THE ROAD TO SALVATION (4); BERTRAND RUSSELL and JORDAN PETERSON

My previous 3 pieces described two Christian orators and the proponents of the Marxist ideology. Both these life-views (or superstitions, if you prefer) are in decline and I turn my attention to two thinkers who have been influential and who try to come to terms with the modern world.

Jordan Peterson

Bertrand Russell

                                                                          

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) had a brilliant mind and had a highly privileged background. He was the second son of the heir to the Russell earldom but both his radical atheist father and his mother died when he was very young. He was brought up by his grand-parents, the famed Lord John Russell, twice a Whig Prime Minister (who soon died) and his formidable grandmother who was a puritan Scots Presbyterian. His godfather was the eminent utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill.

Bertrand was educated privately and his great interests were religion and geometry – a gift of Euclid from his elder brother was life-changing. By the age of 18 Bertrand had convinced himself there was no God and he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge to read mathematics and philosophy. He joined the Apostles and met the fine minds of his generation including G E Moore, Alfred North Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He married his first (of 4) wives, the American Alys Pearsall Smith in 1895 and made much academic progress publishing his seminal Principia Mathematica written jointly with Whitehead in 1910-12, laying down in 3 volumes the principles of logic. He became a founder of the school of analytical philosophy which displaced idealism and dominated UK universities for 50 years.

Russell in 1907

Yet Bertrand soon got into trouble. He was agnostic at a time when Cambridge academics were expected to respect the church; he conducted several known affairs after he decided, while cycling in Cambridge. that he no longer loved Alys; worse, he embraced pacifism just as the Great War erupted in an orgy of patriotism. He lost his position at Trinity when he was convicted of an offence under the Defence of the Realm Act by publishing articles criticizing the War and later served 6 months in Brixton prison for a similar DORA offence. He was reconciled with Trinity after the war but he curtailed his academic career and became a writer on popular ethical and political matters.

He visited the USSR and met Lenin who did not impress him. He did not join the hordes of credulous fellow-travelling intellectuals but wrote in 1920 his highly critical The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism instead. His 1927 essay Why I am not a Christian was shocking but influential and a wide audience appreciated his Marriage and Morals of 1929. He wrote on education, founding progressive Beacon Hill School in 1927 and was in the forefront of “liberal opinion”. On the death of his brother Frank he became the 3^rd Earl Russell in 1931. His pacifism made him slow to condemn Hitler until even he saw the merits of self-defence, though during WW2 he was expelled from teaching at a New York college as being “morally unfit”.

Russell wrote persuasively and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. He was a familiar presence on radio and TV discussion programmes and was a respected public intellectual. Much of this respect was dissipated by his espousal of the cause of nuclear disarmament, quite consistent with his pacifism. His CND and the later Committee of 100 were penetrated by hard Left groups, who ignored rational discussion and were animated by visceral anti-Americanism. Russell’s participation in his 90’s in endless sit-ins and demos was a sad finale for a principled man.

Russell seeks to Ban the Bomb

      

The merits of Jordan Peterson (1962 -) are still to be fully assessed. The son of a teacher and librarian in Fairview, Alberta, Canada, he is a typical prairie radical of conservative leanings. Educated locally in the frozen North, he studied psychology and politics at Alberta University before moving to psychology at McGill becoming a doctoral fellow. From 1995-99 he was a lecturer at Harvard and returned to Canada as a full professor at Toronto where his lectures in psychology are highly popular. He is also a practicing clinical psychologist seeing about 20 patients a week.

An unbearded Jordan Peterson

In 2018 he published 12 Rules of Life: An Antidote to Chaos which has sold over 3 million copies. It is a handbook for modern living and strikes a chord with a wide range of readers. In Peterson’s view our lives are a struggle with evil and with small daily increments of virtuous behaviour we can overcome the suffering we inevitably confront. He gives sound advice on parenting, marriage and human relationships generally, hopefully leading to happiness and inner contentment. His vision is sometimes rather joyless and puritanical in my view but, to be fair, it is still clearly “work in progress”.

There is a dense philosophic foundation to his writing eclectically drawing inspiration from the ethics of the New Testament, from Judaism and from Taoism. He often quotes Jung among psychologists and draws on writers like Dostoyevsky, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn and Ayn Rand.

Peterson thrives as a controversialist and is well known amid the University campuses of the English-speaking world, not to mention in TV interviews, conferences and podcasts. With polite restraint he has attacked the hypocrisies and catch-words of our age – militant feminism, gender fluidity, supposedly unjust pay gaps, the demeaning of masculinity, climate change et al. His opponents are usually a noisy mob of post-modernist (which Jordan equates with Marxists) students or academics and the puffed-up bien-pensants we have seen in the UK in droves during the Brexit debate. Peterson usually skewers them comprehensively with his incisive debating skill.

Our democracies need vigorous and informed debate. A figure like Jordan Peterson brings much encouragement to the Centre and the Right, long out-gunned by an intellectually flabby but well-established Leftist “consensus” embodied in our civil service, teaching and acting professions and political classes.

Thankfully, at last their time is up throughout the West. Nemesis is at hand.



SMD
31.08.19
Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2019