On Disobedience_ Why Freedom Means Saying _No_ to Power - Erich Fromm [8]
Bertrand Russell’s capacity to disobey is rooted, not in some abstract principle, but in the most real experience there is—in the love of life. This love of life shines through his writings as well as through the person. It is a rare quality today, and especially rare in the very countries where men live in the midst of plenty. Many confuse thrill with joy, excitement with interest, consuming with being. The necrophilous slogan “Long live death,” while consciously used only by the fascists, fills the hearts of many people living in the lands of plenty, although they are not aware of it themselves. It seems that in this fact lies one of the reasons which explain why the majority of people are resigned to accept nuclear war and the ensuing destruction of civilization and take so few steps to prevent this catastrophe. Bertrand Russell, on the contrary, fights against the threatening slaughter, not because he is a pacifist or because some abstract principle is involved, but precisely because he is a man who loves life.
For the very same reason he has no use for those voices which love to harp on the evilness of man, in fact thus saying more about themselves and their own gloomy moods than about men. Not that Bertrand Russell is a sentimental romantic. He is a hard-headed, critical, caustic realist; he is aware of the depth of evil and stupidity to be found in the heart of man, but he does not confuse this fact with an alleged innate corruption which serves to rationalize the outlook of those who are too gloomy to believe in man’s gift to create a world in which he can feel himself to be at home. “Except for those rare spirits,” wrote Russell in Mysticism and Logic: A Free Man’s Worship (1903), “that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart.” And later, in Philosophical Essays (1910), he wrote: “But for those who feel that life on this planet would be a life in prison if it were not for the windows onto a greater world beyond; for those to whom a belief in man’s omnipotence seems arrogant, who desire rather the Stoic freedom that comes of mastery over the passions than the Napoleonic domination that sees the kingdoms of this world at its feet—in a word, to men who do not find Man an adequate object of their worship, the pragmatist’s world will seem narrow and petty, robbing life of all that gives it value, and making Man himself smaller by depriving the universe which he contemplates of all its splendour.” His views on the alleged evilness of man, Russell expressed brilliantly in the Unpopular Essays (1950): “Children, after being limbs of Satan in traditional theology and mystically illuminated angels in the minds of educational reformers, have reverted to being little devils—not theological demons inspired by the Evil One, but scientific Freudian abominations inspired by the