The Hume Lobby Gathers Momentum
The race to be crowned In Our Time's Greatest Philosopher is hotting up, well in print at least, as Hume turns out to be the print lobbyist's philosopher of choice.
Last week The Economist urged readers to back David Hume in an article called 'Proles and polls', after first examining some reasons why Marx might be winning:
Rick Lewis, editor of Philosophy Now magazine, puts it down to name recognition. Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian, thinks it stems from "his liberation from the Soviet Union and prediction of globalisation". Madsen Pirie, president of the Adam Smith Institute, a libertarian think-tank, blames the voters. "The BBC audience," he says "is increasingly isolated from reality".
But, given that anyone can vote on the BBC website, there might be another explanation. Such online polls are notoriously open to meddling. Time Magazine's 'Person of the Century' vote was the victim of a campaign to boost Ataturk, a Turkish politician. In 1996 Labour supporters organised the vote in another BBC poll to make Tony Blair the year's outstanding figure.
Far be it from The Economist to suggest foul play, despite Marxists' talent for poll-rigging and ballot-stuffing. Instead, we offer advice on tactical voting. Either John Locke or Adam Smith would command our vote, but neither made the shortlist. Of those remaining, J.S. Mill, author of modern liberalism and backer of both free speech and free trade, is our natural choice. Sadly, he hasn't much hope of victory.
In their place we suggest the current third-place candidate: a liberal sceptic and empiricist, a contemporary of Adam Smith and a man with a good shot at winning. Economist readers seeking to stop Marx should vote for David Hume.
Not a ringing endorsement of Hume, but one of those was not far behind, as yesterday the Sunday Herald published an article by Julian Baggini entitled 'The Greatest Thinker In The World...Ever':
People of Scotland, it is more than your patriotic duty to help crown your 18th century countryman, David Hume, as the greatest philosopher of all time. For once, naked nationalism and good rational sense both lead us to same conclusion: among all great thinkers, Hume reigns supreme.
Baggini's article is one of the more enjoyable I've read about the vote, choosing to look at how Hume's philosophy might fit into the modern world:
Hume's strategy for resolving today's moral dilemmas would be to start by showing how we cannot accept any absolute principles dictated by religious leaders. Then he would show how any moral principles held to be self-evident or proven are no such thing. Purged of all bogus absolutes, we would then begin the process of identifying the common humane impulses that morally motivate us and using our reason to negotiate our way through the contradictions and complexities that emerge. This is pretty much how modern ethics committees proceed. They cannot make their starting points absolutes, since not everyone will agree with them. Rather, they need to build from what unites us.
Hume's genius was his ability to combine a ruthless intellect that revealed the limitations of our understanding with the wisdom to see we can move forward with the meagre intellectual resources available to us. That's why Hume is above fashion and doesn't need a dramatic life, a romantic death or clever slogans in order to endure. A vote for Hume is a vote for the only philosopher who is able to defeat the scepticism of our time without dogmatism.
So as The Economist noted, these kind of polls are open to 'meddling' (as indeed, if you read some of the horror stories about postal voting, is the UK's General Election). We are quite clear in our guidelines about this. For all I care Living Marxism could have been urging its readership to vote Marx on the front page every issue, and that (just like the Sunday Herald calling for a Hume victory) would be perfectly acceptable lobbying. Where we draw the line is when people start attempting to stuff the ballot box by submitting junk data through our systems.
And to think that there is still over a week of this vote to go... :-)