When Reason Goes on Holiday. Neven Sesardic
the hasty and ill-thought-out proposal but were ready to defend it publicly by putting their signatures on the petition. Even more oddly, among the names of the supporters we also find leading philosophers of science who should have immediately realized that there is simply no way that the presented evidence could justify the extravagant proposal of the petitioners. (Two of those philosophers of science, Alexander Bird and James Ladyman, are past editors-in-chief of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, arguably the world’s best journal in the field.)
One would have expected philosophers to be careful about making such confident public assertions about philosophy’s benefits for two reasons. First, since it is obviously in their interest to spread the belief that studying philosophy pays off so well, they should be acutely aware of the possibility of self-deception. Second, they should be concerned about the well-being of their prospective students who could be lured into choosing philosophy by false advertisements, but might later come to regret their massive investment of time and money in something that does not lead to the promised results.
Russell’s Paradox: A Genius with a Streak of Foolishness
The belief that studying philosophy, when it is geared toward developing analytical skills and conceptual clarity, also enhances rationality and critical thinking in practical affairs of everyday life (including politics) dates from the early days of analytic philosophy.
In a book still frequently assigned to undergraduate philosophy students, Bertrand Russell expressed a similar view about the practical usefulness of philosophy: “The essential characteristic of philosophy . . . is criticism. It examines critically the principles employed in science and in daily life” (Russell 1912, 233; emphasis added). This sounds nice, but there was little trace of critical examination in many of Russell’s own actions and especially in his political statements. George Trevelyan, Russell’s undergraduate classmate at Cambridge, once said about him: “He may be a genius in mathematics—as to that I am no judge; but about politics he is a perfect goose” (Monk 2000, 5). Similarly George Santayana said: “Along with his genius he has a streak of foolishness” (quoted in Eastman 1959, 192). Illustrations of Russell’s political irrationality could easily fill a whole chapter in this book, but since many of these episodes are probably already widely known I will give only a few examples of his ludicrous political outbursts.
In an article published on October 30, 1951, in the Manchester Guardian, Russell said that the United States was as much a police state as Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia. He continued:
In Germany under Hitler, and in Russia under Stalin, nobody ventured upon a political remark without first looking behind the door to make sure no one was listening. . . [W]hen I last visited America I found the same state of things there. . . [I]f by some misfortune you were to quote with approval some remark by Jefferson you would probably lose your job and perhaps find yourself behind bars.
It should be stressed that Russell’s anti-Americanism and his political silliness date back to the time of the First World War. In his January 1918 article (for which he went to prison), he stated that if the war continued “[t]he American Garrison will be occupying England and France” (Russell 1918). This confidently predicted occupation of England and France by the U.S. Army of course never happened, but Russell did not allow himself to be embarrassed by such a silly prophecy. In the same article he claimed it was “completely false” that the mass of Russians were against the Bolsheviks (although in fact more than 75 percent voted against them in the election of 1917). He also said it was completely false that Bolsheviks dared not permit the Constituent Assembly to meet (although in fact the Constituent Assembly did meet but was expressly dissolved by Bolsheviks).3
On November 27, 1965, Russell sent the following message to the Tricontinental Conference (an event that took place in Havana in January 1966 and that was described in a report to the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. Senate as “probably the most powerful gathering of pro-Communist, anti-American forces in the history of the Western Hemisphere”):
In every part of the world the source of war and of suffering lies at the door of US imperialism. Wherever there is hunger, wherever there is exploitative tyranny, wherever people are tortured and the masses left to rot under the weight of disease and starvation, the force which holds down the people stems from Washington (quoted in Monk 2000, 467).
Russell biographer Ray Monk correctly observes that here Russell comes close to saying the USA “is responsible for literally every evil in the world” (ibid.). Although Russell was very old at the time, Monk argues that the senility excuse for his signing such statements is not convincing because a lot of evidence shows that Russell was “in full awareness of what he was doing” and that he “remained in possession of his mental faculties until his dying days” (Monk 2000, 455).
On June 11, 1966, Russell sent the following message to Hanoi:
I extend my warm regards and full solidarity for President Ho Chi Minh and for the people of Vietnam. I convey my great wish that the day may not be far off when a united and liberated Vietnam will celebrate its victory in a free Saigon (quoted in Flew 2001, 119).
So Russell expressed “full solidarity” with the Vietnamese Communist leader who was already at the time responsible for labor camps, reeducation, torture, and mass executions under the slogan “Better ten innocent deaths than one enemy survivor” (Courtois et al. 1999, 568–69; Rosefielde 2009, 110–11). Could Russell have known (or reasonably suspected) in 1966 the truth about Ho Chi Minh’s murderous past? Actually, yes. In From Colonialism to Communism: A Case History of North Vietnam, published in the United States in 1964, Hoang Van Chi estimated that around half a million people lost their lives due to Ho Chi Minh’s policies in the fifties. The book had an immediate impact and any responsible person making public statements about Vietnam should have known about it. Russell did not live to see his “great wish” come true; the Communist “liberation” of Vietnam led to hundreds of thousands deaths.
His anti-Americanism was so notorious that even W. V. Quine, who had a great deal of respect for Russell as a philosopher, once said: “I was never drawn to socialism and communism as [Russell] was, much less to the views he held in his declining years when he was demonstrating against the United States in favor of Soviet Russia” (quoted in Borradori 1994, 34). The New York Times published an amazingly biased letter from Russell about the Vietnam War in 1963, to which the editors appended a response saying the letter “reflects an unfortunate and—despite his eminence as a philosopher—an unthinking receptivity to the most transparent Communist propaganda.” The editors expressed their own serious reservations about U.S. policy in Vietnam but said that Russell’s letter represented “something beyond reasoned criticism” and in some parts amounted to “arrant nonsense.”
Russell had taken an anti-American stance earlier, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Here is his crucial argument from a leaflet released on October 23, 1962, reprinted in his autobiography (1967–69; 2009, 625):
YOU ARE TO DIE
Not in the course of nature, but within a few weeks, and not you alone, but your family, your friends, and all the inhabitants of Britain, together with many hundreds of millions of innocent people elsewhere.
WHY?
Because rich Americans dislike the Government that Cubans prefer, and have used part of their wealth to spread lies about it.
Monk makes an apt comment about the pamphlet: “Its oversimplification of the issues involved would have been startling had [it] come from a schoolboy; from one of the greatest thinkers of our age, [it was] truly astonishing” (Monk 2000, 442).
Communist Temptations at Oxford
J. L. Austin, one of the key figures in ordinary language philosophy (a school of thought that flourished at Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s), argued that philosophy has beneficial consequences in the political domain:
In Austin’s generation, the social