themarginalian.org · 7 hours ago

In Praise of the Useless: Bertrand Russell’s Salve for Hard Times – the Marginalian

When the world reduces everything to utility - demanding that knowledge prove its worth, that time justify itself through productivity - something essential withers in the human spirit. Writing a century ago as the world recovered from its first global war, Bertrand Russell offered a radical defense of the "useless": learning for delight rather than application, contemplation instead of relentless action, knowledge that serves no purpose beyond "creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general." He understood that the narrowness driving us toward cruelty and conflict could only be countered by minds trained to find pleasure in large, impersonal truths - in the migration of apricots across continents, in humanity's "strangely accidental and ephemeral position in the cosmos." Russell's prescription remains urgent: that we preserve space for what is "useless as moonlight, unnecessary as music" - not despite hard times, but precisely because of them.