Distinguished Dissenter

In 1940 a lawyer suing to rescind Bertrand Russell's teaching appointment in New York described Russell's writings as lecherous, salacious, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber." The lawyer won his case.

Denunciation of Russell has continued with few interruptions for the last forty years. For the title of "corrupter of youth" and Socratic godfly no equally robust contenders have appeared this century. And the west to active intellectual titan has received more abuse and persecution.

Curiously, Russell's own philosophy is narrow and utterly lacking the metaphysical comfort which William James felt requisite for a creative life. "I have been painfully forced to the belief," he once remarked, "That nine-tenths of what is regarded as philosophy is humbug. The only part that is at all definite is logic, and since it is logic, it is not philosophy."

Yet his highly intellectualistic, even arid, philosophy has not kept him from other realms. From the elegance and awesome grandeur of his recent books on nuclear warfare Russell has wielded a prolific pen for over sixty years. He has dealt with sex and marriage, the nature of communism, atomic energy, relativity theory, the history of philosophy, political organization, and China, as well as beginning a few novels after his seventieth birthday.

'Marriage and Morals'

For his writings on sex he received the list of adjectives at the New York trial. Despite its impact on England of the 1920's, though, Marriage and Morals could hardly shock anyone today. The unwaveringly high-minded tone of Russell's argument, indeed, is more arresting than his taboo-smashing. "I think," he says, "that all sex relations which do not involved children should be regarded as a purely private affair, and that if a man and a women choose to live together without having children, that should be no one's business but their own." The exceeding difficulty of obtaining a divorce in England--Russell has been married four times--has caused him considerable anguish. Surely his own marital problems have enhanced his allure among the non-reading public, as have such books as Why I am not a Christian.

Russell as lechery and Russell as anti-christ have become faded in recent years. Succeeding these images has been the figure of "better red than dead" Bertie, grand marshal of Anglo-American comsymps. Because he cuts this unsavoury figure, Russell's views have generally received the same response as his ideas on sex and religion.

This is a pity, for his impressions of Communist Russia and reactions to war-all on record since 1914--are fascinating, and unfailingly lucid.

In opposing the First World War Russell prophesied that, following a German defeat, "the ordinary German...would resolve the be found better prepared next time and would follow the advice of his militarists more faithfully." "When two dogs fight in the street," he said, "no one supposes that anything but instinct prompts them, or that they are inspired by high and noble ends. They fight merely because something angers them in each other's smells. What is true of dogs in the street equally true of nations in the present war." Although Russell persisted in voicing his un-Wilsonian sentiments until he ultimately incurred a six-month jail sentence he never based his pacifism on universal principles.

It is imperative to distiguish Russell from the bulk of conscientious objectors, since he supported England's entry into W.W.II. He never invoked a moral absolute so his change of heart cannot rightly be held inconsistent: in 1915, war seemed more noxious than defeat by the Kaiser. Yet in 1939 he said, "I am still a pacifist in the sense that I think peace the most important thing in the world. But I do not think there can be any peace in the world while Hitler prospers...If we lose it will be hell, probably for a long time to come."

Russell's delight at the defeat of Hitler was short-lived. Immediately after Hiroshima he wrote, "The atomic bomb makes one...reconsider all sorts of things. I have never, not even in 1940, felt the outlook as gloomy as now. Everything is working up for a war between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., with us a satellite of the U.S.A.; both sides will use atomic bombs, and very little will be left at the end.'

By the time of the Korean War, Russell supported Western rearmament. "If I had to choose between Russian Communism and American capitalism," he said, "I should without a moment's hesitation choose the latter...because it is combined with democracy, and with a measure of personal liberty." Nonetheless, he did not shy from outspoken criticism of many American policies and beliefs. The United State, he argued, forced the Chinese to accept Communism by leaving them no other alternative to the "corrupt" Chiang Kai-shek. In addition, he roundly attacked McCarthyism on countless occasions.

'This Philosophical Wolf'

Despite these outbursts against the United States, Russell seldom receved praise from the Kremlin. Moscow radio once called him "this philosophical wolf, whose dinner jacket conceals all the brutal instincts of a beast." This blast greeted his advocacy of the Baruch Proposal, the American scheme for internationalizing all nuclear armaments. In Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959) he remarks, "I thought, at the time, that it would be worth while to bring pressure to bear upon Russia and even, if necessary, to go so far as to threaten war on the sole issue of the internationalizing of atomic weapons. My aim, then as now, was to prevent a war in which both sides possessed the power of producing world-wide disaster. Western statesmen, however, confident of the supposed technical superiority of the West, believed that there was no danger of Russia achieving equality with the non-Communist world in the field of nuclear warfare. Their confidence in this respect has turned out to have been mistaken. It follows that, if nuclear war is now to be prevented, it must be by new methods and not by those which could have have been employed ten years ago.'

'Common Sense'

Nowhere in Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare does Russell advocate surrender to the Soviet Union. His most extreme passage maintains, "The view that No World is better than a Communist world, or that No World is better than a Capitalist world, is one that is difficult to refute by abstract argument, but I think that those who hold it should question their right to impose their opinion upon those who do not hold it by the infliction of the death penalty upon all of them." Although this September, when he received a seven day jail sentence, Russell was not urging immediate, unilateral disarmament.

His willingness to grant concessions to the Soviets has made him seem all the pinker to Americans. Yet his stand on the Baruch Proposal should absolve him; his current outlook may be wrong, but it cannot justly be called anti-western. Moreover, the uncanny accuracy of his previous prognostications should haunt his opponents. Russell simply does not deserve casual disregard.

During the last seventy years Russell's thinking has formed an indelible imprint on his times. He grew up in the Cambridge of Whitehead, Moore, Broad, Wittgenstein, Eddington, Rutherford, and Keynes, and he has always seemed a product of the intellectual vigor of Cambridge undergraduate life at the turn of the century. Those were the days before an English University education had become part of the professional class's struggle for existence, and for Whitehead and Russell, Cambridge conformed almost exactly to the Platonic ideal of education; they divided their time between mathematics and free discussion with their friends.

"I want to stand at the rim of the world," he once wrote, "and peer into the darkness beyond, and see a little more than others have see, of the strange shapes of mystery that inhabit that unknown night...I want to bring back into the world of men some little bit of new wisdom. There is a little wisdom in the world; Heraclitus, Spinoza, and saying here and there. I want to add to it, even if only ever so little."