In July, I spoke at a debate hosted by the Black Ed movement, a group that seeks racial justice at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). The debate concerned a petition created by my fellow student Elizabeth Lund asking to rename a university building called David Hume Tower.¹ David Hume was found by Lund to be insufficiently pure because of racist comments he made in the eighteenth century. I spoke against the removal of Hume’s name from the tower but, it seems, without success. The university has very quietly (perhaps shamefacedly) announced that the tower will be known as “40 George Square” for the foreseeable future.² This, I assume, is a banal placeholder until the name of someone suitably saintlike is found to adorn the tower. But if they’re waiting for that, they’ll be waiting for a very long time.

At the debate, I argued that the tower was quite obviously named not for Hume’s failures but for his towering successes—for the ways he transcended his time, not the ways he was unable to do so. I argued that removing the name of the tower would do nothing to achieve racial equality. But we now live in the age of the woke, in which we must look at everything through a lens of oppression and power. As such, the tower could not just be a celebration of our university’s greatest son but simply had to be a statement of white supremacy. There it stood, a tool of racial oppression: it could do no other.

This episode is not unique. The killing of George Floyd has unleashed a new wave of critical-theory-inspired wokery, and plenty of other figures have faced the ire of the righteous. Some of this is to the good. It is correct to question our monuments and our heroes and to learn about and discuss racial issues past and present. But much of it is just inane. What does the removal of David Hume’s name from the building do, exactly? If it is a signal, it is a pretty weak one given how quietly the university announced it.

Is there a useful criterion for deciding which monuments should stand and which should not, then? Yes. Jerry Coyne proposes—after (if I recall correctly) the New York Times’s Ross Douthat—that we judge monuments by the reason they were erected.³ So if a monument to Thomas Jefferson is a monument to his racism, it should be removed, contextualized, or put in a museum somewhere. But monuments that honor positive achievements should stand.

There are many cases, then, where we really should remove names from buildings and monuments from parks. Venerating Confederate generals in the public square, for example, is an explicit veneration of men who fought to retain slavery. They can go. But the case of David Hume Tower does not justify the removal of le bon David’s name. The building was named in recognition of Hume’s philosophical achievements and to honor a man whose brilliance previously went unrewarded by the university that educated him because pious cretins vetoed his taking up of a chair there.

Hume’s racist comments and his slight involvement with the slave trade,⁴ the latter discovered by Dr. Felix Waldmann (who supports the tower’s renaming), are things we should condemn and discuss. That conversation has happened and will continue regardless; the placement of contextualizing plaques on the building could have been a reasonable compromise. The people at Black Ed whom I debated were sincere and well-intentioned but, in this case, misguided. The problem with this wave of monument-shaming is that it is indiscriminate and zealous. The fact is that there is not a single person in history who is pure by modern standards—and a century from now, monuments we name today might well appear “problematic” too. (Incidentally, there are “problematic” issues one might bring up about the George for whom George Square is named.)⁵

This point was made unintentionally by Lund herself. Initially, she proposed renaming the tower after another alumnus of Edinburgh, Julius Nyerere. But despite Nyerere’s being an anti-colonial activist and the liberator of Tanzania (and a quasi-intentional toppler of the evil Idi Amin), Nyerere was also a dictator and a homophobe—who therefore, one might cheekily add, harmed many more Black people than Hume ever did.

Lund, then, who admitted during the debate that she hadn’t known much about Hume before discovering his racist comments, disavowed the idea of renaming the tower after Nyerere. This shows that nobody is pure enough to pass muster. It also demonstrates that sprinting to conclusions about historical figures (twice, in this case) is an unreliable, as well as an immature, way of dealing with the monument issue.

When it comes to monuments and the like, then, we are faced with two choices. Either we don’t honor anyone, ever, just in case, and remove all names from everything, or we apply the rough but useful calculus mentioned above to decide which monuments should stay. The former is unfair to people whose achievements deserve to be honored; the latter is a good way to decide whether a figure deserves such approbation or not. And David Hume Tower, by this calculation, should have stayed as it was.

Why does Hume merit celebration in the first place, you might ask? My personal love of Hume is rooted in the fact that he was a liberator who suffered oppression in his own day. The Scottish Kirk [Church] had only just recently stopped burning infidels when Hume tried to get a seat at his old university. Thanks to his moderate Kirk friends, Hume avoided incineration. But because he was a notorious infidel, dogmatic religionists prevented him from securing a job at Edinburgh University and, later, Glasgow. This didn’t stop him, of course, from gaining other employment and continuing his intellectual work.

Later, on his deathbed, he was visited by the biographer James Boswell, who was surprised at Hume’s stoicism in the face of death. Rather than being a coward and recanting his atheistic views, Hume mocked the idea of the afterlife. So, he faced dogmatic oppression—he was nearly canceled, as it were, for his views—and provided a noble example to humbler atheists who came after him against the coercions and sick, sadistic fantasies of faithful vultures leering over the bedsides of dying infidels.

Hume’s attacks on theological orthodoxy mark him as a key figure in humanity’s emancipation from dogma. His championing of Enlightenment ideals, such as tolerance and free expression, helped pave the way for modernity. Therefore, he is owed a debt; for without the Enlightenment legacy of equal human dignity, many of the world’s most oppressed, then and since, would still be under the boot.

All this is barely to mention Hume’s many brilliant philosophical insights.

It is a shame, then, that Critical Race Theory–inspired wokeness has led to the effacement of his name from our university campus. What can be said about the results of this removal? The administrators who made and announced this decision whispered it rather than declared it (which suggests, to me at least, either gutlessness or shame). Some Edinburgh lecturers and professors, including the great Scottish historian Professor Sir Tom Devine, have strongly criticized the decision.⁶ So, the university gives in to nonsense while alienating some of its own academics, Black Ed achieves a tokenistic whimper rather than a bang, and the tower that once bore the name of one of the greatest minds humanity (not to mention Scotland) has ever produced is now boringly named like any other building on any other street. Cui bono?

There is one small consolation to be had, though. During the debate, I rather impertinently argued that because the tower is an ugly beast of a building, we should indeed remove Hume’s name from it—and attach it to another grander edifice, one much more appropriate to the celebration of such a man. Alas, that suggestion has yet to be taken up. Perhaps somebody should start a new petition?

In any case, this whole episode might seem quite paltry—it’s only a name on a tower, for goodness’ sake, you might say. And, you might continue, Hume’s ideas will still be taught and discussed, so what’s the issue? The latter point, incidentally, was very generously conceded by my debate opponents, arbiters of philosophy that they clearly were. But this small, sad affair is part of a bigger battle. Wokeness, which is reactionary pouting dressed up as radicalism, is gaining ground all the time. If you see it coming, resist it.

Meanwhile, let us deal with racial injustice properly and discuss the flaws of historical figures we celebrate—but let us do so reasonably. And David Hume’s ideas will indeed still be taught and discussed, with or without the approval of the modern inquisitors—and his name, I believe, will long outlive the epoch of the woke.

This is a revised and expanded version of an essay originally published in the online magazine Areo.

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