On Bertrand Russell and Vital Energy; or on War and Human Rights
One of the most delicate problems of political thought is to criticize an attractive normative ideal while sharing in the underlying ambitions that give rise to the ideal. This is especially complicated when the existing critics of the ideal are unsavory (or worse), and one’s own political aspirations associated with the normative ideal.*
As regular readers may have discerned, I have long been uneasy with the tight identification of liberalism with an aspiration toward an international human rights regime. (Here’s a decade old piece in Dutch.) But I have no interest in defecting to the by now familiar Marxist-progressive or Schmittian critiques of human rights. To simplify: the former note that a focus on human rights obscure class/redistributionist policy aims and are, plausibly an obstacle to the revolution (which would, of course, itself violate human rights). The latter claim that a focus on human rights obscures the operation of power and actually lead to genocidal wars themselves. The subaltern critique treats human rights as a tool of ongoing imperialism, an so on. Each of the critics express more than a kernel of truth.
My unease about the human rights regime has a family resemblance to existing critiques. But it is motivated by a two-fold observation. First, that, in practice, most of the massive human rights violations are an initial side-effect of war or its downstream effects (especially felt by refugees, migrants, and women who are targeted for sex crimes during wartime). By using the language of ‘side-effect,’ I don’t mean to deny that there are genuine perpetrators here. But I mean to suggest, rather, that in war, human rights violations are simply vastly more likely because they may feed into tactical or strategic war aims.
Second, and more subtly, during wartime the rule of law (warts and all) is always and everywhere highly attenuated so that domestic and occupied populations as well as enemy combatants are more likely to face human rights violations. This is especially salient because the current human rights regime presupposes non-trivial amount of self-restraint on and self-policing against human right violations by states. But the political will to do so goes down during war (and after).
It follows from this sociological observation that any genuine human rights regime worth its salt should, if it permitted itself a consequentialist thought, be focused on war-prevention and war-minimization. But, on the latter, once a war has started, the current human rights approach, while noble, has perverse effects in practice; this is so for a variety of reasons very analogous to the one diagnosed by humanitarian reformers against medieval (and early modern) law: the current human rights regime incentivizes more human rights violations after an initial violation (e.g., the barring and killing of witnesses, the coverups, the prolonging of war, using scare tactics to intimidate populations into silence, etc.) An annexation, alas, invites subsequent expulsion of the population.
The current human rights regime also makes it more difficult to nudge war-leaders of human rights violating countries into peace. For a human rights violator knows that once peace returns, domestic political rivals may try to get rid of him (it is usually a him) by deporting him to a foreign tribunal.
It stands to reason, then, that the prevention of war should be the highest priority, the corner stone of any human rights regime worth its salt. Judging by the status quo, this regime is an abject failure in this respect: there are “110 armed conflicts” of which “more than 45 armed conflicts are currently taking place throughout the Middle East and North Africa.” There are also 43.7 million war related refugees in the world, and millions of stateless and asylum seekers. (It’s the order of magnitude I care about.) Nobody expects this to get better any time soon.
Now, one of the main themes of Bertrand Russell’s public facing intellectual life (1872 – 1970) was the prevention of war and the reduction of its harms. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the Russell Tribunal — founded (1966) inter alia to document and try war crimes and human rights violations of the United States in Vietnam and South East Asia — contributed to and even shaped the modern discourse around human rights in the media and NGOs.*
But much earlier in his life, during WWI, Russell proposed a world state as a solution to the problem of war in his (1916) essay, “War as an Institution.” (My page-numbers are to the 1960 edition of The Principles of Social Reconstruction. The book also appeared as Why Men Fight Stateside.) Now, Russell’s approach to the world state is based on the idea of functional division of labor in the government apparatus. The world state main role would be a kind of preventing of conflict and the policing of them. So, the world state would require a tribunal or “parliament of nations” (p. 62), which he also calls an “International Council” (p. 65), where incipient conflicts could be discussed and resolved (through, for example, “distribution of territory”), and a sufficiently large army to deter and defeat any belligerent power.
Unfortunately, Russell is not very interested in the details of how such a parliament is (s)elected and what nations would be represented in it. Sometimes, in the very same essay, he describes the ‘world state’ as “federation of the world,” (p. 74) but without explaining its structure. One doesn’t read Russell for learning about constitutional design.
Crucially, for Russell the world state would does little else. And he compares it, usefully, to the way then existing nominally independent vassal states and protectorates operate under imperial power. Russell grants that with such immense military power it is “impossible to make sure of avoiding oppression by any purely mechanical guarantees.” (73)
The gist of Russell’s argument should be clear now. In addition to a world state, Russell advocates “far-reaching changes in education, in the economic structure, and in the moral code by which public opinion controls the lives of men and women.” (p. 65) This is sufficiently familiar that I leave it aside.
What makes the essay interesting is Russell’s diagnosis of the sources of war and war fever, and his recommendations for how to prevent these. In particular, and almost alone among well-meaning intellectuals, Russell thinks that being educated is actually one of the contributing factors to being “warlike at ordinary times.” (p. 57) For these intellectual “are vividly aware of other countries or of the part which their own nation might play in the world…it is only their knowledge, not their nature, that distinguishes them from their more ignorant compatriots.” (p. 57) Russell anticipates the gist of Benda’s (1927) Treason of the Intellectuals.
As Russell notes, the interests of the educated are often well served in wartime. But the underlying insight is that the warmongering of the educated is driven more by the image of the activity itself than the actual war aims. (p. 55) The most dangerous intellectuals are the bored ones. And that’s because Russell thinks militarism is itself only a perversion of natural impulses that “are in themselves essential to any vigorous or progressive life.” (p. 65) Russell goes on to develop the though:
All Utopias that have hitherto been constructed98 are intolerably dull. Any man with any force in him would rather live in this world, with all its ghastly horrors, than in Plato’s Republic or among Swift’s Houyhnhnms. The men who make Utopias proceed upon a radically false assumption as to what constitutes a good life. They conceive that it is possible to imagine a certain state of society and a certain way of life which should be once for all recognized as good, and should then continue for ever and ever. They do not realize that much the greater part of a man’s happiness depends upon activity, and only a very small remnant consists in passive enjoyment. (pp. 65-6)
While drawing on William James’ ideas about how ‘vital energy’ must be redirected to less dangerous ends** lurking here is an argument that understands progress as an effect of fruitful conflict. In context, it is easy to see here the indirect influence of Spencer and Darwin on Russell. But the underlying insight goes back to the first few chapters of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. Rather than pacifying and eliminating conflict, it has to be made conducive to social vitality and as a means toward social discovery and change. The “impulses” that make the educated advocate for war have to be given “peaceful outlet.” (p. 66)
Russell’s argument concludes with an advocacy of a kind of permanent social agonism as a displacement of the vital energy away from war (where these themes are also visible):
I have some sympathy for this agonistic conception of society. But as a means to prevent war it strikes me as naive even by Russell’s lights. Those intellectuals and the opportunists they serve that benefit from war (as an activity or an end) are not hereby made undangerous. And a world state may make them even more dangerous yet. I fear that on this issue Russell’s question is more pertinent than his answer.
I do not mean this as a criticism. For all his limitations in his personal dealings with others, there is in Russell a willingness to stand on principle come what may that elicits admiration. And, even more, in his restless search to think about the hardest problems in the social organization of life, and to revisit his own answers through his long life, a touch of noble grandeur.
*Obviously, I am not claiming it helped constitute the legal structure of the modern human rights regime.
**In his essay, Russell cites James’ The Moral Equivalent of War.
Actually, a probable solution to war has come into being, largely unnoticed. The first to notice was Rudy Rummel, who discovered the fact that liberal democracies never had wars with liberal democracies was statistically significant. My Ph.D. dissertation probed into why this was the case, and Rummel liked the solution I offered. I have published on this topic off and on to the collective lack of interest in political science and international relations. Basically it is that democracies, as systems, are spontaneous orders, not organizations such as traditional states. Here is my most recent study of the issue. Understanding the Democratic Peace: Spontaneous Order, Organization, and the Foundations of War and Peace. Cosmos and Taxis. 12:11+12, 89-106. https://cosmosandtaxis.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/diZerega_CT_Vol12_Iss_11_12.pdf