Unpopular Essays

Joseph Stalin loomed large in the world of power politics when Unpopular Essays was published in 1950. With the arrival of the atomic bomb, Bertrand Russell found that too disturbing to ignore. In his essay “The Future of Mankind” he proposes an action that amazes, coming as it does from a man jailed for his pacifism during World War I. It is the most un-populating idea on display in his “unpopular” essays.

Russell saw just three possibilities:
1. End of human life, perhaps of all life on our planet.
2. Reversion to barbarism after catastrophic diminution of global population.
3. Unification of the world under a single government possessing a monopoly of all major weapons of war.
Naturally he preferred the third possibility. Who show more wouldn’t? The problem was that Stalin’s way of governing might become the single government. Russell thought that would be “an appalling disaster.”

Believing that “mutual suspicion between Russia and the West” would prevent any genuine agreement guaranteeing peace, Russell proposed that the governments of the English-speaking nations form alliances with as many other nations as possible and when strong enough threaten Russia with war. He believed “the resulting war, if it happened fairly soon, would probably…enable the victorious alliance…to make peace secure.”

It isn’t often that a renowned pacifist advocates preemptive world war. I hand it to him. I was surprised.

I wonder if Curtis LeMay, the famously aggressive head of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, knew of Russell’s essay. I think it would have pleased him. In Dark Sun, by Richard Rhodes, we learn LeMay remarked in an interview that “There was a time in the 1950s when we could have won a war against Russia…because their defenses were pretty weak.” He also was quoted, by one of his reconnaissance pilots, as saying “maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.” And in a lecture at the National War College, according to Rhodes, LeMay pointed out that in an atomic war with Russia victory “would have been reached in the first few days.”

He tried, Bertrand. He tried.

Not all Russell’s essays have doomsday reverberations but all have interesting thoughts. Readers will find that sometimes he is surprising, sometimes amusing, sometimes analytical or sympathetic, and sometimes annoyingly superior in his conceits. Most will find, I think, a number of thoughts anyone would do well to keep in mind. One that must be a favorite of many: “The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: they are held tentatively…[because] new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.” Another, harder one: “Be wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem.”

Disposed though Russell was to making the occasional statement whose truth he neglects even to try to demonstrate, Unpopular Essays is nonetheless a call to insist on such demonstrations, to distrust those who pride themselves on intellectual or demagogic malpractice, and above all to realize that letting fear become our guide is to give birth to impulses of cruelty, to justify those cruelties, to accept superstition instead of inconvenient fact, and consequently fail in the great aspiration “to act humanely” and “think sanely.” The pressures to fail that way will always be present and heavy. Let’s resist them, he urges. Will we? show less

I am not sure where this book came from, but I recently found it in my office when I was packing up to vacate for summer renovations. I had read a few short things by Russell, but never an entire book. This collection of essays was, to my mind, uneven. However, the ones I liked I read and thoroughly enjoyed. The others I skipped after a few paragraphs.
The first is “Philosophy and Politics.” It was a bit too political for me. I haven’t read much PP since college back in the 60s, and I don’t plan to read much more. This essay reminded me why.
A really good one was “Philosophy for the Laymen.” Russell could take some arcane ideas and boil them down to a clearly understandable sentence. I won’t even try and summarize show more Hegel’s theory of “The Absolute Idea,” but Russell explains it as “pure thought about pure thought.” That makes sense, to me at least.
My favorite, however, was “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish.” Russell takes on everything here – religion, astrology, sex, history, politics, et al. This is the longest essay in the collection and well worth the price of admission.
Not for everyone, but it will take a proud place on my rationalist book shelf. 4 stars.
--Jim, 11/21/07 show less

"I think that the evils that men inflict on each other, and by reflection upon themselves, have their main source in evil passions rather than in ideas or beliefs. But ideas and principles that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions. In Lisbon when heretics were publicly burned, it sometimes happened that one of them, by a particularly edifying recantation, would be granted the boon of being strangled before being put into the flames. This would make the spectators so furious that the authorities had great difficulty in preventing them from lynching the penitent and burning him on their own account. The spectacle of the writhing torments of the victims was, in fact, one of the principal pleasures to which show more the populace looked forward to enliven a somewhat drab existence. I cannot doubt that this pleasure greatly contributed to the general belief that the burning of heretics was a righteous act. [emphasis mine] The same sort of thing applies to war. People who are vigorous and brutal often find war enjoyable, provided that it is a victorious war and that there is not too much interference with rape and plunder. This is a great help in persuading people that wars are righteous."

Bertrand Russell: "Ideas that have harmed mankind" in Essays show less