Russell in the Philippines

Reviews  RUSSELL IN THE PHILIPPINES P S Political Science / Stanford U. Stanford, , – .@. Ramon (“Poch”) Suzara. Bertrand Russell to the Rescue: Can the Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell Save the Philippines? Quezon City, Philippines: Popular Bookstore, . Pp. . [Copies available for . from the author at poch.suzara@mailcity.com.] here are many kinds of books about Bertrand Russell. There are the biogTraphies —Wood, Clark, Moorehead, Monk, not to mention Russell’s own autobiography. There are scholarly studies that address some specific argument he made or cause he championed, such as Gregory Landini’s Russell’s Hidden Substitutional Theory () or Jo Vellacott’s Bertrand Russell and the Pacifists in the First World War (). And there are general introductions for the nonspecialist , from A. C. Grayling’s Russell: a Very Short Introduction () to Paul Strathern’s less highbrow Bertrand Russell in  Minutes (). But one of the most interesting and yet neglected Russell-related genres consists of popular books aimed at bringing Russell’s ideas to a mass audience. These works present Russell’s ideas as a source of wisdom for coping with today’s problems. Among the more notable examples of this small genre are Lee Eisler’s Morals without Mystery () and Peter Cranford’s How to Be Your Own Psychologist: the Art of Irresistible Influence—Compossibility! (). Now these works are joined by Poch Suzara’s Bertrand Russell to the Rescue: Can the Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell Save the Philippines? Suzara’s approach is simple. He counterpoises articles from the Filipino press with quotations from Bertrand Russell. He does this in a manner calculated to illustrate how irrational much of Filipino politics and society can be and how much the situation could be improved if only people took a page from the book of Bertie. To take one example, Suzara reprints part of an article from the Man-  Both Cranford and Eisler were longtime mainstays of the Bertrand Russell Society (), whose mission centrally involves spreading the word about the Good Lord. It should therefore be unsurprising that Suzara has worked with both the  and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, although today he leads his own Philippines-based group devoted to Bertrand Russell. He also chairs both the Philippine Society of Rational Humanists and the Enlightenment League and Moral Society.  Reviews ila Standard depicting the (now deposed) president of the Philippines with some of his cronies. Beneath it, he offers the following line from Russell: “Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility” (p. ). At its best, Suzara’s approach can be both entertaining and extremely effective , especially when he is attacking his favorite opponent—organized religion. It makes sense that this cause should be important to him. As Suzara notes at the beginning of the collection, the Philippines is the only Catholic country in Asia, and therefore the only country on the continent plagued by that religion’s peculiar foibles (such as its obsessive opposition to birth control). At times, Suzara can be quite good at skewering the perversities caused by the shadow Catholicism casts on Filipino society. A good example of this occurs when Suzara reprints an article about contemporary Filipinos who reenact the passion ofChrist—completewithcrucifixion,albeittemporary—andmatchesitwiththe following quotation from Bertrand Russell: “when a man tortures himself he feels that it gives him a right to torture others, and inclines him to accept any system of dogma by which this right is fortified” (p. ). But in other cases, Suzara joins Russell quotations critical of religion to relatively inoffensive articles on the local Catholic Church, as if Russell’s biting wit regarding Christianity automatically proved that whatever the Pope’s followers did was wrong. A little more care in matching quotations to articles might have made his overall polemic against religion more effective. On balance, however, Suzara achieves the effect at which he aims. Filipino society would surely benefit from a good dose of the Russellian outlook, as this book illustrates. Granted, the book would probably convey this point most effectively to a Filipino reader, but then again the Filipino reader is clearly Suzara’s target audience. Besides, other countries...

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