Bertrand Russell and Politics

"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this", says Bertrand Russell and that irrationality is the basis on which small groups of people end up leading large populations on the path to disaster or mayhem. "Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so" is an apt explanation for how suicide bombers blow themselves and a lot of other people up to further their cause - when all of History could readily show that such acts have never achieved the intended effect. Russell, indeed, outlines the rules that form the foundation of politics - of governments, terrorist organizations and any other such organizations.

"Too little liberty brings stagnation and too much brings chaos", says Russell. Governments are necessary to limit the liberty of each individual to a level where there is order, but not to the extent that liberty is stifled to the extent of having a stagnant Society. The process of setting these limits also involves the manner in which goods and services get exchanged; the manner in which people interact with each other; and the rights and responsibilities of the individual.

Russell, though not a votary of Communism's ways of arranging the exchange of goods and services, does not seem quite enamored of Capitalism, either. "Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate", does not seem like unrestrained admiration for Capitalism. In fact, unrestrained capitalism is very likely to end up proving that "Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."

Democracy, as a means of putting in place a government, has its own flaws. "Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them", says Russell of the politics of his day but nothing much seems to have changed since then.

This belief in stupidity being the hallmark of honesty leads to a situation wherein "There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action." One only needs to see the recent happenings in the world - from the demonisation of the Middle-East in the West to obsessive hatred of neighbors - to see how true this still continues to be. Politicians seem to make hay of the fact that "Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed". And the fact is that one is left bemoaning, as Russell did, "Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?" Governments AND people also seem to pay no heed to the fact that "War does not determine who is right - only who is left."

If that is true of governance, Russell holds out not much hope from the moralists either. “Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's”, he says and, unfortunately, that dictum also seems largely true. India has had reason to know the validity of his statement, "The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others". (Of course, he does NOT mean that there should be no interference in the molestation of women!)

He does hold out hope for a better tomorrow. His condition for such a desirable outcome, though, is far from being fulfilled. May the day come soon when this thing becomes true of the world - "If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years."

Bertrand Russell and dogma

Of all the philosophers I have read, I love Bertrand Russell the most. Of course the first reason is his sense of humor. To give but one example, when nuns told him, "You forget the Almighty God" in reply to his question about why they bathed in bathrobes when there was no-one there to see them, he says, "They obviously think of God as an Omnipotent Peeping Tom, who can see through walls but is foiled by bathrobes".

The more important reason, though, is the fact that he is one of the very few philosophers who neither followed nor created any 'ism'. The problem with 'ism's - whether in philosophy, politics or in religion - is that, sooner or later they turn to dogmas and end up stifling any free thought or dissent. This, of course, is a consequence of the fact that “A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.” Not merely inaccurate but dogmatically inaccurate as well, since 'stupid men' who follow the originator are incapable of thinking for themselves and prefer to follow the leader - in the manner in which they understand him - blindly.

Russell set off no such tradition, considering that he held that "I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine." Leave alone philosophy, a measure of doubt is not even entertained by people when it comes to their own tastes - so much so that people cannot even grant the possibility that something that they dislike can be liked by someone else and speak as if their distaste for something ought to be universal. So, how will they ever entertain doubts about their philosophy?

But then, as Russell says, "The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately." The problem also is that "Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." That explains the persistence of beliefs in things that have long been discredited. I would not be too surprised to see a cult, which expects to fall off the edge of a flat Earth, arise and flourish.

A belief, which is wrongly held, is not as harmless a folly as it appears to be. Russell says, "Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false." History gives ample evidence of the fact that the greatest atrocities have been committed on the basis of false beliefs - including false scientific beliefs. Eugenics is a case in point for a false scientific belief that resulted in the unbelievable atrocities of Nazi Germany.

The issue is further exacerbated by the fact that "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." This, in effect, means that the 'fools and fanatics' are willing to work to further their beliefs while the 'wiser people' are still dithering about the pros and cons of the issue - till it is too late. Whenever I see someone very sure of his own faith - and, no matter how virtuous the faith may be - it frightens me because the chap could well be a fool (insofar as he is so narrowly focused on his truth and his way that he fails to see the complete ramifications of his course of action) even if not a fanatic. I'd rather have dithering wiser men than confident fools running countries.

A follower of a creed is a greater danger. For the leader may be one who belongs to the category of “We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach.” Taken in by what is preached, the follower can be a far more potent harbinger of change than the leader - being far more convinced of the rightness of his cause - and may end up crowning the leader, literally or metaphorically. AND, followers could tend to believe the leader, 'even with bad grounds', which may end up with Society having to deal with what the leader 'practices but seldom preaches.'

Which is why, in ideas or in creeds, I prefer someone who, like Russell, says,“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.” For, truth be told, anyone who says he would die for his beliefs actually means that he would kill for his beliefs.

If you read 'beliefs' to mean 'moral values' (for me and, I think, for Russell as well, they are two different things), my apologies for wasting your time with this post.

Keynes - Interesting?

The idea of an economist being interesting - other than to other economists - must be fairly difficult to swallow. The common perception would be of a man, who feels bound to say "On the one hand...On the other hand.." making you feel rather grateful that he is not a Ravan endowed with twenty hands. John Maynard Keynes, though, was rather an exception to this rule. To cite but one instance, though he belonged to the ilk of people who love saying, 'In the long run...", Keynes dismisses it with a pithy "In the long run, we are all dead."

Keynes is rated as one of the major figures in capitalist economics, being the originator of the idea of Government intervention to pull economies out of a depression AND, thus, the man whose ideas influenced the 'stimulus' packages in the recent past to pull economies out of the Recession. It is surprising to see his views on Capitalism - "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

Capitalist economics places a huge premium on Stock Markets to direct the flow of funds into required investments. Keynes has this to say about the idea - “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done”. Does not seem like a ringing endorsement of the basic premise. For speculators, who think that when the stock markets are irrationally high or low and wish to play for a reversal, Keynes' sage advice is “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Advice that quite a few would have wished to have received much earlier in life! Though there is a Keynesian silver lining -  “If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.”  THAT will explain how YOU lose money in all those Stock Market bubbles but the chaps who set it all off do not!

Keynes was, by no means, uni-dimensional or bereft of pithy thoughts on subjects other than economics. Well, you could say that when Keynes says, "The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward", he is still talking economics but you cannot deny that it is a surprising viewpoint for an economist to hold.

Apparently, it was a period where people were REALLY down on education. Like Einstein, who was a contemporary, Keynes too seems to have had no high regard for education. Unless you can see something laudatory in "Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent." But, then, the problem with education has always been that it propagated the existing ideas and fails, even today, to inculcate a spirit of thinking for yourself. A person like Keynes, who held that "The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones" is unlikely to be very impressed by a system that freezes young minds into old ideas, making it impossible for them to escape from them.

I was surprised and gratified to see that I had been echoing Keynes, unconsciously, in a thought that forms the base of quite a few of my posts, though Keynes puts it far more caustically than I ever would have. He says, "When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals." Further along, he is even more caustic when he mentions that, "The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."

That, though, is a sentiment that is likely to be discarded. After all, again as Keynes says, “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for (your) reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” Particularly in a Society where the 'enjoyments and realities of life' have been so warped as to represent the mere possession of money!

The entertaining Einstein

I love Einstein. For a genius, he was a pretty down-to-earth chap. He endeared himself to me with his explanation of Relativity - "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity." Not only was his explanation simple, it was very kind as well. After all, remembering that people like me exist, he could well have said, "When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. For the girl, though, it would seem like an eternity. That's relativity."

It is not surprising that he kept it simple. After all, it was he who also said, "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." Something that is even less comprehensible to the leaders of the world than his theory of relativity. I, particularly, loved that oxymoron - 'intelligent fool'. The world abound in people who are extremely intelligent, indeed, but refuse to apply it in deciding what needs to be done and, instead, exult in how well they have done whatever they have done - even if all that they have done is pulling down civilization around our ears.

That, though, is probably a result of thinking that schooling equals education. Einstein has something to say on that as well - "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school." One can only bemoan the persistence of memory in people, for it leaves them with a collection of facts but robs them of all understanding. As a result, everyone chases the will-o-the-wisp of progress and, more often than not, the progress that they chase is technological progress. And, strangely for the foremost scientist of his times, Einstein says, "Technological progress is like an ax in the hands of a pathological criminal." The solutions that we search for the problems that we create with our over-use of technology also seem to lie in more technology. The failure to solve the problems proves the Einsteinian statement "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

One cannot accuse Einstein of being right all the time. After all, as he himself says, "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." So, when Heisenberg proposed his uncertainty principle, Einstein opposed it with his "God does not play dice." The problem, though, was that he was wrong as were most - if not all - people who presumed to have read the mind of God. (Apropos of that, even Einstein gave up on understanding one thing that all of us dread - "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.") It appeared that God reveled in playing dice, since the Quantum theory is held to be true and has given rise to a whole menagerie starting with the conundrum of Schrodinger's cat and on-wards to the String and M theories of the Universe, which have nearly replaced Einstein's own General Theory of Relativity, even though the Special Theory of Relativity is still considered valid enough for practical use.

One cannot take away from Einstein his seminal contribution to science on account of one misstep. He had the courage to step outside the bounds of the science of his day, thereby earning the right to say, "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep." It also seems like he was a man who knew that what was valuable in life is not always what can be measured. For he held that "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

I only wish that one of his other statements also proves wrong, at least in the future - "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Failing which, we may find ourselves testing the truth of one more of his statements - "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."