On Russell...

 

On a lecture tour of America, Russell reputedly found himself asked by the head of a smart girls’ college why he had given up formal philosophy. ‘Because I found I preferred fucking,’ he replied. But to pay his bills he wrote, prolifically  an estimated average 2000 words a day throughout his life. Inevitably some of his writings were superficial but in others he advocated then radical ideas on sex, marriage, divorce, education, child-care, world government and disarmament. Such views – not unique to Russell but propounded by him with often persuasive brilliance - have since permeated the western mind to become part of the liberal semi-consciousness, so widely accepted as to be almost unremarked. Russell’s popular writings are important precisely because he anticipated or propagated so many later attitudes and trends. The priests and other conservatives who attacked him for  ‘immorality’ were in a way right. Russell was propounding a social and ‘moral’ (i.e. sexual) revolution that has, since his death, come about. We who live with a soaring divorce rate are partly the heirs of Dirty Bertie (one of his less flattering nicknames), who in his life got through four wives and countless mistresses without apology.

 

 

 

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