RICHARD SANSOM:

In recent diatribes, here, against same-sex marriages and a general antagonism toward anything suggesting the value of secular governance since it denigrates religion, I found this wonderful quotation from Humes essays – the one called Of Liberty and Necessity:

There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blamable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dan­gerous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person of an antagonist odious.

In fact, I find that on almost every page of his essays there is some lively remark that deserves underlining, though I refrain from damaging the text – having been admonished by my wife that good books should remain pure. [I usually, especially if a paperback, do underline or highlight sections I find useful.]

Would that today there were a few minds and wit capable of expressions that live up to but a smidgen of Humes intelligent and cogent phrasing – and ones that are as applicable now as they were in Humes day.

I am starting to believe that I could read Hume the rest of my life and not tire of his opinions and art of language.


After reading the first two and part of the third of Humes History of England, up to Henry VIII, I find that, following the exit of the Roman legions, there occurred a more or less slow and steady movement from barbarism and only passionate systems of governance, to more and more stable and rational ones. This process seems like the birth pains of governance by consensus [and merchants!] as opposed to governance only by the sword. My question is this: How and why did this happen? The fact that it did gives credence to the argument that homo sapiens teleologically mature into forms of social organization that are to the benefit of the people – as if our species has a vector of socially organizational maturity that is somehow inexorable. I have my doubts about this inexorability, but it seems clear that there are elements of it at work – even with the interruption of madmen who make stupid and disastrous wars for pathological reasons.


GARY. C. MOORE:
The more I get into it the more it seems just like Darwins theory of natural selection as he himself actually described it - a pure accumulation of chances by an absolutely indifferent natural process. As Darwin did NOT seek a methodology to *better* forms of life but rather simply fortunate chances that stabilized better methods of survival, therefore enduring simply through an inertia of success over more clumsy forms. The contrast between the warrior kings establishing little or nothing at all of enduring value versus ruthless kings like Henry VII imposing peace because war is as an expensive activity as it is unprofitable after a certain point. There is possibly irony in newer historical research that Richard IIIs reign was economically a great boon to England while it lasted. However Henry VII eliminated all other possible contenders to the throne, took advantage and encouraged the prosperity under Richard III, while, as a third party in a sense to the inheritance to the throne, no longer Lancaster or York tainted with controversy and inherent disquiet, established under his colorless reign a stable Tudor dynasty that survived Edward VI and Bloody Mary. It is interesting that A] though the Tudors *believed* in the divine right of kings, it seems to be mere window dressing because Henry VII, VIII, and Elizabeth NEVER took their position for granted but always fought hard to maintain their position on top Whereas James I and Charles I just thought they were due respect simply through inheritance, not solid, ruthless action to entrench their power.

    It is teleological simply in the sense that successful forms of rule have positive qualities for survival whereas incompetents quickly die on the side of the road - or rather deteriorate, loose fear and respect for the crown - when there are always people around ready to grab a piece of the *pie*. The *Puritans*, though putting up a united front, are recognized by Hume as actually being many very radically different types of people. They simply share a common rhetoric while it is necessary, but when it becomes a liability to them for whatever reason quickly shed it.


   RICHARD SANSOM:
We in this country even point, with racial [?] pride at the Magna Carta as a or the seminal agreement among men that justice and equity are crucial ingredients in even boisterous and passionately managed societies. Why and how did such am agreement come about? Is there some absolute aspect to the justification for such social agreements among people? Is there some Darwinian calculus at work that selects for such agreements? Is it no more than a matter of what will work to preserve the very existence of a stable social whole? If this is the case, why is it that, beginning with the order and stability of the Roman Empire, Europe fell into the dark doldrums and took a few hundred years to lift up to an order that eventually surpassed the Pax Romana and gave us the eventual *stability* of todays states? In other words, why have {Western] societies grown up as they have from the turmoil of the Middle Ages into what we have today? What set of human endeavors has caused this?


GARY:
Hume would say *Free Trade*. Real Free Trade needs both Laws AND! PEACE! *Free Trade* will become the British rallying cry more and more - up until the disaster of WWI. Free Trade depends completely on contractual agreements being kept and enforced by law.

I am reading Donald Livingston as I read the HISTORY and he liberally uses the ESSAYS to explicate the HISTORY. Why? Because the ESSAYS state issues in much more abstract - in actual practice simpler, more compact ways, actually mere superficial summaries - *principles* while abstractly stating all principles only come after and are summarizations of *practice*. Practice, experience are always the primaries in Hume, but this immediately conflicts with the factual situation in the civilized world where you learn language and writing, especially writing, first to secondarily talk about experience and practice. This is a fundamental flaw in our natural epistemology [any disagreement Jud?]. In other words, we learn to refine our abstractions before we learn to refine our practices. This is why practical arts and sports are denigrated when abstract subjects like mathematics and science praised at their expense. One might think of the contrast with ancient Greek society where every citizen was obligated from birth to train as a hoplite, a heavily laden armored warrior, whereby 300 Spartan and 1000 allies could hold off the entire Persian army at Thermopylae. From reading Hubert L. Dreyfus, I have learned to appreciate the *education* of the bodily practices much, much more.


     You should have all the ESSAYS in your black books. Most of the titles related to your reading of the HISTORY should be self evident, though I read them from first to last with great enjoyment myself, maybe because each one had a limited amount of territory to cover, giving you immediate but cumulative rewards. Unfortunately Livingston refers to page numbers usually without titles of the edition he is using, but good political and historical points are made in essays one would not suspect, for instance *On the Refinement of the Arts* where he comments politically and economically on good and bad *luxury*

     One of the crucial - and depressing - lessons I have learned so far from my reading of volume V is that the most solid steps in the progress of political liberty come from the very worst of people for the very worst of motives. They are the Puritans whom Hume hates most of all of all the religious parties. He demonstrates, no matter what the Whigs of his days propagandized, that all the *improvements* of the British constitution come about come about because of Puritan prejudice against a religiously tolerant monarchy. They are destroying the monarchy purely for the benefit of their own private party and in utter hatred of all non-Puritans. The *democratic* revolution was entirely motivated by the meanest and narrowest of religious prejudices. You certainly learn to appreciate a monarch who chops off individual heads liberally and arbitrarily to a group that chops off heads of whole groups because they do not agree to every tenant of their religion. The trial of Lord Stafford - one of the most brilliant British politicians of all time - reads like a tragedy of Aeschylus. He MUST die on the block BECAUSE he is a good man and good at what he does. This is LITERALLY and OPENLY debated. The jury is politically forced to give a death sentence - something similar I know happens to Charles I. When the House of Commons votes to confirm the sentence, the 59 delegates who voted against it were publicly named by the Puritans to the lynch mob waiting outside, and few, if any, escaped persecution, death, and infamy. This is true *democracy* in the Athenian style just as in Thucydides. So, yes, I agree with you. They are truly a putrid lot. But you have not even got to the bad ones yet.

GARY C. MOORE:
Referring to other letters, I too have severe problems with memory. Vitamins and things like that may help but that depends purely on the individual, though they can do little harm if abused I have found other than make you nervous or nauseated. Their main problem is [A] expense and [B] bleeding if you have bleeding problems. I find, despite how I feel, however down in the dumps, concentrating just on Hume and forcing myself to respond to Richards letters is the only thing that gets my interest and spirits up anymore. Luckily the period of Parliamentary ascension and Humes thought on the economics of his own day still have many surprises for me. Hume truly seems to be a much more major influence on the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution than I have EVER seen him credited for. In the ESSAYS he lays the ground rules for the ideal commonwealth which re-invigorates my waning enthusiasm for the American form of government. In essence, one may not like how things are now, but Hume makes you realize how much worse things COULD be. My impression is, the British form of government is still far from his favorite - though better at the time than anyone elses - and he distinctly prefers Republics to Monarchies theoretically despite all the things he says about a strong leader being able to act quickly and firmly at the first sign of a problem. Hume would rather have a series of pretty independent republics from the smallest up to a well healed central government whose major purpose is overall defense and little else. The point is, if I am to stay interested in philosophy, I have to only pay attention to a few related books with similar themes now that I can at least refer back to if I get cloudy - and to underline ANYTHING that may be of future interest to a fuller development. I can go back to an underlined passage and re-acquaint myself to the context in one or two pages. Less abstraction and more specifics. So no more Aristotle, no more Aquinas, no more Heidegger, etc. And being able to pin thoughts to events in history also helps greatly. One needs to know what happened before, but I fine themes starting with Henry VII to become more and more important as well as repeated with evolutions with other monarchs and a rising truculence of Parliament - ALL centered around, in one way or another, taxation and other economic issues [monopolies].

GARY C. MOORE:
Hume would say *Free Trade*. Real Free Trade needs both Laws AND! PEACE! *Free Trade* will become the British rallying cry more and more - up until the disaster of WWI. Free Trade depends completely on contractual agreements being kept and enforced by law. That’s all for now.

RICHARD SANSOM:
*** Dear Gary, You mention *free trade.* I understand that Hume and Adam Smith were colleagues, perhaps philosophical soul mates.

GARY C. MOORE:
They were close friends from about 1750 and Smith was the executor of Humes will I think which involved a great deal of money. Humes ESSAYS covering economics came out long before THE WEALTH OF NATIONS which was printed only in 1776, the year of Humes death. I think it is plausible that Hume influenced Smiths lectures/book on morality. So it is very likely many of the initial seeds of Smiths thought originally came from Hume who was more abstract and far less factual and which Smith put flesh and blood to.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Did Hume subscribe to Smiths concept of free trade, as espoused in the latters Wealth of Nations? According to his thesis, free trade will eventually reach an equilibrium of fairness among trading nations, and further, the *selfishness* of producers of goods will eventually result in a balance of exchanged value, etc. Of course we have no such thing as free trade to day – anywhere – and many have pushed for something like free and fair trade. So called free trade as accommodated by NAFTA has decimated Mexican producers of corn. Private ownership of the sugar industry in Haiti [which was virtually shut down after being purchased by some oriental company] resulted in the sugar field workers being put of out work – all of this under the rubric of free and unfettered commerce. [The oriental company, after shutting down the Haitian sugar industry, purchased cheap sugar from the USA that was produced by farmers who got large subsidies from our government, then sold that sugar at a profit to other nations!] So, what do you mean by free trade? IMO unregulated trade can be deadly for some and a boon for others, However, if real equity was built in so that no one suffers, we would have quite a different world and society. Better? Maybe. Worse?


GARY C. MOORE:
*Built in equity* is being thrown out by almost every country in the world. But one needs a microeconomic perspective to understand the real situation being changed. As to sugar, even Castro wanted to get Cuba off a sugar dependent economy. I do not know about Haiti. Do they have any other major exports? In Mexico, the  *corn producers*, I know, were energetic, ambitious, and usually already wealthy families that took advantage of a reform law passed in Mexico like I think the 1950s, probably with US encouragement, that allotted ownership of a certain amount of acreage per person. What became the big corn farming families got acreage for every single person in their families that was as contiguous as possible thus actually reinventing and sometimes reviving the *padrone* system of large land ownership the government actually was trying to break up. The poor farmers got little or nothing out of this and could not compete against the large families political and legal power.
    In *free trade* the ideal is, The unworkable gets tossed aside and only the workable survives. The market solely determines what is viable. When Nehru took over in India, he protected all *native crafts*, especially home weaving. He was a socialist in the mold of the British government at the moment. Only military needs and pressures from the World Bank got India out of its official depression in the last ten or fifteen years - they have been much more cautious - and far less ruthless - than China - no public executions of economic law offenders in the stadium of the capital city which STILL has not stopped corruption and the bending of the laws. Indias economy may be constantly going up and down, but mostly up, and peacefully so. No one ever knows what the hell is happening in China. Can the outraged people come off the communal farms come to the cities again and start another cultural revolution and kill another twenty million people? I do not know. Mao encouraged the first one. But the new leaders certainly realize from past experience they are precisely the ones going to be led out in the fields with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head. Even more interesting, what is or is not happening in Russia? A terrible economy hid from the world until push came to shove was what destroyed Soviet power.


      The question is, Who - actually - is primarily being hurt with these pseudo-free trade laws? I say *pseudo* because things are still being *managed*. However, in some places, old power bases, *the same old people*, MAY BE being eroded. The mullahs hated the last Shah for a number of reasons, but one big one was he took away their lands around 1953 and gave it to the poor peasants - supposedly. But one must remember the corruption of the Mexican reform. Did the Shahs family take the land away from the poor peasants? That way they would not be taking it directly from the mullahs. I do not know.
      But one key component for making *free trade* work is that EVERYONE has to be equal before the law - no exceptions whatsoever. That is one of Humes key themes. So I think the main problem is not unregulated trade per se but rather law biased to the educated, rich, and powerful. But an *equal* law can have its own problems, though usually as a reinvention of how the few seize power. Warmest regards, Gary