2013-04-04 - 2:39 p.m.
3.31.13
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Essay For Easter: Critique of Russell�s �The Harm That Good Men Do�
The piece is from a collection of gently bundled essays Russell published in 1928 called The Skeptical Essays. The essays are rich and logical in that sui generis sort of way that can only be described as Russellian. Russellian ≈ means competency and logic combined with a willingness to attend to mundane or banal subject matters. � Russell was a philosopher who stereotyped and generalized just about everything: including people. Russell is the only philosopher I�m familiar who is both genuine and capable of helping people to lead happier lives. His willingness to stoop down from the rarified heights of analytical philosophy to address banal topics like happiness and marriage are a testament to his genuine impulse; it may be that his analytical know-how are what lend those genuine impulses actual competency. In �The Harm that Good Men Do,� from the aforementioned collection, Russell addresses the differences between Eastern and Western approaches to morality while criticizing the western approach for determining overly rigorous/impossible standards�i.e. setting people up for failure. Russell believed that overly rigorous morally standards set off a whole causal chain responsible for most of what is wrong in the West, and the application of Russell�s insight about the overly rigorous morality can help us avoid going down dead ends when it comes to the institutions of education and medicine.
Both cultures�East and West�stem from those non-gentle, albeit hirsute thinkers whose names started with the letter C and who were teaching at roughly the same time: Christ and Confucius. Of the two, Christ was the more recent teacher and thinker; the codifications based on his thinking became more rigorous and complicated. Russell thinks that the West would do well to take a lesson or two from the relaxed, thus more realistic Confucius- permeated ethical systems of the East. Russell believed that the rigid morality of the West, with its overly complicated and impossible standards, made it difficult for people in the West to avoid those feelings of guilt and self-loathing that eventually take expression in anger and hatred toward others. Russell interpreted Confucius as having simplified moral matters into asking people to do just two things: be respectful and be kind to other people. Although on the surface, the system of Confucius runs the risk of abandoning nuance and sounding a little too kindergarten, keep in mind that the east had nothing like the quixotic religious/moral standards requiring people to not only not do certain things, but to not even allow the mind to think certain things, forever intertwining the thought with the deed. It doesn�t help that a lot of these thoughts are the natural byproducts of animals that have certain urges and can�t fix carbon, so find themselves forever on the move, or more accurately �on the prowl.�� In terms of how Russell�s essay is applicable to present day problems, if Russell were among us today, he would probably caution against any system that sets impossible standards while ignoring the hard facts of reality.� To my mind, the application of Russell�s thought pares sensuously with the current funding-for-education model based on test scores and founded on the metaphor of �children as investments� and receiving ballast from statements like �the soft bigotry of low-expectations.�⁴ While George Bush coined a powerful phrase, it is one of those things that merely sound good. When you are expecting too much from agents within a system, when that failure�however it is measured�becomes evident, everyone working within the system will become miserable.
Russell opens the essay by writing that �If George Washington were to return to earth, the country which he created would puzzle him dreadfully� (76). ⁵ This is B.R�s way of showing how far the origins of the country have deviated from the present scenario. In other words the opening ideals, have found contagion with a case of the present day reals. It is important to keep in mind that Russell thought there were problems 85 years ago, in the early 20th century.
Russell is skeptical of the notion of �progress.� At one level progress might seem evolutionary and adaptive, but also, the business community had co-opted and applied the notion to innovation, technology and consumer goods. To my mind, the bad part of progress has culminated in the loaded and thus confusing modern popular, albeit unconscious, use of the word �upgrade.� ⁶ B.R. wanted people to think against the grain of the word progress: �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� (76). The line of thought that �things get better with time� continues in the present day way of viewing history, although this has changed slightly with movements such as history from the bottom up. ⁷
Surprisingly, Russell finds the Western moral system inferior is when it comes to the principle of returning �good for evil� (78). B.R. claims that Confucius was much more realistic and moderate and that if a person slaps you or does an evil deed to you, that you should return that evil deed. Confucius thought more along the lines of �an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.� To say it in other words, whereas Jesus Christ said that if somebody does somebody else a wrong, then that somebody else should �turn the other cheek� and let them do wrong to that side too. This is J.C. speaking metaphorically, not a literal physical attack, but something that symbolizes any ill-action. So for example, if J.C. were alive today and saw somebody steal somebody else�s I-pod, he would counsel the somebody else to let the somebody take the I-phone too. B.R. finds this line of thinking to be extreme, unrealistic and a way of acting and thinking that can only sow the seeds of resentment. B.R. claims that the East, under Confucius, had it right, but claims it was the Taoists who came in with a line of thinking that was milquetoastishly similar to Judeo-Christian morality and encouraged people to �return good for evil�. (78). ⁸
B.R. is willing to point out the elephant in the room and to shine a light on the morally becobwebbed corners of our society with a sentiment like, �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� (79). This is highly critical to the point of sarcasm and again goes back to his idea that if the standards in a society are set too impossibly high, people will begin to fail; in their failure they will begin to lead a double life ala John Edwards. When folks in a society continue to mess up over the same things, generation after generation, it probably means that the moral codes are overly stringent: This is what B.R. was claiming in this essay 85 years ago.
Russell says that the modern age is under the influence of �competitive industrialism� (79). Max Weber has pointed out that one possible cause for this �competitive industrialism� may actually go back to members of Calvin�s church trying to prove to the congregation that they were among �the elect� and sat waiting in the wings of God�s good graces. In effect, the structure of the church with its focus on the future, actually was able to change the way that people acted in the present. The future focus of Calvin�s elect is what we would call a self-fulfilling prophecy. B.R. adds: In practice our effective morality is that of material success achieved by means of a struggle. (79). While the wording is strange and it is difficult to know exactly what B.R. meant by this, it is however clear that he saw a connection of some sort between the moral and the material. From a materialistic perspective, the material is always the foundation, the cake itself, while much less important things like �the moral� would have no function or no meaning outside of the cake. Following the metaphor of cakes, if the material is the cake, then the moral is like icing or sprinkles. To understand or appreciate the sprinkles, we must look to the cake�i.e. to material, geography, wood, coal, iron, these much bigger thing on which morals, manners and conceptions of the future and the past depend.
At times B.R. comes across as some very outdated seeming anthropologist with phrases like �The Chinese sometimes fight, but are not a combative race� (80). Russell makes other sweeping statements like �Traditionally they [The Chinese] admire learning more than anything else,� but any honest reader who knows a lick about himself/herself, does this sort of thing; it is a crucial part of logical thinking. Schoolchildren around America are currently told to not generalize and to not pre-judge or to not stereotype; when they are being told these things they are being told to not think�at least at one level of thinking. ⁸
Acting again as an outdated anthropologist B.R. claims that the main difference between people in the west and the Chinese is that the Chinese �aim at enjoyment� and the west �aims at power� (80). While Americans may be concerned with power, they are certainly also obsessed with enjoyment in the form of entertainment. Entertainment is a brand of happiness foisted on us mostly by the CI and while it is not at the productive end of business activity, it might as well be considering that the west currently functions as the consumers of eastern products. The west now eats whatever the east makes, despite these products being tailored to our so called specifications. All of these needs are really only perceived as needs after plenty of advertising that pushes products that everybody gets in turn. The business gains enough momentum to become a cycle. In order to keep pace with other members of society, consumers either obtain gadgets and gizmos, or risk falling behind and being perceived as that most unholy of unholy people: an unproductive person.⁹
If a person fails economically in contemporary America, the cause is almost always chalked up to some sort of personal failure or personal shortcoming. Ongoing social networks and sociological studies have helped to demystify this so called personal failure and see it for what it really is�a social class issue connected to how well societal institutions function�the old tendencies for personal/religious guilt or feelings of sin currently manifest themselves in what is often called �depression.� Few people are now willing to go and talk to a priest about �dear father, please forgive me for I have sinned.� Instead, people are slightly more comfortable going to doctors for depression. Depression is almost always a byproduct of an individual�s relationship to his or her work. I grant the point, that the problem may become �neurochemical� at some point, but I have a very hard time in subscribing to etiologies that are endogenous. Viewing the etiology of disease as structural or societal is often more beneficial as that is the current part of the spectrum over which we have control. I think it was Marcuse who said that man needs work. It could be simply not having the right level of work or the conditions at that place of work are not right for the individual. Whatever the case, the sociological becomes passed over into the realm of the psychological�i.e. �individualized.
B.R. gets really interesting in the essay when he makes the critical distinction that the west has set impossible moral standards when it comes to behavior and sin. the west has set up a system that is so rigorous, so demanding, so impossible that most will fail. Most will fall through the cracks into �sin.� Russell claims that the east has a simple, less-is-more type of moral system wherein all it requires people to do is to �be respectful� and to �be kind to others. No other demands on the individual are made and within that sort of a simplified moral system, people can succeed, people can flourish. The West has created a whole nasty guilt and shame provoking system that then leads people to extremes of behavior and excessive emotions that probably came from the guilt that is the negative effect of sin. Guilt�an extremely negative emotion, opens the door to other extreme emotions, both positive and negative, that ultimately create a society of people who are not at their best. The rigorous impossible western moral system might also be why the West has so many people who are addiction prone.
After reading the original piece by Russell readers will feel more logical. His writing is exceedingly clear and systematic, despite the hasty generalizations about Chinese and Russians. �⁰ That being said, Russell is not above dropping opinions that to modern readers will come across as comedic, especially when he stereotypes people in harsh anthropological terms that were the fashion of the time. Russell was never shy about his aristocratic origins and his own privilege, so there always seems to me to be a level of self-aware irony, or dry-wit to his observations. In a sense the stereotypes are only comedic because they are offensive to our modern politically correct sensibilities. Reading the Russell essay left me with the question: Are impossible expectations besmirching our institutions in the west today? If educational attainments could become more realistic and take into account realistic structural factors it might help a lot of people to avoid needless misery. Perhaps this misery will seem all the more petty if we can trace the genealogy back to an Ur-Judeo/Christian line of thought that demands perfection from individuals when it comes to religious and moral matters. As materialism has it, if all material is ultimately moral then all testing is moral testing and ultimately material. There is no reason for somebody to feel guilty for some minor wrong-doing, and there is no reason for teachers or students to feel badly about themselves for performing badly on some arbitrary test whose latest descendent in a long lineage smacks of religion.
Endnotes for Easter Essay Bertand Russell�s �Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness�
� To make a double tilde that means approximately, use your alt code + 247
� There is probably a lot of wisdom that was learned in kindergarten that people apparently can forget: be nice, don�t hit, take a nap, don�t hold your privates as dead giveaway that you need to pee when in public etc.
� The analytic philosphers would dismiss anything questionable or lacking in the facts as �metaphysics.� I know because I read it in a comic book once. You know that whole Introducing: X series that ranges from subject as diverse as Time / Christ / Marx ad infinitum.
⁴ The former secretary of education Margaret Spellings was responsible for the business/investment metaphor. The metaphor is technically a fallacy as it imbues a living thing with non-living qualities much the way a person who is tired will say �I need to re-charge my batteries.� While we might find such utterances a little bit creative and entertaining, we certainly would not expect an entire public educational platform to be launched off of what amounts to being non-factual, emotive, tainted metaphorical language. George Bush was supposedly responsible for �the soft bigotry of low expectations� which is a powerful little phrase and Imop (in my opinion) one of his most memorable non-malapropisms�although I seriously doubt he came up with it. I chalk it up to a rhetorically-gifted speechwriter.
⁵ At this point in the essay, I am growing weary of writing out �Russell� every time. So from now�until the end�it will be either R. or B.R. depending on whatever strikes my fancy. The bigger issue with this is that I am actually writing this essay on Easter 3.31.13 and I need to hurry up so that I can go for a pleasure bike ride with my wife on the A.R.T. (American River Trail). Furthermore, my sense of being a consumer, tells me that time is money and I should do everything as quickly as possible. In contemporary America� where first graders are reportedly being burdened with up to two hours of homework a night at �the good schools�every adult knows about the unspoken sin of wasting time. One must always be producing, shopping or playing some role in the grand drama of viable economic activity. In fact I should probably be downloading apps on an Iphone, upgrading an Iphone or doing something �productive� rather than wasting time by writing an essay about a dead person. And isn�t the worst part of dying really forfeiting the ability to stay economically active?
⁶ Upgrade means to both get a better version of something for the sake of �convenience��convenience is a term that opens up a whole separate materialistic criticism can of worms� and also to pay more money. So the term upgrade is a term that acts as a subterfuge to combine two different meanings into one: one of the meanings is pleasant, and the other meaning is unpleasant. A few weeks ago when I was at a Burger King in Greenfield, CA the drive-thru worker asked me �If I would like to upgrade my french fries.� I said, �huh?�
⁷ The classic example is the way that the Middle Ages are taught with labels like �The Dark Ages.� There is a haughty tendency in the present to assume somehow people were less smart, less alive, less sexy etc. I suppose it�s the same impulse that causes all teenagers to see their parents as being un-cool and lacking in reproductive tendencies despite all the evidence. My guess is that if you were to go around calling the guy who works at Burger King a serf (short for �service�) the guy would probably do things to your sandwich that would put your digestive system into a tailspin. If we do not accept the fact that we are serfs, then it is reasonable to assume that serfs didn�t really ever accept it either. There is also a lot of recent scholarship concluding that serfs probably worked nothing like the hours we modern service workers work. The serfs of yore went to bed with a short-lived winter sun, not working in the fallow fields of winter and just imagine all that free time in the summer between planting and harvests. It isn�t hard for me to imagine it and fantasize about both myself and family and friends living a much more relaxed life�sure maybe most of your family members and friends would have had their lives seriously curtailed from what are now preventable diseases�but those lucky enough to avoid disease...
⁸ So I can only imagine the confusion that children who grow up in Christian households must experience. On the one hand they are told that a good person will not fight and will be a thoroughgoing pacifist at an individual level. All the while, the child sees the legal system, the business system of value and exchange, the military industrial complex with MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), masculinity as generated through the CI (Culture Industry), and people acting on individual levels all operating according to the western �eye for an eye� model. And just think of all those popular cultural expressions, proverbs, idioms and sayings like �if you give an inch, they�ll take a mile�, �quid pro quo� on so on. Does any parent, teacher seriously agree with the Christians or Taoists on this? There are several hypocritical images to capture this: A Christian with a car alarm, or a Christian who carries a safety gun. And I have seen and heard the nonsense before: In a Wal-mart on North Grand in Ames, Iowa when I was 14 years old, I was smashing the windows out on a car because I saw a stuffed pay-day looking wallet inside when the alarm started to go off, and I remember seeing the fish symbol on the Red Mercury SUV. Now that I think about it, why did they have an alarm if they were really Christians? It just doesn�t jibe�something fishy about the whole thing. To be a Christian, shouldn�t one accept this whole turn the other cheek thing? If you don�t accept it, can you still even be a Christian? Maybe just believing in heaven or in hell makes a person a Christian and nobody bothers with the tenets.
⁸ This idea of not judging, of not generalizing, similar to �turning the other cheek� is part of the hypocrisy of the west. Everybody stereotypes, not only because it is key to survival, but because it saves a lot of time and grief. Everybody does these things, but nobody can admit it because the moral code does not permit one to admit that �yes I stereotype people constantly.� It is part of what Nietzsche meant when he talked about the �slave morality.� By slave morality he meant certain parts of Christianity that encourage everybody to be weak -seeming, non-judgmental and non-discerning. Presumably the lack of judgment would make it that much easier for people who are judgmental and discerning to have a ready supply of non-violent, effete, non-protesting workers who are �good Christian men and women that will turn the other cheek when they see their wages plummet and not ask too many questions before going home to watch �Everybody Loves Raymond.�
⁹ This term unproductive person is often used without awareness that it is ultimately a business term. As in somebody will take a nap and then text a friend and say �I have been so unproductive today.� The root word of unproductive is ultimately product. The word has become such an invasive species that even though I know what it means, I still find myself using it on a regular basis. Americans are aswim in an increasingly polluted sea of advertisements that come at us from all angles at all times of the day until all activity, all desires, the very concept of happiness itself, becomes essentially just another commercial activity. The for of expression for a persons deepest most heartfelt thoughts becomes compressed far beyond the realms of nuance and complexity required to get the thought across, and the heartfelt expression becomes: a mere slogan. Slogans, that essential form of energy necessary to help push product. The problem is not that we don�t want happiness, because we do, it�s that the happiness is not genuine; it is shallow and essentially a product that has limited range; often coming at the expensive price of TIME.
�⁰ On page 80 Russell writes: They [The Chinese] are not lazy in the way the Russians are, that is to say they will work hard for their living.� Now I don�t know what happened to him with Russians�bad restaurant experience?
