Hume on Political Discourse

I was reading Simon Blackburn’s book, Being Good, last night (I’m a big fan of his other popular book, Think), and I ran across a quotation from David Hume’s An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals:

When a man denominates another his enemy, his rival, his antagonist, his adversary, he is understood to speak the language of self-love, and to express sentiments, peculiar to himself, and arising from his particular circumstances and situation. But when he bestows on any man the epithets of vicious or odious or depraved, he then speaks another language, and expresses sentiments, in which he expects all his audience are to concur with him. He must here, therefore, depart from his private and particular situation, and must choose a point of view, common to him with others; he must move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string to which all mankind have an accord and symphony.

I was struck by this because it captures what I think is an intensifying of rhetoric between liberals and conservatives in the blogosophere and in national politics. People less often think of their political enemies in terms of “my worthy opponent,” who can be presumed to have the best intentions about the direction the U.S. should move in. One doesn’t say, for example, that one’s political counterpart is mistaken about how to proceed in Iraq; rather, one says that such-and-such a course of action could only be chosen by cowards and traitors. I think this rhetorical strategy has been brought to new heights by Karl Rove and his crew on the right; there are some on the left who do this but without the same power or visibility.