Re: Enlightenment

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "koenraad_elst" <koenraad.elst@...>
wrote:

>
> > > >
> > > > 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.

I still don't get it.

People organize themselves in groups. They regulate the inner life of
the group with a set of rules. For their own continued existence
groups distinguish, or should I say discriminate, between members of
the group, whom you can expect to follow the rules of the group, and
non-members, whom you can't. Any group that doesn't do that will cease
to exist, like a cell without cell walls. Of course the large
religious communities will fight 'discrimination' between groups
within the group, since this is indicative of the existence of
subgroups within the group competing for and threatening to usurp the
loyalty to it. Those are the facts behind the rhetoric, although of
course the groups themselves see it differently, in fact have to,
because if your rules aren't better than everyone else's, what's the
point? Or, as I keep seeing and hearing on my TV: 'WE don't
discriminate between US and THEM like THAT group over there'.


Torsten