In the way of life, I have found three things you can always do in your darkest hour that will never fail to bring back the light:
Read something.
Help someone.
He heard everything.
We need our science to learn how the universe works, to know what we don't know yet and to understand. We need our creativity to learn how the heart works, to feel what we don't like or can't feel and hold it without worry. We need both – knowledge and feeling, intellectual understanding and emotional intelligence – to be able to empathize with each other, and to have compassion for ourselves.
The bane of our time is that it makes everything real, it reduces the wonder of curiosity to the practical use of discoveries, it reduces the symphony of feeling to self-help music, it reduces people to data points in user statistics logs and political polls. It is not only an insult but a violence to our humanity, the only remedy is to zealously protect the irrepressible things that make us human – those things as useless as the moonlight, as unnecessary as music, as love: There is no practical benefit in holding the beautiful eye of a scallop or the mystery of a ghost pipe, no practical benefit Leaves of Grassyet these are the things that link the worst habits of our species – our capacity for despair, which is the price of consciousness, and our capacity for war, which is the cost of despair.
A century ago, as the world was recovering from its first world war, Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) foresaw another unless humanity could find a way to resist this dehumanizing cult of communism. We didn't then, but maybe, just maybe, we can now with the prescription that Russell gives in his wonderful essay “'Useless Knowledge,'” which was later included in the collection of Revelation as a whole. In Praise of Laziness and Other Essays (public library).
Noting that the Renaissance was revolutionary because its “great purpose” was ecstasy – “the restoration of a certain wealth and freedom in art and speculation that was lost while ignorance and superstition kept the mind's eye blinking” – and that the Enlightenment was revolutionary because it explored the workings of the universe, without any expectations:
Throughout the last one hundred and fifty years, people have increasingly questioned the value of “useless” information, and have come to believe that the only information worth having is that which applies to some part of the economic life of society… part of the same organization that led to conscription, boy spies, the organization of political parties, and the dissemination of political enthusiasm by the press.
In a sense he will soon develop in his excellent essay on the value of doing nothing, he adds:
We do not like to think of a person who enjoys living in idleness, however refined may be the extent of his happiness. We feel that everyone should be doing something to help a greater cause (whatever that may be), especially since so many evil men are working against it and must be stopped. Therefore, we have no rest of mind, to gain any knowledge except that which will help us in fighting for whatever we think is important.
But while the help of “useful” knowledge in shaping the modern world is undeniable – here we are, with our computers and airplanes and ever-increasing life expectancy – we need its “useless” counterpart to make life not longer, less productive, but wider and deeper and more present. Russell writes:
There is indirect utility, of various kinds, in managing information that does not contribute to technical efficiency. I think that some of the worst aspects of the modern world can be improved by the great promotion of such knowledge and the ruthless pursuit of mere technological expediency… When the work of consciousness is completely focused on some definite goal, the main result, for many people, is a lack of balance accompanied by a kind of emotional disturbance… The blurring of vision has caused the forgetting of certain powerful fighting forces.
A few years before the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga published his revealing book on how play has made us human, Russell adds:
Men and children have a need for play, that is, periods of exercise that have no purpose other than immediate entertainment. But if play is to fulfill its purpose, it must be able to find pleasure and interest in matters unrelated to work.
However, gaming is an active pastime rather than a hobby. With a prophetic sense that anticipates the threatening mesmerism of social media, how it will turn the human animal into a screen zombie, he notes:
The entertainment of modern urban dwellers is too often passive and collective, and consists in the idle observation of the skillful activities of others… If free people are to be happy, they must be educated people, and they must be educated for intellectual pleasure and the direct usefulness of technical knowledge.
Half a lifetime before he looks back to reflect on the key to aging contentedly – “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until the walls of the ego roll back, and your life is more integrated into the life of the universe” – he writes:
[Such useless] knowledge, when it has been successfully integrated, shapes the character of a person's thoughts and desires, causing them to be concerned, in part, with great impersonal things, and not only with matters important to himself. It has been easily assumed that, once a person has acquired certain skills through knowledge, he will use them in ways that benefit society. A negative view of education ignores the need to train a person's goals and abilities…It must be admitted that highly educated people are sometimes cruel, I think there can be no doubt that they are less often than people whose minds are asleep. A bully at school is rarely a boy whose academic skills are up to par. When a lynching occurs, the ringleaders are almost invariably men with no experience. This is not because cultivating the mind produces good human feelings, although it may do so; rather, it is because it provides other interests than mistreatment of neighbors, and other sources of self-respect than asserting dominance.
Even Bertrand Russell did not foresee that within a century bigots and tyrants with hidden ideas would take over the reins of a great empire, wage wars at will and feed the lust for the glamor of power by intimidating the powerless. But he gave us, as plainly and accurately as possible, a writ of prohibition:
Perhaps the most important benefit of “useless” information is that it encourages the practice of mental reflection. In the world there is a great readiness, not only to act without sufficient previous thought, but also to act at times when wisdom would advise not to act… Hamlet is taken as a terrible warning against thought without action, but no one raises Othello as a warning against action without thinking… the self-reinforcing motivation of love but unequal. The habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than action is a safeguard against irrationality and excessive love of power, a means of maintaining peace in misfortunes and peace of mind in the midst of troubles.
Explaining what Iris Murdoch would later call “apathy,” which she identified as the greatest reward for connecting with art and nature, she adds:
A life limited to what is personal may, sooner or later, become an unbearable pain; they are only windows to a larger and less turbulent universe where the most painful parts of life are endured.
These acts of self-sacrifice, Russell notes, “have benefits that range from the smallest to the most profound, [from] minor concerns, such as fleas, missing trains, or powerful business associates [to] the difficulty of obtaining international cooperation.” In the exciting part of the physics classic Richard Feynman Ode to Imbalishows:
Learning with curiosity not only makes unpleasant things less fun, but also makes fun things more fun. I really enjoyed peaches and apricots as I know they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that the Chinese captives held by the great King Kaniska brought them into India, where they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word “apricot” is derived from the same Latin root as the word “precocious,” because the apricot ripens early; and that A originally added by mistake, due to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit very tasty.
[…]
But while the little pleasures of culture have their place as a relief from the trivial troubles of real life, the most important benefits of meditation are related to the great evils of life, death and pain and cruelty, and the blind journey of nations into needless disaster. For those to whom strict religion can no longer bring comfort, there is a need to take some place, so that life is not dusty and cruel and full of useless self-assertion.
In the amazing science section, he adds:
The world is currently full of angry and selfish factions, each incapable of looking at human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilization rather than gain an inch. In this shortage no technical instruction will provide a solution. The remedy, as it is a matter of the individual mind, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those subjects which, without destroying self-respect, make a man see himself in a proper state. What is needed is not this or that specific knowledge, but such knowledge as inspires the idea of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, familiarity with the lives of heroic people, and some understanding of the strange and strange danger of man's position in the universe – all this affects the feeling of pride in the power of thinking and deep thinking of man. with understanding. It is from great ideas combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom emerges easily.
Train Russell on the secret of happiness, the two pillars of human prosperity, how to heal a sick and divided world, and try an astronaut's cure for despair.
