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Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley (1962)

• 65 Comments
• There is a transcription but reading the original letter, typewritten by Bertrand Russell, with all the typing corrections that probably stemmed from some kind of holy anger he must have felt responding to someone like Mosley, was incredibly more pleasurable.

  By alkyon 15 hours ago

• It's amazing how much fuck-you-and-fuck-who-you-fuck-with Russell managed to fit into a few ink smudges on a piece of paper.

  By dfltr 14 hours ago

• You can almost feel the hammer violently hitting the paper and nearly poking a hole in it with some of these words.

  By ghurtado 14 hours ago

• He also had just turned 91 years old when he wrote this

  By djeastm 10 hours ago

• If you’re really interested in his works and correspondence, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario holds the Bertrand Russell archives.
  Some stuff is online. Here’s a curated collection of some really interesting letters sent to him:
  https://dearbertie.mcmaster.ca/letters

  By interestica 15 hours ago

• I always feel funny starting letters with “dear”, but next time that happens I'm going to remember that this one started with “Dear Sir Oswald,”.

  By mjd 16 hours ago

• Well, when you're saying "goodbye", remember you're really saying "God be with ye"....

  By mikestorrent 14 hours ago

• I can guarantee I absolutely am not saying that :)

  By 6LLvveMx2koXfwn an hour ago

• Which is also what "adios, "adieu", "adéu", "tschüss", etc. approximately mean.

  By lo_zamoyski 13 hours ago

• WHAT is that true!?!?

  By chamomeal 11 hours ago

• https://english.stackexchange.com/a/387742

  By layer8 10 hours ago

• I thought that was how one simply started letters -- you used to even say "Dear Sirs" in the past -- but it seems "dear" has come to be reserved only for close recipients.

  By esafak 15 hours ago

• I receive even e-mails addressed that way on occasion. It's not "dead" but you need to be careful as it can also easily come across as sarcastic, in a "who do you think you are? Let me treat you with overstated importance" kind of way (but then it would generally be followed by other excessive formality and a level of deference you know will seem over-the-top)

  By vidarh 10 minutes ago

• Dear esafak,
  It is not entirely true that the usage has changed; I usually start my emails with this salutation, both to recipients close to me and those whom I do not know well. I address mailing lists with a simple "Dear all".
  Nonetheless, this is the first time I have done so in a Hacker News post, and it shall probably be the last too.
  Best wishes,
  seabass

  By seabass-labrax 10 hours ago

• For an actual letter I think I would use Dear, not an email.
  But it's so very seldom that I write a physical letter these days.

  By jcul 3 hours ago

• Now I think I'll start letters with “Dear Sir Oswald,” regardless of who they are to.

  By mjd 13 hours ago

• I wonder if this was a response to a letter from Mosley. Would love to see more context.

  By jcul 3 hours ago

• Thing is though, it would be more useful to have such an intellectual actually take apart Mosely's views. For posterity. For all of those people who haven't properly thought things through (which is, I would say, most people)
  Thinking completely outside of our post-WWI bubble, history has been far more brutal in the past. This is the anomaly. Taken as a whole, human history has been full of genocide, slavery, brutality.
  When somebody misrepresents "survival of the fittest" in the way that the 20th century fascists did, and embark on mass extermination "for the good of the world" (in their warped view), citing the fairly recent Darwinian view of evolution, isn't it better to tackle these views head on, for the benefit of those who haven't the inclination or the ability to think it through themselves?
  What I see nowadays is a complete lack of curiosity. Nobody wants to try to understand why people "go bad", they just want to put them in the bin. That only works if those "bad" people are a minority.
  Also, when the "good" people stop engaging in debate with the "bad" people, there's a danger of creating a dogmatic society. Looking at Christianity in the middle ages, and extremely confident sense of your own rightness can lead to atrocities too.
  Sorry, probably nonsense, boarding a flight, not paying full attention to my post

  By raffraffraff an hour ago

• Thanks mods for the title fix.
  I can't find a copy of the letter this is in response to which would provide more context. I believe it was an invitation of some sort.
  Bertrand Russel was a prominent logician and philosopher, more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
  Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley

  By giraffe_lady 16 hours ago

• > more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
  For people who haven't encountered it yet, this problem is the famous "Russell's Paradox"[1], which can be stated as
  Consider the set R, consisting of all sets S such that S is not an element of S.
  Ie in set builder notation
  R = {S : S ∉ S}
  and then the paradox comes from the followup question. Is R an element of R? Because of course if it is in R, then it is an element of itself so it should not be. And if it's not in R, then it is not an element of itself, so it should be. This is a logical paradox along the same lines as the famous "The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?"
  In modern axiomatic set theory, Russell's paradox is avoided these days by the "axiom of regularity"[2] which prevents a set builder like "the set of all sets who are not members of themselves", so what I wrote above would not be accepted as a valid set builder for this reason by most people.
  Russell proposed instead Type theory which got revived when computer science got going.
  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_regularity

  By seanhunter 14 hours ago

• > The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?
  I'm not familiar with this one but is it misstated here? The barber doesn't only shave men who don't shave themselves. If he doesn't shave himself then he shaves himself and therefore can shave himself without contradiction. If he shaves himself he can shave himself without contradiction. Either way he shaves himself.
  (Or maybe I'm just bad at logic)

  By triceratops 11 hours ago

• Yes you're right it's typically stated as "shaves all those, and those only, who do not..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_paradox

  By siegelzero 11 hours ago

• Bertrand Russel also was - and hopefully still is - a public intellectual, like Einstein or Chomsky (for better or worse), whose opinions on many areas of life reached ordinary people. His values were ahead of his time.
  This is a wonderful interview with him that gives a great sense of what he was all about:
  • A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952) https://youtu.be/xL_sMXfzzyA

  By thomassmith65 16 hours ago

• Russell also lived a long time, with family who did too.
  While young his grandfather told Bertrand about meeting Napoleon. Late in life Bertrand watched the moon landing on TV.
  Obviously that two experiences that span more than one life time, but they are very far apart.
  https://www.openculture.com/2022/05/philosopher-bertrand-rus...

  By lostlogin 15 hours ago

• I understand that Professor Yaffle -- the woodpecker bookend in the classic kids' TV show Bagpuss -- was loosely based on Russell.

  By colinbeveridge 15 hours ago

• They had a long history of correspondence. The preceding letter is archived and you can probably get a copy. (https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/79128)
  > Jan 6/1962 Re nuclear disarmament and world government. BR is not inclined to agree or disagree with Mosley's views, but he does think that Mosley is "rather optimistic" in his expectations. BR provides criticism of his main two objections. (A polite letter.)
  > Jan 11/1962 Mosley wants to lunch privately with BR about their differences.
  These are basically all the letters exchanged with Mosley:
  https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/bracers-basic-search?search_api_...

  By interestica 15 hours ago

• This letter makes perfect sense to me if he had sent it as his first reply to a fascist in 1946. Why did he correspond with him over 43 previous letters from 1946 and only in 1962 act as though he had principled objections to corresponding with fascists? The tone is not "this time you've gone too far", or "I have decided we're not getting anywhere", but "We have nothing in common and could never converse". I wonder if he realized it was the same guy, or was submitting this to some public forum.

  By Noumenon72 12 hours ago

• As I wrote above they did not have a long history of correspondence (previous correspondence was mainly with a Gordon Mosley).
  The letter written by Russell was preceded by a letter from Mosley (maybe trying to bait BR) on "the root differences between us" in December 1961 to which BR replied with two letters before Mosley tried to invite BR for a private lunch which prompted the letter of note response. I think this makes perfect sense, he initially engaged intellectually, but when invited to associate privately he strongly refuses.

  By cycomanic 12 hours ago

• I was incorrect here. The letters were all from december 61 to jan 62.

  By interestica 4 hours ago

• The long correspondence that you describe (from the 40's to the 60's) was with Gordon Mosley of the BBC, and not with Oswald.
  The only letters that Russell personally wrote to Oswald were sent in January 1961.

  By doug-moen 9 hours ago

• That's incorrect if you read the summaries and recipients, most of the Mosleys are not Oswald Mosley.

  By cycomanic 12 hours ago

• You are absolutely right! The couple from 62 are correct.

  By interestica 5 hours ago

• For general context, this was addressed to post-ww2 Mosley, in the 60s, who argued a unique form of holocaust denialism at the time. He didn’t take the position that the holocaust didn’t happen, he took the position that it was justified.

  By OtherShrezzing 16 hours ago

• Mr Mosley also had a pretty well known son lol.

  By haijo2 16 hours ago

• For reference, this is alluding to Max Mosley who used to be prominent in formula one car racing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Mosley

  By seanhunter 15 hours ago

• As well as F1, he was quite a popular figure in some Nazi cosplaying dungeons.

  By aryonoco 7 hours ago

• In case someone's too lazy to enter the address in Google maps, here you go: https://maps.app.goo.gl/oZ5c8aqH1uJ35VaD8

  By lifeinthevoid 14 hours ago

• quite the redditor

  By webdevver 3 hours ago

• Feels relevant, thank you for posting. I have so many swirling thoughts and emotions from recent prominent events and this letter provides a compass for that.

  By unstyledcontent 13 hours ago

• My dad went to a Bertrand Russell lecture at Michigan State University. This would have been around 1960. He can't remember anything BR talked about, though.

  By JackAcid 7 hours ago

• What did Mosley write to him?

  By boppo1 9 hours ago

• Mosley was an anachronism but his time seems to be coming. Shying away from it isn't the answer. Young men are online a lot and they're seeing an appeal in traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms. The left is weak, and these spasms of violence like the Kirk assassination are symptoms of that. Let's hope this right wing energy can be released productively and some of their grievances addressed before it builds further.

  By socrateswasone 5 hours ago

• A propos

  By IndySun 14 hours ago

• A tangent..
  > Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy
  That title is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (in particular his 1884 book "Grundlagen der Arithmetik", and his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung") who directly influenced Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who all later became large influences on analytic philosophy themselves. Frege is most known for the invention of modern predicate logic.

  By cubefox 16 hours ago

• Where do any of us stand but on the shoulders of giants?

  By esoterae 14 hours ago

• On the shoulders of god(s)?, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
  "He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
  "While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."
  —Srinivasa Ramanujan
  "The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy

  By Der_Einzige 14 hours ago

• Way, way off-topic now, but if you ever get a chance to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disappearing_Number, don't miss it. It's rare to see a play weave mathematics and history into such a form, threading them through our modern world and showing the humanity of those who lived and breathed the equations on the page.

  By kolektiv 13 hours ago

• Is this a critical thinking test? All sorts of public religious figures claim all sorts of miracles as an introductory biography item. I happen to believe in miracles! but this is not one of them. Symbolic logic, and certainly math, is not inherently written in one character set or another. Dreams mean things and things could carry effects somehow but a dream of math symbols with crimson curtains is not convincing from this view.

  By mistrial9 9 hours ago

• That's about the opposite of analytic philosophy though. Frege and Russell would have said it relies on reason, not intuition.

  By cubefox 9 hours ago

• Reason works as a result of its limits. Reason fails as a result of its limits.

  By 8bitsrule 7 hours ago

• He was so angry he could hardly contain himself.

  By arduanika 10 hours ago

• Simultaneously polite, peaceful, respectful, diplomatic, and succinct in writing. LLMs have a long way to go.

  By 1970-01-01 16 hours ago

• IDK, I see this as in some ways verbose, not succinct at all. A completely succinct reply to Mr Mosley would be two words only, the second being "off".
  This letter tries to "unpack" its point of view rather than reply succinctly. But you're right that LLMs do not do it that clearly.

  By SideburnsOfDoom 15 hours ago

• Why did you write so many words then?
  Your second paragraph says nothing.
  The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective. That's succinct, not "the minimum amount of words communicating anything that might roughly align with a view".
  The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me, they're not fluff or pointless pleasantries for code reasons.

  By moritzwarhier 14 hours ago

• English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it? Often the first few words of the sentence tells us everything we're going to need to know about the rest of it.

  By mikestorrent 14 hours ago

• Yeah but f.. off simply does not say the same thing that his letter says, now matter how succinct.
  He writes like he assumes good faith, then explains why he thinks that exactly this attempt won't be fruitful, giving a good-faith argument for why Oswald should consider further correspondence fruitless, unless he changes his whole political ideology.
  That's a lot more than just "I don't want to talk to you and I think badly of you"

  By moritzwarhier 14 hours ago

• The point is that a large percentage of the words in any sentence are there to provide structure, not meaning.
  Removing those words makes the text more difficult to understand, not easier.

  By ghurtado 14 hours ago

• > English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it?
  It's more that journalism and in other context though, it is good writing style to "not bury the lede", i.e. put the main point upfront. It's a writing choice, not a language feature.

  By SideburnsOfDoom 14 hours ago

• > Why did you write so many words then?
  I wasn't claiming to be succinct.
  > The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me
  I agree, and I don't say otherwise. I still though don't agree that someone else should characterise the piece as "succinct" because of that thoughtfulness. These are different qualities of writing, are they not?.
  > The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective.
  Yes, it's a good concise argument, to third parties who read it. I see that. It's a different thing to a succinct reply to Mr Mosley - that is what the words "in some ways" mean in the comment above.

  By SideburnsOfDoom 14 hours ago

• That would not convey nearly the depth of emotion, sincerity, etc. nor would it demonstrate Russell's own innate good will the way he would like to see it characterized.

  By mikestorrent 14 hours ago

• While I agree with that, does that in itself make the writing "succinct" ?

  By SideburnsOfDoom 14 hours ago

• You confuse "succinct" with "laconic".
  "F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning (unless you actually believe this is a literal expression). Without context, it barely even has emotional meaning.
  It's no less or more a spontaneous expression of emotion than yelling some curse word when you step on a piece of Lego.

  By ghurtado 14 hours ago

• > F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning
  I don't think that's relevant. There are many ways to say no within few words - "No." is a complete sentence, "No thank you." is a polite one, "Get lost" has the semantic meaning that you want. etc.
  The rest is not actually a reply to Mr Mosley, it seems more intended for other audiences such as us. Appeals to introspection not action, is not language that the fascists appreciate or even understand.
  Don't get me wrong, there are many things to like about that thoughtful text. I just don't characterise it as "a succinct reply".

  By SideburnsOfDoom 2 hours ago

• I gather by the mention of fascism that the correspondent is a bad person. So it makes sense that Russell told him to get bent. But, that is all that he's really saying here.
  I can only guess this is noteworthy due to the parties corresponding because it isn't very interesting outside of that.

  By draw_down 14 hours ago

• Have you been reading the news? Perhaps about someone who engaged people in debate while holding extreme views? In the process, they gained some measure of credit amongst people with less radical views, merely for the act of having conversations. Except in this case the debates were not with Bertrand Russell, but with 18 year old college freshman.
  I understood the posting to be a subtweet-style comment on that.

  By shermantanktop 11 hours ago