Posted on behalf of mothra, unfairly permanently banned with no reason given!



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The Enlightenment’s Dark Side How the Enlightenment created modern race thinking, and why we should confront it. The Enlightenment is having a renaissance, of sorts. A handful of centrist and conservative writers have reclaimed the 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement as a response to nationalism and ethnic prejudice on the right and relativism and “identity politics” on the left. Among them are Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who sees himself as a bulwark against the forces of “chaos” and “postmodernism”; Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist who argues, in Enlightenment Now, for optimism and human progress against those “who despise the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress”; and conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg, who, in Suicide of the West, argues in defense of capitalism and Enlightenment liberalism, twin forces he calls “the Miracle” for creating Western prosperity. In their telling, the Enlightenment is a straightforward story of progress, with major currents like race and colonialism cast aside, if they are acknowledged at all. Divorced from its cultural and historical context, this “Enlightenment” acts as an ideological talisman, less to do with contesting ideas or understanding history, and more to do with identity. It’s a standard, meant to distinguish its holders for their commitment to “rationalism” and “classical liberalism.” But even as they venerate the Enlightenment, these writers actually underestimate its influence on the modern world. At its heart, the movement contained a paradox: Ideas of human freedom and individual rights took root in nations that held other human beings in bondage and were then in the process of exterminating native populations. Colonial domination and expropriation marched hand in hand with the spread of “liberty,” and liberalism arose alongside our modern notions of race and racism. These weren’t incidental developments or the mere remnants of earlier prejudice. Race as we understand it—a biological taxonomy that turns physical difference into relations of domination—is a product of the Enlightenment. Racism as we understand it now, as a socio-political order based on the permanent hierarchy of particular groups, developed as an attempt to resolve the fundamental contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery. Those who claim the Enlightenment’s mantle now should grapple with that legacy and what it means for our understanding of the modern world. To say that “race” and “racism” are products of the Enlightenment is not to say that humans never held slaves or otherwise classified each other prior to the 18th century. Recent scholarship shows how proto- and early forms of modern race thinking (you could call them racialism) existed in medieval Europe, with near-modern forms taking shape in the 15th and 16th centuries. In Spain, for example, we see the turn from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism, where Jewish ancestry itself was grounds for suspicion, versus Jewish practice. And as historian George Fredrickson notes in Racism: A Short History, “the prejudice and discrimination directed at the Irish on one side of Europe and certain Slavic peoples on the other foreshadowed the dichotomy between civilization and savagery that would characterize imperial expansion beyond the European continent.” One can find nascent forms of all of these ideas in antiquity—indeed, early modern thinkers drew from all of these sources to build our notion of race. But it took the scientific thought of the Enlightenment to create an enduring racial taxonomy and the “color-coded, white-over-black” ideology with which we are familiar. This project, undertaken by the leading thinkers of the time, involved “the setting aside of the metaphysical and theological scheme of things for a more logical description and classification that ordered humankind in terms of physiological and mental criteria based on observable ‘facts’ and tested evidence,” as historian Ivan Hannaford wrote in Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s influential 1776 volume On the Natural Varieties of Mankind posited five divisions of humanity, beginning with “Caucasians.” These frameworks evolved into theories of racial difference, developed to square a conceptual circle. If natural rights are universal—if everyone has the capacity to reason—then what is the explanation for enslaved Africans or “savages” in the Americas, who do not seem to act and reason like white Europeans? The answer is biological inferiority, in accordance with those racial classifications.

Cont’d

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Immanuel Kant sketched out a more formalized racial hierarchy in his own anthropological work. “In the hot countries the human being matures earlier in all ways but does not reach the perfection of the temperate zones,” Kant wrote. “Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race … The yellow Indians have a smaller amount of Talent. The Negroes are lower and the lowest are a part of the American peoples.” Elsewhere, Kant asserted that “[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.” This racial theorizing can’t simply be divorced from the moral philosophy for which he’s hailed, since, as the late Emmanuel Eze has noted, it comprised a substantial portion of Kant’s career. Eze writes in “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology”: Kant’s position on the importance of skin color not only as encoding but as proof of this codification of rational superiority or inferiority is evident in a comment he made on the subject of the reasoning capacity of a “black” person. When he evaluated a statement made by an African, Kant dismissed the statement with the comment: “this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” It cannot, therefore, be argued that skin color for Kant was merely a physical characteristic. It is, rather, evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable moral quality Eze’s re-examination in the 1990s kicked off a flood of research and dialogue—some critical, some supportive. Either way, it is fair to say that Kant’s race theorizing matters for how we understand the history of race. On this point, philosopher Robert Bernasconi is blunt: “[Kant] supplied the first scientific definition of race; he promoted this definition when it was challenged, and he saw it adopted by some of the leading students of human varieties at that time.” John Locke precedes Kant, but his work also shows the influence of early modern racial thinking. In “The Contradictions of Racism: Locke, Slavery, and the Two Treatises,” Bernasconi and Anika Maaza Mann present the pre-eminent liberal philosopher as an architect of the race-based slavery developing in the American colonies during the mid–17th century. At a time when religious conversion could spare an African or Native American from permanent servitude, Locke wrote a provision in The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina—the governing document for the colony that would become North Carolina and South Carolina—that specified that slaves could be “of what opinion or Religion soever … But yet, no Slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his Master has over him, but be in all other things in the same State and condition he was in before.” About the same time, when there was still widespread debate over the treatment of enslaved people, Locke changed a clause in that constitution to give slave owners “absolute power and Authority” (versus “absolute Authority”) over their slaves, giving them full rein to treat slaves as they pleased. It is true that, in his Two Treatises on Government, Locke proclaimed himself an opponent of “slavery.” But this “slavery” refers to the political domination of an absolute monarch. In the second of the treatises, Locke provides a justification for slavery as a result of war, using the same “absolute power” language that grants slave owners the power of life and death over their slaves. While his argument doesn’t fit the hereditary chattel slavery taking shape in the Americans, it was nonetheless used to justify the practice. For Bernasconi and Mann, the Locke of the Two Treatises must be read in dialogue with the Locke of the The Fundamental Constitutions, and can’t be bracketed from his role as a colonial administrator and investor in the slave trade. This Locke, they argue, must be understood as concerned mainly “with the freedom and prosperity of Englishmen, and not troubled if they were gained at the expense of Africans.” One can make a similar argument with regard to Native Americans. In Liberalism: A Counter-History, Domenico Losurdo notes how “the Second Treatise makes repeated reference to the ‘wild Indian,’ who moved around ‘insolent and injurious in the woods of America’ or the ‘vacant places of America.’ ” For Locke, “God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit and for the greatest conveniences of life they could get from it, he can’t have meant it always to remain common and uncultivated.” In the context of English settlement, it’s an argument for theft. It should be said that this view is contested. Recent scholarship challenges this vision of Locke—situating him in a broader conversation that leaves him less tolerant of slavery than he appears. Still, as one of the widely read thinkers of the period, his work remained influential to slaveholders, including the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, and the Framers of the Constitution, for whom racial slavery and native expropriation were compatible with natural rights and representative government. Decades later, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun would appeal to Locke in his defense of individual liberties and attacks on “absolute governments” that turn “the governed” into “the slaves of the rulers.” Calhoun’s cause, of course, was slavery.

Con

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For modern-day philosopher Charles Mills, this joint march of liberalism and white supremacy—whether Locke’s social contract or Kant’s moral theory—supports the notion of an implicit “racial contract” undergirding the Enlightenment project. “[T]he Racial Contract establishes a racial polity, a racial state, and a racial juridical system, where the status of whites and nonwhites is clearly demarcated, whether by law or custom. And the purpose of this state … is specifically to maintain and reproduce this racial order, securing the privileges and advantages of the full white citizens and maintaining the subordination of nonwhites.” As European powers spread across the globe, they used racial notions of personhood—pioneered by Enlightenment thinkers—to justify brutality and domination as the march of “civilization.” This paradox between Enlightenment liberalism and racial domination was well-recognized from the beginning. “You Americans make a great Clamour upon every little imaginary infringement of what you take to be your Liberties; and yet there are no People upon Earth such Enemies to Liberty, such absolute Tyrants, where you have the Opportunity, as you yourselves are,” jeered one English interlocutor to Benjamin Franklin in 1764. Responding to the first American Continental Congress in 1774, Samuel Johnson replied to “no taxation without representation” with, “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?” Criticizing England’s role in the slave trade in 1776, Josiah Tucker wrote that “We … the boasted Patrons of Liberty, and the professed Advocates for the natural Rights of Mankind, engage deeper in this murderous inhuman Traffic than any Nation whatever.” Writers of African ancestry at the time, like Baron de Vastey of Haiti, made note of the hypocrisy of Enlightenment philosophers. Arguably, the only Enlightenment revolution to do justice to its universal aspirations was the Haitian Revolution, whose authors—like Toussaint L’Ouverture—appealed to those values as they fought slavery and colonialism to establish self-governance. Today’s popular discourse on the Enlightenment ignores this contradiction and its modern manifestations, seen in the persistence of race hierarchy in the world’s oldest democracy. Some self-proclaimed defenders of Enlightenment ideals have even gone so far as to ridicule the idea of a connection between the Enlightenment and our modern ideas of race and racial hierarchy, as if the scholarship didn’t exist. This isn’t just unfortunate, it’s ironic—a betrayal of the higher principles of the Enlightenment, of the commitment to evidence, observation, reason, and deliberation. It’s also dangerous. We still live in a world shaped by Enlightenment ideas of race and white supremacy. These notions of inherent inferiority still hold purchase in our society. And political liberalism is still too compatible with both. The path to a truly universal liberalism—one that can actually liberate—demands that we grapple with its ugly heritage. To confront the paradox of the Enlightenment is to take its values seriously; to dismiss it is to prefer hagiography to truth.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html?utm_content=inf_990_2641_2&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=socialedge&utm_source=Facebook&tse_id=INF_9c8fe3b0693c11e88bf25767f9c122ea

This might tax the brain cells of some and cause lip pain to others.

Kant? ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

That supposed to mean something, roach? Got a deep insight you care to share?



Oh boy, this’ll be good!

Troll...  you need to flame harder than that...

I have no doubt many have opinions on Kant.

Feel free to voice yours like I did mine.  That might be on topic for a change.

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At its heart, the movement contained a paradox: Ideas of human freedom and individual rights took root in nations that held other human beings in bondage and were then in the process of exterminating native populations.

That's the world that the enlightenment emerged from. It's only a paradox to idiots who think Europe invented slavery.

You didn’t read it either then FD. No wonder you banned mothra without having a reason!

The Enlightenment VALIDATED the idea of slavery by inventing race.

We now know, from the Human Genome Project, that the idea of race is wrong, the tiny genetic differences do not amount to a race.

Jovial Monk wrote on Jun 7^th, 2018 at 9:05am:

... FD. No wonder you banned mothra without having a reason!

Mention #936

Quote:

The Enlightenment VALIDATED the idea of slavery by inventing race.

Races also existed prior to the enlightenment.

Enlightened people value the free exchange of ideas. To equate the whole movement with any particular one of those ideas is a simpleton's critique.

It was enlightenment Europe and it's colonies that ended global slavery and rejected racism.

The Enlightenment validated those idea.

Any reason you banned mothra and JS? If no reason how about lifting the ban and apologising to them?

Jovial Monk wrote on Jun 7^th, 2018 at 8:23am:

Posted on behalf of mothra, unfairly permanently banned with no reason given!

FD, are you going to allow this POS to rub your nose in it?

Race wasn't invented...  it exists even today... ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

FD. . .?


Hello Snotball.

Jovial Monk wrote on Jun 7^th, 2018 at 9:09am:

Any reason you banned mothra and JS? If no reason how about lifting the ban and apologising to them?

Mention #937

Jovial Monk wrote on Jun 7^th, 2018 at 9:12am:

FD. . .? Hello Snotball.

G'day POS!

FD. . .? Time to unban mothra and JS?

It is obvious from your silence that there was no good reason for the ban in the first place.

AiA wrote on Jun 7^th, 2018 at 9:06am:

Jovial Monk wrote on Jun 7th, 2018 at 9:05am: ... FD. No wonder you banned mothra without having a reason! Mention #936

have you noticed there is always a serious mocking or even damn right insults   to anyone who dares to have an opinion..... ;D ;D ;D

I have noticed with dear monk   he puts up these threads   dark and mysterious  meant to make grown men weep.....but never explains his own  interpretation on the matter at hand.......

just snide little put downs wherever  of ozpol members.......


can you see the link AiA?

now he wants an apology from fd  ... for banning two people who happen to be members of his own site   hilarious....



from some one who has done his fare share in that dept.... :)

why would fd  apologise to these people  who never has a nice word to say about ozpol or its members??

perhaps monk should read some of their [nasty] comments on this site...and its members ....


I think its also time fd told someone its none of his business...maybe SHUT UP... would work... ::) ::)

Jovial Monk wrote on Jun 7^th, 2018 at 9:14am:

FD. . .? Time to unban mothra and JS? It is obvious from your silence that there was no good reason for the ban in the first place.

what ever makes you think he needs to give YOU a reason?....

for someone who spat the worst dummy spit at ozpol....


you sure have tickets on yourself ;D ;D ;D ;D

cods thinks [doubtful] that it is OK to ban people permanently for no reason. I assume if she was to cop a ban for no reason she wouldn’t like it.

FD is still logged on.

How about it, FD, either a reason for the permanent ban of mothra and JS or you unban them.

Christ all this on a topic on the Enlightenment!

This is what YOU posted ^^^^ FD:

Quote:

Enlightened people value the free exchange of ideas.

How about allowing JS and mothra to freely exchange their ideas?

it is a form of child abuse to not tell young aboriginal children to be proud of their heritage
it is a form of child abuse to not tell young cherokee or sioux or unuit children to be proud of their heritage.

the heritage of young western children is the enlightenment and they should be taught to be proud of that. they should be proud of the heroic figures like captain cook and neil armstrong and louis pasteur and henry ford and  leonardo de vinci.

young western children should be bursting with pride.

only a hateful and resentful numpty with severe pyschological issues would tell a western child to apologise or feel shame for being a member of a certain class,

there is no worse idea then class guilt.

it is maoist and stalinist. it resulted in the deaths of 160 million people in the last century.

grow up and stop abusing our young kids and making them more prone to anxiety depression and suicide with this child abusive narrative of "western guilt".

conservatives need to teach "western pride".

i'm proud of the west and ashamed that the likes of mothra are trying to pollute the next generation

More psychobabble.

I will put you in the running for the BatShit Crazy award, ’scoot.

Done! Here: https://tinyurl.com/y8v4fxur

(link to my board)

Jovial Monk wrote on Jun 7^th, 2018 at 10:12am:

More psychobabble. I will put you in the running for the BatShit Crazy award, ’scoot.

i'll tell you what is Batshit crazy.

for a parent to tell their child to be ashamed of their heritage.

i dont think there is a worse idea then that  >:( >:(

As to FD banning mothra, I am pretty sure that mothra warned FD he was leaving himself open to litigation. FD took that as a threat of litigation (doubtless influenced by a perfect barrage of PMs from the sewer) and banned mothra.

It was a warning, FD, one you seem to have heeded. All the more reason to unban mothra and apologise for the ban.

I don’t know why JS copped a permanent ban but it too would be for a bullshit reason.

Come on, FD, do the right thing!

Neither mothra nor JS did anything like as reprehensible as Naffy disclosing Aussie’s details for which she received only a one month ban.

cods wrote on Jun 7^th, 2018 at 9:26am:

Jovial Monk wrote on Jun 7th, 2018 at 9:14am: FD. . .? Time to unban mothra and JS? It is obvious from your silence that there was no good reason for the ban in the first place. what ever makes you think he needs to give YOU a reason?.... for someone who spat the worst dummy spit at ozpol.... you sure have tickets on yourself ;D ;D ;D ;D

Good for you Cods, I agree with you 100%.

I assume JM and Aia are the same person? They certainly sound the same.
Dunning Kruger sprigs sharply to mind.

No we are not the same person. AiA is a slimy slug.

I think it is unfair they were banned permanently—many do far worse things and sometimes don’t even get a one day suspension.

Naffy disclosed a shitload of Aussie’s personal details and got a one month ban.

And here we are talking about the Enlightenment and as FD says “the free exchange of ideas.” Free exchange of ideas for FD’s pals only?

back on topic then eh?


Grendel wrote on Jun 7^th, 2018 at 8:38am:

Kant? ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

Jovial Monk wrote on Jun 7^th, 2018 at 8:25am:

This might tax the brain cells of some and cause lip pain to others.

Jamelle Bouie

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5005bd5824ac859904572da0/t/5846d8b6e3df28b1563db437/1481038025428/?format=750w

Just the guy you want to be lectured by on European Enlightenment and ideas.