Nature's Evil

Tempting commodities excite admiration, stimulate desire and, ultimately, create a habit. A peasant who grows accustomed to drinking tea with sugar or using fashionable calicos will work harder than a peasant who consumes only the things he can produce himself. The former will overcome his indolence, the latter won’t. According to Hume, it was only because of the imports and imitations of luxury goods that landowners could rely on the free will of their tenants and avoid the unpleasant duty of forcing them to work. Importantly, Hume does not speculate about the utility value of ‘the gold and rubies of the Indies’; he does not say that sugar is particularly healthy or silk beautiful. The only common feature of tempting goods is the inability of the peasant to produce them himself. Thus the trade in oriental commodities, and then in their domestic imitations, overcame the indolence, idleness and laziness of the lower classes.

While some scholars write about the Victorian invention of idleness, I see this set of regulatory ideas – idleness, indolence, laziness – coming into fashion much earlier. In the English language, the usage of these words grew rapidly around 1750, reached an all-time peak by 1800, and then declined. * Hume saw idleness as an economic problem that could be resolved by economic means. His solution was a stimulation of demand. Luxury leads to imitation, imitation to commerce, and commerce to liberty. Going against the ascetic legacy of Christianity, which resonated with Hume’s Presbyterian background, it was a radical idea. Be it food, drinks or clothes, most versions of asceticism proclaim both the superiority of the local over the foreign or global and the virtues of production rather than consumption. But the spirit of capitalism invoked something entirely different, and Hume responded to this call. The philosopher was discussing a problem that social sciences understood in the twentieth century: subsistence farming was an obstacle to economic growth, but of course growth could not be based on the destruction of subsistence. Peasant ‘indolence’ was an equilibrium between labour and nature. If progress failed to incentivise the peasant, it would lead to slavery. Using the word ‘progress’ at least as much as ‘imitation’, Hume combined these opposite concepts in his sceptical view of history, which he saw as a cyclical process. If imitation leads to progress, and progress consists of imitations, there is no room for creative energy to break the cycle, no novelty, no revolution. Hume came to this conclusion in a recently colonised Scotland, which had its ambitions curbed by the dominating power. It was in Scotland that scholars formulated the laws of economics and, several generations later, the laws of thermodynamics as well. 12 Energy, the potential of work, was the opposite of idleness. But energy was finite and its perturbations cyclical. Deprived of autonomy, progress turned out to be a pendulum.

In Hume’s view, by imitating oriental luxuries – supplanting fur by wool and silk by cotton, enjoying ever cheaper sugar and tobacco – European societies enter the ‘progress of improvement’. Descending the social ladder, these ‘innocent gratifications’ overcome sloth and invigorate labour. ‘Where luxury nourishes commerce and industry, the peasants, by a proper cultivation of the land, become rich and independent; while the tradesmen and merchants acquire a share of the property.’ With constant new goods available to them, peasants become hard-working and free-minded. Increasing revenue and acquiring property, shopkeepers turn into a middle class – ‘that middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest basis of public liberty.’ Indolence leads to dearth, which leads to barbarity: ‘when sloth reigns, a mean uncultivated way of life prevails amongst individuals, without society, without enjoyment.’ Poor land and bad work are connected to unsociability and ignorance. Like Adam Smith, Hume extended his sympathies only to those commodities that belonged to the mainstay of the English trade and detested Spanish ones: ‘since the discovery of the mines in America, industry has encreased in all the nations of Europe, except in the possessors of those mines.’ 13