I think Bertrand Russell is one of the greatest philosophers in history, deserving consideration among the ranks of the very best. 

My love for Russell extends beyond his great works of logic to his smaller, less-known essays as well. I’ve always found his mind and attitude toward life so exhilarating, and I hope in this article I can show you a little of what I mean.

Not long ago, I read through the Routledge edition of In Praise of Idleness, a series of essays by Bertrand Russell. I wrote this immediately after, but have since edited it to post here. The collection begins with the eponymous essay “In Praise of Idleness”, and is followed by a series of insightful essays that put Russell’s eclecticism on full display. After reading through the series, one stuck out to me more than the rest: an aggressively terse essay titled “On Comets”. 

I tried to find an online version of it to use for this entry, but since none appear to exist, I have transcribed the essay myself. Below is Bertrand Russell’s odd little piece, “On Comets”, followed by some thoughts that I had upon reading it. 

I hope that you enjoy it and that it helps you reflect a little on this lovely Sunday.

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On Comets

by Bertrand Russell

If I were a comet, I should consider the men of our present age a degenerate breed.

In former, times, the respect for comets was universal and profound. One of them foreshadowed the death of Caesar; another was regarded as indicating the approaching death of the Emperor Vespasian. He himself was a strong-minded man, and maintained that the comet must have some other significance, since it was hairy and he was bald; but there were very few who shared this extreme of rationalism. The Venerable Bede said that ‘comets portend revolutions of kingdoms, pestilence, war, winds, or heat’. John Knox regarded comets as evidence of divine anger, and other Scottish Protestants thought them ‘a warning to the King to extirpate the Papists’.

America, and especially New England, came in for a due share of cometary attention. In 1652 a comet appeared just at the moment when the eminent Mr. Cotton fell ill, and disappeared at his death. Only ten years later, the wicked inhabitants of Boston were warned by a new comet to abstain from “voluptuousness and abuse of the good creatures of God by licentiousness in drinking and fashions in apparel’. Increase Mather, the eminent divine, considered that comets and eclipses had portended the deaths of Presidents of Harvard and Colonial Governors, and instructed his flock to pray to the Lord that he would not ‘take away stars and send comets to succeed them’. 

All this superstition was gradually dispelled by Halley’s discovery that one comet, at least, went round the sun in an orderly ellipse, just like a sensible planet, and by Newton’s proof that comets obey the law of gravitation. For some time, Professors in the more old-fashioned universities were forbidden to mention these discoveries, but in the long run the truth could not be concealed.

In our day, it is difficult to imagine a world in which everybody, high and low, educated and uneducated, was preoccupied with comets, and filled with terror whenever one appeared. Most of us have never seen a comet. I have seen two, but they were far less impressive than I had expected them to be. The cause of the change in our attitude is not merely rationalism, but artificial lighting. In the streets of a modern city the night sky is invisible; in rural districts, we move in cars with bright headlights. We have blotted out the heavens, and only a few scientists remain aware of stars and planets, meteorites and comets. The world of our daily life is more man-made than at any previous epoch. In this there is loss as well as gain: Man, in the security of his dominion, is becoming trivial, arrogant, and a little mad. But I do not think a comet would now produce the wholesome moral effect which it produced in Boston in 1662; a stronger medicine would now be needed.

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What was immediately interesting to me about this piece, along with several others from this collection, is the way it runs against the popular conception of Russell as a simple Enlightenment materialist who is too obsessed with scientific and moral progress to be concerned with the loss of “The Old World”. Russell, often labeled as a humanist, communicates here a deep sadness about humanity. He opens his essay with the notion that humans are “a degenerate breed”‒ an uncharacteristically bleak perspective for Russell.  This stuck out to me, and I am not entirely sure of how to read it. 

This middle of the essay rings more typical of Russell‒ he details the way that scientific advancement has improved our understanding of the heavens and rid humanity of superstition. But then, as before, he seems to bemoan this event when he writes that “we have blotted out the heavens”. This leads to his conclusory statement: 

“Man, in the security of his dominion, is becoming trivial, arrogant, and a little mad. But I do not think a comet would now produce the wholesome moral effect which it produced in Boston in 1662; a stronger medicine would now be needed.”

This ending‒ I hesitate to call it a conclusion‒ leaves me with confusion. Is it hopeful? What “medicine” would it take to heal humanity?

This essay seems to run against Russell’s usual penchant for clear analysis and exposition, and for that reason I was particularly enchanted by it. Furthermore, as I grow older, I cannot seem to rid myself of the feeling that there is something being lost in our lives‒ something from the Old World. I often battle the sneaking fear that our progress and our comfort, desirable as they may be, are wreaking hidden damage upon something deeper and more fundamental. This may be a weakness; it may be an irrational fear, but I cannot help but think of it and feel that fear. Perhaps Russell, after seeing a comet, began to think the same.

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As usual, send me thoughts if you have any.

-AW

In this article, you’ll find some writing about gender and grammar, and also a bit about how I like to investigate the random curiosities I have in life. Also, a little bit of Wittgenstein will slither in at the last moment. 

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You know how there are some questions you ask yourself throughout the years but never feel the pressing need to actually investigate? Well, for me, one of those was why Spanish [the language that I had to learn in school]  had those annoying gender endings.

Now, obviously other languages have them too, and I knew that probably Latin had something to do with it, but I never really looked beyond that. Then, one night when I was out with friends at a bar, I learned that the Spanish word for “handcuffs” was the same word for “wives”: “las esposas”. 

Now that’s funny. But it also got me very curious, and I decided I wanted some answers.

Now, following the advice of a wise friend of mine, I never turn immediately to the internet to resolve matters of idle fascination and curiosity. I first interrogate my own mind; and, if after some time, nothing emerges, I then interrogate other humans.

Using only the resources of memory and critical thinking, my first guess was that people thought the universe could be naturally divided into things feminine and things masculine; and that historically, language often reflected this perceived metaphysical fact. So perhaps humans naturally think of things like “The Ocean” in a feminine way. But this obviously wasn’t enough. Firstly, there is plenty of disagreement between languages on the gendering of such words — for example, in English (a language with very little formal genderings), traditionally treats the Ocean as a “her”, while in Spanish it is Masculine “el Oceano” and the same with “el Mar” (the sea). Also, so much of the gender classifications appear totally arbitrary. Why would the eye be “el ojo” but the table be “la mesa”. And what about new words that enter a language, like “computer”? Well, it turns out it depends on what Spanish-speaking country you live in. 

Furthermore, I knew that some other languages, like German, have more than two gender classifications for nouns; and I was later informed that others, like Zulu, have up to fifteen different genders!

So, confused, I began asking my Spanish tutors and my Spanish-speaking friends. I would mostly get a response of hands thrown-up and the general exclamation that “language is weird”. After many such failed responses, and with my curiosity mounting, I was about to give in to the siren song easy internet access. But just before I did, I got one small answer during some of my philosophy pleasure reading.

In the book Quiddities, W.V.O. Quine considers the idea of gender in language from the perspective of an analytic philosopher interested in clarity. He asks us to consider the following English phrase:

He removed the manuscript from the briefcase and cast it into’ the sea

This is a perfectly fine English sentence, but it’s also unclear. What is the “it” referring to? Probably the manuscript, we think; but other than perhaps local convention, there’s no grammatical rule telling us this. Quine then asks us to look at the same phrase, but in French (a gendered language) :

II retira Ie manuscrit de Ia serviette et Ie (la) jeta dans Ia mer

In the French, we see that that the previous confusion about which noun “it” is referring to has been resolved by the fact that these nouns have different genders, and so the “it” that is used will correspond in kind to one or the other.

Now, obviously, this benefit evaporates if the antecedent noun candidates are both of the same gender classifications — then we are right back into the problem of ambiguity that emerged in the English phrase. But this problem will arise something like half as often in languages with two genders, and even less so in languages with more.

After this, I did my internet research into the Proto-Indo-European origin of gender divisions and the way gender is treated linguistically in other, unrelated language systems like Swahili. It goes deep, and most of it is shrouded in mystery due to the irretrievable answers of how and why some of these divisions began. What folk cosmological beliefs caused languages to often refer to the moon as a woman? We will probably never know. So, I’m unable to know the full why, but I have learned one cool benefit that gender division in language offers. It provides a valuable means of clarity regarding pronouns and their antecedents. There’s obviously so much more, and I am woefully out of my depth here.

I still think the gender endings in Spanish are annoying, but I will say that I found new appreciation in Wittgenstein’s idea that to truly understand a single sentence, one must understand the entire language.

-AW