Surveying the British philosopher’s pacifist writings and activism, Jonathan Rée isn’t quite persuaded by how he formulated the nature of war:
The peace agenda of Russell and his followers was always based on the assumption that war is simply a euphemism for the madness of state-sponsored mass murder, and that we could prevent it by standing up for moral and political sanity – by committing ourselves to global justice and the relief of poverty, for instance, or social and sexual equality, or common ownership, or world government…. But the paths to war are paved not with malice but with righteous self-certainty. People who choose to participate in military action are more likely to be altruists than egotists: they are prepared to sacrifice their own lives for the sake of something that transcends them, such as their country or their religion, or socialism, secularism or democracy, or a world where peace and tolerance will reign in perpetuity. Of course they are liable, like the rest of us, to be seriously mistaken in countless ways:
they probably have an inconsistent scale of values, a shaky grasp of facts and a faulty sense of proportion. They may, just possibly, be open to persuasion through tactful argumentation, subtle negotiation and ingenious rhetoric, but nothing will be gained by accusing them of selfishness, nihilism or moral idiocy, or delivering lectures about self-sacrifice, high principle and the future of humanity.
Different threats to peace, like different threats to health, require different precautions and different interventions, depending on the individual case, and success in averting war is going to depend on luck as much as judgement. If the prospect of nuclear extermination has receded since the time when Russell was prophesying it, the explanation lies less in campaigns for peace and freedom than in the unexpected consequences of developments that no one could have foreseen – the calculations and miscalculations of Mikhail Gorbachev, for instance, or the accidental canniness of Ronald Reagan. Irony is a force of history as well as a figure of speech, and in politics you need to be prepared for surprises, even if you are as clever as Bertrand Russell.
(Image: Bertrand Russell and his wife, Edith Russell, lead an anti-nuclear march by the Committee of 100 in London on February 18th, 1961, via Wikimedia Commons)
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