Thank you piobaire for that essay, good that we seem to be on the same page after all. In fact I had already read this in German translation; in that book many essays from various magazines like
Harper's Magazine (from that your link is taken) or
The Atlantic Monthly all by Russell pertaining to this topic, were collected. I will read it again when having more time, but for now I will quote some passages that I myself had marked in that book, that obviously seemed noteworthy to me at the time:
Quote:
The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker
Quote:
Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.
And especially this part; I have also used *partly* similar arguments in my previous posts- maybe even unconsciously inspired by this essay, who knows? (of course Russell overdoes it a bit with his negative depiction of "those above", IMO, after all he was a "social critic" who wrote in the first half of the 20th century)...
Quote:
In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.
Best regards, J.
