Bullshit, and the Truth About European Conquest
There is a prevalent message often circulated and taught within our educational systems that portrays the European travel to and conquest of the Americas, and the initial creation of governments based on the right of self-determination (such as the United States in the late 1700's) as having corrupted, primarily evil motivations.
These indoctrinations are taught early to our youth for the primary reason that indoctrinations are always taught early to the young. The young, wired to develop a useful working view of their world that they can use productively, are instinctually most likely to accept what they are taught without question. Why? Because initially they have no means to validate the truth of the information they are given empirically or engage in independent research. They learn to talk, how to behave, and how to see the world at first and primarily through their parents and teachers. And, while they may question their beliefs as they grow older and mature, those beliefs that they have been indoctrinated with will be questioned last, if at all. Such is the "math" governing Indoctrination.
In the example above, the objective of the indoctrination is to undermine the belief that the founding of The United States created an exceptional and positive asset that should be preserved. Preserved not necessarily as what it has become, but rather as it was intended to progressively unfold into.
Generally, when humans, or any other animal for that matter, do something, there are a variety of motivational factors that play a part in the decision to do so. An opportunity for personal gain tends to be considered positively by the individual being drawn to do something. The risk of loss often is regarded negatively. The net assessment of all factors being considered and relevant leads to a decision. And of course, the positive and negative perceptions of those factors are influenced by the personal Filters people bring with them to the decision.
Some positive motivational factors can have noble origins and consequences. Other positive motivational factors may have not so noble, and even criminal origins and consequences. And then there are the indoctrinations that we have embraced, and how they affect the assumptions and perceptions we decide to embrace a topic with.
How much of what we are indoctrinated with is Truth? And how much of what we are indoctrinated with is Bullshit?
Well, let's take a look at the actual historical facts regarding one aspect of the European discovery and migration...
Straight Talk About Christopher Columbus
The Wall Street Journal, 10 October 2016, Opinion
By David Tucker
Columbus Day used to be a celebration of the enterprising courage of Christopher Columbus and other explorers who set out into the unknown and began the long process of establishing civilization in a new part of the world.
That triumphalist account will no longer do. We think now of the extraordinary presumption of sticking a flag in someone else's land and calling it yours. We think more darkly of how European diseases more than decimated the native peoples of the Western hemisphere. We think most darkly of the slave trade that followed European contact with what was only to the Europeans a new world.
These dark thoughts aren't amiss. Yet when we think of them we should consider two other thoughts: what the world was like when Europeans collided with the natives of North America, and why that world no longer exists.
Europeans headed west in the 15th century to what they thought was Asia because they were blocked from going east by the great Muslim empires of the time.
In Asia, China was rich and powerful beyond anything to which Europeans could aspire. Compared with the Muslims and Chinese, the Europeans were poor, backward and weak.
The Europeans suffered as the weak always do. Terrible plagues from Asia brought by commerce devastated Europe. An estimated 100 million people died, as would many more, even as the Europeans began settling in the Western hemisphere.
Europeans also suffered from slavery. For many years, Europe's most valuable export to the Middle East was its own people, sold as slaves by the Vikings who had conquered them and settled in to rule. The English word "slave" comes from a word still used to describe some Eastern Europeans, "Slav." In the period from 1530 to 1780, Muslim raiders captured and enslaved an estimated one million or more Europeans.
The Europeans who conquered the Western hemisphere acted as people had always acted, no better or no worse; those they conquered suffered as the Europeans themselves had suffered.
This is evident if we look at the first European conquest outside of Europe. The Europeans began to assert themselves with the 1415 conquest of Ceuta, across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain. They conquered Ceuta from the Muslims, which was a dreadful thing to do, as it was when successive Muslim rulers took it by force from each other, after the first of them took it from the Berbers, who had taken it from the Byzantines, who had taken it from the Vandals, who had taken it from the Romans, who had taken it from the Carthaginians, who undoubtedly took it from some others, now lost to history.
The similarity of the Europeans and those they encountered in the Western hemisphere is also clear when we remember that a relatively small number of Spaniards were able to conquer the Aztec empire in part because many of the indigenous people the Aztecs had conquered - and often sacrificed to their gods - hated the Aztecs and joined with the Spanish to fight them.
Of course, to say that Europeans acted as others had acted doesn't justify the awful things Europeans did to each other, and to non-Europeans, in their long history. But it might persuade us to understand and moderate our condemnation of Columbus.
We judge Columbus harshly because the same power that enabled the Europeans to conquer the world also allowed them to impose their views on the world. And the views they imposed are now our views.
Europeans acted the way
that conquerors always
did. We judge them harshly
because they spread a
then-novel idea: equality
Even as the conquest was reaching its zenith in the 19th century, the Europeans were bringing to the world the then-novel idea that one group of people didn't have the right to impose its will on another group.
This revolution in thinking, which ultimately undermined European imperialism, was announced by the Declaration of Independence and its assertion of the self-evident truth of human equality. It was carried further by the British who suppressed the slave trade with their all-powerful navy, commercial might and insistent diplomacy, and who led the campaign for the abolition of slavery. It was completed by American insistence after the world wars of the 20th century on the right of self-determination, the right of people to self-government.
This Columbus Day we need no triumphalism. Let it be a day instead to ponder the human capability for good and evil and wonder how we might encourage more of the good.
Mr. Tucker is a senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University in Ohio and the author of "Revolution and Resistance: Moral Revolution, Military Might, and the End of Empire" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).
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