Columbus As A Dead White European Male: The Ideological Underpinnings of the Controversy Over 1492, by Robert Royal, The World and I, December 1991, Vol. 6, No. 12, pp. 46-56. For most Europeans, as for most North and South Americans, the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the New World next year is reason for gratitude if not outright celebration. Columbus may not have been the first European here, as some would argue, and there is certainly a dark side to him personally and to the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English legacies in the New World. But Columbus' voyage did two things of indisputable significance: It set the stage for the establishment of the new societies and peoples of the Americas, and it began the transformation of discrete human groups - till then scattered over several continents with little or no contact with one another - into the inhabitants of one world. In the United States, however, a diverse group of writers, activists, and some religious people who are pursuing an ideological agenda have taken the quincentenary less as an opportunity to reexamine the Genoese navigator than as a pretext for making large-scale denunciations of Western, "Eurocentric" culture. Kirkpatrick Sale, for example, one of the most vigorous and frequently cited critics of the European migration to the New World, has become the central public figure in the revisionist movement. Sale presented the basic case in his 1990 book The Conquest of Paradise: The explorers had behind them a spiritual pathology, "a Europe that in thought and deed was estranged from its natural environment and had for several thousand years been engaged in depleting and destroying the land and waters it depended on, and justifying that with one or another creed or conviction." Of course, any such simple-minded generalization of a whole continent and civilization invites debunking. But that has not prevented these myths from getting a wide hearing among those with vested interest. Advocacy groups for the environment, Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans, and radical feminists have joined with more purely political ideologues in using Columbus as a fruitful target. Even what might be thought of as mainstream institutions such as the U.S. National Council of Churches (NCC) - an umbrella Protestant organization whose bureaucracy has for years engaged in advocacy for "progressive" causes - seem to see in the European arrival not a flawed social integration that at least had the merit of bringing the Gospel to new peoples, but as genocide tout court, in fact several interlocking genocides and rapes - of land, of people, of raw materials. In the brief statements the NCC issued earlier this year genocide was mentioned several times per page, while evangelization, at least in a positive sense, not at all. For the NCC, evangelization was solely a pretext for exploitation; the quincentenary, then, should be an occasion not for rejoicing but repentance. Several Hispanic-American figures saw in this indictment a Protestant, North American bias manifesting itself against Spanish and Catholic cultures. For example, Mario Paredes, the director of the Northeast Catholic Hispanic Center in New York City, issued a statement counter to the NCC's at the time, pointing to the absurdity of lumping together the early evils of the Spanish with every political, social and environmental problem that has occurred since. The NCC, he said, gave the impression that nothing good had taken place since the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and that, consequently, Hispanics had nothing to be proud of in their mixed heritage. In fact, many local Hispanic communities have plans to celebrate Columbus' "discovery." The use of this word itself in elite circles is considered politically incorrect. Discovery, for some people, implies that Native American needed to be discovered by Europeans, that they acquired importance only when Europeans came into contact with them. The correct term for 1492 is the "encounter between two worlds," a compromise worked out among several European and American parties. THE IRONIES OF MULTICULTURALISM While increased sensitivity to Native American and African American concerns about the Columbus anniversary may be appropriate, and the record should certainly reflect the negative consequences of the European colonization for many peoples, many of the most acrimonious disputes - as is the case with many multicultural debates - overlook several inescapable facts. It may be subtle historical imperialism to make native peoples a part of Western history, but there is good reason for this: Europe, as a culture based on a linear view of time deriving from the Bible, is the history writing culture par excellence. In fact, history as we understand it does not exist outside European culture. There are chronicles, but these are records of incidents that occur within cyclical views of the cosmos, society, and the human being. The only people in the New World with written chronicles were the Mayans, and their mentality - as was the case with the Aztecs - made it difficult for them to even conceptualize who the Spaniards might be. Ironically, it is Western historians like Kirkpatrick Sale who do not seem to realize their own debt to this European heritage. As a result, they impose their own views on history - native as well as European - in ways far more imperialist and distorting than the views they attack. His volume, which has received wide readership as a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, argues that fifteenth-century Europe and the societies it spawned in the Americas are all part of a monolithic "culture of death." In fact, in a letter to the New York Times earlier this year, Sale replied to charges of bias against specific people or groups by claiming that his book "was written to indict not Columbus, the spanish or the Roman Catholic nations, but the thoroughgoing evils of the culture of Europe as a whole, whose enthusiastic inheritors we Americans have been." For some readers, this may be an admission of even more profound bias. Significantly, Sale is not a professional historian: He first made his reputation os a left-wing activist in the 1960s and was a founder of the New York Green Party. Militant environmentalism coupled with the remnants of a radical Cold War anticapitalism drive much of his analysis, as it seems to inspire the activism of diverse groups seeking to do for Columbus Day what other groups have tried to do for the Martin Luther King holiday. The highly regarded University of Chicago historian William H. McNeill, while allowing that we need correctives to the hagiography that has grown up around Columbus, has castigated Sale for attributing every subsequent evil in the Americas to Columbus' intentions and for his radical ecologist's belief that merely altering the natural environment is wicked. Exaggerated praise and blame of Columbus: "are both unhistorical in the sense that they select from the cloudy record of Columbus' actual motives and deeds what suits the researchers twentieth- century purposes." NO EUROCENTRIC MONOLITH McNeill's identification of the ideological agenda that lies behind the critique of Columbus may be applied to the condemnation of European culture and its heirs as well. It only requires a little learning to know that Europe around 1492, whatever its shortcomings, also meant Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Erasmus, Thomas More, and - a short time later - the religious ferment of Luther, Calvin, Bellarmine, the Spanish mystics, and many other distinguished names: Furthermore, Europeans themselves ever since 1492 have objected to European atrocities in the New World. To name only a few: Montaigne early lamented the destruction of large numbers of people; Kant deplored the European arrogance in assuming that the American land could be simply taken because the inhabitants were still at a neolithic level; C.S. Lewis argued that Europeans "became to America what the Huns had been to us" and even dismissed the missionary aspect because "the actual record of Protestantism in this field seems to be 'blank as death.'" Montaigne, Kant, Lewis - dead white European males all who could be joined by many other prestigious names - show that the 'European' attitude about the discovery was not at all the monolith that the anti-Europe ideologues assume it was. The critique of the European colonization, of course, has always had much truth to it. When all allowance has been made for ignorance and good intentions, some terrible things were visited on native people - even unintentionally. Native peoples were decimated by smallpox, measles, and influenza diseases brought unwittingly by the Europeans who brought back - also unwittingly some experts think - syphilis to the old World. The weakening and chaos these epidemics unleashed, even without the mistreatment, would by itself have been devastating. Population figures for pre-Columbian America are notoriously unreliable and subject to distortion by political agendas. But evidence of some Pacific Northwest native communities may be helpful: They had first contact with Europeans in the nineteenth century and lost up to two-thirds of their populations to disease. It is not unreasonable to suppose that similar havoc occurred in some regions after other contacts. The conquest, beyond dispute, was in many ways deliberately brutal as well, but it is worth keeping in mind, as a proper balance to certain claims, that European culture did not introduce oppression and warfare to the Americas. North American Indian tribes and Latin American higher civilizations had made war on one another, occupied others' land, tortured, enslaved, and looked down on one another since time immemorial. Such, alas, is the all-too-human tendency of human history. None of this in any way justifies European behavior, particularly since Europe then generally held principles that should have prevented such acts. OTHER EUROPEAN LEGACIES Europe introduced some of these cultural and spiritual ideas to the New World, with profound historical consequences. The radical critique of European culture often claims to find a communitarian solidarity among native communities that compares favorably with (indeed, appears to have been concocted as an ideal mirror image to) Western individuals. But today, particularly in light of the forced solidarity of the communist societies, we might take another approach to this issue. While solidarity and subsidiarity, including individual rights, exist in a state of constant tension with one another, we must recall that it has been only in Europe that individual rights have been created at all. The famous defender of Indian rights, the Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas, for instance, carried out a double vocation. While he was in the New World, Las Casas was involved in practical measures of protecting natives, but when he returned to Spain he succeeded in establishing, through now little-known theological disputes at Valladolid, that the Indians were rational beings who therefore deserved human treatment congruent with Catholic theology. The theologian and philosopher Francisco de Vitoria began to articulate in these same debates the framework of international law that would legally recognize the rationality of the Indians and their right to independence. Many modern historians may not think theological disputes important. In this case, however, they had a practical effect: They may not have saved the Indian from brutal settlers, but they at least initiated the kind of thinking about individual and groups rights of persons outside of familiar notions, which we now - far too ungratefully - take for granted. Several of the Spanish thinkers, stimulated by their contacts with the hitherto unknown Native American cultures, played a crucial role in developing some of our most cherished international principles. THE EUROPEAN OPENING The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa argues that whatever anger we may feel toward European atrocities and whatever sympathies we may have for abused native people, Europe also brought a unique dimension with it to these lands: Father las Casas was the most active, although not the only one, of those nonconformists who revelled against the abuses inflicted upon the Indians. They fought against their fellow men and against the policies of their own country in the name of the moral principle that to them was higher than any principle of nation or state. This self-determination could not have been possible among the Incas or any of the other pre- Hispanic cultures. In these cultures, as in the other great civilizations of history foreign to the West, the individual could not morally question the social organism of which he was a part, because he existed only as an integral atom of that organism and because for him the dictates of the state could not be separated from morality. The first culture to interrogate and question itself, the first to break up the masses into individual beings who with time gradually gained the right to think and act for themselves, was to become, thanks to that unknown exercise, freedom, the most powerful civilization in our world. This, too, is a legacy - however unintended - of Columbus. It should come as no surprise that then, as now, some politicians, businessmen, and soldiers behaved in ways that contradicted the highest principles accepted by the culture. But not even all of them were bad by any means. The first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, shrewdly proposed that a simple practical rule be adopted to circumvent the agendas of all parties: "Treat the Indians like any other people and do not make special rules and regulations for them. There are few persons in these parts who are not motivated on their opinions of the Indians, by some interest, whether temporal or spiritual, or by some passion or ambition, good or bad." In that early advice, the seeds of fair treatment for all, regardless of origin, begin to sprout - a strongly American trait necessitated by the rich mixture of various people on these shores. GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT Even in the decades after Columbus, little by little, such principles were being promoted by European authorities. Secular and religious leaders were punished or recalled by the crown when word of their abuses reached Madrid. For example, Charles V himself ordered one Francisco de Chaves to pay for the construction of an Indian school as recompense for mistreating Indians. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, laws were passed that prohibited the Spanish from even using abusive names for the natives. One of the most notorious cases of abuse, in fact, was that of the bishop of Yucatan, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa. Ironically, Landa was also perhaps one of the most gifted linguists to come into early contact with the Mayas. Not only did he master the language, he also recorded Mayan customs and history, becoming the most important anthropological source for native culture at the time of first contact. Furthermore, he had phonetic transcriptions made of the words represented by Mayan glyphs, which have been crucial to the recent successes in deciphering them. But Landa was recalled to Spain in 1564 to stand trial for having tortured Indians he suspected of heresy and for having burned hundreds of Mayan books now lost forever. Sadly, Landa and other religious leaders were also operating in opposition to the leaders of their own church. Decades earlier, in 1537, Pope Paul III had written an encyclical, Sublimis Deus, which states authoritatively what was to be decided years later in the theological disputes at Valladolid: Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by the Christians are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen it shall be null and of no effect. ...By virtue of our apostolic authority we declare...that the said Indians and other peoples should be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by preaching the word of God and by the example of good and holy living. THE ATTACK ON THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN HERITAGE But the radical critics are not interested in reasonable, balanced portrayals of the historical record, particularly the religious record. As Sale's quotation at the beginning of this essay suggests, he wishes both to decry the current environmental and social situation of the developed world while finding their deepest causes in biblical sources. The attack is meant to discredit not only developed industrial democracies by the theological and philosophical premises of the entire Judeo- Christian tradition. In this view, the commands "be fruitful and multiply" and "subdue the earth" are the evil seeds that have sprouted into the pervasive evils of the modern world. Western culture is unique, but not as most Westerners imagine it to be. Western society alone has thoroughly divorced itself from the natural world and hypocritically employed its abstract spirituality to exploit the environment and other human beings. This is doubtless one of the silliest parts of the radical critique, an argument so ill-informed that it can only be attributed to sheer spleen. The notion that medieval, late- medieval, and early Renaissance Europe produced systems uniquely founded on the ruthless domination of nature projects back upon that time a contemporary hatred for modern capitalism and industrialism that the historical record does not support. And like all human cultures, sometimes that search resulted in disastrous consequences. In its expansion of empire, for example, Spain caused erosion of its soil by cutting many trees in an already rocky land. Similarly, about six centuries before Columbus in the Mayan city of Copan, growing population led to deforestation, disease, and urban collapse - a fate that also overtook the entire Mayan culture of the Yucatan about the same time. For unknown reasons, the Cahokian mound-builders in what is now Illinois abandoned a large and complex urban center just as Columbus was sailing into the Caribbean. Numerous examples of similar failures might be easily culled from a variety of cultures around the world. Given the limits of human knowledge, misuses of nature in one form or another are probably inevitable. In the high middle ages of Europe, the poet Dante wrote out what was always the central European view of man's relationship to nature. The natural is always without error but the other [i.e., the soul] may err by evil object or by too little or too much vigor. In other words, as we all know, once human will enters into a question, not only will there be mistakes, there will be outright evils. The one argument that presumes some human beings live in transcendent harmony with nature is the true hubris from the standpoint of human history for two reasons. First, it presumes that some people are not limited in their perspicacity as we are - a very doubtful proposition. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it claims to know nature, to know how we may live in and use the natural world without unintended consequences. Some small tribes may have done little harm to their environments in small areas of the world. But this was because they lacked the power to do much of anything, good or bad, rather than because of some imaginary natural harmony. WHAT KIND OF HARMONY? Furthermore, the very concept of harmony is by no means unequivocal. Part of the ancient Aztec religion occupied itself with preserving cosmic harmony as the Aztecs understood it. In spite of their cultural differences, the Aztecs, as well as the Olmecs, Toltecs, and Mayans, conceived of the universe as a place produced by the blood of the gods. The problem was that with the passage of time things got out of balance and required, according to the cyclic cosmology in which they believed, ritual acts to return to the original balance. As the great French historian Jacques Soustells put it in his Daily Life of the Aztecs On the Eve of the Spanish Conquest: "Human sacrifice among the Mexicans was inspired neither by cruelty nor by hatred. It was their response and the only response they could conceive, to the instability of a continually threatened world. Blood was necessary to save the world and the men in it." As students of Native Mesoamerican religion know, every fifty-two years the dual calendar completed a full cycle raising the fear that no further cycles would occur. As Soustelle describes the crucial moments, the native astronomers anxiously watched the constellation of the Pleiades rise toward the zenith and asked themselves whether it would go on: Or would it stop, and would the hideous monsters of the end of the world come swarming out? The astronomers priest made a sign: a prisoner was stretched out on the stone. With a dull sound the flint knife opened his chest and in the gaping wound they spun the fire-stick, the tlequauitl. The miracle took place and the flame sprang up, born from this shattered breast; and amid shouts of joy messengers lit their torches at it and ran to carry the sacred fire to the four corners of the central valley. And so the world had escaped its end once more. But how heavy and blood-drenched a task it was for the priests and the warriors and the emperors, century after century to repel the unceasing onslaught of the void. Aztec culture had many charming sides, but its widespread religious practices of torture and human sacrifice shocked even the battle-hardened conquistadores under the leadership of Cortes. Writers who dislike Europe may blithely refer to it as a culture of death, but it does no take much effort to imagine what the critiques of the Spanish monarchs would now be if they and their religion, like the Aztec kings and theirs, required human sacrifice and human blood to obtain the gods' favor and continue their rule. While there are many things to criticize in the Western colonization, evangelization and the introduction of European ideals is for the most part not one of them. Natives and Europeans alike enslaved, tortured, murdered, and abused the environment. Such, sad to say, are the all-too-human traits of societies throughout history. But as the historical record shows and bodies such as the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops have argued, many goods also resulted from the encounter of the two cultures: not the least the arrival of new notions of God and the cosmos, of man and society, that set in motion several experiments in liberty. All of us who inhabit lands where that experiment continues, allowing us to criticize our own systems for failures to live up to their principles in practice, owe a debt of gratitude to the man who, in spite of many faults, began the intermixing of the Old and the New World, and who, wittingly or unwittingly, started us all toward an entirely new vision of our common human life on earth. This article appeared in the DECEMBER 1991 issue and is reprinted with permission from The World & I, a publication of The Washing ton Times Corporation, copyright (c) 1991.