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Bertrand Russell, the great 20th century philosopher and peace activist, has been gone for 35 years. Russell wrote widely and made many contributions to our understanding of the world, but he was especially concerned with the human problem of war and peace in the nuclear age. His internationalist message—today as relevant as ever—is one which we ignore at our peril. The great evil of his time, no less than today, was what he called “fanatical dogmatism”. Its main manifestations were in politics and religion. Its causes were rooted in a certain narrowness of intellect and emotion which he believed the study of philosophy could remedy by the cultivation of impersonal thinking and generalized sympathy, and by the practice of rational skepticism—suspending judgment where lack of evidence precluded knowledge. His philosophy was an antidote to dogmatic “certainty”, with its inevit¬able intolerance, cruelty and violence, and it was an affirmation of the importance of reason in pursuit of world peace. This July marks the 50th anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. With the growing intensity of the Cold War and the advent of the H-bomb, Russell came to believe that the continued existence of the human race was in doubt. With the support of Albert Einstein (who died soon after he signed the Manifesto) and other eminent scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain, an international plea was issued to renounce war and nuclear weapons as instruments of national policy. The essence of the Manifesto, fashioned after Russell’s 1954 BBC Christmas talk, “Man's Peril”, was as powerful as it was simple: “We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death.” The Manifesto stopped short of advocating the remedy Russell and Einstein favored—a system of world governance with a monopoly on weapons of war and the democratic machinery to make, interpret and enforce world law. But it did call on the international scientific community to work to publicize the perils of nuclear annihilation. The Manifesto led directly to the international Pugwash Conferences first convened in Pugwash, Nova Scotia in 1957. The Pugwash Movement was a prime mover in nuclear arms control, helping to establish Nuclear Free Zones, the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963) which ended atomic testing in the atmosphere, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), now ratified by 189 nations, which has done much to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. In recognition of its work, the Pugwash Conference received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Russell died in 1970, when the SALT process was just getting underway, and never saw the great progress in arms control and the end of the cold war. But he did live to see the advent of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by which the nuclear weapons states share nuclear technology with the non-nuclear states who forswear nuclear weapons. And the Treaty requires that the nuclear weapons states too must eventually abolish their nuclear weapons: they must seek “... the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and ... nuclear disarmament, and ... a treaty on general and complete disarmament....” And most heartening for Russell must have been the Treaty’s insistence that the disarmament be “under strict and effective international control”—a phrase suggestive of the world authority that Russell and Einstein had long felt necessary for world peace. What would Russell say about the state of the world were he alive today? Certainly he would have been amazed and greatly uplifted by the end of the Cold War. But he would see the world as having squandered the opportunity of the last decade to abolish nuclear weapons, what Jonathan Schell has poignantly called our “gift of time”. No doubt, he would rightly assign much of the blame for this political waste to the unilateralist policies of the sole superpower whose leadership could have fostered a truly international turn in world history and put us on the way to the “new Paradise” that the Manifesto envisages. Indeed, the world since 9/11 has in some ways slipped back into the perils of nuclear madness stimulated by the Pentagon’s new doctrines of usable nukes and preemptive war. And the unsolved problem of nuclear war has been compounded by the problem of nuclear terrorism. This is a development that Russell might have predicted for a lawless world where “might makes right”—a world ultimately incapable of providing either justice or security. If he was right, the solution for our nuclear nightmares will require a new way of thinking based on open minds and open hearts—and a genuine commitment to the idea of world peace based on world law. This is the legacy and lesson of Russell and the Manifesto for the 21st century.
Philosophy Department |