Books: Bright-Eyed Rationalism

NEW HOPES FOR A CHANGING WORLD (213 pp.)—Bertrand Russell—Simon & Schuster ($3).

Like any full-time heavyweight thinker, British Philosopher Bertrand Arthur William Russell juggles many kinds of ideas, some sound, and some mere sound. Sifting them apart has kept his critics in a dither for half a century, and may furrow posterity’s brow even longer. The Socialist earl, now 79, has taken all knowledge for his sphere and kicked it around like a soccer ball.

Euclid & God. Even as a boy, he disliked rules. He mastered geometry at eleven, but resented having to accept the axioms of Euclid. Years later, this spark of rebellion touched off an explosive book, Principia Mathematica, in which he and the late great Alfred North Whitehead treated mathematics as “a branch of logic,” and armed philosophers with a complex thinking tool known as “symbolic logic.”

Wide-ranging in his interests, Russell got fed up with mathematics, began applying his own brand of logic to social problems. His friendship with Sidney and Beatrice Webb led him into Fabian Socialism. Bit by bit, he gave away every shilling of his inherited income of £600 a year. He felt “that it was not right for a Socialist to have a private income.” Russell never lacked the courage of his unconventional convictions. In World War I he was a pacifist, and paid for it with his Cambridge teaching post, his personal library, and six months in jail.

A decade later, with the second of his three wives, Russell launched one of England’s first (and fiercest) progressive schools. Its motto might have been: “Education without representation is tyranny.” The children frolicked about in the nude, attended classes voluntarily, once voted to abolish bedtime. According to one story, the local rector knocked on the school door one day, and when he was greeted by a stark-naked nine-year-old girl, spluttered, “Good God!” Retorted the child, as she slammed the door: “There is no God.”

Adultery & C.C.N.Y. Russell’s views on sex and marriage raised eyebrows, temperatures, and the sales of his books on two continents. A man whose own marriages had proved something of a trial, he was a staunch advocate of trial marriage. The purpose of marriage, he said, is primarily to make a home for children. The more deeply the parents are in love, the better, but if that cannot be, then “infidelity in such circumstances ought to form no barrier whatever to subsequent happiness, and in fact it does not, where the husband and wife do not consider it necessary to indulge in melodramatic orgies of jealousy.”

In 1940 a Brooklyn housewife, affronted by such unorthodox sentiments, sued successfully to bar Bertrand Russell from his appointment to teach mathematics and logic at the College of the City of New York. In a melodramatic orgy of name-calling, his writings were attacked as “lecherous, salacious, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, atheistic, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful and bereft of moral fiber.” Ten years later, the Nobel Prize Committee handed down a dissenting opinion by giving him its 1950 award for literature.

Nearing 80, Bertrand Russell is less of a controversial figure, but still a lively one.

Living in a comfortable house in suburban London, he begins a workday at 8 a.m. with three or four cups of tea, ends it with a straight gin before dinner at 7. In between, he sometimes dictates up to 2,200 words, delivers frequent talks over the BBC, only regrets that he can no longer walk more than five miles at a stretch. Whatever shocks he has left to give to the 20th century he is putting into his autobiography, to be published after his death. There are no shockers in his latest book, New Hopes for a Changing World. In it, Bertrand Russell returns pretty much to the faith of his fathers: 19th century bright-eyed rationalism. Man, as Russell sees it, is perennially engaged in three basic conflicts: 1) against nature, 2) against other men, 3) against himself. To resolve these conflicts, New Hopes proposes an old and basic remedy: the use of reason. Russell proposes to balance the human equation. 70,000 Mouths. Modern man, he thinks, is usually one up on nature, but runaway population growth threatens to wolf up the earth’s natural resources; there are 70,000 more mouths to feed every day, 25 million more every year. The Russell solution: universal birth control. “So far as this matter is concerned there is less superstition in the East than in Massachusetts or Connecticut.”

On a global scale, the conflict of man against man means World War III. Nationalism is today “the chief force making for the extermination of the human race.” The Russell solution: “A single Government for the whole planet.” But he concedes that “world Government is not possible unless Communism is overthrown or conquers the whole world.” No friend of the Soviet system, Russell prefers the first alternative, but he feels that the Iron Curtain might melt quicker before a flow of Western goods than a flow of invective.

Modern man, says Russell, is his own worst enemy because he is riddled with fears. The Russell solution is, in effect, the Bible’s:

“Love casteth out fear . . .” But in his comfortable belief that reason is the sure path to virtue and happiness, Russell seems to end up in the shallow company of those who, in T. S. Eliot’s words:

. . . constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and

within

By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.