Derek Ridgley, Nederland. From the statue-toppling summer of 2020 to the renaming of public schools and the Dr. Seuss controversy of 2021, efforts to reexamine the past have become a hot front in the red/blue culture war. These initiatives should ideally be arbitrated individually and contextually. Toppling confederate statues from public squares, for example, is quite different from a private publisher’s decision to pare potentially controversial titles from their roster of children’s literature. However, there are matters of principle at stake in this battle that transcend ‘cancel’ versus ‘callout’ skirmishes.

Sometimes statues are icons of state mythology. When placed prominently in the public domain they carry the imprimatur of government, the state is explicitly endorsing the narrative of such works and encouraging veneration of their subjects. In this context, removing Robert E. Lee’s statue is no different from U.S. troops pulling down a statue of Saddam Hussein after the fall of Iraq. Both signal a significant change in governing narrative.

The estate of Theodor Geisel is a private entity whose editorial decisions cannot be confused with the maintenance of state mythology. Publishers make curatorial decisions. They must be mindful when the evolution of public sentiment renders certain works controversial enough to damage their commercial brand. Sometimes they drop titles. Other times they opt to edit out material that hasn’t aged well. The Stratemeyer Syndicate took the latter course in 1959 when they updated their Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books, which included pruning racial and ethnic stereotypes.

More disturbing is the case of David Hume, a luminary of 18th century Enlightenment philosophy. It was newsworthy when Edinburgh University, where Hume studied, stripped his name from a campus building last year in response to a petition that condemned Hume as a “man who championed white supremacy.” Hume and his contemporaries were previously honored for advancing a framework of ideas about the virtues of logic, empirical evidence and open debate in matters of philosophy and politics. Those ideas, highly progressive in their day, are part of the essential firmament that undergirds liberal democracy, as evidenced by the most famous artifact of Enlightenment thinking: the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

The Age of Enlightenment was a disorganized movement that stood on the shoulders of Renaissance humanism and the Scientific Revolution to challenge conventional wisdom that included belief in witchcraft, transmutation, faith healing and mystical explanations for everyday phenomena. Leveraging the rise of the printing press, Enlightenment thinkers turned the search for truth and knowledge into an open source, collective endeavor. They advanced powerful new ideals - individual liberty, constitutional government, the separation of church and state - that undermined the authority of monarchies and the Catholic Church. Hume and contemporaries like Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Spinoza and Adam Smith produced a wide variety of competing and even contradictory theories, but four themes bound them all together: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Today many in academia treat those themes with indifference or contempt, and popular perception isn’t much better. Enlightenment thinkers insisted on applying objective standards to the world instead of falling back on superstition, dogma, mysticism or gut feelings. Today, like the ‘alternative facts’ they produce, those less rigorous modes of thinking are sadly resurgent.

Many Enlightenment ideas provoked immediate resistance. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others in the Romantic Movement denied that reason could be separated from emotion, that individuals had agency separate from their culture, and even debated whether maximizing the prosperity of the common man was a worthy goal. They saw humanity as intractably governed by allegiances to race, nation and religion.  Presaging modern eco-pessimism, the Romantics also believed society incapable of moral progress, revering instead the primeval purity of the ‘noble savage’.

The idea of transcendent human rights and values attracts similar objections today. Left-aligned critics see those ‘universalist’ aspirations as an enabler of Western domination and racial hierarchy, or argue that individual liberty should be sacrificed to the secular deity of ecology. Right-aligned critics bemoan the individualism of Jefferson’s “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. They argue individuals must conform to the social preferences of the majority, and that religion is an ineffable ingredient of human nature. But it was precisely its cosmopolitan, anti-tribal assertions that made humanist philosophy so radical in the 18th century, and argue for its continued relevance today. Enlightenment universalism rejected the ‘us vs. them’ dialectic upon which slavery, classicism and caste culture all reside.

Which brings us back to David Hume, who certainly was, in his own words, a racist as we employ the term today. Belief in the superiority of Western cultures was nigh universal during the 18th century, when colonial competition was the engine of economic growth. But unlike Rousseau, Hume argued that human culture was an arc that progresses over time. Rousseau and Hume agreed that cultures occupy different points on a spectrum of ‘civilization’; they simply disagreed as to which end of that continuum was more desirable. Hume was guilty of seeing people of color as ‘less than’, but collectively Enlightenment thinkers condemned many ubiquitous cruelties common to their age: slavery, despotism, executions for trivial offenses, and the use of sadistic punishments.  

Enlightenment thinkers examined history contextually. Ignoring the provenance of philosophies from the past would have struck them as illogical. Hume and his peers assumed the fallibility of their own philosophies, which they expected to be supplanted in time as more data and reason were accumulated. The Enlightenment ethos did not stake a claim to perfection; it espoused a set of ideals to strive toward. The Declaration of Independence, likewise, did not declaim an extant American utopia; it was the lodestone of the fledgling nation’s highest ambitions, charting a path for continued societal progress.

Dismissing the exceptional contributions Enlightenment thinkers made to our founding principles simply because they did not anticipate the 20th century cultural relativism of Margaret Mead or the 21st century anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi is to deny them the temporal relativism they richly deserve. Denigrating David Hume’s outsized contributions to the fabric of liberal democracy because he trafficked in a cultural prejudice ubiquitous in his time brings to mind Winston Churchill’s admonition: “Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost our future.”

[Editors note. We have recently had several people comment that they enjoy reading Derek’s writing. Would you like to see this in the newspaper on a regular basis? As a column, instead of a letter? Email your thoughts to publisher1977@gmail.com.]

(Originally published in the April 8, 2021, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)