About that airbrushed progress …

… IGNORANCE, DISHONESTY AND JOHN GRAY | Pandaemonium. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Gray claims that I airbrush the fact that ‘TH Huxley, praised by Malik for his criticism of evolutionary ethics, developed a detailed classification of racial types’. What I actually write is that the late nineteenth century was ‘an age in which even staunch liberals, such as Darwin and Huxley, took racial hierarchies as natural and racial struggle as a given’ (p 307). Gray implies that I ignore Aristotle’s views about women, slaves and barbarians. In fact, I deal with those issues more than once, and describe the ‘Golden Age of Athens’ as one ‘in which barbarians were regarded as fit for enslavement, and in which Aristotle defended slavery on the grounds that some people were naturally created to be enslaved’ (p 51). Gray claims that I fail to see that the Greeks did not have ‘the same conception of morality as we do’. Why, then, do I write of the Iliad that ‘it describes an alien moral world, not simply because its moral rules are so different from those of our world but also because its very notion of what constitutes a moral rule is alien to us’ (p 6)?