Rendering an Account . . .

Following on from an earlier posting on Bertrand Russell (see October 2nd: The Heart is the Matter . . .)

While Russell tried to bend his will and flesh to a progressivist ethic that proved ultimately to be uncongenial to him, his wife, Dora, had no such problem. The progressivist ethic rather than being a hardship to her encompassed all her deepest yearnings. The ‘new morality’ was Dora written in programmatic form.

Dora believed what she believed because she wanted to believe it. At one level, the ‘new morality’ was a rationalization, and hence a justification, of her emotional and instinctive drives and her need, in the face of conventional morality, to assuage them.

Nor did this involve, as it so often does, an hypocrisy. It didn’t represent a private vice, but rather a public call to action. Dora wore her heart (or whatever) firmly on her sleeve and refused to compromise, even when life turned bitterly against her. She comes out of Monk’s book in many ways as a much more sympathetic and human figure than does Russell.

By contrast, Russell believed in the ‘new morality’ because he ‘reasoned’ himself into it, admittedly under influence of Dora. Both, in their different ways, were wrong. Russell put too much faith in mechanical abstract reason; Dora, rather than finding truth, instead invented a ‘truth’ of her own, one that jelled with her own desires and instincts, and persuaded herself that it was in some sense universal.

Yet in substance the ‘new morality’ wasn’t really that new at all. The aristocracy had, for example, been practicing a form of open marriage for years. According to the formula, it was the duty of the well-bred wife to provide an ‘heir and a spare,’ beyond which she could live much as she liked. As A.P.W. Malcomson noted in The Pursuit of an Heiress: Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland 1740 – 1840, ‘adultery on the part of the wife was a routine fact of upper-class life and was practised on an extensive scale . . .’

But in this form it was a private vice—something that was tolerated and that official society averted its eyes from, unless compelled otherwise by some foolishness or inappropriateness of behaviour on the woman’s part. In which case, all the familiar social devices of disapproval and ostracism were likely to come into play.

Such upper-class adultery was also a private vice in another way, insofar as it represented something of a ‘closed shop.’ Outside of aristocratic circles, it was something generally not spoken of, and certainly not something to be preached or recommended to the ‘lower’ orders.

By contrast, the Bloomsbury group of the early twentieth century, which was upper-middle-class rather than aristocratic, tried to, among other things, ape in extended form the aristocratic practice minus the hypocrisy. There seems to have existed the intention of a rather painful honesty among its members with regard to their liaisons. Monk catches the fervid atmosphere of it all, when he speaks of Gerald Brennan as ‘one of the links in a subsequently much-discussed chain of Bloomsbury romantic entanglements: he was in love with Dora Carrington, who, while married to Ralph Partridge, was in love with Lytton Strachey; Strachey, meanwhile, was besotted with Partridge, who, in turn, was in love with Frances Marshall, whom . . . etc. etc.’

The thing is that the Bloomsbury clique was firmly elitist—one of its members, Desmond McCarthy, attributed its eventual demise to ‘a considerable infiltration of inferior persons’— and while not inclined to hide its light under a bushel, nonetheless seems to have had no great orientation towards propagandizing its values and practices.

The ‘new morality’ wasn’t new in another sense too. At most, the Russells merely delivered a new formulation, a new rationalization, for an existing strain of social belief and practice rooted in Marxism and radical feminism (something to be dealt with in a future posting). What was important about their role was mainly Russell’s status as a major intellectual figure and the added influence that this could bring to any beliefs he seemed to espouse.

The ancient Aryan society of northern India was organized in the form of four castes. The most important caste, as was recognized by all of the others, was the peasantry—the shudra or ‘foot’ of society, the foundation upon which society was built. Without the agricultural surpluses produced by the farming caste there could be no priestly caste or warrior caste or merchant caste. The whole existence of society was bound up with the health of its ‘lowest’ and broadest layer.

In like manner, for modern society, the working and farming classes and the small business class ultimately provide the basis for all the rest. The health of the overall society—whether it is to be a house built on sand or one built on solid ground—depends in the last resort upon the health of its productive sectors.

The aristocratic and upper-middle-class practices that we discussed above were in the main private practices—they had little or no active orientation to those outside their immediate social circle or class. People privately pursued pleasure within the norms laid down within their particular classes or cliques—which they were entitled to do.

The Russells, both committed to socialism, by comparison were active proselytizers. They believed that the world could be improved through a ‘struggle against conventional morality and the established order.’ They both, especially Dora, believed in what they were doing and propagandised for it relentlessly—Russell in his writings and lectures; Dora in her activities, especially among working-class women. So fervently did they believe in their program that they set up a pioneering school, where children were to be educated ‘in the light of the “new philosophy”, rather than under the yoke of the old superstitions of religion, patriotism and conventional morality.’

The question ultimately is not about the bona fides of the Russells or their right to promote the things that they believed in—which right of course they had. Rather it is about the efficacy of their programme. Viewed over a reasonable historical distance: Did it succeed in delivering what it sought to deliver—certainly in educational terms, future generations that were to be ‘fearless, independent and free’? Or did it deliver something else entirely?

The subsequent history of the Russell children, who were guinea pigs to the educational and child-rearing theories of their parents, raises a major question mark over the whole programme. Both children and grandchildren were to pursue lives inexorably marked by suicide and madness—although the latter may have been exacerbated by a strain of congenital insanity believed to run through the Russell line. In retrospect, the immediate children consistently blamed their experimental upbringing and the effects on their childhood lives of the ‘new morality’ for their later problems.

Over the intervening ninety or so years the philosophy that the Russells (among others of their contemporaries) espoused has become paradigmatic. It underlies the world we live in now. It pours through innumerable channels into the eyes and ears and minds of every member of every class. Unless you were to shut yourself up in a nunnery—and even then . . .

But at least we are in a position now to assess it objectively—to measure it against reality and see to what extent it has succeeded or failed in its programmatic promise to deliver a new paradise—entailing a free, fulfilled and happy life for all. And, if it has failed, to examine to what extent the whole project was a delusional, self-serving fantasy to begin with, or the product of an untethered reason, or both.