The Road To Perfidy: How Bertrand Russell Became An Evil Man

 

The spark of genius in the pre-school child, if it has not been destroyed already, is often typified by the Socratic manner in which the child asks "Why?" Sadly, in the United States in our times, that spark of genius is usually soon quenched by the old dishwater of what Riesman termed "other-directedness," by that peculiar turn of the sadistic screw sometimes named euphemistically empiricism and pragmatism. A child's spark of genius, the wont to find out how and why past or current opinions and events came into existence, is replaced by brutish faith in the fruits of mere inductive generalization from individual and collective experience, a form of moral self-degradation often termed "practical common sense," or with credit given appropriately to bestiality, "horse sense."

All of the truly great philosophers and teachers of the known history of European civilization, beginning with the best of the Ionian Greeks, and associated famously with Plato's Academy at Athens, or Nicolaus of Cusa and Gottfried Leibniz, have evoked true genius from within young people by recapturing that innate spark of potential, using what is most fairly described as Socratic method. Formalism, by contrast, kills the soul, as this was recognized by the most famous of the modern formalists, Venice's Pietro Pomponazzi, who searched for his own soul, and, poor schlemiel that he had become, reported that he had none.

Thus, since it is that innate spark of potential for genius in every human child which sets all mankind absolutely apart from and above the beasts, we are able to recognize, as Philo of Alexandria shows this the necessary reading of Moses' first chapter of Genesis, that that quality of genius is the human soul, is the aspect of the individual person which is, in the Latin of Nicolaus of Cusa, both imago Dei (the image of God) and capax Dei (the potential to participate in God) . Thus, the formalism which caused the loss of Pomponazzi's soul is intrinsically the adversary of the Good, is evil.

Fortunately, in most cases it is possible to requicken the spark of genius innate to the new child. All the great teachers did this. Every good teacher attempts to do that in some degree, in his or her approximation of the Socratic method employed by Plato, Eudoxus, Theaetetus, Archimedes, Cusa, and Leibniz. One need but reawaken the genius of the child, by citing the password to genius, "Why?"

Begin by choosing an important single event from history. Choose any such event in which there is evidence that the event was motivated by aid of some widely accepted, but fraudulent pretext. Seek to discover what motivated that fraud, and seek to uncover also the reasons that fraud was tolerated by its dupes. Keep asking "Why"? Peel the onion, layer by layer, until the history embedded in that single act is brought to the surface. The result of that sort of Socratic exercise is a referent for the proper definition of the word "knowledge."

So, let us begin.  (more...)

How Bertrand Russell Became An Evil Man Part I    Part II    Part III

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