Can we connect philosophy with racism?

[coberst]

Can we connect philosophy with racism?

In Antebellum South the white man would not work for anyone because he considered laboring for hire made him no better than the black slave and his superiority to the black man was essential to his self-esteem. There was no labor class in the Antebellum South. The slaves did the labor but the slave was a capital investment just like a horse or oxen. Here was a total society without a laboring class.

What were some of the effects of no free labor in the South? The most important factor I suspect was that the ordinary white man felt any labor was beneath his dignity. This lack of ‘free labor’ led to many of the characteristics of the Southern man and woman that probably is a factor today in the still distinctive character of the Southerner.

I think that the wheel might be a useful analogy for understanding the mind of the South. The spokes of the wheel represent the essential components of all societies--economy, law and culture. The hub to which all spokes focus is labor. The Antebellum South revolved around slave labor.

Classical Athenians “believed that to render any form of service, especially the physical, to another man in return for money, even if only for a short time, was a form of slavery, and unacceptable to a free man”.

Ideology universalizes, absolutises, and reifies (makes an object of) abstract concepts. The ideological group converts its concrete experiences and its abstract concepts into universal standards (a form of philosophy?) for the whole society.

A society like our own, in which there exists free labor that “sells” its skills, capacities, and activities to another, must find a means of defining humans in such a way that such individuals can still feel like complete and free individuals even though they sell part of them self to another.

How does a society define the human essence in such a way that the individual “sells” only that which is alienable to him or her while maintaining the essence of a free individual?

“In order to say that his freedom is not compromised when his abilities, skills, and activities are placed at another man’s disposal, he had to be defined in the barest possible manner.”

If a person’s skills, capacities, and activities are alienable to her what is his essence that may be considered to be unalienable? Capitalism, wherein labor is commodified and thus faces this problem, has located the human essence as being the capacity for freedom of choice and will.

“The individual was, above all, an agent. As long as he was not physically overpowered, hypnotized, or otherwise deprived of his powers of choice and will, his actions were uniquely his, and therefore his sole responsibility. It did not matter how painful his alternatives were, how much his character had been distorted by his background and upbringing and how much his capacities of choice and will were debilitated by his circumstances.”

This description seems much like what we Americans now use to assuage our guilt when consciously considering the death and dismemberment, physical and mental (PTSD), of our soldiers serving, dying, and being fragmented in our war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Quotes from Marx’s Theory of Ideology by Bhikhu Parekh

[UFO420]

This is really interesting. That book looks good. But I don't think that philosophy was used to justify slavery in the South. Slavery there was already institutionalized. Indentured servitude was the primary means with which the (English) colonies were established. Only after slavery became a means of profit was something needed to allow it morally. And they relied on traditional ideas of what free men were to show that blacks didn't have the physical or mental capacities to be free and therefore somehow inferior. But they failed to realize that their perceived inferiority or disadvantages were the result of the conditions they had been introduced to for centuries.

[coberst]

UFO



The connection between philosophy and racism exists in the discipline called CT (Critical Thinking). Philosophy might appropriately be said to be about radically critical self-consciousness. CT is the art and science of good judgment and can, in my opinion, be considered as 'philosophy lite'. Social theory becomes an ideology when CT is not part of the general attitude of a population.

A population that is unskilled in CT cannot be easily reasoned with and thus the leaders use emotional appeal. Thus the low level of sophistication becomes permanent in a democracy. If the population does not have a level of sophistication to recognize that they are not sufficiently sophisticated then they may not have the ability to become sophisticated. A vicious circle ensues.

Does this not insure the destruction of the human species when its technology reaches a critical level of too much power in the hands of too many fools?

[blazeofglory]

Of course racism is associated with philosophies. In India there are too many castes and creeds and they have different races based on religions, ethnicity and origins in point of fact.

As a matter of fact they fight based on their ways of thinking and today more than ever before we see people engaged in fighting in the name of religions, castes and creeds and this has a great deal to do with races.

They use a particular philosophy to indoctrinate people,

[mono]

Just as Sophism exists as a branch of philosophy, so racism can have some sort of connection to philosophy. How else could something even nearly as cruel and degrading as the Jim Crow laws made so much progress? The Southern U.S. rule of the mid-19th century managed to extend this idea that individuals of African descent owned such a strong inferiority to those of European descent (in terms of intellect, primarily) that they created laws prohibiting their rights, contradictory to so-written "God-given" rights in such documents as the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Indepedence - one prime example of Sophism. Indeed, coberst, I agree, considering the diversities of branches in philosophy, a philosopher can clearly write something racist (such as the anti-semitic themes of Schopenhauer) or anti-racist (Emerson, for one), or an interpreter of virtually any philosopher could likely twist the words enough to sway them this way or that; this can occur on an almost daily basis of religious texts, in a most extreme example, seeming one of many reasons why so many subsidaries of Christianity exist.

Classical Athenians “believed that to render any form of service, especially the physical, to another man in return for money, even if only for a short time, was a form of slavery, and unacceptable to a free man”.

Ideology universalizes, absolutises, and reifies (makes an object of) abstract concepts. The ideological group converts its concrete experiences and its abstract concepts into universal standards (a form of philosophy?) for the whole society.

A society like our own, in which there exists free labor that “sells” its skills, capacities, and activities to another, must find a means of defining humans in such a way that such individuals can still feel like complete and free individuals even though they sell part of them self to another.
Agreed, this can seem a bit of a "catch-22," for how can one perform a job well, devoid of mediocrity, without feeling like a slave? I feel like I have referred to him a lot, but Plato, also a classic Athenian, wrote in The Republic most inspiringly that every citizen of an ideal performed his/her role, detailing the tri-partite state. Philosopher-kings, basically the government, identified these roles and placed a citizen where s/he belonged in this triangular idealistic state, hence making it a government-controlled state, but composed of a government of "higher" thinkers, philosophers. How a citizen may not feel to have succumbed to slavery, even in a pre-Kantian sense, involves fulfilling one's duty with the intention of doing well, thereby the paycheck, whether getting paid in cattle or direct-deposit into Wells Fargo, feels deserved. Slavery in this idealistic government-controlled society? Hardly, for the citizens, even in Plato's Republic, still had an indepedent choice on their occupations, but would still fit into some category of the tri-partite state (productive, protective, and rule), deemed by the governing rulers.

“The individual was, above all, an agent. As long as he was not physically overpowered, hypnotized, or otherwise deprived of his powers of choice and will, his actions were uniquely his, and therefore his sole responsibility. It did not matter how painful his alternatives were, how much his character had been distorted by his background and upbringing and how much his capacities of choice and will were debilitated by his circumstances.”

This description seems much like what we Americans now use to assuage our guilt when consciously considering the death and dismemberment, physical and mental (PTSD), of our soldiers serving, dying, and being fragmented in our war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
No doubt, this sounds like a slave to me, and it sounds as though Parekh details it in this manner, too. Just as in Plato's Republic, many individuals choose whether or not to enroll in such a protective (the middle tier of the tri-partite state) occupation, such as a soldier, but too many governments end up utilizing its volunteers more like children playing with brainless marbles receiving orders to get flung this way and that, which has made me question the intelligence of some volunteers, who often regret serving and fulfilling their duties (Kant); then again, this comes from a more anti-militant individual, who does not believe in using people as blunt instruments.
Well said, coberst. :)

[blazeofglory]

Of course racism has to do with literature too

For example in pro-Hitler Germany he took side of the literature that could fuel his ideas of racism or he delivered high-pitched speeches that had a style to mesmerize the audience.

[Uberzensch]

A population that is unskilled in CT cannot be easily reasoned with and thus the leaders use emotional appeal. Thus the low level of sophistication becomes permanent in a democracy. If the population does not have a level of sophistication to recognize that they are not sufficiently sophisticated then they may not have the ability to become sophisticated. A vicious circle ensues.

Does this not insure the destruction of the human species when its technology reaches a critical level of too much power in the hands of too many fools?

Wow, you think pretty highly of yourself there, coberst! Please explain to me how your statement about sophistication is any different from any other form of "they know not what they do" or false consciousness. How is this any different from any other ideologue trying to show us "the way"?

[amarna]

Can we connect philosophy with racism?

Actually you can connect philosophy to anything and everything if you try. Anyway, I remember two racist philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th century, Gobineau and Chamberlain. Gobineau's theory had a rather colonial touch, connecting ideas about a hierarchy of phenotypes and skin pigmentation with social darwinism. Chamberlain extended Gobineau's simple white-yellow-black-racism with anti-semitic elements and lots of paranoia and wagnerian pong and became court philosopher of Hitler. Don't know if they were referring to Plato anywhere, maybe, but I think it wasn't their focus.


anti-semitic themes of Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer an anti-semite? This throws me for a loop.

[coberst]

Wow, you think pretty highly of yourself there, coberst! Please explain to me how your statement about sophistication is any different from any other form of "they know not what they do" or false consciousness. How is this any different from any other ideologue trying to show us "the way"?

We must constantly make judgments. There are bad judgments, good judgments, and better judgments. However, it is just not a willey-nlley matter. There are means for judging the value of judgments.

[March Hare]

In Antebellum South the white man would not work for anyone because he considered laboring for hire made him no better than the black slave and his superiority to the black man was essential to his self-esteem. There was no labor class in the Antebellum South.

The most important factor I suspect was that the ordinary white man felt any labor was beneath his dignity.


This is a bit of a generalization. Most whites did not own slaves and therefore had to perform some kind of labor.

[coberst]

This is a bit of a generalization. Most whites did not own slaves and therefore had to perform some kind of labor.

Learning is a process of moving from the particular to the general.

Of course they worked for them self. They did not work for another person except in rare cases. There was little industry in the South at that time. There was subsistence farming.

The most enlightening book that best answered my questions was the book “The Mind of the South” by W.J. Cash. Cash says-- “With an intense individualism, which the frontier atmosphere put into the man of the South also comes violence and an idealistic, hedonistic romanticism. This romanticism is also fueled by the South conflict with the Yankee. Violence manifests itself in mob action, such as lynching, and private dealings.”