The Bloomer Philosopher

HUMAN SOCIETY IN ETHICS AND POLITICS (227 pp.)--Bertrand Russell--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

In a seminar on leading contemporary philosophers at New York University, Professor Sidney Hook once asked his class: "What is Bertrand Russell's philosophy?" "Russell is a materialist," said one student. "An idealist," said another. "A realist," "a rationalist," said still others. The students quickly got the professor's point--that there was an element of truth in each of their answers. "The next time anyone asks you, 'What is Bertrand Russell's philosophy?' " Professor Hook said, "the correct answer is 'What year, please?' " In his 83rd year, Bertrand Arthur William, Earl Russell is busier taking up old stances than throwing fresh philosophical punches. For one brief moment in the preface of his latest book Human Society in Ethics and Politics, the old philosopher gets set to floor all previous Russells with one haymaking swing. He quotes with approval a famous epigram of David Hume: "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions." Though he claims to believe this, Russell, like Philosopher Hume, is not entirely happy about it, and proves it by launching into his favorite fable--how sweet Grandmother Reason is gobbled up by the big bad wolf called Passion.

Leviticus Says No. He tells the story, wittily and well, by putting the problem of ethics on a kind of analyst's couch and dredging up its troubled case history. The childhood of ethics, in the Russell view, is taboo. Taboo morality is a strict black-and-white affair filled with dread and sanctions, the ethics of primitive man.

Taboo lingers on, Russell feels, in the popular objections to euthanasia and birth control. Russell asks: "Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and sister; should they let the human race die out? I do not know the answer, but I do not think H can be in the affirmative merely on the ground that incest is wicked." The problem of ethics grows as it is touched by religion. Biblical authority, says Russell, is sometimes contradictory: "Should a childless widow marry her deceased husband's brother? Leviticus says no, Deuteronomy says yes (Leviticus 20: 21; Deuteronomy 25:5)." Knowledge Is Virtue. An unswerving atheist, Russell is convinced that all faiths do harm." He defines faith as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence." The code of ethics with which Russell would like to supplant the traditional code ironically demands a good deal of faith. The concepts of good and "bad " says Russell, should replace those of "right" and "wrong." A good act would be one in which the "intrinsic value to the individual is most compatible with the general good of mankind.

Essentially, Russell's Utopia is a strongly determinist Garden of Eden where knowledge is virtue and no one has enough free will to choose to do evil. Russell is not unaware of the serpents of danger in the world, but he offers to charm them with never-never tunes that have become more conventional than convincing: 1) world government; 2) world prosperity 3) worldwide birth control; 4) more individual initiative and decentralization of economic and political power.

Philosopher Russell's brand of logic is still interesting--an exhibit of a kind of world view that once seemed bold and Promethean. Today, while it still commands many followers, it seems to others as outmoded as bloomers.

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