David Hume, "On the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature"

obvious idiocies & benevolent creatures

“Were the lowest of our species as wise as Tully, or lord Bacon, we should still have reason to say, that there are few wise men.”

When I was in high school, our dog Bear got bone cancer and we (foolishly, I now think) signed her up for a course of radiation. The treatment left her with a red wound on her left flank — a burn the size of your palm — and in the days when she was home, I noticed something peculiar.

Many times a day she would lie down (she was a Great Pyrenees, and so spent a good eighty-five percent of her time lying down even at her most robust). And when she lay down on her wounded side, she would whimper and cry. When she lay down on her non-wounded side, she was quiet and content. Nevertheless, it was about a fifty-fifty proposition every time whether she would end up on her left or her right. The fact that she was sometimes in excruciating pain and sometimes not was as mysterious to her, as much beyond her view, as the workings of the tides.

And I, blazing with an indignant sort of compassion, thought: how maddening that I can see what she ought to be doing — that it seems so obvious as to take actual work to imagine a mind that wouldn’t understand this — but she just can’t! And then I thought: what if there were a creature who looked down on human affairs the way that we look down on dogs? What obvious idiocies, what compulsively repeated blunders, are we constantly committing that some benevolent, clear-seeing being could liberate us from?

And then I went off to college and (in a philosophy course from which I got very little else) met this exalted being. His name was David Hume.

Hume (in case it’s been a while since your own freshman philosophy course) was a Scottish philosopher who lived and wrote in the mid-18^th century. He and William James, had they coincided, would have gotten along — cheerfully non-dogmatic thinkers and approachable writers who spent much of their lives volubly noodling away at the sorts of questions (the existence of an enduring self, the causes of suffering) that Buddhism had, mostly unbeknownst to them, been grappling with for aeons.

He’s also, I’m embarrassed to say, one of the very few pre-1800 writers I seem to be capable of reading. Don Quijote, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, Tristram Shandy — I generally find myself reading 18^th century prose (in the brief stretches before I toss it aside) with a yawn-disguising smile of condescension: Wow, this would be good, if only it weren’t written like that.

One of my favorite bits of Hume — and one of the clearest demonstrations of his bird’s-eye benevolence — is his essay, “On the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature.” The essay is about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil, and the mistakes we usually make when arguing about it. The prose is clear and conversational — but that conversation, be warned, takes place on an unhurried walk over some rolling hills.

There are certain sects, which secretly form themselves in the learned world, as well as factions in the political; and though sometimes they come not to an open rupture, they give a different turn to the ways of thinking of those who have taken part on either side.

This is Hume for: there are two kinds of people in the world. And he goes on to describe them — there are those who “exalt our species to the skies, and represent man as a kind of human demigod, who derives his origin from heaven,” and there are those who “insist upon the blind sides of human nature, and can discover nothing, except vanity, in which man surpasses the other animals…”

Hume is temperamentally and intellectually with the exalters, but before he gets there, he lays out some common mistakes made by the blind-siders. For instance: they forget to ask the crucial question, Compared to what? Sure, humanity looks bad if you compare it to some imagined ideal — but what if you compare it to lions ripping some defenseless zebra to shreds?

And the pessimists go further wrong, Hume says, when comparing one person to another. Look how few of us are truly wise and virtuous, they say, compared with the countless millions of us who are dim and selfish. What more proof of humanity’s lousiness could you possibly need?

Here Hume performs an act of intellectual rearrangement so deft — so obvious, in retrospect — that when I read it I can feel my aching body lifted up and laid on its proper side.

When we find a man, who arrives at such a pitch of wisdom as is very uncommon, we pronounce him a wise man: So that to say, there are few wise men in the world, is really to say nothing; since it is only by their scarcity that they merit the appellation.

Hume is here making the kind of point that would, if we weren’t always in such a foggy-headed muddle, hardly need making. Of course most things are merely average. Being like most things is what it means to be average! This sentence — in which he demonstrates that wise people are definitionally few — is a clattering and chaotic master-class in argumentative prose. By the end of it (since it is only by their scarcity…) you can hear him speeding up, like a bright student realizing as he speaks that what he’s saying is important, and true.

But it’s the next sentence that makes me love Hume. Because he’s already made his point clearly, and he could, seeing the judges make a mark in his column, move along to the next fallacy in need of demolition. But instead he looks back at that sentence, with its hectic capitalizations and colons and semicolons, and thinks: I want to make sure that everyone gets it. So he writes:

Were the lowest of our species as wise as Tully, or lord Bacon, we should still have reason to say, that there are few wise men.

This is, for Hume, a sentence of Hemingway-esque terseness. There are no grammatical valleys in which you might lose your way, no punctuational rivers to ford. Just a couple of household names (assuming that household is in 18^th century Scotland), a smattering of one-syllable words, and a point as clear and refreshing as a glass of water. In the first sentence he sees us mired in the murk of our suffering and confusion. In the second sentence he extends his hand.