Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology by Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí

Abstract

Reviewed by: Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology by Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí Carl Mitcham (bio) Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology By Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí. Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2022. Pp. x + 245. This book is an analytic biography, from the perspective of cultural sociology, of Bertrand Russell as a public intellectual engaged with the promises and perils of science and technology. Russell was one of the great figures of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century analytic British philosophy, but he stepped away from academic life to become a public intellectual in response to the Great War. Whereas previously he had seen science and the scientization of philosophy as a promising fulfillment of the Enlightenment vision for a rational society, after the war he increasingly viewed science and technology as a civilizational peril. Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí interpret Russell's trajectory as exhibiting the power of cultural binaries (good-pure-sacred versus evil-polluted-profane) to capture the mind of a philosopher and to illustrate the structural character of meaning in a techno-scientific society. Chapter 1 reviews Russell's initial faith in the power of logic, mathematics, and science to provide a realistic picture of the world. What he described as a subsequent "retreat from Pythagoras" was influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Great War. Wittgenstein brought about changes in philosophy, from mathematics to language. But chapter 2 focuses especially on Russell's response to the war and the role it played in his turn from imperialist to pacifist and his shift from university to public life. Chapter 3 considers Russell's effort to formulate a realist, empirical epistemology, and his growing pessimism about politics. As the authors summarize it, he concluded that cognitive beliefs about the external world provide no more than partial and tentative knowledge and that beliefs are less powerful than wishes in politics. They write that political behavior is "often dominated by unconscious processes and impulses. Human nature is overwhelmingly irrational, contradictory, whimsical, and easily manipulable" (p. 116). Chapters 4 and 5 cover Russell's performances as a public intellectual dramatizing the evils of nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, respectively. [End Page 634] From having once advocated surrender to Nazi Germany in order to avoid a second world war and then promoting all-out war against Germany—and even a postwar preventive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union in order to establish an American-dominated world state—Russell wound up lending his prestige to the campaign for nuclear disarmament and convened a war crimes tribunal to pass judgment on America's role in Vietnam. To interpret the repeated twists and turns during his long life—from pure philosopher to public intellectual, from optimistic proponent of science to pessimistic critic of technology, from idealizer of American power to anathematizer of the United States as evil—the authors draw on the cultural sociology developed by Jeffrey Alexander. Through all his contradictory proclamations, how was Russell able to continue to command attention? Although "Russell's positionings could be surprisingly simplistic and Manichean[, the] oversimplifications often had powerful symbolic effects" (p. 190). Radical cultural binaries are on their own powerful social forces in competition with and influencing the cognitive and physical aspects of science and technology. A concluding chapter summarizes the analysis, drawing together diverse strands and pointing toward implications. The case of Russell's multiple public intellectual engagements with modern science and technology, primarily in relation to warfare, has obvious implications for the proliferations of binary coding in current debates about global climate change, pandemic infections, environmental pollution, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and more. It also has implications for thinking about the often-repeated criticisms of all binary coding in postmodern culture. Is the nonbinary versus binary itself just another instance of good-pure-sacred versus evil-polluted-profane? I personally learned a good deal from this volume. I was aware of the broad trajectory of Russell's intellectual life, but his Manichean tendencies had escaped me. And before reading this book, I would not have been able to distinguish cultural sociology (using culture to explain social phenomena) from sociology...