Do no harm to others

So, welfare is not sentimentality. It means making the kindly action to save the man, but then people have to take responsibility for their actions.

Here’s another example. Again, this is from the last century in India. Indian nurses, in the last century, used to believe that human beings had a limited supply of energy.

You’ve got so much fuel for your life, they thought, and that you shouldn’t use up that fuel meaninglessly. It’s as though if you had a long ship’s journey to make, you would conserve your stocks of fuel, and food, and everything. You don’t waste them unnecessarily. The nurses then used to prevent the children from, as they saw it, dashing about, running about, and meaninglessly expending their energy. Nearly all the children who could afford this care never developed much of a physique. They didn’t know that by the exertion of energy, it will be replenished, and the body will become more vigorous. They didn’t know this. The nurses were being kind, as they thought, but it was mistaken. It actually did harm to the children, but that was not the intention, and that was not known.

The idea of action, of welfare, this takes a good deal of thinking. The question is, is more good done by actively helping people, or is it better for those people simply not to harm them? Generally, when this point is raised, people rise up, and they say, “Obviously, it was to help them,” but that’s not necessarily so. It’s not so easy to help people. We do not know the circumstances.

There was a Red Indian tribe off the west coast of Canada, who lived on a number of little islands. To visit another village, they had to make a canoe trip, sometimes quite a tricky one. To go to school, it was quite an elaborate arrangement. The Canadian government, in its kindliness and compassion, allocated a large area of very good land, and they moved the Indians. Now they could have their villages, they could meet each other easily. They had fertile land instead of scraping a living from these little islands. Everything was very much better, but the Indians soon gave up all interest in life. They stopped breathing, and the race died out because their traditions and their whole identity had been lost. The government had no idea that this would happen, but it did happen by doing good. Therefore, one of the things that we notice, the golden rule is, do unto others as you would that they would do unto you. This is attributed first to Jesus, though it can be found before him. The great Rabbi Hillel, about 50 years before Jesus, he put it in a different way.

There’s a story about him. It’s almost certainly authentic. One of these enterprising idiots came up to the great Hillel, and said, “Master, can you say the whole of the law while I stand on one leg?” Most people can’t stand on one leg for more than a few seconds. The chap said, “Right, begin!” Hillel said, “Don’t do to others, what you would not that they do to you. That is the law, all the rest is commentary.” The man stood down. Now, you’ll see this is in a negative form. “Don’t do to others what you would not that they would do to you.”

People say, “Oh, this is negative. This is not so positive,” but tastes differ. I may think I like talking to people, that I’d like people to come and talk to me, but Einstein didn’t want people to come and talk to him. He found them an intolerable nuisance, so that, to do to Einstein as I would like him to do to me, namely to come and talk to me, would be against his interests. Hillel’s formulation, which is the formulation also, you can say, of the Gita, very largely, is don’t do harm to other people. This is probably the most that you can normally expect. If you can avoid doing harm to people, then your account will be well in the plus. These things need considering quite a lot. Karl Marx thought he was going to do good to all living beings. Nationalists like Hitler, they thought they were doing good to the human race in general – yes, a few, of course, had to be wiped out. They said to me, “Look, you English, you’re all mad on horse racing, aren’t you?” That was their idea of the English then. They said, “Look, you don’t breed from inferior horses, do you, when you want racing horses? In the same way, we shouldn’t breed from inferior stock in the human race.” I said to them, “How do you decide which is the good stock?” They said, “It’s their advances. It’s their courage, their determination, and their intellectual capacity.”

© Trevor Leggett

The full talk is Getting beneath the mask