about his new book on atheists, and why he
Nick Spencer: One of the things I particularly liked about the book was that you were quoting Voltaire, Hume, and Kant on unapologetically racist views. What's fascinating is the way that, for a lot of the atheists you write about, the Enlightenment has become almost like the incarnation; it's become the new dispensation. Talk a little bit about your debunking of that Enlightenment mythology.
John Gray: I suppose it's not altogether news that there was a racist element in the thinking of some of the major Enlightenment figures. What I wanted to suggest in this new book on atheism, however, was that the racist element wasn't an incidental prejudice that they'd have as men of their time, but was actually central in many ways to their Enlightenment world-view.
There is, of course, a common defence, which I've heard countless times, where people say “Well, they were men of their time, [which is that] everyone had these prejudices. And I think that that fails for two reasons. One is the simple reason that they claim to be the intellectual leaders of the time; they weren't the 18th-century or 17th-century version of the taxi driver. They were people who could give authority and intellectual weight to these prejudices, and that's what they did.
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