Sustaining a Non-Dismal World of Non-Drones

When you work in an academic department in a field of study which is popularly known as "the dismal science," you tend to look for even small signs of life with which you can counter that designation. You know: Undismal things. Things that hint of happiness or beauty, things that provoke curiousity or dreams. Things like a well-ironed shirt, for instance, on a customarily rumpled faculty member. Meeting a spouse who's a talented artist or finding out that the staid professor of Industrial Organization is a Flamenco dancer. Finding someone on Facebook, even if you wisely decline to friend him, discovering a fellow blogger. Or spotting an expensively framed portrait of the English philosopher Bertrand Russell on the wall in a faculty office.

Bertrand. I confessed to the professor in whose office I found the philosopher framed that I found Russell's work very dense and had never finished anything he'd written, even though I'd tried several times. He reached up behind the thick heavy volumes of Smith and Mas Colell and Varian and extricated a very thin paperback, Authority and the Individual. "Try this," he suggested. "It's from his lectures, and it's eminently readable."

I don't know if I will ever succeed in reading anything else of Russell's, but I am so enthralled by the analysis of our civilization in this slim volume I will certainly try again. Everything he discusses in these Reith lectures is relevant today. The lectures, delivered to large BBC audiences way back in 1948, did not anticipate a post 9/11 world, where the strong have become fearful and the weak bold. Russell did not see that the religion of capital would find itself in a horrifying round of Russian roulette, minus the now largely ineffectual Russians, minus the sense of gamesmanship inherent in roulette. Just spin the chamber and the twin towers fall down. Spin and Afghanistan's destroyed. Spin again and a plane crashes. Spin again and again and again; like the saying goes, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

No one predicted the way political violence would find its way to the shores of the US, and the subsequent way terrorism became almost mundane, something we pretend to cope with every time we fly to Aunt Brunhilde's for a cousin's wedding, something so much a part of our life now we barely flinch for attacks that kill less than several score. Russell, lecturing in the WWII era, still manages to address nearly everything we're seeing now, even in this slimmest and simplest of his writings.

What he talked about then remains entirely relevant today. When he dicusses fear, one can imagine a shot of a weakly smiling George W Bush on the screen behind Russell's podium, as the towers came crashing down along with our sense of immunity. "If loyalty to (a national culture) is to be replaced by loyalty to (corporations) ...there is only one psychological motive which is adequate for the purpose, and that is the motive of fear of external enemies." We hear the thumping of military boots tromping onto the shores of Iraq. We see the recession being addressed by infusing capital into the very industry that precipitated the crisis, that bankrupted the American working class, without any real reform or regulation of their tactics.

Russell talks about how the individual siting in the world has developed from that of a tribal to a national to a lost soul, still in search of gratifications for our enduring need to explore and create and belong. Combat and war, he postulates, are the most extreme expression of our need to stake out our individual territory, to wager our lives on our physical and logistical superiority. To counter this impulse, Russell advocates something that is becoming familiar to our ears lately: smaller, decentralized economies.

"The instincts that long ago prompted the hunting and fighting activities of our savage ancestors demand an outlet; if they can find no other, they will turn to hatred and thwarted malice. But there are outlets for these very instincts that are not evil. For fighting, it is possible to substitute emulation and active sport; for hunting, the joy of adventure and discovery and creation." To promote these, Russell recommends what we have come to call in our own time, sustainable lifestyles.

Yes. In a postwar world obsessed with unparalleled industrialization (for was it not American manufacturing prowess that actually won the war?), Bertrand Russell is speaking to millions of rapt listeners over the waves of the BBC and telling them to invest in decentralized, local economies, to provide satisfying work for artisans and artists and intellectuals as a means to avert our fatal impulse to find adrenaline and challenge on the battlefield, satisfaction no longer accruing from our daily work routines. Engagement in our work, Russell says, satisfying our sense of individual importance and fulfillment in our communities, is the best means to take away the horrifying prospect of life as drones in the military industrial complex we've built.

What perhaps Russell could not anticipate in these lectures, was the fact that even warfare would become by the 21st century, automated and impersonal. Drones and missiles, armaments that fire over such a long distance in either blinding daylight or deepest midnight that battles can be won or lost without soldiers facing an enemy. Even warfare is becoming an alienated process. The combination of instinct and training that once developed leadership in soldiers on the field of combat has been replaced by a microphone and a computer chip embedded in their helmet, telling them where to look, where to fire, when to run. How much more do we need the shelter of work that engages, inspires and allows us to develop the initiative and creativity that is the best part of being human?

Well. Russell's lectures say it all much better. "We shall not," Russell concludes, "create a good world by trying to make men tame and timid, but by encouraging them to be bold and adventurous. and fearless except in inflicting injuries on their fellow-men." Everyone on my Christmas list is getting a copy of this book this year. I hope you get a copy, too.