
The Enlightenment bull market and its decolonial future - pepys
http://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/kingshistory/2015/10/27/the-enlightenment-bull-market-and-its-decolonial-future/
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vlehto
Starts good. The idea that enlightenment is constructed later doesn't even
surprise me too much. Cohesive political movements usually have some sort of
geopolitical motivation behind them. And that element seems to be missing from
the enlightenment. It seems weird to label long period of time just because
there happened to be individual smart people thinking great ideas relatively
separately. Socrates, Buddha and Confucius we're alive at the same time, yet
we don't call that "age of philosophy".

>"unbearable whiteness of the Enlightenment"

This is weird. If you wish to strip history from it's later constructs, it's
really weird you label something "too white". Smells like political agenda
more than truth seeking. Colonialism and enlightenment happened at the same
time. Was that really news to anybody?

This get's bit off topic. I'm ashamed to say, but I really don't understand
this "accomplishment is too white" sentiment. If I try I get two alternatives:

A) Somebody is envious.

B) Somebody thinks pride is a sin, and the master race should purify itself
from sin. To show the barbarians how much better the master race is.
(Unconsciously of course but anyhow.)

~~~
pjc50
_Colonialism and enlightenment happened at the same time. Was that really news
to anybody?_

Only if you stop and think about it for a second: the use of "enlightenment"
to refer to a set of ideas about freedom and liberty which were in practice
only extended to white men. The only way to reconcile the "we the people" of
the US constitution with the actual historical facts is to assume that the
drafters meant that people == white men. Because the rights weren't extended
equally to women, slaves, or Indians.

You've substituted "accomplishment" for "enlightenment", which isn't the same
thing. The article refers to the Enlightenment in the context of its modern
marketing campaign: why are people talking about the Enlightenment so much
now? He postulates that this is in contrast to Islam, as part of current habit
of painting the West as morally and racially superior to the people of the
near East.

> _" The apotheosis of this turn came in the early Twenty-First Century, when
> Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis identified “Enlightenment values” with
> the prosecution of the “Global War on Terror”. And so, it appeared, we came
> to bomb and torture in defence of the Enlightenment."_

There's also an assault on the "Whig view of history", an old academic hobby
horse; a reminder of the importance of the Haitian revolution; and a general
call to seek out and include in the Enlightenment canon those who were an
important influence on it but not white or European.

~~~
JanezStupar
Yet you and the others presenting this argument conveniently forget that not
all white men were free and privileged - and that these progressive thinkers
of the day, naturally strived to free and uplift those that were closest to
them and mostly visible to them.

Also you forget that not all people of colour were slaves and that not all
slaves were of colour. You also ignore the fact that most slaves were bought
and purchased by non whites.

Applying modern zeitgeist and morals to different historic periods is wrong at
best.

~~~
nemo
Enlightenment ideals of liberty were not universally applied, but only to a
limited in-group deemed worthy. That in-group was primarily wealthy white men
and not all (hence the American States originally granting the vote to male
property owners as well as adding race requirements), but that doesn't really
change anything about the point of the article or the point of the person
you're replying to, but rather illustrates it.

~~~
s_baby
If you gave every 18th century American a vote there would be an official
church in every state along with all the marginalization/oppression that
brings along. Not extending the vote was part of the checks and balances
negotiated as a result. Right or wrong it was a valid existential problem for
a young democracy.

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javajosh
It's amusing to me that works of criticism like this are jam-packed with the
same questionable labels that it seeks to debunk. German Jews, white
Americans, Trancendentalists, Cold War liberalism, Anti-Communists,
Marxists...

Who are these people? Why are these labels any less problematic that the label
of "Enlightenment" assigned to a certain group of philosophers in the 18th
century Europe?

~~~
knagra
Those labels are less problematic because they are much better defined (e.g.,
"German Jews" == persons who practice(s|d) Judaism in Germany), self-applied
labels (e.g., anti-Communist), or a combination of both (Cold War liberalism).

~~~
javajosh
The question of what counts as "Jewish" is, itself, incredibly complex. As for
self-applied labels, what does that even mean? If you call yourself something
once, are you that thing forever? Do you even know what it implies to call
yourself "Anti-Communist"?

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laglad
It could be that the rise of 'enlightenment' word occurences in the 1960s
refers to the enlightenment as the Buddhists and Zen practitioners speak of it
instead of the European context of the word. The rise would map with the
counterculture movement of those times which we're still living in.

~~~
lsy
I thought this might be the case too, but the n-grams for "enlightenment",
"Enlightenment", "the Enlightenment", and "The Enlightenment", etc. are all
quite different. Lowercase "enlightenment" doesn't show the same pattern as
capital-E or with the definite article.

