Conrad, the son of Bertrand Russell, came to suffer from mental illness in his later life. He made what was perhaps the strangest speech ever heard in the House of Lords.
Earl RUSSELL
My Lords, I rise to raise the question of penal law and lawbreakers as such, and to question whether modern society is wise to speak in terms of law breakers at all. A modern nation looks after everybody and never punishes them. If it has a police force at all, the police force is the Salvation Army. and gives a hungry or thirsty people cups of tea. If a man takes diamonds from a shop in Hatton Garden you simply give him another bag of diamonds to take with him. I am not joking. Such is the proper social order for modern Western Europe, and all prisons ought to be abolished throughout its territories. Of course, the Soviet Union and the United States could include themselves in these reforms, too. Kindness and helping people is better than punitiveness and punishing them, and a constructive endeavour is better than a destructive spirit. If anybody is in need, you help him; you do not punish him. Putting children into care, and other forms of spiritual disinheritance ought to be stopped. Borstal ought to be stopped. And the workings of the Mental Health Act which empowers seizure of people by the police when they are acting in a way likely to be harmful to themselves or others, ought to be looked into.
What are you?—soulless robots? Schoolmasters who are harsh with schoolboys, who later as a result burn down the school house, ought to be more human. Schoolboys in any case are at present treated with an indescribable severity which crushes their spirits and leaves them unnourished. The police ought to be totally prevented from ever molesting young people at all or ever putting them into gaols and raping them and putting them into brothels, or sending them out to serve other people sexually against their wills. The spirit ought to be left free and chaining it has injured the creative 276power of the nation. The young unemployed ought not in any way to have become separate from governmental power but ought to have been given enough to live on out of the national wealth to look after themselves and never ask themselves even to think of working while there is no work to be had.
Trade union thinking on this subject is wrong. Leisure is the point and working is wrong, being in any case the curse visited by God upon Adam, and not blessed. Upper classes are right, and should be restored to vogue and favour more than is the present custom to do. Automation in the factories, with universal leisure for all, and a standing wage sufficient to provide life without working ought to be supplied for all, so that everybody becomes a leisured aristocrat. Aristocrats are Marxist. The Lord Chancellor holds the Order of Lenin. The fulfilment of industrial life is Tonga and the South Sea Islands, and not the satanic mills at all. Shops ought to supply goods without payment, the funds to pay for the goods being supplied by the State, so that all motive for stealing vanishes. And, in a completely reorganised modern society, Women's Lib. would be realised by girls being given a house of their own at the age of 12, with three-quarters of the wealth of the State being given to the girls in houses of their own to support them; so that marriage would be abolished and a girl could have as many husbands as she liked; she would, of course, be free to choose only one, should she choose to do so. The men receive the remaining quarter of the national wealth to support them, and can, if they like, live in communal huts.
The full prospects of industrial civilisation ought to he realised: it is a boon, it should be called a boon, it should be used as a boon. The free spirit in school should be preserved, so that Sir Isaac Newton returns to us. Sweden and France have modernised themselves; all other nations in Europe, including Britain, should follow their example. A nation with industrial power should use it for benefit. There are other points in which a modernising nation modernising itself could improve its administration. For instance, lunatics could he looked after individually, and it could be found out what is missing from them, and the world which is missing from them could be 277restored. The madness of the Cold War could also be removed by the whole human race, since it is quite evident that neither Communist not American exists, but only persons. What makes it abundantly clear is the saying of "little Audrey", who laughed and laughed because she knew that only God could make a tree. Mr. Brezhnev and Mr. Carter are really the same person: one lunatic certifiable, or, in American terms, one nation, indivisible, with prisonment and lunacy for all.
In a word, the entire human race can banish the Cold War, with one word, by simply saying: "You don't exist." This fact ought to be recognised in practice, with logical recognition by the statement concerned, so that the aims of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament can be realised, and there can be disarmament throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Insight into the truth of this statement must be acknowledged, so that logic may take hold of the mind.
The CIA should be banished from Western Europe, and Euro-communism should be substituted for the present bosses of the Common Market as the prevailing social and economic system in Europe. The Portuguese Revolution should be defended and emulated throughout Western Europe. President Carter should be brought to a full halt in his "Fulton Speech" programme for Europe, in which he mentioned Paris, Rome and Lisbon by name. There should be revolutions throughout Latin America, in accordance with the wish of His Holiness the Pope; and the CIA should be driven out from every nation of Latin America. The original Indian nation should be restored to sovereignty. It goes without saying that all prisoners throughout all these areas would be released and are released from prison and are no longer whipped and tortured.
Since the so-called Protestants who govern Britain, or claim to govern her, are spiritless papal bum-boys, if they cannot take charge of themselves and find the spirit, the confidence, the power to decide to remove British arms and all Protestants from Ulster, they should forthwith find the said confidence and power to remove them. There is no point in what calls itself the British Protestant Authority remaining a spiritless limbo any longer. All soldiers and police throughout the Northern Hemisphere should disappear. They and their functions are no longer necessary and are out of date.
Such is the future which the human race requires and desires. It is very silly to ask every generation to moderate itself and palliate with old institutions and old fogeys when what is needed is modernisation. The plea that the Establishment should he preserved is the plea that the old ogres should be allowed to gobble up the younger generation. You may preserve the Establishment, but only if you introduce new institutions when they are needed. The modernisation of British Railways is a case in point. The total abolition of law and order is needed, and the police turn into the Salvation Army, as already observed, and always help people. There are no prisons or punishments.
These points are the chief requirements for the future of the human race. They should be realised briskly and with discipline. It can be noted in conclusion that, since the police and bourgeois bosses are and have been anti-aristocratical, this House is indisputably Marxist, and inherits the banner of the Red Army of the Soviet Union.
The habit of arresting young people and raping them in gaol is part of the plot which is designed to destroy the human race by making it subserve dead spirits instead of live ones; it is a craven fear of nature, arguing a mind and spirit cringingly afraid, unalive, and not itself. No wonder that, in these circumstances, the best and most creative products and political movements have not proceeded out of Europe, hut out of Africa where these practices do not prevail. Europe has been slighting herself; she has not been giving of her best to herself or to humanity. Forward the creative spirit! Leave people as nature made them, not indoor products of ersatz suffocation. And have the courage to do so. It is noteworthy that Tommy Atkins has lost every war he has fought in for the past 25 years by reason of these spiritual attritions; and that the United States and the CIA lost the war in Vietnam because they were spiritually subservient to death for these reasons.
The Ancient Greeks fought naked: they did not have solitary confinement 279cells; not in the sense that we do so today, although the captives from the Athenian expedition to Syracuse were subjected to extreme hard labour in slave conditions. Naked bathing on beaches or in rivers ought to be universal. What is right is right. If, for reasons of present law or custom, or inward spiritual slavery, people do not reach these standards, it does not mean that they ought not to reach them. And is it not better to defend the city before it is fallen? Better than to arrive too late, and defend only what would have been, if it had not already gone? But the fact is that all oppressions can always be overthrown, and that it is never too late to overthrow them. After the oppression has declared itself, its harms to mankind are known: it is then easy to reprove them, and, hapless in its revealed injury to mankind, it is powerless to defend itself against the accusation of its guilt, and has to yield. It is helpless: the accused prisoner at the bar; hammerblow upon hammerblow of accusation and reproof can be hammered into it, and, like a fallen boxer, it cannot get up to defend itself—
Interestingly, at about this time, Welfare Economics of the Sen-tentious sort now in vogue was making a similar claim to the mentally disturbed nobleman.
To paraphrase Vivian Walsh, a Society is not free unless every individual in it can 'walk away from humanly intolerable' transactions. Thus, nobody would be required to work for a living or to go to jail just because they raped and decapitated a baby.
Walsh says that Sen's social choice theory requires the provision to everybody of the means of being completely free of any resource constraint- including, though he does not admit this, the constraints placed on convicts in jails.
How could this be done? Following Bulwer Lytton, we can imagine a world in which everybody has possession of a bomb able to blow up the Earth. No one would dare refuse any such person any thing. Equally, none would have to pay taxes or go to prison unless they felt like it. Such a world would be short-lived. Sooner or later a guy who is about to die of natural causes may decide that if he can't live, no one else should be allowed to.
It seems that the old fashioned 'utilitarians' coeval with the great Earl, whose successor was one of the first peers to join the Labor Party, were aware that if Liberty was contingent upon making everyone equally powerful and wealthy, then there would be no Society. Sadly, there are certain differences which exist between men and women. It is unfair that only women can give birth. It is unfair that some people are smart, thrifty, and able to get ahead in life. Biology, like Economics, is unfair. Rationality for humans must mean reasoning in a manner which accepts the fact that Nature is indifferent to what we value.
Sen's notion of Rationality is as crazy as the views of the third Earl Russell-
Suppose you meet an old friend who is boasting about the many lives saved by his son, the leading surgeon. You may say 'not till everybody's life has been saved can we praise a Doctor for saving one or two lives here and there.' I suppose, if you happen to be a Bishop you will be understood as warning against hubris and the sin of vanity. Only God truly saves anyone. Doctors should not get too big headed otherwise they will burn in Hell. This is a type of rationality- it is theological- but it is not economic rationality. The plain fact is, we should praise and reward skilled surgeons. What they do is useful. Pretending that nobody can be helped till everybody is helped is foolish.
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