Race and the Enlightenment
Sep. 6th, 2008 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylBroadly construed, seventeenth century modernism can be characterized as an intellectual movement that produces three profound shifts. The first is a shift in intellectual autonomy. Transformed into a secular enterprise, the study of philosophy emancipates itself from the tutelage of theology and distinguishes itself as a independent discipline. In the process, it forsakes appeals to canonical and divine authority and becomes self-validating. The second is a shift in focus from theological issues to naturalistic phenomena. And the third is a shift from a scholasticism that focuses on the clarification of received truth to the speculative methodologies of empiricism and rationalism.
Franklin, A.T., "The New Enlightenment: Critical Reflections on the Political Significance of Race", in Simon, R.L., (2002), The Blackwell Guide to Political and Social Philosophy, Blackwell, p.274
The succinctness of Franklin's comment on the Enlightenment is characteristic of the rest of essay &mdash which I heartily recommend — and the elegant way it describes the history of the politicisation of race, from Aristotle to Linnaeus and beyond to modern liberal thinkers.
I was particularly struck by the role of the historian Josephus in the justification of sixteenth century racism. Essentially, this boils down to the fact that Josephus claimed that the populations of the world were descended from Noah's three sons: Japhet (Europe), Shem (Middle East) and Ham (Africa). But when Ham laughed at some indignity of his father's, Noah cursed his son's descendants to be estranged from God. Needless to say, this curse was interpreted as meaning skin colour, and hence that racism could be safely justified on religious grounds.
Just as appalling were the accounts of casual racism from those who you'd think ought to have known better: John Locke and Immanuel Kant. Franklin mentions that although Locke's justifications for slavery after often couched in terms of his views on war — he envisages the ability of victors to enslave those that they have conquered — he appeared only to extend the concept of natural rights to "creatures of the same species and rank". And Kant is just as bad, casually dismissing the advice of a man, something that he notes might not be without merit, on the grounds of his race, and recommending as particularly effective one method of slave beating over another.
And Locke and Kant were two of the greatest liberal thinkers of their age. I wonder which parts of the current liberal consensus our descendants will look back on and shudder; and ask how we, as supposedly enlightened and rational people, could possibly have believed as we do. Animal rights, anyone?
