“The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed” by Bertrand Russell

Is it still true that "When at last power has been equalized, it becomes apparent to everybody that all the talk about superior virtue was nonsense"?

I like to point out how short is the handshake link from Napoleon to a living, active celebrity, namely Paul McCartney. Sir Paul is connected by his political mentor, mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), through Russell’s grandfather, Prime Minister John Russell, to Bonaparte.

Russell was also a prodigious opinion journalist, by which he earned most of his income. He would compose his punditry for the press during his morning two hour walk, then dictate it to his secretary, and move on to his more esoteric thoughts. Russell’s journalistic skills were comparable to those of his contemporary, Winston Churchill. Both were awarded Nobel Prizes in Literature for their nonfiction after WWII as a sort of reward to the English right and the English left for winning the war.

Here’s a 1937 article Russell wrote for the The Nation.

ONE of the persistent delusions of mankind is that some sections of the human race are morally better or worse than others. This belief has many different forms, none of which has any rational basis. It is natural to think well of ourselves, and thence, if our mental processes are simple, of our sex, our class, our nation, and our age. But among writers, especially moralists, a less direct expression of self-esteem is common. They tend to think ill of their neighbors and acquaintances, and therefore to think well of the Sections of mankind to which they themselves do not belong. Lao-tse admired the “pure men of old,” who lived before the advent of Confucian sophistication. Tacitus and Madame de Stael admired the Germans because they had no emperor. Locke thought well of the “intelligent American” because he was not led astray by Cartesian sophistries.

A rather curious form of this admiration for groups to which the admirer does not belong is the belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed: subject nations, the poor, women, and children. …

Nationalism introduced, in the nineteenth century, a substitute for the noble savage: the patriot of an oppressed nation. The Greeks until they had achieved liberation from the Turks, the Hungarians until the Ausgleich of 1867, the Italians until 1870, and the Poles until after the 1914-18 war were regarded romantically as gifted poetic races, too idealistic to succeed in this wicked world.

The Irish were regarded by the English as possessed of a special charm and mystical insight until 1921, when it was found that the expense of continuing to oppress them would be prohibitive.

One by one these various nations rose to independence, and were found to be just like everybody else; but the experience of those already liberated did nothing to destroy the illusion as regards those who were still struggling. English old ladies still sentimentalize about the “wisdom of the East” and American intellectuals about the “earth consciousness” of the Negro. …

As appears from the various instances that we have considered, the stage in which superior virtue Is attributed to the oppressed is transient and unstable. It begins only when the oppressors come to have a bad conscience, and this only happens when their power is no longer secure.

Is that true?

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