russell ethics...

 The Freethinker’s Universe

Bertrand Russell

“The universe is what it is, not what I choose that it should be. If it is indifferent to human desires, as it seems to be; if human life is a passing episode, hardly noticeable in the vastness of cosmic processes; if there is no superhuman and supernatural purpose, and no hope of ultimate salvation, it is far better to understand and acknowledge this truth than to endeavor, in futile self-assertion, to order the universe to be what we may find comfortable.

The universe is neither hostile nor friendly; it neither favors our ideals nor refutes them. Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of humankind will be brief if measured on an astronomical scale. But that is no reason for not living it as seems best to us. The things that seem to us good are none the less good for not being eternal, and we should not ask of the universe an external approval of our own ethical standards.

The freethinker’s universe may seem bleak and cold to those who have been accustomed to the comfortable indoor warmth of the various religious cosmologies. But to those who have grown accustomed to it, it has its own sublimity, and confers its own joys. In learning to think freely we have hopefully learnt to thrust fear out of our thoughts, and this lesson, once learnt, brings a kind of peace which is impossible to the slave of hesitant and uncertain credulity.”

— Bertrand Russell, The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery (1944), pp. 40-41

Bertrand Russell's The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery (1944) was published as a booklet by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (né Emanuel Julius) (July 30, 1889 – July 31, 1951). Haldeman-Julius was a Jewish-American socialist writer, atheist thinker, social reformer and publisher. He is best remembered as the head of Haldeman-Julius Publications, the creator of a series of pamphlets known as "Little Blue Books," total sales of which ran into the hundreds of millions of copies.

Image: Bertrand Russell 1951.

Bertrand Russell was a philosopher, mathematician, educational and sexual reformer, pacifist, prolific letter writer, author and columnist. Bertrand Russell was one of the most influential and widely known intellectual figures of the twentieth century. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his extensive contributions to world literature and for his "rationality and humanity, as a fearless champion of free speech and free thought in the West."

Born in Wales in 1872, Russell was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1910, he published the first volume of the acclaimed Principa Mathematica, cowritten with Alfred North Whitehead. During The First World War, Russell went to prison as a pacifist, where he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. After the war, he traveled extensively, especially to the Soviet Union and the Far East, and in 1927, he began a progressive school for young children with his wife in Sussex, which they ran until 1932. Moving to the United States shortly before World War II, Russell taught philosophy successively at the University of Chicago and the University of California at Los Angeles. Bertrand Russell was a prominent anti-war activist and championed anti-imperialism. He campaigned against Adolf Hitler, then criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, and was one of the world's most outspoken proponents of nuclear disarmament.

Russell died of influenza at his home in Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales, United Kingdom on 2nd February 1970, at the age of ninety-seven, where his ashes were scattered over the Welsh hills.

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Jacob Feder

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