I count myself as one of the many Russel fans, but I have to admit that if this article were my first encounter with his thoughts then my opinion on him would p

I count myself as one of the many Russel fans, but I have to admit that if this article were my first encounter with his thoughts then my opinion on him would probably be very different. In this speech Russel loosely identifies 3 competing views regarding what constitutes the central motives behind human actions: - His own view, that he states upfront: All human activity is prompted by desire and men differ from each others and from animals mainly because they desire different things. - All human activity is governed by a sense of virtues (Russel focus on "sense of duty" but I think it's fairer to enlarge this class of arguments a bit). This is a major leitmotiv in conservative worldviews although Russel does not name it as such. - All human activity is governed by the material circumstances in which they live, mentioned rather "en passant", and the landmark of the other end of the spectrum as far as worldview is concerned, the one that cannot be named. Russel goes on by enumerating (some of?) those desires/motives: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity and love of power. He gives some illustrations, many of which are funny but none convincing. His posits that the most important determinant of human behavior is how much one is sensible to each of those desires, yet he has to concede that human desires do not merely differs in intensity but also in quality, noting that, for instance, acquisitiveness can come in various shapes: accumulation of money for some, of potatoes for others. But then, one might ask, what causes some to seek gold rather than potatoes ? Russel's answer: it depends on the material circumstances that one was subjected to in childhood. Oh, but wait... All in all, I find this speech not only unconvincing but actually reactionary in the sense that it seems to ignore what we actually know about behaviors, desires and feelings (especially today, but maybe even in 1950). And we know actually a thing or two about behaviors of social apes, but that's not usually written in sociology books nor in psychology books nor in history books. One have to resort to evolutionary sciences or even better: primatology. Russel mentions observing apes in the zoo and recognizes that they can exhibit curiosity ("escape from boredom"). Youtube addicts might remember that viral video of a chimp entertaining himself by teasing a tiger. But that goes well beyond that: primatologists have indeed observed a range of motives in chimps that are familiar to us humans. But when its about chimps we don't tell ourselves stories about idealized motives: at the end of the day, it's all about mating partners, although the chimps themselves may believe in more sophisticated explanation. Desires and feelings, it turns out, might not be that unique. It is no longer believed that they originates from the human-only evolved cortex, but more likely from the brain stem, of ancient descent and thus commonplace in the animal kingdom. We don't know what it feels like to be a bat, except that in some way we do know: the bat experiences fear, hunger, sexual attraction, social competition, tiredness, curiosity... We have no idea what the world "feels like" for a bat, having different senses and different brainpower, but the desires and emotions we can recognize easily, because we share many of them. So if one is after what makes human actions distinct, one should probably look at something else than desires.