Today's soundtrack is The Misfits: Famous Monsters.
This evening, I'm reading the first chapter of The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, "My Religious Reminiscences."
Russell's parents had "advanced opinions in politics, theology, and morals" (p. 31). During his teens, Russell considered theology, and rejected the concepts of "free will, immortality, and belief in God" (p. 31). He found a feeling of relief at this conclusion, but could not find anyone like-minded with whom to discuss these unorthodox opinions. At the age of fourteen, Russell found that his beliefs coincided with those of the Utilitarianists; his proclamation of being a Utilitarian was met with ridicule and mocking by his family. Henceforth, he kept his thoughts to himself.
"I [...] made elaborate notes in which I practised the art of expressing the gist of each pragraph in a single sentence" (p. 33).
Russell was influenced by Darwin and John Stuart Mill; though he was raised in a professing Christian home, he was made aware of an incompatibility between Darwinism and Christianity, and knew even at a young age that he would choose the former if it came down to it. He invented "an original system of phonetic spelling" and wrote his ideas in a notebook using Greek characters so that he could record his thoughts without fear of ridicule. He learned how to take effective notes by boiling down each paragraph into a single sentence.
When he went to university, Russell found that many of his professors "held religion to be an essential ingredient in the truth, and defective only when taken as the whole truth" (p. 34). He notes that in the 1860s, the social reformers were pleasant, cultured men; they proposed change in an agreeable way. But in the period that Russell went to university - the 1890s - the world was being given an outlet for their anger by the new wave of reformers: "Ibsen, Strindberg, and Nietzche were angry men" (p. 36); "[t]he young admired their passion, and found in it an outlet for their own feelings of revolt against parental authority. The assertion of freedom seemed sufficiently noble to justify violence; the violence duly ensued, but freedom was lost in the process" (p. 36). So Russell's world was one of a new era.
