This talk by Alan Watts is one of my favorites. Here’s a transcript for those who prefer to read.
Start:
We aren’t better because we want to be. Because the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Because all the do gooders in the world whether they’re doing good for others or doing it for themselves are troublemakers. On the basis of ‘kindly let me help you or you’ll drown’, said the Monkey putting the fish safely up a tree. We white anglo saxon protestants; British, German, American. We have been on a rampage for the past hundred or more years to improve the world. We have given the benefits of our culture, our religion, our technology to everybody except perhaps the Australian aborigines. And we have insisted that they receive the benefits of our culture even our political styles our democracy you better be dead Democratic I will shoot you. And having conferred these blessings all over the place we wonder why everybody hates us. Because sometimes doing good to others and even doing go to oneself is amazingly destructive. Because it’s full of conceit. How do you know what’s good for other people? How do you know what’s good for you? If you say you want to improve. Then you want to know what’s good for you. But obviously you don’t because if you did you would be improved. So we don’t know. It’s like the problem of geneticists, which they face today. I went to a meeting of geneticists not so long ago where they gathered in a group of philosophers and theologians and said Now look here we need help. We now are on the verge of figuring out how to bring in any kind of human character. We would want to have. We give you saints, philosophers, scientists, great politicians, anything you want, just tell us what kind of human beings ought we to breed.
So I said, ‘How will those of us who are genetically unregenerated make up our minds what genetically generated people might be.?’ Because I’m afraid very much that our selection of virtues may not work. It may be like for example this new kind of high-yield grain which is made and which is becoming ecologically destructive. When we interfere with the processes of nature and breed efficient plants and efficient animals there’s always some way in which we have to pay for it. And I can well see that a eugenically-produced human beings might be dreadful. We could have a plague of virtuous people. Do you realize that? Any animal considered in itself is virtuous it does its thing but in crowds they’re awful. Like a cross crowd of ants, or locusts on the rampage, they’re all perfectly good animals. But it’s just too much I could imagine a perfectly pestiferous mass of a million signs. So I said to these people, ‘Look, if there’s anything you can do, just be sure that a vast variety of human beings is maintained.’ Don’t please bring us down to a few excellent types excellent for what we never know how circumstances are going to change. And how. Our need. For different kinds of people changes.
At one time we may need very individualistic and aggressive people, at another time we may need very co-operative team working people. At another time we may need people who are full of interest in dexterous manipulation of the external world, at another time we may need people who explore into their own psychology and are introspective. There is no knowing but the mall varieties and the mosque ills we have obviously the better. So you see here again the problem comes out in genetics we do not really know how to interfere with the way the world is. The way the world actually is is an enormously complex interrelated organism. The same problem arises in medicine, because the body is a very complexly interrelated organism. And if you look at the body in a superficial way you may see there’s something wrong with it, here’s chicken pox. And the spots that it should come all out all over the place well you might say well spots of that cut them off. So you kill the bug. But then you find you’ve got real problems. Because you have to introduce some bugs to kill the bug, it’s like bringing rabbits into Australia. And that starts going all over the place and getting out of hand. And then you think well now wait a minute, it wasn’t the bugs in the blood there are bugs all over the place. What was wrong with this person that his blood system suddenly became vulnerable to those particular bugs his resistance was in doubt? Therefore what you should have given was not an antibiotic but vitamins. OK so we’re going to build up his resistance but resistance to what. You may build up resistance to this and this and this class of bugs, but then there’s another one that loves that situation it comes right in. See we always look at the human being medically, in bits and pieces, because we have heart specialists, lung specialists, bones specialists, nerve specialists, and so on. And they each see the human being from their point of view there are a few generalists but they realise that human bodies. Complicated that no one mind can understand it. And furthermore, supposing we do succeed in healing all these people of that diseases. What do we then do about the population problem. I mean we’ve stopped cholera, the black bubonic plague, we’re getting the better of tuberculosis, we may fix cancer and heart disease.
Then what will people die of? Well they’ll just go on living. On the enormous quantities of others. Then we have to fix this birthing. Pills for everybody. Then we find one of the effects the side effects of those pills. What are the psychological effects upon men and women of not breeding of children in the usual way? We don’t know. And what seems a good thing today or yesterday like D.D.T. turns out tomorrow to been a disaster. What seemed in the moral and spiritual sphere, to like great virtues in times past are easily seen today as hideous evils, let’s take for example the Inquisition, in its own day among Catholics the Holy Inquisition was regarded. As we’d today regard the practice of psychiatry. You, you see, you feel that in curing the person of cancer almost anything is justified. The most complex operations, the most weird surgery people suspended for days and days on end on the end of tubes with X. ray penetration burning. Or people undergoing shock treatment, people locked in the colorless monotonous corridors of mental institution. In all good faith, they knew that witchcraft and heresy were terrible things. Often plagues imperiling people souls forever and ever. So any means we’re justified. To cure people of heresy. We don’t change. We’re doing the same thing today. But under different names. We can look back at those people and see how evil that was but we can’t see it in ourselves. So therefore, beware of virtue.
