Where do you get this from? "The Enlightenment produced the Declaration of Independence and the philosophical architecture of colonial extraction." As Ritchie Robertson demonstrates in The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790, the "enlighteners" (the active participants) were generally appalled by colonial extraction. Blaming colonialism on the Enlightenment is recently popular. But it wasn't the Enlightenment's program to go out and convert the "savages" to Christ while stealing their spices and treasures.
The Norse were effective at colonial extraction from the 900s forward, in northern England and Ireland, Normandy, Sicily, Naples.... True, they found less to extract in Greenland, though they tried. There's much we might choose to admire in those old Norse. Were they vanguard of the Enlightenment?
I think this is a pretty impoverished reading of Enlightenment thought. That Enlightenment thinkers were riddled with moral contradictions and hypocrisies against their own stated values is not controversial to me. I actually have addressed this from my processual frame on moral progress through history many times.
Do you have evidence from the writings of any recognized Enlightenment figure providing rationalization for colonial expropriation? There are separable claims here. Certainly, during the Enlightenment, colonial expropriation expanded, aided by improvements in shipbuilding, navigation and geography. However colonial expropriation was itself no new invention. The funding of Dutch and British enterprises as joint-stock enterprises was an innovation. But Spain was already far ahead in the colonial expropriation game yet outside the major Enlightenment currents.
You have made a specific claim that Enlightenment thinkers were establishing rational frameworks justifying colonial expropriation. My question is "On what evidence?" In Catholic countries, the Church was making such a claim. And among Protestants, there were evangelicals. But among the deists and alchemists and atheists of the Enlightenment? Please, when you have time, give us a few examples.
Whit — John Locke. The Second Treatise. His labor theory of property — that land becomes property through the application of labor, and that land not 'improved' by European-style agriculture is effectively unowned — became the philosophical foundation of terra nullius, the legal doctrine that justified the expropriation of Indigenous lands across the Americas and Australia. Locke was not merely theorizing in the abstract. He was an investor in the Royal Africa Company and the Bahama Adventurers. He helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. The man who wrote the philosophical architecture of natural rights also wrote the philosophical architecture of colonial property claims. Both. In the same hand.
Kant's racial taxonomy placed human beings in a hierarchy based on geography and phenotype, with white Europeans at the top. This was not incidental to his philosophy — it was published, developed across multiple essays, and became foundational to the scientific racism of the 19th century. The Scottish Enlightenment's stadial theory — the stages of civilization from hunter-gatherer to commercial society — explicitly ranked peoples and provided the intellectual scaffolding for the claim that colonized peoples were simply at an earlier stage of development, and that colonial administration was a civilizing project.
But I want to push back on the framing of your question, because I think it reveals exactly the theory of history I'm critiquing. You're asking me to show that Enlightenment thinkers intended to rationalize colonial extraction. That's not the claim. The claim is that the Enlightenment produced universalist frameworks — frameworks that claimed to describe human nature, property, civilization, and progress from a view from nowhere — and those frameworks were structurally available for colonial use regardless of their authors' intentions. Locke didn't have to intend the dispossession of the Cherokee for his property theory to enable it. That's the point. The contradiction is not a bug in the Enlightenment. It is the Enlightenment. The whole of it. Achievement and crime in the same hand.
Okay, it depends on how we distinguish thinker from thought. My claim is that the convention that cultivating previously uncultivated land establishes ownership goes back to the Fertile Crescent, and was universally recognized across Europe by five millennia before Locke. It was in no wise distinctly Locke's, nor the Enlightenment's.
Your framing establishing new farmland as a crime makes the whole expansion of farming across Europe, from 9000 BCE forward, criminal. That claim looks a bit "view from nowhere" to me. Are we to feel shame and guilt because our ancestors shifted from hunting to agriculture?
As for the Cherokee, many of them happily transitioned to farming, some acquiring African slaves to work their land. The dispossession, the later Trail of Tears, was theft of their farms. It was a violation of their right to private property, as established by the European tradition which Locke transcribed. That was criminal by any account.
The engineering of the Apollo moon rocket is no less impressive for having been designed by the same engineer who built the V-2. To insist otherwise — to direct normative judgments at the products of people whose character we rightly condemn — is to claim that matter carries the moral stains of the consciousness whose hands shaped it. I understand the impulse. But it leads nowhere. It leads, especially on the political left and its postmodernist discontents, to the jettisoning of moral progress entirely. If nothing can be separated from the sins of its origin, then nothing can be built — because everything we build is built with tools inherited from flawed hands. The debts are real. The history is real. But the insistence that nothing has political legitimacy until every historical balance is settled to someone's satisfaction is its own form of paralysis. It is memory without imagination. And it leaves the republic unbuilt.
Whit — separating the thinker from the thought is foundational to philosophical reasoning. We even have a name for the failure to do so: the ad hominem. So let's do that here. I'm not making a claim about Locke's personal moral character. I'm making a claim about what his formalization of existing practice accomplished philosophically.
You're right that cultivating land and claiming ownership predates Locke by millennia. But there's a difference between a local custom and a universalist philosophical framework. Locke didn't just describe what farmers do. He built an argument from natural law that said: this is what reason itself requires. Land that is not 'improved' — by a specific, European definition of improvement — is effectively unowned. That universalization is the philosophical move. And that move made the practice exportable in a way that the Mesopotamian custom never was, because the custom didn't claim to speak for all of humanity. Locke's framework did.
And you've actually demonstrated my point beautifully in your final paragraph. You say the Trail of Tears was a violation of the property tradition Locke transcribed. I agree. It was. And the legal framework that enabled the removal was also a product of that same tradition. Both things. Same tradition. Same hand. That's not an indictment. It's the processual view of history — the tradition contains the principle and its violation, the achievement and the crime, and the honest inheritor carries both.
Addendum: Okay, on further research the claim is generally aimed at Locke's description of private property being established by cultivating the land, in the context of farms on formerly Native American hunting territory in Carolina. But Locke's logic was no Enlightenment invention! That's the norm since farming-based property ownership's sweep across Europe, arriving from the Fertile Cresent, beginning in 7000 BCE. By 3500 BCE that sweep was complete to the Baltics. We're looking at five thousands years of what, to any European, was common sense about property rights. There's nothing "Enlightenment" about that, no new contribution by Locke beyond writing down a common background assumption.
Wow! I always love your pieces, but I have to agree, this one is brilliant! It so perfectly expresses what I have always felt in my heart but have not been able to fully articulate. I think when mankind realizes the truth, we will have reached enlightenment.
A wonderfully articulated essay. IMO God/Divine consciousness/Creator experiences this 'journey' of life through each living being (not just the White Duke...), human, animal and even plants, allowing for the journey to continue and evolve. And yes steering is what we are here to learn. In the end complexity may well lead to entropy and to the end of the journey, only for it to start all over again... Thank you, Mike.
Absolutely NOT. Just not trapped in "philosophy". Such contortions aren't my thing. You've made excellent use of the high points, and it's hard to watch the torture of writhing through its entire briar patch. As if philosophy were "it"...
As I’m not a philosopher, this may not be as coherent as you’d like. I have admired your facility with wending through all the stuff that philosophers produce.
As an indigenous person, my perspective is very much informed by a different orientation. As something of a (degreed) sociologist and political scientist, I’ve long been pondering why things get a little crazy. As a civil servant charged with making statutory law regarding the public trust in “resources” work for the full spectrum of views and opinions while protecting Nature, I have a career’s experience in blending motivations and civil priorities. As an amateur psychologist, I’ve circled back to my biology roots to approach understanding motivations.
Human intelligence evolved in an ambulatory, foraging mode, giving us our amazing abilities to learn the place of every species of plant, animal, mineral, and whatever else there may be, their meaning to every other species, the understanding of how to tend them for the mutual benefit of all, and the ability to map our environment in its dizzying complexity. Our bodies monitor the environment moment by moment, with each part of the body working toward harmonizing our bodily functions with the environment, storing information throughout the body. Our bodily intelligence is thus distributed throughout the body, and the very last bit of evolution took place in the cerebral cortices. It’s not surprising that these are the “last to know” what’s going on.
Philosophy may have originated in some corporal recognition, but it’s quite clear that it’s gotten mired in the creativity of the cranial mind. Evidence abounds over the last 10,000 years of mischief, abuse, and the strictures of “civilization”. It now arrives in the 6th Mass Extinction, the first to credit humans alone. It would seem that philosophy has wrestled with this for a very, very long time, not particularly successfully.
We need to “reinhabit” the body’s full panoply of intelligence, and most seem quite unaware that every part of the body hums with relevant information. To begin and end with the fertile imagination of the cranial spheres seems not only the disaster in front of our eyes, but a tragedy that is completely avoidable. Native Americans concluded – accurately, in my view – that humans are the weakest and dumbest of creation, and must humbly seek the wisdom of the living world around us. Explore the amazing capacities of slime molds and ant colonies to get a clue about the quantum intelligence inhering in Creation. Physicists are struck dumb.
I would say that my metaphysics point directly at the same object you point me to in your last paragraph of my response. This is, of course, a view that is common to the contemplative traditions. From indigenous peoples of the Americas to the lessons of the Buddha. So I'm not so sure we're navigating such different terrain.
If you think that my only concept of consciousness in the universe is a singular view through the type I observe in my own ego, you are wrong. My claim should be held as general. That other forms of intelligences pervade our body and the tree of life, with harmonics and subharmonics is something that I would argue that my metaphysics, properly understood, gestures at quite forcefully.
So I think our intutions converge much more than may seem apparent to you, as you watch me narrate from within another canon.
Deep, long, insightful, deserving slow reading, research, and pondering: an AMAZING feat! You should write a book around these insights, integrating the contents of your many posts.
Thank you! You have written this great truth so beautifully, so brilliantly and so simply. I have often said that great truth is both beautiful and simple, and you articulated that perfectly! Again, thank you!
Just here to add my appreciation for this stunning piece of work. I have long admired Watts, but couldn’t quite articulate what felt like a vague dissatisfaction with where his philosophy led. You do not mention quantum theory but it seems to me what you write is a beautiful expression of what it means to live/perceive/express/act inside a system and as that system. Which is perhaps just another word that points to God.
“Heaven must not be a kingdom but a republic” - a beautiful statement.
Beautully written, and genuinely profound, although completely remote from the meaning Rubio put into many of the same words.
Alan Watts - The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Wow. Thank you. Agency - what a concept. Outstanding writing.
Where do you get this from? "The Enlightenment produced the Declaration of Independence and the philosophical architecture of colonial extraction." As Ritchie Robertson demonstrates in The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790, the "enlighteners" (the active participants) were generally appalled by colonial extraction. Blaming colonialism on the Enlightenment is recently popular. But it wasn't the Enlightenment's program to go out and convert the "savages" to Christ while stealing their spices and treasures.
The Norse were effective at colonial extraction from the 900s forward, in northern England and Ireland, Normandy, Sicily, Naples.... True, they found less to extract in Greenland, though they tried. There's much we might choose to admire in those old Norse. Were they vanguard of the Enlightenment?
I think this is a pretty impoverished reading of Enlightenment thought. That Enlightenment thinkers were riddled with moral contradictions and hypocrisies against their own stated values is not controversial to me. I actually have addressed this from my processual frame on moral progress through history many times.
Do you have evidence from the writings of any recognized Enlightenment figure providing rationalization for colonial expropriation? There are separable claims here. Certainly, during the Enlightenment, colonial expropriation expanded, aided by improvements in shipbuilding, navigation and geography. However colonial expropriation was itself no new invention. The funding of Dutch and British enterprises as joint-stock enterprises was an innovation. But Spain was already far ahead in the colonial expropriation game yet outside the major Enlightenment currents.
You have made a specific claim that Enlightenment thinkers were establishing rational frameworks justifying colonial expropriation. My question is "On what evidence?" In Catholic countries, the Church was making such a claim. And among Protestants, there were evangelicals. But among the deists and alchemists and atheists of the Enlightenment? Please, when you have time, give us a few examples.
Whit — John Locke. The Second Treatise. His labor theory of property — that land becomes property through the application of labor, and that land not 'improved' by European-style agriculture is effectively unowned — became the philosophical foundation of terra nullius, the legal doctrine that justified the expropriation of Indigenous lands across the Americas and Australia. Locke was not merely theorizing in the abstract. He was an investor in the Royal Africa Company and the Bahama Adventurers. He helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. The man who wrote the philosophical architecture of natural rights also wrote the philosophical architecture of colonial property claims. Both. In the same hand.
Kant's racial taxonomy placed human beings in a hierarchy based on geography and phenotype, with white Europeans at the top. This was not incidental to his philosophy — it was published, developed across multiple essays, and became foundational to the scientific racism of the 19th century. The Scottish Enlightenment's stadial theory — the stages of civilization from hunter-gatherer to commercial society — explicitly ranked peoples and provided the intellectual scaffolding for the claim that colonized peoples were simply at an earlier stage of development, and that colonial administration was a civilizing project.
But I want to push back on the framing of your question, because I think it reveals exactly the theory of history I'm critiquing. You're asking me to show that Enlightenment thinkers intended to rationalize colonial extraction. That's not the claim. The claim is that the Enlightenment produced universalist frameworks — frameworks that claimed to describe human nature, property, civilization, and progress from a view from nowhere — and those frameworks were structurally available for colonial use regardless of their authors' intentions. Locke didn't have to intend the dispossession of the Cherokee for his property theory to enable it. That's the point. The contradiction is not a bug in the Enlightenment. It is the Enlightenment. The whole of it. Achievement and crime in the same hand.
Okay, it depends on how we distinguish thinker from thought. My claim is that the convention that cultivating previously uncultivated land establishes ownership goes back to the Fertile Crescent, and was universally recognized across Europe by five millennia before Locke. It was in no wise distinctly Locke's, nor the Enlightenment's.
Your framing establishing new farmland as a crime makes the whole expansion of farming across Europe, from 9000 BCE forward, criminal. That claim looks a bit "view from nowhere" to me. Are we to feel shame and guilt because our ancestors shifted from hunting to agriculture?
As for the Cherokee, many of them happily transitioned to farming, some acquiring African slaves to work their land. The dispossession, the later Trail of Tears, was theft of their farms. It was a violation of their right to private property, as established by the European tradition which Locke transcribed. That was criminal by any account.
The engineering of the Apollo moon rocket is no less impressive for having been designed by the same engineer who built the V-2. To insist otherwise — to direct normative judgments at the products of people whose character we rightly condemn — is to claim that matter carries the moral stains of the consciousness whose hands shaped it. I understand the impulse. But it leads nowhere. It leads, especially on the political left and its postmodernist discontents, to the jettisoning of moral progress entirely. If nothing can be separated from the sins of its origin, then nothing can be built — because everything we build is built with tools inherited from flawed hands. The debts are real. The history is real. But the insistence that nothing has political legitimacy until every historical balance is settled to someone's satisfaction is its own form of paralysis. It is memory without imagination. And it leaves the republic unbuilt.
Whit — separating the thinker from the thought is foundational to philosophical reasoning. We even have a name for the failure to do so: the ad hominem. So let's do that here. I'm not making a claim about Locke's personal moral character. I'm making a claim about what his formalization of existing practice accomplished philosophically.
You're right that cultivating land and claiming ownership predates Locke by millennia. But there's a difference between a local custom and a universalist philosophical framework. Locke didn't just describe what farmers do. He built an argument from natural law that said: this is what reason itself requires. Land that is not 'improved' — by a specific, European definition of improvement — is effectively unowned. That universalization is the philosophical move. And that move made the practice exportable in a way that the Mesopotamian custom never was, because the custom didn't claim to speak for all of humanity. Locke's framework did.
And you've actually demonstrated my point beautifully in your final paragraph. You say the Trail of Tears was a violation of the property tradition Locke transcribed. I agree. It was. And the legal framework that enabled the removal was also a product of that same tradition. Both things. Same tradition. Same hand. That's not an indictment. It's the processual view of history — the tradition contains the principle and its violation, the achievement and the crime, and the honest inheritor carries both.
Addendum: Okay, on further research the claim is generally aimed at Locke's description of private property being established by cultivating the land, in the context of farms on formerly Native American hunting territory in Carolina. But Locke's logic was no Enlightenment invention! That's the norm since farming-based property ownership's sweep across Europe, arriving from the Fertile Cresent, beginning in 7000 BCE. By 3500 BCE that sweep was complete to the Baltics. We're looking at five thousands years of what, to any European, was common sense about property rights. There's nothing "Enlightenment" about that, no new contribution by Locke beyond writing down a common background assumption.
Thank you for the audio. This is a tour de force. You must publish your work.
Wow! I always love your pieces, but I have to agree, this one is brilliant! It so perfectly expresses what I have always felt in my heart but have not been able to fully articulate. I think when mankind realizes the truth, we will have reached enlightenment.
A wonderfully articulated essay. IMO God/Divine consciousness/Creator experiences this 'journey' of life through each living being (not just the White Duke...), human, animal and even plants, allowing for the journey to continue and evolve. And yes steering is what we are here to learn. In the end complexity may well lead to entropy and to the end of the journey, only for it to start all over again... Thank you, Mike.
Absolutely NOT. Just not trapped in "philosophy". Such contortions aren't my thing. You've made excellent use of the high points, and it's hard to watch the torture of writhing through its entire briar patch. As if philosophy were "it"...
I’m unsure of the nature of your critique. This is a philosophy blog, you know.
As I’m not a philosopher, this may not be as coherent as you’d like. I have admired your facility with wending through all the stuff that philosophers produce.
As an indigenous person, my perspective is very much informed by a different orientation. As something of a (degreed) sociologist and political scientist, I’ve long been pondering why things get a little crazy. As a civil servant charged with making statutory law regarding the public trust in “resources” work for the full spectrum of views and opinions while protecting Nature, I have a career’s experience in blending motivations and civil priorities. As an amateur psychologist, I’ve circled back to my biology roots to approach understanding motivations.
Human intelligence evolved in an ambulatory, foraging mode, giving us our amazing abilities to learn the place of every species of plant, animal, mineral, and whatever else there may be, their meaning to every other species, the understanding of how to tend them for the mutual benefit of all, and the ability to map our environment in its dizzying complexity. Our bodies monitor the environment moment by moment, with each part of the body working toward harmonizing our bodily functions with the environment, storing information throughout the body. Our bodily intelligence is thus distributed throughout the body, and the very last bit of evolution took place in the cerebral cortices. It’s not surprising that these are the “last to know” what’s going on.
Philosophy may have originated in some corporal recognition, but it’s quite clear that it’s gotten mired in the creativity of the cranial mind. Evidence abounds over the last 10,000 years of mischief, abuse, and the strictures of “civilization”. It now arrives in the 6th Mass Extinction, the first to credit humans alone. It would seem that philosophy has wrestled with this for a very, very long time, not particularly successfully.
We need to “reinhabit” the body’s full panoply of intelligence, and most seem quite unaware that every part of the body hums with relevant information. To begin and end with the fertile imagination of the cranial spheres seems not only the disaster in front of our eyes, but a tragedy that is completely avoidable. Native Americans concluded – accurately, in my view – that humans are the weakest and dumbest of creation, and must humbly seek the wisdom of the living world around us. Explore the amazing capacities of slime molds and ant colonies to get a clue about the quantum intelligence inhering in Creation. Physicists are struck dumb.
I would say that my metaphysics point directly at the same object you point me to in your last paragraph of my response. This is, of course, a view that is common to the contemplative traditions. From indigenous peoples of the Americas to the lessons of the Buddha. So I'm not so sure we're navigating such different terrain.
If you think that my only concept of consciousness in the universe is a singular view through the type I observe in my own ego, you are wrong. My claim should be held as general. That other forms of intelligences pervade our body and the tree of life, with harmonics and subharmonics is something that I would argue that my metaphysics, properly understood, gestures at quite forcefully.
So I think our intutions converge much more than may seem apparent to you, as you watch me narrate from within another canon.
Agreed! Communications being what they are, let's keep the struggle going!
My god! This is so tortured! My condolences!
Should I take you for a cynic on this matter?
Deep, long, insightful, deserving slow reading, research, and pondering: an AMAZING feat! You should write a book around these insights, integrating the contents of your many posts.
Mike,
Thank you! You have written this great truth so beautifully, so brilliantly and so simply. I have often said that great truth is both beautiful and simple, and you articulated that perfectly! Again, thank you!
Love as a structure. Love steering. Heaven as a Republic. Paradigm shifting, enlightening work assigning agency to us all, where it belongs.
Just here to add my appreciation for this stunning piece of work. I have long admired Watts, but couldn’t quite articulate what felt like a vague dissatisfaction with where his philosophy led. You do not mention quantum theory but it seems to me what you write is a beautiful expression of what it means to live/perceive/express/act inside a system and as that system. Which is perhaps just another word that points to God.
On quantum theory, I think Roger Penrose is on the right track
Beautifully expressed.
I could not stop reading this. You are spot on! Thank you for this eloquent explanation. I am quite sure Richard Rohr would agree!