Bertrand Russell, Hook-Up Culture, and the Existential Isolation under Free Conditions

It’s fair to say that The Bloomsbury Group invented modern hook-up culture. (I wouldn’t want to say that they invented the practice.)* While Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was not at the core of Bloomsbury, his family seems to have owned a good part of the property where the set met and lived. He seems to have educated and know quite a bit of the male members of the group at Cambridge. And his Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916, which appeared as Why we Fight Stateside) originated in public lectures that many of them seem to have attended and certainly have read.** (Regular readers know I have been blogging about that work for a while now.)

Chapter 6 is titled “Marriage and the Population Question.” This is a rather important chapter because it seems to be Russell’s first public writing on eugenics (and his implied race theory) and feminist themes that he returned to in later writings (not the least Marriage and Morals). Obviously, I return to Russell’s eugenics before long.

The chapter is formally about marriage as a “political institution” (p. 117; my page-numbers are to the 14th impression from 1960.) And, unsurprisingly, much of the chapter is an argument for reform in divorce laws. But Russell is also interested in the psychological effects on the partners and their children during changing mores. This makes sense because (recall) in the Principles for Russell, a progressive society is an evolving set of norms and institutions that are, when healthy, constantly adapting to changing circumstances.

Anyway, much to my surprise Russell’s account of sexual liberty is not just focused on the benefits of this. In fact, he diagnoses what I take to be a potential problem of hook-up culture. Along the way, Russell ends up sounding more existentialist than Heidegger. Let me quote the passage which starts with the possibility of what we may call ‘open marriages’ in the context of the transition from one set of norms surrounding the marriage institution to a new set:

Mutual liberty, which is now demanded, is making the old form of marriage impossible. But a new form, which shall be an equally good vehicle for instinct, and an equal help to spiritual growth, has not yet been developed. For the present, women who are conscious of liberty as something to be preserved are also conscious of the difficulty of preserving it. The wish for mastery is an ingredient in most men’s sexual passions, especially in those which are strong and serious. It survives in many men whose theories are entirely opposed to despotism. The result is a fight for liberty on the one side and for life on the other. Women feel that they must protect their individuality; men feel, often very dumbly, that the repression of instinct which is demanded of them is incompatible with vigor and initiative. The clash of these opposing moods makes all real mingling of personalities impossible; the man and woman remain hard, separate units, continually asking themselves whether anything of value to themselves is resulting from the union. The effect is that relations tend to become trivial and temporary, a pleasure rather than the satisfaction of a profound need, an excitement, not an attainment. The fundamental loneliness into which we are born remains untouched, and the hunger for inner companionship remains unappeased. (pp. 131-132)

So, first let’s notice the odd moment of toxic masculinity (“wish for mastery”) in Russell’s account of the nature of natural impulse lurking in men’s sexual passion. I am not wholly sure if Russell basically is defending the idea that sex and rape within a relationship are closely related for “most men,” but I wouldn’t rule it out either.

This is especially notable because in the previous paragraph he had embraced the following idea:

To every man who has the power of thinking impersonally and freely, it is obvious, as soon as the question is asked, that the rights of women are precisely the same as the rights of men. Whatever dangers and difficulties, whatever temporary chaos, may be incurred in the transition to equality, the claims of reason are so insistent and so clear that no opposition to them can hope to be long successful. (p. 131)

This is the only explicit mention of the ‘rights of women’ in the book. So, in the paragraph that I am discussing one expects a rather rousing affirmation of the equality between the sexes—not the bedrock nature of men’s impulsive desire for mastery in the sexual sphere. Earlier in this same chapter, “Marriage and the Population Question,” and later in Marriage and Morals, he would ascribe marital rape as an effect of bad social norms around divorce (and public opinion), but here he naturalizes it.

Third, for Russell, even in its non-toxic guises, sexual freedom by itself clearly risks generating a re-affirmation of “fundamental loneliness into which we are born.” And while he suggests that “[f]or the great majority of men and women seriousness in sex relations is most likely to be achieved through children,” (p. 133) he is quite clear in context that this is least likely among those who are most likely to establish relations based on mutual liberty.

That’s all I wanted to digress. But there is a further point lurking here. If we recall a passage from the second chapter, “The State.” (Recall this post.) I quote it first and then comment:

Apart from war, the modern great State is harmful from its vastness and the resulting sense of individual helplessness. The citizen who is out of sympathy with the aims of the State, unless he is a man of very rare gifts, cannot hope to persuade the State to adopt purposes which seem to him better. Even in a democracy, all questions except a very few are decided by a small number of officials and eminent men; and even the few questions which are left to the popular vote are decided by a diffused mass-psychology, not by individual initiative. This is especially noticeable in a country like the United States, where, in spite of democracy, most men have a sense of almost complete impotence in regard to all large issues. (p. 44)

So, Russell shares in the general unease — familiar from diverse thinkers like Huizinga, Arendt, Ortega Y Gassett, and Röpke — about the massification of modern society. And one of the effects of such massification is the general social impotence and helplessness. Russell does not say that democracy makes this feeling worse, but it’s only a narrow extension from the quoted passage because under democracy, each of us is supposed to be able to participate in the formation of and influence public policy (at least in principle).

So, the mismatch between official doctrine and practice is liable to be larger in democracy when it comes to our individual impotence on influencing outcomes. This is especially so because Russell de facto agrees here with the Italian elite theorists that even in a democracy only “a small number of officials and eminent men” have an effective impact on most decisions.

If you combine this material from the second chapter with the material from the sixth on “Marriage and the Population Question,” one can discern that Russell recognizes that in modern conditions the “fundamental loneliness into which we are born” is deepened by modern social/sexual relations and is accentuated by the fundamental individual political/social impotence [sic] of each. Even if we do not go down the route of Freudian interpretation about such passages, we are, in fact, on the threshold of the significant political themes familiar from Arendt and the great existentialist themes familiar from Camus or Heidegger.

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*This blog post originates in a reading group on these Principles with the eminent scholars, Alex Klein and Sander Verhaegh (with the usual caveats that I blame them for any mistakes).

**In these biographical details, I am drawing on Stanford P. Rosenbaum, "Bertrand Russell in Bloomsbury." Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Archives 4.1 (1984): 11-29.