Dualism and Racism

In a follow up article, Sartwell points out that his claim is not that Western Philosophy is unique in its dualism or the employment of its categories by oppressors.  Rather, his point is that:

…as modern white supremacism arose, together with colonialism and the slave trade, it made use of Plato-style, Descartes-style mind/body dualism, which is beautifully suited to political oppression, and that the conceptual structure of anti-black racism is identical to that of substance dualism. 

There are three issues worth pointing out here.

First, as I argued earlier, Descartes was driven to dualism not by concerns about race or nationality but, rather, by the fact that the creative production of language could not be accounted for by the mechanical philosophy (i.e. science) that insisted that the motion of material bodies is to be accounted for by appeal to universal, deterministic laws.  It follows from this that, to put it crudely, the motion of sound molecules emanating from a human mouth is not the result of mechanical causation and, therefore, cannot be the result of material bodies.  So, the argument is primarily the result of the inability to account for certain kinds of human behaviour in terms of the physics of the day. So the motivation is not racist.

Secondly, the fact that there is an isomorphism between two sets of views tells us very little.  For example, there is an isomorphism between the laws of classical mechanics and the motions of thrown stones, but it is not obvious that this means that early modern scientists are responsible for death by stoning.  Would Sartwell have Galileo, Descartes, and Newton give up on mechanics because of this sharing of form?  Of what about Einstein’s famous E = mc², which was necessary for developing the atomic bomb?  Is this supposed to entail that Einstein and his work deserve the blame for the horrors of that weapon?  Einstein, like Descartes, was trying to figure out the nomological structure of the world, and it is unfortunate that some people will try to use that knowledge to destroy others.  What is unclear is what aspersions this latter fact casts on the discoverers of the knowledge.  It would seem that Sartwell’s case would imply that we should simply give up on scientific exploration because any particular piece of it could not only be put to morally problematic ends, but simply be isomorphic to them.  

Finally, not every conceptual tool that is used by racists is thereby tainted by association.  I am sure that many morally obscene views employ logical principles, such as modus tollens (implication).  I can imagine that no racist tract that has had any influence has failed to employ many of the basic principles of logic.  Is this sufficient to jettison these principles?  It seems that Sartwell thinks so, given that the fact that racists employed dualistic thinking is sufficient to tar the work of someone like Descartes as that of some sort of proto white supremacist.  This would mean that any time an evil ideology took hold, we would have to abandon whatever principles employed by the ideology, which would be to remove the tools – logic, evidence, reason, science, what have you – that the opponents of the bad ideology need to make their case.

In the end, I am not sure what conclusion to draw from the fact that some philosophers and racists are both dualists: after I suspect that some racists are also atheists, scientific anti-realists, socialists, or capitalists and, I would be willing to bet further, are happy to employ those doctrines in defence of their racism; does this on its own support any disparaging conclusion about, say, socialism?  I think Sartwell would need to demonstrate that Platonic/Cartesian style dualism is necessary for racism, that nobody is likely to have come up with the “but they are just animals” justification for horrific treatment of others without it. This strikes me as dubious.  The fact that advocates of evil seem willing to grab on to whatever suits their ends seems to suggest that whatever one writes could be perverted for such ends.  So, more is required to establish an interesting relation between dualism and racism than has been provided here.  

In sum, I think that the invocation of Descartes misses the true motivation of his substance dualism, isomorphism proves too little, and guilt by association is not only unreasonable but a double edged sword that will cut into the opponents of evil.