Daniel Johnson writes on our sister website, Law and Liberty, on David Hume and cancel culture. The University of Edinburgh “decided to rename the David Hume Tower, one of the best-known landmarks on its campus; it will henceforth be known as ‘40 George Square’.” The decision was taken because what Johnson calls “the fatal footnote – a brief sentence that to modern eyes seems unambiguously racist. His main argument is directed against Montesquieu’s claim that climate and other physical causes determine what we would call culture.”
The key argument by Johnson is at the end of his piece:
Was Hume more prejudiced than other thinkers of his day? Hardly: Voltaire and Kant, for example, were vicious anti-Semites. Or was he more complicit in the slave trade? No: Isaac Newton had been a large shareholder in the South Sea Company, which supplied slaves to Latin America. Hume’s compatriot, Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns, accepted a post as a slave overseer in Jamaica, though he was unable to take it up. These and many other luminaries of the Enlightenment turned a blind eye to slavery and made no secret of their ethnic or religious antipathies. Yet none of them has been ‘cancelled’—at least, not yet.
Hume was unusual in only one respect: he confined his most odious prejudice to a single footnote.
This is a point what makes Edinburgh’s decision so astonishing. Hume was a highly original thinker, whose originality has little to do with his argument over persons of color. In a sense, this was actually nothing original: for once, the great philosopher somewhat echoed the prejudices of his time. Plus, nobody is reading Hume for *that* message: you cannot picture a thinker who is less likely to become popular among white suprematists or fascists of any sort.
Perhaps even more ironic is the fact that the new name of the building is strictly “geographical”: 40 George Square. But, as a Facebook friend of mine (alas I cannot remember whom!) pointed out, George Square is named after George III, whose reputation is not really that of a committed anti-racist.
READER COMMENTS
Steve
Oct 1 2020 at 12:58pm
I found this quote in the bbc.com article:
I love the pearl-clutching attitude here, that we are just so sensitive we can’t even read what was actually written by Hume and make our own judgements.
Michael Pettengill
Oct 1 2020 at 2:56pm
Been here before… Scopes Monkey Trial…
Mark Z
Oct 1 2020 at 3:12pm
I propose each ‘canceller’ be given a thought experiment: if you had lived in the time and place of the person you’re trying to cancel, what would you have believed? If they’re honest, they’ll admit that if they’d probably be at least as bigoted as the people whose legacies they’re attacking (e.g. the founders of the US were more critical of slavery than most people then). If you owe being right about something entirely to being born in a particular time or place, you don’t deserve any credit for it relative to those born in a different time/place. Condemning people in the 18th century for having 18th century values makes as little sense as mocking people in the 1400s for not understanding what covalent bonds are.
Tyler Wells
Oct 1 2020 at 3:31pm
Your comment “his argument over persons of color” I don’t think is correct. Hume’s comments, if I understand correctly, were specific to people of Sub-Saharan African descent. In fact, he specifically uses the word “Negro”, which of course means black. We have no idea, from this footnote, whether his prejudices extended to other groups. This is not a defense of Hume but a rejection of lumping all people “of color” together.
Steve
Oct 2 2020 at 1:24pm
Here is the full quote, since we are all adults capable of reading it and considering its implications on our own.
I do think he means anyone of Arabic, Asian, etc. descent, since he says, “[t]here never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white.” Still, he says he is “apt to suspect” this, probably based on limited personal exposure to the world at large. Do we know if he was exposed to the histories and cultures of the African, Asian, and American continents? Would that have changed his mind?
robc
Oct 2 2020 at 4:33pm
I would be surprised if he was not aware of the Arabic and Persian cultures. It is quite likely he grouped them as “white”.
I would think he would be aware of China too.
Mark Brady
Oct 3 2020 at 12:55am
Search for “David Hume” + “China” and you’ll see that David Hume did have opinions about China, and they weren’t very flattering.
Robert
Oct 4 2020 at 6:24pm
I did such a search and I can’t say that there is much racist about what I found. Once, that is, I waded through the translations of David Hume into Chinese! Here’s an example, which would be the kind of opinion I would think would be freely debated today.
https://athousandnations.com/2011/07/19/david-hume-on-chinese-tech-stagnation/
Fred_in_PA
Oct 4 2020 at 8:05pm
I agree with Robert.
The quote he posts seems very similar to some speculations in Jared Diamond’s Epilogue to Guns, Germs and Steel (just 250 years earlier!).
Hume’s true affront was probably that he was a close friend of Adam Smith.
Cancel culture is a hate movement promulgated by belligerent conformists. Such people lack the character and perhaps the wit to think for themselves.
Anders
Oct 7 2020 at 1:45pm
Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose progressive credentials and moral probity remains beyond question, also noted prominently she did not think blacks and whites could or should live together – assuming racial inferiority and an inability to adopt to civilised mores. Trumping even what I would expect from the likes of David Duke.
Does this make her less of a hero in the struggle against poverty? What about the overt Nazi sympathies of Heidegger – arguably one of the biggest thinkers of the century?
Come to think of it, it is hard to think of any prominent thinker from history, let alone head of state, that does not fall foul of our current consensus – not to mention the standards at times applied at universities. And our reaction seems downright arbitrary: we slam Hume for a footnote, while celebrating Catherine the Great, who killed her own husband for power and slaughtered hundreds of thousands in her imperial conquest of Central Asia and the Caucasus, in a movie that portrayed her as equal parts heroine and victim (because of her gender – we conveniently forget that two other great empires at the time were run by queen regents).
The important question here is: to which extent, if any, should historiography serve the purpose of reaffirming our current beliefs? To some extent, of course, we should – even if the likes of Irving come with factually correct, albeit selective, claims, questioning the enormity of the Holocaust even by implication is abhorrent to most of us. But take the example of the outrage in Germany as the movie Der Untergang portrayed Hitler in merely a slightly more nuanced way – why did that upset us? It is almost as if we NEED Hitler to be not a human being, but an unadulterated symbol of evil. The essence, in other words, of what we are not – and without which we would be stuck in a disconcerting definitional and moral vacuum.
From that perspective, this is not about Hume at all. It is about us and our need for identity.
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