Education and the good life · Bertrand Russell
AFFECTION AND SYMPATHY
Then history may be taught, with all its wars. But in telling about wars, sympathy at first should be with the defeated. I should begin with battles in which it is natural to feel on the side of the beaten party--for instance, the battle of Hastings in teaching an English boy. I should emphasize always the wounds and suffering produced. I should gradually lead the child to feel no partisanship in reading about wars, and to regard both sides as silly men who had lost their tempers, and ought to have had nurses to put them to bed till they were good. I should assimilate wars to quarrels among the children in the nursery. In this way, I believe children could be made to see the truth about war, and to realize that it is silly. If any actual instance of unkindness or cruelty comes under the child’s notice, it should be fully discussed, with all the moral values which the adult himself attaches to the incident, and always with the suggestion that the people who acted cruelly were foolish, and did not know any better because they had not been well brought up. But I should not call the child’s attention to such things in his real world, if they were not spontaneously observed by him, until after he had grown familiar with them in history and stories. Then I should gradually introduce him to a knowledge of evil in his surroundings. But I should always give him the feeling that the evil can be combated, and results from ignorance and lack of self-control and bad education. I should not encourage him to be indignant with malefactors, but rather to regard them as bunglers, who do not know in what happiness consists.
The cultivation of wide sympathies, given the instinctive germ, is mainly an intellectual matter: it depends upon the right direction of attention, and the realization of facts which militarists and authoritarians suppress. Take, for example, Tolstoy’s description of Napoleon going round the battlefield of Austerlitz after the victory. Most histories leave the battlefield as soon as the battle is over; by the simple expedient of lingering on it for another twelve hours, a completely different picture of war is produced. This is done, not by suppressing facts, but by giving more facts. And what applies to battles applies equally to other forms of cruelty. In all cases, it should be quite unnecessary to point the moral; the right telling of the story should be sufficient. Do not moralize, but let the facts produce their own moral in the child’s mind. It remains to say a few words about affection, which differs from sympathy in being inevitably and essentially selective. I have spoken already of affection between parents and children; it is affection between equals that I now wish to consider.
Affection cannot be created; it can only be liberated. There is a kind of affection which is partly rooted in fear; affection for parents has this element, since parents afford protection. In childhood affections of this sort are natural, but in later life they are undesirable, and even in childhood affection for other children is not of this sort. My little girl is intensely devoted to her brother, although he is the only person in her world who ever treats her unkindly. Affection as to an equal, which is the best kind, is much more likely to exist where there is happiness and absence of fear. Fears, conscious or unconscious, are very apt to produce hatred, because other people are regarded as capable of inflicting injuries. With most people, as things are, envy is a barrier to wide-spread affection. I do not think envy can be prevented except by happiness; moral discipline is powerless to touch its subconscious forms. Happiness, in turn, is largely prevented by fear. Young people who have a chance of happiness are deterred by parents and “friends”, nominally on moral grounds, but really from envy. If the young people have enough fearlessness, they will ignore the croakers; otherwise, they will allow themselves to be made miserable, and join the company of envious moralists. The education of character that we have been considering is designed to produce happiness and courage; I think, therefore, that it does what is possible to liberate the springs of affection. More than this cannot be done. If you tell children that they ought to be affectionate, you run the risk of producing cant and humbug. But if you make them happy and free, if you surround them with kindness, you will find that they become spontaneously friendly with everybody, and that almost everybody responds by being friendly with them. A trustful affectionate disposition justifies itself, because it gives irresistible charm, and creates the response which it expects. This is one of the most important results to be expected from the right education of character.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.