> > >
> > > We all come from societies where racism is or was an inherent
> > > part. That's an unfortunately inherent trait of humans uninformed
> > > by the Enlightenment.
> >
Well, the Enlightenment hardly was the high tide of anti-racism. On
the contrary. Pre-Enlightenment religion sometimes mitigated
instinctive racism by emphasizing that our bodies are but temporary
dwelling-places of our eternel souls. Hence, biological
characteristics are not the real man, his colourless soul is. Hence
e.g. the Catholic Church's intervention on behalf of the Amerindians
protecting them from the worst excesses of slavery (as in the Jesuit
reducciones; about Africans, however, the Church wasn't so sure that
they had souls). With the rise of materialism, man was reduced to his
biological dimension, hence totally determined by his presumed racial
characteristics. Occasional racist statements can be culled from
Aristotle, Maimonides, Ibn Khaldun and other premoderns, but a
systematic racialist doctrine is typical of the ca. 1750-1950 time
bracket. Racist statements can be found, some of them quite gory, in
such enlightened authors as Kant, Hegel, Disraeli, Mark Twain, Albert
Schweitzer, and numerous others. Racists once based their views on the
Old Testament, as in the US South and South Africa, but increasingly
they switched to the language of science.
Equality is an Enlightenment idea, but not equality of non-equals, e.g.
men and animals. Hence, if science can be shown to prove that the
races are radically different, there need be no equality between them.
It is only in a more advanced phase of the Enlightenment that this
assumption of inequality was challenged.
Kind regards,
KE