More from Hume, Historian

Here's another passage, following up on last week's entry on David Hume's history of England. A little further on than the description of Luther I've already quoted, Hume discusses the fact that Henry VIII wrote a book defending Roman Catholic orthodoxy against Lutheran critiques.

"But Henry had been educated in strict attachment to the church of Rome, and he bore a particular prejudice against Luther, who in his writings spoke with contempt of Thomas Aquinas, the King's favorite author: He opposed himself, therefore, to the progress of the Lutheran tenets by all the influence which his extensive and almost absolute authority conferred upon him: he even undertook to combat them with weapons not usually employed by monarchs ... He wrote a book in Latin against the principles of Luther; a performance which, if allowance be made for the subject and age, does no discredit to his capacity."

Where do you think is the balance of sympathies here? My own take on it is that despite the enormous gulf that separates Hume from, say, Thomas Aquinas -- Hume thinks of Aquinas as a fellow philosopher, a man of learning, and thinks the less of Luther for having spoken of Aquinas with contempt. So Hume sympathizes with Henry VIII's original stance, as the defender of the Roman faith, and implicitly as the defender of his "favorite author," Aquinas.

Hume also seems to pat Henry on the back figuratively for using reason and the Latin language, rather than edicts and armies, as his chosen "weapons" in the fight against the Lutherans.

I think the freshness of that prose speaks to us across the centuries and retains the power to challenge.

Be Sure You Guess Right

At a message board where I regulartly go to vent, one of the other venters asked us all the question: "Do you wish you were an oil speculator right now?"

I do. Oil's gone from the mid-high 140's to 115. Someone's getting really rich off of this.

The big swings is always where the biggest money is made.

I think this thread has the potential to be a lot of fun. How many of you reading this thread right now didn't know that commodities speculators make money when the price goes down?

This shows a wonderful naivete that thinks of itself as sophistication. Speculators make money when the price goes down? Wow, man, you're blowing my head.

I had to reply. And I enjoyed my reply so much that, in lieu of other inspiration, I'll reproduce it here.

Oil speculators make money when the price goes down only if they knew in advance that it would, or just guessed well.

Personally, I don't believe that the average oil speculator right now knew anything in advance. It seems to have been a paradigm 'random walk' of late, both up and down. So the successful ones have been guessing right.

No ... I wouldn't want to be a speculator right now for the same reason that I don't spend a lot of time in casinos.

People who DO spend time in casinos are performing a socially useful function (somebody else will probably make better use of their money than they know how to do). Likewise, people who speculate on commodity prices are performing a socially useful function. They create a market in which other parties, commercial entities, can hedge against risks.

But I wouldn't want to be the one performing that function, no. When oil was above $140, the general guess was that it would keep going up, maybe to $200, before heading down in a big way. What [do you] believe has happened to any speculator who acted on that bit of wisdom?

Nixon's resignation

It was thirty-four years ago today that Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, spoke to the nation and explained that he was resigning that office effective noon the following day.

It is sometimes said, vacuously, that there are no second acts in American lives. That is nonsense. The example of Richard Nixon shows that American lives can and do have a multiplicity of acts. Ineed, the "first act" might well be said to have been over by 1962, when he lost his campaign to become Governor of California and angrily told the press that it wouldn't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more.

But of course he couldn't stay out of the limelight, and made a comeback within a party that was shellshocked by finding itself on the losing side of a landslide just two years after that outburst. Nixon became President -- a heck of a second Act.

The Watergate scandal, the Judiciary Committee vote, the decision by a Supreme Court largely consisting of his own appointees yet unanimous against him -- all these facts brought down the curtain on that second act.

Yet there was a third. Nixon returned to public life, and was playing the traditional elder statesman by 1981, when he attended Anwar Sadat's funeral.

Reagan had just survived an assassination attempt when Sadat was killed. So Reagan understandably didn't go on that trip himself. He sent all the living ex-Presidents inhis stead.

Nixon was very much in the public eye, usually in terms he was able to structure himself, from that time until his death in 1994.

Lesson: only death determines when there will be no additional "acts" in an American life.

The Beijing Olympics

Opening ceremonies take place tomorrow.

Since the number 8 itself is considered lucky in China, the idea of opening their games on 8/8/08 especially appealed to the hosts.

Just free-associating here, but hey, it's my blog: the comic strip Doonesbury has used the Olympics as a way of re-uniting Duke with "Honey," the woman who served as his aide and gal-Friday when Duke was ambassador to China in the 1970s.

Duke is now a public-relations consultant for tyrants. In particular, he is trying to refurbish the image of a dictator from a central Asian country with a name that ends in "-stan," trying to make the world forget some nasty bit of ethnic cleansing there.

In the service of that goal, Duke has built up the -Stan country's Olympic team with some ringers, and accompanied the lot of them to China. That of course is where he re-encounters Honey, who is in charge of Olympic credentialing.

Of course, they've run into each other repeatedly since the 1970s. I believe their most recent encounters involved post-hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf of Mexico three years ago. That is what honey refers to in yesterday's strip.

Now she's a "powerful sports bureaucrat" who feels no "sexual tension" while in the room with Duke. I love it.

Let the games begin.

Hume's History of England

"Luther, a man naturally inflexible, vehement, opinionative, was become incapable, either from promises of advancement or terrors of severity, to relinquish a sect of which he was himself the founder, and which brought him a glory superior to all others, the glory of dictating the religious faith and principles of multitudes."

Those are the words of David Hume, best known these days as a hyper-skeptical philosopher, was more successful in his own time (1711-1776) as a historian.

Hume was the author of a six volume work called, revealingly enough, "The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688." One measure of the success of these volumes is that despite his subsequent renown as one of the triumvirate of "great British empiricists," as the man who woke Kant from his "dogmatic slumber" and all that, the British Library, and the Cambridge University Library both still list Hume's works under the heading, "David Hume, historian."

I'm delighted to discover that "Project Gutenberg" has put the whole thing on line. It is now freely available to all the curious. And though I would imagine few of my readers will be able to invest the time necessary to read through the whole of it, the format makes it easy to take a dip here and there -- reading the table of contents of a volume, then going to the page or pages that interest you.

You'll find yourself addressed by a distinctive voice. At the beginning of Vol. III, for example, he introduces the subject of the Protestabt Reformation by discussing the clerical profession, and the reason any wise state must keep an eye on them.

"Each ghostly practitioner, in order to render himself more precious and sacred in the eyes of his retainers, will inspire them with the most violent abhorrence of all other sects, and continually endeavor, by some novelty, to excite the languid devotion of his audience. No regard will be paid to truth, morals, or decency, in the doctrines inculcated."

The creation of a state-supported Church helps the magistrates keep order, Hume continues. Without it there would be continual warring amongst the sects inspired by such "ghostly practitioners." But with state support for one Church, the clergy of that one lose the incentive to excite the devotion of their audience in such ways. Their audience is guaranteed them, and their salaries assigned.

"And in this manner ecclesiastical establishments, though commonly they arose at first from religious views, prove in the end advantageous to the political interests of society."

These general views being first clearly stated, we are unsurprised when we come to read what Hume has to say specifically -- in the passage I quoted above -- about the disturber of the official Church of all of western Europe to whom he soon turns his attention -- Martin Luther.

Changes and Valedictions

I'm facing some changes in my life just now. The vinyard in which I have toiled professionally is closing. Or, strictly speaking, it will hereafter be a place for the display of grapes, not for their actual growth.

This is a corporate decision made by the sort of high muckety-mucks whose work consists of re-writing organizational charts when two large corporations merge. I, as a long-time proponent of capitalism in all of its glory, am happy to accede to such consequences, even if it should create a valedictory mood.

Perhaps the old vinyard had become too comfortable and it is time to try to find something else.

In the meantime, I'll continue my usual practice in this blog, which is with rare exceptions not to talk about myself but to talk about the rest of the world, in the expectations that our interests are more likely to coincide there than in acts of solipsism.

Hale and farewell, then, old vinyard.

Always be closing

I just thought I'd slide by today with a link to a famous rant. The one delivered by Alec Baldwin in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

Here's the YouTube let's talk about something important.

He did a North Pole version of this character in a Yuletime Saturday Night Live skit once.

Instead of "put that coffee down" it was "put that cocoa down" and so forth.

If you have the time watch them both.

Gotta love the motivational use of the alphabet. ABC = Always be closin'.