Hume—Part 3

Multiculturalism and Ignorance

The first of Hume’s two destructive concepts referred to in the previous part of this article is found in “Section V, Sceptical Solution of These Doubts, Part I” where he introduces what he calls a “principle” that is his explanation and justification for believing in cause and effect. “This principle is Custom or Habit. For wherever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding, we always say, that this propensity is the effect of Custom. … This hypothesis seems even the only one which explains the difficulty, why we draw, from a thousand instances, an inference which we are not able to draw from one instance, that is, in no respect, different from them. Reason is incapable of any such variation. The conclusions which it draws from considering one circle are the same which it would form upon surveying all the circles in the universe. But no man, having seen only one body move after being impelled by another, could infer that every other body will move after a like impulse. All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning.

“Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation.” [All emphasis mine.]

It may not be immediately apparent to you in what form this terrible concept is today corrupting every aspect of Western Civilization, culture, and society. It is used in the argument, there are no absolute values or principles, there are only customs and every culture and society has different ones, therefore, there is no set of customs that is better than another—this is the root of multiculturalism. Another form of this same mistake is the so-called cultural hegemony of Gramsci and the cultural Marxists.

In case you do not believe this implies cultural hegemony in Hume, he states it plainly in “Section VIII, Of Liberty and Necessity, Part I:” “We learn thence the great force of custom and education, which mould the human mind from its infancy and form it into a fixed and established character.” We are whatever our culture and society makes us, in other words.

The second destructive concept is found in “Section IV, Sceptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding, Part I,” and is Hume’s repudiation of the mind. Based on his conclusion that cause can never actually be found, either by observation or reason, he asserts that no ultimate knowledge of any kind is possible and man must forever remain hopelessly ignorant.

“Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher, who is rational and modest, has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power, which produces any single effect in the universe. It is confessed, that the utmost effort of human reason is to reduce the principles, productive of natural phenomena, to a greater simplicity, and to resolve the many particular effects into a few general causes, by means of reasonings from analogy, experience, and observation. But as to the causes of these general causes, we should in vain attempt their discovery; nor shall we ever be able to satisfy ourselves, by any particular explication of them. These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry. … The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it. [Emphasis mine.]

The Fruits of Ignorance

No one who knows and understands the history of the West could swallow Hume’s pessimistic view of human progress in knowledge. Mankind is certainly not doomed to ignorance; but there might be something to the view that if one believes they are doomed to ignorance they really will be. That seems to be the case with most of the academics of today who follow that line; it was certainly true of Hume.

This is a digression, I know, but one I could not resist.

Fortunately, most people have not swallowed Hume’s lie. For example, there are today a host of fields and industries devoted to the subject of nutrition, such as nutritional medicine and the dietary sciences; there are even government programs and guidelines on nutrition. Everything we buy today has a list of ingredients as well as nutritional information that is generally understood by everyone.

According Hume, all of this is impossible.

“If a body of like colour and consistence with that bread, which we have formerly eat, be presented to us, we make no scruple of repeating the experiment, and foresee, with certainty, like nourishment and support. … The bread, which I formerly eat, nourished me; that is, a body of such sensible qualities was, at that time, endued with such secret powers: but does it follow, that other bread must also nourish me at another time, and that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like secret powers? The consequence seems nowise necessary.” This is his explanation for the following incredible statement:

“Our senses inform us of the colour, weight, and consistence of bread; but neither sense nor reason can ever inform us of those qualities which fit it for the nourishment and support of a human body.” [Emphasis mine.]

I understand this was written before most of the principles of nutrition were discovered, but only an anti-intellectual could claim such knowledge was beyond human understanding. The assault on human understanding waged by Hume failed for almost 150 years, but is in full bloom today in the form of multiculturalism and the assertion in all of academia that nothing is certain and “no one has all the answers,” by which they mean, no one has any answers. But there is a worse assault in Hume, it is called “subjectivism”.

Radical Subjectivism

One might wonder, if the only means of reasoning about facts is an appeal to cause and effect, and there is no way, by either observation or reason, to discover cause and effect, so we are forever bound to hopeless ignorance of it, how does one ever know that anything is true? According to Hume, you cannot really “know” that anything is true, as though it were established by reason, we only believe things are true, out of habit and from custom. Still, there must be some means to determine what to believe, and what not to—but, since Hume has already established reason is not the means, what is it? According to Hume, it is our feelings:

“In this consists the whole nature of belief. For as there is no matter of fact which we believe so firmly that we cannot conceive the contrary, there would be no difference between the conception assented to and that which is rejected, were it not for some sentiment which distinguishes the one from the other. … “Were we to attempt a definition of this sentiment, we should, perhaps, find it a very difficult, if not an impossible task; in the same manner as if we should endeavour to define the feeling of cold or passion of anger, to a creature who never had any experience of these sentiments. Belief is the true and proper name of this feeling; and no one is ever at a loss to know the meaning of that term; because every man is every moment conscious of the sentiment represented by it. … in philosophy, we can go no farther than assert, that belief is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgement from the fictions of the imagination.”

How do you know what is true? According to Hume, “it just feels right.” Absolutely anything can be put over on the basis of, “whatever feels right is true,” and divorces all values, all principles, and all knowledge from objective reason and puts “feelings” or “sentiment” in the seat of power over the mind. The assault on objective reason could not be more blatant, and this particular perversion of reason and blatant subjectivism has infected every area of our culture and society. If you wonder why in education, how a student feels is now more important than what he knows, Hume is the reason.

Cultural Hegemony Vs. Volition

In the first article of this series, “Marxist Revolution of the West”, I identified Antonio Gramsci, with Georg Lukacs, as the originators of cultural Marxism, and pointed out, it was Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony that was the underlying principle justifying that movement. I cannot say whether Gramsci ever heard of or read Hume, but he certainly read Marx and contemporary philosophers who were all influenced, at least indirectly, by Hume. It was Gramsci who made the concept of cultural hegemony the foundation of cultural Marxism, but it was Hume who originated the concept itself.

Nowhere is Hume’s sophistry more blatant than in his discussion of, “free will,” which is a badly conceived version of volition, the ability and necessity of man to consciously choose his behavior. At least it seems like that is what he is discussing, but in fact, what he addresses is not the question of volition itself, but what most people believe about it.

He begins his discussion, as do all philosophers who followed him, by presenting the universally assumed problem with volition—physical determinism.

“It is universally allowed that matter, in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause that no other effect, in such particular circumstances, could possibly have resulted from it. The degree and direction of every motion is, by the laws of nature, prescribed with such exactness that a living creature may as soon arise from the shock of two bodies as motion in any other degree or direction than what is actually produced by it. Would we, therefore, form a just and precise idea of necessity, we must consider whence that idea arises when we apply it to the operation of bodies.”

This is, of course, a complete contradiction of everything he says about cause and effect, which neither he or anyone following took any notice of, because it has become the stock argument against volition to this day. It is more consistent today in those who use it, because the argument is made from the strict physicalist view of reality, but Hume was not a physicalist at all—if you can believe what he writes.

In “Section VII, Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion, Part I, he writes: “For first: Is there any principle in all nature more mysterious than the union of soul with body; by which a supposed spiritual substance acquires such an influence over a material one, that the most refined thought is able to actuate the grossest matter? … But if by consciousness we perceived any power or energy in the will, we must know this power; we must know its connexion with the effect; we must know the secret union of soul and body, and the nature of both these substances; by which the one is able to operate, in so many instances, upon the other.”

What hume means by “soul” is not clear and whether he has in mind the Christian “ghost that lives within us,” (from whence the expression “giving up the ghost” comes) or only the consciousness, as the philosopher Ayn Rand did, he obviously regards it as distinct from the physical body. Whether his belief in the soul is the reason or not, although he accepts absolute determinism in the physical realm, he does not use that as the basis for his argument that human behavior is determined. His reason for concluding human behavior is determined comes from an entirely different direction.

“Should a traveller, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men, wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted; men, who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge; who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit; we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood, and prove him a liar, with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies. And if we would explode any forgery in history, we cannot make use of a more convincing argument, than to prove, that the actions ascribed to any person are directly contrary to the course of nature, and that no human motives, in such circumstances, could ever induce him to such a conduct.”

Hume’s presumptions are breathtaking, and a bit disgusting. His opinion of mankind is so low he cannot believe it possible for a man to live without vice. While I cannot agree with his view of virtue, he assumes no man is capable of living virtuously. He was also, apparently quite ignorant about human behavior and, though he was a historian, must have been unfamiliar with most human history, because in that history there is almost no act, however absurd or vile, that some men have not indulged in, and no acts of courage, strength of character, patience, or virtue, that some men have not performed. Men are capable of anything and no behavior is beyond the scope of human motives.

Though his argument is mistaken, the point he is making is that human behavior is predictable because it is determined by their “nature.” With this he is not content, but mixes two different kinds of determinism, “natural determinism,”[we are determined by the natures we are born with] and cultural determinism [we are determined by the culture and society we live in], which I’ll separate. First more natural determinism:

“… Is the behaviour and conduct of the one sex very unlike that of the other? Is it thence we become acquainted with the different characters which nature has impressed upon the sexes, and which she preserves with constancy and regularity? … Even the characters, which are peculiar to each individual, have a uniformity in their influence; otherwise our acquaintance with the persons and our observation of their conduct could never teach us their dispositions, or serve to direct our behaviour with regard to them.”

It is bad enough that he regards human behavior determined by one’s gender and inborn “character,” but, he also introduces a subtly more malignant concept:

“Are the manners of men different in different ages and countries? We learn thence the great force of custom and education, which mould the human mind from its infancy and form it into a fixed and established character. … Are the actions of the same person much diversified in the different periods of his life, from infancy to old age? This affords room for many general observations concerning the gradual change of our sentiments and inclinations, and the different maxims which prevail in the different ages of human creatures.” [Emphasis mine.]

I quoted the italicized sentence earlier, in reference to multiculturalism, which had its origin in cultural Marxism. Here I want to emphasize the obvious fact that Gramsci’s social hegemony is nothing but an adaptation of Hume’s cultural determinism.

First consider the two points Hume makes: 1. the “force of custom and education, which mould the human mind from its infancy and form it into a fixed and established character;” and 2. there is “a gradual change of our sentiments and inclinations … [at] different ages; both of which are used to demonstrate our character and behavior are determined by culture and society. It is that principle which Gramsci uses as the premise of his social hegemony.

It is interesting that Hume uses the expression, “force of custom and education,” because that is exactly what Gramsci means by hegemony, a cultural or social force that causes the masses of population to consent to certain views without the use of coercion. While Hume simply meant people’s views and character are shaped by education, culture, and society without specifying any particular character or culture, Gramsci applies the principle to a particular political view, namely, that the majority are oppressed by the ruling or dominant class, which, through a “subtle and dynamic form of socialization” dominate them by there “willful consent,” rather than coercive force. That “willful consent” is achieved through education and social influences (the media, entertainment, etc.) which causes the oppressed masses to accept as, “common sense,” the social views and principles that keep the ruling powers in place.

From Hegemony in Antonio Gramsci:

“Social hegemony” names the “‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group [i.e. the ruling class – in Gramsci’s Western Europe, the bourgeoisie]; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.

From a review of False Consciousness and the Composing Process, by Nancy Geisler Mack in the “International Gramsci Society Newsletter, March 1993:”

“The work of Gramsci is used to explicate two very different but related definitions for hegemony. On the one hand, Gramsci described hegemony as a subtle and dynamic form of socialization through which the ruling class dominates the masses by willful consent rather than violence. On the other hand, Gramsci defined a new type of hegemony which could be an activist response to the first more negative connotation: Gramsci explained that the workers could create a new, emancipatory hegemony.”

Here in Gramsci (as well as in Hume) we find two contradictory views of the same concept. At least for Gramsci there is an excuse for the contradiction, because he was greatly influenced by Hegel whose whole philosophy proceeds by means of contradictions. Hume just doesn’t notice that an individual’s character cannot be both, “fixed and established,” and “change … [at] different ages.” In Gramsci the contradiction is a bit different—if the masses willingly consent to the oppression of the ruling classes, because their views are determined by cultural hegemony, what could possibly induce them to change that hegemony? If they can change it, then their behavior is obviously not determined by it.