Douglas Murray has written in the Telegraph about the University of Edinburgh’s excruciatingly woke decision to cancel one of Scotland’s greatest Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume, and the anti-woke backlash that led to a drop in donations to the university of £2 million.
David Hume’s work was crucial in moving our society out of the realm of superstition and into that of reason and rationalism. But in one fatal footnote to one fatal essay Hume said something that is certainly by modern standards racist.
I doubt any of his critics had ever read any of Hume’s works. Or at least, my strong suspicion is that they did not stumble upon this footnote during a routine read-through of Hume’s collected works. Outrage culture does not work like that.
But soon, searching for victims, the mob was after Hume, deemed him a racist and insisted his name be removed from the University of Edinburgh building. So it came to pass that the university authorities changed the building name to “40 George Square”. A name which is still far more poetic than the building in question.
And there it lay. Another victim of the latter-day culture war I described in my most recent book, The War on the West. But as I also pointed out there, these things can have unintended consequences. Weak, pusillanimous and ignorant officials, like those who lead most of our universities, thought it would be the easiest thing imaginable to spit on the memory of David Hume. Yet, as the Telegraph reported this week, there has in fact been a downside for them.
It turns out that in the wake of their auto-cancellation the University of Edinburgh saw a slump in donations. Indeed, the university lost almost £2 million, including 24 donations and 12 legacy donations that have either been “cancelled, amended or withdrawn” since the cancellation of Hume.
Personally, I am delighted to see this. David Hume is a figure that the university should take immense pride in. Naturally, working 250 years ago, he held some views that we do not hold today. Just as we doubtless hold views today that our successors will not hold in another 250 years.
But the point of institutions is not to judge the past and act as judge, jury and executioner over it. Nor is it to erase the past. The job of institutions is to preserve the past, educate the young about it and then pass that education along. In that process continuity is vital, so that a student today might realise that they could achieve even a portion of the heights of those who went before them. Judge a man on one footnote and “who should ‘scape whipping” (as Hamlet put it)?
Worth reading in full.
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To save someone the trouble of searching for it. The footnote in question is apparently
I’m apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to whites.
This cautious admittance to have an intuitive tendency for sharing common prejudices of society during his lifetime despite being aware that they’re very likely prejudices is sufficient for the following statement from the Edinburgh University Students’ Association
Hume’s writings consistently evidenced his belief in the inferiority of non-white peoples, and his beliefs on race are extremely problematic and incredibly harmful to our student body.
The idle pompousness of this vain statement is harmful to my mind. One should take note of the two word compositions presumably supposed to feign substance where none happens to be. Hume’s writings not just evidence this supposed belief but consistently evidence it. For all practical purposes, that’s a tautology. For something to be considered evidence of something else, it must always be consistent with what it’s supposed to evidence. Such views are – of course – not just problematic but extremely problematic, in other words, the writer meant to express that this problem is Really A True Problem[tm]. Lastly, beliefs someone might have held more than 250 years ago are not just harmful to the student body but incredibly harmful. I really wouldn’t believe that.
This makes me want to tell an old joke: The best proof that there’s intelligent life in the universe is that nobody ever visited us. Certainly no intelligent lifeform ever visited the Edinburgh University Students’ Association.
Thanks for the info. Is Hume’s statement racist? Did he mean that ALL black people are inferior to ALL white people? Seems unlikely – he wasn’t an idiot. Or was he stating his opinion based on what he’d observed/understood, that ON AVERAGE this was the case. And what did he mean by “inferior”. Did he mean in every respect – intellectually, physically, morally? Seems unlikely. So what did he mean? Perhaps intellectually, or with respect to constructing civilisations. Is the context important, or are we (polite society) saying that ANY observation/generalisation making mention of race is “racist”? Except of course when such an observation is made about how horrible white people are…
I think what he meant was that he felt intuitively inclined to affirm his contemporary’s belief in the inferiority of black people from Africa, in any respect, to Europeans, based on what he heard, read and possibly, also saw about them. Not individually, obviously, but as a culture/ civilisation. This means to him or rather, according to the ideas of the time, they represented an earlier stage of development Europeans had already left behind them quite a long time ago. This is a similar to the notion of the ancient Greeks that they were the only civilized people in a world inhabited by (much more primitive) barbarians.
“but as a culture/ civilisation”
Seems plausible. Was he right? Is his observation racist? Is it “true”? I suppose it partly depends on how you evaluate a culture/civilisation. I think ours (English, Western Christian) is the best but then I would say that. Perhaps others have a different view, though people do keep trying to go and live in rich democracies.
You see, it seems we cannot talk about race, but we must talk about race because people go on and on and on about it. I don’t think this is going to end well.
And what is meant by racism? It seems to mean any generalisation that makes reference to race (unless it’s about white people – people of the global minority). When I was a boy we had “racial prejudice” which is literally pre-judging someone based on their race. I mean we pre-judge situations all the time, to stay alive – the key is do we change that judgement as new facts emerge? Prejudice can be based on lack of information, and it can turn into bigotry if someone does not modify their first impression/thought based on the facts in front of them.
I could provide an example of that. Some years ago, I encountered a black guy among a couple of white ones in a local night club. By that time, I had the expectation that black people generally behave and talk in certain rustic ways, but there was absolutely no trace of that in this guy. He acted and talked just like the others around him. Hence, I thought Ok, it seems that I should really update my prejudices a little.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have generalized from a from a few personal experiences in the way I did but in the end, only experiences guide us. It’s ok to be ignorant. But one should be willing to learn new things as they present themselves.
Indeed. People find research into/observations about race and race-related differences (differences in the average or mean level of things) upsetting and think it’s dangerous, so we could possibly just stop doing it, but the problem we have is that people expect equality of outcome, and blame the lack of it on inequality of opportunity and say that’s evidence of systemic racism, and any attempt to disprove such systemic racism kind of leads to looking at whether there are general differences related to race (again I emphasise based on the average/mean, recognising everyone is an individual). It is not going to end well.
I’m sorry but averaging measurements of different quantities still makes no sense. Especially not, when they’re not even really measurements but bullshit assessments like so-called IQ tests whose outcome depends not so much on the intelligence of the participiants but on how motivated they are to work through a tedious bunch of pointless trick questions in exchange for nothing.
None of these tests/assessments/measurements are perfect, but if someone says “group X attains less, because systemic racism” how would you go about demonstrating that it might be because “group X” has less aptitude on average in whatever area of attainment you’re looking at?
I’d rather we ditched the whole thing and stopped talking about race completely, but there are groups who are determined not to let that happen, but they want to control WHAT is talked about with relation to race.
I wouldn’t want to do that because averaging measurements of different quantities really doesn’t make any sense, let alone averaging bullshit non-measurements. These are not not perfect, they’re just junk. Real measurements are not perfect because they contain measurement errors. And averaging them is one way to eliminate (in theory) or rather, reduce (in practice), the amount of error in a given quantity.
Systemic racism is a nonsense term. Racism is something said to influence the behaviour of people. But things (and abstractions) can never be racist because they have no motivations, only mechanics. Further, grouping different people into groups envisionend as homogenous based on superficial differences (like skin colour) is based on the presumption that this superficial difference is actually more characteristic for the individual in question than their real-world differences. Insofar these are (supposedly) race groups, that would be a splendid example of racism. Considering this, there’s no use discussing anything with people making such statemens. Shut up, this is nonsense! is the only option.
Sorry I am not following.
I believe “race” exists (and no it’s not “skin colour”) though it’s clearly got a lot of fuzzy edges. I know people who go on about “systemic racism” pretend they don’t believe “race” exists other than as a social construct, but they seem mad to me. So they say, well this group (race, whatever you want to call it) is not doing well at school or whatever, because racism. They say we must have equality of outcome. And we pursue this, for decades, and it doesn’t happen, apparently because racism. So maybe we should look for other reasons, otherwise we will just forever be madly pursuing the unattainable. And to do that, you would arguably consider race-related factors. But that’s taboo, so we are stuck with “system racism” and we will be forever, because equality of outcome is impossible, IMHO.
So they say, well this group (race, whatever you want to call it) is not doing well at school or whatever, because racism.
This group is an artificial construct created under the assumption that some characteristic the members of the group share (and in that hot-bed of transcontinental interbreeding that is the USA, this is certainly not somewhat clear-cut biological relationship, except accidentally) would be THE dominant factor for doing well at school, dwarving anything else the people making up the group might also have in common, ie, are they rather rich or rather poor, and dwarving whatever individual differences exist between members of the group. This assumption is really presumption, something that’s believed to be true a priori. In mathematics, this would be called an axiom. There’s no reason for constructing this particular group save that it’s the group the people who like to use terms like systemic racism want to construct.
What about taking a different approach, eg, group all people who aren’t doing well in school together (surely, they’re not all black) and then look for common characteristics? That might yield some insight into why people aren’t doing well at school without being hampered by preconceived explanations (supporting pre-existing political narratives).
Or start from the individuals in that group. Try to find out why they’re individually not doing well at school, possibly systematize the results and try to work out some method for improvements based on that.
What I’m trying to get at is that this race group is a political construct some people invented because it suits them and not because it makes any real-world sense. They want racism. Hence, they invent a way to proove that it exists. Based on them creating the artificial groups, improvements obviously never happen. They don’t really want them, hence, all they need to do is to adjust their group creation methods to ensure the desired outcome.
That’s what I call ‘taking apart’ an argument.
Brilliant.
Unfortunately it comes as no surprise that one of the bedrocks of the 18th Century Enlightenment has now become an epicentre of the 21st Century Endarkenment.
The University of Edinburgh symbolically began its journey in this backward direction when Charles Darwin briefly attended as a medical student in the 1820s and started to develop his atheistic and amoral / nature-based world view there.
Appropriately the University went on to became one the earliest and most dedicated institutional backers of his later 19th Century evolutionary and ‘survival of the fittest’ theories, including offshoot social-Darwinian pseudo sciences such as eugenics, racism and craniology.
In the more recent era Edinburgh University has become a leading academic light in the main contemporary manifestation of social-Darwinism, the Green / Climate Change movement (modern environmentalism finds its main ideological roots in the Nazi Party which obviously itself worshiped at the feet of Mr Darwin and his ‘law of the jungle’ approach).
Alongside the University, Edinburgh as a whole has long been orientated in a Green direction. It has some of the most extreme anti-car policies in the UK (large swathes of this once beautiful city have been visually ruined by crude and ugly barriers sectioning off cycle lanes) and since 1988 has hosted the annual Beltane Fire Festival.
This neo-pagan / Green / Celticist (ie racist) / Scottish nationalist event sees torchlit processions of thousands of young people march up to the top of Carlton Hill in the dead of night to worship the anti-morality gods of chaos and ‘Mother Nature’.
This link will give an indication of Beltane’s combined Wicker Man and neo-Nazi flavour (the Nazi Party held very similar paganistic festivals in 1930s Germany):
https://www.google.com/search?q=beltane+festival+2022&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjq_dW-5JP5AhWKaMAKHXvJCeoQ_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1549&bih=876&dpr=1
And to bring the thing full circle a large percentage of the organisers, participants and attendees of this long running event will be Edinburgh University students.