Russell - A Very Short Indroduction (15 page)

A standard technique for Russell was to refuse to accept a proposition unless there is good reason for doing so. A central part of the case in natural theology for the proposition that God exists (‘natural theology’ means discussion of the concept of deity independently of particular revelations in scripture or mystical experience) is the set of well-known ‘proofs of God’s existence’. Russell discusses them in
Why I Am Not A Christian
(1957, first delivered as lectures in 1927).

One is the First Cause argument, which says that everything has a cause, so there must be a first cause. But this, says Russell, is inconsistent, because if everything has a cause how can the first cause be uncaused? On some views, God is the self-caused cause (in Aristotle, the selfmoved mover), but either this notion is incoherent, or if it denotes something possible, then either the principle of universal causation upon which the whole argument rests is false if causes must be other than their effects (as indeed the principle seems to imply), or, if causes can be their own causes, why should there be only one such?

A second argument draws from the appearance of design in the universe the conclusion that there must be a Designer. But for one thing the appearance of design in things is better explained by evolution, which involves no extra entities in the universe, and fits the empirical data; and for another there is anyway no evidence of
overall
design in the world, where the facts – consistently with the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that the world is in effect decaying – suggest quite the contrary.
A third argument is that there has to be a deity to provide grounds for morality. This will not do, however, because, as Russell elsewhere succinctly argues, ‘Theologians have always taught that God’s decrees are good, and that this is not a mere tautology: it follows that goodness is logically independent of God’s decrees’ (
HSEP
48). It might be added that if the will of a deity is taken to be the ground of morality, then one’s reason for being moral is a prudential one merely; it consists in a desire to escape punishment. But this is hardly a satisfactory basis for the moral life, and anyway threats are not
logically
compelling premisses for any argument.

A related argument, employed by Kant, is that there must be a God to reward virtue and punish evil, because it is clear from experience that in this life virtue is not always or even often guaranteed a reward. But this, says Russell, is like saying that because all the oranges at the top of the crate are rotten, the oranges further down must be good; which is absurd.

Many opponents of religion, while decrying its evil effect in the world as a promoter of persecution and discord, nevertheless find Jesus Christ an attractive figure – Russell did not. He thought him less gentle and compassionate than Buddha and far inferior to Socrates in intellect and character. Some of his behaviour is uncongenial, as when he blasted the fig tree – which could hardly have helped being fruitless, since it was out of season – and threatened to visit eternal agonies on those who would not believe in him. Russell pointed out that for many centuries, just so long as it served the interests of the Church, people were encouraged to believe in the literal truth of these bloodthirsty warnings. But when in a more humane age critics pointed out how repulsive they are, the Church shifted to saying that they are to be understood only metaphorically.

But it is against Christianity as an
organized
phenomenon that Russell most directed his fire. He hated superstition – ‘The Roman Catholic Church holds that a priest can turn a piece of bread into the body and blood of Christ by talking Latin to it’ – and its sheer illogicality – ‘We are told not to work on Saturdays, and Protestants take this to mean that we are not to play on Sundays’. In Russell’s view, Christianity is distinguished above other religions in its readiness for persecution. Christians have harrassed and killed heretics, Jews, freethinkers, and one another; they have drowned, burned, and otherwise murdered thousands of innocent women accused of ‘witchcraft’; and they have blighted the lives of hundreds of millions with their preposterous doctrines about sin and sexuality.

Russell’s weapons in the war on religion were chiefly mockery and disdain. He knew the Bible better than many of his opponents, and could confound them with apt quotation; as when he remarks, in discussing the relative merits of religion and science, that ‘the Bible tells us that the hare chews the cud’, which causes difficulties for fundamentalists faced with zoology. Indeed the contrast between religion and science could not be more marked. Religion deals in absolute and incontrovertible truths which hold good for eternity; science is more cautious and tentative. Religion imposes limits on thought, forbidding enquiry when it conflicts with what the Church lays down; science is open-minded (
Religion and Science
, 14–16). These are telling contrasts. In the face of scientific reason the best that religion can do, when it does not try to remain obdurately fundamentalist, is to reinterpret its scriptures in allegorical vein, and to hide behind the claim that religious truths surpass human understanding.

But although Russell was hostile to religion, he was nevertheless a religious man. This is only a seeming paradox. It is possible to have a religious attitude to life without belief in supernatural beings and occurrences. Such an attitude is one in which appreciation of art, love, and knowledge brings nourishment to the human spirit, and carries with it a sense of awe before the world and those one loves, and a concomitant sense of the immensity of which one is part. In a famous if stylistically overblown essay, ‘A Free Man’s Worship’, written under the influence of the failure of his first marriage and concomitant changes in outlook, Russell sets out just such a vision. But it carries dark qualifications:

when first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of selfassertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world.

(‘A Free Man’s Worship’, 1903, reprinted in
Mysticism and Logic
)

As this shows, the yearning for transcendence – for Spinoza’s dream of an utterly clear, dispassionate, synoptic understanding of all things that will set one free – was always tempered for Russell by the hard facts of suffering in the world. In the ‘Prologue’ to his autobiography he writes: ‘Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward to the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth.’ In his agnostic way, therefore, Russell yearned for the heavens, and strove to find pathways that would lead mankind there.

Education

The chief of those pathways, Russell hoped, was education, which for him was a question of how people should be equipped for life. He did not address himself to administrative details about the provision of schools and universities and the training of teachers, as Sydney and Beatrice Webb might have done, but talked instead of what might be called the spiritual (again, in a secular sense) goals of education. The aim of education, he wrote, is to form character; and the best kind of character is vital, courageous, sensitive, and intelligent, all ‘to the highest degree’. This is how he puts matters in
On Education
, published in 1926, a year before he and Dora founded Beacon Hill School. This book deals mainly with the earliest childhood years, and in his autobiography Russell acknowledges that he was ‘unduly optimistic in his psychology’ and in some ways also ‘unduly harsh’ in the methods he proposed. An example might be the view, adopted from Montessori principles, that if a child behaves badly it should be isolated from other children until it learns to be good. Russell later came to think this a cruel form of discipline.

The book nevertheless contains some sound advice. Starting with the very young, Russell argues that babies should have a regular routine and be provided with as many opportunities for learning as possible, but that any parental anxieties should be carefully concealed lest they ‘pass to the child by suggestion’. This tenet reflects Russell’s belief that since anxiety is not instinctive among other higher mammals, its appearance in children must be the result of their learning it from adults. At the same time he reminded readers not to martyr themselves to parenthood, but to strike an appropriate balance between their own interests and those of their children.

Russell believed that knowledge is in itself both liberating and a safeguard against fear. A lively interest in outward things – a central theme also of his
Conquest
of
Happiness –
is a powerful help to courageous and joyous living. Russell also advises on how to promote truthfulness and generosity: not by relying on punishment of their opposites – since what might on the face of things seem to be, say, lying might in fact be the exercise of imagination – but by encouraging the positive traits when they appear. It was in this regard, as he later recognized, that he might have been too optimistic about the psychology of the young. His experience as a schoolmaster soon taught him that children are capable of wickedness, and that if wickedness is left unpunished it can, as in
Lord of the Flies
, grow monstrous.

But even in these early views Russell was not wedded to
laissez-faire
principles, especially not in connection with study. He believed that the acquisition of habits of self-discipline and concentration would prove liberating in the long run, and although he argued that the attention of children should be engaged by attracting rather than coercing them to their schoolwork, he was not against applying their noses to the grindstone when necessary. Children should be able to read by the age of 5, he said, and should make an early start on a couple of languages. The rudiments of mathematics need drilling, and it should be given. Poetry and plays can be enjoyed at primary school age, but real appreciation of literature only comes later. Classics, history, and science come later still; by this stage the pupil, after having tried these subjects, should choose whichever seems most interesting, and follow it up for himself or herself (
OE
18–162).

These views on the curriculum are conventional enough. What was not conventional, and therefore caused scandal at the time, was what Russell had to say about sex education. Instant legends sprang up about Beacon Hill School; a representative tale has a bishop arriving at the door and exclaiming, on being met by a naked child, ‘My God!’, to which the naked child replies, ‘There is no God’. But in fact all Russell argued was that children should not be made anxious about their bodies, and should therefore be calmly informed of the mechanics of sex before puberty arrives, a good reason for the early start being that they will not therefore learn about sex in inappropriate and fevered ways. In surprisingly conventional line with medical opinion of the day Russell

10.
Russell was shocked by the severity of bullying at Beacon Hill School. He saw it as a microcosm of the brutal behaviour of adults and as an indication that nationalism and war are inevitabilities of the human condition.
was doubtful whether masturbation is a good thing, so on this matter at

least he can hardly be accused of dangerous opinions.

Five years later, after first-hand experience in his own school, Russell wrote
Education and the Social Order
(1931). In it he held to most of what he had said in
On Education
, but now labelled it the ‘negative’ theory and admitted that it needed supplementation. The negative theory says that the task in education is to provide opportunities and remove barriers so that children can develop in their own ways. Russell now saw that what is further required is that children should receive positive instruction in getting along with others. He had been shocked by episodes of bullying at Beacon Hill, and saw it as a microcosm of the brutal behaviour of adults, and indeed of whole nations. His anxiety that irrationality and aggression are innate was deepened by the experience, and it made him despair for the world because it seemed to suggest that nationalism and war are inevitabilities of the human condition.