Woke Activists Need to Read Their David Hume

Yes, I know, starting a column by talking briefly about one of the world’s great philosophers is a bit odd. But bear with me. I’m going to relate this back to today’s woke ideologies. First, though, let’s go to the great Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. This Scots-Canadian writer thinks Hume is the greatest philosopher ever to have lived. But agree or disagree with me on that front, you know he must be an importantly august figure when you recall that Edinburgh University recently took its illustrious native city son’s name off a university building after a student survey ludicrously condemned the great man. And then the university’s ‘equality and diversity’ committee sided with the students. (Every ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ bureaucracy in every university needs to be shut down the way Ron DeSantis closed them down in Florida. These DEI bureaucrats, all over-paid, deal solely in identity politics, not individualism and merit; they ironically obliterate viewpoint diversity in all universities; and they get things right about as frequently as a Transit of Venus.)

But back to Hume. His powerful insights were myriad including on how to think about miracles, causation, economics, religion and morality. But for the purposes of this column recall that Hume was a great empiricist (getting there 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. Some of these we limited biological humans can know very confidently (I’m betting the Sun comes up tomorrow); some are very complicated and so always in play, at least around the edges; and some truths are out there but we humans are too limited ever to know or discover them.

Now that sort of basic worldview became widespread after the Enlightenment – the Scottish version of the Enlightenment with Hume and Adam Smith, for what it’s worth, being more insightful and more liberal than the French variant with the okay Voltaire and the truly despicable Rousseau. But 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 politically 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.

Here’s another way this plays out. This non-Enlightenment, identitarian worldview often makes one’s subjective preferences and desires more important than mind-independent truths about the world. Only sometimes of course. And when that is and when it isn’t can be wholly arbitrary at times. For instance, if a 43-year-old man says “look, I identify as a 13-year-old and want to play under-14 rugby” the whole of the progressive political world – including doctors’ organisations, the UN, the International Olympic Committee, a few child acting stars who played in the Harry Potter movies, half the Liberal Party and the whole of the Anglosphere’s university senior managerial class – does not promptly kick into action to demand that that guy’s subjective preferences and desires hereafter will trump what we all know is true about the external causal world (including that the actual 13 year-olds could get badly hurt playing with an adult full-grown male). Nor do taxpayers stump up huge monies to provide free plastic surgeries that make the old guy look a bit younger or pump him full of drugs to mimic some of the features of youth. The same general unwillingness to allow someone’s subjective feelings to trump truth occurs where some white person announces that she now identifies as a black or an Aborigine. (Well, affirmative action benefits being what they are these days you do get more than a few Elizabeth Warrens out there trying this one on, sometimes successfully, but on this one, on the whole, the inner-city progressive population does not lose its mind wanting truth to lose to subjective feelings.)

So you can’t point to your own druthers and claim to be younger or to be a different race and expect all the rest of society to genuflect at the foot of your subjective preferences. We point to mind-independent truths. But for some reason, and it seems rather arbitrary really, many people in today’s Western societies seem wholly prepared to do this as regards sex. The mind-independent truth which Richard Dawkins and many others lay out nicely is that sex is binary; that males are in statistical terms bigger, faster and stronger – the then-world champion U.S. national women’s soccer team a few years back lost to an under-16 Dallas boys’ team, and it wasn’t close – and the athletic advantages of testosterone and muscle twitch speed tell us why women who transition to men never come close to making any men’s teams in anything, but the other way round fifth-rate loser men do dominate. They unfairly take places away from girls and women. That is the factual truth that the external, causal world imposes on us all. One’s subjective desires are neither here nor there. The very brave J.K. Rowling, another Scot, gets this correct down the line. In fact, the progressive, woke position is near-on incoherent. Most, like me, don’t care at all how some adult wants to dress or live or do to him or herself. But we do care about truth, about enforced untrue pronouns, and about some of the malign things that can flow from ignoring truth – think male rapists actually being put into women’s prisons, such are the mental idiocies of the woke mind. Or operating on kids who can’t buy cigarettes, drink or join the army yet.

Now it’s possible the tide is starting to turn on this. You can only run positions patently at odds with the truth about the external, causal world for so long (though this idiocy started when we allowed a term of grammar, ‘gender’, to usurp the factual term ‘sex’ and then let the ‘it’s all socially constructed’ BS come to dominate).

Be brave. Speak the truth. We’re starting to win on this one.

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.