“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?

Paywall here.

Hard to say.

Thomas Babington Macaulay cited an opposite case in his History of England. The English feared and loathed Macaulay’s barbaric Scottish Highlander ancestors up through their frightening invasion of England in 1745 under the Jacobite pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie. Otherwise, the English paid almost no attention to the radically different culture of the Highlands. When they did notice it, they wrinkled their noses in disgust.

After 1745, Westminster cracked down hard on the clans for a generation, methodically eradicating what was distinctive about Highlander ways.

Then, when there was no longer a threat posed by the kilt-wearing Highlanders, the English (and much of Europe) suddenly fell in love with all things Highland. First, the Ossian hoax in which Europe became fascinated by a purported Gaelic national epic, then the better researched historical novels of Sir Walter Scott.

The Royal Family continues to summer at Balmoral Castle in the Highlands.

The idealizing of the victim is useful for a time: if virtue is the greatest of goods, and if subjection makes people virtuous, it is kind to refuse them power, since it would destroy their virtue. If it is difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, it is a noble act on his part to keep his wealth and so imperil his eternal bliss for the benefit of his poorer brethren. It was a fine self-sacrifice on the part of men to relieve women of the dirty work of politics. And so on. But sooner or later the oppressed class will argue that its superior virtue is a reason in favor of its having power, and the oppressors will find their own weapons turned against them.

When at last power has been equalized, it becomes apparent to everybody that all the talk about superior virtue was nonsense, and that it was quite unnecessary as a basis for the claim to equality.Lord Russell may have been overly optimistic about how quickly it become apparent to everybody that all the talk about superior virtue was nonsense …

In regard to the Italians, the Hungarians, women, and children, we have ran through the whole cycle. But we are still in the middle of it in the case which is of the most importance at the present time namely, that of the proletariat.

Admiration of the proletariat is very modern. The eighteenth century, when it praised “the poor,” thought always of the rural poor. Jefferson’s democracy stopped short at the urban mob; he wished America to remain a country of agriculturists. Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and airplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age. Considered in human terms, it has as little in its favor as belief in Celtic magic, the Slav soul, women’s intuition, and children’s innocence.

If it were indeed the case that bad nourishment, little education, lack of air and sunshine, unhealthy housing conditions, and overwork produce better people than are produced by good nourishment, open air, adequate education and housing, and a reasonable amount of leisure, the whole case for economic reconstruction would collapse, and we could rejoice that such a large percentage of the population enjoys the conditions that make for virtue.

But obvious as this argument is, many Socialist and Communist intellectuals consider it de rigueur to pretend to find the proletariat more amiable than other people, while professing a desire to abolish the conditions which, according to them, alone produce good human beings.

Children were idealized by Wordsworth and un-idealized by Freud. Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come.

Well, leftist intellectuals got pretty tired of the proletariat by the 1960s, leaving them for rightist intellectuals to extoll.

An interesting development since then is that the left came up with a new theory of social change: namely, that nothing ever happens. If blacks, say, were oppressed in the past, that means they must still be oppressed. The progressive view is now:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

Well, not quite eternity. History, we now know, began in 1619.

On the other hand, nothing that happened in the 50,000 years before 1619 could possibly matter today.

The Science is settled!