Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Official Report
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Time for Reflection
Good afternoon. The first item of business today is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is Professor A C Grayling, master of the New College of the Humanities, London.
Presiding Officer and members of this Parliament, I thank you for the opportunity to address you today.
My mother’s maiden name was Burns and her birthday was 25 January. That gives me a small claim on Scottishness, and thereby on the great inheritance of the Scottish enlightenment and, in particular, on that of one of its greatest thinkers, David Hume. That is the more especially agreeable because Hume’s view of ethics is proving to have been very prescient: he located the basis of benevolence and justice, the two great pillars of morality, in human nature itself, and today we see the emergence of powerful scientific support for that view in our understanding of humanity’s place in the natural world. The terms “sociobiology” and “evolutionary psychology” are bandied about in discussions of human nature’s continuity with the rest of nature; but whatever labels we use, we now have every reason to acknowledge that good and ill alike arise from facts about our biological history.
The most important fact is that we are essentially social beings. We need each other; we need companionship and community, we need to give and receive love, and we need to co-operate and agree. The heartening fact is that these fundamental needs of our psychology give us what is the majority story of human moral experience. Our news media are full of strife, mayhem and atrocity, but that is because these things are indeed news, which is to say that they are the minority story of human experience. The main story is that in every city, town and village everywhere in the world, every minute of each day, there are millions of acts of courtesy and kindness, friendship and help: that is our basic human reality, against which the tribulations that arise from division and discord must be set.
Those discords are largely the result of our giving too much influence to tribalisms of one kind or another. Given the things that all human beings share in the way of the needs that I mentioned, it is clear that we could—if we applied the resources necessary—bring people together to make us collegial sharers of our one world in kindness and agreement. David Hume thought in those terms, and the advance of inquiry is showing that both he and we are right to place our best hopes in that aspect of human nature.