richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

T H E ' G () O I) ' B O O K A N D T ! I ! M O R A I / /: / 7' (7 t I S 7' 269
no doubt killed more people than Genghis, but he had twentiethcentury
technology at his disposal. And did even Hitler gain his
greatest pleasure, as Genghis avowedly did, from seeing his victims'
'near and dear bathed in tears'? We judge Hitler's degree of evil by
the standards of today, and the moral Zeitgeist has moved on since
Caligula's time, just as the technology has. Hitler seems especially
evil only by the more benign standards of our time.
Within my lifetime, large numbers of people thoughtlessly
bandied derogatory nicknames and national stereotypes: Frog,
Wop, Dago, Hun, Yid, Coon, Nip, Wog. I won't claim that such
words have disappeared, but they are now widely deplored in polite
circles. The word 'negro', even though not intended to be insulting,
can be used to date a piece of English prose. Prejudices are indeed
revealing giveaways of the date of a piece of writing. In his own
time, a respected Cambridge theologian, A. C. Bouquet, was able to
begin the chapter on Islam of his Comparative Religion with these
words: 'The Semite is not a natural monotheist, as was supposed
about the middle of the nineteenth century. He is an animist.' The
obsession with race (as opposed to culture) and the revealing use of
the singular ('The Semite . . . He is an animist') to reduce an entire
plurality of people to one 'type' are not heinous by any standards.
But they are another tiny indicator of the changing Zeitgeist. No
Cambridge professor of theology or any other subject would today
use those words. Such subtle hints of changing mores tell us that
Bouquet was writing no later than the middle of the twentieth
century. It was in fact 1941.
Go back another four decades, and the changing standards
become unmistakeable. In a previous book I quoted H. G. Wells's
Utopian New Republic, and I shall do so again because it is such a
shocking illustration of the point I am making.
And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races?
How will it deal with the black? . . . the yellow man? . . .
the Jew? . . . those swarms of black, and brown, and dirtywhite,
and yellow people, who do not come into the new
needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a
charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go ...
And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic,