Super-storm Sandy and the dearth of election polls has so wrenched my daily routine that I find myself pursuing arguably more worthy pastimes--a perusal of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion while the storm raged and Messrs Gallup et al left off placing calls.
Hume is not one of those philosophers, like Plato or Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Russell, that some people read just for pleasure. His Treatise of Human Nature, which I recently slogged through, is no page-turner. It was finished before Hume was 30, and he summarized the book's reception by saying it "fell dead-born from the press." Pick it up, start reading: you'll see why. The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, on the other hand, was published posthumously and is fun to read. It could have been sent to the press while its author lived, but being publicly skeptical about Christianity in 18th-century Britain was not good for one's career, or health, and Hume's friends advised him to keep it in a desk drawer. His nephew oversaw its publication in 1779, three years after Hume died.
Nothing sparkles more than the tenth chapter, concerning the question of whether ours is the best of all possible worlds. Here is the contribution of one of the characters in the dialogue:
Were a stranger to drop, on a sudden, into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow. . . .
When he is contradicted by one with a more cheeful view, this same character replies:
Ask yourself, ask any of your acquaintance, whether they would live over again the last ten or twenty years of their life. No! But the next twenty, they say, will be better.
And from the dregs of life, hope to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give.
Thus at last they find (such is the greatness of human misery; it reconciles even contradictions) that they complain, at once, of the shortness of life, and of its vanity and sorrow.
The couplet is from the English poet Dryden; Hume changes the verb in the first line from "think" to "hope." Inevitably we arrive at familiar, "unanswered" questions:
[God's] power we allow is infinite: Whatever he wills is executed: But neither man nor any other animal is happy: Therefore he does not will their happiness. His wisdom is infinite: He is never mistaken in choosing the means to any end: But the course of nature tends not to human or animal felicity: Therefore it is not established for that purpose. Through the whole compass of human knowledge, there are no inferences more certain and infallible than these. . . .
Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?
Hume in all his works appears to anticipate modern biology in denying that human beings are somehow set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. "Neither man nor any other animal is happy." Schopenhauer perhaps was thinking of Hume, whom he admired, when he memorably weighed in on this general question:
A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.
If you are of the right-wing, Christianist persuasion, and find this all too dismal to contemplate, allow me to suggest the election prognostications of Power Line's John Hinderaker. Following Michael Barone, he has the following line-up of states in the Romney column: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin--and a total of 315 electoral votes for Willard. The notable thing about the "analysis" behind this prediction is that it is unconnected from any polling data. There were 22 polls of battleground states published yesterday. Here are the results (courtesy of Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight blog):
John diagnosed his own case when, in a long-ago post (2004), he wrote: "One of the most powerful forces in human affairs is wishful thinking. It's impact is incalculable." Hume would concur.
