MICHAEL MORRIS: Russell’s 1951 warning: freedom combats authoritarian dangers - Business Day

Michael Morris

Fittingly, with McCarthyism then gaining momentum in the US, Bertrand Russell wrote in The New York Times Magazine of December 16 1951, of the risks posed by what he called “the dangers that frighten authoritarians”.

The dangers were real enough, he acknowledged, “but no other method of combating them is so effective as freedom”. The greater danger, he suggested, lay in overlooking this truth.

In South Africa, no less than in any other part of the globe in the nearly 75 years since, people have come to appreciate that authority, which is almost always advertised as sound and dependable — the source, avowedly, of safety and security, of stability and order — is also almost always an enemy of freedom.

Far more important is that freedom delivers safety, security, stability and order far more effectively than the force of authority ever does.

Of course, it doesn’t always seem to. And there will inevitably be times when it isn’t absolutely true that freedom delivers these things in every place, in every second, dependably, from one hour to the next. Russell said something about this, too, which we’ll get to in a minute.

For most people, living with risk as the reasonable cost of living freely is tolerably abstract. That changes in the instant any reasonable human becomes the victim of an indiscriminate fanatic willing to maim and kill for a cause — and we know that for complicated and mainly wonderful human reasons it is possible to become a victim a continent away from the bloody atrocity itself.

In this light we can understand the applause for efforts in New South Wales, in the shadow of the terror attack that claimed 15 lives at Bondi Beach in mid-December, to fast-track laws to curtail what is deemed “hate speech” in protests against Israeli action in Gaza, as indeed it is possible to understand the fury over the violence in Gaza, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Certainly, one can appreciate the anxiety of, for example, Australia’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, who said in recent days: “We want to make sure that [for] those hate preachers who have managed to keep themselves just on the legal side of Australian law, the threshold is lowered.”

In contrast — to return, as promised, to the question of risk — here’s Russell in 1951 on the “dangers” that may result from “unbridled human passion”: “I will not deny that there are such dangers. But I would ask timorous people to remember that safety is impossible to achieve and is ignoble as an aim. Risks must be run, and those who refuse to run risks incur a certainty of much greater disaster sooner or later. It is all very fine to wish to curb human passions, but you cannot curb the passions of those who do the curbing.”

This passage ends with Russell saying: “The dangers that frighten authoritarians are real, but no other method of combating them is so effective as freedom.”

The lesson is surely that, just as extremists are indifferent to the moderating impulses of the civilised and the curious — most of us who try to be humane even under the most testing circumstances — extremists are also indifferent to the threat of penalties.

This does not mean we give up. It does mean our fight is a different one, one in which we constantly remind ourselves that achieving a free and civilised society means living every hour in a free and civilised way.

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/columnists/2026-01-05-michael-morris-russells-1951-warning-freedom-combats-authoritarian-dangers/