power and admiration

I am reading a collection of essays by Bertrand Russell. The second essay is entitled “Useless” Knowledge. In this essay there is discussion that people spend their lives seeking power and admiration. I have previously written about greed and aggression being defining charactistics of humans but maybe power and admiration are related to these. Maybe greed and aggression are ways to achieve power and riches which is to be admired. This essay was published about 90 years ago and still seems relevant today. Actually that is not surprising. Human evolution of behaviours is slow and we probably behave much as we did thousands of years ago. We think we are modern because we live in modern house, use modern transport, modern communication technology etc but actually we evolve mentally and physically much more slowly than our civilization does.
Russell writes “The world at present is full of angry self-centred groups, each incapable of viewing human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilisation rather than yield an inch.” This seems so modern even though it was written almost one hundred years ago. The world between the world wars knew the reality of war, fighting over the lines on a map. Too few people then and now see the human race as a whole, see that countries are artificial constructs, that borders exist only for humans, not for other species, and too few people see the full extent of our similarities, focussing instead on a few minor differences. We should spend more time looking up at the night sky and wondering about our place in the universe. As Russell writes “It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.” He is right; we need to learn to lazily enjoy life.