Re: Enlightenment

--- 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.

While Kant was from the Aufklarung, Hegel wrote in the
Romanticist Period --i.e. post-Enlightenment (although
some see him as part of a late German Enlightenment).
Disraeli and Twain were from the Romantic period. And
Schweitzer was later still.
Briefly, the Romantic period emphasized personal
traits such as will and emotion and a time of intense
nationalism as well as the beginning of
pseudo-scientific racism, anarchy, libertarianism,
etc. A whole course would be needed to plumb this but
this is just a brief look.
The Out of India movement is definitely typical of
Romanticism notions that every nation must have "it's
place in the sun."

>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.

Pseudo-Science --and remember that Romanticism was not
Enlightenment, E emphasized reason, R stressed
emotions.

>
> 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
>
>