SOC101 - Class 2A - Dr. James Parisot PDF

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Dr. James Parisot...

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Monday, January 14, 2019

SOC101 Class 2A

- Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism • Dussel explains that Ancient Greece and Rome was not the modern “Europe”; it was more dealing with the Middle East, North Africa (specifically Greece)

• Europe, in the last hundreds of years, has now become the motor-force of history or the modern place

- Eurocentrism • Modernity: the idea of the modern world • Colonialism: European countries taking over the “savaged” countries • Minds and Podesy in Bolivia: the major parts of silver and gold production - Where Spain took advantage of Bolivian people to gain gold or silver • Europeans have made up the idea of race - Some have been conquered and some are the conquerors - White is superior and color is inferior • The rise of colonialism and race were together - Europeans said to themselves that something in us, Europeans, must superior if we are able to colonize these countries of color

• The colonized were underdeveloped because the colonizers skew the country to suit their own needs

- Europeans were skewing the countries to their needs or wants • Europe had no special quality that were able to colonize; they had the economic backing to do it and change those countries being colonized

• “Modernity’s Eurocentrism lies in the confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center.” - Dussel pg. 471

• The myth of European Superiority: - 1. The modern civilization casts itself as a superior, developed civilization (something tantamount to unconsciously upholding a Eurocentric position).

- 2. The aforementioned superiority makes the improvement of the most barbaric, primitive, coarse people a moral obligation (from Ginés de Sepúlveda until Kant or Hegel).

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Monday, January 14, 2019 - 3. The model of this educational process is that implemented by Europe itself (in fact, it is a unilineal, European development that will eventually—and unconsciously—result in the “developmentalist fallacy”).

- 4. Insofar as barbaric people oppose the civilizing mission, modern praxis must exercise violence only as a last resort, in order to destroy the obstacles impeding modernization (from the “colonial just war” to the Gulf War).

- 5. As the civilizing mission produces a wide array of victims, its corollary violence is understood as an inevitable action, one with a quasi-ritual character of sacrifice; the civilizing hero manages to make his victims part of a saving sacrifice (I have in mind here the colonized indigenous people, the African slaves, women, and the ecological destruction of nature).

- 6. For modern consciousness, the barbarians are tainted by “blame” stemming from their opposition to the civilizing process, which allows modernity to present itself not only as innocent but also as absolving the blame of its own victims.

- 7. Finally, given the “civilizing” character of modernity, the sufferings and sacrifices—the costs— inherent in the “modernization” of the “backward,” immature people, of the races fitted to slavery, of the weaker female sex, are understood as inevitable.

- Throughout the of history of Europe and European colonialism, makes us seem that Europe is equal to modernity

- Race is a justification of colonial expansion and the justification of slavery = history of modernity - Gender is a component to the idea of reason • It was always a “man’s” idea; never the woman • Only a man was reasonable; a woman was too emotional or lacked reason -

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