I dealt with this in my thread. I think it's a good thing to be able to pick and choose what we like from idea-packages, as long as we make clear that that's what we're doing, and avoid argument-from-authority.
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The problem is that this particular idea package is historically bound up in some very ugly stuff that stretched the whole of [checks timeline of the modern "West"] 400 years.
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I think "historically bound up in" is an inaccurate phrase that elides the question of whether the association was causal or not; yet this distinction is crucial to the question of whether Pinker's conception of "the Enlightenment" must grapple with racism.
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so the only way Pinker would have to deal with race and racism is if you can show a direct causal link, i.e., "I, Alexander Stephens, read Hegel and therefore I think slavery is good."
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Replying to @jbouie @Noahpinion and
this is absolute madness, btw. slavery, colonialism, apartheid are major parts of modern history. the fact that they co-existed with liberalism is, on its face, a reason to delve deeply. to argue otherwise is to essentially say that you're doing philosophy for white people.
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Yes, we should delve deeply. But what does "delving deeply" mean? It means looking for causal connections between ideas and actions, between ideas and other ideas, etc. I don't think we've delved that deeply yet. (I'm sure someone out there has.)
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no, it completely flattens inquiry to reduce investigation to a search for "cause and effect"
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Finding cause and effect, rather than temporal association or correlation, is exactly what I think is necessary if you want to really delve deeply into the association between, say, rights-based egalitarianism and slavery/colonialism.
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Historians have been working on that for quite some time. None of this is a mystery. Here's one of many examples.https://books.google.com/books?id=cgSBbsjUrAAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=slavery+enlightenment&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjC9OTe2L_bAhUlilQKHcuxDbAQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=slavery%20enlightenment&f=false …
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Yeah, the literature on stuff like Locke's impact on slavery & Native rights is extensive. But it's not even necessary for making the basic point we should complexity of Enlightenment even if we're constructing a usable past.
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Yeah, I'm confused by the exact terms of this debate, but saying that a) the Enlightenment(s) gave us systematized racism and rationalized slavery and b) the people involved saw zero contradiction between that and their (admirable) other work is pretty straightforward
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