Well, maybe. It's a bit hard to tell from that one-liner whether you're being serious or glib, but the question of how the great man or woman treats the people closest to him or her is a tricky one. I agree that it's relevant, but it hasn't traditionally been considered to be. And we never have access to the full story. Everyone knows from their own personal life how utterly different things can look up close than they do from afar.

It wouldn't be a surprise if Russell were the classic intellectual type with strong affections for humanity in the abstract and the people around him not so much. Champions of causes are often this way. There are incredibly striking and tragic cases of this, such as what happened between Gandhi and his oldest son. But one should especially hesitate to condemn in matters of the heart.

Meh. The world has suffered enough from "the classic intellectual type with strong affections for humanity in the abstract and the people around him not so much". I'd much rather listen to someone who's attached to others and behaves decently towards them.

(I've got a particular bias against Gandhi for what that so-called "moral paragon" famously said about the Holocaust.)

For others who are curious about the Gandhi reference, here's what I dug up:

"“Hitler,” Gandhi solemnly affirmed, “killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. I believe in hara-kiri. I do not believe in its militaristic connotations, but it is a heroic method.”

“You think,” I said, “that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?”

“Yes,” Gandhi agreed,” that would have been heroism. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to the evils of Hitler’s violence, especially in 1938, before the war. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”"

http://stevereads.com/weblog/2007/12/10/gandhi-the-jewish-vi...

Yes, basically, that. It kind of indicates that he believed Jewish lives are worth so little that we should have pointlessly thrown away millions of them for publicity.

Edit: It's questionable whether this was something specific he had against Jews or not. Frankly, I'm not even sure whether an anti-Semite or an anti-humanist is morally superior.

No, he wasn't saying that "we should have pointlessly thrown away" any of them. He was saying that the Jews should have sacrificed themselves to make a point, in something like the same way as many of Gandhi's followers put themselves in danger to make a point, and Gandhi himself went on (life-threatening) hunger strike to make a point. And he was saying that the end result would likely have been the loss of fewer Jewish lives.

There is a big difference between "It would be a noble and also an effective thing for group X to sacrifice themselves" and "Other people should sacrifice group X", and it seems very clear that Gandhi was saying the first of those and not the second, and that he was advocating that they should do the same kind of thing as he did himself.

Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I think (1) he was wrong about this and (2) there's still something a bit indecent about saying "those people should have sacrificed themselves". But I don't see anything anti-Semitic, or anti-humanistic, in this, nor do I think he was saying that Jewish lives were worth little in absolute terms or relative to others. He was saying that in the face of a powerful oppressor self-sacrifice is both an effective tool and a noble thing to do.

Ah. The dispute here is that I (along with most Jews nowadays) simply do not believe that self-sacrifice is effective or noble. The Holocaust was, in fact, our single biggest lesson ever in precisely that. From our perspective, self-sacrifice is anti-humanistic, it's a simple murder: you kill yourself, save nobody else, and win nothing for it but the sympathy of future generations -- hopefully.

I mean, for that matter, compare how many Holocaust victims did fight back versus those who didn't. Since the vast majority didn't fight back, what could they have done to make their deaths into an effective "martyrdom"?

Thank you for this lucid explanation. Gandhi's way of thinking and acting remains extremely counterintuitive (to us), so it's important to remember both that he practiced what he preached and that it actually worked. If one forgets either of those things, many of his statements become obvious monstrosities. But the fault is with our definition of "obvious".