They say it's my birthday, and it is. [+ Bertrand Russell]

77

Here’s what I posted on my 76th birthday, an update of a long post I did on my 70th: Reflections on entering my eighth decade and why it portends to be the most productive one of my life. Between now and back then there have been times when I thought that title was nuts. “The most productive one of my life!?” No way. But those periods always pass. FWIW, I had more New Savanna posts last year than in any previous year, 1004. The next highest was 2019, with 910. When this is posted I’ll have 968, and then year isn’t over. Of course, number of blog posts is a superficial measure of productivity. What matters are idea. We’ll see.

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Since I’ve been thinking about Bertrand Russell and he was a hero of mine in my youth, I thought I’d post some excerpts from his Playboy interview from March 1963, not half a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. I would have been 15 when that issue was published and may well have discovered Playboy by that time. I’d have to walk, I don’t know, maybe as much as a mile, to get to a store where I could buy it and then sneak it back into the house.

In his introduction to the interview, Norman MacKenzie notes that Russell played a small role in bringing it to a close. This is from the interview itself:

PLAYBOY: What do you believe was the effect of your own personal intervention with Khrushchev via your much publicized cable appealing for Russian prudence in responding to the American blockade of Cuba?

RUSSELL: He carried out the promise he made in the letter replying to my cable -- the promise to do nothing rash that would risk conflict. Within hours of my communication, 12 Soviet ships had turned back from their Cuban destination and Khrushchev had stopped further shipment. This left Cuba illegally blockaded in violation of international law. I believe that if a blockade is defensible when applied to Cuba, then the precedent can be applied also to Berlin and even to Britain, which is an advanced American nuclear base. America should remember the War of 1812 when the United States would not tolerate a British blockade. This is the very heart of what I have been saying for years: If nuclear bases are intolerable in Cuba, then they are intolerable anywhere in the world. Nuclear bases threaten the survival of mankind and the Cuban crisis has shown us how very close we are to annihilation.

Are there any current intellectuals who have such influence? Later in the interview:

PLAYBOY: In 1957 you wrote in The New Statesman, the liberal British journal, an appeal to Premier Khrushchev and then-President Eisenhower for just such a lessening of world tension, to which both the Russian leader and John Foster Dulles responded with public reassurances. Six years have elapsed since then without a noticeable decline in global strife and division. At this critical moment in the cold war, would you care to make another such appeal, perhaps suggesting specific ways in which relations can be improved?to Khrushchev and President Kennedy?

RUSSELL: If I were to make another such appeal, I would have to begin by repeating what I said in 1957. I should say simply to both men: “You seem anxious to destroy the world, to create vast misery and total destruction. All this preparation for war is childish and suicidal. If you could only begin to tolerate each other, you would be perfectly happy.” I would go on to suggest that the overridingly urgent necessity is to come to an agreement. This is far more important than the precise form the agreement takes. Last summer, I sent a message to Moscow in which I expressed the wish that in all negotiations between East and West, the negotiator for the Communists should begin by saying that the universal victory of capitalism would be less disastrous than nuclear war. At the same time, the Western spokesman should start by admitting that the universal victory of communism would be preferable to the destruction of mankind. In a speech last July, Khrushchev singled out this suggestion and said that he entirely agreed. I was rather pleased. I would suggest further that the likelihood of war could be lessened immeasurably if both sides would place a great deal more emphasis on the ghastly destructiveness of war. At present, the major organs of publicity in both East and West are inclined to make the public believe that nuclear war wouldn’t really be so terrible after all. That is why I am opposed to Civil Defense preparations. They are diabolical inventions calculated to tell lies and to deceive. Everyone who knows anything knows that. People may think themselves safe in their deep shelters but they will roast. Governments must be made to give up the habit of lying in order to persuade people to die quietly. Thirdly, I would strongly recommend an agreement on both sides not to teach that the other side is wicked. For Americans, communism is the Devil; for the Russians, capitalism is the Devil. The truth is that neither is wickeder than the other. They are both wicked.

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal, to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle, to allow moments of insight to impart wisdom in mundane times. Social, to envision in imagination, an attainable society in which the individual can grow freely, in which hate and greed and envy will die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I still believe. So you can see that the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

PLAYBOY: Do you see no difference between the moral positions of America and Russia?

RUSSELL: No. They both have abominable systems. I am inclined to prefer the American system, but only because it is more allied with what I am used to. If I had been born a Russian, probably I should prefer the Russian system.

On civil disobedience:

PLAYBOY: On a personal level, why have you chosen to adopt a policy of civil disobedience as a means of promoting the cause of peace?

RUSSELL: Purely to get attention. All the major organs of publicity are against us. It was extremely difficult to get any attention at all until we resorted to it. I have no views in principle, either for or against civil disobedience. It has always been practiced at different times and places. With me, it is purely a practical question of whether to do it or not, a method of propaganda.

PLAYBOY: Do you feel that the authorities have the moral right to prosecute and imprison those involved in such non-violent demonstrations for peace as they have done to you?

RUSSELL: I have no right to complain about being punished for breaking the law. I complain only if I am not permitted to break it. I recognize that if you go outside the law you cannot complain if it is made a little awkward for you, but it ought to be possible to do so. If I suddenly took it into my head that I wanted to assassinate the Queen, then I should expect to be punished. You do that sort of thing with full foreknowledge of the consequences.

Looking back over his life:

PLAYBOY: So far we have been talking mainly of the issues which have preoccupied you during the last half-dozen years. But your life’s work has encompassed a multitude of causes. Which of them has mattered most to you?

RUSSELL: Though they have mattered differently at different times, the question of international peace certainly transcends any I have ever been concerned with or any issue that previously excited me. But I have derived great satisfaction from many of my interests, matters of the mind more than anything else. Mathematical logic has been the source of perhaps my deepest intellectual gratification. It has given me very great pleasure to feel, in an important field of human knowledge, that I may have made some lasting contribution to man’s understanding of things that were once beyond his grasp, but which can now be comprehended and manipulated. I am also pleased with the aftermath of my campaign for women’s suffrage and my efforts to secure a more enlightened sexual morality and behavior. They have gone almost as well as I would have liked them to go. When I was young, one talked to a woman in a different language than when talking to a man. There was a cultivated unreality in intercourse between men and women, which I thought was very bad indeed. Today things are utterly different. Young people don’t realize how much change there has been. But we still need much more freedom and frankness in sexual instruction. Another matter to which I have always attached great importance in education is that schools ought not to teach nationalism. Every school, with hardly any exception, has as one of its objects the deception of children. They teach them patriotism, to salute the flag. But the flag is a murder symbol, and the state is a pirate ship, a gang of murderers who have come together. When they salute the flag, they salute the symbol of bloody murder. All this is perfectly clear, valid psychology.

PLAYBOY: On the occasion of your 90th birthday, Lord Russell, you said, “In old age, one becomes aware of what has, and of what has not been achieved.” Did you mean this observation to apply to the fruits of your own efforts in behalf of the various causes you’ve espoused?

RUSSELL: Let me reply this way. Contrary to the customary pattern, I have gradually become more and more of a rebel as I have grown older. Since boyhood, my life has been devoted to two different objectives, which for a long time remained separate. It’s only in comparatively recent years that they have come together. One has been to discover whether anything could actually be known; this was a matter of philosophical inquiry. The other has been to do whatever I could to help create a happier world. I cannot claim that what I have written, said and done about social and political problems has had any great importance. It is easy to have an immense effect if you dogmatically preach a precise gospel such as communism. But I do not believe that mankind needs anything dogmatic. I think it essential to teach a certain hesitancy about dogma. Whatever you believe, you must have reservations. You must envisage the possibility that you may be wrong. I want to see individuals retain the kind of personal flexibility and initiative that they ought to have. This means that they cannot, and must not, be forced into a rigid mold. In my lifetime, freedom which once seemed to be gaining ground?has come to be regarded as weakness. When I was young, I thought the battle for tolerance had been won. But more recently we have reverted back to the intolerance of the great religious wars. And when I was young, I set out with the belief that love, free and courageous love, could conquer the world. I perhaps thought that the road to a free and happy world would be shorter than it has turned out to be.

PLAYBOY: Do you feel now that this dream of a free and happy world was perhaps little more than the kind of utopian vision which has always inspired man in youth?and so often disenchanted him in maturity?

RUSSELL: It is something more. There is not anything to stop it from coming to pass except our own silliness, a silliness forced upon us by an education that teaches us that our country is vastly better than any other, and that in all respects it is always in the right. It would not be difficult to build a peaceful world if people really wanted it. It is certainly worthwhile to live and act and do what one can to bring it about. I haven’t changed my earlier views in that respect. I still believe exactly what I said when I was 80, when people were asking me much the same question. I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal, to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle, to allow moments of insight to impart wisdom in mundane times. Social, to envision in imagination, an attainable society in which the individual can grow freely, in which hate and greed and envy will die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I still believe. So you can see that the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.