(Posted to FB by Jairus Banaji.)
“Most of the old divisions of the human species have long been rejected
anyhow. Noah's sons, the four parts of the world, the four colours,
white, black, yellow, copper red—who still thinks of these outdated
fashions today?” (Georg Forster, 1789)
(Well, most of Trump’s 70 million-odd supporters do, and beyond them
considerable numbers of racial and religious bigots in places as far
removed as Eastern Europe, Brazil, India and China. )
Anyway, the remarkable sentence above was written in 1789 by Georg
Forster (1754–94), the German naturalist, journalist and revolutionary
who had published his “A Voyage Round the World” in 1777. Forster wrote
this book in English, describing his travels on James Cook’s second
voyage to the Pacific which he was part of when he was barely 20. And
those ‘four colours’ that he ridicules were a reference to no one less
than Kant and his self-styled “scientific” theory of race based on skin
colour. The two are known to have engaged in a fierce debate about that
in the late 1780s.
Sally Gray writes, “Unlike most Europeans, Forster had encountered and
studied a great variety of cultural groups. Young Forster had
accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, who had been hired as
naturalist aboard Cook’s Resolution, on her circumnavigation of 1772-75.
In their writings, the Forsters did not treat the land as though it were
empty, ready to be colonized …Instead of erasing the agency and often
even the existence of the inhabitants, the Forsters' accounts described
the people in detail, their customs and languages. The Forsters seemed
especially sensitive not only to the relative beauty of women, but also
to their roles in society and even to injustices committed against
them”. In his rebuttal of Kant’s race-theory, Forster dismissed Kant’s
ideas of racial “seeds” and “inevitably inherited characteristics” as
pure fantasy.
Down to the end of the 1780s and until 1792, Kant was defending both
slavery and racism, and seemed to see nothing odd in espousing such
views and simultaneously arguing, as he famously did, for a “moral
universalism”, viz. the idea contained in the categorical imperative
that “all human beings should be treated as means in themselves and not
as a means to an end”.
Yet after the bruising debate with Forster, Kant abandoned some of his
earlier ideas. By the mid-1790s he had evolved his fascinating notion of
“cosmopolitan right” as something distinct from “international rights”.
As Kleingeld explains in a lucid essay, “Cosmopolitan right applies to
humans on all continents, and is explicitly incompatible with slavery
and colonialism”. In other words, Kant’s formulation of such a right
generated a prohibition on the colonial conquest of foreign lands and
thus a critique of imperialism, that is, of the way “the civilised
states of our continent, especially the commercial states”, behaved when
they “visited”—and here is Kant’s list—“ America, the negro countries,
the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc.”, all of which “were looked upon at
the time of their discovery as ownerless territories; for the native
inhabitants counted as nothing. In East India (Hindustan), foreign
troops were brought in under the pretext of merely setting up trading
posts”. Forster’s influence is undeniable in Kant’s reference to
treating whole parts of the world as if they were unoccupied.
What would Kant’s cosmopolitan legal order look like today? At the very
least it would mean a world with open borders. With most big states in
the world rushing to salvage nation-state sovereignty from its permanent
economic ruin and some frantically building walls to keep “illegal
immigrants” out, those walls and fences become graphic symbols of a
subject population, the one at home, that is “defensive, parochial,
nationalistic, and militarized” (Wendy Brown in Walled States, Waning
Sovereignty ) and prone to constant manipulation of a xenophobic sense
of nationhood—Brexit, the Israel Security Fence, Trump’s Wall, India’s
Citizenship Amendment Act, India’s National Register of Citizens, etc.
are so many desperate attempts to stave off the emergence of a
cosmopolitan order grounded in the common humanity of every individual
regardless of nationality. This is where the Left has to start if it
wants to contest nationalism in any serious way.
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59Richard Drayton, Cedric Beidatschand57 others
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