Bertrand Russell as a Moral Force in World Politics

Abstract

THE PHILOSOPHER WE are here to honour tonight has a unique distinction in the history of philosophy. There has never been in the history of the world a philosopher who was as much loved in his time and as world wide as Bertrand Russell. No other philosopher made himself so relevant to the concerns and the anguish ofhis time as Bertrand Russell. True, he did not develop a system, but every system merely takes a flash ofinsight and creates an elaborate fiction out of it. But I am not here to talk about Russell as a philosopher-I am not competent to discuss his achievements in the more recondite and technical fields of philosophy-but to speak of him as a moral influence, for the world has great need ofmen of this kind. He and Einstein (and one really has to think of them together) represented what is something almost new in world history. Ifwe look about for a successor to exercise a moral influence on the rather tangled and immoral activities of mankind, we have to recognize that the human race is very, very primitive. To exercise a moral influence over the human race requires, first of all, that you be associated with some tricks-a little bit of circus is required to capture the imagination and win the awe of mankind. Moses had the worst and the best of the Pharoah's sorcerers to prove his mettle, Jesus had to walk on water, and in our more enlightened age, we have much the same phenomenon, although it is in a somewhat more superficially subtle form. One of