Thread by @JeffreyASachs

A few days late to the @jbouie Enlightenment kerfuffle, but here's my scorching hot take. Also my attempt to respond to some of critiques by @CathyYoung63, @ortoiseortoise, etc.

"Hey idiot, Antiquity/Medieval people were already super racist."

Not in the same way, and that matters. E.g. here's a good discussion of what was going on in Europe during the Middle Ages.

publicmedievalist.com/medieval-peopl…

Or take this image. It's the frontispiece to Athanasius Kircher's "China Illustrata" (1667), an encyclopedia-cum-travel guide for aspiring missionaries. Look how dignified the two mandarins are, how respectfully rendered.

Or check this drawing of Cusco, depicted by Pedro Cieza de Leon in his Cronicas del Peru (1553). Pure propaganda. Conquistador-ing is expensive, so he's trying to show how friendly and reasonable - "just like us!" - the Inca were.

It's hard to credit now, the Black Legend and all, but early Spanish colonialism placed much less emphasis on race (and much more on religion) than subsequent empires.* Anthony Pagden traces this super clearly.

* Yes, experts. I know.

yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030007…

Now savvy this peach of a pic from Judge Magazine (1899). Same message (go forth and civilize!), but an unbridgeable chasm separates them.

Except it was bridged. That's where the Enlightenment comes in.

Here's my take on it. The gist is that once you say everyone has a rational faculty (idiots, madmen, and those in their nonage, a la Locke, excluded), you need to explain why not everyone uses it.

External Tweet loading...
If nothing shows, it may have been deleted
by @JeffreyASachs view original on Twitter

Because clearly not all do, otherwise they'd all live like you!

The upshot is that Enlightenment liberalism (not synonymous with the Enlightenment writ large) needs a theory of difference.

For a variety of historically contingent reasons (as opposed to the parts of history that aren't contingent?), race and racism became that theory. And from that --> empire/colonialism/scientific racism.

Side note: that's why Jordan Peterson is spewing hot diarrhea when he argues that because of Stalin, everything descended from Marx is tainted. By that logic, classical liberalism, via Bentham, the Mills, etc., is tainted by colonialism. This is intellectual history for children.

But anyway, why should we care about any of this? Here are three more pics. The first is a British ad (1920s), the second is from French Algeria (1950s), and the third is obvious. But actually, they all say the same thing: we can force you to be free.

"Your differences are *obstacles* to rationality, but we can rebuild you. We have the technology." That's what the Enlightenment hath wrought. An account of racial difference that licenses conquest.

Everyone has a rational faculty, they just need to be compelled via bayonet point/Residential Schooling into using it. It's that simple.

NARRATOR: It wasn't that simple, but this was Twitter and people understood. Also, it helps to answer this question.

External Tweet loading...
If nothing shows, it may have been deleted
by @conor64 view original on Twitter

If you're really interested, Jennifer Pitts has the receipts. A pdf of the Introduction can be found here:

thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5238N.pdf

press.princeton.edu/titles/7967.ht…

2nd Side note: "But what about non-European racists? They were racist too!"

Maybe. For instance, Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801-1873) called the Sudanese "a blackness in a blackness in a blackness" and likened them to animals. He didn't need Europe to teach him how to hate.

And again, it was all about licensing empire. But Tahtawi's bigotry was tethered to manners, dress, food, speech, etc. Physical form was incidental. It wasn't really about race as such. It was culture.

ucpress.edu/book/978052023…

Ditto with Greek antiquity, where the relevant marker wasn't race, but rather citizenship in a polis. That's why "white" Athenian women, who couldn't be citizens, enjoyed the same political status as slaves. (Though the evidence is spotty and I don't really understand the lit).

tl;dr: Bouie is right about the link between the Enlightenment and racism. But it would be a mistake (one I don't believe he actually makes) to think that racism *exhausts* the Enlightenment's legacy, or even that there was just one Enlightenment.

press.princeton.edu/titles/7669.ht…

But the exceptions prove the rule. We live in a world filled with difference. For a philosophy with universalistic pretension, that's a pretty significant problem. Racism offered a solution.