As a 17-year old boy, I was incredibly lucky to find a book by Bertrand Russell at the local public library.  This was a key time in my development–I was skeptical about many things back then, but I felt alone. The people in my life were earnestly telling me things about life, politics and religion that didn’t make any sense to me and discussions with them mostly resulted only in strange and condescending lectures.

I remember the joy and relief I felt when I first started reading the first paragraph of Russell’s 1943 essay, “AN OUTLINE OF INTELLECTUAL RUBBISH,” which was a chapter in a book I found at the library.

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. 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 fogy regrettably surviving from a bygone age. All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies. In what follows I shall mix the sillinesses of our day with those of former centuries. Perhaps the result may help in seeing our own times in perspective, and as not much worse than other ages that our ancestors lived through without ultimate disaster.

Russell’s full essay is much longer than this excerpt and it is filled with many other pointed observations, permeated throughout with Russell’s wry sense of humor. Until the teenaged version of me saw this essay, I thought I was alone in my skepticism. That’s a difficult place to be trapped for a teenager. This was in the 1970’s, long before the Internet. I sometimes wondered whether there was something wrong with me. I didn’t think so, but when I would express doubts about religion, for example, everyone else got quiet and started to look nervous The only exception was my mother, who often had the courage to ask simple questions. As I am writing this article, my mother is a vibrant and independent-living 87 year old.  How lucky I am in that regard, too. I sometimes thank her for her unbridled curiosity and “blame” her for the fact that I became somewhat subversive.  She laughs and says she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

Reading this essay was a joyride for the 17-year old version of me. I discovered that I was not alone. I learned that it is critically important to speak up, even when you are the only one in the room taking a controversial position. When I first read Russell’s essay, I learned that I was not crazy. This was the beginning of a whole new way of thinking for me, and it gave me the courage to take stronger stands on my own against things that made no sense to me.

Here’s is another section of this essay dealing with what is “natural,” leading to Russel’s full-force defense on the right to use birth control. It’s important to remember the context.  Russell wrote this in 1943 in a world that was radically different in moral outlook than it is now, and much different than the world was in the 1970s. Keep in mind that it wasn’t until 1965 that the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Connecticut statute prohibiting all use of birth control, to the disappointment of the self-appointed moral police of that era. In taking this strong stand in favor of birth control (and equally brave stands on many other important issues), Russell became a hero to me.

Enjoy . . .

Belief in ‘nature’ and what is ‘natural’ is a source of many errors. It used to be, and to some extent still is, powerfully operative in medicine. The human body, left to itself, has a certain power of curing itself; small cuts usually heal, colds pass off, and even serious diseases sometimes disappear without medical treatment. But aids to nature are very desirable, even in these cases. Cuts may turn septic if not disinfected, colds may turn to pneumonia, and serious diseases are only left without treatment by explorers and travellers in remote regions, who have no option. Many practices which have come to seem ‘natural’ were originally ‘unnatural’, for instance clothing and washing. Before men adopted clothing they must have found it impossible to live in cold climates. Where there is not a modicum of cleanliness, populations suffer from various diseases, such as typhus, from which Western nations have become exempt. Vaccination was (and by some still is) objected to as ‘unnatural’. But there is no consistency in such objections, for no one supposes that a broken bone can be mended by ‘natural’ behaviour. Eating cooked food is ‘unnatural’ ; so is heating our houses. The Chinese philosopher Lao-tse, whose traditional date is about 600 B.C., objected to roads and bridges and boats as ‘unnatural’, and in his disgust at such mechanistic devices left China and went to live among the Western barbarians. Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.

The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against ‘nature’. (For some reason we are not allowed to say that celibacy is against nature; the only reason I can think of is that it is not new.) Malthus saw only three ways of keeping down the population: moral restraint, vice, and misery. Moral restraint, he admitted, was not likely to be practised on a large scale. ‘Vice’, i.e. birth control, he, as a clergyman, viewed with abhorrence. There remained misery. In his comfortable parsonage, he contemplated the misery of the great majority of mankind with equanimity, and pointed out the fallacies of the reformers who hoped to alleviate it. Modern theological opponents of birth control are less honest. They pretend to think that God will provide, however many mouths there may be to feed. They ignore the fact that He has never done so hitherto, but has left mankind exposed to periodical famines in which millions died of hunger. They must be deemed to hold-if they are saying what they believe-that from this moment onwards God will work a continual miracle of loaves and fishes which He has hitherto thought unnecessary. Or perhaps they will say that suffering here below is of no importance; what matters is the hereafter.

[You can read Russell’s entire essay here.]