1/This case against Steve Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" - i.e., that the Enlightenment created modern racism - has gotten a huge amount of attention and approval. But I want to push back against it just a bit.https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1004144583360557056 …
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2/It's true that many of the people we call "Enlightenment" thinkers - Kant, Hume, etc. - said racist things. But does that mean those racist things are part of "the Enlightenment"? Pinker et al. would say "no".
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3/Now, that argument - i.e. that "the Enlightenment" represents a set of good ideas that we moderns get to pick and choose - has a flavor of "No True Scotsman" to it. It's not fair to defend an ideology by limiting its definition to the subset that we feel is defensible!
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4/But it IS a worthwhile exercise to distill good ideas from historical intellectual movements, while discarding the bad ones. Ideas should not be package deals. We should get to choose which lessons we learn and which we repudiate. Otherwise, philosophy becomes religion.
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5/So Pinker et al. SHOULD get to define "The Enlightenment" to exclude the racism of Kant, Hume, etc., as long as they make it clear that this is what they're doing. And doing this should disallow Pinker et al. from making arguments-from-authority.
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6/Now, it ALSO might be the case that even the Enlightenment ideas that Pinker praises might be inextricably bound up with racism. But I don't think Bouie (or Heer) has made that case successfully, yet.
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Jamelle wrote: "Race as we understand it—a biological taxonomy that turns physical difference into relations of domination—is a product of the Enlightenment."
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Replying to @Noahpinion @UpsetPatterns and
Now, if you define "the Enlightenment" as a historical time period, or as the sum of all statements by Kant, Hume, etc., then this might be true. But if you define "the Enlightenment" as the subset of ideas Pinker advances, then this also might be true, but needs more evidence.
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The first two definitions (historical period of time & thoughts of Kant, etc) is how scholars use the word Enlightenment for many decades. To define Enlightenment as just "whatever Pinker pulls out his ass" is to have a very peculiar definition.
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Yes, with the exception that "pulls out of his ass" doesn't seem like a good characterization of what Pinker is doing. I think he's trying to isolate a subset of Enlightenment-era ideas he feels is conceptually coherent, and call that "The Enlightenment".
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Replying to @Noahpinion @HeerJeet and
If only Neil Postman were still around to set him straight.
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