Lord Russell, meet Terence

One of the fun new things about moving to WP1.5 is that I can integrate static pages with the blog.

I wrote the first such page, which you will see listed over on the right under ‘Pages’, on the weekend, in response to the most common question I get about the blog: What’s up with that blog title? (The second most common question, by the way, is “Are you gay?”; which I guess comes from having a title that starts with “Homo”.)

As part of writing that page I was thinking about these big ideas about the interconnectedness of humanity, and the fact that I can relate in some way to every human. (David Frum, of course, is excepted on the basis that I do not consider him human). While I was thinking about this stuff I came back to a bit of Bertrand Russell, which should come as no suprise to people who have known me for a while.

So, here’s some Russell for you to chew on, more relevant now even than it was when published, and related to the theme captured in this blog’s title.

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things: That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity- except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.