John Hare, in booksandculture.com, analyses the personality and personal history of the celebrated mathematician and anti-Christian philosopher, Bertrand Russell.
Russell’s “Why I Am Not A Christian,“ is a favorite of many atheists and anti-Christian Hindus.
Note: Most Hindus adhere to the mainstream Hindu tradition of respect for Jesus as an avatar of God, even while they object to the aggressive conversion tactics and chauvinistic language of some missionaries.
But, as Hare writes, Ray Monk’s outstanding biography of the man, “Bertrand Russell: The Ghost Of Madness,” tears off the mask of genius to show a deeply immoral, cruel, and mentally unstable man:
What keeps the reader fascinated is the unfolding of this double truth; that one of the century’s brightest, most influential thinkers seems to have been at the same time capable of appalling cruelty and moral blindness……..
Russell’s sense of the hereditary danger was confirmed by his own experience. An informal account of what we would now call a psychopathic personality is the disorder of someone who is amoral, who harbors great rage that he usually hides, who considers almost all others inferior, and who is a pathological liar. Monk gives us evidence of all of these traits in these first 49 years of Russell’s life. I am not trying to say here that Russell was a psychopath, but that he had evidence in his own life to make it reasonable for him to fear that he was predisposed to some such disorder.”
Salient excerpts from Hare’s review of the Monk biography reveal Russell’s moral monstrosity:
[Note: Beatrice Webb (referred to in the first line below) was the wife of Sidney Webb, and, along with him, was one of the founding members of the Fabian Society, which promoted Fabian socialism.
Fabian socialism was a gradualist approach to communism that was inflicted on former colonies, like India.
It had as its own goal the goal of the New World Order – population control through family planning and feminism and through the advocacy of income redistribution]
On Russell’s callous treatment of women (this from someone who championed women’s “liberation”):
Beatrice Webb, after a visit, put it this way, “[Russell] looks at the world from a pinnacle of detachment. What he lacks is sympathy and tolerance for other people’s emotions.” One of the most chilling examples of this trait is the story of Russell’s relationship with Helen Dudley, whom he met in America and persuaded to come to England to live with him. When she arrived, he discovered he was no longer in love with her and got rid of her, as a result of which she suffered a complete and permanent mental breakdown. In his Autobiography, Russell puts it this way: “I had relations with her from time to time . . . and I broke her heart.”
It is not just what Russell did that is chilling, but the fact that he talks about this and other such episodes as though they had happened to somebody else.”
On Russell’s murderous rages and seething hatred (this from a “humanitarian” and “pacifist”):
Russell’s desire to kill people was sometimes quite literal. Indeed, this was one of his fears about his heredity, because of the fate of his Uncle Willy, who had lost his memory and ended up in a workhouse infirmary. As in Plato’s example in the Republic, the police gave Uncle Willy back a knife he owned and with it he went on a murderous rampage. When institutionalized, he continued to be prone to apparently random attacks of rage and violence. Russell had moods in which he hated the whole human race. But he also had to fight against the desire to kill quite specific people, such as his friend Fitzgerald: “On one occasion, in an access of fury, I got my hands on his throat and started to strangle him. I intended to kill him, but when he began to grow livid, I relented. I do not think he knew that I intended murder.”
On Russell’s alienation from, and feelings of superiority to, ordinary people (this from a man who professed that his hatred of religion, especially of Christianity, was based on his love for human freedom):
“When I am talking to an ordinary person,” Russell says, “I feel I am talking baby language, and it makes me lonely.” In prison because of his anti-war activities, he reports that “Life here is just like life on an Ocean Liner. One is cooped up with a number of average human beings, unable to escape except into one’s own stateroom.”
On Russell’s pathological lying (this from a philosopher who attacked religion for being based on something other than truth):
He seems to have been a pathological liar. This started very early, with his grandmother. He maintained the outward show of piety, while departing further and further from the Christian faith. It became, however, a recognizable pattern in all his relationships, even those he cared most about. “You simply don’t speak the truth,” said D. H. Lawrence to him. “You simply are not sincere.”
On Russell’s self-loathing, expressed in hatred for Christianity (the religion of his upbringing), alienation from his own emotions, and constant alternation between rage and guilt (this from someone who claimed to be completely rational):
Later, the sense of sin keeps recurring, as a kind of self-hatred………
..On another occasion Russell found himself on his knees in a church in Verona, praying for strength to subdue his instincts. He does not associate either experience explicitly with God, but what strikes this reader is the echoes of Russell’s grandmother’s piety, which was also a religion of love, duty, and suffering.
A Christian can see these experiences as God trying to break through, as the untiring chase by the hound of heaven. But Russell himself could not interpret them that way, or at least he could not do so for long. My hypothesis about why he could not do so is the one I gave earlier. The experience of God’s presence and his own failure was just too painful for him, and the pain was too close to his fear of madness. One response was the retreat to the surface and to disengagement.”