How can an intelligent man be so silly?

A friend has sent me a video of Bertrand Russell’s 1952 interview, and I enjoyed every one of its 30 minutes.

The enjoyment, I hasten to allay your fears for my sanity, had nothing to do with what he said and everything to do with how he said it. One just doesn’t hear such patrician cadences any longer.

The last person to strangulate every vowel in such an irresistible manner was our late Queen, roughly at the time of Bertie Russell’s interview. Later in life, Her Majesty somewhat flattened out her accent, much to my chagrin.

King Charles took royal pronunciation down another tiny notch, and his children a couple of notches more. If this tendency persists, our future monarchs will sound like Michael Caine or Bob Hoskins, which will be most unfortunate (much as I admire both actors).

The phonetic appeal of Russell’s diction prevented me from doing what I would have done with any other recording of unalloyed rubbish: turn it off after five minutes.

Russell started out his academic career as a mathematician, later switching to philosophy. He had made the transition, he explained, to see if philosophy could lead to religious faith. Instead, it led him to lifelong atheism.

I don’t necessarily believe that a man without faith thereby exhibits a lapse of intelligence. What I found harder to dismiss was Russell’s misunderstanding of the link between faith and philosophy, which sounds like a misunderstanding of both.

By taking up philosophy as a possible path to faith, Russell didn’t just put the cart before the horse. He put the horse down, only to be amazed that the cart didn’t become self-propelled.

Jacques Maritain defined philosophy as the science of first principles, in the same sense in which physics and chemistry are the sciences of matter. Anyone wishing to take up natural science has to start from the assumption that nature exists, irrespective of his own sensory perception of it.

By the same token, anyone taking up the science of first principles has to proceed from the assumption that first principles exist. His study may later disabuse him of that notion, but any search for truth, be it philosophical or physical, has to start from a working hypothesis.

Therefore, philosophical quest can’t, nor can be expected to, lead to faith in God. Faith, on the other hand, may serve as a powerful springboard for a dive into the troubled waters of philosophy. The thinker may eventually decide that his philosophy doesn’t justify faith, which would be a lamentable conclusion but at least one reached from the right premise.

I can’t judge the quality of Russell’s work in mathematical logic, Principia Mathematica, that he wrote with AN Whitehead. Anything mathematical takes me out of my depth, but general logic doesn’t. By the sound of it, Lord Russell had the opposite problem.

When asked who was the most influential philosopher in the contemporaneous world (1952), he said Marx, although Russell wouldn’t dignify him with the name ‘philosopher’. I agree with him there, and in general one has to say that, unlike his Bloomsbury friends, Russell wasn’t taken in by Marxism or Bolshevism.

When he visited Russia in the 1920s, he found its government hideous, which was a welcome diversion from the panegyrics mouthed by the likes of Shaw and the Webbs. But then he showed how impossible it is even for a confirmed atheist to break out of the Christian mindset of our civilisation.

The problem with Marx, explained Russell to his American interviewer, is that he not so much loved the poor as hated the rich. And true philosophy has to be animated by love, not hatred.

He would have found it difficult to insist on this crypto-Christian belief when talking, say, to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, who both had a fair claim to the title of philosopher, the latter perhaps the less fair one.

Then the subject veered towards war and peace. Russell was a pacifist, and the interviewer drew his attention to that aspect of his philosophy. The tactful American didn’t mention the fact that Russell’s campaign against the First World War earned him a six-month stint in prison.

He did bring up that global conflict, and Russell explained that he had never opposed war in general, only that war. He was in favour of Britain’s involvement in the Second World War, however.

He realised that, “War was always a great evil, but in some particularly extreme circumstances, it may be the lesser of two evils.”

I don’t know if Lord Russell was aware of this, but he repeated, almost verbatim, St Augustine’s teaching on the subject of just war. I doubt Russell ever read The City of God, but yet again he was unable to shake the tethers of Western civilisation, aka Christendom.

A less tactful interviewer might have mentioned that Russell’s understanding of war against Nazism as the “lesser of two evils” came to him rather late in the conflict, in 1943 to be exact.

Throughout the 1930s he was a rank appeaser. For example, in a personal letter written in 1937, when Nazism was already in full swing, Russell offered this idea:

“If the Germans succeed in sending an invading army to England we should do best to treat them as visitors, give them quarters and invite the commander in chief to dine with the prime minister.” Across the Channel, Pierre Laval got executed for less.

But yes, confirmed Lord Russell, he was a committed pacifist opposed to any war other than the one that had ended five years earlier. For example, the West should find an accommodation with the Soviet Union, much as Lord Russell deplored Bolshevism.

In general, he had high hopes for the world, even though it was demonstrably in dire straits at the moment. The interviewer perked up and asked Lord Russell to outline the basis for such hopes. Or, putting it differently, could Lord Russell please identify the most pressing problems and suggest solutions for them?

Russell was happy to oblige. One potentially deadly problem with the world is that there exist too many countries, each bristling with weapons and some even with nuclear arms. The solution offered itself to the anti-Marxist genius of mathematical logic: there should be just one world government, in possession of all armaments, from catapults to atom bombs.

Just as he seemed to be unaware of the Christian provenance of some of his ideas, Lord Russell obviously didn’t realise that the idea of a single world government came right out of Marx’s playbook. It’s an old socialist dream, which happens to be everyone else’s nightmare.

The interviewer was so taken aback that he didn’t delve any deeper. I would have been curious to ask about the practicalities involved. Who, besides Lord Russell, would be a member of the world cabinet? All governments being to some extent instruments of coercion, how would that pan-global body come up with policies and laws, ensuring that the former be carried out and the latter obeyed?

And so forth, up to the final question: Doesn’t Lord Russell realise that, even if such a dystopic monstrosity were possible, it would be so despotic that by comparison Hitler and Stalin would look like humanitarians trying to get in touch with their feminine side?

But fine, one government for all, wars are impossible, that’s one problem out of the way. Any others?

Yes there are, said Lord Russell. Two, to be precise. One is that all the countries of America, Europe, Asia and Africa, indeed all the continents, ought to be equally wealthy. Otherwise sooner or later the poor countries would attack the rich ones, and war would ensue.

That was going Marx one better. Lord Russell pushed socialist egalitarianism beyond parochial social classes and all the way to a global scale. The question of how that laudable equality was to be achieved wasn’t asked, which is a shame. I’m sure the great philosopher would have emphasised his credentials by offering a mathematically logical solution.

And the other problem? There Lord Russell changed horses in mid-stream, dismounting Marx and mounting Malthus. It’s overpopulation, he explained.

The population of the world must remain “stationary” lest it run out of food. Unlike Malthus, Lord Russell eschewed number crunching. He didn’t repeat the fallacy that, while the world’s population increased in a geometric progression, food supply only grew in an arithmetic one. Hence we’d all starve to death before long.

Actually, the world overproduces food, and many governments keep the supply down artificially. But the ‘how’ question would again have been more interesting.

By what diabolical measures would Lord Russell prevent people from multiplying like rabbits? How far would he go in his commitment to eugenics? His contemporary, GB Shaw, for example, advocated a mass cull of all wrinklies reaching the ripe age of 70. They should all be asked to justify their continued existence and, if they couldn’t, they’d get the chop.

GBS assumed he himself could offer convincing reasons for living past 70. But he’d have had no problem with turning the world into an abattoir of old-age pensioners. Mr Marx, meet Mr Hitler, you have so much to talk about.

Russell lived for another 18 years after that interview, which he put to good use by going on CND marches sponsored by the KGB, protesting against American crimes in Vietnam and Israeli ones in Palestine, and joining forces with communists like Jean-Paul Sartre to call for forming a tribunal to bring those criminal regimes to justice.

But that interview was bad enough. It made me glad I don’t try to overachieve by studying mathematical logic and its relation to philosophy. Such disciplines clearly play funny tricks with a man’s mind.