Pursuing last week’s theme, this week’s column raises the question: if there is no such thing as ‘race’ — since all humans belong to the same subspecies — why is there such a thing as racism? The modern answer is that race is (yawn) a ‘social construct’. But in the light of a famous passage in the 5th century BC by Thucydides, there is a case for saying that racism is the antisocial construct.
Thucydides described how in 427 BC civil war broke out in Corcyra (Corfu) as pro-Spartan oligarchs attempted to drive out pro-Athenian democrats. What struck Thucydides about this development was that violence became the norm, with men ‘reversing the usual evaluative force of words to suit their own assessment of the situation’. So words associated with admirable behaviour, like ‘prudence’, were replaced by words of quite different connotation — in this case, ‘cowardice’.
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