BERTRAND
RUSSELL
I had been a sort of admirer
of Bertrand Russell long before I read any of his works, and largely on the
basis of information I gleaned from various literary and media sources that he
was fervently anti-Christian and thus a kind of atheist. To me, born a Catholic though struggling
against Baptist inculcation in the Children's Home to which my mother
had cruelly and selfishly dispatched me at the tender age of ten, following the
death of my ethnically protective Catholic grandmother, Russell's antipathy to
Christianity was a kind of crutch and moral support which I badly needed in
order to fortify my own somewhat tenuous position vis-à-vis the various
Protestant assaults (subsequently including High School Anglicanism) on my
over-sensitive sensibility, and I had a small photo of him tacked to the wall
above my bed in the dormitory, where he seemed to occupy the role of a guardian
angel, if a rather unconventional, not to say unlikely, one!
Many years later, when I got around to reading such books as Unpopular Essays, In
Praise of Idleness, The Conquest of Happiness, and the seminal History
of Western Philosophy, he was less of a crutch than a mentor and source of
enlightenment. In fact, I soon realized
that he was one of the greatest prose masters of the English language, not simply
a philosopher or mathematician or political theorist, but a true-born, if
belated, philosophe, meaning someone in the tradition of Diderot,
Voltaire, etc., who is really a combination of a great many intellectual
tendencies and more than the sum of his parts - indeed, a kind of guru and
intellectual homme de lettres.
So much for the praise!
There was also, in due course, criticism and even disillusionment. For this British guru was no messiah, but a
sort of follower of the Antichrist, a man who, in turning against Christianity,
had fallen, like so many others, into the Marxist trap, where he was fated to
remain on a moderately petty-bourgeois level of democratic compromise. Castigated by hard-line Marxists for his
liberalism, it is nevertheless surprising that he should have become a
socialist at all, since of aristocratic lineage. Clearly an earl who is also a Democratic
Socialist is more decadent than genuine, an autocrat in theory or appearance,
but a democrat in practice or essence - a paradoxical and, in this day and age,
not entirely uncommon phenomenon!
For the British cling to feudal traditions and the
administrative structures thereof like virtually no other people on earth, and
it is perhaps ironic that a people who, throughout the duration of their
Empire, acted as a crutch to and liberator from jungle primitivity of so many
backward peoples ... should seemingly be incapable of standing on their own two
political feet and dispensing with such autocratic traditions in the name of
socialist or, at any rate, democratic liberation. When oh when, one asks oneself, will the
British people democratically throw off the monarchic yoke and grow into full
political maturity?
But of course the answer to this highly rhetorical question is:
never! If they are ever liberated from
constitutional monarchy and its aristocratic or feudal accoutrèments, it
will only be either in consequence of closer European integration or through
the efforts of a more radical power following, in all probability, a revolutionary
upheaval, or both. In the meantime, no
serious criticism of the monarchy is permissible for the British people,
despite their ostensible free speech which, contrary to appearances, is really
a rather limited affair appertaining to democratic criteria and to the
continuing service of the bourgeois status quo.
Free within democratic bounds but ... ah! there's
the rub.
For a freedom of speech, whether in or out of print, beyond this
level is perceived as a sort of subversive threat to democratic freedom rather
than as a manifestation of or means to a greater, higher freedom ... such as
accrues, for example, to my own Social Transcendentalist bent. The British are slaves to their parliamentary
democracy and constitutional autocracy, and such they will remain so long as
Yet such sovereignty can only be assured by preventing, at all
costs, both the development of closer European integration and the outbreak of
revolution. Hence the
importance attached by the bourgeoisie to both domestic sovereignty and
international peace. And there
will be others, not least of all among the people, who will say: 'Better alive
under a monarchy than dead without one', as though their own measly little
lives were of more importance than the march of history and the bringing to
pass of a moral-world-order! But what
about the notion: 'Dead because of your having lived under a monarchy (a
peerage, a parliamentary democracy, a
Yes, undoubtedly a hard notion for such people to swallow, but
nonetheless valid for all that! Still, I
am not, after all, the mouth for British ears, so, in
all probability, they won't be obliged to swallow it. Instead they will have to continue swallowing
the lies and half-truths of essentially well-meaning though fundamentally
deluded people like Bertrand Russell, who was passionately opposed to war but
not inclined to the sort of revolutionary activism which might have led to an
end to the domestic situation which, by its very existence, both justifies and
perpetuates war, meaning the bourgeois/aristocratic establishment.
For no matter how futile the attempt may have been, Russell was
himself a part of that establishment and no more disposed to battling it in the
name of republican values than the next peer.
Neither are the great majority of those who live under it disposed to
battling it, if for no other reason than that they prefer to take orders from
above rather than to do their own thing in social self-determination. And even where, in all but a minority of
cases, this isn't the case, there is a slinking suspicion that the battle would
be lost even before it had really begun.
For if they are slaves to tradition, it is because they have masters,
and those masters, whether aristocratic or bourgeois, have generally got the
better of them!
