot be abused. Elected parliaments have been used as instruments of
oppression; plebiscites have served to confirm and strengthen tyranny; courts of justice have been transformed into
Star Chambers and military tribunals. Like all the rest, the ward system may be a source of good in a desirable
context and a source of unmitigated evil in an undesirable context. It remains in any case a device worth
considering by those who aspire to impose a communal pattern upon the atomistic, irresponsible life of modern city
dwellers. For the rest, it looks as though the townsman's main experience of democratic institutions and responsible
self-government would have to be obtained, not in local administrations, but in the fields of industry and
economics, of religious and cultural activity, of athletics and entertainment.
In the preceding paragraphs I have tried to answer the first of our questions and have described the methods
by which the principle of self-government can be applied to the daily lives of ordinary men and women. Our
second question concerns the compatibility of self-government all round with the efficiency of industry in
particular and society as a whole. In Russia self-government in industry was tried in the early years of the
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revolution and was abandoned in favor of authoritarian management. Within the factory discipline is no longer
enforced by elected representatives of the Soviet or worker's committee, but by appointees of the Communist
Party. The new conception of management current in Soviet Russia was summed up by Kaganovitch in a speech
before the seventeenth congress of the Communist Party. "Management," he said, "means the power to distribute
material things, to appoint and discharge subordinates, in a word, to be master of the particular enterprise." This is
a definition of management to which every industrial dictator in the capitalist countries would unhesitatingly
subscribe.
By supporters of the present Russian government it is said that the change over from self-government to
authoritarian management had to be made in the interests of efficiency. That extremely inexperienced and ill-
educated workers should have been unable to govern themselves and keep up industrial efficiency seems likely
enough. But in Western Europe and the United States such a situation is not likely to arise. Indeed, Dubreuil has
pointed out that, as a matter of historical fact, self-government within factories has often led to increased
efficiency. It would seem, then, that in countries where all men and women are relatively well educated and have
been accustomed for some time to the working of democratic institutions, there is no danger that self-government
will lead to a breakdown of discipline within the factory or a decline in output. But, like "liberty" the word
"efficiency" covers a multitude of sins. Even if it should be irrefragably demonstrated that self-government in
industry invariably led to a greater contentment and increased output, even if it could be proved experimentally that
the best features of individualism and collectivism could be combined if the state were to co-ordinate the activities
of self-governing industries, there would still be complaints of "inefficiency." And by their own lights, the
complainers would be quite right. For to the ruling classes, not only in the totalitarian, but also in the democratic
countries, "efficiency" means primarily "military efficiency." Now, a society in which the principle of self-
government has been applied to the ordinary activities of all its members, is a society which, for purely military
purposes, is probably decidedly inefficient. A militarily efficient society is one whose members have been brought
up in habits of passive obedience and at the head of which there is an individual exercising absolute authority
through a perfectly trained hierarchy of administrators. In time of war, such a society can be manipulated as a
single unit and with extraordinary rapidity and precision. A society composed of men and women habituated to
working in self-governing groups is not a perfect war-machine. Its members may think and have wills of their own.
But soldiers must not think nor have wills. "Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die." Furthermore a
society in which authority is decentralized, a society composed of co-ordinated but self-governing parts, cannot be
manipulated so swiftly and certainly as a totalitarian society under a dictator. Self-government all round is not
compatible with military efficiency. So long as nations persist in using war as an instrument of policy, military
efficiency will be prized above all else. Therefore schemes for extending the principle of self-government will
either not be tried at all or, if tried, as in Russia, will be speedily abandoned. Inevitably, we find ourselves
confronted, yet once more, by the central evil of our time, the overpowering and increasing evil of war.
I must now try to answer our questions concerning the efficiency of a society made up of co-ordinated self-
governing units and the nature of the co-ordinating body.
Dubreuil has shown that even the largest industrial undertakings can be organized so as to consist of a
number of co-ordinated but self-governing groups; and he has produced reasons for supposing that such an
organization would not reduce the efficiency of the businesses concerned and might even increase it. This small-
scale industrial democracy is theoretically compatible with any kind of large-scale control of the industries
concerned. It can be (and in certain cases actually has been) applied to industries working under the capitalist
system; to businesses under direct state control; to co-operative enterprises; to mixed concerns, like the Port of
London Authority, which are under state supervision, but have their own autonomous, functional management. In
practice this small-scale industrial democracy, this self-government for all, is intrinsically most compatible with
business organizations of the last two kinds -- co-operative and mixed. It is almost equally incompatible with
capitalism and state socialism. Capitalism tends to produce a multiplicity of petty dictators, each in command of
his own little business kingdom. State socialism tends to produce a single, centralized, totalitarian dictatorship,
wielding absolute authority over all its subjects through a hierarchy of bureaucratic agents.
Co-operatives and mixed concerns already exist and work extremely well. To increase their numbers and to
extend their scope would not seem a revolutionary act, in the sense that it would probably not provoke the violent
opposition which men feel toward projects involving an entirely new principle. In its effects, however, the act
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would be revolutionary; for it would result in a profound modification of the existing system. This alone is a
sufficient reason for preferring these forms of ultimate industrial control to all others. The intrinsic compatibility of
the co-operative enterprise and mixed concern with small-scale democracy and self-government all round
constitutes yet another reason for the preference. To discuss the arrangements for co-ordinating the activities of
partially autonomous co-operative and mixed concerns is not my business in this place. For technical details, the
reader is referred once again to the literature of social and economic planning. I will confine myself here to quoting
a relevant passage from the admirable essay contributed by Professor David Mitrany to the Yale Review in 1934.
Speaking of the need for comprehensive planning, Professor Mitrany writes that "this does not necessarily mean
more centralized government and bureaucratic administration. Public control is just as likely to mean
decentralization -- as, for instance, the taking over from a nation-wide private corporation of activities and services
which could be performed with better results by local authorities. Planning, in fact, if it is intelligent, should allow
for a great variety of organization, and should adapt the structure and working of its parts to the requirements of
each case."
A striking change of view on this point is evident in the paradox that the growing demand for state action
comes together with a growing distrust of the state's efficiency. Hence, even among socialists, as may be seen from
the more recent Fabian tracts, the old idea of the nationalization of an industry under a government department,
responsible to Parliament for both policy and management, has generally been replaced by schemes which even
under public ownership provide for autonomous functional managements. After describing the constitution of such
mixed concerns as the Central Electricity Board (set up in England by a Conservative government) the British
Broadcasting Corporation and the London Transport Board, Professor Mitrany concludes that it is only "by some
such means that the influence both of politics and of money can be eliminated. Radicals and conservatives now
agree on the need for placing the management of such public undertakings upon a purely functional basis, which
reduces the role of Parliament or of any other representative body to a distant, occasional and indirect
determination of general policy."
Above these semi-autonomous "functional managers" there will have to be, it is clear, an ultimate co-
ordinating authority -- a group of technicians whose business it will be to manage the managers. What is to prevent
the central political executive from joining hands with these technical managers of managers to become the ruling
oligarchy of a totalitarian state? The answer is that, so long as nations continue to prepare for the waging of
scientific warfare, there is nothing whatever to prevent this from happening -- there is every reason, indeed, to
suppose that it will happen. In the context of militarism, even the most intrinsically desirable changes inevitably
become distorted. In a country which is preparing for modern war, reforms intended to result in decentralization
and genuine democracy will be made to serve the purpose of military efficiency -- which means in practice that
they will be used to strengthen the position of a dictator or a ruling oligarchy.
Where the international context is militaristic, dictators will use the necessity for "defense" as their excuse
for seizing absolute power. But even where there is no threat of war, the temptation to abuse a position of authority
will always be strong. How shall our hypothetical managers of managers and the members of the central political
executive be delivered from this evil? Ambition may be checked, but cannot be suppressed by any kind of legal
machinery. If it is to be scotched, it must be scotched at the source, by education in the widest sense of the word. In
our societies men are paranoiacally ambitious, because paranoiac ambition is admired as a virtue and successful
climbers are adored as though they were gods. More books have been written about Napoleon than about any other
human being. The fact is deeply and alarmingly significant. What must be the day-dreams of people for whom the
world's most agile social climber and ablest bandit is the hero they most desire to hear about? Duces and Fuehrers
will cease to plague the world only when the majority of its inhabitants regard such adventurers with the same
disgust as they now bestow on swindlers and pimps. So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars
and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable. The proper attitude toward the "hero" is not Carlyle's, but
Bacon's. "He doth like the ape," wrote Bacon of the ambitious tyrant, "he doth like the ape that, the higher he
clymbes, the more he shewes his ars." The hero's qualities are brilliant; but so is the mandril's rump. When all
concur in the great Lord Chancellor's judgment of Fuehrers, there will be no more Fuehrers to judge. Meanwhile
we must content ourselves by putting merely legal and administrative obstacles in the way of the ambitious. They
are a great deal better than nothing; but they can never be completely effective.
(From Ends and Means)
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Politics and Religion
About politics one can make only one completely unquestionable generalization, which is that it is quite
impossible for statesmen to foresee, for more than a very short time, the results of any course of large-scale
political action. Many of them, it is true, justify their actions by pretending to themselves and others that they can
see a long way ahead; but the fact remains that they can't. If they were completely honest they would say, with
Father Joseph,
J'ignore où mon dessein, qui surpasse ma vue.

Si vite me conduit;
Mais comme un astre ardent qui brille dans la nue,
Il me guide en la nuit.
If hell is paved with good intentions, it is, among other reasons, because of the impossibility of calculating
consequences. Bishop Stubbs therefore condemns those historians who amuse themselves by fixing on individuals
or groups of men responsibility for the remoter consequences of their actions. "It strikes me," he writes, "as not
merely unjust, but as showing an ignorance of the plainest aphorisms of common sense, . . . to make an historical
character responsible for evils and crimes, which have resulted from his actions by processes which he could not
foresee." This is sound so far as it goes; but it does not go very far. Besides being a moralist, the historian is one
who attempts to formulate generalizations about human events. It is only by tracing the relations between acts and
their consequences that such generalizations can be made. When they have been made, they are available to
politicians in framing plans of action. In this way past records of the relation between acts and consequences enter
the field of ethics as relevant factors in a situation of choice. And here it may be pointed out that, though it is
impossible to foresee the remoter consequences of any given course of action, it is by no means impossible to
foresee, in the light of past historical experience, the sort of consequences that are likely, in a general way, to
follow certain sorts of acts. Thus, from the records of past experience, it seems sufficiently clear that the
consequences attendant on a course of action involving such things as large-scale war, violent revolution,
unrestrained tyranny and persecution are likely to be bad. Consequently, any politician who embarks on such
courses of action cannot plead ignorance as an excuse. Father Joseph, for example, had read enough history to
know that policies like that which Richelieu and he were pursuing are seldom, even when nominally successful,
productive of lasting good to the parties by whom they were framed. But his passionate ambition for the Bourbons
made him cling to a voluntary ignorance, which he proceeded to justify by speculations about the will of God.
Here it seems worth while to comment briefly on the curious time sense of those who think in political
terms. Courses of action are recommended on the ground that if carried out, they cannot fail to result in a solution
to all outstanding problems -- a solution either definitive and everlasting, like that which Marx foresaw as the result
of the setting up of a classless society, or else of very long duration, like the thousand-year futures foretold for their
regimes by Mussolini and Hitler. Richelieu's admirers envisaged a Bourbon golden age longer than the
hypothetical Nazi or Fascist era, but shorter (since it had a limit) than the final, classless stage of Communism. In a
contemporary defense of the Cardinal's policy against the Huguenots, Voiture justifies the great expenditures
involved by saying that "the capture of La Rochelle alone has economized millions; for La Rochelle would have
raised rebellion at every royal minority, every revolt of the nobles during the next two thousand years." Such are
the illusions cherished by the politically minded when they reflect on the consequences of a policy immediately
before or immediately after it has been put in action. But when the policy has begun to show its fruits, their time
sense undergoes a radical change. Gone are the calculations in terms of centuries or millennia. A single victory is
now held to justify a Te Deum, and if the policy yields apparently successful results for only a few years, the
statesman feels satisfied and his sycophants are lavish in their praise of his genius. Even sober historians writing
long after the event tend to express themselves in the same vein. Thus, Richelieu is praised by modern writers as a
very great and far-sighted statesman, even though it is perfectly clear that the actions he undertook for the
aggrandizement of the Bourbon dynasty created the social and economic and political conditions which led to the
downfall of that dynasty, the rise of Prussia and the catastrophes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His
policy is praised as if it had been eminently successful, and those who objected to it are blamed for their short-
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sighted views. Here, for example, is what Gustave Fagniez has to say of the French peasants and burgesses who
opposed the Cardinal's war policy -- a policy for which they had to pay with their money, their privations and their
blood. "Always selfish and unintelligent, the masses cannot be expected to put up for a long time with hardships, of
which future generations are destined to reap the fruits." And this immediately after a passage setting forth the
nature of these particular fruits -- the union of all Europe against Louis XIV and the ruin of the French people.
Such extraordinary inconsistency can only be explained by the fact that, when people come to talk of their nation's
successes, they think in terms of the very briefest periods of time. A triumph is to be hymned and gloated over,
even if it lasts no more than a day. Retrospectively, men like Richelieu and Louis XIV and Napoleon are more
admired for the brief glory they achieved than hated for the long-drawn miseries which were the price of that glory.
Among the sixteen hundred-odd ladies whose names were set down in the catalogue of Don Giovanni's
conquests, there were doubtless not a few whose favors made it necessary for the hero to consult his physician. But
pox or no pox, the mere fact that the favors had been given was a thing to feel proud of, a victory worth recording
in Leporello's chronicle of successes. The history of the nations is written in the same spirit.
So much for the consequences of the policy which Father Joseph helped to frame and execute. Now for the
questions of ethics. Ethically, Father Joseph's position was not the same as that of an ordinary politician. It was not
the same because, unlike ordinary politicians, he was an aspirant to sanctity, a contemplative with a considerable
working knowledge of mysticism, one who knew the nature of spiritual religion and had actually made some
advance along the "way of perfection" toward union with God. Theologians agree that all Christians are called to
union with God, but that few are willing to make the choice which qualifies them to be chosen. Father Joseph was
one of those few. But having made the choice, he went on, some years later, to make another; he chose to go into
politics, as Richelieu's collaborator. As we have seen, Father Joseph's intention was to combine the life of political
activity with that of contemplation, to do what power politics demanded and to annihilate it in God's will even
while it was being done. In practice, the things which had to be done proved unannihilatable, and with one part of
his being Father Joseph came to be bitterly sorry that he had ever entered politics. But there was also another part
of him, a part that craved for action, that yearned to do something heroic for the greater glory of God. Looking
back over his life, Father Joseph, the contemplative, felt that he had done wrong, or at any rate been very unwise,
to enter politics. But if he had not done so, if he had remained the evangelist, teacher and religious reformer, he
would probably have felt to the end of his days that he had done wrong to neglect the opportunity of doing God's
will in the great world of international politics -- gesta Dei per Francos.
Father Joseph's dilemma is one which confronts all spirituals and contemplatives, all who aspire to worship
God theocentrically and for his own sake, all who attempt to obey the commandment to be perfect as their Father
in heaven is perfect. In order to think clearly about this dilemma, we must learn first of all to think clearly about
certain matters of more general import. Catholic theologians had done a great deal of this necessary clear thinking,
and, if he had cared to make use of them, Father Joseph could have found in the teachings of his predecessors and
contemporaries most of the materials for a sound philosophy of action and a sound sociology of contemplation.
That he did not make use of them was due to the peculiar nature of his temperament and talents and, above all, to
his intense vicarious ambition for the French monarchy. He was lured away from the path of perfection by the most
refined of all temptations -- the baits of loyalty and self-sacrifice, but of a loyalty to a cause inferior to the supreme
good, a sacrifice of self undertaken in the name of something less than God.
Let us begin by a consideration of the theory of action which was current in the speculative writings
available to Father Joseph. The first thing we have to remember is that, when theologians speak of the active life as
contrasted with that of contemplation, they do not refer to what contemporary, non-theological writers call by the
same name. To us, "life of action" means the sort of life led by movie heroes, business executives, war
correspondents, cabinet ministers and the like. To the theologians, all these are merely worldly lives, lived more or
less unregenerately by people who have done little or nothing to get rid of their Old Adams. What they call active
life, is the life of good works. To be active is to follow the way of Martha, who spent her time ministering to the
material needs of the master, while Mary (who in all mystical literature stands for the contemplative) sat and
listened to his words: When Father Joseph chose the life of politics, he knew very well that it was not the life of
action in the theological sense, that the way of Richelieu was not identical with the way of Martha. True, France
was, ex hypothesi and almost by definition, the instrument of divine providence. Therefore any policy tending to
the aggrandizement of France must be good in its essence. But though its essence might be good and entirely
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accordant with God's will, its accidents were often questionable. This was where the practice of active annihilation
came in. By means of it, Father Joseph hoped to be able to sterilize the rather dirty things he did and to make them
harmless, at any rate to himself.
Most people at the present time probably take for granted the validity of the pragmatists' contention, that
the end of thought is action. In the philosophy which Father Joseph had studied and made his own, this position is
reversed. Here contemplation is the end and action (in which is included discursive thought) is valuable only as a
means to the beatific vision of God. In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, "action should be something added to the
life of prayer, not something taken away from it." To the man of the world, this statement is almost totally devoid
of meaning. To the contemplative, whose concern is with spiritual religion, with the kingdom of God rather than
the kingdom of selves, it seems axiomatic. Starting from this fundamental principle of theocentric religion, the
practical mystics have critically examined the whole idea of action and have laid down, in regard to it, a set of rules
for the guidance of those desiring to follow the mystical path toward the beatific vision. One of the best
formulations of the traditional mystical doctrine in regard to action was made by Father Joseph's contemporary,
Louis Lallemant. Lallemant was a Jesuit, who, in spite of the prevailing anti-mystical tendencies of his order, was
permitted to teach a very advanced (but entirely orthodox) kind of spirituality to the men entrusted to his care.
Whenever we undertake any action, Father Lallemant insists, we must model ourselves upon God himself,
who creates and sustains the world without in any way modifying his essential existence. But we cannot do this
unless we learn to practice formal contemplation and a constant awareness of God's presence. Both are difficult,
especially the latter which is possible only to those very far advanced along the way of perfection. So far as
beginners are concerned, even the doing of good works may distract the soul from God. Action is not safe, except
for proficients in the art of mental prayer. "If we have gone far in orison," says Lallemant, "we shall give much to
action; if we are but middlingly advanced in the inward life, we shall give ourselves only moderately to outward
life; if we have only a very little inwardness, we shall give nothing at all to what is external, unless our vow of
obedience commands the contrary." To the reasons already given for this injunction we may add others of a strictly
utilitarian nature. It is a matter of experience and observation that actions undertaken by ordinary unregenerate
people, sunk in their selfhood and without spiritual insight, seldom do much good. A generation before Lallemant,
St. John of the Cross had put the whole matter in a single question and answer. Those who rush headlong into good
works without having acquired through contemplation the power to act well -- what do they accomplish? "Poco
mas que nada, y a veces nada, y aun a veces dano." (Little more than nothing, and sometimes nothing at all, and
sometimes even harm.) One reason for hell being paved with good intentions has already been mentioned, and to
this, the impossibility of foreseeing the consequences of actions, we must now add another, the intrinsically
unsatisfactory nature of actions performed by the ordinary run of average unregenerate men and women. This
being so, Lallemant recommends the least possible external activity until such time as, by contemplation and the
unremitting practice of the presence, the soul has been trained to give itself completely to God. Those who have
traveled only a little way along the road to union, "should not go out of themselves for the service of their
neighbors, except by way of trial and experiment. We must be like those hunting dogs that are still half held upon
the leash. When we shall have come by contemplation to possess God, we shall be able to give greater freedom to
our zeal." External activity causes no interruption in the orison of the proficient; on the contrary it is a means for
bringing them nearer to reality. Those for whom it is not such a means should as far as possible refrain from action.
Once again Father Lallemant justifies himself by the appeal to experience and a purely utilitarian consideration of
consequences. In all that concerns the saving of souls and the improving of the quality of people's thoughts and
feelings and behavior, "a man of orison will accomplish more in one year than another man in all his life."
What is true of good works is true, a fortiori, of merely worldly activity, particularly when it is activity on a
large scale, involving the collaboration of great numbers of individuals in every stage of unenlightenment. Good is
a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced. All Catholic theologians
were well aware of this truth, and the church has acted upon it since its earliest days. The monastic orders -- and
preeminently that to which Father Joseph himself belonged -- were living demonstrations of the traditional doctrine
of action. This doctrine affirmed that goodness of more than average quantity and quality could be practically
realized only on a small scale, by self-dedicated and specially trained individuals. In his own work of religious
reform and spiritual instruction, Father Joseph always acted on this same principle. The art of mental prayer was
taught by him only to individuals or small groups; the Calvarian rule was given as a way of life to only a very few
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of the nuns of Fontevrault, the order as a whole being much too large to be capable of realizing that peculiar
spiritual good which the reform was intended to produce. And yet, in spite of his theoretical and experimental
knowledge that good cannot be mass-produced in an unregenerate society, Father Joseph went into power politics,
convinced not only that by so doing he was fulfilling the will of God, but also that great and lasting material and
spiritual benefits would result from the war which he did his best to prolong and exacerbate. He knew that it was
useless to try to compel the good ladies of Fontevrault to be more virtuous and spiritual than they wanted to be; and
yet he believed that active French intervention in the Thirty Years' War would result in "a new golden age." This
strange inconsistency was, as we have often insisted, mainly a product of the will -- that will which Father Joseph
thought he had succeeded in subordinating to the will of God, but which remained, in certain important respects,
unregenerately that of the natural man. In part, however, it was also due to intellectual causes, specifically to his
acceptance of a certain theory of providence, widely held in the church and itself inconsistent with the theories of
action and the good outlined above. According to this theory, all history is providential and its interminable
catalogue of crimes and insanities is an expression of the divine will. As the most spectacular crimes and insanities
of history are perpetrated at the orders of governments, it follows that these and the states they rule are also
embodiments of God's will. Granted the truth of this providential theory of history and the state, Father Joseph was
justified in believing that the Thirty Years' War was a good thing and that a policy which disseminated
cannibalism, and universalized the practice of torture and murder, might be wholly accordant with God's will,
provided only that it was advantageous to France. This condition was essential; for as a politician, one was justified
by the providential theory of history in believing that God performs his gesta per Francos, even though, as a
practical reformer and spiritual director one knew very well that the deeds of God get done, not by the Franks at
large, but by one Frank here and another there, even by occasional Britons, such as Benet Fitch, and occasional
Spaniards, such as St. Teresa.
Mystical philosophy can be summed up in a single phrase: "The more of the creature, the less of God." The
large-scale activities of unregenerate men and women are almost wholly creaturely; therefore they almost wholly
exclude God. If history is an expression of the divine will, it is so mainly in a negative sense. The crimes and
insanities of large-scale human societies are related to God's will only in so far as they are acts of disobedience to
that will, and it is only in this sense that they and the miseries resulting from them can properly be regarded as
providential. Father Joseph justified the campaigns he planned by an appeal to the God of Battles. But there is no
God of Battles; there is only an ultimate reality, expressing itself in a certain nature of things, whose harmony is
violated by such events as battles, with consequences more or less disastrous for all directly or indirectly concerned
in the violation.
This brings us to the heart of that great paradox of politics -- the fact that political action is necessary and at
the same time incapable of satisfying the needs which called it into existence.
Only static and isolated societies, whose way of life is determined by an unquestioned tradition, can
dispense with politics. In unstable, unisolated, technologically progressive societies, such as ours, large-scale
political action is unavoidable. But even when it is well-intentioned (which it very often is not) political action is
always foredoomed to a partial, sometimes even a complete, self-stultification. The intrinsic nature of the human
instruments with which, and the human materials upon which, political action must be carried out, is a positive
guarantee against the possibility that such action shall yield the results that were expected from it. This
generalization could be illustrated by an indefinite number of instances drawn from history. Consider, for example,
the results actually achieved by two reforms upon which well-intentioned people have placed the most enormous
hopes -- universal education and public ownership of the means of production. Universal education has proved to
be the state's most effective instrument of universal regimentation and militarization, and has exposed millions,
hitherto immune, to the influence of organized lying and the allurements of incessant, imbecile and debasing
distractions. Public ownership of the means of production has been put into effect on a large scale only in Russia,
where the results of the reform have been, not the elimination of oppression, but the replacement of one kind of
oppression by another -- of money power by political and bureaucratic power, of the tyranny of rich men by a
tyranny of the police and the party.
For several thousands of years now men have been experimenting with different methods for improving the
quality of human instruments and human material. It has been found that a good deal can be done by such strictly
humanistic methods as the improvement of the social and economic environment, and the various techniques of
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character training. Among men and women of a certain type, startling results can be obtained by means of
conversion and catharsis. But though these methods are somewhat more effective than those of the purely
humanistic variety, they work only erratically and they do not produce the radical and permanent transformation of
personality, which must take place, and take place on a very large scale, if political action is ever to produce the
beneficial results expected from it. For the radical and permanent transformation of personality only one effective
method has been discovered -- that of the mystics. It is a difficult method, demanding from those who undertake it
a great deal more patience, resolution, self-abnegation and awareness than most people are prepared to give, except
perhaps in times of crisis, when they are ready for a short while to make the most enormous sacrifices. But
unfortunately the amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the
efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from
another, and of which normal lives mainly consist. Because of the general reluctance to make such efforts during
uncritical times, very few people are prepared, at any given moment of history, to undertake the method of the
mystics. This being so, we shall be foolish if we expect any political action, however well-intentioned and however
nicely planned, to produce more than a fraction of the general betterment anticipated.
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less
complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially
free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence. Large-scale
organizations are capable, it would seem, of going down a good deal further than they can go up. We may
reasonably expect to reach the upper limit once again; but unless a great many more people than in the past are
ready to undertake the only method capable of transforming personality, we may not expect to rise appreciably
above it.
What can the politicians do for their fellows by actions within the political field, and without the assistance
of the contemplatives? The answer would seem to be: not very much. Political reforms cannot be expected to
produce much general betterment, unless large numbers of individuals undertake the transformation of their
personality by the only known method which really works -- that of the contemplatives. Moreover, should the
amount of mystical, theocentric leaven in the lump of humanity suffer a significant decrease, politicians may find it
impossible to raise the societies they rule even to the very moderate heights realized in the past.
Meanwhile, politicians can do something to create a social environment favorable to contemplatives. Or
perhaps it is better to put the matter negatively and say that they can refrain from doing certain things and making
certain arrangements which are specially unfavorable.
The political activity that seems to be least compatible with theocentric religion is that which aims at
increasing a certain special type of social efficiency -- the efficiency required for waging or threatening large-scale
war. To achieve this kind of efficiency, politicians always aim at some kind of totalitarianism. Acting like the man
of science who can only deal with the complex problems of real life by arbitrarily simplifying them for
experimental purposes, the politician in search of military efficiency arbitrarily simplifies the society with which he
has to deal. But whereas the scientist simplifies by a process of analysis and isolation, the politician can only
simplify by compulsion, by a Procrustean process of chopping and stretching designed to make the living organism
conform to a certain easily understood and readily manipulated mechanical pattern. Planning a new kind of
national, military efficiency, Richelieu set himself to simplify the complexity of French society. That complexity
was largely chaotic, and a policy of simplification, judiciously carried out by desirable means would have been
fully justified. But Richelieu's policy was not judicious and, when continued after his death, resulted in the
totalitarianism of Louis XIV -- a totalitarianism which was intended to be as complete as anything we see in the
modern world, and which only failed to be so by reason of the wretched systems of communication and
organization available to the Grand Monarque's secret police. The tyrannical spirit was very willing, but,
fortunately for the French, the technological flesh was weak. In an era of telephones, finger printing, tanks and
machine guns, the task of a totalitarian government is easier than it was.
Totalitarian politicians demand obedience and conformity in every sphere of life, including, of course, the
religious. Here, their aim is to use religion as an instrument of social consolidation, an increaser of the country's
military efficiency. For this reason, the only kind of religion they favor is strictly anthropocentric, exclusive and
nationalistic. Theocentric religion, involving the worship of God for his own sake, is inadmissible in a totalitarian
state. All the contemporary dictators, Russian, Turkish, Italian and German, have either discouraged or actively
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persecuted any religious organization whose members advocate the worship of God, rather than the worship of the
deified state or the local political boss. Louis XIV was what is called "a good Catholic"; but his attitude toward
religion was characteristically totalitarian. He wanted religious unity, therefore he revoked the Edict of Nantes and
persecuted the Huguenots. He wanted an exclusive, nationalistic religion; therefore he quarreled with the Pope and
insisted on his own spiritual supremacy in France. He wanted state-worship and king-worship; therefore he sternly
discouraged those who taught theocentric religion, who advocated the worship of God alone and for his own sake.
The decline of mysticism at the end of the seventeenth century was due in part to the fatal over-orthodoxy of
Bérulle and his school, but partly also to a deliberate persecution of mystics at the hands of ecclesiastics, who
could say, with Bossuet, that they worshiped God under the forms of the King, Jesus Christ and the Church. The
attack on quietism was only partly the thing it professed to be -- a punitive expedition against certain rather silly
heretical views and certain rather undesirable practices. It was also and more significantly a veiled assault upon
mysticism itself. The controversial writings of Nicole, who worked in close collaboration with Bossuet, make it
quite clear that the real enemy was spiritual religion as such. Unfortunately for Nicole, the church had given its
approval to the doctrines and practices of earlier mystics, and it was therefore necessary to proceed with caution;
but this caution was not incompatible with a good deal of anti-mystical violence. Consciously, or unconsciously,
Nicole and the other enemies of contemplation and theocentric religion were playing the game of totalitarianism.
The efficiency of a pre-industrial totalitarian state, such as that which Richelieu planned and Louis XIV
actually realized, can never be so high as that of an industrial state, possessed of modern weapons, communications
and organizing methods. Conversely, it does not need to be so high. A national industrial system is something so
complicated that, if it is to function properly and compete with other national systems, it must be controlled in all
its details by a centralized state authority. Even if the intentions of the various centralized state authorities were
pacific, which they are not, industrialism would tend of its very nature to transform them into totalitarian
governments. When the need for military efficiency is added to the need for industrial efficiency, totalitarianism
becomes inevitable. Technological progress, nationalism and war seem to guarantee that the immediate future of
the world shall belong to various forms of totalitarianism. But a world made safe for totalitarianism is a world, in
all probability, made very unsafe for mysticism and theocentric religion. And a world made unsafe for mysticism
and theocentric religion is a world where the only proved method of transforming personality will be less and less
practiced, and where fewer and fewer people will possess any direct, experimental knowledge of reality to set up
against the false doctrine of totalitarian anthropocentrism and the pernicious ideas and practices of nationalistic
pseudo-mysticism. In such a world there seems little prospect that any political reform, however well intentioned,
will produce the results expected of it.
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. Individuals
and small groups do not always and automatically behave well. But at least they can be moral and rational to a
degree unattainable by large groups. For, as numbers increase, personal relations between members of the group,
and between its members and those of other groups, become more difficult and finally, for the vast majority of the
individuals concerned, impossible. Imagination has to take the place of direct acquaintance, behavior motivated by
a reasoned and impersonal benevolence, the place of behavior motivated by personal affection and a spontaneous
and unreflecting compassion. But in most men and women reason, sympathetic imagination and the impersonal
view of things are very slightly developed. That is why, among other reasons, the ethical standards prevailing
within large groups, between large groups, and between the rulers and the ruled in a large group, are generally
lower than those prevailing within and among small groups. The art of what may be called "goodness politics," as
opposed to power politics, is the art of organizing on a large scale without sacrificing the ethical values which
emerge only among individuals and small groups. More specifically, it is the art of combining decentralization of
government and industry, local and functional autonomy and smallness of administrative units with enough over-
all efficiency to guarantee the smooth running of the federated whole. Goodness politics have never been attempted
in any large society, and it may be doubted whether such an attempt, if made, could achieve more than a partial
success, so long as the majority of individuals concerned remain unable or unwilling to transform their
personalities by the only method known to be effective. But though the attempt to substitute goodness politics for
power politics may never be completely successful, it still remains true that the methods of goodness politics
combined with individual training in theocentric theory and contemplative practice alone provide the means
whereby human societies can become a little less unsatisfactory than they have been up to the present. So long as
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they are not adopted, we must expect to see an indefinite continuance of the dismally familiar alternations between
extreme evil and a very imperfect, self-stultifying good, alternations which constitute the history of all civilized
societies. In a world inhabited by what the theologians call unregenerate, or natural men, church and state can
probably never become appreciably better than the best of the states and churches, of which the past has left us the
record. Society can never be greatly improved, until such time as most of its members choose to become
theocentric saints. Meanwhile, the few theocentric saints which exist at any given moment are able in some slight
measure to qualify and mitigate the poisons which society generates within itself by its political and economic
activities. In the gospel phrase, theocentric saints are the salt which preserves the social world from breaking down
into irremediable decay.
This antiseptic and antidotal function of the theocentric is performed in a variety of ways. First of all, the
mere fact that he exists is profoundly salutary and important. The potentiality of knowledge of, and union with,
God is present in all men and women. In most of them, however, it is covered, as Eckhart puts it, "by thirty or forty
skins or hides, like an ox's or a bear's, so thick and hard." But beneath all this leather, and in spite of its toughness,
the divine more-than-self, which is the quick and principle of our being, remains alive, and can and does respond to
the shining manifestation of the same principle in the theocentric saint. The "old man dressed all in leather" meets
the new man, who has succeeded in stripping off the carapace of his thirty or forty ox-hides, and walks through the
world, a naked soul, no longer opaque to the radiance immanent within him. From this meeting, the old man is
likely to come away profoundly impressed by the strangeness of what he has seen, and with the nostalgic sense that
the world would be a better place if there were less leather in it. Again and again in the course of history, the
meeting with a naked and translucent spirit, even the reading about such spirits, has sufficed to restrain the leather
men who rule over their fellows from using their power to excess. It is respect for theocentric saints that prompts
the curious hypocrisy which accompanies and seeks to veil the brutal facts of political action. The preambles of
treaties are always drawn up in the choicest Pecksniffian style, and the more sinister the designs of a politician, the
more high-flown, as a rule, becomes the nobility of his language. Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we
condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that
the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly
less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.
The theocentric saint is impressive, not only for what he is, but also for what he does and says. His actions
and all his dealings with the world are marked by disinterestedness and serenity, invariable truthfulness and a total
absence of fear. These qualities are the fruits of the doctrine he preaches, and their manifestation in his life
enormously reinforces that doctrine and gives him a certain strange kind of uncoercive but none the less
compelling authority over his fellow men. The essence of this authority is that it is purely spiritual and moral, and
is associated with none of the ordinary social sanctions of power, position or wealth. It was here, of course, that
Father Joseph made his gravest and most fatal mistake. Even if his mysticism had proved to be compatible with his
power politics, which it did not, he would still have been wrong to accept the position of Richelieu's collaborator;
for by accepting it he automatically deprived himself of the power to exercise a truly spiritual authority, he cut
himself off from the very possibility of being the apostle of mysticism.
True, he could still be of use to his Calvarian nuns, as a teacher of contemplation; but this was because he
entered their convent, not as the foreign minister of France, but as a simple director. Outside the convent, he was
always the Grey Eminence. People could not speak to him without remembering that he was a man from whom
there was much to hope or fear; between themselves and this friar turned politician, there could no longer be the
direct contact of soul with naked soul. For them, his authority was temporal, not spiritual. Moreover, they
remembered that this was the man who had organized the secret service, who gave instructions to spies, who had
outwitted the Emperor at Ratisbon, who had worked his hardest to prolong the war; and remembering these things,
they could be excused for having their doubts about Father Joseph's brand of religion. The tree is known by its
fruits, and if these were the fruits of mental prayer and the unitive life -- why, then they saw no reason why they
shouldn't stick to wine and women, tempered by church on Sundays, confession once a quarter and communion at
Christmas and Easter.
It is a fatal thing, say the Indians, for the members of one caste to usurp the functions that properly belong
to another. Thus when the merchants trespass upon the ground of the kshatriyas and undertake the business of
ruling, society is afflicted by all the evils of capitalism; and when the kshatriyas do what only the theocentric
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brahmin has a right to do, when they presume to lay down the law on spiritual matters, there is totalitarianism, with
its idolatrous religions, its deifications of the nation, the party, the local political boss. Effects no less disastrous
occur when the brahmins go into politics or business; for then they lose their spiritual insight and authority, and the
society which it was their business to enlighten remains wholly dark, deprived of all communication with divine
reality, and consequently an easy victim to preachers of false doctrines. Father Joseph is an eminent example of
this last confusion of the castes. Abandoning seership for rulership, he gradually, despite his most strenuous efforts
to retain it, lost the mystical vision which had given him his spiritual authority -- but not, unfortunately, before he
had covered with that authority many acts and policies of the most questionable nature. (Richelieu was a good
psychologist, and it will be remembered that "whenever he wanted to perform some piece of knavery, he always
made use of men of piety.") In a very little while, the last vestiges of Father Joseph's spiritual authority
disappeared, and he came, as we have seen, to be regarded with general horror, as a man capable of every crime
and treachery.
The politically minded Jesuits, who practiced the same disastrous confusion of castes, came to have a
reputation as bad as Father Joseph's. The public was wrong in thinking of these generally virtuous and well-
intentioned men as fairy-tale monsters; but in condemning the fundamental principle of their work in the world, it
was profoundly right. The business of a seer is to see, and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing
activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him. Mystics
and theocentrics are not always loved or invariably listened to; far from it. Prejudice and the dislike of what is
unusual, may blind their contemporaries to the virtues of these men and women of the margin, may cause them to
be persecuted as enemies of society. But should they leave their margin, should they take to competing for place
and power within the main body of society, they are certain to be generally hated and despised as traitors to their
seership.
To be a seer is not the same thing as to be a mere spectator. Once the contemplative has fitted himself to
become, in Lallemant's phrase, "a man of much orison," he can undertake work in the world with no risk of being
thereby distracted from his vision of reality, and with fair hope of achieving an appreciable amount of good. As a
matter of historical fact, many of the great theocentrics have been men and women of enormous and beneficent
activity.
The work of the theocentrics is always marginal, is always started on the smallest scale and, when it
expands, the resulting organization is always subdivided into units sufficiently small to be capable of a shared
spiritual experience and of moral and rational conduct.
The first aim of the theocentrics is to make it possible for any one who desires it to share their own
experience of ultimate reality. The groups they create are organized primarily for the worship of God for God's
sake. They exist in order to disseminate various methods (not all of equal value) for transforming the "natural
man," and for learning to know the more-than-personal reality immanent within the leathery casing of selfhood. At
this point, many theocentrics are content to stop. They have their experience of reality and they proceed to impart
the secret to a few immediate disciples, or commit it to writing in a book that will be read by a wider circle
removed from them by great stretches of space and time. Or else, more systematically, they establish small
organized groups, a self-perpetuating order of contemplatives living under a rule. In so far as they may be expected
to maintain or possibly increase the number of seers and theocentrics in a given community, these proceedings
have a considerable social importance. Many theocentrics, however, are not content with this, but go on to employ
their organizations to make a direct attack upon the thorniest social problems. Such attacks are always launched
from the margin, not the center, always (at any rate in their earlier phases) with the sanction of a purely spiritual
authority, not with the coercive power of the state. Sometimes the attack is directed against economic evils, as
when the Benedictines addressed themselves to the revival of agriculture and the draining of swamps. Sometimes,
the evils are those of ignorance and the attack is through various kinds of education. Here again the Benedictines
were pioneers. (It is worth remarking that the Benedictine order owed its existence to the apparent folly of a young
man who, instead of doing the proper, sensible thing, which was to go through the Roman schools and become an
administrator under the Gothic emperors, went away and, for three years, lived alone in a hole in the mountains.
When he had become "a man of much orison," he emerged, founded monasteries and composed a rule to fit the
needs to a self-perpetuating order of hard-working contemplatives. In the succeeding centuries, the order civilized
northwestern Europe, introduced or re-established the best agricultural practice of the time, provided the only
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educational facilities then available, and preserved and disseminated the treasures of ancient literature. For
generations Benedictinism was the principal antidote to barbarism. Europe owes an incalculable debt to the young
man who, because he was more interested in knowing God than in getting on, or even "doing good," in the world,
left Rome for that burrow in the hillside above Subiaco.)
Work in the educational field has been undertaken by many theocentric organizations other than the
Benedictine order -- all too often, unhappily, under the restrictive influence of the political, state-supported and
state-supporting church. More recently the state has everywhere assumed the role of universal educator -- a
position that exposes governments to peculiar temptations, to which sooner or later they all succumb, as we see at
the present time, when the school system is used in almost every country as an instrument of regimentation,
militarization and nationalistic propaganda. In any state that pursued goodness politics rather than power politics,
education would remain a public charge, paid for out of the taxes, but would be returned, subject to the fulfillment
of certain conditions, to private hands. Under such an arrangement, most schools would probably be little or no
better than they are at present; but at least their badness would be variegated, while educators of exceptional
originality or possessed of the gift of seership would be given opportunities for teaching at present denied them.
Philanthropy is a field in which many men and women of the margin have labored to the great advantage of
their fellows. We may mention the truly astounding work accomplished by Father Joseph's contemporary, St.
Vincent de Paul, a great theocentric, and a great benefactor to the people of seventeenth-century France. Small and
insignificant in its beginnings, and carried on, as it expanded, under spiritual authority alone and upon the margin
of society, Vincent's work among the poor did something to mitigate the sufferings imposed by the war and by the
ruinous fiscal policy which the war made necessary. Having at their disposal all the powers and resources of the
state, Richelieu and Father Joseph were able, of course, to do much more harm than St. Vincent and his little band
of theocentrics could do good. The antidote was sufficient to offset only a part of the poison.
It was the same with another great seventeenth-century figure, George Fox. Born at the very moment when
Richelieu was made president of the council and Father Joseph finally committed himself to the political life, Fox
began his ministry the year before the Peace of Westphalia was signed. In the course of the next twenty years the
Society of Friends gradually crystallized into its definitive form. Fanatically marginal -- for when invited, he
refused even to dine at Cromwell's table, for fear of being compromised -- Fox was never corrupted by success, but
remained to the end the apostle of the inner light. The society he founded has had its ups and downs, its long
seasons of spiritual torpor and stagnation, as well as its times of spiritual life; but always the Quakers have clung to
Fox's intransigent theocentrism and, along with it, to his conviction that, if it is to remain at all pure and unmixed,
good must be worked for upon the margin of society, by individuals and by organizations small enough to be
capable of moral, rational and spiritual life. That is why, in the two hundred and seventy-five years of its existence,
the Society of Friends has been able to accomplish a sum of useful and beneficent work entirely out of proportion
to its numbers. Here again the antidote has always been insufficient to offset more than a part of the poison injected
into the body politic by the statesmen, financiers, industrialists, ecclesiastics and all the undistinguished millions
who fill the lower ranks of the social hierarchy. But though not enough to counteract more than some of the effects
of the poison, the leaven of theocentrism is the one thing which, hitherto, has saved the civilized world from total
self-destruction. Father Joseph's hope of leading a whole national community along a political short cut into the
kingdom of heaven on earth is illusory, so long as the human instruments and material of political action remain
untransformed. His place was with the antidote-makers, not with those who brew the poisons.
(From Grey Eminence)
The Scientist's Role
It is fashionable nowadays to say that Malthus was wrong, because he did not foresee that improved
methods of transportation can now guarantee that food surpluses produced in one area shall be quickly and cheaply
transferred to another, where there is a shortage. But first of all, modern transportation methods break down
whenever the power politicians resort to modern war, and even when the fighting stops they are apt to remain
disrupted long enough to guarantee the starvation of millions of persons. And, secondly, no country in which
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population has outstripped the local food supply can, under present conditions, establish a claim on the surpluses of
other countries without paying for them in cash or exports. Great Britain and the other countries in western Europe,
which cannot feed their dense populations, have been able, in times of peace, to pay for the food they imported by
means of the export of manufactured goods. But industrially backward India and China -- countries in which
Malthus' nightmare has come true with a vengeance and on the largest scale -- produce few manufactured goods,
consequently lack the means to buy from underpopulated areas the food they need. But when and if they develop
mass-producing industries to the point at which they are able to export enough to pay for the food their rapidly
expanding populations require, what will be the effect upon world trade and international politics? Japan had to
export manufactured goods in order to pay for the food that could not be produced on the overcrowded home
islands. Goods produced by workers with a low standard of living came into competition with goods produced by
the better paid workers of the West, and undersold them. The West's retort was political and consisted of the
imposition of high tariffs, quotas and embargoes. To these restrictions on her trade Japan's answer was the plan for
creating a vast Asiatic empire at the expense of China and of the Western imperialist powers. The result was war.
What will happen when India and China are as highly industrialized as prewar Japan and seek to exchange their
low-priced manufactured goods for food, in competition with Western powers, whose standard of living is a great
deal higher than theirs? Nobody can foretell the future; but undoubtedly the rapid industrialization of Asia (with
equipment, let it be remembered, of the very latest and best postwar design) is pregnant with the most dangerous
possibilities.
It is at this point that internationally organized scientists and technicians might contribute greatly to the
cause of peace by planning a world-wide campaign, not merely for greater food production, but also (and this is the
really important point) for regional self-sufficiency in food production. Greater food production can be obtained
relatively easily by the opening up of the earth's vast subarctic regions at present almost completely sterile.
Spectacular progress has recently been made in this direction by the agricultural scientists of the Soviet Union; and
presumably what can be done in Siberia can also be done in northern Canada. Powerful ice-breakers are already
being used to solve the problems of transportation by sea and river; and perhaps commercial submarines, specially
equipped for traveling under the ice may in the future insure a regular service between arctic ports and the rest of
the world. Any increase of the world's too scanty food supply is to be welcomed. But our rejoicings must be
tempered by two considerations. First, the surpluses of food produced by the still hypothetical arctic granaries of
Siberia and Canada will have to be transferred by ship, plane and rail to the overpopulated areas of the world. This
means that no supplies would be available in wartime. Second, possession of food-producing arctic areas
constitutes a natural monopoly, and this natural monopoly will not, as in the past, be in the hands of politically
weak nations, such as Argentina and Australia, but will be controlled by the two great power systems of the
postwar period -- the Russian power system and the Anglo-American power system. That their monopolies of food
surpluses will be used as weapons in the game of power politics seems more than probable. "Lead us not into
temptation." The opening up of the Arctic will be undoubtedly a great good. But it will also be a great temptation
for the power politicians -- a temptation to exploit a natural monopoly in order to gain influence and finally control
over hitherto independent countries, in which population has outstripped the food supply.
It would seem, then, that any scientific and technological campaign aimed at the fostering of international
peace and political and personal liberty must, if it is to succeed, increase the total planetary food supply by
increasing the various regional supplies to the point of self-sufficiency. Recent history makes it abundantly clear
that nations, as at present constituted, are quite unfit to have extensive commercial dealings with one another.
International trade has always, hitherto, gone hand in hand with war, imperialism and the ruthless exploitation of
industrially backward peoples by the highly industrialized powers. Hence the desirability of reducing international
trade to a minimum, until such time as nationalist passions lose their intensity and it becomes possible to establish
some form of world government. As a first step in this direction, scientific and technical means must be found for
making it possible for even the most densely populated countries to feed their inhabitants. The improvement of
existing food plants and domestic animals; the acclimatization in hitherto inhospitable regions of plants that have
proved useful elsewhere; the reduction of the present enormous wastes of food by the improvement of insect
controls and the multiplication of refrigerating units; the more systematic exploitation of seas and lakes as sources
of food; the development of entirely new foods, such as edible yeasts; the synthesizing of sugars as a food for such
edible yeasts; the synthesizing of chlorophyll so as to make direct use of solar energy in food production -- these
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are a few of the lines along which important advances might be made in a relatively short time.
Hardly less important than regional self-sufficiency in food is self-sufficiency in power for industry,
agriculture and transportation. One of the contributing causes of recent wars has been international competition for
the world's strictly localized sources of petroleum, and the current jockeying for position in the Middle East, where
all the surviving great powers have staked out claims to Persian, Mesopotamian and Arabian oil, bodes ill for the
future. Organized science could diminish these temptations to armed conflict by finding means for providing all
countries, whatever their natural resources, with a sufficiency of power. Water power has already been pretty well
exploited. Besides, over large areas of the earth's surface there are no mountains and therefore no sources of
hydroelectric power. But across the plains where water stands almost still, the air often moves in strong and regular
currents. Small windmills have been turning for centuries; but the use of large-scale wind turbines is still, strangely
enough, only in the experimental stage. Until recently the direct use of solar power has been impracticable, owing
to the technical difficulty of constructing suitable reflectors. A few months ago, however, it was announced that
Russian engineers had developed a cheap and simple method for constructing paraboloid mirrors of large size,
capable of producing superheated steam and even of melting iron. This discovery could be made to contribute very
greatly to the decentralization of production and population and the creation of a new type of agrarian society
making use of cheap and inexhaustible power for the benefit of individual small holders or self-governing, co-
operative groups. For the peoples of such tropical countries as India and Africa the new device for directly
harnessing solar power should be of enormous and enduring benefit -- unless, of course, those at present possessing
economic and political power should choose to build mass-producing factories around enormous mirrors, thus
perverting the invention to their own centralistic purposes, instead of encouraging its small-scale use for the benefit
of individuals and village communities. The technicians of solar power will be confronted with a clear-cut choice.
They can work either for the completer enslavement of the industrially backward peoples of the tropics, or for their
progressive liberation from the twin curses of poverty and servitude to political and economic bosses.
The storage of the potentialities of power is almost as important as the production of power. One of the
most urgent tasks before applied science is the development of some portable source of power to replace petroleum
-- a most undesirable fuel from the political point of view, since deposits of it are rare and unevenly distributed
over the earth's surface, thus constituting natural monopolies which, when in the hands of strong nations, are used
to increase their strength at the expense of their neighbors and, when possessed by weak ones, are coveted by the
strong and constitute almost irresistible temptations to imperialism and war. From the political and human point of
view, the most desirable substitute for petroleum would be an efficient battery for storing the electric power
produced by water, wind or the sun. Further research into atomic structure may perhaps suggest new methods for
the construction of such a battery.
Meanwhile it is possible that means may be devised, within the next few years, for applying atomic energy
to the purposes of peace, as it is now being applied to those of war. Would not this technological development
solve the whole problem of power for industry and transportation? The answer to this question may turn out to be
simultaneously affirmative and negative. The problems of power may indeed be solved -- but solved in the wrong
way, by which I mean in a way favorable to centralization and the ruling minority, not for the benefit of individuals
and co-operative, self-governing groups. If the raw material of atomic energy must be sought in radioactive
deposits, occurring sporadically, here and there, over the earth's surface, then we have natural monopoly with all its
undesirable political consequences, all its temptations to power politics, war, imperialistic aggression and
exploitation. But of course it is always possible that other methods of releasing atomic energy may be discovered --
methods that will not involve the use of uranium. In this case there will be no natural monopoly. But the process of
releasing atomic energy will always be a very difficult and complicated affair, to be accomplished only on the
largest scale and in the most elaborately equipped factories. Furthermore, whatever political agreements may be
made, the fact that atomic energy possesses unique destructive potentialities will always constitute a temptation to
the boy gangster who lurks within every patriotic nationalist. And even if a world government should be set up
within a fairly short space of time, this will not necessarily guarantee peace. The Pax Romana was a very uneasy
affair, troubled at almost every imperial death by civil strife over the question of succession. So long as the lust for
power persists as a human trait -- and in persons of a certain kind of physique and temperament this lust is over-
masteringly strong -- no political arrangement, however well contrived, can guarantee peace. For such men the
instruments of violence are as fearfully tempting as are, to others, the bodies of women. Of all instruments of
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violence, those powered by atomic energy are the most decisively destructive; and for power lovers, even under a
system of world government, the temptation to resort to these all too simple and effective means for gratifying their
lust will be great indeed. In view of all this, we must conclude that atomic energy is, and for a long time is likely to
remain, a source of industrial power that is, politically and humanly speaking, in the highest degree undesirable.
It is not necessary in this place, nor am I competent, to enter any further into the hypothetical policy of
internationally organized science. If that policy is to make a real contribution toward the maintenance of peace and
the spread of political and personal liberty, it must be patterned throughout along the decentralist lines laid down in
the preceding discussion of the two basic problems of food and power. Will scientists and technicians collaborate
to formulate and pursue some such policy as that which has been adumbrated here? Or will they permit themselves,
as they have done only too often in the past, to become the conscious or unconscious instruments of militarists,
imperialists and a ruling oligarchy of capitalistic or governmental bosses? Time alone will show. Meanwhile, it is
to be hoped that all concerned will carefully consider a suggestion made by Dr. Gene Weltfish in the September,
1945, issue of the Scientific Monthly. Before embarking upon practice, all physicians swear a professional oath --
the oath of Hippocrates -- that they will not take improper advantage of their position, but always remember their
responsibilities toward suffering humanity. Technicians and scientists, proposes Dr. Weltfish, should take a similar
oath in some such words as the following: "I pledge myself that I will use my knowledge for the good of humanity
and against the destructive forces of the world and the ruthless intent of men; and that I will work together with my
fellow scientists of whatever nation, creed or color for these our common ends."
(From Science, Liberty and Peace)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Between 1800 and 1900 the doctrine of Pie in the Sky gave place, in a majority of Western minds, to the
doctrine of Pie on the Earth. The motivating and compensatory Future came to be regarded, not as a state of
disembodied happiness, to be enjoyed by me and my friends after death, but as a condition of terrestrial well-being
for my children or (if that seemed a bit too optimistic) my grandchildren, or maybe my great-grandchildren. The
believers in Pie in the Sky consoled themselves for all their present miseries by the thought of posthumous bliss,
and whenever they felt inclined to make other people more miserable than themselves (which was most of the
time), they justified their crusades and persecutions by proclaiming, in St. Augustine's delicious phrase, that they
were practicing a "benignant asperity," which would ensure the eternal welfare of souls through the destruction or
torture of mere bodies in the inferior dimensions of space and time. In our days, the revolutionary believers in Pie
on the Earth console themselves for their miseries by thinking of the wonderful time people will be having a
hundred years from now, and then go on to justify wholesale liquidations and enslavements by pointing to the
nobler, humaner world which these atrocities will somehow or other call into existence. Not all the believers in Pie
on the Earth are revolutionaries, just as not all believers in Pie in the Sky were persecutors. Those who think
mainly of other people's future life tend to become proselytisers, crusaders and heresy hunters. Those who think
mainly of their own future life become resigned. The preaching of Wesley and his followers had the effect of
reconciling the first generations of industrial workers to their intolerable lot and helped to preserve England from
the horrors of a full-blown political revolution.
Today the thought of their great-grandchildren's happiness in the twenty-first century consoles the
disillusioned beneficiaries of progress and immunizes them against Communist propaganda. The writers of
advertising copy are doing for this generation what the Methodists did for the victims of the first Industrial
Revolution.
The literature of the Future and of that equivalent of the Future, the Remote, is enormous. By now the
bibliography of Utopia must run into thousands of items. Moralists and political reformers, satirists and science
fictioneers -- all have contributed their quota to the stock of imaginary worlds. Less picturesque, but more
enlightening, than these products of phantasy and idealistic zeal are the forecasts made by sober and well-informed
men of science. Three very important prophetic works of this kind have appeared within the last two or three
years—The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown, The Foreseeable Future by Sir George Thomson, and
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The Next Million Years by Sir Charles Darwin. Sir George and Sir Charles are physicists and Mr. Brown is a
distinguished chemist. Still more important, each of the three is something more and better than a specialist.
Let us begin with the longest look into the future—The Next Million Years. Paradoxically enough, it is
easier, in some ways, to guess what is going to happen in the course of ten thousand centuries than to guess what is
going to happen in the course of one century. Why is it that no fortune tellers are millionaires and that no insurance
companies go bankrupt? Their business is the same -- foreseeing the future. But whereas the members of one group
succeed all the time, the members of the other group succeed, if at all, only occasionally. The reason is simple.
Insurance companies deal with statistical averages. Fortune tellers are concerned with particular cases. One can
predict with a high degree of precision what is going to happen in regard to very large numbers of things or people.
To predict what is going to happen to any particular thing or person is for most of us quite impossible and even for
the specially gifted minority, exceedingly difficult. The history of the next century involves very large numbers;
consequently it is possible to make certain predictions about it with a fairly high degree of certainty. But though we
can pretty confidently say that there will be revolutions, battles, massacres, hurricanes, droughts, floods, bumper
crops and bad harvests, we cannot specify the dates of these events nor the exact locations, nor their immediate,
short-range consequences. But when we take the longer view and consider the much greater numbers involved in
the history of the next ten thousand centuries, we find that these ups and downs of human and natural happenings
tend to cancel out, so that it becomes possible to plot a curve representing the average of future history, the mean
between ages of creativity and ages of decadence, between propitious and unpropitious circumstances, between
fluctuating triumph and disaster. This is the actuarial approach to prophecy -- sound on the large scale and reliable
on the average. It is the kind of approach which permits the prophet to say that there will be dark handsome men in
the lives of x per cent of women, but not which particular woman will succumb.
A domesticated animal is an animal which has a master who is in a position to teach it tricks, to sterilize it
or compel it to breed as he sees fit. Human beings have no masters. Even in his most highly civilized state, Man is
a wild species, breeding at random and always propagating his kind to the limit of available food supplies. The
amount of available food may be increased by the opening up of new land, by the sudden disappearance, owing to
famine, disease or war, of a considerable fraction of the population, or by improvements in agriculture. At any
given period of history there is a practical limit to the food supply currently available. Moreover, natural processes
and the size of the planet being what they are, there is an absolute limit, which can never be passed. Being a wild
species, Man will always tend to breed up to the limits of the moment. Consequently very many members of the
species must always live on the verge of starvation. This has happened in the past, is happening at the present time,
when about sixteen hundred millions of men, women and children are more or less seriously undernourished, and
will go on happening for the next million years -- by which time we may expect that the species Homo sapiens will
have turned into some other species, unpredictably unlike ourselves but still, of course, subject to the laws
governing the lives of wild animals.
We may not appreciate the fact; but a fact nevertheless it remains: we are living in a Golden Age, the most
gilded Golden Age of human history -- not only of past history, but of future history. For, as Sir Charles Darwin
and many others before him have pointed out, we are living like drunken sailors, like the irresponsible heirs of a
millionaire uncle. At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels
accumulated in the earth's crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?
Estimates vary. But all are agreed that within a few centuries or at most a few millennia, Man will have run
through his capital and will be compelled to live, for the remaining nine thousand nine hundred and seventy or
eighty centuries of his career as Homo sapiens, strictly on income. Sir Charles is of the opinion that Man will
successfully make the transition from rich ores to poor ores and even sea water, from coal, oil, uranium and
thorium to solar energy and alcohol derived from plants. About as much energy as is now available can be derived
from the new sources -- but with a far greater expense in man hours, a much larger capital investment in
machinery. And the same holds true of the raw materials on which industrial civilization depends. By doing a great
deal more work than they are doing now, men will contrive to extract the diluted dregs of the planet's metallic
wealth or will fabricate non-metallic substitutes for the elements they have completely used up. In such an event,
some human beings will still live fairly well, but not in the style to which we, the squanderers of planetary capital,
are accustomed.
Mr. Harrison Brown has his doubts about the ability of the human race to make the transition to new and
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less concentrated sources of energy and raw materials. As he sees it, there are three possibilities. "The first and by
far the most likely pattern is a return to agrarian existence." This return, says Mr. Brown, will almost certainly take
place unless Man is able not only to make the technological transition to new energy sources and new raw
materials, but also to abolish war and at the same time stabilize his population. Sir Charles, incidentally, is
convinced that Man will never succeed in stabilizing his population. Birth control may be practiced here and there
for brief periods. But any nation which limits its population will ultimately be crowded out by nations which have
not limited theirs. Moreover, by reducing cut-throat competition within the society which practices it, birth control
restricts the action of natural selection. But wherever natural selection is not allowed free play, biological
degeneration rapidly sets in. And then there are the short-range, practical difficulties. The rulers of sovereign states
have never been able to agree on a common policy in relation to economics, to disarmament, to civil liberties. Is it
likely, is it even conceivable, that they will agree on a common policy in relation to the much more ticklish matter
of birth control? The answer would seem to be in the negative. And if, by a miracle, they should agree, or if a
world government should someday come into existence, how could a policy of birth control be enforced? Answer:
only by totalitarian methods and, even so, pretty ineffectively.
Let us return to Mr. Brown and the second of his alternative futures. "There is a possibility," he writes, "that
stabilization of population can be achieved, that war can be avoided, and that the resource transition can be
successfully negotiated. In that event mankind will be confronted with a pattern which looms on the horizon of
events as the second most likely possibility -- the completely controlled, collectivized industrial society." (Such a
future society was described in my own fictional essay in Utopianism, Brave New World.)
"The third possibility confronting mankind is that of a world-wide free industrial society, in which human
beings can live in reasonable harmony with their environment." This is a cheering prospect; but Mr. Brown quickly
chills our optimism by adding that "it is unlikely that such a pattern can exist for long. It certainly will be difficult
to achieve, and it clearly will be difficult to maintain once it is established."
From these rather dismal speculations about the remoter future it is a relief to turn to Sir George Thomson's
prophetic view of what remains of the present Golden Age. So far as easily available power and raw materials are
concerned, Western man never had it so good as he has it now and, unless he should choose in the interval to wipe
himself out, as he will go on having it for the next three, or five, or perhaps even ten generations. Between the
present and the year 2050, when the population of the planet will be at least five billions and perhaps as much as
eight billions, atomic power will be added to the power derived from coal, oil and falling water, and Man will
dispose of more mechanical slaves than ever before. He will fly at three times the speed of sound, he will travel at
seventy knots in submarine liners, he will solve hitherto insoluble problems by means of electronic thinking
machines. High-grade metallic ores will still be plentiful, and research in physics and chemistry will teach men
how to use them more effectively and will provide at the same time a host of new synthetic materials. Meanwhile
the biologists will not be idle. Various algae, bacteria and fungi will be domesticated, selectively bred and set to
work to produce various kinds of food and to perform feats of chemical synthesis, which would otherwise be
prohibitively expensive. More picturesquely (for Sir George is a man of imagination), new breeds of monkeys will
be developed, capable of performing the more troublesome kinds of agricultural work, such as picking fruit, cotton
and coffee. Electron beams will be directed onto particular areas of plant and animal chromosomes and, in this
way, it may become possible to produce controlled mutations. In the field of medicine, cancer may finally be
prevented, while senility ("the whole business of old age is odd and little understood") may be postponed, perhaps
almost indefinitely. "Success," adds Sir George, "will come, when it does, from some quite unexpected directions;
some discovery in physiology will alter present ideas as to how and why cells grow and divide in the healthy body,
and with the right fundamental knowledge, enlightenment will come. It is only the rather easy superficial problems
that can be solved by working on them directly; others depend on still undiscovered fundamental knowledge and
are hopeless till this has been acquired."
All in all, the prospects for the industrialized minority of mankind are, in the short run, remarkably bright.
Provided we refrain from the suicide of war, we can look forward to very good times indeed. That we shall be
discontented with our good time goes without saying. Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost
instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have
climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet. But the right to disillusionment is as
fundamental as any other in the catalogue. (Actually the right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the
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right to disillusionment phrased in another way.)
Turning now from the industrialized minority to that vast majority inhabiting the underdeveloped countries,
the immediate prospects are much less reassuring. Population in these countries is increasing by more than twenty
millions a year and in Asia at least, according to the best recent estimates, the production of food per head is now
ten per cent less than it used to be in 1938. In India the average diet provides about two thousand calories a day --
far below the optimum figure. If the country's food production could be raised by forty per cent -- and the experts
believe that, given much effort and a very large capital investment, it could be increased to this extent within
fifteen or twenty years -- the available food would provide the present population with twenty-eight hundred
calories a day, a figure still below the optimum level. But twenty years from now the population of India will have
increased by something like one hundred millions, and the additional food, produced with so much effort and at
such great expense, will add little more than a hundred calories to the present woefully inadequate diet. And
meanwhile it is not at all probable that a forty per cent increase in food production will in fact be achieved within
the next twenty years.
The task of industrializing the underdeveloped countries, and of making them capable of producing enough
food for their peoples, is difficult in the extreme. The industrialization of the West was made possible by a series of
historical accidents. The inventions which launched the Industrial Revolution were made at precisely the right
moment. Huge areas of empty land in America and Australia were being opened up by European colonists or their
descendants. A great surplus of cheap food became available, and it was upon this surplus that the peasants and
farm laborers, who migrated to the towns and became factory hands, were enabled to live and multiply their kind.
Today there are no empty lands -- at any rate none that lend themselves to easy cultivation -- and the over-all
surplus of food is small in relation to present populations. If a million Asiatic peasants are taken off the land and
set to work in factories, who will produce the food which their labor once provided? The obvious answer is:
machines. But how can the million new factory workers make the necessary machines if, in the meanwhile, they
are not fed? Until they make the machines, they cannot be fed from the land they once cultivated; and there are no
surpluses of cheap food from other, emptier countries to support them in the interval.
And then there is the question of capital. "Science," you often hear it said, "will solve all our problems."
Perhaps it will, perhaps it won't. But before science can start solving any practical problems, it must be applied in
the form of usable technology. But to apply science on any large scale is extremely expensive. An underdeveloped
country cannot be industrialized, or given an efficient agriculture, except by the investment of a very large amount
of capital. And what is capital? It is what is left over when the primary needs of a society have been satisfied. In
most of Asia the primary needs of most of the population are never satisfied; consequently almost nothing is left
over. Indians can save about one hundredth of their per capita income. Americans can save between one tenth and
one sixth of what they make. Since the income of Americans is much higher than that of Indians, the amount of
available capital in the United States is about seventy times as great as the amount of available capital in India. To
those who have shall be given and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have. If the
underdeveloped countries are to be industrialized, even partially, and made self-supporting in the matter of food, it
will be necessary to establish a vast international Marshall Plan providing subsidies in grain, money, machinery,
and trained manpower. But all these will be of no avail, if the population in the various underdeveloped areas is
permitted to increase at anything like the present rate. Unless the population of Asia can be stabilized, all attempts
at industrialization will be doomed to failure and the last state of all concerned will be far worse than the first -- for
there will be many more people for famine and pestilence to destroy, together with much more political discontent,
bloodier revolutions and more abominable tyrannies.
(From Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow)
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SECTION IV
PSYCHOLOGY
Madness, Badness, Sadness
Goering and Hitler displayed an almost maudlin concern for the welfare of animals; Stalin's favorite work
of art was a celluloid musical about Old Vienna, called The Great Waltz. And it is not only dictators who divide
their thoughts and feelings into unconnected, logic-tight compartments; the whole world lives in a state of chronic
and almost systematic inconsistency. Every society is a case of multiple personality and modulates, without a
qualm, without even being aware of what it is up to, from Jekyll to Hyde, from the scientist to the magician, from
the hardheaded man of affairs to the village idiot. Ours, for example, is the age of unlimited violence; but it is also
the age of the welfare state, of bird sanctuaries, of progressive education, of a growing concern for the old, the
physically handicapped, the mentally sick. We build orphanages, and at the same time we stockpile the bombs that
will be dropped on orphanages. "A foolish consistency," says Emerson, "is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen, philosophers and divines." In that case, we must be very great indeed.
That all, or even most, human beings will ever be consistently humane seems very unlikely. We must be
content with the smaller mercies of unemployment benefits and school lunches in the midst and in spite of an
armament race. We must console ourselves with the thought that our inky darks are relieved by quite a number of
lights.
Between Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, there stands a mental hospital which admirably
illustrates our blessed inconsistency. Bomber plants and guided-missile laboratories surround it on every side, but
have not succeeded in obliterating this oasis of organized and instructed benevolence. With their wide lawns, their
tree-lined walks, their scattering of nondescript buildings, the hospital grounds look like the campus of an
unpretentious college. The inmates, unfortunately, could never be mistaken for undergraduates and co-eds. The
mind is its own place, and their gait, their posture, the distressed or remotely preoccupied expression of their faces
reveal them as the inhabitants of dark worlds, full of confusion, fertile in private terrors. But at least nothing is
being done in this green oasis among the jets and the rockets to deepen the confusion or intensify the terrors. On
the contrary, much good will and intelligence, much knowledge and skill are going into a concerted effort to
transform their isolated, purgatorial universes into something happier and more accessible.
Not long ago a psychiatrist friend took me with him to this oasis. Walking through one of the Disturbed
Wards, I found myself suddenly remembering the first occasion on which I had visited a mental hospital. The place
was Kashmir, the time more than thirty years ago, and the hospital was actually no hospital, but that part of the
local prison which was used for the confinement of maniacs. Naked, unkempt, horribly unwashed, these
unfortunates were shut up in cages. Not the spacious enclosures reserved, in zoos, for gibbons and orangutans, but
filthy little pens, in which a couple of steps in any direction would bring their occupants to the confining bars.
Kashmir is remote, "uncivilized," non-Christian. But let us be in no hurry to flatter ourselves. The horrors I
witnessed there, among the Himalayas, were of exactly the same kind as the horrors which my grandfather and his
contemporaries could see in any asylum in civilized and Christian England, France or Germany, in civilized and
Christian America. Of the many dark and hideous pages of our history, few are more shameful than the record of
Western man's treatment of the mentally ill. The story has been told at length in Doctor Gregory Zilboorg's History
of Medical Psychology and there are whole libraries of books dealing with special periods and particular aspects of
the long martyrdom of the insane.
The tormentors of the insane have been drawn, in the main, from two professions -- the medical and the
clerical. To which shall we award the palm? Have clergymen been responsible for more gratuitous suffering than
doctors? Or have doctors made up for a certain lack of intensity in their brand of torture (after all, they never went
so far as to burn anyone alive for being mad) by its longer duration and the greater number of the victims to whom
it was applied? It is a nice point. To prevent hard feelings, let us divide the prize equally between the contenders.
So far as the mentally sick are concerned, Western history has had only two golden ages. The first lasted
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from about fifty years before the birth of Christ into the second century of our era; the second began, very
hesitantly, in the early years of the nineteenth century and is still continuing. During these golden ages the mentally
sick, or at least the more fortunate of them in the more civilized parts of the classical and modern world, were
treated with a measure of common decency, as though they were unfortunate human beings. During the intervening
centuries they were either ignored, or else systematically tormented, first (on the highest theological grounds) by
the clergy, later (for the soundest of medical reasons) by the doctors.
Let us ask ourselves a question. If I had lived in the eighteenth century, and if I had been afflicted by some
mental illness, what would have happened to me?
What happened to you in those days depended, first of all, on the financial situation of your family. People
with money either locked up their insane relatives in some remote corner of the family mansion, or banished them,
with a staff of attendants, to an isolated cottage in the country, or else boarded them out, at considerable expense,
in a private madhouse run for profit by a doctor or, under medical supervision, by some glorified jailer. Lunatics
confined in the attics (like Mr. Rochester's wife in Jane Eyre) or in a country cottage were spared the rigors of
medical treatment, which could only be administered in an institution staffed by brawny attendants and equipped
with the instruments of coercion. Those who were sent to such an institution were first stripped naked. Mad people
were generally kept in a state of partial or complete nudity. Nakedness solved the problem of soiled clothes and
contributed, in what was felt to be a most salutary way, to the patient's sense of degradation and inferiority. After
being stripped, the patient was shaved, so as to prepare him or her for that part of the treatment which consisted in
rubbing various salves into the scalp with a view to soothing or stimulating the brain. Then he or she was taken to a
cell, tied down to the bed and locked in for the night. If the patient struggled and screamed, that was a sign of
mania; if he reacted with silent resignation, he was obviously suffering from some form of melancholy. In either
case he needed treatment and, duly, next morning the treatment was commenced. In the medical literature of the
time it was referred to as "Reducing the Patient by Physic." Over a period of eight or ten weeks the victim was
repeatedly bled, at least one pound of blood being taken on each occasion. Once a week, or if the doctor thought it
advisable at shorter intervals, he or she was given an emetic -- a "Brisk Vomit" as our ancestors, with their
admirable command of English, liked to call it. The favorite Brisk Vomit was a concoction of the roots of black
hellebore. Hellebore had been used in the treatment of the insane since the time of Melampus, a legendary
soothsayer, first mentioned by Homer. Taken internally, the toxicologists tell us, hellebore "occasions ringing in
the ears, vertigo, stupor, thirst, with a feeling of suffocation, swelling of the tongue and fauces, emesis and
catharsis, slowing of the pulse and finally collapse and death from cardiac paralysis. Inspection after death reveals
much inflammation of the stomach and intestines, more especially the rectum." The doses prescribed by the old
psychiatrists were too small to be fatal, but quite large enough to produce a dangerous syndrome, known in medical
circles as "helleborism." Every administration of the drug resulted in an iatrogenic (doctor-induced) disease of the
most distressing and painful kind. One Brisk Vomit was more than enough; there were no volunteers for a second
dose. All the later administrations of hellebore had to be forcible. After five or six bouts of helleborism, the time
was ripe for purgatives. Senna, rhubarb, sulphur, colocynth, antimony, aloes -- blended into Black Draughts or
worked up into enormous boluses, these violent cathartics were forced, day after day, down the patient's throat. At
the end of the two-month course of bloodlettings, vomits and purges, most psychotics were "reduced by physic" to
a point where they were in no condition to give trouble. These reductions were repeated every spring during the
patient's incarceration and in the meantime he was kept on a low diet, deficient in proteins, vitamins and even
calories. It is a testimony to the amazing toughness of the human species that many psychotics survived under this
treatment for decades. Indeed, they did more than survive; in spite of chronic undernourishment and periodical
reductions by physic, some of them still found the strength to be violent. The answer to violence was mechanical
restraint and corporal punishment. "I have seen," wrote Dorothea Dix in 1848, "more than nine thousand idiots,
epileptics and insane in the United States, destitute of appropriate care and protection, bound with galling chains,
bowed beneath fetters and heavy iron balls attached to drag chains, lacerated with ropes, scourged with rods and
terrified beneath storms of execration and cruel blows." The armamentarium of an English asylum of the Early
Victorian period comprised "strait-waistcoats, handcuffs, leg locks, various coarse devices of leather and iron,
including gags and horrible screws to force open the mouths of patients who were unwilling or even unable to take
food." In the Lancaster Asylum good old-fashioned chains had been ingeniously combined with the very latest in
plumbing. In 1840 its two Restraint Rooms were fitted up with "rows of stalled seats serving the double purpose of
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a water closet and an ordinary seat. The patients were secured by hand locks to the upper portion of the stalls and
by leg locks to the lower portion." The Lancaster lunatics were relatively well off. The toilets to which they were
chained guaranteed a certain cleanliness and the newly installed heating system, of which the asylum was justly
proud, preserved them from the long-drawn torture-by-freezing, which was the lot, each whiter, of the
overewhelming majority of mentally sick paupers. For while the private madhouses provided a few of the
rudimentary creature comforts, the public asylums and workhouses, in which the psychotic "Objects of Charity"
were confined, were simply dungeons. (In official documents the phrase, "Objects of Charity" is abbreviated, and
the insane poor are regularly referred to as "Objects.") "I have seen them naked," wrote Esquirol of the Objects in
French asylums, "and protected only by straw from the damp, cold pavement on which they were lying." And here
is William Tuke's account of what he saw in the lunatic ward of an English workhouse in 1811: "The poor women
were absolutely without any clothes. The weather was intensely cold, and the evening previous to our visit the
thermometer had been sixteen degrees below freezing. One of these forlorn Objects lay buried under a miserable
covering of straw, without a blanket or even a horsecloth to defend her from the cold." The feet of chained lunatics
often became frostbitten. From frostbite to gangrene was a short step, and from gangrene through amputation to
death was only a little longer.
Lunatics were not merely confined. Attempts were even made to cure them. The procedures by which
patients were reduced to physical exhaustion were also supposed to restore them to sanity. Psychoses were thought
to be due to an imbalance between the four humors of the body, together with a local excess or deficiency of the
vital and animal spirits. The bloodlettings, the vomits and the purges were intended to rid the viscera and the
circulatory system of peccant humors, and at the same time to relieve the pressure of the animal spirits upon the
brain. Physical treatment was supplemented by psychological treatment. This last was based upon the universally
accepted principle that the most effective cure for insanity is terror. Boerhaave, the most influential medical teacher
of the first half of the eighteenth century, instructed his pupils "to throw the Patient into the Sea, and to keep him
under for as long as he can possibly bear without being stifled." In the intervals between duckings the mentally sick
were to be kept in constant fear by the threat of punishment. The simplest and handiest form of punishment is
beating, and beating, in consequence, was regularly resorted to. During his psychotic episodes even George III was
beaten -- with the permission, of course, of his Privy Council and both Houses of Parliament. But beating "was
only one form, and that the slightest, of cruelty toward the insane." (I quote the words of the great French reformer,
Doctor Pinel.) "The inventions to give pain were truly marvelous." Thus an eminent German doctor had devised a
therapeutic punishment, which consisted in tying a rope about the patient's middle, hoisting him to a great height
and then lowering him very rapidly, so that he should have the sensation of falling, into a dark cellar, "which was
to be all the better if it could be stocked with serpents." A very similar torture is minutely described by the Marquis
de Sade, the heroine of whose novel, Justine, is punished for being virtuous (among many other ways) by being
dangled halfway down a shaft opening into a cavern full of rats and corpses, while her tormentor of the moment
keeps threatening, from above, to cut the rope. That this fiendish notion should have occurred not only to the most
famous psychotic of the period, but also to one of its leading psychiatrists, throws a revealing light on our
ancestors' attitude toward the mentally sick. In relation to these predestined victims sadistic behavior was right and
proper, so much so that it could be publicly avowed and rationalized in terms of current scientific theories.
So much for what would have happened to me, if I had become mentally sick in the eighteenth, or even the
first half of the nineteenth, century. If I had lived in the sixteenth century, my fate might have been even worse. For
in the sixteenth century most of the symptoms of mental illness were regarded as supernatural in origin. For
example, the pathological refusal or inability to speak was held to be a sure sign of diabolic possession. Mutism
was frequently punished by the infliction of torture and death at the stake. Dumb devils are mentioned in the
Gospels; but the evangelists made no mention of another hysterical symptom, localized insensibility to pain.
Unfortunately for the mentally ill, the Early Fathers noticed this curious phenomenon. For them, the insensitive
spots on the body of a mentally sick person were "the Devil's stigmata," the marks with which Satan branded his
human cattle. In the sixteenth century anyone suspected of witchcraft would be systematically pricked with an awl
or bodkin. If an insensitive spot were found, it was clear that the victim was allied with the devil and must
therefore be tortured and burned alive. Again, some mentally sick persons hear voices, see visions of sinister
figures, have phantasies of omnipotence or alternatively of persecution, believe themselves to be capable of flying,
of being subject to metamorphosis into animals. In the sixteenth century these common symptoms of mental
157
derangement were treated as so many statements of objective fact, so many confessions, explicit or implicit, of
collaboration with the Enemy. But, obviously, anyone who collaborated with the Devil had to be tortured and
burned alive. And what about the neurotics, particularly the female neurotics, who suffer from sexual illusions.
"All witchcraft," proclaim the learned clerical authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, the standard textbook for
sixteenth-century inquisitors and magistrates, "all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is
insatiable." From this it followed that any disturbed woman, whose sexual daydreams were more than ordinarily
vivid, was having relations with an Incubus. But an Incubus is a devil. Therefore she too must be tortured and
burned alive.
Doctor Johann Weier, who has been called the Father of Psychiatry, had the humanity, courage and
common sense to assail the theories and hellish practices of the Catholic theologians and magistrates, and the no-
less-ferocious Protestant witch-hunters of his time. But the majority even of well-educated men approved the
crimes and follies of the Church. For having ventured to treat the witches' confessions as symptoms of mental
illness, Weier was regarded as a diabolical fellow traveler, even a full-blown sorcerer. That he was not arrested,
tortured and burned was due to the fact that he was the personal physician of a ruling prince. Weier died in his bed;
but his book was placed on the Index, and the persecution of the mentally ill continued, unabated, for another
century. How many witches were tortured and burned during the sixteenth century is not exactly known. The total
number is variously estimated at anything from one hundred thousand to several millions. Many of the victims
were perfectly sane adherents of the old fertility cult which still lingered on in every part of Europe. Of the rest,
some were persons incriminated by informers, some the unhappy victims of a mental illness. "If we took the whole
of the population of our present-day hospitals for mental diseases," writes Dr. Zilboorg, "and if we sorted out the
cases of dementia praecox, some of the senile psychoses, some of those afflicted with general paralysis, and some
of the so-called involution melancholies, we should see that Bodin (the great French jurist, who denounced Dr.
Weier as a sorcerer and heretic) would not have hesitated to plead for their death at the stake, so similar and
characteristic are their trends to those he describes. It is truly striking that the ideational contents of the mental
diseases of four hundred years ago are so similar to those of today."
In the second half of the seventeenth century the mentally sick ceased to be the prey of the clergy and the
theologically minded lawyers, and were left instead to the tender mercies of the doctors. The crimes and follies
committed in the name of Galen were, as we have seen, almost as monstrous as those committed at an earlier
period in the name of God. Improvement came at last in the closing years of the eighteenth century, and was due to
the efforts of a few nonconforming individuals, some of them doctors, others outside the pale of medicine. These
nonconformists did their work in the teeth of official indifference, sometimes of active official resistance. As
corporations, neither the Church nor the medical profession ever initiated any reform in the treatment of the
mentally sick. Obscure priests and nuns had often cared for the insane with kindness and understanding; but the
theological bigwigs thought of mental illness in terms of diabolic possession, heresy and apostasy. It was the same
with the medical bigwigs. Strait jackets, Brisk Vomits and systematic terrorism remained the official medical
policy until well into the nineteenth century. It was only tardily and reluctantly that the bigwigs accepted the
reforms initiated by heroic nonconformists, and officially changed their old, bad tune.
Reform began almost simultaneously on either side of the Channel. In England a Quaker merchant, William
Tuke, set up the York Retreat, a hospital for the mentally sick, in which restraint was never used and the
psychological treatment was aimed, not at frightening the patients, but at bringing them back from their isolation
by persuading them to work, play, eat, talk and worship together. In France the pioneer in reform was Doctor
Philippe Pinel, who was appointed to the direction of the Bicetre Asylum in Paris at the height of the French
Revolution. Many of the patients were kept permanently chained in unlighted cells. Pinel asked permission of the
revolutionary government to set them free. It was refused. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were not for lunatics.
Pinel insisted, and at last permission was grudgingly given. The account of what followed is touching in the
extreme. "The first man on whom the experiment was tried was an English captain, whose history no one knew, as
he had been in chains for forty years. He was thought to be one of the most furious among them. His keepers
approached him with caution, as he had in a fit of fury killed one of them on the spot with a blow from his
manacles. He was chained more rigorously than any of the others. Pinel entered his cell unattended and calmly said
to him, 'Captain, I will order your chains to be taken off and give you liberty to walk in the court, if you will
promise me to behave well and injure no one.' 'Yes, I promise,' said the maniac. 'But you are laughing at me. . .' His
158
chains were removed and the keepers retired, leaving the door of his cell open. He raised himself many times from
the seat, but fell again on it; for he had been in a sitting posture so long that he had lost the use of his legs. In a
quarter of an hour he succeeded in maintaining his balance and with tottering steps came to the door of his dark
cell. His first look was at the sky, and he exclaimed, 'How beautiful, how beautiful!' During the rest of the day he
was constantly in motion, uttering exclamations of delight. In the evening he returned of his own accord to his cell
and slept tranquilly."
In Europe the pioneer work of Tuke and Pinel was continued by Conolly, Esquirol and a growing number
of their followers in every country. In America, the standard bearer of reform was a heroic woman, Dorothea Dix.
By the middle of the century many of the worst abominations of the old regime were things of the past. The
mentally ill began to be treated as unfortunate human beings, not as Objects. It was an immense advance; but it was
not yet enough. Reform had produced institutional care, but still no adequate treatment. For most nineteenth-
century doctors, things were more real than thoughts and the study of matter seemed more scientific than the study
of mind. The dream of Victorian medicine was, in Zilboorg's phrase, to develop a psychiatry that should be
completely independent of psychology. Hence the widespread and passionate rejection of the procedures lumped
under the names of Animal Magnetism and Hypnotism. In France, Charcot, Liebault and Bernheim achieved
remarkable results with hypnosis; but the intellectually respectable psychiatrists of Europe and America turned
their backs on this merely psychological treatment of mental illness and concentrated instead on the more
"objective," the more "scientific" methods of surgery.
It had all happened before, of course. Cutting holes in the skull was an immemorially ancient form of
psychiatry. So was castration, as a cure for epilepsy. Continuing this grand old tradition, the Victorian doctors
removed the ovaries of their hysterical patients and treated neurosis in young girls by the gruesome operation
known to ethnologists as "female circumcision." In the early years of the present century Metchnikoff was briefly a
prophet, and autointoxication was all the rage in medical circles. Along with practically every other disease,
neuroses were supposed to be due to intestinal stasis. No intestine, no stasis -- what could be more logical? The
lucky neurotics who could afford a major operation went to hospital, had their colons cut out and the end of their
small intestines stitched to the stump. Those who recovered found themselves with yet another reason for being
neurotic: they had to hurry to the bathroom six or eight times a day. Intestinal stasis went out with the hobble skirt,
and the new vogue was focal infection. According to the surgical psychiatrists, people were neurotic not because of
conflicts in their unconscious mind, but because of inflammation in their tonsils or abscesses at the roots of their
teeth. The dentists, the nose-and-throat men set to work with a will. Toothless and tonsilectomized, the neurotics,
needless to say, went on behaving just as neurotically as ever. Focal infections followed intestinal stasis into
oblivion, and the surgical psychiatrists now prefer to make a direct assault upon the brain. The current fashion is
shock treatment or, on great occasions, prefrontal lobotomy. Meanwhile the pharmacologists have not been idle.
The barbiturates, hailed not so long ago as panaceas, have given place to Chlorpromazine, Reserpine, Frenquel and
Miltown. Insofar as they facilitate the specifically psychological treatment of mental disorders, these tranquilizers
may prove to be extremely valuable. Even as symptom stoppers they have their uses.
The green oasis among the jets and the rockets is crammed to overflowing. So are all the other mental
hospitals of the Western world. Technological and economic progress seems to have been accompanied by
psychological regress. The incidence of neuroses and psychoses is apparently on the increase. Still larger hospitals,
yet kinder treatment of patients, more psychiatrists and better pills -- we need them all and need them urgently. But
they will not solve our problem. In this field prevention is incomparably more important than cure; for cure merely
returns the patient to an environment which begets mental illness. But how is prevention to be achieved? That is
the sixty-four-billion-dollar question.
(From Esquire Magazine)
A Case of Voluntary Ignorance
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that
history has to teach. Si vis pacem, the Romans liked to say, para bellum -- if you want peace prepare for war. For
the last few thousand years the rulers of all the world's empires, kingdoms and republics have acted upon this
159
Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Pr...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html
Manufacturing Consent
A Propaganda Model
excerpted from the book
Manufacturing Consent
by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Pantheon Books, 1988
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It
is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs,
and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a
world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires
systematic propaganda.
In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic
control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve
the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the
media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively
compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively
portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not
evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the
huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and
on its behavior and performance.
A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on
mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out
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the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to
get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of
news "filters," fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth,
and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source
of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and
"experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means
of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism.
These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through
successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and
interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis
and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.
The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of
these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity
and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively"
and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are
objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way,
that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable. In assessing the newsworthiness of the
U.S. government's urgent claims of a shipment of MIGs to Nicaragua on November 5, I984, the media
do not stop to ponder the bias that is inherent in the priority assigned to government-supplied raw
material, or the possibility that the government might be manipulating the news, imposing its own
agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from other material. It requires a macro, alongside a
micro- (story-by-story), view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic
bias.
SIZE, OWNERSHIP, AND PROFIT ORIENTATION OF THE MASS MEDIA: THE FIRST FILTER
In their analysis of the evolution of the media in Great Britain, James Curran and Jean Seaton
describe how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a radical press emerged that reached a
national working-class audience. This alternative press was effective in reinforcing class consciousness:
it unified the workers because it fostered an alternative value system and framework for looking at the
world, and because it "promoted a greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasizing the
potential power of working people to effect social change through the force of 'combination' and
organized action." This was deemed a major threat by the ruling elites. One MP asserted that the
workingclass newspapers "inflame passions and awaken their selfishness, contrasting their current
condition with what they contend to be their future condition-a condition incompatible with human
nature, and those immutable laws which Providence has established for the regulation of civil society."
The result was an attempt to squelch the working-class media by libel laws and prosecutions, by
requiring an expensive security bond as a condition for publication, and by imposing various taxes
designed to drive out radical media by raising their costs. These coercive efforts were not effective, and
by mid-century they had been abandoned in favor of the liberal view that the market would enforce
responsibility.
Curran and Seaton show that the market did successfully accomplish what state intervention failed to
do. Following the repeal of the punitive taxes on newspapers between I853 and I869, a new daily local
press came into existence, but not one new local working-class daily was established through the rest of
the nineteenth century. Curran and Seaton note that
Indeed, the eclipse of the national radical press was so total that when the Labour Party developed out
of the working-class movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, it did not obtain the
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exclusive backing of a single national daily or Sunday paper.
One important reason for this was the rise in scale of newspaper enterprise and the associated increase
in capital costs from the mid-nineteenth century onward, which was based on technological
improvements along with the owners' increased stress on reaching large audiences. The expansion of
the free market was accompanied by an "industrialization of the press." The total cost of establishing a
national weekly on a profitable basis in I837 was under a thousand pounds, with a break-even
circulation of 6,200 copies. By I867, the estimated start-up cost of a new London daily was 50,000
pounds. The Sunday Express, launched in I9I8, spent over two million pounds before it broke even
with a circulation of over 200,000.
Similar processes were at work in the United States, where the start-up cost of a new paper in New
York City in I85I was $69,000; the public sale of the St. Louis Democrat in I872 yielded $456,000; and
city newspapers were selling at from $6 to $I8 million in the I920s. The cost of machinery alone, of
even very small newspapers, has for many decades run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; in
I945 it could be said that "Even small-newspaper publishing is big business . . . [and] is no longer a
trade one takes up lightly even if he has substantial cash-or takes up at all if he doesn't."
Thus the first filter-the limitation on ownership of media with any substantial outreach by the requisite
large size of investment-was applicable a century or more ago, and it has become increasingly effective
over time. In I986 there were some I,500 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 9,000 radio and I,500 TV
stations, Z,400 book publishers, and seven movie studios in the United States-over 25,000 media
entities in all. But a large proportion of those among this set who were news dispensers were very small
and local, dependent on the large national companies and wire services for all but local news. Many
more were subject to common ownership, sometimes extending through virtually the entire set of
media variants.
Ben Bagdikian stresses the fact that despite the large media numbers, the twenty-nine largest media
systems account for over half of the output of newspapers, and most of the sales and audiences in
magazines, broadcasting, books, and movies. He contends that these "constitute a new Private
Ministry of Information and Culture" that can set the national agenda.
Actually, while suggesting a media autonomy from corporate and government power that we believe to
be incompatible with structural facts (as we describe below), Bagdikian also may be understating the
degree of effective concentration in news manufacture. It has long been noted that the media are
tiered, with the top tier-as measured by prestige, resources, and outreach-comprising somewhere
between ten and twenty-four systems. It is this top tier, along with the government and wire services,
that defines the news agenda and supplies much of
the national and international news to the lower tiers of the media, and thus for the general public.
Centralization within the top tier was substantially increased by the post-World War II rise of
television and the national networking of this important medium. Pre-television news markets were
local, even if heavily dependent on the higher tiers and a narrow set of sources for national and
international news; the networks provide national and international news from three national sources,
and television is now the principal source of news for the public. The maturing of cable, however, has
resulted in a fragmentation of television audiences and a slow erosion of the market share and power
of the networks.
... the twenty-four media giants (or their controlling parent companies) that make up the top tier of
media companies in the United States. This compilation includes: (I) the three television networks:
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ABC (through its parent, Capital Cities), CBS, and NBC (through its ultimate parent, General Electric
[GE]); (2) the leading newspaper empires: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times
(Times-Mirror), Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones), Knight-Ridder, Gannett, Hearst, Scripps-Howard,
Newhouse (Advance Publications), and the Tribune Company; (3) the major news and general-interest
magazines: Time, Newsweek (subsumed under Washington Post), Reader's Digest, TV Guide
(Triangle), and U.S. News ~ World Report; (4) a major book publisher (McGraw-Hill); and (5) other
cable-TV systems of large and growing importance: those of Murdoch, Turner, Cox, General Corp.,
Taft, Storer, and Group W (Westinghouse). Many of these systems are prominent in more than one
field and are only arbitrarily placed in a particular category (Time, Inc., is very important in cable as
well as magazines; McGraw-Hill is a major publisher of magazines; the Tribune Company has become
a large force in television as well as newspapers; Hearst is important in magazines as well as
newspapers; and Murdoch has significant newspaper interests as well as television and movie
holdings).
These twenty-four companies are large, profit-seeking corporations, owned and controlled by quite
wealthy people. It can be seen in table I-I that all but one of the top companies for whom data are
available have assets in excess of $I billion, and the median size (middle item by size) is $z.6 billion. It
can also be seen in the table that approximately three-quarters of these media giants had after-tax
profits in excess of $100 million, with the median at $I83 million.
Many of the large media companies are fully integrated into the market, and for the others, too, the
pressures of stockholders, directors, and bankers to focus on the bottom line are powerful. These
pressures have intensified in recent years as media stocks have become market favorites, and actual or
prospective owners of newspapers and television properties have found it possible to capitalize
increased audience size and advertising revenues into multiplied values of the media franchises-and
great wealth. This has encouraged the entry of speculators and increased the pressure and temptation
to focus more intensively on profitability. Family owners have been increasingly divided between those
wanting to take advantage of the new opportunities and those desiring a continuation of family control,
and their splits have often precipitated crises leading finally to the sale of the family interest.
This trend toward greater integration of the media into the market system has been accelerated by the
loosening of rules limiting media concentration, cross-ownership, and control by non-media
companies. There has also been an abandonment of restrictions-previously quite feeble anyway-on
radio-TV commercials, entertainment mayhem programming, and "fairness doctrine" threats,
opening the door to the unrestrained commercial use of the airwaves.
The greater profitability of the media in a deregulated environment has also led to an increase in
takeovers and takeover threats, with even giants like CBS and Time, Inc., directly attacked or
threatened. This has forced the managements of the media giants to incur greater debt and to focus
ever more aggressively and unequivocally on profitability, in order to placate owners and reduce the
attractiveness of their properties to outsiders. They have lost some of their limited autonomy to
bankers, institutional investors, and large individual investors whom they have had to solicit as
potential "white knights."
While the stock of the great majority of large media firms is traded on the securities markets,
approximately two-thirds of these companies are either closely held or still controlled by members of
the originating family who retain large blocks of stock. This situation is changing as family ownership
becomes diffused among larger numbers of heirs and the market opportunities for selling media
properties continue to improve, but the persistence of family control is evident in the data shown in
table I-Z. Also evident in the table is the enormous wealth possessed by the controlling families of the
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top media firms. For seven of the twenty-four, the market value of the media properties owned by the
controlling families in the mid-I980s exceeded a billion dollars, and the median value was close to half
a billion dollars. These control groups obviously have a special stake in the status quo by virtue of their
wealth and their strategic position in one of the great institutions of society. And they exercise the
power of this strategic position, if only by establishing the general aims of the company and choosing
its top management.
The control groups of the media giants are also brought into close relationships with the mainstream of
the corporate community through boards of directors and social links. In the cases of NBC and the
Group W television and cable systems, their respective parents, GE and Westinghouse, are themselves
mainstream corporate giants, with boards of directors that are dominated by corporate and banking
executives. Many of the other large media firms have boards made up predominantly of insiders, a
general characteristic of relatively small and owner-dominated companies. The larger the firm and the
more widely distributed the stock, the larger the number and proportion of outside directors. The
composition of the outside directors of the media giants is very similar to that of large non-media
corporations. ... active corporate executives and bankers together account for a little over half the total
of the outside directors of ten media giants; and the lawyers and corporate-banker retirees (who
account for nine of the thirteen under "Retired") push the corporate total to about two-thirds of the
outside-director aggregate. These 95 outside directors had directorships in an additional 36 banks and
255 other companies (aside from the media company and their own firm of primary affiliation).
In addition to these board linkages, the large media companies all do business with commercial and
investment bankers, obtaining lines of credit and loans, and receiving advice and service in selling
stock and bond issues and in dealing with acquisition opportunities and takeover threats. Banks and
other institutional investors are also large owners of media stock. In the early I980s, such institutions
held 44 percent of the stock of publicly owned newspapers and 35 percent of the stock of publicly
owned broadcasting companies. These investors are also frequently among the largest stockholders of
individual companies. For example, in I980-8I, the Capital Group, an investment company system,
held 7.I percent of the stock of ABC, 6.6 percent of KnightRidder, 6 percent of Time, Inc., and z.8
percent of Westinghouse. These holdings, individually and collectively, do not convey control, but these
large investors can make themselves heard, and their actions can affect the welfare of the companies
and their managers. If the managers fail to pursue actions that favor shareholder returns, institutional
investors will be inclined to sell the stock (depressing its price), or to listen sympathetically to outsiders
contemplating takeovers. These investors are a force helping press media companies toward strictly
market (profitability) objectives.
So is the diversification and geographic spread of the great media companies. Many of them have
diversified out of particular media fields into others that seemed like growth areas. Many older
newspaper-based media companies, fearful of the power of television and its effects on advertising
revenue, moved as rapidly as they could into broadcasting and cable TV. Time, Inc., also, made a
major diversification move into cable TV, which now accounts for more than half its profits. Only a
small minority of the twenty-four largest media giants remain in a single media sector.
The large media companies have also diversified beyond the media field, and non-media companies
have established a strong presence in the mass media. The most important cases of the latter are GE,
owning RCA, which owns the NBC network, and Westinghouse, which owns major
television-broadcasting stations, a cable network, and a radio station network. GE and Westinghouse
are both huge, diversified multinational companies heavily involved in the controversial areas of
weapons production and nuclear power. It may be recalled that from I965 to I967, an attempt by
International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) to acquire ABC was frustrated following a huge outcry
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that focused on the dangers of allowing a great multinational corporation with extensive foreign
investments and business activities to control a major media outlet. The fear was that ITT control
"could compromise the independence of ABC's news coverage of political events in countries where
ITT has interests." The soundness of the decision disallowing the acquisition seemed to have been
vindicated by the later revelations of ITT's political bribery and involvement in attempts to overthrow
the government of Chile. RCA and Westinghouse, however, had been permitted to control media
companies long before the ITT case, although some of the objections applicable to ITT would seem to
apply to them as well. GE is a more powerful company than ITT, with an extensive international
reach, deeply involved in the nuclear power business, and far more important than ITT in the arms
industry. It is a highly centralized and quite secretive organization, but one with a vast stake in
"political" decisions. GE has contributed to the funding of the American Enterprise Institute, a
right-wing think tank that supports intellectuals who will get the business message across. With the
acquisition of ABC, GE should be in a far better position to assure that sound views are given proper
attention. The lack of outcry over its takeover of RCA and NBC resulted in part from the fact that
RCA control over NBC had already breached the gate of separateness, but it also reflected the more
pro-business and laissez-faire environment of the Reagan era.
The non-media interests of most of the media giants are not large, and, excluding the GE and
Westinghouse systems, they account for only a small fraction of their total revenue. Their
multinational outreach, however, is more significant. The television networks, television syndicators,
major news magazines, and motion-picture studios all do extensive business abroad, and they derive a
substantial fraction of their revenues from foreign sales and the operation of foreign affiliates.
Reader's Digest is printed in seventeen languages and is available in over I60 countries. The Murdoch
empire was originally based in Australia, and the controlling parent company is still an Australian
corporation; its expansion in the United States is funded by profits from Australian and British
affiliates.
Another structural relationship of importance is the media companies' dependence on and ties with
government. The radio-TV companies and networks all require government licenses and franchises
and are thus potentially subject to government control or harassment. This technical legal dependency
has been used as a club to discipline the media, and media policies that stray too often from an
establishment orientation could activate this threat. The media protect themselves from this
contingency by lobbying and other political expenditures, the cultivation of political relationships, and
care in policy. The political ties of the media have been impressive. ... fifteen of ninety-five outside
directors of ten of the media giants are former government officials, and Peter Dreier gives a similar
proportion in his study of large newspapers. In television, the revolving-door flow of personnel
between regulators and the regulated firms was massive during the years when the oligopolistic
structure of the media and networks was being established.
The great media also depend on the government for more general policy support. All business firms
are interested in business taxes, interest rates, labor policies, and enforcement and nonenforcement of
the antitrust laws. GE and Westinghouse depend on the government to subsidize their nuclear power
and military research and development, and to create a favorable climate for their overseas sales. The
Reader's Digest, Time, Newsweek, and movie- and television-syndication sellers also depend on
diplomatic support for their rights to penetrate foreign cultures with U.S. commercial and value
messages and interpretations of current affairs. The media giants, advertising agencies, and great
multinational corporations have a joint and close interest in a favorable climate of investment in the
Third World, and their interconnections and relationships with the government in these policies are
symbiotic. In sum, the dominant media firms are quite large businesses; they are controlled by very
wealthy people or by managers who are subject to sharp constraints by owners and other
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market-profit-oriented forces; and they are closely interlocked, and have important common interests,
with other major corporations, banks, and government. This is the first powerful filter that will affect
news choices.
THE ADVERTISING LICENSE TO DO BUSINESS: THE SECOND FILTER
In arguing for the benefits of the free market as a means of controlling dissident opinion in the
mid-nineteenth century, the Liberal chancellor of the British exchequer, Sir George Lewis, noted that
the market would promote those papers "enjoying the preference of the advertising public.''
Advertising did, in fact, serve as a powerful mechanism weakening the working-class press. Curran
and Seaton give the growth of advertising a status comparable with the increase in capital costs as a
factor allowing the market to accomplish what state taxes and harassment failed to do, noting that
these "advertisers thus acquired a de facto licensing authority since, without their support, newspapers
ceased to be economically viable."
Before advertising became prominent, the price of a newspaper had to cover the costs of doing
business. With the growth of advertising, papers that attracted ads could afford a copy price well
below production costs. This put papers lacking in advertising at a serious disadvantage: their prices
would tend to be higher, curtailing sales, and they would have less surplus to invest in improving the
salability of the paper (features, attractive format, promotion, etc.). For this reason, an
advertising-based system will tend to drive out of existence or into marginality the media companies
and types that depend on revenue from sales alone. With advertising, the free market does not yield a
neutral system in which final buyer choice decides. The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity
and survival The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them a
price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on and further weaken their ad-free (or
ad-disadvantaged) rivals. Even if ad-based media cater to an affluent ("upscale") audience, they easily
pick up a large part of the "downscale" audience, and their rivals lose market share and are eventually
driven out or marginalized.
In fact, advertising has played a potent role in increasing concentration even among rivals that focus
with equal energy on seeking advertising revenue. A market share and advertising edge on the part of
one paper or television station will give it additional revenue to compete more effectively-promote
more aggressively, buy more salable features and programs-and the disadvantaged rival must add
expenses it cannot afford to try to stem the cumulative process of dwindling market (and revenue)
share. The crunch is often fatal, and it helps explain the death of many large-circulation papers and
magazines and the attrition in the number of newspapers.
From the time of the introduction of press advertising, therefore, working-class and radical papers
have been at a serious disadvantage. Their readers have tended to be of modest means, a factor that
has always affected advertiser interest. One advertising executive stated in I856 that some journals are
poor vehicles because "their readers are not purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much
thrown away." The same force took a heavy toll of the post-World War II social-democratic press in
Great Britain, with the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, and Sunday Citizen failing or absorbed into
establishment systems between I960 and I967, despite a collective average daily readership of 9.3
million. As James Curran points out, with 4.7 million readers in its last year, "the Daily Herald
actually had almost double the readership of The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian
combined." What is more, surveys showed that its readers "thought more highly of their paper than
the regular readers of any other popular newspaper," and "they also read more in their paper than the
readers of other popular papers despite being overwhelmingly working class...." The death of the
Herald, as well as of the News Chronicle and Sunday Citizen, was in large measure a result of
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progressive strangulation by lack of advertising support. The Herald, with 8.I percent of national daily
circulation, got 3.5 percent of net advertising revenue; the Sunday Citizen got one-tenth of the net
advertising revenue of the Sunday Times and one-seventh that of the Observer (on a
per-thousand-copies basis). Curran argues persuasively that the loss of these three papers was an
important contribution to the declining fortunes of the Labor party, in the case of the Herald
specifically removing a mass-circulation institution that provided "an alternative framework of
analysis and understanding that contested the dominant systems of representation in both
broadcasting and the mainstream press." A mass movement without any major media support, and
subject to a great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious disability, and struggles against grave
odds.
The successful media today are fully attuned to the crucial importance of audience "quality": CBS
proudly tells its shareholders that while it "continuously seeks to maximize audience delivery," it has
developed a new "sales tool" with which it approaches advertisers: "Client Audience Profile, or CAP,
will help advertisers optimize the effectiveness of their network television schedules by evaluating
audience segments in proportion to usage levels of advertisers' products and services." In short, the
mass media are interested in attracting audiences with buying power, not audiences per se; it is
affluent audiences that spark advertiser interest today, as in the nineteenth century. The idea that the
drive for large audiences makes the mass media "democratic" thus suffers from the initial weakness
that its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!
The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the simple fact that they buy and
pay for the programs-they are the "patrons" who provide the media subsidy. As such, the media
compete for their patronage, developing specialized staff to solicit advertisers and necessarily having to
explain how their programs serve advertisers' needs. The choices of these patrons greatly affect the
welfare of the media, and the patrons become what William Evan calls "normative reference
organizations," whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they are to succeed.
For a television network, an audience gain or loss of one percentage point in the Nielsen ratings
translates into a change in advertising revenue of from $80 to $100 million a year, with some variation
depending on measures of audience "quality." The stakes in audience size and affluence are thus
extremely large, and in a market system there is a strong tendency for such considerations to affect
policy profoundly. This is partly a matter of institutional pressures to focus on the bottom line, partly a
matter of the continuous interaction of the media organization with patrons who supply the revenue
dollars. As Grant Tinker, then head of NBC-TV, observed, television "is an advertising supported
medium, and to the extent that support falls out, programming will change."
Working-class and radical media also suffer from the political discrimination of advertisers. Political
discrimination is structured into advertising allocations by the stress on people with money to buy. But
many firms will always refuse to patronize ideological enemies and those whom they perceive as
damaging their interests, and cases of overt discrimination add to the force of the voting system
weighted by income. Public-television station WNET lost its corporate funding from Gulf + Western in
I985 after the station showed the documentary "Hungry for Profit," which contains material critical of
multinational corporate activities in the Third World. Even before the program was shown, in
anticipation of negative corporate reaction, station officials "did all we could to get the program
sanitized" (according to one station source). The chief executive of Gulf + Western complained to the
station that the program was "virulently anti-business if not anti-American," and that the station's
carrying the program was not the behavior "of a friend" of the corporation. The London Economist
says that "Most people believe that WNET would not make the same mistake again."
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In addition to discrimination against unfriendly media institutions, advertisers also choose selectively
among programs on the basis of their own principles. With rare exceptions these are culturally and
politically conservative. Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that
engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of environmental degradation,
the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third
World tyrannies. Erik Barnouw recounts the history of a proposed documentary series on
environmental problems by NBC at a time of great interest in these issues. Barnouw notes that
although at that time a great many large companies were spending money on commercials and other
publicity regarding environmental problems, the documentary series failed for want of sponsors. The
problem was one of excessive objectivity in the series, which included suggestions of corporate or
systemic failure, whereas the corporate message "was one of reassurance."
Television networks learn over time that such programs will not sell and would have to be carried at a
financial sacrifice, and that, in addition, they may offend powerful advertisers.' With the rise in the
price of advertising spots, the forgone revenue increases; and with increasing market pressure for
financial performance and the diminishing constraints from regulation, an advertising-based media
system will gradually increase advertising time and marginalize or eliminate altogether programming
that has significant public-affairs content.
Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing
controversies that interfere with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly entertain
and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases-the dissemination of a
selling message. Thus over time, instead of programs like "The Selling of the Pentagon," it is a natural
evolution of a market seeking sponsor dollars to offer programs such as "A Bird's-Eye View of
Scotland," "Barry Goldwater's Arizona," "An Essay on Hotels," and "Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner"-a
CBS program on "how Americans eat when they dine out, where they go and why." There are
exceptional cases of companies willing to sponsor serious programs, sometimes a result of recent
embarrassments that call for a public-relations offset. But even in these cases the companies will
usually not want to sponsor close examination of sensitive and divisive issues-they prefer programs on
Greek antiquities, the ballet, and items of cultural and national history and nostalgia. Barnouw points
out an interesting contrast: commercial-television drama "deals almost wholly with the here and now,
as processed via advertising budgets," but on public television, culture "has come to mean 'other
cultures.' . . . American civilization, here and now, is excluded from consideration.''
Television stations and networks are also concerned to maintain audience "flow" levels, i.e., to keep
people watching from program to program, in order to sustain advertising ratings and revenue. Airing
program interludes of documentary-cultural matter that cause station switching is costly, and over
time a "free" (i.e., ad-based) commercial system will tend to excise it. Such
documentary-cultural-critical materials will be driven out of secondary media vehicles as well, as these
companies strive to qualify for advertiser interest, although there will always be some cultural-political
programming trying to come into being or surviving on the periphery of the mainstream media.
SOURCING MASS-MEDIA NEWS: THE THIRD FILTER
The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by
economic necessity and reciprocity of interest. The media need a steady, reliable flow of the raw
material of news. They have daily news demands and imperative news schedules that they must meet.
They cannot afford to have reporters and cameras at all places where important stories may break.
Economics dictates that they concentrate their resources where significant news often occurs, where
important rumors and leaks abound, and where regular press conferences are held. The White House,
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the Pentagon, and the State Department, in Washington, D.C., are central nodes of such news activity.
On a local basis, city hall and the police department are the subject of regular news "beats" for
reporters. Business corporations and trade groups are also regular and credible purveyors of stories
deemed newsworthy. These bureaucracies turn out a large volume of material that meets the demands
of news organizations for reliable, scheduled flows. Mark Fishman calls this "the principle of
bureaucratic affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news bureaucracy."
Government and corporate sources also have the great merit of being recognizable and credible by
their status and prestige. This is important to the mass media. As Fishman notes,
Newsworkers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as factual because news personnel
participate in upholding a normative order of authorized knowers in the society. Reporters operate
with the attitude that officials ought to know what it is their job to know.... In particular, a newsworker
will recognize an official's claim to knowledge not merely as a claim, but as a credible, competent piece
of knowledge. This amounts to a moral division of labor: officials have and give the facts; reporters
merely get them.
Another reason for the heavy weight given to official sources is that the mass media claim to be
"objective" dispensers of the news. Partly to maintain the image of objectivity, but also to protect
themselves from criticisms of bias and the threat of libel suits, they need material that can be
portrayed as presumptively accurate. This is also partly a matter of cost: taking information from
sources that may be presumed credible reduces investigative expense, whereas material from sources
that are not prima facie credible, or that will elicit criticism and threats, requires careful checking and
costly research.
The magnitude of the public-information operations of large government and corporate bureaucracies
that constitute the primary news sources is vast and ensures special access to the media. The Pentagon,
for example, has a public-information service that involves many thousands of employees, spending
hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of
any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups. In I979 and 1980, during a brief
interlude of relative openness (since closed down), the U.S. Air Force revealed that its
public-information outreach included the following:
I40 newspapers, 690,000 copies per week Airman magazine, monthly circulation I25,000 34 radio and
I7 TV stations, primarily overseas 45,000 headquarters and unit news releases 6I5,000 hometown news
releases 6,600 interviews with news media 3,200 news conferences 500 news media orientation flights
50 meetings with editorial boards 11,000 speeches
This excludes vast areas of the air force's public-information effort. Writing back in I970, Senator J.
W. Fulbright had found that the air force public-relations effort in I968 involved I,305 full-time
employees, exclusive of additional thousands that "have public functions collateral to other duties."
The air force at that time offered a weekly film-clip service for TV and a taped features program for
use three times a week, sent to I,I39 radio stations; it also produced I48 motion pictures, of which 24
were released for public consumption. There is no reason to believe that the air force public-relations
effort has diminished since the I960s.
Note that this is just the air force. There are three other branches with massive programs, and there is
a separate, overall public-information program under an assistant secretary of defense for public
affairs in the Pentagon. In I97I, an Armed Forces Journal survey revealed that the Pentagon was
publishing a total of 37I magazines at an annual cost of some $57 million, an operation sixteen times
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larger than the nation's biggest publisher. In an update in I982, the Air Force Journal International
indicated that the Pentagon was publishing I,203 periodicals. To put this into perspective, we may note
the scope of public-information operations of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and
the National Council of the Churches of Christ (NCC), two of the largest of the nonprofit organizations
that offer a consistently challenging voice to the views of the Pentagon. The AFSC's main office
information-services budget in I984-85 was under $500,000, with eleven staff people. Its
institution-wide press releases run at about two hundred per year, its press conferences thirty a year,
and it produces about one film and two or three slide shows a year. It does not offer film clips, photos,
or taped radio programs to the media. The NCC Office of Information has an annual budget of some
$350,000, issues about a hundred news releases per year, and holds four press conferences annually.
The ratio of air force news releases and press conferences to those of the AFSC and NCC taken
together are I50 to I (or 2,200 to 1, if we count hometown news releases of the air force), and 94 to I
respectively. Aggregating the other services would increase the differential by a large factor.
Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public information and propaganda on the
scale of the Pentagon and other government bodies. The AFSC and NCC cannot duplicate the Mobil
Oil company's multimillion-dollar purchase of newspaper space and other corporate investments to get
its viewpoint across. The number of individual corporations with budgets for public information and
lobbying in excess of those of the AFSC and NCC runs into the hundreds, perhaps even the thousands.
A corporate collective like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had a I983 budget for research,
communications, and political activities of $65 million. By I980, the chamber was publishing a business
magazine (Nation's Business) with a circulation of I.3 million and a weekly newspaper with 740,000
subscribers, and it was producing a weekly panel show distributed to 400 radio stations, as well as its
own weekly panel-discussion programs carried by I28 commercial television stations.
Besides the U.S. Chamber, there are thousands of state and local chambers of commerce and trade
associations also engaged in public relations and lobbying activities. The corporate and
trade-association lobbying network community is "a network of well over I50,000 professionals," and
its resources are related to corporate income, profits, and the protective value of public-relations and
lobbying outlays. Corporate profits before taxes in I985 were $295.5 billion. When the corporate
community gets agitated about the political environment, as it did in the I970s, it obviously has the
wherewithal to meet the perceived threat. Corporate and trade-association image and issues
advertising increased from $305 million in I975 to $650 million in I980. So did direct-mail campaigns
through dividend and other mail stuffers, the distribution of educational films, booklets and
pamphlets, and outlays on initiatives and referendums, lobbying, and political and think-tank
contributions. Aggregate corporate and trade-association political advertising and grass-roots outlays
were estimated to have reached the billion-dollar-a-year level by I978, and to have grown to $I.6 billion
by I984.
To consolidate their preeminent position as sources, government and business-news promoters go to

great pains to make things easy for news organizations. They provide the media organizations with
facilities in which to gather; they give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports;
they schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines; they write press releases in
usable language; and they carefully organize their press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions.
It is the job of news officers "to meet the journalist's scheduled needs with material that their beat
agency has generated at its own pace."
In effect, the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access by
their contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring the raw materials of, and producing,
news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become "routine" news sources and have privileged
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access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary
decision of the gatekeepers. It should also be noted that in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and
the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy, the subsidy is at the taxpayers' expense, so that, in
effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest of powerful groups such as military
contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.
Because of their services, continuous contact on the beat, and mutual dependency, the powerful can use
personal relationships, threats, and rewards to further influence and coerce the media. The media may
feel obligated to carry extremely dubious stories and mute criticism in order not to offend their sources
and disturb a close relationship. It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily
news liars, even if they tell whoppers. Critical sources may be avoided not only because of their lesser
availability and higher cost of establishing credibility, but also because the primary sources may be
offended and may even threaten the media using them.
Powerful sources may also use their prestige and importance to the media as a lever to deny critics
access to the media: the Defense Department, for example, refused to participate in National Public
Radio discussions of defense issues if experts from the Center for Defense Information were on the
program; Elliott Abrams refused to appear on a program on human rights in Central America at the
Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, unless the former ambassador, Robert White,
was excluded as a participant; Claire Sterling refused to participate in television-network shows on the
Bulgarian Connection where her critics would appear. In the last two of these cases, the authorities
and brand-name experts were successful in monopolizing access by coercive threats.
Perhaps more important, powerful sources regularly take advantage of media routines and
dependency to "manage" the media, to manipulate them into following a special agenda and
framework (as we will show in detail in the chapters that follow). Part of this management process
consists of inundating the media with stories, which serve sometimes to foist a particular line and
frame on the media (e.g., Nicaragua as illicitly supplying arms to the Salvadoran rebels), and at other
times to help chase unwanted stories off the front page or out of the media altogether (the alleged
delivery of MIGs to Nicaragua during the week of the I984 Nicaraguan election). This strategy can be
traced back at least as far as the Committee on Public Information, established to coordinate
propaganda during World War I, which "discovered in I9I7-I8 that one of the best means of
controlling news was flooding news channels with 'facts,' or what amounted to official information."
The relation between power and sourcing extends beyond official and corporate provision of
day-to-day news to shaping the supply of "experts." The dominance of official sources is weakened by
the existence of highly respectable unofficial sources that give dissident views with great authority.
This problem is alleviated by "co-opting the experts"-i.e., putting them on the payroll as consultants,
funding their research, and organizing think tanks that will hire them directly and help disseminate
their messages. In this way bias may be structured, and the supply of experts may be skewed in the
direction desired by the government and "the market." As Henry Kissinger has pointed out, in this
"age of the expert," the "constituency" of the expert is "those who have a vested interest in commonly
held opinions; elaborating and defining its consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an
expert." It is therefore appropriate that this restructuring has taken place to allow the commonly held
opinions (meaning those that are functional for elite interests) to continue to prevail.
This process of creating the needed body of experts has been carried out on a deliberate basis and a
massive scale. Back in I972, Judge Lewis Powell (later elevated to the Supreme Court) wrote a memo
to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging business "to buy the top academic reputations in the
country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campuses."
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One buys them, and assures that-in the words of Dr. Edwin Feulner, of the Heritage Foundation-the
public-policy area "is awash with in-depth academic studies" that have the proper conclusions. Using
the analogy of Procter & Gamble selling toothpaste, Feulner explained that "They sell it and resell it
every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer's mind." By the sales effort, including the
dissemination of the correct ideas to "thousands of newspapers," it is possible to keep debate "within
its proper perspective.''
In accordance with this formula, during the I970s and early I980s a string of institutions was created
and old ones were activated to the end of propagandizing the corporate viewpoint. Many hundreds of
intellectuals were brought to these institutions, where their work was funded and their outputs were
disseminated to the media by a sophisticated propaganda effort. The corporate funding and clear
ideological purpose in the overall effort had no discernible effect on the credibility of the intellectuals
so mobilized; on the contrary, the funding and pushing of their ideas catapulted them into the press.
As an illustration of how the funded experts preempt space in the media, table I-4 describes the
"experts" on terrorism and defense issues who appeared on the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour" in the
course of a year in the mid-I980s. We can see that, excluding journalists, a majority of the participants
(54 percent) were present or former government officials, and that the next highest category (I5.7
percent) was drawn from conservative think tanks. The largest number of appearances in the latter
category was supplied by the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an
organization funded by conservative foundations and corporations, and providing a revolving door
between the State Department and CIA and a nominally private organization. On such issues as
terrorism and the Bulgarian Connection, the CSIS has occupied space in the media that otherwise
might have been filled by independent voices.
The mass media themselves also provide "experts" who regularly echo the official view. John Barron
and Claire Sterling are household names as authorities on the KGB and terrorism because the
Reader's Digest has funded, published, and publicized their work; the Soviet defector Arkady
Shevchenko became an expert on Soviet arms and intelligence because Time, ABC-TV, and the New
York Times chose to feature him (despite his badly tarnished credentials). By giving these purveyors of
the preferred view a great deal of exposure, the media confer status and make them the obvious
candidates for opinion and analysis.
Another class of experts whose prominence is largely a function of serviceability to power is former
radicals who have come to "see the light." The motives that cause these individuals to switch gods,
from Stalin (or Mao) to Reagan and free enterprise, is varied, but for the establishment media the
reason for the change is simply that the ex-radicals have finally seen the error of their ways. In a
country whose citizenry values acknowledgement of sin and repentance, the turncoats are an
important class of repentant sinners. It is interesting to observe how the former sinners, whose
previous work was of little interest or an object of ridicule to the mass media, are suddenly elevated to
prominence and become authentic experts. We may recall how, during the McCarthy era, defectors
and ex-Communists vied with one another in tales of the imminence of a Soviet invasion and other
lurid stories. They found that news coverage was a function of their trimming their accounts to the
prevailing demand. The steady flow of ex-radicals from marginality to media attention shows that we
are witnessing a durable method of providing experts who will say what the establishment wants said.
FLAK AND THE ENFORCERS: THE FOURTH FILTER
"Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. It may take the form of letters,
telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of
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complaint, threat, and punitive action. It may be organized centrally or locally, or it may consist of the
entirely independent actions of individuals.
If flak is produced on a large scale, or by individuals or groups with substantial resources, it can be
both uncomfortable and costly to the media. Positions have to be defended within the organization and
without, sometimes before legislatures and possibly even in courts. Advertisers may withdraw
patronage. Television advertising is mainly of consumer goods that are readily subject to organized
boycott. During the McCarthy years, many advertisers and radio and television stations were
effectively coerced into quiescence and blacklisting of employees by the threats of determined Red
hunters to boycott products. Advertisers are still concerned to avoid offending constituencies that
might produce flak, and their demand for suitable programming is a continuing feature of the media
environment. If certain kinds of fact, position, or program are thought likely to elicit flak, this prospect
can be a deterrent.
The ability to produce flak, and especially flak that is costly and threatening, is related to power.
Serious flak has increased in close parallel with business's growing resentment of media criticism and
the corporate offensive of the I970s and I980s. Flak from the powerful can be either direct or indirect.
The direct would include letters or phone calls from the White House to Dan Rather or William Paley,
or from the FCC to the television networks asking for documents used in putting together a program,
or from irate officials of ad agencies or corporate sponsors to media officials asking for reply time or
threatening retaliation. The powerful can also work on the media indirectly by complaining to their
own constituencies (stockholders, employees) about the media, by generating institutional advertising
that does the same, and by funding right-wing monitoring or think-tank operations designed to attack
the media. They may also fund political campaigns and help put into power conservative politicians
who will more directly serve the interests of private power in curbing any deviationism in the media.
Along with its other political investments of the I970s and I980s, the corporate community sponsored
the growth of institutions such as the American Legal Foundation, the Capital Legal Foundation, the
Media Institute, the Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Accuracy in Media (AIM). These may
be regarded as institutions organized for the specific purpose of producing flak. Another and older
flak-producing machine with a broader design is Freedom House. The American Legal Foundation,
organized in I980, has specialized in Fairness Doctrine complaints and libel suits to aid "media
victims." The Capital Legal Foundation, incorporated in I977, was the Scaife vehicle for
Westmoreland's $I20-million libel suit against CBS.
The Media Institute, organized in I972 and funded by corporate-wealthy patrons, sponsors monitoring
projects, conferences, and studies of the media. It has focused less heavily on media failings in foreign
policy, concentrating more on media portrayals of economic issues and the business community, but its
range of interests is broad. The main theme of its sponsored studies and conferences has been the
failure of the media to portray business accurately and to give adequate weight to the business point of
view, but it underwrites works such as John Corry's expose of the alleged left-wing bias of the mass
media. The chairman of the board of trustees of the institute in I985 was Steven V. Seekins, the top
public-relations officer of the American Medical Association; chairman of the National Advisory
Council was Herbert Schmertz, of the Mobil Oil Corporation.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs, run by Linda and Robert Lichter, came into existence in the
mid-I980s as a "non-profit, nonpartisan" research institute, with warm accolades from Patrick
Buchanan, Faith Whittlesey, and Ronald Reagan himself, who recognized the need for an objective and
fair press. Their Media Monitor and research studies continue their earlier efforts to demonstrate the
liberal bias and anti-business propensities of the mass media.
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AIM was formed in I969, and it grew spectacularly in the I970s. Its annual income rose from $5,000 in
I97I to $I.5 million in the early I980s, with funding mainly from large corporations and the wealthy
heirs and foundations of the corporate system. At least eight separate oil companies were contributors
to AIM in the early I980s, but the wide representation in sponsors from the corporate community is
impressive. The function of AIM is to harass the media and put pressure on them to follow the
corporate agenda and a hard-line, right-wing foreign policy. It presses the media to join more
enthusiastically in Red-scare bandwagons, and attacks them for alleged deficiencies whenever they fail
to toe the line on foreign policy. It conditions the media to expect trouble (and cost increases) for
violating right-wing standards of bias.
Freedom House, which dates back to the early I940s, has had interlocks with AIM, the World
Anticommunist League, Resistance International, and U.S. government bodies such as Radio Free
Europe and the CIA, and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the government and
international right wing. It sent election monitors to the Rhodesian elections staged by Ian Smith in
I979 and found them "fair," whereas the I980 elections won by Mugabe under British supervision it
found dubious. Its election monitors also found the Salvadoran elections of I982 admirable. It has
expended substantial resources in criticizing the media for insufficient sympathy with U.S.
foreign-policy ventures and excessively harsh criticism of U.S. client states. Its most notable
publication of this genre was Peter Braestrup's Big Story, which contended that the media's negative
portrayal of the Tet offensive helped lose the war. The work is a travesty of scholarship, but more
interesting is its premise: that the mass media not only should support any national venture abroad,
but should do so with enthusiasm, such enterprises being by definition noble. In I982, when the Reagan
administration was having trouble containing media reporting of the systematic killing of civilians by
the Salvadoran army, Freedom House came through with a denunciation of the "imbalance" in media
reporting from El Salvador.
Although the flak machines steadily attack the mass media, the media treat them well. They receive
respectful attention, and their propagandistic role and links to a larger corporate program are rarely
mentioned or analyzed. AIM head, Reed Irvine's diatribes are frequently published, and right-wing
network flacks who regularly assail the "liberal media," such as Michael Ledeen, are given Op-Ed
column space, sympathetic reviewers, and a regular place on talk shows as experts. This reflects the
power of the sponsors, including the well-entrenched position of the right wing in the mass media
themselves.
The producers of flak add to one another's strength and reinforce the command of political authority
in its news-management activities. The government is a major producer of flak, regularly assailing,
threatening, and "correcting" the media, trying to contain any deviations from the established line.
News management itself is designed to produce flak. In the Reagan years, Mr. Reagan was put on
television to exude charm to millions, many of whom berated the media when they dared to criticize
the "Great Communicator.''
ANTICOMMUNISM AS A CONTROL MECHANISM
A final filter is the ideology of anticommunism. Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the
specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior
status. The Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were traumas to Western elites, and the ongoing
conflicts and the well-publicized abuses of Communist states have contributed to elevating opposition
to communism to a first principle of Western ideology and politics. This ideology helps mobilize the
populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating
policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and
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radicalism. It therefore helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control
mechanism. If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism
abroad is justified as a lesser evil. Opposition to social democrats who are too soft on Communists and
"play into their hands" is rationalized in similar terms.
Liberals at home, often accused of being pro-Communist or insufficiently anti-Communist, are kept
continuously on the defensive in a cultural milieu in which anticommunism is the dominant religion. If
they allow communism, or something that can be labeled communism, to triumph in the provinces
while they are in office, the political costs are heavy. Most of them have fully internalized the religion
anyway, but they are all under great pressure to demonstrate their anti-Communist credentials. This
causes them to behave very much like reactionaries. Their occasional support of social democrats often
breaks down where the latter are insufficiently harsh on their own indigenous radicals or on popular
groups that are organizing among generally marginalized sectors. In his brief tenure in the Dominican
Republic, Juan Bosch attacked corruption in the armed forces and government, began a land-reform
program, undertook a major project for mass education of the populace, and maintained a remarkably
open government and system of effective civil liberties. These policies threatened powerful internal
vested interests, and the United States resented his independence and the extension of civil liberties to
Communists and radicals. This was carrying democracy and pluralism too far. Kennedy was
"extremely disappointed" in Bosch's rule, and the State Department "quickly soured on the first
democratically elected Dominican President in over thirty years." Bosch's overthrow by the military
after nine months in office had at least the tacit support of the United States. Two years later, by
contrast, the Johnson administration invaded the Dominican Republic to make sure that Bosch did not
resume power. The Kennedy liberals were enthusiastic about the military coup and displacement of a
populist government in Brazil in I964. A major spurt in the growth of neo-Fascist national-security
states took place under Kennedy and Johnson. In the cases of the U.S. subversion of Guatemala,
I947-54, and the military attacks on Nicaragua, I98I-87, allegations of Communist links and a
Communist threat caused many liberals to support counterrevolutionary intervention, while others
lapsed into silence, paralyzed by the fear of being tarred with charges of infidelity to the national
religion.
It should be noted that when anti-Communist fervor is aroused, the demand for serious evidence in
support of claims of "communist" abuses is suspended, and charlatans can thrive as evidential sources.
Defectors, informers, and assorted other opportunists move to center stage as "experts," and they
remain there even after exposure as highly unreliable, if not downright liars. Pascal Delwit and
Jean-Michel Dewaele point out that in France, too, the ideologues of anticommunism "can do and say
anything.'' Analyzing the new status of Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix, two former passionate Stalinists
now possessed of a large and uncritical audience in France, Delwit and Dewaele note:
If we analyze their writings, we find all the classic reactions of people who have been disappointed in
love. But no one dreams of criticizing them for their past, even though it has marked them forever.
They may well have been converted, but they have not changed.... no one notices the constants, even
though they are glaringly obvious. Their best sellers prove, thanks to the support of the most indulgent
and slothful critics anyone could hope for, that the public can be fooled. No one denounces or even
notices the arrogance of both yesterday's eulogies and today's diatribes; no one cares that there is
never any proof and that invective is used in place of analysis. Their inverted hyper-Stalinism-which
takes the usual form of total manicheanism-is whitewashed simply because it is directed against
Communism. The hysteria has not changed, but it gets a better welcome in its present guise.
The anti-Communist control mechanism reaches through the system to exercise a profound influence
on the mass media. In normal times as well as in periods of Red scares, issues tend to be framed in
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terms of a dichotomized world of Communist and anti-Communist powers, with gains and losses
allocated to contesting sides, and rooting for "our side" considered an entirely legitimate news
practice. It is the mass media that identify, create, and push into the limelight a Joe McCarthy, Arkady
Shevchenko, and Claire Sterling and Robert Leiken, or an Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix. The
ideology and religion of anticommunism is a potent filter.
DICHOTOMIZATION AND PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGNS
The five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates, and even more sharply limit
what can become "big news," subject to sustained news campaigns. By definition, news from primary
establishment sources meets one major filter requirement and is readily accommodated by the mass
media. Messages from and about dissidents and weak, unorganized individuals and groups, domestic
and foreign, are at an initial disadvantage in sourcing costs and credibility, and they often do not
comport with the ideology or interests of the gatekeepers and other powerful parties that influence the
filtering process.
Thus, for example, the torture of political prisoners and the attack on trade unions in Turkey will be
pressed on the media only by human rights activists and groups that have little political leverage. The
U.S. government supported the Turkish martial-law government from its inception in I980, and the
U.S. business community has been warm toward regimes that profess fervent anticommunism,
encourage foreign investment, repress unions, and loyally support U.S. foreign policy (a set of virtues
that are frequently closely linked). Media that chose to feature Turkish violence against their own
citizenry would have had to go to extra expense to find and check out information sources; they would
elicit flak from government, business, and organized right-wing flak machines, and they might be
looked upon with disfavor by the corporate community (including advertisers) for indulging in such a
quixotic interest and crusade. They would tend to stand alone in focusing on victims that from the
standpoint of dominant American interests were unworthy.
In marked contrast, protest over political prisoners and the violation of the rights of trade unions in
Poland was seen by the Reagan administration and business elites in I98I as a noble cause, and, not
coincidentally, as an opportunity to score political points. Many media leaders and syndicated
columnists felt the same way. Thus information and strong opinions on human-rights violations in
Poland could be obtained from official sources in Washington, and reliance on Polish dissidents would
not elicit flak from the U.S. government or the flak machines. These victims would be generally
acknowledged by the managers of the filters to be worthy. The mass media never explain why Andrei
Sakharov is worthy and Jose Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy-the attention and general
dichotomization occur "naturally" as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the same as
if a commissar had instructed the media: "Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget
about the victims of friends.''
Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the filters; they may also become the
basis of sustained propaganda campaigns. If the government or corporate community and the media
feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the
public. This was true, for example, of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean airliner KAL 007
in early September I983, which permitted an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy
and greatly advanced Reagan administration arms plans. As Bernard Gwertzman noted complacently
in the New York Times of August 3I, I984, U.S. officials "assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet
handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow." In sharp
contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February I973 led to no outcry in
the West, no denunciations for "cold-blooded murder,'' and no boycott. This difference in treatment
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was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility: "No useful purpose is served
by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the
Sinai peninsula last week.'' There was a very "useful purpose" served by focusing on the Soviet act,
and a massive propaganda campaign ensued.
Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests. The Red scare of I9I9-20
served well to abort the union organizing drive that followed World War I in the steel and other
industries. The Truman-McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and the permanent war
economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive coalition of the New Deal years. The chronic
focus on the plight of Soviet dissidents, on enemy killings in Cambodia, and on the Bulgarian
Connection helped weaken the Vietnam syndrome, justify a huge arms buildup and a more aggressive
foreign policy, and divert attention from the upward redistribution of income that was the heart of
Reagan's domestic economic program. The recent propaganda-disinformation attacks on Nicaragua
have been needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in E1 Salvador and to justify the
escalating U.S. investment in counterrevolution in Central America.
Conversely, propaganda campaigns will not be mobilized where victimization, even though massive,
sustained, and dramatic, fails to meet the test of utility to elite interests. Thus, while the focus on
Cambodia in the Pol Pot era (and thereafter) was exceedingly serviceable, as Cambodia had fallen to
the Communists and useful lessons could be drawn by attention to their victims, the numerous victims
of the U.S. bombing before the Communist takeover were scrupulously ignored by the U.S. elite press.
After Pol Pot's ouster by the Vietnamese, the United States quietly shifted support to this "worse than
Hitler" villain, with little notice in the press, which adjusted once again to the national political
agenda. Attention to the Indonesian massacres of I965-66, or the victims of the Indonesian invasion of
East Timor from I975 onward, would also be distinctly unhelpful as bases of media campaigns, because
Indonesia is a U.S. ally and client that maintains an open door to Western investment, and because, in
the case of East Timor, the United States bears major responsibility for the slaughter. The same is true
of the victims of state terror in Chile and Guatemala, U.S. clients whose basic institutional structures,
including the state terror system, were put in place and maintained by, or with crucial assistance from,
U.S. power, and who remain U.S. client states. Propaganda campaigns on behalf of these victims would
conflict with government-business-military interests and, in our model, would not be able to pass
through the filtering system.
Propaganda campaigns may be instituted either by the government or by one or more of the top media
firms. The campaigns to discredit the government of Nicaragua, to support the Salvadoran elections as
an exercise in legitimizing democracy, and to use the Soviet shooting down of the Korean airliner KAL
007 as a means of mobilizing public support for the arms buildup, were instituted and propelled by the
government. The campaigns to publicize the crimes of Pol Pot and the alleged KGB plot to assassinate
the pope were initiated by the Reader's Digest, with strong follow-up support from NBC-TV, the New
York Times, and other major media companies. Some propaganda campaigns are jointly initiated by
government and media; all of them require the collaboration of the mass media. The secret of the
unidirectionality of the politics of media propaganda campaigns is the multiple filter system discussed
above: the mass media will allow any stories that are hurtful to large interests to peter out quickly, if
they surface at all.
For stories that are useful, the process will get under way with a series of government leaks, press
conferences, white papers, etc., or with one or more of the mass media starting the ball rolling with
such articles as Barron and Paul's "Murder of a Gentle Land" (Cambodia), or Claire Sterling's "The
Plot to Kill the Pope," both in the Reader's Digest. If the other major media like the story, they will
follow it up with their own versions, and the matter quickly becomes newsworthy by familiarity. If the
18 of 20 12/23/2005 6:25 PM
articles are written in an assured and convincing style, are subject to no criticisms or alternative
interpretations in the mass media, and command support by authority figures, the propaganda themes
quickly become established as true even without real evidence. This tends to close out dissenting views
even more comprehensively, as they would now conflict with an already established popular belief.
This in turn opens up further opportunities for still more inflated claims, as these can be made without
fear of serious repercussions. Similar wild assertions made in contradiction of official views would
elicit powerful flak, so that such an inflation process would be controlled by the government and the
market. No such protections exist with system-supportive claims; there, flak will tend to press the
media to greater hysteria in the face of enemy evil. The media not only suspend critical judgment and
investigative zeal, they compete to find ways of putting the newly established truth in a supportive
light. Themes and facts-even careful and well-documented analyses-that are incompatible with the now
institutionalized theme are suppressed or ignored. If the theme collapses of its own burden of
fabrications, the mass media will quietly fold their tents and move on to another topic.
Using a propaganda model, we would not only anticipate definitions of worth based on utility, and
dichotomous attention based on the same criterion, we would also expect the news stories about worthy
and unworthy victims (or enemy and friendly states) to differ in quality. That is, we would expect
official sources of the United States and its client regimes to be used heavily-and uncritically-in
connection with one's own abuses and those of friendly governments, while refugees and other
dissident sources will be used in dealing with enemies. We would anticipate the uncritical acceptance of
certain premises in dealing with self and friends-such as that one's own state and leaders seek peace
and democracy, oppose terrorism, and tell the truth-premises which will not be applied in treating
enemy states. We would expect different criteria of evaluation to be employed, so that what is villainy
in enemy states will be presented as an incidental background fact in the case of oneself and friends.
What is on the agenda in treating one case will be off the agenda in discussing the other. We would also
expect great investigatory zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high officials
for abuses in enemy states, but diminished enterprise in examining such matters in connection with
one's own and friendly states.
The quality of coverage should also be displayed more directly and crudely in placement, headlining,
word usage, and other modes of mobilizing interest and outrage. In the opinion columns, we would
anticipate sharp restraints on the range of opinion allowed expression. Our hypothesis is that worthy
victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their
victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest
and sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal
humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.
Meanwhile, because of the power of establishment sources, the flak machines, and anti-Communist
ideology, we would anticipate outcries that the worthy victims are being sorely neglected, that the
unworthy are treated with excessive and uncritical generosity, that the media's liberal, adversarial (if
not subversive) hostility to government explains our difficulties in mustering support for the latest
national venture in counterrevolutionary intervention.
In sum, a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and highly political
dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests. This
should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage... such
dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic: not only are choices for publicity and
suppression comprehensible in terms of system advantage, but the modes of handling favored and
inconvenient materials (placement, tone, context, fullness of treatment) differ in ways that serve
political ends.
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Part I
The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Twenty years ago, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics
on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of
intellectuals. I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war, and
had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost
none of their power or persuasiveness. Macdonald is concerned with the
question of war guilt. He asks the question: To what extent were the German or
Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments?
And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us: To what extent are the
British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of
civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and
reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most
unspeakable crimes in history. To an undergraduate in 1945–46—to anyone
whose political and moral consciousness had been formed by the horrors of the
1930s, by the war in Ethiopia, the Russian purge, the “China Incident,” the
Spanish Civil War, the Nazi atrocities, the Western reaction to these events and,
in part, complicity in them—these questions had particular significance and
poignancy.
With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally
disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of
governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often
hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes
from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For
a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and
the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and
misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of
current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are
much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the
unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.
The issues that Macdonald raised are as pertinent today as they were twenty
years ago. We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American
people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless
rural population in Vietnam, still another atrocity in what Asians see as the
“Vasco da Gama era” of world history. As for those of us who stood by in

silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen
years—on what page of history do we find our proper place? Only the most
insensible can escape these questions. I want to return to them, later on, after a
few scattered remarks about the responsibility of intellectuals and how, in
practice, they go about meeting this responsibility in the mid-1960s.
IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose

lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment.
Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious. Thus we
have Martin Heidegger writing, in a pro-Hitler declaration of 1933, that “truth is
the revelation of that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong in its action
and knowledge”; it is only this kind of “truth” that one has a responsibility to
speak. Americans tend to be more forthright. When Arthur Schlesinger was
asked by the New York Times in November 1965 to explain the contradiction
between his published account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had
given the press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and
a few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having suppressed
information on the planned invasion, in “the national interest,” as this term was
defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom Schlesinger gives
such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the Kennedy administration. It
is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause
which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so
little response in the intellectual community—for example, no one has said that
there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in the humanities to a
historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-
sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort. And what of the
incredible sequence of lies on the part of our government and its spokesmen
concerning such matters as negotiations in Vietnam? The facts are known to all
who care to know. The press, foreign and domestic, has presented documentation
to refute each falsehood as it appears. But the power of the government’s
propaganda apparatus is such that the citizen who does not undertake a research
project on the subject can hardly hope to confront government pronouncements
with fact.1

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the
lies of governments, to analyze actions
according to their causes and motives and
often hidden intentions.
The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is

by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock. It is therefore useful to
recall that although new levels of cynicism are constantly being reached, their
clear antecedents were accepted at home with quiet toleration. It is a useful
exercise to compare government statements at the time of the invasion of
Guatemala in 1954 with Eisenhower’s admission—to be more accurate, his boast
—a decade later that American planes were sent “to help the invaders” (New
York Times, October 14, 1965). Nor is it only in moments of crisis that duplicity
is considered perfectly in order. “New Frontiersmen,” for example, have scarcely
distinguished themselves by a passionate concern for historical accuracy, even
when they are not being called upon to provide a “propaganda cover” for
ongoing actions. For example, Arthur Schlesinger (New York Times, February 6,
1966) describes the bombing of North Vietnam and the massive escalation of
military commitment in early 1965 as based on a “perfectly rational argument”:
“So long as the Vietcong thought they were going to win the war, they obviously
would not be interested in any kind of negotiated settlement.”
The date is important. Had this statement been made six months earlier, one
could attribute it to ignorance. But this statement appeared after the UN, North
Vietnamese, and Soviet initiatives had been front-page news for months. It was
already public knowledge that these initiatives had preceded the escalation of
February 1965 and, in fact, continued for several weeks after the bombing
began. Correspondents in Washington tried desperately to find some explanation
for the startling deception that had been revealed. Chalmers Roberts, for
example, wrote in the Boston Globe on November 19 with unconscious irony:
[Late February 1965] hardly seemed to Washington to be a propitious

moment for negotiations [since] Mr. Johnson . . . had just ordered the
first bombing of North Vietnam in an effort to bring Hanoi to a
conference table where the bargaining chips on both sides would be more
closely matched.
Coming at that moment, Schlesinger’s statement is less an example of deceit

than of contempt—contempt for an audience that can be expected to tolerate
such behavior with silence, if not approval.2
TO TURN TO SOMEONE closer to the actual formation and implementation of

policy, consider some of the reflections of Walt Rostow, a man who, according to
Schlesinger, brought a “spacious historical view” to the conduct of foreign
affairs in the Kennedy administration.3 According to his analysis, the guerrilla
warfare in IndoChina in 1946 was launched by Stalin,4 and Hanoi initiated the
guerrilla war against South Vietnam in 1958 (View from the Seventh Floor, pp.
39 and 152). Similarly, the Communist planners probed the “free world spectrum
of defense” in northern Azerbaijan and Greece (where Stalin “supported
substantial guerrilla warfare”—ibid., pp. 36 and 148), operating from plans
carefully laid in 1945. And in Central Europe, the Soviet Union was not
“prepared to accept a solution which would remove the dangerous tensions from
Central Europe at the risk of even slowly staged corrosion of Communism in
East Germany” (ibid., p. 156).
It is interesting to compare these observations with studies by scholars
actually concerned with historical events. The remark about Stalin’s initiating
the first Vietnamese war in 1946 does not even merit refutation. As to Hanoi’s
purported initiative of 1958, the situation is more clouded. But even government
sources5 concede that in 1959 Hanoi received the first direct reports of what
Diem6 referred to as his own Algerian war and that only after this did they lay
their plans to involve themselves in this struggle. In fact, in December 1958,
Hanoi made another of its many attempts—rebuffed once again by Saigon and
the United States—to establish diplomatic and commercial relations with the
Saigon government on the basis of the status quo.7 Rostow offers no evidence of
Stalin’s support for the Greek guerrillas; in fact, though the historical record is

far from clear, it seems that Stalin was by no means pleased with the
adventurism of the Greek guerrillas, who, from his point of view, were upsetting
the satisfactory postwar imperialist settlement.8
Rostow’s remarks about Germany are more interesting still. He does not see
fit to mention, for example, the Russian notes of March–April 1952, which
proposed unification of Germany under internationally supervised elections,
with withdrawal of all troops within a year, if there was a guarantee that a
reunified Germany would not be permitted to join a Western military alliance.9
And he has also momentarily forgotten his own characterization of the strategy
of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations: “to avoid any serious negotiation
with the Soviet Union until the West could confront Moscow with German
rearmament within an organized European framework, as a fait accompli”10—to
be sure, in defiance of the Potsdam agreements.
In addition to this growing lack of concern for

truth, we find a real or feigned naiveté about
American actions that reaches startling
proportions.
But most interesting of all is Rostow’s reference to Iran. The facts are that
there was a Russian attempt to impose by force a pro-Soviet government in
northern Azerbaijan that would grant the Soviet Union access to Iranian oil. This
was rebuffed by superior Anglo-American force in 1946, at which point the
more powerful imperialism obtained full rights to Iranian oil for itself, with the
installation of a pro-Western government. We recall what happened when, for a
brief period in the early 1950s, the only Iranian government with something of a
popular base experimented with the curious idea that Iranian oil should belong to

the Iranians. What is interesting, however, is the description of northern
Azerbaijan as part of the “free world spectrum of defense.” It is pointless, by
now, to comment on the debasement of the phrase “free world.” But by what law
of nature does Iran, with its resources, fall within Western dominion? The bland
assumption that it does is most revealing of deep-seated attitudes towards the
conduct of foreign affairs.
IN ADDITION TO THIS growing lack of concern for truth, we find, in recent

published statements, a real or feigned naiveté about American actions that
reaches startling proportions. For example, Arthur Schlesinger, according to the
Times, February 6, 1966, characterized our Vietnamese policies of 1954 as “part
of our general program of international goodwill.” Unless intended as irony, this
remark shows either a colossal cynicism or the inability, on a scale that defies
measurement, to comprehend elementary phenomena of contemporary history.
Similarly, what is one to make of the testimony of Thomas Schelling before the
House Foreign Affairs Committee, January 27, 1965, in which he discusses two
great dangers if all Asia “goes Communist”?11 First, this would exclude “the
United States and what we call Western civilization from a large part of the
world that is poor and colored and potentially hostile.” Second, “a country like
the United States probably cannot maintain self-confidence if just about the
greatest thing it ever attempted, namely to create the basis for decency and
prosperity and democratic government in the underdeveloped world, had to be
acknowledged as a failure or as an attempt that we wouldn’t try again.” It
surpasses belief that a person with even a minimal acquaintance with the record
of American foreign policy could produce such statements.
It surpasses belief, that is, unless we look at the matter from a more historical
point of view and place such statements in the context of the hypocritical
moralism of the past; for example, of Woodrow Wilson, who was going to teach
the Latin Americans the art of good government, and who wrote (1902) that it is
“our peculiar duty” to teach colonial peoples “order and self-control [and] . . .
the drill and habit of law and obedience.” Or of the missionaries of the 1840s,
who described the hideous and degrading opium wars as “the result of a great
design of Providence to make the wickedness of men subserve his purposes of
mercy toward China, in breaking through her wall of exclusion, and bringing the
empire into more immediate contact with western and Christian nations.” Or, to

approach the present, of A.A. Berle, who, in commenting on the Dominican
intervention, has the impertinence to attribute the problems of the Caribbean
countries to imperialism—Russian imperialism.12
AS A FINAL EXAMPLE of this failure of skepticism, consider the remarks of

Henry Kissinger in his concluding remarks at the Harvard-Oxford television
debate on America’s Vietnam policies. He observed, rather sadly, that what
disturbs him most is that others question not our judgment, but our motives—a
remarkable comment by a man whose professional concern is political analysis,
that is, analysis of the actions of governments in terms of motives that are
unexpressed in official propaganda and perhaps only dimly perceived by those
whose acts they govern. No one would be disturbed by an analysis of the
political behavior of the Russians, French, or Tanzanians questioning their
motives and interpreting their actions by the long-range interests concealed
behind their official rhetoric. But it is an article of faith that American motives
are pure and not subject to analysis (see note 1). Although it is nothing new in
American intellectual history—or, for that matter, in the general history of
imperialist apologia—this innocence becomes increasingly distasteful as the
power it serves grows more dominant in world affairs, and more capable,
therefore, of the unconstrained viciousness that the mass media present to us
each day. We are hardly the first power in history to combine material interests,
great technological capacity, and an utter disregard for the suffering and misery
of the lower orders. The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that
disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third
world, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and
benign intent are to be interpreted.
It is an article of faith that American motives

are pure and not subject to analysis.

The basic assumptions of the “New Frontiersmen” should be pondered
carefully by those who look forward to the involvement of academic
intellectuals in politics. For example, I have referred above to Arthur
Schlesinger’s objections to the Bay of Pigs invasion, but the reference was
imprecise. True, he felt that it was a “terrible idea,” but “not because the notion
of sponsoring an exile attempt to overthrow Castro seemed intolerable in itself.”
Such a reaction would be the merest sentimentality, unthinkable to a tough-
minded realist. The difficulty, rather, was that it seemed unlikely that the
deception could succeed. The operation, in his view, was ill-conceived but not
otherwise objectionable.13 In a similar vein, Schlesinger quotes with approval
Kennedy’s “realistic” assessment of the situation resulting from Trujillo’s
assassination:
There are three possibilities in descending order of preference: a decent

democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime or a Castro
regime. We ought to aim at the first, but we really can’t renounce the
second until we are sure that we can avoid the third [p. 769].
The reason why the third possibility is so intolerable is explained a few

pages later (p. 774): “Communist success in Latin America would deal a much
harder blow to the power and influence of the United States.” Of course, we can
never really be sure of avoiding the third possibility; therefore, in practice, we
will always settle for the second, as we are now doing in Brazil and Argentina,
for example.14
Or consider Walt Rostow’s views on American policy in Asia.15 The basis
on which we must build this policy is that “we are openly threatened and we feel
menaced by Communist China.” To prove that we are menaced is of course
unnecessary, and the matter receives no attention; it is enough that we feel
menaced. Our policy must be based on our national heritage and our national
interests. Our national heritage is briefly outlined in the following terms:
“Throughout the nineteenth century, in good conscience Americans could devote
themselves to the extension of both their principles and their power on this
continent,” making use of “the somewhat elastic concept of the Monroe
doctrine” and, of course, extending “the American interest to Alaska and the
mid-Pacific islands. . . . Both our insistence on unconditional surrender and the
idea of post-war occupation . . . represented the formulation of American

security interests in Europe and Asia.” So much for our heritage. As to our
interests, the matter is equally simple. Fundamental is our “profound interest that
societies abroad develop and strengthen those elements in their respective
cultures that elevate and protect the dignity of the individual against the state.”
At the same time, we must counter the “ideological threat,” namely “the
possibility that the Chinese Communists can prove to Asians by progress in
China that Communist methods are better and faster than democratic methods.”
Nothing is said about those people in Asian cultures to whom our “conception of
the proper relation of the individual to the state” may not be the uniquely
important value, people who might, for example, be concerned with preserving
the “dignity of the individual” against concentrations of foreign or domestic
capital, or against semi-feudal structures (such as Trujillo-type dictatorships)
introduced or kept in power by American arms. All of this is flavored with
allusions to “our religious and ethical value systems” and to our “diffuse and
complex concepts” which are to the Asian mind “so much more difficult to
grasp” than Marxist dogma, and are so “disturbing to some Asians” because of
“their very lack of dogmatism.”
To prove that we are menaced is of course

unnecessary, and the matter receives no
attention; it is enough that we feel menaced.
Such intellectual contributions as these suggest the need for a correction to

de Gaulle’s remark, in his Memoirs, about the American “will to power, cloaking
itself in idealism.” By now, this will to power is not so much cloaked in idealism
as it is drowned in fatuity. And academic intellectuals have made their unique
contribution to this sorry picture.

LET US, HOWEVER, return to the war in Vietnam and the response that it has
aroused among American intellectuals. A striking feature of the recent debate on
Southeast Asian policy has been the distinction that is commonly drawn between
“responsible criticism,” on the one hand, and “sentimental,” or “emotional,” or
“hysterical” criticism, on the other. There is much to be learned from a careful
study of the terms in which this distinction is drawn. The “hysterical critics” are
to be identified, apparently, by their irrational refusal to accept one fundamental
political axiom, namely that the United States has the right to extend its power
and control without limit, insofar as is feasible. Responsible criticism does not
challenge this assumption, but argues, rather, that we probably can’t “get away
with it” at this particular time and place.
A distinction of this sort seems to be what Irving Kristol, for example, has in
mind in his analysis of the protest over Vietnam policy (Encounter, August
1965). He contrasts the responsible critics, such as Walter Lippmann, the Times,
and Senator Fulbright, with the “teach-in movement.” “Unlike the university
protesters,” he points out, “Mr. Lippmann engages in no presumptuous
suppositions as to ‘what the Vietnamese people really want’—he obviously
doesn’t much care—or in legalistic exegesis as to whether, or to what extent,
there is ‘aggression’ or ‘revolution’ in South Vietnam. His is a realpolitik point
of view; and he will apparently even contemplate the possibility of a nuclear war
against China in extreme circumstances.” This is commendable, and contrasts
favorably, for Kristol, with the talk of the “unreasonable, ideological types” in
the teach-in movement, who often seem to be motivated by such absurdities as
“simple, virtuous ‘anti-imperialism,’” who deliver “harangues on ‘the power
structure,’” and who even sometimes stoop so low as to read “articles and
reports from the foreign press on the American presence in Vietnam.”
Furthermore, these nasty types are often psychologists, mathematicians,
chemists, or philosophers (just as, incidentally, those most vocal in protest in the
Soviet Union are generally physicists, literary intellectuals, and others remote
from the exercise of power), rather than people with Washington contacts, who,
of course, realize that “had they a new, good idea about Vietnam, they would get
a prompt and respectful hearing” in Washington.

The will to power is not so much cloaked in
idealism as it is drowned in fatuity. And
academic intellectuals have made their unique
contribution to this sorry picture.
I am not interested here in whether Kristol’s characterization of protest and

dissent is accurate, but rather in the assumptions on which it rests. Is the purity
of American motives a matter that is beyond discussion, or that is irrelevant to
discussion? Should decisions be left to “experts” with Washington contacts—
even if we assume that they command the necessary knowledge and principles to
make the “best” decision, will they invariably do so? And, a logically prior
question, is “expertise” applicable—that is, is there a body of theory and of
relevant information, not in the public domain, that can be applied to the analysis
of foreign policy or that demonstrates the correctness of present actions in some
way that psychologists, mathematicians, chemists, and philosophers are
incapable of comprehending? Although Kristol does not examine these questions
directly, his attitude presupposes answers, answers which are wrong in all cases.
American aggressiveness, however it may be masked in pious rhetoric, is a
dominant force in world affairs and must be analyzed in terms of its causes and
motives. There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information,
beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from
criticism. To the extent that “expert knowledge” is applied to world affairs, it is
surely appropriate—for a person of any integrity, quite necessary—to question
its quality and the goals it serves. These facts seem too obvious to require
extended discussion.
A CORRECTIVE TO KRISTOL’S curious belief in the administration’s

openness to new thinking about Vietnam is provided by McGeorge Bundy in a
recent issue of Foreign Affairs (January 1967). As Bundy correctly observes, “on
the main stage . . . the argument on Viet Nam turns on tactics, not

fundamentals,” although, he adds, “there are wild men in the wings.” On stage
center are, of course, the president (who in his recent trip to Asia had just
“magisterially reaffirmed” our interest “in the progress of the people across the
Pacific”) and his advisers, who deserve “the understanding support of those who
want restraint.” It is these men who deserve the credit for the fact that “the
bombing of the North has been the most accurate and the most restrained in
modern warfare”—a solicitude which will be appreciated by the inhabitants, or
former inhabitants, of Nam Dinh and Phu Ly and Vinh. It is these men, too, who
deserve the credit for what was reported by Malcolm Browne as long ago as
May 1965:
In the South, huge sectors of the nation have been declared “free
bombing zones,” in which anything that moves is a legitimate target.
Tens of thousands of tons of bombs, rockets, napalm and cannon fire are
poured into these vast areas each week. If only by the laws of chance,
bloodshed is believed to be heavy in these raids.
Fortunately for the developing countries, Bundy assures us, “American

democracy has no taste for imperialism,” and “taken as a whole, the stock of
American experience, understanding, sympathy and simple knowledge is now
much the most impressive in the world.” It is true that “four-fifths of all the
foreign investing in the world is now done by Americans” and that “the most
admired plans and policies . . . are no better than their demonstrable relation to
the American interest”—just as it is true, so we read in the same issue of Foreign
Affairs, that the plans for armed action against Cuba were put into motion a few
weeks after Mikoyan visited Havana, “invading what had so long been an almost
exclusively American sphere of influence.” Unfortunately, such facts as these are
often taken by unsophisticated Asian intellectuals as indicating a “taste for
imperialism.” For example, a number of Indians have expressed their “near
exasperation” at the fact that “we have done everything we can to attract foreign
capital for fertilizer plants, but the American and the other Western private
companies know we are over a barrel, so they demand stringent terms which we
just cannot meet” (Christian Science Monitor, November 26), while
“Washington . . . doggedly insists that deals be made in the private sector with
private enterprise” (ibid., December 5).16 But this reaction, no doubt, simply
reveals, once again, how the Asian mind fails to comprehend the “diffuse and

complex concepts” of Western thought.
IT MAY BE USEFUL to study carefully the “new, good ideas about Vietnam”
that are receiving a “prompt and respectful hearing” in Washington these days.
The U.S. Government Printing Office is an endless source of insight into the
moral and intellectual level of this expert advice. In its publications one can
read, for example, the testimony of Professor David N. Rowe, director of
graduate studies in international relations at Yale University, before the House
Committee on Foreign Affairs (see note 11). Professor Rowe proposes (p. 266)
that the United States buy all surplus Canadian and Australian wheat, so that
there will be mass starvation in China. These are his words:
Mind you, I am not talking about this as a weapon against the Chinese
people. It will be. But that is only incidental. The weapon will be a
weapon against the Government because the internal stability of that
country cannot be sustained by an unfriendly Government in the face of
general starvation.
Professor Rowe will have none of the sentimental moralism that might lead
one to compare this suggestion with, say, the Ostpolitik of Hitler’s Germany.17
Nor does he fear the impact of such policies on other Asian nations, for example,
Japan. He assures us, from his “very long acquaintance with Japanese
questions,” that “the Japanese above all are people who respect power and
determination.” Hence “they will not be so much alarmed by American policy in
Vietnam that takes off from a position of power and intends to seek a solution
based upon the imposition of our power upon local people that we are in
opposition to.” What would disturb the Japanese is “a policy of indecision, a
policy of refusal to face up to the problems [in China and Vietnam] and to meet
our responsibilities there in a positive way,” such as the way just cited. A
conviction that we were “unwilling to use the power that they know we have”
might “alarm the Japanese people very intensely and shake the degree of their
friendly relations with us.” In fact, a full use of American power would be
particularly reassuring to the Japanese, because they have had a demonstration
“of the tremendous power in action of the United States . . . because they have

felt our power directly.” This is surely a prime example of the healthy,
“realpolitik point of view” that Irving Kristol so much admires.
But, one may ask, why restrict ourselves to such indirect means as mass
starvation? Why not bombing? No doubt this message is implicit in the remarks
to the same committee of the Reverend R.J. de Jaegher, regent of the Institute of
Far Eastern Studies, Seton Hall University, who explains that like all people who
have lived under Communism, the North Vietnamese “would be perfectly happy
to be bombed to be free” (p. 345).
Of course, there must be those who support the Communists. But this is
really a matter of small concern, as the Honorable Walter Robertson, assistant
secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs from 1953 to 1959, points out in his
testimony before the same committee. He assures us that “The Peiping regime . .
. represents something less than 3 per cent of the population” (p. 402).
It may be that as honest men the students and

junior faculty are attempting to find out the
truth for themselves rather than ceding the
responsibility to “experts” or to government.
Consider, then, how fortunate the Chinese Communist leaders are, compared
to the leaders of the Vietcong, who, according to Arthur Goldberg (New York
Times, February 6, 1966), represent about “one-half of one percent of the
population of South Vietnam,” that is, about one-half the number of new
Southern recruits for the Vietcong during 1965, if we can credit Pentagon
statistics.18
In the face of such experts as these, the scientists and philosophers of whom
Kristol speaks would clearly do well to continue to draw their circles in the sand.

HAVING SETTLED THE ISSUE of the political irrelevance of the protest
movement, Kristol turns to the question of what motivates it—more generally,
what has made students and junior faculty “go left,” as he sees it, amid general
prosperity and under liberal, Welfare State administrations. This, he notes, “is a
riddle to which no sociologist has as yet come up with an answer.” Since these
young people are well-off, have good futures, etc., their protest must be
irrational. It must be the result of boredom, of too much security, or something of
this sort.
Other possibilities come to mind. It may be, for example, that as honest men
the students and junior faculty are attempting to find out the truth for themselves
rather than ceding the responsibility to “experts” or to government; and it may
be that they react with indignation to what they discover. These possibilities
Kristol does not reject. They are simply unthinkable, unworthy of consideration.
More accurately, these possibilities are inexpressible; the categories in which
they are formulated (honesty, indignation) simply do not exist for the tough-
minded social scientist.
IN THIS IMPLICIT disparagement of traditional intellectual values, Kristol

reflects attitudes that are fairly widespread in academic circles. I do not doubt
that these attitudes are in part a consequence of the desperate attempt of the
social and behavioral sciences to imitate the surface features of sciences that
really have significant intellectual content. But they have other sources as well.
Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems;
but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by
“sophisticated” methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are
important or real. Responsible, nonideological experts will give advice on
tactical questions; irresponsible, “ideological types” will “harangue” about
principle and trouble themselves over moral issues and human rights, or over the
traditional problems of man and society, concerning which “social and
behavioral science” has nothing to offer beyond trivialities. Obviously, these
emotional, ideological types are irrational, since, being well-off and having
power in their grasp, they shouldn’t worry about such matters.
At times this pseudoscientific posing reaches levels that are almost
pathological. Consider the phenomenon of Herman Kahn, for example. Kahn has

been both denounced as immoral and lauded for his courage. By people who
should know better, his On Thermonuclear War has been described “without
qualification . . . [as] . . . one of the great works of our time” (Stuart Hughes).
The fact of the matter is that this is surely one of the emptiest works of our time,
as can be seen by applying to it the intellectual standards of any existing
discipline, by tracing some of its “well-documented conclusions” to the
“objective studies” from which they derive, and by following the line of
argument, where detectable. Kahn proposes no theories, no explanations, no
factual assumptions that can be tested against their consequences, as do the
sciences he is attempting to mimic. He simply suggests a terminology and
provides a facade of rationality. When particular policy conclusions are drawn,
they are supported only by ex cathedra remarks for which no support is even
suggested (e.g., “The civil defense line probably should be drawn somewhere
below $5 billion annually” to keep from provoking the Russians—why not $50
billion, or $5.00?). What is more, Kahn is quite aware of this vacuity; in his
more judicious moments he claims only that “there is no reason to believe that
relatively sophisticated models are more likely to be misleading than the simpler
models and analogies frequently used as an aid to judgment.” For those whose
humor tends towards the macabre, it is easy to play the game of “strategic
thinking” à la Kahn, and to prove what one wishes. For example, one of Kahn’s
basic assumptions is that
an all-out surprise attack in which all resources are devoted to counter-

value targets would be so irrational that, barring an incredible lack of
sophistication or actual insanity among Soviet decision makers, such an
attack is highly unlikely.
A simple argument proves the opposite. Premise 1: American decision-

makers think along the lines outlined by Herman Kahn. Premise 2: Kahn thinks
it would be better for everyone to be red than for everyone to be dead. Premise
3: if the Americans were to respond to an all-out countervalue attack, then
everyone would be dead. Conclusion: the Americans will not respond to an all-
out countervalue attack, and therefore it should be launched without delay. Of
course, one can carry the argument a step further. Fact: the Russians have not
carried out an all-out counter-value attack. It follows that they are not rational. If
they are not rational, there is no point in “strategic thinking.” Therefore . . .
Of course this is all nonsense, but nonsense that differs from Kahn’s only in

the respect that the argument is of slightly greater complexity than anything to be
discovered in his work. What is remarkable is that serious people actually pay
attention to these absurdities, no doubt because of the facade of tough-
mindedness and pseudoscience.
IT IS A CURIOUS and depressing fact that the “anti-war movement” falls prey
all too often to similar confusions. In the fall of 1965, for example, there was an
International Conference on Alternative Perspectives on Vietnam, which
circulated a pamphlet to potential participants stating its assumptions. The plan
was to set up study groups in which three “types of intellectual tradition” will be
represented: (1) area specialists; (2) “social theory, with special emphasis on
theories of the international system, of social change and development, of
conflict and conflict resolution, or of revolution”; (3) “the analysis of public
policy in terms of basic human values, rooted in various theological,
philosophical and humanist traditions.” The second intellectual tradition will
provide “general propositions, derived from social theory and tested against
historical, comparative, or experimental data”; the third “will provide the
framework out of which fundamental value questions can be raised and in terms
of which the moral implications of societal actions can be analyzed.” The hope
was that “by approaching the questions [of Vietnam policy] from the moral
perspectives of all great religions and philosophical systems, we may find
solutions that are more consistent with fundamental human values than current
American policy in Vietnam has turned out to be.”
In short, the experts on values (i.e., spokesmen for the great religions and
philosophical systems) will provide fundamental insights on moral perspectives,
and the experts on social theory will provide general empirically validated
propositions and “general models of conflict.” From this interplay, new policies
will emerge, presumably from application of the canons of scientific method.
The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn
to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the
specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into
fundamental human values.
There is much more that can be said about this topic but, without continuing,
I would simply like to emphasize that, as is no doubt obvious, the cult of the
experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent.

Obviously, one must learn from social and behavioral science whatever one can;
obviously, these fields should be pursued as seriously as possible. But it will be
quite unfortunate, and highly dangerous, if they are not accepted and judged on
their merits and according to their actual, not pretended, accomplishments. In
particular, if there is a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to the
conduct of foreign affairs or the resolution of domestic or international conflict,
its existence has been kept a well-guarded secret. In the case of Vietnam, if those
who feel themselves to be experts have access to principles or information that
would justify what the American government is doing in that unfortunate
country, they have been singularly ineffective in making this fact known. To
anyone who has any familiarity with the social and behavioral sciences (or the
“policy sciences”), the claim that there are certain considerations and principles
too deep for the outsider to comprehend is simply an absurdity, unworthy of
comment.
When we consider the responsibility of

intellectuals, our basic concern must be their
role in the creation and analysis of ideology.
WHEN WE CONSIDER THE responsibility of intellectuals, our basic concern

must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology. And, in fact, Kristol’s
contrast between the unreasonable ideological types and the responsible experts
is formulated in terms that immediately bring to mind Daniel Bell’s interesting
and influential “The End of Ideology,” an essay which is as important for what it
leaves unsaid as for its actual content.19 Bell presents and discusses the Marxist
analysis of ideology as a mask for class interest, quoting Marx’s well-known
description of the belief of the bourgeoisie “that the special conditions of its

emancipation are the general conditions through which alone modern society
can be saved and the class struggle avoided.” He then argues that the age of
ideology is ended, supplanted, at least in the West, by a general agreement that
each issue must be settled in its own terms, within the framework of a Welfare
State in which, presumably, experts in the conduct of public affairs will have a
prominent role. Bell is quite careful, however, to characterize the precise sense
of “ideology” in which “ideologies are exhausted.” He is referring to ideology
only as “the conversion of ideas into social levers,” to ideology as “a set of
beliefs, infused with passion . . . [which] . . . seeks to transform the whole of a
way of life.” The crucial words are “transform” and “convert into social levers.”
Intellectuals in the West, he argues, have lost interest in converting ideas into
social levers for the radical transformation of society. Now that we have
achieved the pluralistic society of the Welfare State, they see no further need for
a radical transformation of society; we may tinker with our way of life here and
there, but it would be wrong to try to modify it in any significant way. With this
consensus of intellectuals, ideology is dead.
There are several striking facts about Bell’s essay. First, he does not point out
the extent to which this consensus of the intellectuals is self-serving. He does not
relate his observation that, by and large, intellectuals have lost interest in
“transforming the whole of a way of life” to the fact that they play an
increasingly prominent role in running the Welfare State; he does not relate their
general satisfaction with the Welfare State to the fact that, as he observes
elsewhere, “America has become an affluent society, offering place . . . and
prestige . . . to the onetime radicals.” Secondly, he offers no serious argument to
show that intellectuals are somehow “right” or “objectively justified” in reaching
the consensus to which he alludes, with its rejection of the notion that society
should be transformed. Indeed, although Bell is fairly sharp about the empty
rhetoric of the “new left,” he seems to have a quite utopian faith that technical
experts will be able to cope with the few problems that still remain; for example,
the fact that labor is treated as a commodity, and the problems of “alienation.”
It seems fairly obvious that the classical problems are very much with us;
one might plausibly argue that they have even been enhanced in severity and
scale. For example, the classical paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty is now
an ever-increasing problem on an international scale. Whereas one might
conceive, at least in principle, of a solution within national boundaries, a
sensible idea of transforming international society to cope with vast and perhaps
increasing human misery is hardly likely to develop within the framework of the

intellectual consensus that Bell describes.
THUS IT WOULD SEEM natural to describe the consensus of Bell’s

intellectuals in somewhat different terms from his. Using the terminology of the
first part of his essay, we might say that the Welfare State technician finds
justification for his special and prominent social status in his “science,”
specifically, in the claim that social science can support a technology of social
tinkering on a domestic or international scale. He then takes a further step,
ascribing in a familiar way a universal validity to what is in fact a class interest:
he argues that the special conditions on which his claim to power and authority
are based are, in fact, the only general conditions by which modern society can
be saved; that social tinkering within a Welfare State framework must replace
the commitment to the “total ideologies” of the past, ideologies which were
concerned with a transformation of society. Having found his position of power,
having achieved security and affluence, he has no further need for ideologies that
look to radical change. The scholar-expert replaces the “free-floating
intellectual” who “felt that the wrong values were being honored, and rejected
the society,” and who has now lost his political role (now, that is, that the right
values are being honored).
Conceivably, it is correct that the technical experts who will (or hope to)
manage the “industrial society” will be able to cope with the classical problems
without a radical transformation of society. It is conceivably true that the
bourgeoisie was right in regarding the special conditions of its emancipation as
the only general conditions by which modern society would be saved. In either
case, an argument is in order, and skepticism is justified when none appears.
Within the same framework of general utopianism, Bell goes on to pose the
issue between Welfare State scholar-experts and third-world ideologists in a
rather curious way. He points out, quite correctly, that there is no issue of
Communism, the content of that doctrine having been “long forgotten by friends
and foes alike.” Rather, he says,
the question is an older one: whether new societies can grow by building
democratic institutions and allowing people to make choices—and
sacrifices—voluntarily, or whether the new elites, heady with power, will
impose totalitarian means to transform their societies.

THE QUESTION IS AN interesting one. It is odd, however, to see it referred to
as “an older one.” Surely he cannot be suggesting that the West chose the
democratic way—for example, that in England during the industrial revolution,
the farmers voluntarily made the choice of leaving the land, giving up cottage
industry, becoming an industrial proletariat, and voluntarily decided, within the
framework of the existing democratic institutions, to make the sacrifices that are
graphically described in the classic literature on nineteenth-century industrial
society. One may debate the question whether authoritarian control is necessary
to permit capital accumulation in the underdeveloped world, but the Western
model of development is hardly one that we can point to with any pride. It is
perhaps not surprising to find Walt Rostow referring to “the more humane
processes [of industrialization] that Western values would suggest” (An
American Policy in Asia). Those who have a serious concern for the problems
that face backward countries, and for the role that advanced industrial societies
might, in principle, play in development and modernization, must use somewhat
more care in interpreting the significance of the Western experience.
Returning to the quite appropriate question, whether “new societies can grow
by building democratic institutions” or only by totalitarian means, I think that
honesty requires us to recognize that this question must be directed more to
American intellectuals than to third-world ideologists. The backward countries
have incredible, perhaps insurmountable problems, and few available options;
the United States has a wide range of options, and has the economic and
technological resources, though, evidently, neither the intellectual nor moral
resources, to confront at least some of these problems. It is easy for an American
intellectual to deliver homilies on the virtues of freedom and liberty, but if he is
really concerned about, say, Chinese totalitarianism or the burdens imposed on
the Chinese peasantry in forced industrialization, then he should face a task that
is infinitely more important and challenging—the task of creating, in the United
States, the intellectual and moral climate, as well as the social and economic
conditions, that would permit this country to participate in modernization and
development in a way commensurate with its material wealth and technical
capacity. Large capital gifts to Cuba and China might not succeed in alleviating
the authoritarianism and terror that tend to accompany early stages of capital
accumulation, but they are far more likely to have this effect than lectures on
democratic values. It is possible that even without “capitalist encirclement” in its

various manifestations, the truly democratic elements in revolutionary
movements—in some instances, soviets and collectives—might be undermined
by an “elite” of bureaucrats and technical intelligentsia. But it is almost certain
that capitalist encirclement itself, which all revolutionary movements now have
to face, will guarantee this result. The lesson, for those who are concerned to
strengthen the democratic, spontaneous, and popular elements in developing
societies, is quite clear. Lectures on the two-party system, or even on the really
substantial democratic values that have been in part realized in Western society,
are a monstrous irrelevance, given the effort required to raise the level of culture
in Western society to the point where it can provide a “social lever” for both
economic development and the development of true democratic institutions in
the third world—and, for that matter, at home.
Large gifts to Cuba and China might not

succeed in alleviating the authoritarianism,
but they are far more likely to help than
lectures on democratic values.
A GOOD CASE CAN be made for the conclusion that there is indeed something
of a consensus among intellectuals who have already achieved power and
affluence, or who sense that they can achieve them by “accepting society” as it is
and promoting the values that are “being honored” in this society. It is also true
that this consensus is most noticeable among the scholar-experts who are
replacing the free-floating intellectuals of the past. In the university, these
scholar-experts construct a “value-free technology” for the solution of technical
problems that arise in contemporary society,20 taking a “responsible stance”

towards these problems, in the sense noted earlier. This consensus among the
responsible scholar-experts is the domestic analogue to that proposed,
internationally, by those who justify the application of American power in Asia,
whatever the human cost, on the grounds that it is necessary to contain the
“expansion of China” (an “expansion” which is, to be sure, hypothetical for the
time being)21—that is, to translate from State Department Newspeak, on the
grounds that it is essential to reverse the Asian nationalist revolutions or, at least,
to prevent them from spreading. The analogy becomes clear when we look
carefully at the ways in which this proposal is formulated. With his usual
lucidity, Churchill outlined the general position in a remark to his colleague of
the moment, Joseph Stalin, at Tehran in 1943:
The government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, who

wished nothing more for themselves than what they had. If the world-
government were in the hands of hungry nations there would always be
danger. But none of us had any reason to seek for anything more. . . . Our
power placed us above the rest. We were like the rich men dwelling at
peace within their habitations.
For a translation of Churchill’s biblical rhetoric into the jargon of

contemporary social science, one may turn to the testimony of Charles Wolf,
senior economist of the Rand Corporation, at the Congressional Committee
Hearings cited earlier:
I am dubious that China’s fears of encirclement are going to be abated,

eased, relaxed in the long-term future. But I would hope that what we do
in Southeast Asia would help to develop within the Chinese body politic
more of a realism and willingness to live with this fear than to indulge it
by support for liberation movements, which admittedly depend on a great
deal more than external support. . . . The operational question for
American foreign policy is not whether that fear can be eliminated or
substantially alleviated, but whether China can be faced with a structure
of incentives, of penalties and rewards, of inducements that will make it
willing to live with this fear.
The point is further clarified by Thomas Schelling: “There is growing

experience, which the Chinese can profit from, that although the United States
may be interested in encircling them, may be interested in defending nearby
areas from them, it is, nevertheless, prepared to behave peaceably if they are.”
In short, we are prepared to live peaceably in our—to be sure, rather
extensive—habitations. And, quite naturally, we are offended by the undignified
noises from the servants’ quarters. If, let us say, a peasant-based revolutionary
movement tries to achieve independence from foreign powers and the domestic
structures they support, or if the Chinese irrationally refuse to respond properly
to the schedule of reinforcement that we have prepared for them—if they object
to being encircled by the benign and peace-loving “rich men” who control the
territories on their borders as a natural right—then, evidently, we must respond
to this belligerence with appropriate force.
IT IS THIS MENTALITY that explains the frankness with which the U.S.
government and its academic apologists defend the American refusal to permit a
political settlement in Vietnam at a local level, a settlement based on the actual
distribution of political forces. Even government experts freely admit that the
NLF is the only “truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam”22; that the
NLF had “made a conscious and massive effort to extend political participation,
even if it was manipulated, on the local level so as to involve the people in a
self-contained, self-supporting revolution” (p. 374); and that this effort had been
so successful that no political groups, “with the possible exception of the
Buddhists, thought themselves equal in size and power to risk entering into a
coalition, fearing that if they did the whale would swallow the minnow” (p. 362).
Moreover, they concede that until the introduction of overwhelming American
force, the NLF had insisted that the struggle “should be fought out at the
political level and that the use of massed military might was in itself illegitimate.
. . . The battleground was to be the minds and loyalties of the rural Vietnamese,
the weapons were to be ideas” (pp. 91–92; cf. also pp. 93, 99–108, 155f.); and,
correspondingly, that until mid-1964, aid from Hanoi “was largely confined to
two areas—doctrinal know-how and leadership personnel” (p. 321). Captured
NLF documents contrast the enemy’s “military superiority” with their own
“political superiority” (p. 106), thus fully confirming the analysis of American
military spokesmen who define our problem as how, “with considerable armed
force but little political power, [to] contain an adversary who has enormous

political force but only modest military power.”23
Similarly, the most striking outcome of both the Honolulu conference in
February and the Manila conference in October was the frank admission by high
officials of the Saigon government that “they could not survive a ‘peaceful
settlement’ that left the Vietcong political structure in place even if the Vietcong
guerilla units were disbanded,” that “they are not able to compete politically
with the Vietnamese Communists” (Charles Mohr, New York Times, February 11,
1966, italics mine). Thus, Mohr continues, the Vietnamese demand a
“pacification program” which will have as “its core . . . the destruction of the
clandestine Vietcong political structure and the creation of an iron-like system of
government political control over the population.” And from Manila, the same
correspondent, on October 23, quotes a high South Vietnamese official as saying
that:
Frankly, we are not strong enough now to compete with the Communists
on a purely political basis. They are organized and disciplined. The non-
Communist nationalists are not—we do not have any large, well-
organized political parties and we do not yet have unity. We cannot leave
the Vietcong in existence.
Officials in Washington understand the situation very well. Thus Secretary

Rusk has pointed out that “if the Vietcong come to the conference table as full
partners they will, in a sense, have been victorious in the very aims that South
Vietnam and the United States are pledged to prevent” (January 28, 1966). Max
Frankel reported from Washington in the Times on February 18, 1966, that
Compromise has had no appeal here because the Administration

concluded long ago that the non-Communist forces of South Vietnam
could not long survive in a Saigon coalition with Communists. It is for
that reason—and not because of an excessively rigid sense of protocol—
that Washington has steadfastly refused to deal with the Vietcong or
recognize them as an independent political force.
In short, we will—magnanimously—permit Vietcong representatives to

attend negotiations only if they will agree to identify themselves as agents of a
foreign power and thus forfeit the right to participate in a coalition government,

a right which they have now been demanding for a half-dozen years. We well
know that in any representative coalition, our chosen delegates could not last a
day without the support of American arms. Therefore, we must increase
American force and resist meaningful negotiations, until the day when a client
government can exert both military and political control over its own population
—a day which may never dawn, for as William Bundy has pointed out, we could
never be sure of the security of a Southeast Asia “from which the Western
presence was effectively withdrawn.” Thus if we were to “negotiate in the
direction of solutions that are put under the label of neutralization,” this would
amount to capitulation to the Communists.24 According to this reasoning, then,
South Vietnam must remain, permanently, an American military base.
All of this is, of course, reasonable, so long as we accept the fundamental
political axiom that the United States, with its traditional concern for the rights
of the weak and downtrodden, and with its unique insight into the proper mode
of development for backward countries, must have the courage and the
persistence to impose its will by force until such time as other nations are
prepared to accept these truths—or simply to abandon hope.
IF IT IS THE responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also

his duty to see events in their historical perspective. Thus one must applaud the
insistence of the secretary of state on the importance of historical analogies, the
Munich analogy, for example. As Munich showed, a powerful and aggressive
nation with a fanatic belief in its manifest destiny will regard each victory, each
extension of its power and authority, as a prelude to the next step. The matter
was very well put by Adlai Stevenson, when he spoke of “the old, old route
whereby expansive powers push at more and more doors, believing they will
open until, at the ultimate door, resistance is unavoidable and major war breaks
out.” Herein lies the danger of appeasement, as the Chinese tirelessly point out
to the Soviet Union—which, they claim, is playing Chamberlain to our Hitler in
Vietnam. Of course, the aggressiveness of liberal imperialism is not that of Nazi
Germany, though the distinction may seem academic to a Vietnamese peasant
who is being gassed or incinerated. We do not want to occupy Asia; we merely
wish, to return to Mr. Wolf, “to help the Asian countries progress toward
economic modernization, as relatively ‘open’ and stable societies, to which our
access, as a country and as individual citizens, is free and comfortable.” The

formulation is appropriate. Recent history shows that it makes little difference to
us what form of government a country has so long as it remains an “open
society,” in our peculiar sense of this term—that is, a society that remains open
to American economic penetration or political control. If it is necessary to
approach genocide in Vietnam to achieve this objective, then this is the price we
must pay in defense of freedom and the rights of man.
If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to

insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see
events in their historical perspective.
In pursuing the aim of helping other countries to progress towards open

societies, with no thought of territorial aggrandizement, we are breaking no new
ground. In the Congressional Hearings that I cited earlier, Hans Morgenthau
aptly describes our traditional policy towards China as one which favors “what
you might call freedom of competition with regard to the exploitation of China”
(op. cit., p. 128). In fact, few imperialist powers have had explicit territorial
ambitions. Thus in 1784, the British Parliament announced: “To pursue schemes
of conquest and extension of dominion in India are measures repugnant to the
wish, honor, and policy of this nation.” Shortly after this, the conquest of India
was in full swing. A century later, Britain announced its intentions in Egypt
under the slogan “intervention, reform, withdrawal.” It is obvious which parts of
this promise were fulfilled within the next half century. In 1936, on the eve of
hostilities in North China, the Japanese stated their Basic Principles of National
Policy. These included the use of moderate and peaceful means to extend her
strength, to promote social and economic development, to eradicate the menace
of Communism, to correct the aggressive policies of the great powers, and to
secure her position as the stabilizing power in East Asia. Even in 1937, the
Japanese government had “no territorial designs upon China.” In short, we

follow a well-trodden path.
It is useful to remember, incidentally, that the United States was apparently
quite willing, as late as 1939, to negotiate a commercial treaty with Japan and
arrive at a modus vivendi if Japan would “change her attitude and practice
towards our rights and interests in China,” as Secretary Hull put it. The bombing
of Chungking and the rape of Nanking were unpleasant, it is true, but what was
really important was our rights and interests in China, as the responsible,
unhysterical men of the day saw quite clearly. It was the closing of the open door
by Japan that led inevitably to the Pacific war, just as it is the closing of the open
door by “Communist” China itself that may very well lead to the next, and no
doubt last, Pacific war.
QUITE OFTEN, the statements of sincere and devoted technical experts give
surprising insight into the intellectual attitudes that lie in the background of the
latest savagery. Consider, for example, the following comment by the economist
Richard Lindholm, in 1959, expressing his frustration over the failure of
economic development in “free Vietnam”:
The use of American aid is determined by how the Vietnamese use their
incomes and their savings. The fact that a large portion of the
Vietnamese imports financed with American aid are either consumer
goods or raw materials used rather directly to meet consumer demands is
an indication that the Vietnamese people desire these goods, for they
have shown their desire by their willingness to use their piasters to
purchase them.25
In short, the Vietnamese people desire Buicks and air conditioners, rather
than sugar-refining equipment or road-building machinery, as they have shown
by their behavior in a free market. And however much we may deplore their free
choice, we must allow the people to have their way. Of course, there are also
those two-legged beasts of burden that one stumbles on in the countryside, but as
any graduate student of political science can explain, they are not part of a
responsible modernizing elite, and therefore have only a superficial biological
resemblance to the human race.

In no small measure, it is attitudes like this that lie behind the butchery in
Vietnam, and we had better face up to them with candor, or we will find our
government leading us towards a “final solution” in Vietnam, and in the many
Vietnams that inevitably lie ahead.
Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of
intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who
burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they?
What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are
willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their
personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp
paymaster.” The question “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask
ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam—as we create, or
mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of
freedom.

Shooting an Elephant (1936)
Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people–the

Ime.only
N
time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to
I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind
of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a
riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would
probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious tar-
get and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman
tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the
other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than
once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me every-
where, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on
my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several
thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do
except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up
my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job
and got out of it the better. Theoretically–and secretly, of course–I was all for the
Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing,
I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see
the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in
the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term con-
victs, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos–all
these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing
into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my
problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I
did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it
is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All
I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my
rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.
With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny,
as something clamped down, In Saecula Saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate
peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be
15
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1936)
to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the nor-
mal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch
him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening.
It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had
before of the real nature of imperialism–the real motives for which despotic gov-
ernments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other
end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was rav-
aging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not
know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a
pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and much too small
to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful In Terrorem. Various
Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s doings. It
was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must." It
had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must"
is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout,
the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in
pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey
away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town.
The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It
had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some
fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van
and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over
and inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me
in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a
labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm-leaf, winding all over a
steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning
of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone
and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case
in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you
get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that
the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another,
some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up
my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little
distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away
this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner
of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women
followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something
that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s
dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie,
almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people
said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the
hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into
16
the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had
scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly
with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated
with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression
of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful.
Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast’s
foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon
as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to borrow an
elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with
fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and
meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the
paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practi-
cally the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed
me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to
shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he
was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to
be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides
they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shoot-
ing the elephant–I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary–and
it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill,
looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing
army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the
huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a
thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dot-
ted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his
left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He
was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them
and stuffing them into his mouth.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It
was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It
blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow
faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all
certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they
would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with
the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly
I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected
it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing
me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the
rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white
man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing
in front of the unarmed native crowd–seemingly the leading actor of the piece;
but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of
those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man
17
turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow,
posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of
his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in
every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask,
and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed
myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib;
he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To
come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels,
and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing–no, that was impossible. The
crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East,
was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of
grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants
have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was
not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never
wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides,
there was the beast’s owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at
least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks,
five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-
looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how
the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice
of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within,
say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I
could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the
mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was
a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink
at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as
much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking
particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that
moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as
I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in
front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in
my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would
see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that
Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them
would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and
lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep,
low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed
from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The
rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know
that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running
from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on,
18
to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of
this, thinking the brain would be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick–one never
does when a shot goes home–but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up
from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought,
even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over
the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered.
He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful
impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last,
after what seemed a long time–it might have been five seconds, I dare say–he
sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed
to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old.
I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but
climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs
sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did
for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last
remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise,
for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a
huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for
the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a
crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that
it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even
before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by
the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of
the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do
nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to
be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans
opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it
was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant
was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very
glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me
a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of
the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

19
The American Prospect , Jan 1, 2002 v13 i1 pA2(5)
How to judge globalism: global links have spread knowledge and raised
average living standards. But the present version of globalism needlessly
harms the world's poorest. Amartya Sen .
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 The American Prospect, Inc.
GLOBALIZATION IS OFTEN SEEN AS GLOBAL WESTernization. On this

point, there is substantial agreement among many proponents and opponents.
Those who take an upbeat view of globalization see it as a marvelous
contribution of Western civilization to the world. There is a nicely stylized
history in which the great developments happened in Europe: First came the
Renaissance, then the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and these
led to a massive increase in living standards in the West. And now the great
achievements of the West are spreading to the world. In this view, globalization
is not only good, it is also a gift from the West to the world. The champions of
this reading of history tend to feel upset not just because this great benefaction
is seen as a curse but also because it is undervalued and castigated by an
ungrateful world.
From the opposite perspective, Western dominance--sometimes seen as a

continuation of Western imperialism--is the devil of the piece. In this view,
contemporary capitalism, driven and led by greedy and grabby Western
countries in Europe and North America, has established rules of trade and
business relations that do not serve the interests of the poorer people in the
world. The celebration of various non-Western identities--defined by religion
(as in Islamic fundamentalism), region (as in the championing of Asian values),
or culture (as in the glorification of Confucian ethics)--can add fuel to the fire of
confrontation with the West.
Is globalization really a new Western curse? It is, in fact, neither new nor
necessarily Western; and it is not a curse. Over thousands of years, globalization
has contributed to the progress of the world through travel, trade, migration,
spread of cultural influences, and dissemination of knowledge and
understanding (including that of science and technology). These global
interrelations have often been very productive in the advancement of different

countries. They have not necessarily taken the form of increased Western
influence. Indeed, the active agents of globalization have often been located far
from the West.
To illustrate, consider the world at. the beginning of the last millennium rather
than at its end. Around 1000 A.D., global reach of science, technology, and
mathematics was changing the nature of the old world, but the dissemination
then was, to a great extent, in the opposite direction of what we see today. The
high technology in the world of 1000 A.D. included paper, the printing press,
the crossbow, gunpowder, the iron-chain suspension bridge, the kite, the
magnetic compass, the wheelbarrow, and the rotary fan. A millennium ago,
these items were used extensively in China--and were practically unknown
elsewhere. Globalization spread them across the world, including Europe.
A similar movement occurred in the Eastern influence on Western mathematics.

The decimal system emerged and became well developed in India between the
second and sixth centuries; it was used by Arab mathematicians soon thereafter.
These mathematical innovations reached Europe mainly in the last quarter of
the tenth century and began having an impact in the early years of the last
millennium, playing an important part in the scientific revolution that helped to
transform Europe. The agents of globalization are neither European nor
exclusively Western, nor are they necessarily linked to Western dominance.
Indeed, Europe would have been a lot poorer--economically, culturally, and
scientifically--had it resisted the globalization of mathematics, science, and
technology at that time. And today, the same principle applies, though in the
reverse direction (from West to East). To reject the globalization of science and
technology because it represents Western influence and imperialism would not
only amount to overlooking global contributions--drawn from many different
parts of the world--that lie solidly behind so-called Western science and
technology, but would also be quite a daft practical decision, given the extent to
which the whole world can benefit from the process.
A GLOBAL HERITAGE
In resisting the diagnosis of globalization as a phenomenon of quintessentially

Western origin, we have to be suspicious not only of the anti-Western rhetoric
but also of the pro-Western chauvinism in many contemporary writings.
Certainly, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution
were great achievements--and they occurred mainly in Europe and, later, in

America. Yet many of these developments drew on the experience of the rest of
the world, rather than being confined within the boundaries of a discrete
Western civilization.
Our global civilization is a world heritage--not just a collection of disparate

local cultures. When a modern mathematician in Boston invokes an algorithm
to solve a difficult computational problem, she may not be aware that she is
helping to commemorate the Arab mathematician Mohammad Ibn Musa-al-
Khwarizmi, who flourished in the first half of the ninth century. (The word
algorithm is derived from the name al-Khwarizmi.) There is a chain of
intellectual relations that link Western mathematics and science to a collection
of distinctly non-Western practitioners, of whom al-Khwarizmi was one. (The
term algebra is derived from the title of his famous book Al-Jabr wa-al-
Muqabilah.) Indeed, al-Khwarizmi is one of many non-Western contributors
whose works influenced the European Renaissance and, later, the
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The West must get full credit for
the remarkable achievements that occurred in Europe and Europeanized
America, but the idea of an immaculate Western conception is an imaginative
fantasy.
Not only is the progress of global science and technology not an exclusively
West-led phenomenon, but there were major global developments in which the
West was not even involved. The printing of the world's first book was a
marvelously globalized event. The technology of printing was, of course,
entirely an achievement of the Chinese. But the content came from elsewhere.
The first printed book was an Indian Sanskrit treatise, translated into Chinese by
a half-Turk. The book, Vajracchedika Prajnaparamitasutra (sometimes referred
to as "The Diamond Sutra"), is an old treatise on Buddhism; it was translated
into Chinese from Sanskrit in the fifth century by Kumarajiva, a half-Indian and
half-Turkish scholar who lived in a part of eastern Turkistan called Kucha but
later migrated to China. It was printed four centuries later, in 868 A.D. All this
involving China, Turkey, and India is globalization, all right, but the West is not
even in sight.
GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCES AND MOVEMENTS
The misdiagnosis that globalization of ideas and practices has to be resisted

because it entails dreaded Westernization has played quite a regressive part in
the colonial and postcolonial world. This assumption incites parochial

tendencies and undermines the possibility of objectivity in science and
knowledge. It is not only counterproductive in itself; given the global
interactions throughout history, it can also cause non-Western societies to shoot
themselves in the foot--even in their precious cultural foot.
Consider the resistance in India to the use of Western ideas and concepts in
science and mathematics. In the nineteenth century, this debate fitted into a
broader controversy about Western education versus indigenous Indian
education. The "Westernizers," such as the redoubtable Thomas Babington
Macaulay, saw no merit whatsoever in Indian tradition. "I have never found one
among them [advocates of Indian tradition] who could deny that a single shelf
of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and
Arabia," he declared. Partly in retaliation, the advocates of native education
resisted Western imports altogether. Both sides, however, accepted too readily
the foundational dichotomy between two disparate civilizations.
European mathematics, with its use of such concepts as sine, was viewed as a
purely "Western" import into India. In fact, the fifth-century Indian
mathematician Aryabhata had discussed the concept of sine in his classic work
on astronomy and mathematics in 499 A.D., calling it by its Sanskrit name, jya-
ardha (literally, "half-chord"). This word, first shortened to jya in Sanskrit,
eventually became the Arabic jiba and, later, jaib, which means "a cove or a
bay." In his history of mathematics, Howard Eves explains that around 1150
A.D., Gherardo of Cremona, in his translations from the Arabic, rendered jaib
as the Latin sinus, the corresponding word for a cove or a bay. And this is the
source of the modern word sine. The concept had traveled full circle--from
India, and then back.
To see globalization as merely Western imperialism of ideas and beliefs (as the
rhetoric often suggests) would be a serious and costly error, in the same way
that any European resistance to Eastern influence would have been at the
beginning of the last millennium. Of course, there are issues related to
globalization that do connect with imperialism (the history of conquests,
colonialism, and alien rule remains relevant today in many ways), and a
postcolonial understanding of the world has its merits. But it would be a great
mistake to see globalization primarily as a feature of imperialism. It is much
bigger--much greater--than that.
THE ISSUE OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF ECONOMIC GAINS and losses

from globalization remains an entirely separate question, and it must be
addressed as a further--and extremely relevant--issue. There is extensive
evidence that the global economy has brought prosperity to many different areas
of the globe. Pervasive poverty dominated the world a few centuries ago; there
were only a few rare pockets of affluence. In overcoming that penury, extensive
economic interrelations and modern technology have been and remain
influential. What has happened in Europe, America, Japan, and East Asia has
important messages for all other regions, and we cannot go very far into
understanding the nature of globalization today without first acknowledging the
positive fruits of global economic contacts.
Indeed, we cannot reverse the economic predicament of the poor across the
world by withholding from them the great advantages of contemporary
technology, the well-established efficiency of international trade and exchange,
and the social as well as economic merits of living in an open society. Rather,
the main issue is how to make good use of the remarkable benefits of economic
intercourse and technological progress in a way that pays adequate attention to
the interests of the deprived and the underdog. That is, I would argue, the
constructive question that emerges from the so-called antiglobalization
movements.
ARE THE POOR GETTING POORER?
The principal challenge relates to inequality--international as well as

intranational. The troubling inequalities include disparities in affluence and also
gross asymmetries in political, social, and economic opportunities and power.
A crucial question concerns the sharing of the potential gains from

globalization--between rich and poor countries and among different groups
within a country. It is not sufficient to understand that the poor of the world
need globalization as much as the rich do; it is also important to make sure that
they actually get what they need. This may require extensive institutional
reform, even as globalization is defended.
There is also a need for more clarity in formulating the distributional questions.
For example, it is often argued that the rich are getting richer and the poor
poorer. But this is by no means uniformly so, even though there are cases in
which this has happened. Much depends on the region or the group chosen and
what indicators of economic prosperity are used. But the attempt to base the

castigation of economic globalization on this rather thin ice produces a
peculiarly fragile critique.
On the other side, the apologists of globalization point to their belief that the
poor who participate in trade and exchange are mostly getting richer. Ergo--the
argument runs--globalization is not unfair to the poor: they too benefit. If the
central relevance of this question is accepted, then the whole debate turns on
determining which side is correct in this empirical dispute. But is this the right
battleground in the first place? I would argue that it is not.
GLOBAL JUSTICE AND THE BARGAINING PROBLEM
Even if the poor were to get just a little richer, this would not necessarily imply
that the poor were getting a fair share of the potentially vast benefits of global
economic interrelations. It is not adequate to ask whether international
inequality is getting marginally larger or smaller. In order to rebel against the
appalling poverty and the staggering inequalities that characterize the
contemporary world--or to protest against the unfair sharing of benefits of
global cooperation--it is not necessary to show that the massive inequality or
distributional unfairness is also getting marginally larger. This is a separate
issue altogether.
When there are gains from cooperation, there can be many possible
arrangements. As the game theorist and mathematician John Nash discussed
more than half a century ago (in "The Bargaining Problem," published in
Econometrica in 1950, which was cited, among other writings, by the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences when Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize in
economics), the central issue in general is not whether a particular arrangement
is better for everyone than no cooperation at all would be, but whether that is a
fair division of the benefits. One cannot rebut the criticism that a distributional
arrangement is unfair simply by noting that all the parties are better off than
they would be in the absence of cooperation; the real exercise is the choice
between these alternatives.
AN ANALOGY WITH THE FAMILY
By analogy, to argue that a particularly unequal and sexist family arrangement is

unfair, one does not have to show that women would have done comparatively
better had there been no families at all, but only that the sharing of the benefits

is seriously unequal in that particular arrangement. Before the issue of gender
justice became an explicitly recognized concern (as it has in recent decades),
there were attempts to dismiss the issue of unfair arrangements within the
family by suggesting that women did not need to live in families if they found
the arrangements so unjust. It was also argued that since women as well as men
benefit from living in families, the existing arrangements could not be unfair.
But even when it is accepted that both men and women may typically gain from
living in a family, the question of distributional fairness remains. Many different
family arrangements--when compared with the absence of any family system--
would satisfy the condition of being beneficial to both men and women. The
real issue concerns how fairly benefits associated with these respective
arrangements are distributed.
Likewise, one cannot rebut the charge that the global system is unfair by
showing that even the poor gain something from global contacts and are not
necessarily made poorer. That answer may or may not be wrong, but the
question certainly is. The critical issue is not whether the poor are getting
marginally poorer or richer. Nor is it whether they are better off than they would
be had they excluded themselves from globalized interactions.
Again, the real issue is the distribution of globalization's benefits. Indeed, this is
why many of the antiglobalization protesters, who seek a better deal for the
underdogs of the world economy, are not--contrary to their own rhetoric and to
the views attributed to them by others--really "antiglobalization." It is also why
there is no real contradiction in the fact that the so-called antiglobalization
protests have become among the most globalized events in the contemporary
world.
ALTERING GLOBAL ARRANGEMENTS
However, can those less-well-off groups get a better deal from globalized
economic and social relations without dispensing with the market economy
itself? They certainly can. The use of the market economy is consistent with
many different ownership patterns, resource availabilities, social opportunities,
and rules of operation (such as patent laws and antitrust regulations). And
depending on these conditions, the market economy would generate different
prices, terms of trade, income distribution, and, more generally, diverse overall
outcomes. The arrangements for social security and other public interventions
can make further modifications to the outcomes of the market processes, and

together they can yield varying levels of inequality and poverty.
The central question is not whether to use the market economy. That shallow
question is easy to answer, because it is hard to achieve economic prosperity
without making extensive use of the opportunities of exchange and
specialization that market relations offer. Even though the operation of a given
market economy can be significantly defective, there is no way of dispensing
with the institution of markets in general as a powerful engine of economic
progress.
But this recognition does not end the discussion about globalized market
relations. The market economy does not work by itself in global relations--
indeed, it cannot operate alone even within a given country. It is not only the
case that a market-inclusive system can generate very distinct results depending
on various enabling conditions (such as how physical resources are distributed,
how human resources are developed, what rules of business relations prevail,
what social-security arrangements are in place, and so on). These enabling
conditions themselves depend critically on economic, social, and political
institutions that operate nationally and globally.
The crucial role of the markets does not make the other institutions
insignificant, even in terms of the results that the market economy can produce.
As has been amply established in empirical studies, market outcomes are
massively influenced by public policies in education, epidemiology, land
reform, microcredit facilities, appropriate legal protections, et cetera; and in
each of these fields, there is work to be done through public action that can
radically alter the outcome of local and global economic relations.
INSTITUTIONS AND INEQUALITY
Globalization has much to offer; but even as we defend it, we must also, without
any contradiction, see the legitimacy of many questions that the
antiglobalization protesters ask. There may be a misdiagnosis about where the
main problems lie (they do not lie in globalization, as such), but the ethical and
human concerns that yield these questions call for serious reassessments of the
adequacy of the national and global institutional arrangements that characterize
the contemporary world and shape globalized economic and social relations.
Global capitalism is much more concerned with expanding the domain of

market relations than with, say, establishing democracy, expanding elementary
education, or enhancing the social opportunities of society's underdogs. Since
globalization of markets is, on its own, a very inadequate approach to world
prosperity, there is a need to go beyond the priorities that find expression in the
chosen focus of global capitalism. As George Soros has pointed out,
international business concerns often have a strong preference for working in
orderly and highly organized autocracies rather than in activist and less-
regimented democracies, and this can be a regressive influence on equitable
development. Further, multinational firms can exert their influence on the
priorities of public expenditure in less secure third-world countries by giving
preference to the safety and convenience of the managerial classes and of
privileged workers over the removal of widespread illiteracy, medical
deprivation, and other adversities of the poor. These possibilities do not, of
course, impose any insurmountable barrier to development, but it is important to
make sure that the surmountable barriers are actually surmounted.
OMISSIONS AND COMMISSIONS
The injustices that characterize the world are closely related to various
omissions that need to be addressed, particularly in institutional arrangements. I
have tried to identify some of the main problems in my book Development as
Freedom (Knopf, 1999). Global policies have a role here in helping the
development of national institutions (for example, through defending
democracy and supporting schooling and health facilities), but there is also a
need to re-examine the adequacy of global institutional arrangements
themselves. The distribution of the benefits in the global economy depends,
among other things, on a variety of global institutional arrangements, including
those for fair trade, medical initiatives, educational exchanges, facilities for
technological dissemination, ecological and environmental restraints, and fair
treatment of accumulated debts that were often incurred by irresponsible
military rulers of the past.
In addition to the momentous omissions that need to be rectified, there are also
serious problems of commission that must be addressed for even elementary
global ethics. These include not only inefficient and inequitable trade
restrictions that repress exports from poor countries, but also patent laws that
inhibit the use of lifesaving drugs--for diseases like AIDS--and that give
inadequate incentive for medical research aimed at developing nonrepeating
medicines (such as vaccines). These issues have been much discussed on their

own, but we must also note how they fit into a general pattern of unhelpful
arrangements that undermine what globalization could offer.
Another--somewhat less discussed--global "commission" that causes intense

misery as well as lasting deprivation relates to the involvement of the world
powers in globalized arms trade. This is a field in which a new global initiative
is urgently going beyond the need--the very important need--to curb terrorism,
on which the focus is so heavily concentrated right now. Local wars and
military conflicts, which have very destructive consequences (not least on the
economic prospects of poor countries), draw not only on regional tensions but
also on global trade in arms and weapons. The world establishment is firmly
entrenched in this business: the Permanent Members of the Security Council of
the United Nations were together responsible for 81 percent of world arms
exports from 1996 through 2000. Indeed, the world leaders who express deep
frustration at the "irresponsibility" of antiglobalization protesters lead the
countries that make the most money in this terrible trade. The G-8 countries
sold 87 percent of the total supply of arms exported in the entire world. The
U.S. share alone has just gone up to almost 50 percent of the total sales in the
world. Furthermore, as much as 68 percent of the American arms exports went
to developing countries.
The arms are used with bloody results--and with devastating effects on the
economy, the polity, and the society. In some ways, this is a continuation of the
unhelpful role of world powers in the genesis and flowering of political
militarism in Africa from the 1960s to the 1980s, when the Cold War was
fought over Africa. During these decades, when military overlords--Mobuto
Sese Seko or Jonas Savimbi or whoever--busted social and political
arrangements (and, ultimately, economic order as well) in Africa, they could
rely on support either from the United States and its allies or from the Soviet
Union, depending on their military alliances. The world powers bear an
awesome responsibility for helping in the subversion of democracy in Africa
and for all the far-reaching negative consequences of that subversion. The
pursuit of arms "pushing" gives them a continuing role in the escalation of
military conflicts today--in Africa and elsewhere. The U.S. refusal to agree to a
joint crackdown even on illicit sales of small arms (as proposed by UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan) illustrates the difficulties involved.
FAIR SHARING OF GLOBAL OPPORTUNITIES

To conclude, the confounding of globalization with Westernization is not only a
historical, it also distracts attention from the many potential benefits of global
integration. Globalization is a historical process that has offered an abundance
of opportunities and rewards in the past and continues to do so today. The very
existence of potentially large benefits makes the question of fairness in sharing
the benefits of globalization so critically important.
The central issue of contention is not globalization itself, nor is it the use of the
market as an institution, but the inequity in the overall balance of institutional
arrangements which produces very unequal sharing of the benefits of
globalization. The question is not just whether the poor, too, gain something
from globalization, but whether they get a fair share and a fair opportunity.
There is an urgent need for reforming institutional arrangements--in addition to
national ones--in order to overcome both the errors of omission and those of
commission that tend to give the poor across the world such limited
opportunities. Globalization deserves a reasoned defense, but it also needs
reform.
AMARTYA SEN , the 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science, is Master of

Trinity College, Cambridge.

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Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

To my mentor SIR AHMAD RAZA KHAN

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

This work would not have been completed without

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

To Dr Faustus in his study Mephistophelis told the history of the Creation,

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Bring forth men children only,

All these ways of speaking come of unwillingness to abandon foolish

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Sentences may be interrogative, optative, exclamatory, or imperative; they

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Brutus killed CAESAR;

Caesar killed BRUTUS.

These are diﬀerent sensations, and it is this diﬀerence—so it may be

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

Hamood Ur Rehman Ranjha(PAS) 03227720772

‘I saw x and x is human.’

This form is not atomic, being compounded of ‘I saw x’ and ‘x is human’. It