Opinion
Ranking the greatest philosopher is like ranking the greatest rock band. The same few names will be thrown around, but everyone will argue for their own favourite. For me, the title belongs to Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. I even have a 19th century engraving of him framed on the wall of my library. Sad, I know, but the great sceptic stamped his influence down the centuries on everything from science, to ethics and religion.
But, in this age that valorises a dumb black thug as the saint of all saints, the hurty feelings of resentful ‘people of colour’ are elevated above all achievements of humanity. So, for the heinous sin of once writing, two hundred and fifty years ago, something unflattering about “negroes”, Hume’s name was erased from Edinburgh University. (Hilariously, the justifiably since-forgotten student who started the petition to do so, proposed replacing Hume’s name with another Edinburgh alumnus: Julius Nyerere, the homophobic dictator who ran Tanzania as a one-party state for two decades, detaining opponents without trial.)
But we might be forgiven for suspecting that Hume’s greatest sin against modern sensibilities was reminding them that their hurty feelings don’t count for shit.
Recall that Hume was a great empiricist (acquiring knowledge in a round-about way). You may not be able to prove it deductively, he argued, but there is an external, causal world outside our minds. (Hume gave the perfect response to Berkeley on this, by the way.) Put bluntly, there just are mind-independent truths about the world and these are imposed on us humans whatever our individual preferences, desires and druthers might happen to be. Accordingly, there are no ‘my truths’. There is just one truth about the myriad questions about the mind-independent world.
Cue a cacophony of demented screeching from a chorus of resentful ‘people of colour’, land-whales, bum-punchers, cross-dressers and assorted mid-wits. Because Hume’s famous razor — one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is” — completely demolishes their entire worldview.
One of the core achievements of the whole woke, identity politics worldview is to attack and undermine this inheritance and then force-feed to our students a very different, non-Enlightenment understanding about the world. It’s a wrong understanding but we have let its proponents capture all the main cultural institutions. This identity politics worldview puts politics above the search for empirical truths. So if the facts were to show, say, that males have a different distribution of intelligence (same median scores but differences at each end of the distribution) than females or that there are statistically meaningful differences in terms of male-female preferences, that is to be silenced because these woke identity politics pushers want to put individuals into groups and then explain all group differences in terms of discrimination, oppression and power. It’s a rewarmed variant of Marxism, just in non-economic clothes now. And this thinking, I’m afraid, undergirds even the Julie Bishop desire for Liberal party soft quotas. The core point is that where truth conflicts with desired political outcomes you suppress truth. That’s how you can get away with writing books about the supposedly amazing agricultural achievements of hunter-gatherer peoples – you let your subjective druthers trump true facts.
When feelings, delusions, and fetishes, are prioritised above facts, we get wokeism in all its ugliness. When a middle-aged man “feels like” a 13-year-old girl, well, we’re told, who are we to stop him slithering his way into the girls’ change rooms? When a blindingly white man or woman asserts, against all evidence, that they’re as black as Albert Namatjira, or red as Sitting Bill, we have no choice but to shower them with praise and welfare.
Then there are so-called “Truth Telling” and “indigenous ways of knowing”, which demand to elevate the hurty feelings and magic fairy tales of people whose 1/16th ancestors never progressed as far as the Neolithic era, above centuries and millennia of rational, empirical inquiry.
All of this pops like a bloated, rotting jellyfish the instant one applies the sharp pin of Hume’s rationalism.
That is the factual truth that the external, causal world imposes on us all. One’s subjective desires are neither here nor there.
Spectator Australia
No wonder the wokeists are so terrified of David Hume that they have to erase his name from the very institution he made famous.