Summary Of Hughes Critique Of The Myth Of Nature's God
654 Words3 Pages
Richard T. Hughes’ critique of the myth of nature’s nation, while doing an admirable job at exposing the myth’s flaws, implies that this myth was always readily accepted by European males, who benefitted from this myth, and ignores the slow process of accepting all Europeans as ‘white’. Hughes’ main idea is that embedded in the American Creed “are certain truths” which “are rooted in ‘Nature and Nature’s God’ and therefore, reflect the way things are meant to be.” His argument though, is that America’s version of what is self-evident in nature is unoriginal since much was borrowed from the Europeans and in general, was a platform to further white male hegemony. This argument is based on historical documents from the Revolutionary period and beyond, some…show more content… Hughes quotes Carl Becker on how Enlightenment philosophers were “bound to find [the principles] they start out with” when looking at what nature reveals. Hughes then goes on to state how in America, nature was defined “in Eurocentric terms that especially served the interests of a white male population descended from European stock.” However, I think Hughes is jumping the gun with that evaluation. While I disagree with almost everything about Dinesh D'Souza’s America: Imagine the World without Her, he had a point with his argument about indentured servants and Irish slaves. This point though, contradicts Hughes’ commentary. While the fate of white servants is nothing compared to the horrors of slavery that blacks were put through, it is true that not all of the elite white males of the early American government would not have seen themselves as equals to non-Anglo whites or poor whites. In fact, well into the nineteenth century, white men were barred from voting due to property qualifications. While Hughes was insightful about how the nature myth was used to justify white superiority in society and the marginalization of people of color, it fails to mention how even people