Bookchat: Buying Bertrand Russell on my way to Japan

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Bertrand Russell may not be as well-known as he once was, but he still stands as one of England’s great philosophers, and an influential writer and teacher. Russell, who won the 1950 Nobel Prize of Literature in a rare double Award year (alongside another little literary figure most readers might have heard of, William Faulkner), is perhaps most famous for his strenuous yet-ultimately-failed joint effort with A.N. Whitehead to provide a complete set of axioms and inference rules from which all of mathematics could be derived. This lofty goal to formulate a logically consistent foundation for all of mathematics ultimately failed, and the incompleteness theory prevailed, but it remains a watershed in the field of mathematical logic, notably spending several hundred pages to prove the validity of the proposition 1+1=2.

Among his sixty books, Russell is better known for his books on religion and morals, such as Why I am Not Christian, and Marriage and Morals. Unfortunately, I have not yet read any of Russell’s more renown book-length works, and yet, even as it must appear a footnote in the career of the great writer, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), the book I am writing about, is an impressive if at times incomplete-feeling set of proposals (much like his set of mathematical axioms). The book is by turns both witty and pithy, as Russell tries to address a multitude of arguments and counter-arguments in service of defining a universal and logical set of Ethics. Russell provides a very bare outline, with at times glaring incompleteness that the author himself alludes to, but in exchange, the tome is a light 239 pages, and its ideas are more than interesting enough to engage with.

Now, given the book is already a very condensed summary of some intentionally broad axiom for ethics, (and the book is written for popular consumption rather than as serious, academic philosophy) it seems to me to be impossible to produce a much more concise version than Russell already does without misrepresenting Russell through elision. Such an elided and technical explanation is less interesting (and useful) than the context of the book, why it spoke to me; how books come into our lives and what alters the impact they make on us as readers.

I bought the book in January 2017, in the best kind of used bookstore (one filled with narrow winding bookshelves all crammed with books, more books stacked on top of them, some in stacks on floor; a literal cave system of books whose organizational system defies explanation) in Houston on my way back to Japan from Louisiana. My grandfather and I arranged so that we could spend a day in Houston together before my flight back to Haneda Airport, (which left at 10PM) and so we drove to Houston the night before, ate at a wonderful Mexican restaurant, and the next day went book-shopping and then spent 3-4 hours drinking coffee and playing scrabble at a table in a busy post-Holiday Starbucks quite near the Galleria Mall complex, oblivious to the puzzled stares of busy suburbanite shoppers and young businessmen and techies with their computers and IPads, ensconced in their more serious affairs at other tables, all of them with a this-is-not-quite-what-Starbucks-is-for-is-it? look on their faces. I love bookstores, and in truth, the only limiting factor for me at the time was my near maxed weight limit on my luggage, so I reluctantly bought only 2 books (the other, for reference, is Darkness Visible by another British Nobel Laureate, William Golding, better known of course, for Lord of the Flies).

What was it, that out of thousands of books, pulled me so roughly into a relatively obscure work by Bertrand Russell? Donald Trump’s election as President had really shaken me, and not in the sense of ideological disapproval, as say I would have been ideologically upset and frustrated had Mitt Romney won, or had Marco Rubio won out in 2016. The election marked a changing point—nay it codified a change in American society and discourse years and years in the making, but which I was desperate to pretend wasn’t real. The post-election angst brought a distinct sense of having some fundamental conception of both decency, intelligence, and indeed, absolutely everything I believed politics was about in a democracy: competency, self-control, intelligence, detailed knowledge, ability to sell a coherent and positive program of action, and most importantly, a fundamentally positive agenda and positive views about America. I had a lingering sense of melancholy and a feeling of being unmoored, as all my expectations and things I thought I understood about politics, polling, prognostication were thoroughly disproved in a way that prompted some serious identity-searching. Something fundamental in logic, something rooted so deep in my assumptions that it is practically embedded in my identity, was shattered and  I was left looking at a world that defied my attempts to understand it, and, I daresay, Russell himself would have seen as the epitome of failed logic.

I am person prone to gloominess, but I also am prone to thinking, and to turning over topics that bother me like a rough stone, constantly polishing and polishing until the thought has been made clean and smooth. In this frame of mind, I saw Bertrand Russell’s name, and recognizing it, picked up the book for a quick glance. In the opening pages I found a sense of profound ease and comfort; an ability to read, think, and consider issues of ethics and politics without the confusion of the mob or myriad irrational subjective assertions. I read the attempt to propose humanistic ethics from a pure, reason-based, rational framework and enjoyed the quiet space, similar to a library, of its framework and authorial style. In the preface, two quotes in particular convinced me I had to own and read the entire work, ““Reason” has a perfectly clear and precise meaning. It signifies the choice of the right means to an end that you wish to achieve” (8), and a comment that seemed to me sharply prescient of contemporary America and for which I felt a personal kinship to, “I suppose the advocates of unreason think that there is a better chance of profitably deceiving the populace if they keep it in a state of effervescence. Perhaps it is my dislike of this sort of process which leads people to say that I am unduly rational” (10).

Life intervened, and it wasn’t until two years until that I finally returned to the book that had tugged my heart so strongly that January day in Houston. I returned to Russell having been frustrated time and again of trying to argue ethical ends of politics in the age of Fake News and Trumpism. The effervescent, brilliant manner in which Russell’s writing elided this discussion by ignoring debates about facts to try and establish through impersonal and logical discussions, what Ends all politics should work towards as a means. In particular, one statement from Russell has proved to be a shining gem of hope; an elegant manifesto in a world increasingly broken, mistrustful, and facing pernicious threats from technology and the lack of human wisdom. When Russell writes

The world in which we find ourselves is one where great hopes and appalling fears are equally justified by the possibilities. The fears are very generally felt, and are tending to produce a world of listless gloom. The hopes, since they involve imagination and courage, are less vivid in most men’s minds. It is only because they are not vivid that they seem utopian. Only a kind of mental laziness stands in the way. If this can be overcome, mankind has a new happiness within its grasp. (21)

I envied Russell the world, with its somewhat simple bipolar geopolitical calculus and the easy-to-understand dangers of atomic bombs, in which he found himself and found those words more prescient than ever over 60 years after they were first written; a great rarity in works dealing with politics and ethics. Russell was facing a world of two nuclear superpowers, suspicious of each other and engaged in a global power struggle in the dusk of two devastating conflicts. Russell saw his world on the precipice, one that could result in the end of civilization or the end of the human species. I believe ever-increasingly specific forms of control and influence driven by algorithms and technological mapping- f human life and society, that human freedom and the end of the human as a human is the precipice my generation faces, with the great risks and even greater potentialities that entails, but the threats amorphous, hard to understand and even harder to visualize, unlike the quite visceral immediacy of the horror of Hiroshima.

Russell proposes a series of assertions for how ethics can be asserted, given that Ethics seem so fundamentally subjective, and how one can create an Ethics that applies universally. The first thing, for Russell, is to abandon any other conception of humanity other than as the human species; race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, these things are all irrelevant in the grand history and destiny of humanity. Happiness should be the goal of all ethical action, and a happiness the access to which is as evenly distributed to all the humans of the world as possible given individual freedom and differences in individual ability. To that end, there is no Right or Wrong, which are subjective terms, but rather only Good and Bad, Good being what causes pleasure, and Bad being that which causes pain or discomfort. The General Good, then, is that which increases the net sum of happiness in the world, and as such, any action that increases that happiness, or, in certain instances, decreases it the least out of all possible actions, is, objectively, the proper Ethical action to take. Some goods are not compatible with the general good, and must be prohibited or regulated through both legal, educational, and social means. Russell calls a good whose attainment does not interfere in others' attainment of happiness, compossible, and as such, it logically follows that the aim of politics and other human endeavors is to increase compossible goods (it is not enough to make one group happy merely by abusing another group). This is encompassed in Russell’s concept of Ethical Oughtness: the ethical judgement of ought, of preferencing compossible goals and compossible happiness's.

The essential presumption that Russell makes, and which he argues well, but not so logically or philosophically defensibly as he pretends (particularly for such a key axiom) is that given two hypothetical worlds, a world in which a humans are happy (not just comfortable, but happy; there is a not entirely satisfying or air-tight argument about why the two are different), and one in which they suffer, people fundamentally prefer the happy scenario. All ethical systems, then, more or less work to produce a good outcome or the best possible outcome. Problems emerge from incomplete systems; from an ethics that fails acknowledge the universality of humanness, instead invoking religion, nationality, or race as some substitute goal, or believing in irrational and unscientific means, such as sacrificing your enemies or sacrificing your children to the God Moloch, in order to gain prosperity for the society as a whole. One analogy that remained striking to me (as an undergraduate level scholar of the Holocaust), was the contention that there is a non-scientific sense that every person can distinguish between matters of taste that are subjective and those that are fundamental to the human experience; one of a number of logically unsatisfying and incomplete axioms in Russell’s universal ethical rules. Russell’s example is more or less: if I adore oysters and you hate oysters, we agree that this is taste, but should I find the Nazi gas chambers reprehensible and you find them an excellent idea, we will not accept this disagreement as a matter of taste. Russell brings up this example to declare that while it is leap of logic, a gap in logical consideration—that there is something in human beings that makes this distinction an impulse of human behavior and psychology even if we don't understand the function or the rules, and thus, Russell reluctantly concludes, deserving of a certain weight, even if he can't totally refute the argument saying ethics are subjective arguments of taste if you remove ontological arguments relying on God to construct objectivity.

Russell is more or less trying to boil down some universal and logical deductions about human ethics. Humans as animals desire their own pleasure and comfort over their discomfort and pain, and from this axiom, Russell, and us as readers, conclude that, given that man is imperfectly gregarious, social and legal limitations should focus on increasing humanities' net happiness and restraining impulses where they are harmful. Russell optimistically concludes a free-thinking, well-educated populace and a politics that functions according to logic rather than feelings is necessary to avoid extinction. What’s most fascinating about these ideas is how potent they feel today, and how incredibly far away they seem from the way education actually works and from the actual attentiveness and intensity of voters in democracies. Concurrently to this aura of unattainability is a sense of admiration—even peace of mind and clear-headedness—that comes with reading Russell, as he relates a world government as merely a logical outcome of this system; inevitable, unbiased, and the best instrument to maximize compossible interests. According to Russell, the nation has reached its limitations in the history of civilization and must be succeeded by the truly global, open, liberal democracy of free thinking, education, and logic, rather than the emotional and impulsive, petty discourses of local groups working only for their groups’ self-interest. Russell has many such similar propositions in the thin book, all phrased with a brilliant ability to make them seem like utterly natural conclusions, almost as if you made them yourself by adding a string of digits. Russell has a unique talent for avoiding leftist moralizing in favor of calculations that seem to arise naturally from a core set of propositions defining Good and defining Right action (and that these things exist on a sliding scale of intensity). Russell even argues eloquently that the vast majority of human aims, whether American and NATO, or Soviet Bloc, are the same. What distinguishes humans from one another is not their ends, but their means, and politics is defined by its inability to argue proper means in a logically coherent fashion (on a completely unrelated topic, I wish I could read what Russell would think about our debates and inaction on climate change and environmental pollution).

While unpacking Russell’s views on Christianity, (essential to really getting into his argument on why religion and sin aren’t sufficient tools for the ends of human happiness), is a topic for another post and one that would also need to reference a broader reading of his writings on the subject, Russell also makes snide potshots at a number of philosophers that end up being represented as simpletons or idiots at best. There was a running strain, I felt, of Russell making sweeping summaries of the works of philosophers he either did not understand well, or at some level seemed to profoundly misunderstand. Speaking more to my sensitivities perhaps, but the most objectionable moment I had in the entire book was Russell summarizing what various philosophers had said on ethics and summarized Nietzsche, sounding for all the world like he had only read the abominable (most likely cobbled together and rewritten by his sister to please Nazis), The Will to Power, rather than any of his more important (and subtle, complex works), like Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Beyond Good and Evil—despite the fact that Russell rather clearly parrots a key concept of Nietzsche’s, namely that ethical distinctions and ideas of rightness follow power relations of dominant groups (on page 82 in particular). Then again, Russell also gave one of the worst and most misguided summaries I’ve yet seen of Hegel in the same passage of text, and also caricaturized Marx in ways that, regardless of his [Russell's] accurate intuitions and feelings about Stalin and the Soviet Union, are not fair or representative to Marx. These blatant—tongue in cheek as the intent may be—potshots seem disrespectful and altogether out of place; tacked on so as to gather attention, but ultimately unimportant and better off removed. Even though a very short book, one filled with pithy (sassy) wisdom, what in modern lingo would be called snark, and excellent use of examples and parables, I often felt Russell’s prose flailed between topics, sometimes without a clear rhyme or reason. Russell would drop one topic or thought right upon proposing it, and despite its importance, forget to return to it, instead fleeting along a string of subsequent thoughts. A more strident editor and additional authorial strictness, would have benefited this particular work of philosophy at times; bringing in its broad discourses, returning it to focus on the concepts and ideas of the most interest and relevance and also to fully expound upon examples and arguments it introduces related to key topics. Instead it comes off very much like a late-career work, one cobbling together decades of scattered musings and jottings into a post-Nobel Prize addendum to the author’s lifelong project as an intellectual.

One last, glaring flaw is the casual resort to the most galling, simplistic, and at times (such as with indigenous peoples of the Americas) simple, unexamined racism of many of the work's examples. Russell makes the mistake again and again of invoking other ethnic groups' cultural practices and misrepresented historical examples even though he lacks any and all qualification to talk about them, instead showing his elite, 19th Century British upbringing and colonialist mindset (Russell was born in the 1870s and raised by his much older grandmother). Without dragging the text fully out of context, the eminent philosopher displays a glaring lack of reflection or understanding of his biases, and that he had not properly studied serious works of history and anthropology available even in the 1940s and 1950s that someone seeking to make these kinds of ethical parables for a universal ethics should have read. Russell in this case and in the in-book prickly responses to critiques and perceived wrongs many years old at the time of writing, shows a kind of reflexive, ungoverned bias, wrapped in many layers of privilege and entirely unexamined by the author himself. It is quite an odd thing for a brilliant and systematic philosopher to have systematic and unexamined faults in thinking, and obvious biases. I am not putting a dead man from another century to trial by modern social media (a wholly unwarranted course of action), but Russell’s views and writings on colonialism are inconsistent and iffy at best, and he often displayed startling racism towards Native American and indigenous groups and support for varying forms of cultural genocide as well as preferencing the scientific tyranny of eugenics. In short, Russell’s progressivism and concept of logic tend to be dogmatic and to embrace assimilation and universalism, rather than interpretive frameworks and multiculturalism. Russell, for all his admirable traits (his generally anti-war politics and socialism), has to be read in a context of his shortcomings, just as books of fiction and philosophy are there to study and learn from, not to admire uncritically as people and works.

The prose in Human Society however, is remarkable for the intense empathy paired with a visceral reaction to cruelty and a frustration with hypocrisy and all things that create unhappiness and strife in the world. For Russel, it is not that Christianity fails to obey some scientific law or logical standard that makes him livid—it is that Christianity totally fails to adhere to its own internal moral codes, so that “When Christ told men that they should love each other, He produced such fury that the mob shouted, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” Christians ever since have followed the mob rather than the founder of their religion” (155-156). Russell is similarly disdainful of politicians embracing war and preaching the need to legislate social morality, and of military men declaring that faith is a very important and necessary thing for men who might drop atomic bombs to have. The reason d’être for Russell’s project on ethics is directed at politics and politicians, and indirectly at educating readers and putting pressure towards a better politics than the irrational gamesmanship he saw in the Cold War, and the work is best read with that lens in mind.

For me, there was a certain sense of connection I felt for the comment “All this [global cooperation, peace, and happiness] would happen very quickly if men desired their own happiness as ardently as they desire the misery of their neighbors” (173). Why? Unlike many on the Left, I have an intimate acquaintance with Red America, I am a mad Cajun after all, and I saw much of Trump’s campaign firsthand through my own social networks. What struck me, and I should say left a lingering foul taste, was the lack of any sincere belief in a positive political program—few were the Trump supporters I saw and interacted with who actually thought he would improve their lives and find policies to fix the things that ailed them. What motivated most to support him was a visible, gleeful zeal to induce misery on others; to taunt people from a different mindset or different background. I saw very little in the way of “Trump has the ideas that are going to my life better” but quite a bit in the way of “Trump will make the people who aren’t like me, or who I don’t like, miserable, like those same people made me miserable.” It is perhaps one of the most profound and difficult to deal with problems not just in American politics, but in global populist politics: a politics of petty small-mindedness, nationalism, feelings over logical thinking and reactions over consideration—the antithesis of everything Russell is trying to counter with an ethical system based on the simple proposition that the core component of every action Ought to be increasing or protecting as much as possible the net human happiness of all human beings on Earth full-stop.

A wise humanity, in politics as elsewhere, comes only of remembering that even the largest groups are composed of individuals, that individuals can be happy or sad, and that every individual in the world who is suffering represents a failure of human wisdom and of common humanity. (234)

When we read books, we do not read them for their context, we read them for our own context. Each work, whether history or philosophy or fantasy, might as well be a mirror for how dependent it is on our hidden invisible face, the face of a period in time and its circumstances. An excellent book is defined by the ability to have many contexts, a face for all seasons. Russell was, at least, a balm and solution to many confusions for our modern politics. I turned over his ethical judgments, his comments, many times not to consider the long-passed contemporary issues Russell is directly concerned with, but my own. Reading Russell helped piece together some broken sense in me of Ought, of how to deal with Fake News and Trumpism. As someone very similar to Russell in some areas, it was a breath of fresh-air to find a like-minded person, to read and by looking at very broad and general arguments, to get away from the endless minutia of minor fights in the American politics I follow so closely—to have the sense of scanning things from the mountaintop, with all the relief and detail that such a position entails. How radical, the proposition of universal empathy as a rational axiom of being human, and how uplifting, the final passage of hope amidst the author’s deep pessimism (it is no wonder that Russell quietly praised the Nobel Speech of William Faulkner at the Nobel Banquet, after Faulkner's hard-to-hear, nervous rambling presentation left the room mostly confused and led to only scattered applause). A world where empathy and calm, rational thinking, thinking only concerned with the ends, not of power nor the happiness of some subset of people but net human happiness...Russell was just the palliative my stressed and frustrated mind needed.

Human imagination long ago pictured Hell, but it is only through recent skill that men have been able to give reality to what they had imagined. The human mind is strangely poised between the bright vault of Heaven and the dark pit of Hell. It can find satisfaction in the contemplation of either, and it cannot be said that either is more natural to it than the other.

Sometimes, in moments of horror, I have been tempted to doubt whether there is any reason to wish that such a creature as man should continue to exist. It is easy to see man as dark and cruel, as an embodiment of diabolic power, and as a blot upon the fair face of the universe. But that is not the whole truth, and is not the last word of wisdom.

Man, as the Orphics said, is also the child of the starry heaven. Man, though his body is insignificant and powerless in the comparison with the great bodies of the astronomer’s world, is yet able to mirror that world, is able to travel in imagination and scientific knowledge through enormous abysses of space and time. (237)

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