About four years ago, I picked up my first Bertrand Russell book in a library, a collection of essays centered around his "Why I am not a Christian". I already had some experience with sceptical writing, and not coincidentally, I had some experience with disappointment with such writing. I thought I had something in the way of high standards, and I opened books with low expectations. Well, I had not yet read Bertrand Russell, so I might be forgiven this youthful vanity.
What made me a `Russellian' is the tremendous clarity and comprehensiveness of Russell's writing. While reading "Why I am not a Christian", I mentally parsed through potential objections and qualifications, only to have them answered in the next paragraph or sentence. This thoroughly enjoyable experience has been repeated with the help of his other works. Though Russell's prose is most often praised for its clarity and simplicity - one of Orwell's maxims of good writing - his best quality is that amazing coherency and anticipation of objections. It is no small matter to be both comprehensive and clear while staying concise. No wonder the man received a Nobel Prize in Literature; no wonder he remains an authoritative figure in the intellectual world; no wonder he remains High Bogeyman of the pop apologists. And the works in Sceptical Essays are squarely within the Russellian tradition of forceful clarity, relentless reasoning, and felt humanism.
The modern sceptic should not expect to read this work unchallenged. As John Gray notes in his introduction to this edition, Bertrand Russell does not merely hit soft targets, such as traditional religion and superstition. He questions the methodologies of science itself in the Humean tradition. Though Gray's facile misrepresentation of Russell's position, that science rests on faith, is an overstatement - and by knowing some of the anti-humanist work of Gray, I see the roots of this as a desire for certain false equivalences - Russell recognizes that one cannot be too confident in the results of science. During the time of writing, Russell only saw the practical results of science as its power; the problems of induction and causation remained intractable. And so Russell concluded that the truth of science was a truth of pragmatism, and potentially a quite dangerous one at that. For the finding of a more satisfactory, rational basis for the sciences, Russell looked to the future. (For the interested, the philosophy of science has flourished since the time of writing. I think of advances in probabilism in particular.) Despite the epistemological authority enjoyed by science, scientists and modern sceptics who rely heavily on science should attend to the problems presented by Russell. To do otherwise would be missing the point of scepticism.
Above all else, these essays focus on sceptical thinking in matters of daily concern, such as education, technology, and politics. As far as politics is concerned, Russell joins Orwell, A.J. Ayer, Chomsky, and (sometimes) Hitchens in the `rationalist left' tradition, as opposed to what we might call the `irrationalist left', e.g. relativism, religious socialism, and the plagues of fellow-traveling and conspiracism. There is an emphasis on universalism in moral principles which center on human desires, even if the basis of morality is ultimately subjective. Russell draws on his travel experience in "Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness" to compare and contrast the same, praising the more decent customs - these often being alien to the Western tradition. Russell strongly criticizes conventional morality throughout this collection. In "The Harm that Good Men Do", for example, he states the following: "Official morality has always been oppressive and negative: it has said `thou shalt not', and has not troubled to investigate the effect of activities not forbidden by the code" (p.99).
Russell sought to address the problems of his time and to anticipate the problems of the future. In "The Recrudescence of Puritanism", Russell diagnoses the problem of popular moral absolutism: "Unfortunately, the love of power which is the natural outcome of Puritan self-denial makes the Puritan more executive than other people, and makes it difficult for others to resist him" (p.107). In "The Need for Political Scepticism", he recognizes that parties seek division rather than cooperation (p.110), the need to acknowledge and value expertise in the political sphere (p.113), the increased need for international cooperation consequent to advances in technology and industry (p.119), the dependency of press and educational reform on political reform (p.120), and a need for increased transparency (p.122). In "Free Thought and Official Propaganda", Russell documents the filtering of free-thought by norms and the desires of power and how propaganda harms rational inquiry. "The Danger of Creed Wars" serves as a wonderful counterexample to those who thought that secularization would destroy the threat of dogmatic violence. Who can say that these issues have not remained relevant?
The works do have some deficiencies. Though he does not use it to deeply wrongheaded ends, Russell places too much confidence in psychoanalysis. This also occurs in his otherwise excellent History of Western Philosophy, among other places. Some of the essays feature arguments which are of little more than historical interests to the average reader, such as "Behaviorism and Values" and "Machines and the Emotions", but these do not detract from the quality of the collection.
A (mostly) timeless treat from a great analyst and historian. Five stars.
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- Amazon CustomerReviewed in Canada on July 11, 2017
Great book, very interesting ideas
