8th February 2004, 11:14 PM
Quote:One thing ABF. When you say "the Enlightenment" like that, with the capital letter, and the huge superiority thing, it makes people want to hurt you . I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to say this, but I'm the first who actually WILL. The idea that we are such an incredibly "enlightened" society, superior to the "barbaric savages" of the past (and don't disagree here, the second you claim us as enlightened, you are automatically labelling all previous cultures as savages), is EXACTLY what Europe did so long ago, and remember what happened there? Entire peoples were labelled savages and considered less than human because of it. While I can agree that certain values CAN be absolutely better than others, in fact that's a part of my belief system, it's simply terrible to have this "we are enlightened compaired to those monsters" mindset. Sets you up for a huge ego of "I can do no wrong", and eventually it can cause you to treat primitive cultures horribly. And don't go on about violence, it's not just that. Deciding that someone from a primitive culture needs to be "coddled" or "trained in the ways of civilized society" while being given stares of "oh that poor misguided creature" is just as much an example of xenophobic hatred as the more violent things one can do.
*note -- I know this post is confused and doesn't really make connecting sense, but oh well the effort to fix it wouldn't be worth it... :D
Umm... the Enlightenment was a philosophical and eventually social movement, like the Renaissance before it... 1700s, when as I said we started really moving towards democracy. It doesn't say other people are wrong... you are right Europe was hardly perfect. But it's where our intellectual tradition comes from. And by the 1700s Europe WAS the most powerful part of the world... so its ideas mattered more than just their weight in the number of people in the area.
Look, hunter-gatherers were happy as hunter-gatherers because they know nothing better. Up until the British colonized Austrailia the Aborigines were hunter-gatherers... but the British wiped many of them out and the ones that were left were forced to stop. Now when you just uproot a people and try to settle them it doesn't work -- they need the base to be able to cope there and they don't have it so they'd be miserable... so you can't do that. But, I'd say, it is also wrong to leave them exactly as they are in some ways... it is irresponsible to not get better medical care to people if you can provide it, for instance.
But the question really is 'how civilized was this society'. Are we talking about Aborigines or Bushmen here, or are we talking, say, the people of India who had a high-level civilization that just wasn't able to hold off the Europeans... saying that people are worse than you just because their beliefs are different is obviously wrong, as is saying that your way of life is the best... but you have a point if there are concrete things that are objectively better -- like modern medical care. Or if nothing can be done to save their original way of life (in its natural state), given how humans are...
Yes, Europe did many very bad things in its colonies. That much is very, very obvious. And they took their technological superiority as moral/religious superiority too... that is not right. But is it always wrong to try to make things better for people who do not have things? No! Destroying native ways of life... very tricky issue. On the one hand you don't want to get rid of a culture... ideally you'd let the culture develop on its own and have it grow its own way towards change and betterment, but we just don't have that luxury living in the real world for the most part... given how human nature is often not very nice.
But this is all beside the point... I mean, how is the Enlightenment the cause of all this? Imperialism (and all its faults) started before it after all...