I’ve just started re-reading Russell’s Unpopular Essays. I was torn between Russell and Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which has been sitting unread on my shelf for far longer than I care to admit. Ultimately, I chose to re-read the Essays because in them Russell offers prescient and portentous arguments on the dangers of dogmatic authoritarianism, not unlike that espoused by the present Bush administration. While Bush and Co. haven’t exactly delineated their motivating principles (quite the contrary: they’ve been careful to mask them with some nominal commitment to vague “democratic” values based in weakly Christian “ideals,” whereby citizens may be held indefinitely, without charge, under unmonitored conditions and wars may be waged without congressional approval or sanction), neither have they eschewed the anti-scientific moralism that has been the biggest deterrent to critical liberalism for the past three millennia. In “Philosophy and Politics,” Russell notes that, “The scientific outlook… is the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism.”

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