(Image by Angelgreat – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69574070)

Many people, in this case many nations, in some sense want to believe they are better than others. One of the failings of the Enlightenment was that instead of heading toward the cosmopolitanism and humanism, countries preferred nationalism. In historicizing or telling historical stories about national identities, nationalistic sentiments were further fueled by a language-based racial theory. Thinking in terms of their own nationality, race and language prompted European academics and colonialists to write national histories for non-European countries. This invention of nationalism, which also created national identities and promoted racial theories, had significant consequences that would ultimately unfold through nationalistic wars in the 20th century, antisemitism and discrimination. The lofty humanistic messages of the first Enlightenment fell through the cracks.

Nation-states emerged in the European continent either as a result of smaller city-states coalescing together, or empires being broken down to smaller territories. During the Enlightenment period, the experiment of historiography resulted in national histories written based on fictional territorial and linguistic boundaries in order to boost a sense of nationalism to go with the new nation. With the rise of various countries holding distinct national identities and sometimes even a distinct racial tag, the sense of “othering” among Europeans was awakened in the most significant ways. As Peter Joseph said: ‘Nationalism is just racism with a flag.’

Turning the Linguistic Hypotheses Into Racial Theories

A classic example of the dangerous consequences of nationalism-racism and othering can be seen in the development of the idea of Jewish identity. Although the idea of discriminating against the Jews goes far back in Christian European history, systematic and racial antisemitism came out of a linguistic conception when Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809) coined the term “Semitic” for a group of languages and people. The Hebrew language was singled out from other European languages as belonging to a Near Eastern Semitic language family, and thus by association, European Jews who had inhabited Europe for centuries were gradually viewed as being linguistically and racially non-Europeans. This linguistic theory was then used for ‘othering’ the European Jews in the age of nationalism, which ultimately led to their persecution and massacre during WWII.

Nationalism and antisemitism in the European continent thus pushed the Jewish people to create Israel outside of the European continent. In this regard, the bold and controversial book of Shlomo Sand, The Invention of Jewish People (Hebrew edition 2008, English translation 2009), proposes that Jewish identity was actually invented, with Jews being presented as “one folk,” although in actuality they came from extremely diverse geographical, linguistic and ethnic backgrounds in Europe and elsewhere.

The invention of a unifying historical identity for all Jews was undertaken by the Europeans who extracted material from religious sources to connect the Jews to a “holy” land. If Sand’s argument is correct, then the professional historians and Zionists successfully linked the assimilated European Jews and Jews from elsewhere to peoples of the very remote past, and thereby helped create Israel and forge its identity as a Jewish nation-state based on a mythology of settling together on a particular ‘holy land’. (M. Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation: The Construction of National Identity, 1993, 2013). Thus, Israel became an inevitable political outcome. Rather than being an innate, homegrown nation-state in search of a cultural and religious pedigree, Israel was actually the progeny state of European nationalism and antisemitism.

Another example of a linguistic conception developing into a racial theory is the highly misleading idea of ‘Aryan.’ Over the course of the 19th century, during colonial exploits in India and the Middle East, the idea of an Indo-European language family was hypothesized. The term ‘arya–aryan’ (“honorable people”) was extracted from various Indo-Iranian sources, with the term ‘arya’ first used as a racial term by Sanskrit scholar Friedrich von Schlegel in his work Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India) in 1808. The term was then applied to the Europeans and their philological cousins in Indo-Iranian regions. Consequently, the people who spoke this group of languages, particularly German, Persian and Sanskrit, were arbitrarily linked to an invented race, namely the “Aryan race.” This premise gave rise to unprecedented racism in the 20th century, not only in Germany but also in Iran and eventually in modern India. Thus, a controversial hypothesis of language classification became a baseless racial theory which was then mined as raw material and used by zealot nationalists and racists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Enlightenment thinkers and scholars could not prevent the tragedy under way. The ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the Enlightenment was becoming dimmer, moving farther away from the notions of liberty and justice. If the ideals of the Enlightenment had been more rigorously practiced and more deeply integrated, and if the dangers of divisive nationalism had been recognized, there might never have been such devastating nationalistic wars in Europe. Perhaps European Jews would not have been pushed out of their home countries and brought into conflict with the native Palestinians, repercussions that continue to disrupt the region and engage the world today.

Even an Enlightenment thinker such as Kant, supposedly an advocate of cosmopolitanism, made extremely condescending remarks about non-white races, especially about the ineptitude of black Africans and ‘red skinned’ Native American Indians. The racism of Enlightenment thinkers propagandized the superiority of the white Europeans and Americans over other races. They propagated an arbitrary and yet atrocious hierarchy of the races. Needless to say, the idea of ‘race’ and ‘racial talents’ were all invented and the biased race theory was to be mistaken for the differences in physiognomies. 

The lessons have been learned. Racism and nationalism combined together have the potential of becoming a detrimental ideology if it and when it blinds people to the importance and value of other peoples’ cultures and contributions to humanity, and instead causes them to blindly see their own ethnicity and country as being superior.

We Can Focus on Our Commonalities

If we are to succeed in our venture of a Second Enlightenment, we the people, the literati and the politicians of our time, need to refocus on our human commonalities. Natural variations in cultures, ethnicity and languages need not have such divisive effects. This new attitude would strengthen humanization of each other and could be a way out of hellish ultra-nationalistic conflict. In the years and decades ahead, we as individuals and nations could start recalibrating our perspectives by equalizing how we see ourselves and others.

Even today, nationalism has elements of prehistoric tribalism that preach, ‘Our ‘tribe’ is human and we are better. Those others are different and inferior. The immaturity of nationalistic movements during the Enlightenment was a state of mind which corresponded to that era. Today we can do more to put it behind us.

Let us be more succinct about what dogmatic nationalism and its severe consequences such as war do to ordinary people: Parents who send their 20-year-old son to a war against another country do not want him to be shot by an enemy bullet. But upon deeper thought, parents may realize: the bullet coming out of their son’s gun will kill the son of another set of parents who also desperately do not want their son to be shot – the same act, the same sentiment, equally worthy sons, and equally worthy parents.

Why should we follow our politicians’ dogma of nationalism when we know that the psychological consequences of us-versus-them will only bring us to physical confrontation and bloodshed? Global Enlightenment means to manifest human life on earth the way Neil Armstrong saw the earth from the surface of the moon: as a remarkable blue planet without borders.