Edinburgh University is learning the hard way that there's a price to pay for going woke
Weak, pusillanimous and ignorant officials thought it would be easy to spit on the memory of David Hume. They were wrong
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.
But the Wokesters of the University of Edinburgh will surely themselves make up the shortfall in cash through an impost on the salary of each and every one of them.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.
Meantime, the donors who have ceased donating should consider building a multi-million pound monument in recognition of David Hume's monumental contribution to the advancement of human understanding.
As to Hume's great offence? He said that white people are smarter and more creative than people of any other race. Moreover, he had no qualms about the slave trade. In today's multiracial Western world, such views naturally cause outrage.
But this is now and that was then. Hume lived in a world totally dominated by European technology, capital and military might. Even today, almost every important feature of the modern world that makes it rich and modern was invented by white people: cars, planes, wireless, television, missiles, atom bombs.
Moreover, Hume was an empiricist. Certain truth about the world was, he believed, unknowable. On that view, our only means of anticipating the future is to assume that the future will resemble the past, which it often does -- but not always.
On the relative creativity of the races of mankind, much evidence during the 18th Century, supported Hume's assumption of white superiority. The British nation, the people of a small island, had begun the settlement of North America and the conquest of India, on the way to creating the greatest empire the world has ever seen. Other European nations were creating other vast overseas empires. Meantime, at home, the European nations were instigating a scientific, technological and industrial revolution, whereas China, the World's most populous nation existed in a condition of cultural and economic stagnation, and Africa, the World's largest continent was lightly populated by a multitude of tribal groups of very limited cultural and technological advancement.
So was David Hume wrong in his belief in the superiority of white people? At the time he committed his view to paper in a footnote to a paper on national characteristics, few white people would have judged him so. Among others, well the Chinese for sure, would have laughed at the absurdity of his presumption.
But today, when formerly white nations have turned multi-racial, and their university and corporate research laboratories ire staffed by creative people of every race, colour and creed, and when China's industrial output far exceeds that of any other nation, Hume's judgement seems mistaken.
But there's no end to the PC crowd's hatred of white people or their endless search for justification of their anti-white racism and their ignorance of the history of the advancement of human understanding.
