David Hume was a complex man. Erasing his name is too simplistic a gesture
“Learn, Mr Hume, to prize the blessings of Liberty and Education, for… had you been born and bred a slave, your Genius, whatever you may think of it, would never have been heard of.”
So wrote the members of the 18thcentury Aberdeen Philosophical Society, one of the leading debating salons in Scotland, in response to an essay by the presiding genius of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. In “Of National Characters”, first published in 1748, Hume had explored the reasons for national differences.
Five years after publishing the essay, Hume appended a footnote: “I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men… to be naturally inferior to the whites.” This footnote incensed not just the Aberdeen Philosophical Society but many other thinkers of the time.
Now, 250 years later, Edinburgh University has decided to join the fray. Last week it announced that its David Hume Tower is to be renamed because the philosopher’s “comments on matters of race… rightly cause distress”.
It’s the latest in a series of controversies about how, in challenging the inequities of today, we should relate to the inequities of the past. From the toppling of the statue of the Bristol slaver Edward Colston to the furore over Rule, Britannia!, from the arguments over Winston Churchill’s legacy to the campaigns to “decolonise” the education curriculum, recent debates about racism have interrogated not just the present but the past, too, and our relationship to it.
Much of this questioning of how the past is portrayed is necessary, particularly as traditional accounts have often whitewashed the historical record of racism and empire. There is a danger, though, that we end up with a cartoonish view of history and, guided by contemporary needs, ignore its complexities. There is a danger, too, that we fight not the struggles of the present but those of the past; and that symbolic gestures come to replace material change.
Edinburgh University claims it had to act to protect student “sensitivities”. There is no evidence, though, that students were outraged by the Hume tower or traumatised by it. The renaming adds nothing to our understanding of the philosopher, nor takes away anything of the racism that black people face today.
Hume was a complex figure, an opponent of slavery who helped his patron Lord Hertford buy a slave plantation; one of the most important philosophers of the past half millennium, whose ideas about scepticism and naturalism have shaped the modern world, but with odious views on racial differences. A figure worthy both of celebration and condemnation.
If individuals are complex, so is history. The controversy over Hume takes place against the background of a broader debate about the Enlightenment, of which he was a key figure.
For years, the Enlightenment was seen by the left as a source of radical ideals. “All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies are implicit in it and indeed come out of it,” the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm observed. But, increasingly, as the reactionary views of some Enlightenment thinkers have become more apparent, it has come to be seen as tainted, irrevocably stained by its “Eurocentrism”. In response to such criticism, many others have come to defend “the Enlightenment” in a reflexive, unnuanced way, regarding it as a kind of Rorschach test over “wokeness”.
Yet, as the history of the debate over Hume’s views shows, the question of what it is to be “enlightened” was contested within the Enlightenment itself. In a series of monumental books, the historian Jonathan Israel has usefully drawn the distinction between “mainstream” and “radical” Enlightenments. The mainstream, comprising well-known figures such as Locke, Hume and Kant, is often taken to be the Enlightenment, but was constrained in its critique of old social forms and beliefs, leading to abhorrent views about slavery and race, democracy and equality. The Radical Enlightenment, shaped by lesser-known figures such as Spinoza and Diderot, was by contrast, Israel shows, uncompromising in its defence of equality and in its condemnation of racism and colonialism.
The Enlightenment was critical in the development of progressive social ideals. At the same time, European nations, through slavery and colonialism, denied these ideals to the majority of peoples across the globe. Many figures, Hume among them, stood on both sides of this equation, furnishing the intellectual tools with which to challenge injustice, but also often defending injustices.
Neither history nor biography cleaves easily into “good” and “bad”.
Fewer cheap gestures, more real questioning, both of the past and the present, would be useful.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
bition tries to fill. The general story is well known: the Mayflower took its 102 men, women, and children – the majority of whom were Puritan religious dissenters known as Separatists, but also called Pilgrims – from Plymouth to what they hoped would be the Hudson river. They endured a treacherous 66-day voyage and were blown off course, landing on the tip of what is now Massachusetts, before crossing the bay to set up a colony on land belonging to the Wampanoag, whose name means “people of the first light” and who had inhabited the area for some 12,000 years.
They had an estimated population of at least 15,000 in the early 1600s, and lived in villages on the Massachusetts coast and inland. Their help enabled the English to survive, and also became the basis for the much-mythologised first Thanksgiving feast, still celebrated in the US as a national holiday, though not without controversy. The reality, as this exhibition shows, was far more complicated – and violent.
Although the Pilgrims are often used as an origin myth for the US, the English were late arrivals to North America. Juan Ponce de León explored Florida as early as 1513, and the Spanish had a settlement in St Augustine by 1565, while French Huguenots tried and failed to establish a colony on the coast of what is now South Carolina in 1562.
Some 35 years before the Mayflower, two ships set sail from Plymouth to explore the North Carolina coast, and the following year the colony of Roanoke was established, but by 1590 all the settlers had disappeared. Eventually, in 1607, the English had success with the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, which managed to survive. As well as these early settlers, Europeans came to trade – and often to kidnap and enslave Native Americans – well before the arrival of the Pilgrims.
Part of the exhibition looks at these failed attempts at colonisation. “People living and working in Plymouth might be surprised about the importance that the city has played in that part of history,” said Nicola Moyle, head of heritage, art and film for the Box. “There were the Mayflower passengers, but more importantly the institutions that have roots in Plymouth that were playing a part in encouraging settlements taking place on the eastern part of the US.”
This was also the case for the Separatists. Although the mythology presents them as fierce critics of the Church of England seeking religious freedom, they had already found that in the Dutch city of Leiden, where they lived for a decade before crossing the Atlantic. What drove them onwards was the lack of economic opportunity.
“It’s just not the story we think it is,” said Loosemore. Economic factors fuelled the Separatists’ decision to obtain permission from the London Company of Virginia to establish a colony, and for funding from the Company of Merchant Adventurers.
But religious freedom and economic opportunity for the English would come at a heavy price for the Wampanoag. By the time the English arrived, the Wampanoag would have been familiar with Europeans, including the terrible diseases they brought. A few years before the Mayflower’s
passengers landed, a plague wiped out an estimated 70% of their population. When the Pilgrims stepped ashore, the Wampanoag had been significantly weakened and were willing to make alliances with the English in order to keep their rivals, the Narragansett, at bay.
Although there were periods of good relations between the English and Wampanoag, there were also violent conflicts, culminating in King Philip’s War of 1675, which ended with the head of Metacom, the Wampanoag leader, being put on a spike and the survivors sold into slavery. It was a far cry from the scenes of a harvest celebration.
“These were people who came here for their religious freedom because they couldn’t worship as they pleased in their own country, and yet when they came to this country they did not seem to have that same tolerance for the people that they met here, despite all that the Wampanoag did to help them,” said Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Nation and of the advisory council to the exhibition. “You can’t have a colony without someone being colonised.”
The Wampanoag objects included in the show – some of which have never been seen outside the US – give a sense of both how they lived before the English arrived and after. One key piece is a commissioned pot by Wampanoag artist Ramona Peters, also known as Nosapocket, that draws from the group’s tradition. There is also a national touring exhibition of a new Wampum belt made of shell beads that will stop at the Box later this year.
Elsewhere in the exhibition is what is considered to be the first Bible printed in North America. Published in 1661, it is in the version of the Algonquian language that the Wampanoag spoke. It is known as the Eliot Indian Bible, named after chief evangelist John Eliot, who set up a series of “praying towns” to promote the conversion of the Native Americans to Christianity.
Yet the myth of Native American and English in Thanksgiving harmony remains, and these cheerful commemorations are the focus of the final part of the exhibition. There are display cases with Mayflower-related goods: plates and mugs, biscuit tins, stamps and tea towels. This mythology persists, despite the fact that the Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to arrive in North America, and their relationship with the Wampanoag was far from peaceful.
To Loosemore, the key to understanding this larger story lies in the rediscovery of a manuscript describing the Pilgrims’ experiences in the Netherlands and new world. Of Plymouth Plantation was written by the colony’s leader, William Bradford, 20 years after his arrival, but the manuscript was lost until 1855, when it surfaced in the collection of the bishop of London. “Its rediscovery has a lot to answer for in the sense that it inspired this Victorian interest in the Mayflower,” said Loosemore.
Around the same time, in the US, President Abraham Lincoln declared a Thanksgiving holiday in 1863 in an attempt at national unity while the civil war was under way. In the decades that followed, these strands merged together into a narrative, which was fostered by a New England elite that including many prominent US leaders who were Mayflower descendants, such as the second president, John Adams, whose letters are on display in the show.
Jamestown, with its slavery, and St Augustine, with its Spanish Catholics, were ignored, and the national story became that of the hard-working, freedom-seeking Protestant “Pilgrim fathers”, aided by kind Native Americans. Now, says Peters, there is a chance for the public to learn a different story.
“For me, it’s an opportunity to say, yes, we are still here, and what happened to us mattered.”
Carrie Gibson is the author of El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America
cabal is behind the current crisis,” said David Lawrence, a researcher with the antifascist organisation Hope not Hate, which has been monitoring the rise of QAnon in the UK.
In London on Saturday, Resist and Act for Freedom, which described itself as “a medic-focused” anti-vaccination rally, was addressed by Kate Shemirani, a nurse suspended from practising by the Nursing and Midwifery Council for being accused of promoting baseless theories about Covid-19, vaccines and 5G.
Shemirani has espoused some of the QAnon theories and has described the Covid-19 crisis as a “plandemic scamdemic”. She has described the NHS as “the new Auschwitz” and her online media postings make references to Hitler and the Nazis, an investigation by the Jewish Chronicle has found.
A handful of QAnon-inspired banners, such as “We Are Q”, were being held aloft. Others held flags bearing slogans – for example, “Save Our Children” and “Where We Go One We Go All” – that are affiliated to QAnon.
Shemirani told the crowd: “Our government has declared war on the people of the UK.”
The police, including some on horseback, made several unsuccessful attempts to break up the rally, pushed back by scores of protesters. As they did, the crowd chanted to them: “Choose your side.”
One woman in her 20s, who was wearing a hoodie with a QAnon logo, told the Observer that she had come to the rally because she had read about the child abuse taking place across the US and the UK, a chief QAnon trope.
Another protester, Emma, 25, said she had a young daughter. She was holding a placard suggesting hundreds of thousands of children had been abducted around the world. “I’ve done years of research,” she said. “QAnon are right. There’s a global elite out there going for our children. Trump is taking down the elite and draining the swamp.”
She was dismissive of the government’s response to Covid. “The government is trying to take away our constitutional rights. You don’t need vaccination, you need to live well, eat well.”
She also believed that Black Lives Matter was funded by George Soros, the Jewish financier who funds a number of major civil society initiatives. “He’s a Zionist,” she said without further explanation.
Gregory Stanton, founding president of Genocide Watch, said: “QAnon’s conspiracy theory is copied from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the conspiracy theory promoted by Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany.
“Its potential for the promotion of genocidal hatred is a deadly historical fact. The Protocols’ theory that Jews plan to take over the world, and are well on their way to doing so, has been an ideology and motivator for pogroms since the middle ages, and under the Nazis for the Holocaust. It is a conspiracy theory that has literally cost millions of lives. QAnon has revived the Protocols, complete with the Blood Libel, that the secret cabal kidnaps children, drains their blood and cannibalises them to gain mystical power.”
There is evidence that far-right groups in Europe are turning their attention to the QAnon movement. A “freedom rally”, held last month in Trafalgar Square and where QAnon supporters were clearly present, was also attended by a group flying a flag of the now defunct British Union of Fascists.
In Germany, a major QAnon rally was attended by followers of the Reichsbürger far-right movement, which rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. Similar flirtations have been reported among groups in Finland and Scandinavia.
But QAnon is also creeping into UK street protest movements that have no affiliation with the far right.
Earlier this year a “justice for all” rally in Nottingham attracted hundreds who came out in support of military veterans and tougher action on childgrooming gangs.
QAnon iconography was visible at the event, while one of the rally’s organisers claimed to have had contact with “a general from Q” and a “group from Q”.
Another group, Freedom for the Children UK, which aims to raise awareness about child exploitation and human trafficking, holds marches in cities around the UK.
Many involved are well-intentioned but Hope not Hate has found that inside the private group’s online forums, members frequently post QAnon misinformation and references to “Pizzagate”, an unsubstantiated QAnon precursor that claimed several high-ranking Democrat officials, including Hillary Clinton, were involved in a child sex abuse ring based at a Washington pizza restaurant.
“QAnon has gathered pockets of support in the UK, and is likely to continue to build momentum as the US election approaches,” Lawrence explained. “But, while the spread of a dangerous conspiracy theory is always concerning, especially when it is animating people on to the street in protest, it is important to underline that the QAnon scene as a whole is still dominated by the US.”
Indeed, over in the US QAnon is now marching on Washington. Several Republican congressional candidates, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, who looks likely to win her seat in Georgia, have openly expressed support for the movement.
Last week, Lauren Witzke, who has posed in a QAnon-branded T-shirt and tweeted the QAnon motto, WWG1WGA – where we go one we go all – won the Republican primary for a US Senate seat in Delaware. Witzke has since distanced herself from QAnon.
By contrast, QAnon has been confined to the fringes of the UK political scene. But this is not to say it will remain there. “Support for conspiracy theories and the far right tends to rise in volatile, uncertain times,” Lawrence explained. “Public trust in UK institutions has been increasingly challenged in recent years, and exacerbated by the pandemic and the government’s inconsistent responses.”
That QAnon is gaining traction in the UK now, three years after it first emerged in the US, is no surprise to those who have encountered it.
An analyst who monitors online extremism in Britain, and spoke to the Observer on condition of anonymity, said it had the ability to appeal to anyone. It hardly mattered that the movement was US-focused.
“It offers wish fulfilment – the idea that at some moment Donald Trump is going to liberate people from debt and slavery. Someone might hate banks, well Donald Trump is going to liberate them from banks. Someone might despise immigrants, well Donald Trump is fighting a conspiracy against him inspired by George Soros. The content is not as important as the communities in which it embeds itself.”
Stanton said QAnon was “an opportunistic ideology”.
“QAnon even briefly stole the Twitter hashtag for Save the Children, the genuine charity that protects children,” Stanton said. “QAnon attracts some women who think it is about saving kidnapped children. By relaying ‘secret messages’ from inside the ‘Deep State’ QAnon lurks in the shadows, where its leaders cannot be exposed for promoting racist, anti-Jewish Nazi terrorism. Extremist ideologies are often dismissed until they take power, as the Nazis did, as communism did, as Isis did. We ignore them at our peril.”
Many of those drawn to QAnon from within the UK are followers of the new religious movements that emerged out of the 60s and 70s, or the newage traveller communities of the 90s. Others have a fascination with UFOs.
But to believe that their views have no relevance to the UK’s political ecosystem would be dangerous, experts claim. “QAnon feeds on widespread conspiracy theories, new age, and occult belief systems,”said Chamila Liyanage of the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right. “QAnon will not be able to influence UK politics right away, but it will first gain a foothold among the enthusiasts of fringe belief systems and conspiracy theories. This is metapolitics, changing minds, then cultures can be changed in the long run. If more and more people distrust liberal democracies and believe that liberals are satanists planning to implement the New World Order, it’s not possible to uphold democratic accountability. Such a situation will surely bring political consequences in the long run.”
Earlier this year, the Observer reported that John Mappin, a Scientologist and supporter of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, was flying the QAnon flag over his castle in Cornwall. Mappin is a central figure behind Turning Point UK, the British arm of the pro-Trump American student organisation Turning Point USA, whose founder, Charlie Kirk, has been accused of pushing pro-QAnon narratives based on debunked statistics produced by the movement’s supporters.
Turning Point UK has been endorsed by several leading Conservatives, including the home secretary, Priti Patel, and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Mappin, who has declared that “Q is 100% valid”, has used YouTube to promote QAnon.
One person in the US who has seen friends and family turn to QAnon told the Observer: “People who fall into QAnon or adjacent modern conspiracy thinking, including my family member and friends, are people who have unresolved trauma, such as from childhood, that has left them with deep insecurities about their place in the world and the state of society.”
He said that these people often had “a lack of understanding for sciences, math, history and politics, a lack of critical thinking, a vulnerability to magical thinking – Evangelical Christian or deep new-age spirituality” – and were dealing with the “trauma of Covid, the loss of physical connections, the loss of work” while confronted by “unfettered internet access and dangerous social media algorithms”.
Robert Johnson, who helps moderate the Qanoncasualties site after watching a relative fall victim to the movement, warned anyone can fall down the QAnon rabbit hole.
“How fast someone can be sucked in? If they are susceptible, I’d say five days to start believing. If they have an underlying condition, they can reach mania in a week.”
One contributer to the QAnoncasualties forum said that his father had become “so invested in QAnon that it feels like someone just hypnotised him”.
Stanton has argued powerfully that QAnon is simply the Nazi cult rebranded. “Two definitions of a cult are: a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister; and a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing: a cult of personality surrounding the leaders. QAnon’s strange and sinister beliefs qualify it as a cult, as does QAnon’s misplaced admiration for Donald Trump.”
As with any cults, financial gain is not far away. QAnon merchandise has mushroomed. Websites hosting the theory are making money out of traffic. Covid quackery is doing brisk business on QAnon sites.
The world today is ripe for the cult’s promotion, Stanton argues, as it shares many similarities with the world in which Hitler emerged.
“I think it comes at a similar time to the 1920s and 1930s. We have mass unemployment. We face a plague that is like the Spanish Flu that killed millions. Nazis and QAnon both seek a ‘saviour’ leader who will deliver society from disorder and the cabal of conspirators that is secretly taking over their nations.”
The difference now, though, is that technology has unified the world. A movement emanating from the US can quickly spread beyond its borders.
One contributor to the Qanoncasualties forum told the Observer that QAnon appears to mimic the spread of the pandemic.
“It struck me that the way QAnon has taken off in a really big way this year, despite being three years old, is like the spread of the virus, in terms of the exponential growth curve. The more people that are connected to QAnon, the steeper the curve will be in terms of them spreading the BS on social media and in real-life interactions.”
The appeal seems almost physical. As one German contributor to Qanoncasualties, who was not a QAnon follower but had been a believer in Pizzagate, explained: “It all started on Reddit. It began with stumbling on a few ‘alternative’ subreddits, those with prefixes ‘real’, ‘anarchy’, ‘true’, etc. To this day, I’m still not sure what triggered the hate spiral in me.
“I think one of the possibilities is that any unresolved conflicts are channelled in anger and negative energy. A lot of people describe their relatives watching QAnon videos all day – they know that they’re essentially on an IV drip of some stuff they crave. I have no idea how it works inside the body, but I’m willing to bet there’s a physical response to this behaviour.”
Research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has found that QAnon and the online world have enjoyed a powerful symbiosis after lockdown started in many countries, including the UK.
A report the ISD published in June showed that membership of QAnon groups on Facebook increased by 120% in March, while engagement rates increased by 91%. From 27 October 2017 to 17 June 2020, the ISD recorded 69,475,451 million tweets, 487,310 Facebook posts and 281,554 Instagram posts mentioning QAnon-related hashtags and phrases.
The ISD said that “across all three platforms, a clear trend exists showing a notable increase in conversation volumes coinciding with periods when lockdowns were issued”.
It found that the top four countries driving discussion of QAnon on Twitter were the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. Much of the online discussion is driven by the actions of Trump, who has retweeted QAnon-promoting accounts.
One Reddit contributor said that QAnon was spreading for “one reason only”. “The failure of the government, in the US at least, to deny and denounce it. These conspiracies and cultlike behaviours have arrived thousands of times over the years and usually die out.
“However, when you have a president who says he didn’t know much about QAnon, except ‘they like me very much’ and ‘I heard... that these are people who love our country’, then immediately this is essentially permission and acknowledgement of their movement.”
Facebook and Twitter have recently taken steps to restrict QAnon. The movement now largely operates on the 8kun message board site, whose earlier incarnation, 8chan, has been criticised for hosting images of child abuse and promoting white supremacy groups.
“QAnon hardcore followers are still gaining but there is more awareness and active scepticism recently,” Johnson said. “They had a recent setback with the shutdown of qmap.pub (a website endorsed by Q). But they are a great hype machine and Covid has been a godsend. Globally it is gaining ground and numbers. I think it surpassed 72 countries this week. We recently had a user report dealing with a family member in Switzerland.”
But can a cult survive the demise of its leader?
Few believe that if Trump loses in November, QAnon will disappear.
“When Obama won that’s what kickstarted half of the angry movements that fed into this,” the online extremism analyst explained. “It didn’t calm the Republican right, it made them much more aggravated.”
Nor would Trump’s defeat sound the death knell for an incipient QAnon movement in the UK.
“There is a high possibility that the spirited belief system which surrounds QAnon can slowly become a political movement in the UK,” Liyanage said. “It will be successful because no one can fight it through reason. It’s not a rational belief system but mostly a supernatural belief system.”
The mysterious rise of QAnon
• QAnon publicly emerged on 28 October 2017 when a user calling themselves Q, who claimed to have highlevel security clearance, posted a series of cryptic messages on the website 4chan (which later became 8chan and then 8kun).
• Q claimed that they would work to covertly inform the public about President Trump’s ongoing battle against the “deep state”, a blanket term used to describe those in power working against the president. Since then, users claiming to be Q have made over 4,000 posts, known in the community as “Qdrops”, fuelling the growth
of a lurid meta-conspiracy connecting a range of harmful narratives.
• The QAnon theory now connects antivaccine, anti-5G conspiracies, antisemitic and antimigrant tropes, and several bizarre theories that the world is in the thrall of a group of paedophile elites set on global domination in part aided by ritualistic child sacrifice. It morphed out of an earlier conspiracy, “Pizzagate”, which suggested that a paedophile ring involving senior officials in the Democratic Party was being run out of a pizza restaurant in
Washington.
• In 2019, the FBI labelled QAnon a domestic terror threat, observing that conspiracy theories have the potential to encourage “both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts”.
• In the 2020 US elections there are 14 congressional candidates on the ballot for November who express support for the theory.
• Who is behind QAnon remains opaque. But NBC has reported that it took off when two 4chan moderators, who went by the usernames Pamphlet Anon and BaruchtheScribe, reached out to Tracy Diaz, a small-time YouTube star who helped popularise the earlier ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy who then helped bring QAnon to a wider online audience.