A Good Life Is One Inspired by Love and Guided by Knowledge

In the late 1930s a group of researchers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, launched a programme to help boys at risk of delinquency. A staff of caring counsellors visited the boys' homes, took them to summer camps, tutored them and gave them medical care for five years. It was a model of generosity. When the researcher Joan McCord followed up the participants decades later, she found that the men who had received the help were more likely than a matching group to have committed crimes, to have developed alcoholism and to have died young. The programme had been inspired by love and lacked knowledge, and it had done harm. The story gives a vivid meaning to the phrase of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, that the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Russell set out the idea in 1925 in an essay on what he believed, and returned to it in later writings. Love, he held, supplies the motive. It is the impulse that makes people care about the suffering of others and the happiness of those close to them. Knowledge supplies the means. Without it, love is helpless or misdirected. Neither alone is enough, and the two must work together. A good life, in his view, is neither a life of pure feeling nor of pure calculation but a union of warmth and intelligence.

The argument can be tested by taking each element away. Love without knowledge is common and dangerous. A mother who loves her child but believes a rumour about vaccines may leave the child exposed to disease. Missionaries and reformers in many ages have inflicted harm on communities they wished to save, from forced conversions to well meant relief that destroyed local markets. In medicine, the history of bloodletting and the use of mercury as a cure show the damage done by doctors who cared deeply and knew little. Good intentions are no guarantee of good outcomes.

Knowledge without love is equally dangerous. The chemist Fritz Haber developed in 1909 the process that fixes nitrogen from the air, which made synthetic fertiliser possible and now helps to feed about half of the world's population. He also directed the first large scale use of chlorine gas as a weapon in 1915 and led the German chemical warfare programme. His intellect was extraordinary, and his purposes were narrow. Doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners in the Nazi camps were highly trained. Knowledge is a tool, and a tool serves whoever holds it. It was the absence of love, in the sense of regard for others as persons, that made their science monstrous.

Knowledge is a tool, and a tool serves whoever holds it.

Lives that combine both are the ones that we admire. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist, co founded Partners in Health and brought modern treatment for tuberculosis and HIV to poor villages in Haiti and Rwanda, in places where experts had said it could not be done. He insisted on rigorous evidence and on solidarity with the sick in equal measure. Closer to home, Baba Amte built a community for leprosy patients at Anandwan in Maharashtra, and Dr Verghese Kurien used management science to build a dairy cooperative that serves millions of small farmers. In each case compassion set the goal and expertise reached it.

Love, in Russell's sense, is wide. It includes affection for family and friends, the love of work and the compassion that makes a person care about strangers. Aristotle had treated friendship as one of the necessities of life, and modern research agrees. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed men and their families for over eighty years, has found that the quality of close relationships is the strongest predictor of health and satisfaction in old age. People who love and are loved live longer and happier lives. This is part of what the good life consists of, and not only a means to it.

Knowledge, too, is broader than information. It includes understanding of the world, of oneself and of other people. Socrates held that the unexamined life is not worth living, and the Indian tradition values jnana, knowledge that liberates from illusion. A person who knows his own weakness, such as his temper or his prejudice, is better able to love well. Knowledge also includes the habit of testing beliefs against evidence, which protects love from becoming fanaticism. A person who loves his nation and has not studied its history may be moved to harm others in its name.

There are limits to Russell's formula. A good life seems to need other things as well, such as freedom to choose its own course, courage in the face of danger, health, some sufficiency of means and a share of good luck. A person born into war or deep poverty may love and know a great deal and still not live well, because the circumstances forbid it. Some philosophers would add duty or justice to the list. Others would say that creativity or achievement belong in any account of a flourishing life. The two named qualities are better thought of as the heart of a good life than as its whole.

The pair also stand in tension. Love is partial, attached to particular people, while knowledge is impartial and tells us that other people matter equally. A doctor who loves his own child may be tempted to bend the rules for her, and a scientist who values truth may feel nothing for the person who suffers from its discovery. The skill of living lies in holding them together, letting each correct the other. Love warms knowledge into wisdom, and knowledge disciplines love into justice.

What remains unanswered is the question of the objects of the two. Love of what? Knowledge of what? A person may love a cause that is wicked and know a great deal about the means to advance it, so that the formula alone does not distinguish a good life from a skilful one. Russell relied on the assumption that wide love and true knowledge would point in the same direction, and that the more one learned and cared, the more one would be led toward the good. It is a hopeful assumption, and the history of the century in which he made it does not entirely support it.