any account of the Enlightenment that doesn’t acknowedge how those ideas helped build systems of racial and colonial domination is woefully incomplete at best
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[glances at racial domination, native extermination, and the expropriation of land and labor by “enlightened” nations across the globe] hmmmm.....pic.twitter.com/7zUL79Lkpd
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to put it bluntly: racism is an enlightenment idea, whose foundations were laid by key thinkers like Locke and Kant
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this doesn’t make the Enlightenment bad, but it does mean you can’t uncritically say things like “it brought human flourishing.” it brought flourishing for some, domination for others.
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I shouldn't even bother, but "about 300 years ago" is when 'race' as a word meaning "major division of people categorized by physical appearance" was introduced into English. Good thing facts are meaningless in such discussions.
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Who in fuck's name wrote that navel-gazing bullshit?
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Agreed. You could say the same about ancient Greece and Rome too. It's perfectly possible to celebrate the uniqueness of Enlightenment thought without implicitly trashing everything else that came before.
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the idea that anyone who doesn't subscribe to enlightenment liberalism is a "semi-hairless upright ape" is both extremely ahistorical and also very racist
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