Fifty years after reading Bertrand Russell for the first time, I read him today with mixed feelings. In the middle 1950s, his History of Western Philosophy was a treat to teenage schoolboys bored to death with the slog of O Level. It gave us all the weapons we needed to torment the school chaplain when he tried to explain to agnostic teenagers Aquinas’s Five Ways to the knowledge of God’s existence. Why I Am Not a Christian was an even more valuable weapon against authority. My housemaster’s belief that Russell’s four marriages discredited his views on sex, God and nuclear warfare only confirmed my view that most holders of authority were bigoted, illogical and not to be taken seriously. I have not wholly changed my mind. Russell’s four marriages are irrelevant to his views on sex, God and nuclear warfare; I now think that his marital difficulties should have made him more wary about making the pursuit of happiness look easy, but his ideas about what the good life is wear well.
He had many vices as a critic of views he disliked, and his practice was at odds with his professed principle of taking on one’s opponents at their strongest points rather than their weakest. In those ways, he was less admirable than John Stuart Mill. On the other hand, he was, and is, much more fun. In particular, he wrote wonderfully; even the articles he turned out for the Hearst newspapers at fifty dollars a pop, in order to support Beacon Hill, the school that he and his second wife had created, are not only quick and clever, but thought-provoking too. If Britain took literacy seriously, teenagers would be given Russell as a model essayist.
During the First World War Russell realised that he had an extraordinary talent for lecturing to lay audiences. He was deeply opposed to the war and, as a member of the Union for Democratic Control early in the war and later as a leading figure in the No-Conscription Fellowship, he worked unceasingly to bring the war to an early end, to persuade the United States to remain neutral and to protect conscientious objectors from abuse at the hand of the tribunals that heard their case for exemption, and from ill-treatment in prison or the army, if they ended up there. These activities cost him his lecturership at Trinity College, Cambridge, but they brought him into a new world, too.
In addition to the innumerable meetings aimed directly at bringing an end to the war and saving objectors from conscription, Russell gave a strikingly successful series of lectures on The Principles of Social Reconstruction. To the extent that he had a single political philosophy, it was contained in the short book that the lectures became. Much that is taken for granted in What I Believe is argued for at some length in The Principles of Social Reconstruction.
There are two sorts of atheist – Russell called himself an agnostic to indicate that it was not impossible that there should be some sort of God, but he was perfectly certain that God did not exist, and atheist seems more apt. The position of the first sort of atheist is sometimes paraphrased as “there is no God, and I hate him”; he or she wishes that there was a God, in order to have someone to complain at about the absurdity of the universe. Leonard Woolf once remarked that he would like to question God about the design of the human digestive, system, the plumbing of which seemed peculiarly inept. The second sort of atheist is more bored than outraged; he or she cannot see what purpose is served by inventing stories about gods, spirits or whatever supernatural entities you care to name; they add nothing to our understanding of the world, and bring with them intellectual clutter and grounds for mutual persecution when our species hardly needs to be encouraged in its incoherence and violence. One can be both sorts, but it is rhetorically awkward to be both at once.
Russell was as often the first sort of atheist as the second, but What I Believe is mostly written from this second point of view. All the same, it is the first sort of atheism that supplies much of the emotional force even of this essay. Atheists who cannot see why anyone would bother to invent unbelievable stories about the origins of the universe and how we are supposed to behave might be expected to say nothing on the subject and to devote themselves to other matters. Russell rarely passed up an opportunity to speak unkindly about the devout – and was repaid in kind.
The obvious explanation is that Russell was at least half convinced that human existence was a miserable business; life could have been wonderful, but very largely was not. It was therefore intolerable to think that some being might deliberately have created a world in which we suffer constant anxiety, die of painful diseases when we do not die of violence, and suffer vastly more acute pains from heartbreak and disappointment than the pleasures of love and realised ambition can justify. If there were a God, he, she, it or they should be tried for crimes against humanity. The devout are guilty of praising wickedness, either because they are too cowardly to face the fact that God is a criminal, or because they have a perverted sense of morality and really believe that might makes right.
The atheism of What I Believe is of the less inflamed second kind. What there is to be known about the world is what science reveals, and there is no good reason to suppose either that we are immortal or that some ghostly clockmaker stands behind the machinery of the universe. Nonetheless, some sharp complaints are levelled at the role of religion in ethics and politics. Russell particularly seizes the occasion to denounce the religious for advocating birth control by war and famine while trying to prevent birth control using contraception as advocated by Margaret Sanger and others at the time. Russell, of course, took a delight in enraging the devout by arguments such as these. Many of his readers deplore his frequent unfairness, but there was a serious point behind his rhetorical tactics.
It is this: many religions – Christianity particularly – pay an obsessive attention to matters of sexual conduct. Instead of asking what would allow people to lead tolerably happy lives and bring up enough, but not too many, healthy, happy and decently educated children, Christians, in Russell’s view, spend their time making it harder rather than easier to think about such things calmly. Looking at the opponents of abortion in the United States almost eighty years later, it is easy to sympathise with Russell. The godly got their revenge on Russell in 1940, when a New York court overturned his appointment at City College on the grounds that he taught “immorality”. What I Believe was part of the evidence his enemies appealed to. At least one of Russell’s objections to religiously based moralities would apply to more than those moralities that are based on religion, narrowly defined. Russell was hostile to all forms of ethics based on rules. Rightly enough, he thought morality plays a very small part in life. Nobody looks up the rules about parental duty when caring for a sick child, for instance; they are motivated by love – or not – and in either event morality plays no role. If they lack proper affection, they will not be moralised into it, and if they feel it, the moral standpoint is redundant. Russell was especially hostile to the thought that morality consists of rules laid down by some authority, whether God or the superego. Rules are inflexible, and the one thing Russell was sure of was that intelligent thought about our conduct must have a flexibility that matched the changeability of events.
Finally, then, the role of science in all this. In What I Believe, Russell said firmly that we should not “respect” nature but learn how nature works so as to turn nature’s powers to useful human ends. There are two things to be said about this. First, as we have seen, Russell was in two minds about whether humanity had the sense to use science for good ends rather than bad; the tendency in Icarus is to dwell on the probability that we shall misuse science, but in What I Believe it is to exhort us to use it for good ends. Secondly, Russell relies very heavily on the contrast between, on the one hand, religion and morality conceived as inflexible rules that lack any rational basis or gratify the human taste for cruelty, and, on the other, science conceived as the piecemeal understanding of what causes what on the other. The scientific attitude is what he wants to foster.
He was not always eager to tell his readers not to respect nature. Forty years later he commented bitterly on the eagerness of mankind to defile the heavens by putting into orbit satellites that would launch nuclear warheads at the enemy, and he accused the American pragmatist John Dewey of “impiety” in suggesting that nature was somehow infused with human purpose. This is not a simple contradiction. At no time did Russell think that nature provided a moral standard or was itself a source of norms for our conduct; when he denounces “respect” in What I Believe, that is the point he is making. At the same time he always found the vast emptiness of the universe deeply moving – terrifying and consoling at the same time. That emotion has led many readers to decide that Russell was despite himself a deeply religious thinker. If so, he was one of many religious thinkers who have found all actual religions repulsively inadequate to the sentiments they purport to express.
This is an edited extract of the introduction to What I Believe: Routledge Great Minds by Bertrand Russell, published by Routledge.
