Byzantine: You really think 18th century Englishmen walked around telling each other diversity is strength, race is a social construct, etc.? Any Jew or Muslim howling about discrimination or human rights back then would have been laughed at, right before being strung up a lamppost.
You really think 18th century Englishmen walked around telling each other diversity is strength, race is a social construct, etc.? Any Jew or Muslim howling about discrimination or human rights back then would have been laughed at, right before being strung up a lamppost.
You are hopelessly projecting your own prejudices and today's social conditions in your presumptions.
1. It would be hard to hang anyone up a lamp post in 18th century England . . . because it would be hard to find a lamp post back then.
2. 18th century was before Charles Darwin's treatise on natural history, therefore long before the (erroneously) derivative "social darwinist" ideology. "Race" in the 18th century was a taxonomy concept, not a biological concept. When discussing "race," a person in 18th century England and France would mostly be talking about Saxons vs. Normans or Franks vs. Gauls.
3. One doesn't talk about diversity if that's the social environment that he is born into, grown up with and presumed to be the norm. In the major trading cities like London, that was apparently the case. What do you think Voltaire's writings mentioned earlier were about? An _outside_ who was impressed by the diversity he saw in London; that's why he was "talking" about it in his letters to his friends back in France.
4. Outside of metropolises like London, before the age of railroad, most people lived and died within a few miles of their place of birth. Most of the people they saw every day were their own blood relatives to the nth degree. The few who could afford to travel far and wide (via sailing ships) had no qualms abot marrying local members of the opposite sex that they found . . . and vice versa for many traders who arrived in England; sailing was too dangerous and arduous to involve many women. "Race" was a much weaker concept in the 17th and 18th century than it later became in the 19th century.
5. While France had special laws against Jews as far back as 13th century, England did not have such discrimitory laws. Netherlands first codified religious freedom in the 17th century, and became the pre-eminent sea-faring nation. When Dutch Republic declined in the 18th century due to invasion and war by neighboring France ruled by despotic kings, much of Dutch mercantal capital migrated to England, and brought with it profound social influences. Jews and Muslims wouldn't need to howl about discrimination (as Voltaire observed first hand). As for talks about human rights, Hobbes and Locke, among many others, had been talking about that ever since 17th century, and always in universal terms . . . not, say, defining rights as those belong only to the "race" of Normans. As far as we know, people around them did not laugh at them or hurry up and invent street lamp so as to hang them from the lamp posts.