Politics: Between The Enthusiasts and the Superstitious

 One of DAvid Hume's essays that has stuck longest in my head is Of Superstition and Enthusiasm..  Alan Jacobs writes on that essay in his David Hume’s Guide to Today’s Politics Between enthusiasm and superstition, and I think it worthwhile noting it for anyone passing through here.

Take, for instance, Hume’s contention, in a famous essay, that the two primary “corruptions of true religion” are superstition and enthusiasm. He was thinking primarily of Roman Catholics on the one hand and, on the other, a variety of Protestant religious groups that today we might see as examples or forerunners of evangelicalism; but he deliberately frames his argument in more general terms, as though describing not distinct factions of his time but rather enduring dispositions. “The true sources of superstition,” he argues, are “weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance.” The true sources of enthusiasm, by contrast, are “hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance.” You will note that the only item common to both sides is ignorance. A typical Hume comment.

I want to argue that the primary social forces disrupting American society today are modern versions of these two false religions. Our current version of superstition is the MAGA belief system. Our current version of enthusiasm is what some people call wokeness but I prefer to call Left Purity Culture (LPC).

This appeals to my biases. I feel a bit of a plague on both of your houses for both factions. I distrust people who think they have all the answers. In my experience, and from my reading of history, these people put other people in harm's way. Too often that is a fatal harm.

Mr. Jacobs see a problem that Hume did not. Hume having no sue for the superstitious and believing the enthusiast loses energy until they are a spent force.

And here we must return to our current enthusiasts’ “march through the institutions” I mentioned earlier. This poses problems for Hume’s analysis, and suggests that over time even the warmest of enthusiasts can discover the power of institutions—like velociraptors figuring out how to open doors. It may be, pace Hume, that once a party achieves rule, in any given place, it feels less strongly its need for priestly intercession. It becomes its own retribution. Thus supporters of California Governor Gavin Newsom are superstitious—fearful, sorrowful—with regard to places like Texas and Florida, while supporters of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are superstitious with regard to “coastal elites” and enthusiastic with regard to life in Florida. This is how we manage to get a situation Hume did not anticipate; a situation one might fairly describe as the worst of both worlds.

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