We seem to feel that the proper way in which human beings should behave is something which, in some way or other, is already established. That is to say, it consists either in a divinely revealed law—in some such principles, say, as the Ten Commandments—or else it exists somehow in a law of nature. There are certain things, in other words, which it is natural for us to do, and certain things which it is unnatural for us to do. And we have a kind of naïve faith that if scientists or psychologists or even philosophers can establish what is human nature, as if that were some sort of fixed and given quantity, we could then (on the basis of what human nature is) find those tram lines along which we should run.

But I think our problems are not so much even those of the bus, they are much more like the problems of the pilots of airlines, trying to agree among themselves as to the proper schedules and the proper lanes for air traffic. In other words, that the problems of ethics have very little indeed to do with what we ought to do, but very much more with what we want to do and in what ways we can agree about it.

I’m reminded of a story that was told to me many years ago by a mathematical friend of mine where, in the beginning of time, when the Lord God was thinking up all the words that human beings should use, he was carrying around with him a great dictionary. And one day he went to call on Saint Peter—or perhaps Saint Peter didn’t live then; it may have been the archangel Gabriel—and he unfortunately left the dictionary in a taxi which was waiting for him outside the archangel’s apartment. At that moment, the devil crept in and entered two words in the dictionary, which have been the problem ever since. The two words were “ought” and “should.”

Of course, these two words reflect the tram line conception of ethics: the whole conception that there is fixed already some pattern, some ought, to which human beings should conform themselves. And the disadvantage of this whole approach to ethical problems seems to be that it entirely excludes an experimental attitude to human behavior. And I can think of nothing which is more a breath of fresh air into our fantastically complex ethical—and then, as it were, in ascending order: economic, political, and social—problems. I can think of nothing which introduces more of a breath of fresh air than the adoption of an experimental attitude to these questions as distinct from a preconceived one.

Now, it’s amazing how difficult it is to propose this point of view; what anxieties, what rigidities lie in the way of anybody who wants to persuade human beings to adopt an experimental attitude. Because in so many spheres we seem to be obsessed with an anxiety to be right at all costs. I wonder if you’ve ever considered what this anxiety would do to any kind of experimenter in any of the sciences if he felt that he could not afford to engage in any kind of scientific inquiry without being certain, in the first place, that any experiment he conducted would come out right—that is to say, that it would prove the hypothesis which he was trying to prove. All scientific inquiry would be completely at an end. The whole virtue of the scientific spirit is that the scientist is prepared to be shown that he is wrong. And so an anxiety to be right above all else is, I would consider, one of the major blocks to the development of human intelligence.

And yet, at this particular time we are being led to the brink of unimaginable horrors by people among us who insist on being right above all else—who have preconceived ideas of what sort of human laws, what sort of human relationships, what sort of human conduct really will work, really is proper, and ought to be done. Time and time again one finds by experimentation that what everybody had considered common sense from a theoretical point of view is invalid. I mean, we know that, according to aerodynamical theories, bees and other insects simply can’t fly, but nonetheless they do. I came across recently some experiments in various kinds of furnaces which showed that a certain metallurgical process could be carried out with extreme simplicity, but every engineer who ever heard of it said in advance it simply won’t work, it’s absurd. But it does work, and one doesn’t find out until one tries the experiment.

And so now, in just this past week, I—who read the newspapers somewhat sporadically, and must seem to some of you very uninformed in comparison with some of the excellent commentators that come on these stations—read such things as, say, the famous Eddie Rickenbacker, President of Eastern Airlines, who urges the United States to abandon the United Nations, to adopt instantly a thoroughly aggressive policy against our Russian enemies, on the grounds that it would be much better for us all to be dead than to be slaves. An so, in the same vein, I read just the other day an editorial in the Chicago Tribune about Mr. Kennedy’s foreign policy, where it said that Mr. Kennedy is urging us to settle down to a long, long cold war in which there will be small gains here, small losses there, all kinds of indecision, all kinds of back and forth negotiation, but in which nothing will be settled for a long, long time to come. And the editorial commented: “This is not the kind of spineless attitude that Americans will stand for. We are accustomed to clear solutions, to not compromising with what we know to be right.”

And it seems to me that it isn’t a question that these people would rather be dead than red. It is that they would rather be dead than wrong. And if that is your attitude to life, then it seems to me that you had better go right out now and take a dose of prussic acid. If Mr. Rickenbacker would rather be dead than be a slave—and a slave always has hope. For as the common proverb says: while there is life there is hope. A slave can always, if he is clever enough, find a means of liberating himself. But if he personally would rather be dead than be a slave, I suggest that he blow his brains out right now, and not involve the rest of the world—human, animal, and botanical—in his own particular suicide. But this is what comes of the anxiety to be right at all costs. And it is rather curious that what we call the political extreme right wing wishes to be right at all costs—a political situation, incidentally, which is interesting not only because its attitude is totally non-experimental, but also because it has absolutely nothing positive to offer, except a gospel of being against something that is assumed to be a threat.

And this brings me back, after this little political excursion, to again what seems to me to be the fundamental problem of an experimental attitude to ethics. There’s an old saying that where there is no vision, the people perish. And I must say that, as I read all kinds of journals—philosophical, political, psychological, historical, and so on; all kinds of publications and communications through the mass media, both from the United States and Britain, and to a rather lesser extent Europe and Asia—I’m increasingly depressed by the fact that nobody has anything to say about the development of human life, except what means we can take to avoid a ghastly and terrible doom. There seems to be no other vision at all in any important quarter.

Nowadays, a person who has the naïveté, it would seem, to try and think out what human life might be like—not in some sort of strange paradise of the science fiction novel, but what human life could be like with the technical abilities that we have available right now—anybody who seems to talk and think in this way is simply dismissed as a utopian and an idle dreamer. It no longer seems to be political or economic realism, it’s not social realism of any kind, to think out practically and in detail what kind of world we might have. And I think this is one of the most disturbing factors in the whole picture. And here I do not even speak as a progressive westerner as distinct from some sort of acceptance-of-life Easterner. All men at all times, when they set about to do anything, had a conception in their minds, in the first place, of what they wanted, and then set out to get it. We don’t seem to have this conception in our minds at all. We don’t seem to know what we want. We even seem to be ashamed of admitting that there is something that we want. Because we are committed to the proposition that what we want we won’t get.

It reminds me of an incident in London many years ago, of a Cockney mother with a little girl, passing by a street vendor who was selling little paper windmills. An she pointed at one of them and said to the child, “D’ya want it? Well, ya can’t ’ave it.” But I think one might rather say, “Be careful of what you desire. You may get it.” And I cannot think in this time of any more kind of practical realism than to desire and to be careful of what we desire. Both to try again to formulate a vision of what human life could be with the technical powers that we now have available.

Now, of course, there is the so-called American dream. There is life as it might be in the advertisements, in Better Homes and Gardens, in Sunset magazine and in all this glamorous display of everybody happily living in gadget-infested homes. But, of course, one of the problems of this vision is it isn’t thought out. This is the moral of the saying, “Be careful of what you desire.” It’s so easy to think of what you desire in very vague terms. And the result is, of course, when it’s fulfilled, a very vague object. It’s like I’ve so often said, and as Dr. Hayakawa often says: that our automobiles—which are one of the great prestige symbols of what we ought to desire—haven’t been thought through. They’ve only been thought through so far as the shiny, apparently streamlined surface, is concerned. The food that we can buy in such vast quantities hasn’t been thought through. It looks alright, but it’s amazingly tasteless and lacking in nutritive value. And so, in the same way, the homes that we build: picture windows looking into somebody else’s picture window, and are a practical architectural failure of the first order. And that is simply because we have never really sat down to think out what we want to happen in detail. And not only sit down to think it out, but to try experiments and see what will work.

There are various difficulties in the way of doing this, and the first difficulty is that, when anybody proposes anything of this kind, all kinds of objections—that is to say, verbal and theoretical objections—will be brought up. People will say, “Well, you can’t do that, because something like it was tried several years ago and that didn’t work out.” But, of course, several years ago are not the same time and the same place as today. And, in other words, the thinker in our culture, is to—the intellectual in our culture—is to such a large extent a critic, a demolisher of proposals, that he can’t think of anything that he himself would propose. He wouldn’t dare do such a thing. He’s like so many academicians who daren’t engage upon any substantial and major work of scholarship, because they’re terrified of being utterly condemned in an obscure footnote upon some small detail of error.

And the second problem is of course the unwillingness to believe that human life could really be a rather beautiful and fantastically delightful affair. This is, I think, even more true of western man than it is of eastern man. We seem to have, I think, in our culture a greater degree of ingrained masochism: of the feeling that when we are enjoying ourselves there must be something morally wrong with us. Of the feeling that, when we discover that something that we really want to do is fulfilled rather easily, an annoying sense that somewhere or other we must have made a mistake, and that we ought not to be so well off as we are.

I suppose this goes back to our age-old sense of original sin: our fundamental mistrust in our own desires and in our own decisions, as if they were something different from ourselves, as if they were, as it were, devils or strange spirits inhabiting our organisms and tempting us. It’s curious, isn’t it, that we look upon our desires very often as temptations, indicating they are something other than us, they are something there to beguile us.

I suppose I am simply a small voice crying in the wilderness, and that it may be too late to advocate against this insane clamor for national suicide with honor—which of course also means world suicide with honor, I presume. Isn’t it interesting that, I suppose, many of the people who clamor for this sort of thing call themselves Christians, and believe in an afterlife where they will be justified and where they will be able to turn round to all their beastly opponents and say, “I told you so!” Watch out! This is something deeply ingrained in the psychology of the suicide. Even the ordinary low-down sort of a wretched neurotic suicide, who hasn’t got any religious principles, who doesn’t believe in any afterlife, but he does believe in an afterlife in the sense that, after he’s jumped off the bridge or blown his brains out, he can imagine his relatives and his friends saying, “Oh dear, how wretched it was of us to treat him so badly.” And I suppose in the moment of taking the fatal step, he imagines how they will regret what they’ve done to him and solace himself with that. And it’s not a far cry from that.

And the people who would destroy this world in the name of a fantasy—of some life beyond death in which the Lord God will pat them on the back and say, “Well, you did the right thing. You stood by the right cause, and certainly your enemies were all wrong.”—if that’s the kind of heaven those people expect, if they expect the Lord God to have a big account book in which he adds up all the rights and wrongs, and praises the people who did right, and gives a long, long lecture and perhaps many tortures in eternal subterranean dungeons for those who’ve done wrong, such a Lord God is not worth any human being’s reverence.