Michael Fry: Did the famed philosopher David Hume truly hold racist views?

It’s something of a contradiction in terms. If a man was that much of a genius, then he doesn’t really need a commemorative image of himself, does he? After all, there was, till 2008, not a single statue of Adam Smith in the land of his birth.

From here to Stanford, California, in one direction, or to Tokyo in the other, public monuments of various kinds had been erected to the great man’s ideas and achievements. But in the 200-odd years since his death, nobody in the place he knew best had thought it worth the effort of setting him in stone.

We do know what he looked like, at least sideways on, because James Tassie, inventor of the Tassie medallions, made one of him. It is an elegant little piece of work, but it hardly conveys the impression that Smith made on other people during his lifetime. He was not an impressive figure, being small in stature and notable for the way he wandered along mumbling to himself, oblivious of his surroundings. His gait was said to be “vermicular”, that is, resembling that of a worm. We know he was boring when drunk, and I would guess he was the sort of figure wee urchins would throw sods at if they met him in the street.

The statue of Adam Smith in Edinburgh

Whatever his failings, he was arguably the greatest Scotsman of all time, at least to judge by the impact he has had on the whole world. I can’t think of anybody else whose work is still, to this day, the subject of heated discussion by intellectual leaders of our own time, for instance, the Nobel prizewinners in economics. And he did no harm to anybody, though I dare say socialists would disagree with that. At any rate, a statue of him now graces the High Street of Edinburgh, opposite the City Chambers where he had an office. I’m glad he’s there.

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A couple of hundred yards up the Royal Mile is a statue of Smith’s great friend, the philosopher David Hume, seated outside the sheriff court. The sculptor of both figures, Sandy Stoddart, believes the practitioners of his art should be faithful to figurative reality. That is to say, the statues should look like a man rather than, say, an oyster with a hole through its middle. Sandy allowed himself a little licence with his tall and muscular Smith, but a good deal more licence with his Hume, who looks very athletic indeed, under his toga. The only incongruous detail is his big toe, of which the bronze has gone all shiny from being touched for luck by students on the way to their final examinations at the university.

This statue is another that has given rise to an unlikely stushie. A reader, A Dimcam of Cupar, Fife, had a letter published in the latest Sunday National, on a recent development that he says “completes a circle of civic stupidity”.

That nearby university, which refused ever to give Hume the most menial job while he was still alive, decided in 1960 to name after him the tallest block on the complex of academic buildings being created round George Square. It is a typical example of the New Brutalism, which might have been suitable enough for some provincial campus but is an insult to the city that nurtured the greatest works of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Previously named David Hume Tower, the University of Edinburgh building now goes by its street address of 40 George Square

Worse, it seemed to claim a relationship between the university and the great man that never existed and that was indeed the reverse of the real historical one. But never despair of academic crassness! Two sub-committees of the administration recently received an online petition, signed by 1700 students, that Hume “wrote racist epithets”. For this reason the tower should be renamed. The university replied that Hume’s comments on race “though not uncommon at the time, rightly cause distress today”. An interim order was made changing the building’s name to 40 George Square. A poetic imagination must have been at work.

Let’s take a look at what Hume actually said to merit this. His comments appear as footnotes to a chapter, “On National Characters” in his Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, published in 1758. He stated: “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites …

“There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences.”

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A reasonable person could not interpret these remarks as anything other than racist. They take race as a reality, and firmly attribute different characteristics to different races. Could one of the world’s greatest philosophers truly believe such objectionable drivel?

The best explanation lies in the fact that in the 18th century, racist language was new to western intellectual discourse. Only now had Europeans grown aware of the diversity in the human form revealed by explorers discovering distant continents. They possessed no older conceptual framework in which to place the novel information they were receiving about mysterious places and peoples. Did the differences in physical appearance point to deeper differences?

The only way to dispel the ignorance was to ask the questions, and to that extent inquiry into race was the same as inquiry into anatomy or geology. If you do not ask the questions you do not get to the truth. Some questioners will propose the wrong answers, but they actually help the search for truth. Hume was one of these.

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It was not till the 19th century that enough information had been gathered to allow racism to approach scientific stature, by implying that certain physical features came always connected with others. Edinburgh still lay at the centre of this enterprise. Dr Robert Knox, to whom Burke and Hare flogged the corpses of the victims they had murdered, used the evidence to develop his own theories of scientific racism. At length he gathered enough evidence for it to be demonstrated that his theories did not stand up. And so racism died the death as a candidate for scientific stature.

It is likely to be little less of an error for some people to argue nowadays that certain evidence should not be collected or should be repudiated in advance if it happens to call into question our own convictions about race.

The present controversy over the statue of Henry Dundas in St Andrew’s Square is a good example. The Dundas family was itself partly black because sons who went out into the Empire had children by native women. And the family owned not a single slave.

I wonder why that was.