The Hypocrisy Behind Europe's 'Age of Reason'

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]The argument goes something like this.

[00:00:02]Wasn't it a contradiction for the great men of the enlightenment to write about universal human rights while owning, selling, or defending the ownership of human beings. Thomas Jefferson argues that all men are created equal, yet keeps 600 people in bondage over his lifetime. John Loach claims that no man can have power over another's life and liberty and helps construct a colonial constitution that provides the master unlimited authority over his slaves.

[00:00:36]Emanuel Kant bases a whole moral theory on the dignity accorded to all rational beings and teaches for 30 years that Africans are just above the bottom of the human hierarchy and we call them hypocrites. We claim they have betrayed their own values. I want to make an uncomfortable argument. That's not hypocrisy in my book. I don't think that's even a contradiction. But when you study what these men wrote, the complete architecture of their ideas, not the famous words, you see that their defense of slavery is no stain on the institution. That's the system doing what it's supposed to do. And I've come to think that calling it a contradiction is a way of letting ourselves off the hook. Let me show you what I mean. Start before the Enlightenment because the Enlightenment did not invent this. It got it by inheritance. Aristotle in the first book of his politics established a notion that was to resound for 2,000 years. The doctrine of the natural slave. Some human beings, Aristotle taught, are naturally only equipped to be controlled. They have reason enough to be instructed, but not enough to be governed. He adds that for such a person, slavery is not a damage. It is the appropriate expression of their essence and even a form of profit. Keep this thought in mind, for everything that follows is a variation on that theme. The first template is the natural slave. The question which the present age puts is not whether such persons exist. The question is who they are and how to identify them by sight. Think of John Loach the philosopher who we are told gave us life, liberty and property.

[00:02:27]In the second treatise of government, Loach describes slavery as a terrible and dreadful existence so abject that he can barely imagine an Englishman begging for it. This is the sentence we quote.

[00:02:41]But hold on. In the same treatise, Loach makes a careful and deliberate exception. A man who has forfeited his own life by any act of violence. A captive justly taken in a just conflict may justly be enslaved by his conqueror.

[00:02:59]Loach does not fall into this situation.

[00:03:01]He constructs a door in the war. The door is the philosophy of just war enslavement. Now put that thought alongside Lock's life. He was a shareholder in the Royal African Company, the vehicle of the English monarchy for trafficking African people across the Atlantic. He served the Lord's proprietors of Carolina and was involved in the colony's fundamental constitutions which declared that every free man shall have total power and jurisdiction over his African slaves.

[00:03:34]The question of whether Atlantic cattle slavery could in all honesty have squeezed through the door of the just war that Loach is talking about has long been a matter of academic debate. Many competent historians think it could not.

[00:03:50]The Africans sold in Charleston were not captives of any legitimate war Loach could recognize. They are prerogative.

[00:03:58]But look what that entails. This is not to say that Loach had no notion of slavery. It means he had one and it was bent in practice to disguise a trade he profited from. The principle and the prophet weren't enemies. The instrument was the principle which made the prophet possible. Then there is David Hume, the skeptic, the historian, the most cautious intellect of his century. In an essay on national character, Hume included a footnote in it. He stated that he was inclined to assume that black people were naturally inferior to whites and that no civilized nation, no famous individual had ever emerged among them. A footnote, an aside almost, but that is the goal that insucience. For the European mind, the inferiority of African peoples had become common sense, a fixed background assumption that could be referred to in passing and required no rebuttal.

[00:05:03]Now we turn to Kant for it is in Kant that the mechanism comes to light. Kant is the philosopher of dignity of man. He teaches that every rational being is a goal in himself and never only a means.

[00:05:19]that no individual is to be used as a tool. This is one of the most powerful moral ideas ever written down and I do not want to give it up. But we need to pose the question, Kant's defenders rush past. Who qualifies as a reasonable being? For Kant, dignity is not given to human beings as warm bodies. As rational beings, they are entitled to it. Reason is the cost of admission. What is it that makes you a person rather than a thing? The ability to control yourself rationally. And therefore, the only question that matters is who has this ability and how much. Kant had answers.

[00:06:03]For most of his career, he spoke on physical geography and on anthropology.

[00:06:08]And in his lectures and works on the human races, he created a clear hierarchy. He preached that white Europeans had the most reason and the most ability to better themselves. Other peoples had less by gradations and Africans he put toward the bottom capable of training in his account but not of true self-direction. In an early essay, he might disregard the comments of a black guy by saying that the man's skin was in itself evidence that what he said was stupid. This is not a minor K.

[00:06:44]This is the same mentality in the same decades writing the lectures. Follow the logic. Kant argues that rights belong to rational beings. Kant argues Africans lack reason. There is no conflict between the two assertions. The second one only tells you that the first one was never about Africans. He did not violate his dignity principle. He put it on and the application crashed. And here is the section that should send a chill down the spine of the observant reader.

[00:07:16]The same move disqualifies women. Kant thought that women's minds work by feeling rather than the deep prolonged reasoning that philosophy required. That a lady who gets into scholastic argument might as well grow a beard. In his political work, he divided citizens into the active and the passive. and women like servants were included among the passive, the controlled rather than the self-governing. The tool that bars out the African is the same tool that bars out the woman. One tool. It is the ranking of human beings according to their presumed share of reason. And once that ranking is there, everyone who is not the European gentleman, philosopher finds himself or herself someplace below him on the ladder. I should be fair, a historian should be. Some academics suggest that the late K evolved that in his final political writings criticizing the horror of colonial invasion, he discreetly abandoned the racial hierarchy. Maybe other experts believe the recantation is at best incomplete.

[00:08:30]But even this charitable interpretation allows my thesis. It allows that for most of his career, Kant's racism and K's philosophy were not strangers to each other. They shared the same residents across the Atlantic and the pattern is repeated. Jefferson does an interesting thing in his notes on the state of Virginia. He suggests merely as a suspect, he says, with a demonstration of scientific prudence, the proposition that the black is inferior to the white in the capabilities of reason and imagination. Just a suspicion. But suspicion did the work of verdict. It made it possible for a guy who wrote that all men are created equal to also believe that the men he enslaved were not in the relevant sense the men he was talking about. The equality was genuine.

[00:09:25]The barrier around it was real as well.

[00:09:28]And then Hegel who writes Africa out of the story and completes the image. Hegel in his lectures on the philosophy of history asserted that Africa Africa south of the desert has no movement, no development, no history. It was, he remarked, the realm of childhood outside the sunshine of self-conscious march of history. This is the most telling of all claims to an African historian because it is made with such confidence and is so blatantly wrong. Hegel hadn't stated it because he had studied the empires of the Sahel, the libraries of Timbuktu, the bronze casters of Epha, the centuries of collected Jewish prudence in the manuscripts of Sankare. He stated so because his theory of history demanded a vacuum apart from history, a blankness on which European reason might measure its own progress. So zoom out and look at the full thing.

[00:10:31]By the 17th century, European thought had twisted multiple notions into one rope. Aristotle, the natural slave, the Christian cosmology of the great chain of being. All creatures arranged in a definite order from lowest to highest.

[00:10:49]The stadial hypothesis of history. From the Scottish Enlightenment, all societies climb the same stairway from savagery to barbarism to commercial civilization with Europe presumably on the top step. And bringing it all together, a new criterion, reason as the measure of man. Combine them and you do not have a set of admirable principles occasionally betrayed by bias. What you have is what the philosopher Charles Mills termed a racial contract, a tacit agreement built into the roots of modern political philosophy regarding who the persons are. The Nigerian philosopher Emmanuel Ease put the meta bluntly. The enlightenment failed to apply its universalism to Africans. It constructed its basic idea of the universal human on a racial template with the European as the norm and all others as a deviant.

[00:11:51]The exclusion was made of the same material as the universalism at the same workshop. I want to be fair and precise.

[00:11:59]Not all thinkers of the age are to be included in this narrative. Montescu criticized the logic of slavery with cruel irony. Condors wrote simply and morally against the slave trade. There was an authentic abolitionist enlightenment and it counted. But even many who condemned slavery did not give up the hierarchy of reason behind it.

[00:12:24]They claimed that the lower races should be raised, instructed, civilized, which is merely the natural slave concept dressed up in the garb of kindness. The chains were broken, but the ladder remained. Here's why I dismiss the word contradiction. When we claim these men contradicted themselves, we think of a great philosophy with an unfortunate imperfection, and we persuade ourselves we can wipe out the blemish and keep the rest undisturbed, unexamined. That's the easy story. I think it's a copout too because it allows us to sidestep the actual hard question which is if the idea of rational personhood was constructed from the beginning as a tool of hierarchy then how much of that hierarchy do we still carry unconsciously in our own ideas of intelligence of merit of who deserves to be listened to of which societies are advanced and which are behind The African intellectual heritage has been responding to Hegel for a long time.

[00:13:32]Jake Antadop spent his life explaining using evidence that Hegel never even tried to look for that Africa was a land of science, writing, statecraftraft, and ongoing history. Vy Mudbeimbe proved that the entire category of Africa was a fabrication of the European library.

[00:13:54]Something made to be reasoned about rather than with their work is not a footnote to the age of enlightenment. It is the cross-examination that the enlightenment never permitted itself. So let me conclude where a philosopher should not with an answer but with a discipline. I am not urging you to give up the idea of human dignity or of reason or of rights. I don't know how to live without them. Neither do you. What I am saying is that we cannot inherit these concepts the way one gets furniture joyfully and without inquiry.

[00:14:32]The men who gave them to us built in a door and a ladder and a blank place on the chart.