“Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.” So goes the characteristically dry opening to Bertrand Russell’s 1943 essay An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish.
He presses the point: “On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness. I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense. I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age.”
Russell was writing all this at the depths of the Second World War, when the spectre of a world bent under the yoke of Nazism...
Andrew Potter wrote The Authenticity Hoax and, with Joseph Heath, The Rebel Sell.
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