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Anthony L. On JMB

...like Roald Dahl, he admired the heartlessness and cunning of the young far more than he did their good behavior, and, for every mention of skipping fairies in “Peter Pan,” there will be some dashed-off sketch of alarming and sanguinary malice. Look between the cracks of the play, in the stage directions, and you will find his prose hardening and cooling into casual sadism, as in this line about Tootles, one of the pirate boys in Neverland: 

He has been in fewer adventures than any of them because the big things constantly happen while he has stepped round the corner; he will go off, for instance, in some quiet hour to gather firewood, and then when he returns the others will be sweeping up the blood. 

The most unfeeling child of all, needless to say, is Peter Pan himself. He flits through the play and the novels, and he has flitted through a century of stage productions and movies, and one result of those flittings is that we regard him as airy and innocuous. In truth, he is mean and green, a mini-monster of capering egotism; could there be any more dazzling proof of self-regard than a boy who first shows up in pursuit of his own shadow? In the early versions of the play, there is no Captain Hook, because there is no need for him. Peter supplies all the cruelty that is required.

All of this was enough to wreck Barrie, or, at least, to throw intolerable shadows over the remainder of his life. Few of his works, aside from “Peter Pan” and his desert-island comedy of class conflict, “The Admirable Crichton,” are remembered now, yet in 1922 he was invested with the Order of Merit, the grandest of British honors. He died in 1937, and we should be thankful that he didn't live to be a hundred, and so to witness the terrible final act. On April 5, 1960, Peter Llewellyn Davies, by then an esteemed publisher, threw himself under a subway train in London. We should not presume to read a mind in torment, but we may note in passing that, if he had lived another month, he would have reached the centenary of Barrie's birth and thus, one imagines, a fresh flurry of interest in “Peter Pan’ — “that terrible masterpiece,” in the words of Peter Llewellyn Davies.

On Thucydides and Herodotus

Herodotus in his Histories treated the international conflict of the Persian Wars between 491) and 479 BCE as a turning point in Greek history, in fact devoting most of his vast text to reconstructing the war itself and the events leading up to it, all prefaced by lengthy ethnographic descriptions of the numerous, and far-flung, provinces of the Persian empire that it involved. About the Scythians, for example, he said that they 

take the seeds of... cannabis, creep [into a tent-like structure], and throw the seeds onto the blazinghot stones within. When the seeds hit the stones, they produce smoke and give off a vapor such as no steam bath in Hellas could surpass. The Scythians howl, awed and elated by the vapor. This takes the place of a bath for ihem, since they do not use any water at all to wash their bodies. 

Archaeology confirms this account in detail. 

D uring the past half-century, however, Thucydides’ almost superhuman reputation has come under severe critical scrutiny, while Herodotus’ stock has correspondingly risen—a fact to which Robert Strassler’s new Landmark volume of translation and commentary bears substantial witness. The change does little more than belatedly reflect a fundamental revolution in Western cultural values that has taken place during the last two hundred years. Greece, in particular the Athenian democratic ideal, only came to be privileged over Rome after the Greek, French, and American revolutions gave imperialism a decidedly shopworn look. Thucydides’ main virtue for the seventeenth-century monarchist Vhomas Hobbes had been that “he made me realize how silly is che mocracy.” (This is hardly surprising. For true democracy Thucydides had no more time than did that aristocratic intellectual Plato; he welcomed the authoritarianism implicit in Pericles’ de facto rule as first citizen, and his favorite acknowledged form of government was in fact a limited oligarchy.) The swing toward idealistic republicanism was further developed in the English-speaking world’ by the banker George Grote’s unprecedentedly liberal History of Greece, published in twelve volumes between 1846 and 1856, which praised not only democracy but the Sophists as the true heralds of freedom. 

This was the most radical change in Western assumptions about the ancient world since the Renaissance, and it prepared the ground for many other changes. Alexander the Great, for example, hitherto looked up to as the imperialist conqueror par excellence, now had to have his career of conquest explained and justified as a crusade designed to bring Hellenic culture to the benighted East (Victorian missionary work in Africa and Polynesia helped to support this view of him). The century-long struggle by feminists from the suffragette movement onward meant that eventually their automatic exclusion from the Thucydidean historiographical canon would be seriously questioned. 

On Liebnitz and Spinoza

 For many Christian thinkers of the time being a godless Jew and leading a morally excellent life was a dreadful contradiction if thewell contradiction if there was no God in one's life anything bad was possible yet by any 17th century standard of morality Spinoza led an exemplary life Stewart mentions that his only indulgences were smoking and wearing silver shoe buckles. 

Like Spinoza, Leibniz was a philosopher of propositions. He held, for example, that there must be a sufficient reason why something is the way it is and not otherwise. This means that everything that happens can be explained and nothing happens just by chance. This is Leibniz’s well-known principle of sufficient reason. He also advocated the principle that things that have no discernible difference with respect to their properties, say, two indistinguishable drops of water, are identical; there is, he concluded, only one such drop. This is his princtple of the identity of indiscernibles. But unlike his Dutch counterpart, Leibniz did not try to turn his propositions into a way of life: he was a fashionable diplomat, not a sage. In Stewart’s words he was “the ultimate insider,” whose work in metaphysics and philosophy coincided with an intense involvement in worldly affairs and often took the form of letters of advice written to powerful patrons. By the time he was twenty-four, Leibniz was a leading figure in German efforts to contain the expansionist policies of Louis XIV. (He tried to persuade the French king to launch a crusade against Egypt, as a way to divert the French army away from Germany.) When he and Spinoza met, his income as a diplomat was eleven times higher than Spinoza’s as a lens grinder. He died rich, leaving his nephew a huge sum of over 12,000 thalers. When the nephew’s wife heard of this windfall, “she fell to the floor in a frenzy and died of joy.” 

Leibniz was engaged in speculative philosophy, looking at philosophy as a mirror (speculum) of life rather than as a guide. Leibniz made a distinction, which greatly influenced Kant, between the universe as it really is—or rather as it is viewed by God = and the universe as it iS presented to us finite human beings. The universe in itself is the proper subject of metaphysical speculation. The world as it appears to us is the realm of science. Science deals with appearances—with what we actually sce —not with ultimate reality, with which it need not concern itself. In making this distinction Leibniz freed science from the yoke of metaphysics and religion. 

With the help of such guiding principles Leibniz speculated about the nature of ultimate reality. It consists, he thought, of nothing but a multiplicity of soul-like entities that he called monads. Space, time, material particles, cause and effect, are all appearances and not part of ultimate reality. In the world of monads each monad mirrors the whole universe. God, in this account, is a super-monad, a necessary being that by its very existence provides sufficient reason for everything that could have been otherwise. Monads, unlike atoms, do not interact but evolve by preestablished harmony the way clocks are synchronized. The synchronizer is God. 

With the help of this rather weird conception, Leibniz tried to solve nagging problems in Christian doctrine such as the problem of evil: how the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God created a world in which evil exists. He hoped that his speculations would help support conventional Christian beliefs and practices.

Spinoza was an atheist in a particular sense of the word: not godless, but one who denies the existence of a theistic God. The theistic God is a person. He expresses himself by his will. He is a supreme being, omniscient, Omnipotent, and perfectly benevolent. In the historical religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam the theistic God created a world distinct from himself by free will. The theistic God sustains the world out of his goodness and is worthy of our devotion and worship. The source of our knowledge about the theistic God, according to the historical religions, is revelation to prophets and messengers. Spinoza found the idea of a theistic God profoundly superstitious. Reason, not revelation, he believed, should be our source of knowledge about God. Revelations are dreams and fantasies of self-appointed prophets. Spinoza’s God, as one and the same as Nature, is not transcendent and separated from the world. Everything in the world follows causally and necessarily from the nature of God in the same way that the sum of the angles in a triangle equaling 180 degrees follows from the nature of the triangle. The world is not created and sustained by the will of a person any more than the will of the triangle is what makes the sum of its 3 angles equal 180 degrees. The theistic God can live without the world. Spinoza’s God cannot exist apart from the world; 4°. he is immanent in the world or, —if you like, he is the world. By ‘contrast, Leibniz wanted to retain the attributes of the theistic God as understood by Christianity and provide them with proper philosophical underpinnings. The main attribute of God is freedom to choose. God is a being who was free to choose this world Out of all possible worlds. He sustains this world out of his goodness hence our world is the best possible world. 

On white jazz

Applied to jazz, such realignment of perspective (allied with the kind of ex post facto condemnation of long-ago social norms known to historians as ‘‘presentism’”’) has also produced an imbalance, a shoe-on-the-other-foot reconception of jazz history that minimizes the role of whites or, in some prominent instances, airbrushes them out of the picture altogether. 

Cultural and racial politics have deeply divided even jazz musicians themselves. Those responsible for the schism, whatever their motives, have fostered fractiousness and fracture, rivalry and mutual suspicion, near-beatification of some figures and shameless neglect of others. In sum, a dynastic view of jazz history: black masters, and white (when present at all) acolytes and exploiters. 

It’s been too easy to justify such tampering as feeding a noble goal: granting American blacks — particularly urban, high-risk black youth — the worthiest of birthrights, a lineage brimming with estimable role models. In that visualization, every black child Erowing up in the United States in the next century Can place himself or herself at the core of what is best in the popular culture 

But the architects of that vision have falsified the record, indulging in what Pins calls, in “The Republic,” the “‘Noble Lie". Some circumstances allow “beneficial fictions,” perversions of fact in the interests of outcome, or the higher good, Plato has Socrates telling Glaucon. In the case of jazz, the noble lie is achieved at great cost. The true losers may be neither the white musicians of the historical past nor their descendants, now laboring against strong racial currents in today’s music business, but rather the intended beneficiaries, American blacks; the message they receive is of a black cultural preserve, invaded and colonized by white America, and now being “reclaimed.” At its heart, it is a message of divisiveness and disunity, of balkanization.

Black jazzmen of the pioneer generations were unhesitating in expressing respect for white musicians like Bix Beiderbecke, Adrian Rollini, Joe Venuti, Jack Teagarden, Miff Mole, Frank Trumbauer, Steve Brown, Benny Goodman, Dave Tough and Eddie Lang. More than once, Louis Armstrong hailed Bunny Berigan, a white, as his favorite &4mong fellow trumpeters, The tenor saxophone pioneer Coleman Hawkins advised young fans to listen to his band of choice, the white Casa Loma Orchestra, for lessons in ensemble teamwork. Records played a key role, crossing color lines with ease, permitting black and white musicians to hear and learn from one another with a regularity seldom available on the job. The saxophonist Eddie Barefield loved to recall the expression on 17-year-old Lester Young’s face when, one snowy night in Bismarck, N.D., the future ‘‘Prez’’ first heard ‘‘Singin’ the Blues,” as performed on record by Frank rumbauer, whose dry, witty saxophone yle became Young’s chief inspiration. 

D. Denby on the Scottish Enlightenment

...a vivacious and erudite celebration of the flowering of Scottish intellectual life in the eighteenth century—the Scottish Enlightenment, as people now call it—maintains that Aikenhead’s execution “haunted” the century that followed. Just six decades after the student's rant to his friends, an Edinburgh ecclesiastical assembly attempted to excommunicate the freethinking Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume, perhaps the most thoroughgoing skeptic in the history of philosophy, believed that religion is a portrait not of how the cosmos works but of how the human mind works—of what men and women want and need. His view of life was worldly and sociable. Like many of the learned Scots, he revered the new science of Copemicus, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton; he believed in the experimental method and loathed superstition. Hume was admired in Edinburgh by some, disdained or dismissed by many others. But, after a tumultuous debate, the motion to excommunicate him failed, by a vote of fifty to seventeen. Hume's chief tormentor, a splenetic clergyman named George Anderson, died a few months later, and, Buchan concludes, “an ecclesiastical era drew to an end.” 

In the years between the two trials, Edinburgh had changed from a dour near-theocracy to a cosmopolitan center. Not just Hume and Adam Smith and James Boswell but a host of superb lesser fires burst into public acclaum. 

The fountainhead was Francis Hutcheson, a kind of pan-Enlightenment figure, who, from 1729 until his death, in 1746, held the chair in moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, where he broke with tradition by lecturing in English as well as Latin. Hutcheson, a frequent visitor to Edinburgh, was Adam Smith's teacher and he encouraged Hume's early efforts. He was suspicious of metaphysics or any claims not based on observation or experience. Empiricism and the inductive method was the clarion call of the Scottish Enlightenment. Space. time, mass, movement, force—these things could be known in a way that such metaphysical imponderables as “divine purpose” and “final causes” could not. 

The intellectual break wih the past was drastic and seeming irreversible. In 1770, James Hutton, a farmer, began poking at the peculiar shapes and textures of the Salisbury Crags, the looming, irregular rock formations in Edinburgh. Hutton noticed something astonishing—fossilized fish remains embedded in the rock. The remains suggested that volcanic activity had raised the mass from some depth in the sea. In 1785, he delivered a lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which included the remarkable statement that “with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end.” Coolly discarding Biblical accounts of creation, the book that he eventually published, “The Theory of the Earth,” helped establish the foundations of modern geology. Shortly before Hutton’s investigation, in 1769, James Watt refashioned the steam engine. In recent years, scholars have traced the rudiments of modern psychology, anthropology, the earth sciences, and theories of civil society and liberal education to eighteenthcentury Scotland. 

For those who keep track of such things, the Scots, in current accounts of intellectual history, have caught up with the French as leading exponents of Enlightenment thought. Yet the learned Scots were remarkably unlike the French philosophes; indeed, they were unlike any other group of philosophers that ever existed. 

In “Leviathan,” published in 1651, Thomas Hobbes had developed a mechanistic view of human behavior: men were en tirely amoral; they reacted positively to anything that gratified their seIf-interest, calling it “good,” but the reaction was no more than a mechanical response to a stimulus. Unless they were overawed by a strong central authority, men would quickly be at one another's throats. The Scots were also familiar with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s “Maximes,” a wickedly funny collection of aphorisms that dissolved virtue in the acid of selfinterest. If we performed a benevolent act, La Rochefoucauld suggested, we did so in order to stoke our vanity or to seek a return of favor. But I lutcheson, and also Hume and Smith, were repelled by such fashionable cynicism; they were determined to prove that virtuc was grounded in human nature itself. H could so many modern ways of thinking have emerged in so seemingly backward a place? Buchan, a journalist, essayist, and novelist, describes the physical substance of Edinburgh with enormous gusto. In 1700, the city had its towers, its ancient castle, and a magnificently broad long strect running down its center. A walled city built on a high butte with a gentle lake on one side, Edinburgh was stunningly beautiful but dirty and poor, a foul-smelling, mucky place whose citizens tossed their wastes onto the street at night while a cloud of peat smoke hung in the sky above—“auld reckie,” it was affectionately called by its inhabitants. The common dict, dreary and conducive to alcoholism, consisted of fish, pottage, milk, kale, and a great deal of home-brewed small beer. James Boswell, when he was not in London pursuing Dr. Johnson and women, may have been Edinburgh’s most famous drunk, but there were many others. Everyone, including children, drank whiskey, claret, rum, and ale. By the middle of the century, there were six hundred drinking establishments servicing a town of only forty thousand. Buchan says that there were few public buildings, so that all legal, civic, and ecclesiastical business was conducted in dark taverns. 

Early in his career, David Hume devoted a chapter in “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” (1748) to disputing miracles. One might have supposed that miracles were beyond proof and therefore beyond argument, but saune didn’t think so. “A miracle is a stolat:on of the laws of nature,” he asservs, and then engages in a lawyerly intexrogation of the evidence. What’s the number and reliability of the witnesses? How close are they to the event itself? For Hume, the question is not whether miracles happen but under what conditions belief in them spreads. He moves the discussion from revelation to epistemology and arrives at the following mis_, chievous conclusion: “No testimony is suf| ficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the | fact, which it endeavours to establish.” 

Hume was greatly impressed by the recent news that nature operated according to laws provable by repeated experiment; he must have feared that the uncritical acceptance of Biblical miracles put at risk our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. If it was possible to clear away the superstition and speculation that had passed for science in the past, could something analogous be done in political and moral philosophy? , 

Wisdom, for Hume, begins with the acknowledgment of uncertainty—of the _ Limits of what we know. We have perceptions of the world in the form of impressions, Hume says, some of which, in recollection, become ideas—that is, the ideas have the force of impressions, without which they are meaningless. We're able to navigate our way through the world because such impressions of it are coherent, they support one another with respect to time and space. But the power of reason to prove much of what we know is weak, and Hume denied that our beliefs about the world could be ascertained with anything like scientific certainty. Events occur in a particular sequence (a billiard ball, struck by another, moves forward), yet reason cannot establish that one event necessarily causes another. Sequence should not be confused with causality. The best we can say is that our repeated experience of the sequence allows us to believe that it will occur in the future. Hume was fascinated by what we would call consciousness, but he always leads us back to experience, which is the arena, the test, the goal. 

Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711. His father was a lawyer who died when the boy was very young, his mother the daughter of a prominent judge. Hume was being groomed for law when, at the age of thirteen, epic poetry and philosophy overwhelmed him; he read obsessively until, at eighteen, he developed hypochondriacal tendencies and suffered a kind of nervous breakdown, an event from which he recovered by exercising and by eating a great deal (a lifelong habit—he became enormously fat). A convivial bachelor, he required company, preferably a dinner party at home (he prided himself on his “cookery”) or a debate at the Select Society, a group of fifty of Edinburgh’s most clubbable and erudite minds. Hume had no recorded romantic life, though he enjoyed the company of elegant women in Edinburgh and in Paris, where he was certifiably a success (“/e bon David”) among the aristocratic ladies who entertained intellectual luminaries. His friend Adam Smith, born a little later, in 1723, was an asexual bachelor, too. The men shared temperamental quirks, derived, perhaps, from similarities in their childhoods. Both were reared by their mothers—Smith’s father, a customs inspector, died before he was born, and as a middle-aged man Smith still lived with his mother (and his maiden cousin). Except for the recklessly energetic Boswell, who recounted his heroic copulations in his journal, the Scottish intellectuals were given less to sensuality than to the comforts of a solitary domestic routine and easy fellowship with friends. Sociability was whit mattered, and in their writings the world, teeming yet measurable, is always with them.

Defining certain regularities ir one’s experience of the world—if not with scientific precision, then at least with observational rigor—was central to the problem of moral theory. What were the social arrangements in which these regularities appeared and in which our moral life was carried out? By the mideighteenth century, the Scots had realized that the acts of kings and queens and the words of religious or humanist sages were less important—less formative of social life—than such things as modern manufacture, commerce, and international trade. 

Early in “The Wealth of Nations,” the colossal book published in 1776 but first conceived many years before, Adam Smith announced, “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.” Looking about him at mid-century, Smith saw a great deal of “trucking” and bartering—a vast, buzzing, articulated landscape of productive and commercial activity that connected everyone to everyone else. In a stirring passage, he evokes the seemingly rude existence of a day laborer. The man’s woollen coat, kitchen implements, and glass windows can be produced only by the combined labor and codrdinated exchange of literally thousands of individuals (“ship-builders, sailors, sailmakers, rope-makers . . .”), as well as by the contribution of such institutions as farms, mines, mills, smithies, shipping companies. National wealth, Smith insisted, consists in the sum total of productive activities, such as those which furnish the laborer’s house—and not, as earlier economic theory maintained, in the amount of gold and silver hoarded in state treasuries, or the total agricultural output protected by tarifts. Smith's analytic framework amounts to a shift in consciousness of how the world works, of how individuals fit into a national economy? it is the birth of the gross domestic product, the recognition that national wealth is something created by the entre populace. . 

For Smith, commerce was the glue that held the show together. “The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so,” Smith said in an early lecture. “And in this manner everyone is practicing oratory on others through the whole of his life.” The men and women in this vast system of speech are performing as rational agents, freely selling their labor and goods, exchanging, buying, and consuming. This rational actor calculates his best advantage in any given situation and gets what he wants by appealing to the same calculating instinct in others. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” he wrote, “but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” What Smith is describing is the ethos that came to be called capitalism. A startling irony proceeds from his formulation, an irony confounding to the literal-minded and outrageous to those who demand moral consistency of the world. Each man, imagining that he’s working for his own advantage, is at the same time inadvertently working to increase the general wealth. The mechanism that transforms the many self-advancing efforts into general affluence is, of course, the market, along with its attendant bodyguard and ruthless enforcer, competition—the two of them, in tandem, ceaselessly setting wages and prices, adjusting supply and demand, goading, redirecting, enlarginy, rewarding, annihilating. 

In Smith's system, commercial man might not be docile, exactly, but he could be governed, and, just as important, he could learn to tolerate his neighbor's religion in order to do business with him. In the nineteenth century, Smith's happy view of life in commercial society was rejected by the Romantics as insipid and by the Marxists as naive, a mask for the despair of alienation. The later development of industrial capitalism, including the emergence, after Smith’s death, of dangerous factories and the immiseration of workers jammed into enormous sordid cities, was not something that Smith had envisioned. But his frequently stated belief in minimal government interference with the economythe doctrine of laissez-faire—should not be taken as passive acceptance of the depredations of capitalism. Adam Smith was not an earlier version of Milton Friedman or Jack Kemp. He would not have been pleased with the inequities of income in the United States today. He defended the rights of labor and deplored the withering effects of specialization on the individual worker. Smith was a liberal in both the modem and the classical sense. Buried in the work Of the great framer of Capitalism as a vast impersonal system, there is a modern humanist. 

Modern market societies, Smith and Mice thought, made men more reasonable, even more “polite,” but neither of them supposed that commercial relations provided all the values that men needed to live by. Their mentor Francis Hutcheson, writing in 1725, had suggested that, just as people derived infF voluntary pleasure from beauty, so they spontaneously delighted in nerforming, \ or observing benevolent actions. Benevolence made us feel good in the same way that a Greek statue does. The moral response matched the aesthetic response; disgust at ugliness was matched by disgust at cruelty; together, these responses constituted a kind of natural moral sense. Hutcheson was so sure that we enjoyed the spectacle of virtue that he made a weird kind of hedonic calculation, a numerical system in which different acts were rated according to the pleasure they gave. Hutcheson, who invented the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers,” which the ufhitanans made so much of in the next century, reflects the peculiarly sunny temperament of the Scotush moralists. His system depends on our possession of favorable innate tendencies; to him, the moral sense was just thit—a sense, akin to sight or smell. Hume, in “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals” (1751), tries to put a little muscle into Hutcheson's pleasant ideas. He begins by admitting, as always, the limited powers of reason: by itself, reason can no more give us notions of virtue and vice than it can prove a necessary connection between events. “’Tis not contrary to reason,” Hume once said, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” Reason lacks power to command, judge, or reform behavior. Common observation suggests, on the contrary, that morality is based on sentiment and passion: we look at Nero, or at a neighborhood thief, and we feel disgust. Like knowledge of the world, moral sentiment begins with particular impresstons—a key idea, since it suggests that we should make moral judgments individually rather than by category. 

What causes the impressions? It turns out that there are a few kindly elements in human nature, caused by the experience of family love in childhood, that could be called universal: 

It is sufficient for our present purpose, if it be allowed, what surely, without the greatest absurdity, cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame, along with the clements of the wolf and serpent. | et these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be tnsufhuent to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must sall direct the determimatians of our mund, and where cvery thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous. A moral distinc tron, therefore, immediately arises; a general sentement of blame and approbation; a tendency, however faint, to the abjects of the one, and a proportionable aversion to those of the other. 

In describing the benefits of human nature, Hume sounds almost plaintive; he asks for our belief in a minimal case for human decency. Beginning with this minimal case, Hume, in an earlier book, “A Treatise of Human Nature” (1740), laid out a genealogy of morals. In the family unit of primitive society, people acted generously toward one another, so there was no need for formal rules, But when families banded together for vonvenienc°, safety, and support, property fell into dispute, and formal rules, which is what Hume means by “justice” —what'’s yours and what’s mine—became necessary. As communities develop in size, men’s natural selfishness, without disappearing, is joined by enlightened self-interest—an approval of what is good for the community and thus good for you and me. That common standard created by enlightened self-interest is what we call morality. In Hume's language, universal traits like benevolence, kindliness, and love for one’s children are “natural” virtues, while socially necessary traits like courage, honesty, justice, and loyalty are “artificial” virtues; that is, they are engendered by our need to live with one another. All societies admire such virtues and disdain cowardice, dishonesty, treachery, and meanness. We are angered by criminal behavior even if we are not hurt by it personally. Everyone, or almost evcryone, weeps or smiles at the same point ina play. F{uman nature exists, and moral codes created by our need to live together exist, too. 

You can see the common standard , Hume says, by noting the Janguaye tt people use. [fF somcos e designates another as “adversary,” he sveaks only for hirnself; if he describes .n ther as “odious,” he is appealing tu wic pread feelings of distaste. Hume i> speakin.s not only of the comnion lang. we of b is.ness or law but of tie gossip a. the vege able market and the water we'l. Eicbbes and La Rochcfoucauld and he other moral skeptics, it turns out, vere partly night in their description of human nature, but, in the end, paradoxically, a moral code is created, not defeated, by self-interest: we create a code precisely because we have mutually opposed interests but must leam to live with one another. If one studies the language, Hume urged, one can see that most people approve of what is socially useful, disapprove of what is socially destructive, and remain indifferent to acts that express individual self-interest. We can build morality on the first two and allow the third a free existence without judging it one way or another. 

Hume's “Principles of Morals” lacks beauty, passion, and drama. There is no perversity or darkness in this worldly view. Hume's is the everyday view, the life-as-it-is~-commonly-lived view, a forerunner of both utilitarianism and pragmatism. Human nature, sentiment, and sociality itself create morals. In a society held together by commerce and property, and by law based on property—modem democratic society—such commonsense ideas offer the minimal but necessary faith, Hume and the other Enlightenment Scots anticipated a civil order in which most people would continue to adhere to religion but would rely less and less on God as a guide to everyday lite. Such reliance would be replaced by a modified confidence in the successful functioning of institutions like the legal osstem, the civil service, schools and universities, and business and commerce. The administration of such enterprises is the ideal of “instrumental rationality,” as Max Weber called it, by which things run impersonally and reasonably well for evervone—not a spiritually impassioned wav of life, to be sure, and by no means suthcient to satisfy many of our desires, but one that allows, as an over-all framework, for the greatest individual development, the greatest freedom. It’s a framework that most Americans, even very religious Americans, actually depend on from day to day—the unspoken rationale of American secular liberty. Capitalism and liberal society dont seem especially heroic until threatened by fanatics; only then do people have to fight for what they’ve taken for granted,