In Religion and Science, Russell covered much the same ground as Barnes and Inge – the Copernican revolution, the new physics, evolution, cosmic purpose – but he also included an analysis of medicine, demonology, and miracles, and a chapter on determinism and mysticism.108 Throughout most of the book, he showed the reader how science could explain more and more about the world. For a scientist, he was also surprisingly easy on mysticism, declaring that some of the psychic experiments he had heard about were ‘convincing to a reasonable man.’ In his two concluding chapters, on science and ethics, he wrote as a fierce logician, trying to prove that there is no such thing as objective beauty or goodness. He began with the statement, ‘All Chinese are Buddhists.’ Such a statement, he said, could be refuted ‘by the production of a Chinese Christian.’109 On the other hand, the statement ‘I believe that all Chinese are Buddhists’ cannot be refuted ‘by any evidence from China [i.e., about Buddhists in China]’, but only by evidence that ‘I do not believe what I say.’ If a philosopher says, ‘Beauty is good,’ it may mean one of two things: ‘Would that everybody loved the beautiful’ (which corresponds to ‘All Chinese are Buddhists’) or ‘I wish that everybody loved the beautiful’ (which corresponds to ‘I believe that all Chinese are Buddhists’). ‘The first of these statements makes no assertion but expresses a wish; since it affirms nothing, it is logically impossible that there should be evidence for or against it, or for it to possess either truth or falsehood. The second sentence, instead of being merely optative, does make a statement, but it is one about the philosopher’s state of mind, and it could only be refuted by evidence that he does not have the wish that he says he has. This second sentence does not belong to ethics, but to psychology or biology. The first sentence, which does belong to ethics, expresses a desire for something, but asserts nothing.’110
Russell went on, ‘I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value [Inge’s argument], this is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.’111 Again, there was no reference to Freud.
A quite different line of attack on science came from Spain, from José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930. Ortega was professor of philosophy at the University of Madrid, and his main thesis was that society was degenerating, owing to the growth of mass-man, the anonymous, alienated individual of mass society, this growth itself of course due in no small measure to scientific advances. For Ortega, true democracy occurred only when power was voted to a ‘super minority.’ What in fact was happening, he said, was ‘hyper-democracy,’ where average man, mediocre man, wanted power, loathed everyone not like himself and so promoted a society of ‘homogenised … blanks.’ He blamed scientists in particular for the growth of specialisation, to the point where scientists were now ‘learned ignoramuses,’ who knew a lot about very little, focusing on their own small areas of interest at the expense of the wider picture. He said he had found such scientists ‘self-satisfied,’ examples of a very modern form of degeneration, which helped account for the growing absence of culture he saw encroaching all around him.
Ortega y Gasset was a sort of cultural social Darwinist, or Nietzschean. In The Dehumanisation of Art, he argued that it was ‘the essential function of modern art to divide the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot.’112 He thought that art was a means by which the elite, ‘the privileged minority of the fine senses,’ could recognise themselves and distinguish themselves from the ‘drab mass of society,’ who are the ‘inert matter of the historical process.’ He believed that the vulgar masses always wanted the man behind the poet and were rarely interested in any purely aesthetic sense (Eliot would have been sympathetic here). For Ortega y Gasset, science and mass society were equally inimical to ‘fine’ things.
With fascism on the rise in Germany and Italy, and the West in general beset by so many problems, people began to look to Soviet Russia to examine an alternative system of social organisation, to see whether the West could learn anything. Many Western intellectuals, such as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, paid visits to Russia in the 1920s and ‘30s, but the most celebrated at the time was the journey by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose account of their visit, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? was published in 1935.
Well before the book appeared, the Webbs had a profound influence on British politics and society and were very well connected, with friends such as the Balfours, the Haldanes, the Dilkes, and the Shaws.113 Sidney Webb became a cabinet minister in both interwar Labour governments, and the couple formed one of the most formidable intellectual partnerships ever (Sidney was once called ‘the ablest man in England’).114 They founded the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1896, and the New Statesman in 1913, and were instrumental in the creation of the welfare state and in developing the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation that believed in the inevitability of gradual change. They were the authors, either singly or jointly, of nearly a hundred books and pamphlets, including The Eight Hours Day, The Reform of the Poor Law, Socialism and Individualism, The Wages of Men and Women: Should They Be Equal? and The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation. Committed socialists all their lives, the Webbs met when Beatrice wanted someone to help her study the co-op movement and a friend suggested Sidney. Lisanne Radice, the Webbs’ biographer, makes the point that, on the whole, Sidney and Beatrice were more successful together, as organisers and theoreticians, than he was as a practical politician, in the cabinet. Their prolific writings and their uncompromising socialist views meant that few people were indifferent to them. Leonard Woolf liked them, but Virginia did not.115
The Webbs went to Russia in 1932, when they were both already in their mid-seventies. Beatrice instigated the visit, feeling that capitalism was in terminal decay and that Russia might just offer an alternative. In their books, the Webbs had always argued that, contrary to Marx, socialism could arrive gradually, without revolution; that through reason people could be convinced, and equality would evolve (this was the very essence of Fabianism). But with fascism on the rise, she and Sidney felt that if capitalism could be swept away, so too could Fabianism.116 In these circumstances, Russian collective planning became more viable. At the end of 1930 Beatrice began reading Russian literature, her choice being assisted by the Soviet ambassador to London and his wife. Almost immediately Beatrice made a note in her diary: ‘The Russian Communist government may still fail to attain its end in Russia, as it will certainly fail to conquer the world with a Russian brand of Communism, but its exploits exemplify the Mendelian view of sudden jumps in biological evolution as against the Spencerian vision of slow adjustment.’ (The social Darwinist Herbert Spencer had been a close friend of Beatrice’s father.) A year later, just before her trip, Beatrice wrote the words that were to be remembered by all her detractors: ‘In the course of a decade, we shall know whether American capitalism or Russian communism yields the better life for the bulk of the people … without doubt, we are on the side of Russia.’117