Misha's Reviews > Portraits from memory: and other essays.

Russell is like fine wine - instead of peaking early and then going mouldy, age rather ameliorates the flavour, by bringing about a deepening of character. Whereas young Russell lacks the vigour and originality of, say, the youthful Wittgenstein or Nietzsche, old Russell has something unique to offer. Unlike, The Problems of Philosophy, which is quite bland, Portraits from Memory, and especially the other essays, ponders over some of the deepest questions facing the post-WWII world. Here, Russell's uniquely clear thinking and writing helpfully associates with his sophisticated and wide-ranging knowledge of societal affairs, created by his almost a century-long effort to acquire more knowledge (Russell was ~84 when this book was first published).

One notable essay is Why I am not a Communist, in which Russell gives a very short but intriguing critique of communism. He believes that both its theoretical tenets are unsound and its practical consequences undesirable. For one, Marxism, Russell writes, applies Ricardo's labour-based theory of values to wages, but not the prices of manufactured products (if they did, a bad product generated by the sweat and tears of many should be more expensive than an amazing product, effortlessly finessed into existence by a creative manufacturer). Furthermore, the dictatorship of the Proletariat cannot be very democratic if, like in Soviet Russia, the Proletariat is a tiny minority compared to, e.g., the peasants. It is even less democratic if we restrict the dictatorship to 'class-conscious' Proletarians, which in the Soviet Union was deemed to be 'only one person', quips Russell - Joseph Stalin.

Another very interesting essay is History as an Art, in which Russell really shows off his depth of knowledge, and the ease with which he appeals to it. He argues that history should not be treated as a specialist subject, intelligible only to academics or other specialist professionals. Rather, history should be an essential part of anyone's mental constitutions, guiding our decisions in any of our affairs. Some of Russell's thoughts on, for instance, Spengler's morphological view of history, and on the effect of television on society, I found highly engaging.

Man's Peril, and its sequel, Steps Towards Peace argue that the Hydrogen Bomb has totally upset global warfare. Essentially, any institution with substantial funding and some amount of scientific competence, can produce such a beast of a bomb, and by recklessness or maliciousness destroy all of life on earth. This, Russell shows, cannot but entail that we can have no more wars if we wish to preserve humanity at all. Indeed, violent global wars seem far from imminent in our present age, some 60 years after Man's Peril was written. In the digital age, wars have not ceased. They have rather grown more complicated, less violent, and much more hard to grasp. A 150-year-old Russell with even more acquired wisdom could have proved quite useful.