Purely anecdotal experience, but this is in keeping with my interactions with British folk of a certain type.
For many years (nearly 20), I worked with an Englishman at a consultancy in the US. He was a very well mannered, well educated person - son of an upper rank Army officer, public school, first-class honors degree from Oxford, multiple post-grad degrees. I don’t know his exact age, but I recall he came to the US in the late 70s shortly after completing his first grad degree. In terms of sheer intellectual horsepower, one of the smartest people I have ever met. Also liked and respected by everyone in the office.
One week, he fails to show up for work (he was high enough in the organization that he didn’t need to make excuses for an absence). He comes back about 10 days later. We all remarked on his absence, expressed concern, and asked the cause. He responded in a chipper almost joking tone, “My mother kicked the bucket. We had to bury her.” And he didn’t say anything else about it. Ever.
I agree. Not only does he lack the standard polite expressions of grief, but there's a total lack of what we might call "for whom the bell tolls" sensibility, which we expect in any ethically sensitive adult human being.
My opinion: You’re judging Russell according to standards that did not apply in 1948, to a man of his social class. Nor did they apply to men where I was brought up, in 1958 or 1968.
Both his reported comments and in his autobiography he seemed to me quite clearly playing it down. Both are dispassionate and bare descriptions of his experience. Eulogy’s about the dead were not appropriate.
Playing the amateur psychiatrist on such scant evidence is foolish.
And now I’ve written the above it occurs to me that I’ve responded to social media click bait – something ridiculous or provocative, just more words than usual or Fbook or X.
While not wishing to suggest that it's necessarily a healthy response, I don't find it at all untypical of what I know of British men of that generation and class, especially given his rather sad and very emotionally repressive Presbyterian upbringing. Plus, given all the atrocities people had recently endured during WWII, to someone of his mindset it might have seemed like 'bad form', or simply pointless, to dwell too much on death. Like I say, not necessarily healthy, but I don't think necessarily an indicator of anything else either. Post-Diana's-death-Britain is an extremely different place as regards speaking candidly about emotions.
You should find comparable notes on personal tragedies by a British man of the period. It seems quite in character for a British philosopher of the period.
That might be true of British philosophers, but not of British people generally, I reckon. I'm thinking the war poets, Vera Brittain, Churchill, even (always crying!).
Bear in mind that Russell’s great work was a massive, dense work on mathematical logic. It seems likely that he was schizoid or on the autistic spectrum. His response to his air crash is typical of this. You can pick some of this up in his History of Western Philosophy, which is still seen as a first class one volume introduction. But people of his generation didn’t tend to emote openly, and would hide behind attempts at humour.
Isn't this attitude not untypical of those who are led to believe that they are above the rest of humanity, that they have a superior intellect and honours are theirs by right?
If I had the choice of any two people as dinner guests, it would be interesting to have Bertrand Russel and Nelson Mandela ...
Somehow or other I ran into this piece and after reading it it made me think about many things, which is good. I was not sure what the motivation was for it but leaving that aside, the first thing I thought about was the criteria and values that we use to judge various figures that lived in different times under different morays and morals and I thought about JFK and Trump. Both men had/have sexual habits and attidues that many would not endorse and some would call call monstorous. Yet JFK seems have come through it all less scathed. On the issue of turning a blind eye to death, suffering and in todays situation premeditated, we need not look at the past, just open your computor and check out your own works. That is what I do daily.
I have a vague recollection from Russell's Autobiography that he described his decision to divorce his (first?) wife in a similarly affectless (or selfish?) way. He was riding his bicycle down the road when he decided that he no longer cared to be married to her (as if the decision was like solving a math problem), and then announced this to her when he walked into the house after the bike ride (again, as if he was announcing that he solved a math problem).
I was put off by Russell after perusing one of his short books in a used books bin. Some ridiculous statement about black people being less suited to intellectual pursuits (although quite good athletes). No wonder Wittgenstein had a falling out with the man — kinda dense for a famous philosopher.
I have read that Russell was quite a proponent of eugenics. There is no doubt he considered himself superior, as your example seems to indicate. And perhaps he was. Empathy is a valuable condition, but not essential for constructing ethical positions.
Eugenics raises almost everyone's hackles, and certainly has mine, because we might imagine ourselves or a loved one being the target, however...
As a thought experiment when considering eugenics, I have considered the idea that if the group we identify as true, persistent Nazis (apparently rising in every generation) proved to be genetically uniform and separate from the rest of humanity would I be pro-eugenics? You can think of this categorization as incurably psychopathic by nature, not defined by anything else, certainly not by national origin or religious status. Would empathy be the valued characteristic is this were true? Or would a certain intellectually cold stance actually be more humane?
It wasn't uncommon in the late-19th/early-20th century.
Here's Virginia Woolf from a diary entry (9 January 1915):
"We met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."
Yeah, that's curious. It might just be a cultural divide; back then it was more common to respond to tragedy with humor. Or maybe there's more to it. It would help to know how the other survivors responded.
There's got to be a cultural/social class dimension, but then if you think about Vera Brittain (slightly later, I realise) or the war poets... well, I don't think they'd have centered themselves in this story in quite the way that Russell did.
Plus, humor in the face of tragedy tends to be a little less jaunty.
Yeah, it was probably a strange reaction even by 1940s standards. But it's also possible that, since then, what counts as "centering" has changed. You see him as centering himself, whereas he might have seen himself as radically de-centering himself, describing the event as if he weren't part of the tragedy at all. You see him as minimizing the tragedy but he might have seen himself as minimizing his role in the tragedy so as not to take attention away from the true victims. Of course I'm just speculating. Who knows what he was thinking?
Purely anecdotal experience, but this is in keeping with my interactions with British folk of a certain type.
For many years (nearly 20), I worked with an Englishman at a consultancy in the US. He was a very well mannered, well educated person - son of an upper rank Army officer, public school, first-class honors degree from Oxford, multiple post-grad degrees. I don’t know his exact age, but I recall he came to the US in the late 70s shortly after completing his first grad degree. In terms of sheer intellectual horsepower, one of the smartest people I have ever met. Also liked and respected by everyone in the office.
One week, he fails to show up for work (he was high enough in the organization that he didn’t need to make excuses for an absence). He comes back about 10 days later. We all remarked on his absence, expressed concern, and asked the cause. He responded in a chipper almost joking tone, “My mother kicked the bucket. We had to bury her.” And he didn’t say anything else about it. Ever.
I agree. Not only does he lack the standard polite expressions of grief, but there's a total lack of what we might call "for whom the bell tolls" sensibility, which we expect in any ethically sensitive adult human being.
My opinion: You’re judging Russell according to standards that did not apply in 1948, to a man of his social class. Nor did they apply to men where I was brought up, in 1958 or 1968.
Both his reported comments and in his autobiography he seemed to me quite clearly playing it down. Both are dispassionate and bare descriptions of his experience. Eulogy’s about the dead were not appropriate.
Playing the amateur psychiatrist on such scant evidence is foolish.
And now I’ve written the above it occurs to me that I’ve responded to social media click bait – something ridiculous or provocative, just more words than usual or Fbook or X.
While not wishing to suggest that it's necessarily a healthy response, I don't find it at all untypical of what I know of British men of that generation and class, especially given his rather sad and very emotionally repressive Presbyterian upbringing. Plus, given all the atrocities people had recently endured during WWII, to someone of his mindset it might have seemed like 'bad form', or simply pointless, to dwell too much on death. Like I say, not necessarily healthy, but I don't think necessarily an indicator of anything else either. Post-Diana's-death-Britain is an extremely different place as regards speaking candidly about emotions.
I don't find it odd at all. Isn't the whole point of philosophy about getting away from the personal?
You should find comparable notes on personal tragedies by a British man of the period. It seems quite in character for a British philosopher of the period.
That might be true of British philosophers, but not of British people generally, I reckon. I'm thinking the war poets, Vera Brittain, Churchill, even (always crying!).
Perhaps Berlin or Ayer, or Ryle - his ghost in the machine is a bit bleak.
(Then all I can think of is Bleak House, different era.)
Bear in mind that Russell’s great work was a massive, dense work on mathematical logic. It seems likely that he was schizoid or on the autistic spectrum. His response to his air crash is typical of this. You can pick some of this up in his History of Western Philosophy, which is still seen as a first class one volume introduction. But people of his generation didn’t tend to emote openly, and would hide behind attempts at humour.
Sounds more like the vaunted “Stiff upper lip” than psychopathy.
Isn't this attitude not untypical of those who are led to believe that they are above the rest of humanity, that they have a superior intellect and honours are theirs by right?
If I had the choice of any two people as dinner guests, it would be interesting to have Bertrand Russel and Nelson Mandela ...
Somehow or other I ran into this piece and after reading it it made me think about many things, which is good. I was not sure what the motivation was for it but leaving that aside, the first thing I thought about was the criteria and values that we use to judge various figures that lived in different times under different morays and morals and I thought about JFK and Trump. Both men had/have sexual habits and attidues that many would not endorse and some would call call monstorous. Yet JFK seems have come through it all less scathed. On the issue of turning a blind eye to death, suffering and in todays situation premeditated, we need not look at the past, just open your computor and check out your own works. That is what I do daily.
I am about to embark on Ray Monk’s biography of Russell.
I have a vague recollection from Russell's Autobiography that he described his decision to divorce his (first?) wife in a similarly affectless (or selfish?) way. He was riding his bicycle down the road when he decided that he no longer cared to be married to her (as if the decision was like solving a math problem), and then announced this to her when he walked into the house after the bike ride (again, as if he was announcing that he solved a math problem).
Yes, you recall correctly:
https://www.heristical.com/p/on-loving-bertrand-russell
It's a genuinely tragic story.
Thanks for the link. Your treatment of that subject took place before I subscribed.
I was put off by Russell after perusing one of his short books in a used books bin. Some ridiculous statement about black people being less suited to intellectual pursuits (although quite good athletes). No wonder Wittgenstein had a falling out with the man — kinda dense for a famous philosopher.
I have read that Russell was quite a proponent of eugenics. There is no doubt he considered himself superior, as your example seems to indicate. And perhaps he was. Empathy is a valuable condition, but not essential for constructing ethical positions.
Eugenics raises almost everyone's hackles, and certainly has mine, because we might imagine ourselves or a loved one being the target, however...
As a thought experiment when considering eugenics, I have considered the idea that if the group we identify as true, persistent Nazis (apparently rising in every generation) proved to be genetically uniform and separate from the rest of humanity would I be pro-eugenics? You can think of this categorization as incurably psychopathic by nature, not defined by anything else, certainly not by national origin or religious status. Would empathy be the valued characteristic is this were true? Or would a certain intellectually cold stance actually be more humane?
I'll have to research the eugenics thing.
It wasn't uncommon in the late-19th/early-20th century.
Here's Virginia Woolf from a diary entry (9 January 1915):
"We met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."
Pretty bloody shocking, that.
It is. It makes one really contemplate what creates such "creatures," and what it might take to heal rather than kill them. Is it always possible?
Survivor's guilt is irrational, but it was cold-hearted of him not to make a performative display of it.
Yeah, that's curious. It might just be a cultural divide; back then it was more common to respond to tragedy with humor. Or maybe there's more to it. It would help to know how the other survivors responded.
There's got to be a cultural/social class dimension, but then if you think about Vera Brittain (slightly later, I realise) or the war poets... well, I don't think they'd have centered themselves in this story in quite the way that Russell did.
Plus, humor in the face of tragedy tends to be a little less jaunty.
Yeah, it was probably a strange reaction even by 1940s standards. But it's also possible that, since then, what counts as "centering" has changed. You see him as centering himself, whereas he might have seen himself as radically de-centering himself, describing the event as if he weren't part of the tragedy at all. You see him as minimizing the tragedy but he might have seen himself as minimizing his role in the tragedy so as not to take attention away from the true victims. Of course I'm just speculating. Who knows what he was thinking?
That's possible... but you'd expect him to at least make some comment to the effect that it was a tragedy. Even by 1940s standards.