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Russell, for those of you unfamiliar, was one of the premiere philosophers of the last century. He was unconventional and controversial, in no small part due to the fact that he was a life-long socialist. Being a socialist meant that he did not translate well across The Pond. Even today, you'd be hard-pressed to find an American diplomat who knows the difference between communism and socialism. So much's the pity.
One of my great fantasies, some years ago, was to have Bertrand Russell debate that apologist of conservative aristocracy in America, William F. Buckley. While Buckley would hold forth for an aristocracy which only existed in his own mind, mean-spirited and arrogant, there would be Bertie on the other side, a "genuine" member of aristocracy, explaining that the entire concept was a function of enforcing power and privilege based on heavily in-bred bloodlines, that it was oppressive and wrong. Lord Russell had a way of cutting to the quick because his mind was so sharp. Better pit him against a lard-ass like Buckley than an effete snob in his own right like Gore Vidal, was my thinking.
Accepting Buckley's definition of noblesse oblige, which affirms the American presidency of the Dubya, is akin to accepting that Jay Leno is a worthy successor to the seat of Jack Paar. Both are based on fuzzy thinking.
Here's a sampling of his ideas from his essay "How to Read and Understand History":
16: Like the early Christians, Marx expected the millennium very soon; like their successors, his have been disappointed--once more, the world has shown itself recalcitrant to a tidy formula embodying the hopes of some section of mankind.
22: The professors must not prevent us from realizing that history is fun, and that the most bizarre things really happen.
22: Some great men become greater the more they are studied; I should mention Spinoza and Lincoln as instances. Napoleon, on the other hand, becomes, at close quarters, a ridiculous figure. Perhaps it was not his fault that on the night of his wedding to Josephine her pug-dog bit him in the calf as he was getting into bed . . .
27: Wars had been an affair of kings or small aristocracies; the armies were composed of mercenaries, and the general population looked on with indifference . . . every peasant who had been freed from feudal burdens and had acquired some portion of his seigneur's land felt that he had something to fight for . . . governments have increasingly realized the necessity of making wars popular and have used the potent weapon of popular education to that end.
47: If none of the existing Churches satisfies you, your neighbors view you with suspicion as an eccentric, their wives fight shy of your wife, and your business career suffers.
48: The State, when it educates you, has the public object of supplying you with useful knowledge, and the private object of making you willing to pay taxes for the benefit of corrupt politicians....As for the Churches - but hush! at this point we must draw the line; no church dignitary, I am sure, ever considers for a moment anything but the eternal welfare of his flock.
53: If you have been taught that it is as wicked to swear is it is to steal, you may, when you decide that swearing is permissible, conclude that there is no harm in stealing, but if so that only shows that you are not intelligent and that you were taught a foolish morality.
54: No nation can long flourish unless it tolerates exceptional individuals, whose behavior is not exactly like that of their neighbors. Everyone knows that men who achieve great things in art or literature or science are apt, in youth, to be eccentric; ...Our bodily life is confined to a small portion of time and space, but our mental life need not be thus limited....Our private lives are often exasperating, and sometimes almost intolerably painful...
56: Men are born and die; some leave hardly a trace, others transmit something of good or evil to future ages. The man whose thoughts and feelings are enlarged by history will wish to be a transmitter, and to transmit, so far as may be, what his successors will judge to have been good.
During the last few years, I have not had a copy of Russell around, something that I used to consider de riguer. I regret that. I need his kind of elegant brain enema in my life now and again, if only because I am eccentric.
I rejoice in the very process of looking at how people think. I rejoice in their stories and their superstitions. Most of all, I believe that we can only see the holes in the political claptrap with which we are so often presented by striving for CLEAR THINKING.
Please note that I did not say "critical thinking." Like Derrida's concept of "post-modernism," this newest Ivory Tower trend to create a discipline called "critical thinking" is so much pop-culty devolution, as far as I'm concerned. It gives the Politically Correct (Intellectually Inept) another opportunity to grind their axes hoping that one day they will become sharp.
What is needed -- now more than ever -- is the ability to see our feet-of-clay. What is needed is the ability to look at the evidence of our own eyes, rather than listen to "the Spin" and convince ourselves that our eyes deceive us. DoubleSpeak is now the order of the day, no matter what government you live under. But your eyes seldom lie.
Neither does your wallet.
During my misspent youth, I made it a habit to read the works of Lord Bertrand Russell at least once every two years. I thought of it as my brain enema. There is so much fuzzy thinking in this world, I knew even in those formative years, that one needs a challenge like Bertrand Russell to make you validate your own perceptions, perception being as slippery as a snake's back. ("You just cain't quite put your finger on it!")
10: Most children wish to know things until they go to school; in many cases it is bad teaching that makes them stupid and uninquiring.
40: No, the greatest men have not been "serene." They have had, it is true, an ultimate courage, a power of creating beauty where nature has put only horror, which may, to a petty mind, appear like serenity. But their courage has had to surpass that of common men, because they have seen deeper into the indifference of nature and the cruelty of man. To cover up these things with comfortable lies is the business of cowards; the business of great men is to see them with inflexible clarity, and yet to think and feel nobly. And in the degree in which we can all be great, this is the business of each one of us.
The very notion of spending one's life on mathematical principals, logic and understanding how people think seems almost passé in the consumerist world we have today. But that was Lord Russell's life and the reason I find his words almost electric. We all say that we would have loved to be able to converse with Socrates, as an example, but I suspect that given the choice of MTV or a perambulation with the old Greek philosopher, most of us who choose the former. "Here, pal. Hemlock's not that bad."
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