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.”
Liberal ideals, which have their modern roots in the empiricist philosophy of Locke, would urge principled toleration, willing participation in the global community—a sort of “good neighbor” approach to foreign affairs—and a willingness to adapt and change in the face of supporting evidence rather than a dogged reactionism. Russell writes:
Our confused and difficult world needs various things if it is to escape disaster, and among these one of the most necessary is that, in the nations which still uphold Liberal beliefs, these beliefs should be wholehearted and profound, not apologetic towards dogmatisms of the right and of the left, but deeply persuaded of the value of liberty, scientific freedom, and mutual forbearance. For without these beliefs life on our politically divided but technically unified planet will hardly continue to be possible.
What we see in America today is an Executive who praises unscientific Christianity and faith-based governance, who earnestly espouses isolationism in the name of “coalition building,” who would openly wage war with a country in the “Axis of Evil” that is supposedly known to have and to be willing to use weapons of mass destruction without ever providing any evidence to the public that such actions are directly related to the “War on Terror.” We are offered some small consolation, however. It is not entirely with tongue in cheek that Russell writes:
After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
…
On a somewhat related note: I finished Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Despite excessive preaching of her rather progressive brand of Christian theology, the youngest Brontë offers a vivid and delightful portrait of a strong and willful woman torn between Christian duty and her love for her child. The language is rich and engaging, the psychology honest and penetrating, and the story refreshing in its originality. In true Victorian fashion, the plot ties itself nicely into a well-composed bow at the end; in a wholly unnatural display of divine justice in this world, the wicked suffer, and those who live, live happily ever after. Yet it is the narrative and character that shine through and recommend The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as one of the best books I have ever had the pleasure to read.
NP: Björk, Scatterheart
Russell is right about liberalism representing the scientific view, and you are right in saying that Bush advocates a fundamentally non-liberal, evangelical Christian view. However, he is fundamentally incorrect in suggesting that Hitler was not of the same scientific viewpoint. Indeed all of the great tyrants of the right and left in the 19th and 20th centuries were heavily steeped in scientific ideology. Science, when incorrectly applied out of its area, almost necessarily leads to tyranny. The difficulty is that science is beyond good and evil, which is okay when studying physics, but certainly not okay when governing persons. Devoid of a moral foundation the scientific ruler is either motivated by goals of power or efficiency, because these goals have the merits of scientific measurability in ways that moral well being does not. Even the “good” scientific rulers (e.g., Bill Clinton) are motivated by a hedonistic calculus wherein some persons (namely unborn persons and the terminally ill) literally do not count.
There can be another division then between ruler then besides just left and right. Some believe in good and evil, and some don’t in this classification we can place Clinton with Mao and Hitler (and Schroeder and Blair and Bismark), and we can place Bush with Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. (and with Regan and Tsar Nicholas II and Hamilton). Abuse can occur in either group. I would suggest that the key difference is the question as to whether or not people believe there is such a thing as moral truth, and this belief alone make Bush a better leader than his predecessor.
If one moves beyond good and evil, then one necessarily moves beyond the beautiful and the ugly. And this speaks to the Garden of Proserpine. It is a beautiful poem, and it is made so neither by inauthenticity on my part nor any sort of trans-valuation I perform on it. It is beautiful in itself. Anyone who disagrees is either wrong, or not sufficiently acculturated to appreciated its beauty. The point it that MY perception doesn’t make it beautiful. Swinburne does. And we can know that only if we are not living beyond good and evil, because in that world melancholy becomes depression, a clinical disease, which needs to be treated because it affects efficiency and productivity.
“He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.” Ps40:2
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Comment by Ben—September 4, 2002 @ 3:29 pm