Hume is the latest target of our cancel culture but not the last

YOU might believe universities are dedicated to encouraging debate and free thinking.

If so, you’re stuck in the past, and the past is increasingly a problematic place, full of unsuitable views.

At the University of Edinburgh, officials have succumbed to student pressure to re-name the David Hume Tower.

Hume is our greatest philosopher, but academic inquiry uncovered a letter in which he urged his patron to buy a plantation in Grenada.

Links to slavery have caused statues to topple elsewhere, and it was inevitable that Hume would become another casualty of ‘cancel culture’.

But he’s also a victim of dumbing down: no-one with a genuine understanding of his contribution as a globally renowned thinker could endorse this decision.

He was one of the key figures of the Enlightenment – and a student at the very university which now seeks to disown him.

One of his most important ideas was that all human knowledge derives from experience, but the story of his ‘cancellation’ also demonstrates a degree of ignorance.

My old philosophy lecturer at St Andrews University – Professor Gordon Graham – wonders how our own social mores will be viewed in a few hundred years’ time.

For him, the anti-Hume crusade is an example of ‘presentism’ – the notion that our own attitudes and beliefs are inherently superior to those of our ancestors.

And he asks: ‘Can we honour no one for their great accomplishments unless their lives tick all our moral boxes? If so, we can never honour anyone.’

That may be the end-point of this strange process of aggressive revisionism now taking root on too many campuses, and indeed beyond.

The University of Edinburgh is also embarking on a two-year study to audit public buildings for references to the ‘white superiority’ of the British Empire.

But it sounds like an exercise that has already decided what it will find before it has begun, overlooking the role the Empire played in wiping out slavery.

We don’t need to support slavery and racism to believe Hume should be commemorated: we can abhor them, while recognising that those views belong firmly in the past.

That doesn’t mean that ideas that were formulated long ago also deserve to be consigned to history – or that the people who devised them should be vilified because some of those ‘moral boxes’ Professor Graham mentioned are unticked.

Universities are meant to be crucibles of debate and innovation, where new and contentious ideas are fearlessly tested and challenged.

But they also reflect the outside world, where ministers are in the process of trying to push through hate crime legislation that in its current form would limit free speech.

While tackling hate crime is a noble idea, and government insists it will compromise on the Bill to protect freedom of expression, it’s another example of officialdom telling us what to think, and say.

Philosophy, like any other discipline, depends on knowing what its best-known proponents said and wrote.

I studied the subject for two years – and found it as complex and compelling as it was ultimately maddening.

Its central message was that there aren’t any easy answers, and most subjects are many-sided: but that’s not a bad life lesson.

Of course, those who seek to airbrush Hume’s legacy out of existence in Edinburgh would point out they’re not burning his books – well, at least not yet.

But it’s a slippery slope: once you accept that certain figures are morally tainted, and therefore beyond the pale, you risk propelling them out of the syllabus altogether.

Literature has more than its fair share of candidates for this kind of reappraisal: TS Eliot and Philip Larkin are among our most lauded poets, but between them now stand accused of anti-Semitism, misogyny, and racism.

But the artist should be separated from their art: for sure, we should study what they said or wrote, and we can’t hide from the fact that some of their views, while unacceptable, were widely shared at the time.

If we were to restrict study solely to the field of those artists who were, by today’s standards, flawless, most university courses would be over quite quickly, or perhaps wouldn’t get off the ground.

(David Hume: now the target of the cancel culture mob)

We study Eliot and Larkin for their genius, and that’s a quality that doesn’t fit into the pro forma approach of those sanctimonious statue-topplers and re-namers for whom life is a series of binary questions, with no grey areas.

Even Shakespeare isn’t sacrosanct: Titus Andronicus is believed to be his first play but isn’t widely taught, as it’s deemed simply too shocking and politically incorrect – containing as it does rape, murder and severed body parts.

Another title seen as inappropriate is cult fiction bestseller American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis. The violence and misogyny in its pages are also deemed beyond the pale for many students of English literature.

But it’s also a novel about the greed and moral decline of corporate America in the 1980s: should we pretend that didn’t (or doesn’t) exist, in the U.S. and elsewhere?

As John Sutherland, emeritus Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London, has observed: ‘Justified or not, we are imposing on higher learning a climate of intellectual caution.’

That’s also manifested in the growing phenomenon of ‘trigger warnings’ which litter the rubric of university modules, and are dutifully trotted out by lecturers cowed into submission by an orthodoxy some of them privately deplore.

Students are warned what they’re about to learn might upset them – but a lot of human history, much like the present, is pretty upsetting.

Cotton-wool academia does a disservice to young adults by infantilising them, and peddling a fiction that you can learn without ever changing your point of view.

Students have been given ‘trigger warnings’ about potentially jarring scenes in classic fairytales.

Lecturers at Glasgow University admitted students were cautioned about ‘violent material’ contained in the famous children’s stories by the Brothers Grimm.

Their tales include Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood.

Terrifying stuff, and yet generations of children somehow overcame the trauma of hearing their parents reading them aloud.

Once it’s started, where does the dethroning of public figures, or the invalidation of celebrated stories from our shared past, end?

And who is empowered to have the final say – fat-cat academics, with one eye on government funding?

Or perhaps one day, if the SNP has its way, texts by some of history’s most influential thinkers and writers will be banned, branded ‘inflammatory’ under the provisions of the Hate Crime Bill.

Hume is just the latest target, but is unlikely to be the last.

Is it any wonder one of our leading academic institutions felt it could get away with this act of intellectual vandalism when our political masters appear to regard free speech with such brazen contempt?

A pincer movement has academic freedom in its sights: an increasingly authoritarian government – and the champions of ‘woke’ values who smugly believe history has nothing to teach them.

*This column was published on September 15, 2020.