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Races and Persons
| Article
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20140 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
8,791 Words |
| Author
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Daniel N. Robinson
Daniel N. Robinson is chairman of the Department of
Psychology at Georgetown University. His latest book is
Aristotle's Psychology (Columbia University Press, 1989). |
The issue of racism in America arises from a deeper and more general tendency in the intellectual life of the nation. In its now flourishing form, this tendency results in the collectivization of the self and the imposition of entirely external standards of virtue and worthiness. Far from being a modern development, the tendency was already established in the very eighteenth century that otherwise sought to form a society along the classical model of participatory democracy. But the classical world itself was able to host such a society only briefly, and only so long as its membership adopted internal standards of virtue and worthiness. The nagging question, then, is whether the estimable institutions characteristic of the American achievement are compatible with the sorts of persons and perspectives they have nurtured.
The present essay is organized in distinct parts. The first part is devoted to an examination of the "Classical ideal" as it was understood by those who forged it and as it was later regarded by those Enlightenment architects of the American republic. The point of this is to make clear the quite unique and fragile nature of the original, and the utter dependence of its democratic politics on the larger culture in which it was imbedded. As the Hellenic world understood democracy and liberty, neither was possible within what would now be called a pluralistic society.
In the second and third sections of the essay the conceptual foundations of racism are explored. It is argued that a collectivist social philosophy is at the heart of racism and was already a more or less "official" philosophy at the time the American polity was formed. Had there never been distinguishable races this same philosophy would have discovered here, as it did throughout Europe, other "types" and other nationalistic or provincial grounds of exclusion. Racism is a special case chiefly because of the virulence of the evils it has spawned. In the third section the concept of "race" is analyzed for the purpose of defining racism itself, this finally being understood as the rejection of individuality through collectivization. Then, in the final section, the person is reconsidered within the polis. The claim is again defended that life within the polis must be understood finally in cultural terms, and that, the further society moves from the animating culture of Hellenism, the less compatible that society will be with Hellenic institutions and understandings.
The Classical Ideal
In an essay of a century ago, and one bound to be
...
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