Bertie

``1950, beginning with the OM and ending with the Nobel, seems to have marked the apogee of my respectability. It is true that i began to feel slightly uneasy, fearing that this might mean the onset of blind orthodoxy. I have always held that no-one can be respectable without being wicked, but so blunted was my moral sense that I could not see in what way I had sinned.''

Bertrand Russell (Autobiography volume III)

Russell was of course a completely impossible person, but there is much in him to love. However much he might protest, the author of this remark was born to respectability—he was the heir to a political family of the ruling class, and nothing could be more natural to him than to go into the House of Lords (of which of course he was a member, as of right) and tell everybody what's what—which of course he proceded to do. However, he was also an instinctive anarchist: the last sentence reveals a deep humility which his detractors often miss, and without which he could never have become the great thinker that he was. Russell never thought he knew everything, never thought he was God; (this is why we love Russell but not Wittgenstein); he cared—passionately—but he never believed. Not for nothing did someone (Alan Wood) once write a psychobiography called ``Bertrand Russell, the passionate sceptic''.

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