On Columbus Day, Celebrate Western Civilization, Not Multiculturalism

The Rational Argumentator ^ | October 14, 2002 | Dr. Michael S. Berliner

[G. Stolyarov II]

Columbus Day approaches and this year has a special meaning. Christopher Columbus is a carrier of Western Civilization and the very values attacked by terrorists on September 11. To the "politically correct," Columbus Day is an occasion to be mourned. They have mourned, they have attacked, and they have intimidated schools across the country into replacing Columbus Day celebrations with "ethnic diversity" days.

The politically correct view is that Columbus did not discover America, because people had lived here for thousands of years. Worse yet, it's claimed, the main legacy of Columbus is death and destruction. Columbus is routinely vilified as a symbol of slavery and genocide, and the celebration of his arrival likened to a celebration of Hitler and the Holocaust. The attacks on Columbus are ominous, because the actual target is Western Civilization.

Did Columbus "discover" America? Yes—in every important respect. This does not mean that no human eye had been cast on America before Columbus arrived. It does mean that Columbus brought America to the attention of the civilized world, i.e., to the growing, scientific civilizations of Western Europe. The result, ultimately, was the United States of America. It was Columbus' discovery for Western Europe that led to the influx of ideas and people on which this nation was founded—and on which it still rests. The opening of America brought the ideas and achievements of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and the thousands of thinkers, writers, and inventors who followed.

Prior to 1492 what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused, and undeveloped. The inhabitants were primarily hunter-gatherers, wandering across the land, living from hand to mouth and from day to day. There was virtually no change, no growth for thousands of years. With rare exception, life was nasty, brutish, and short: there was no wheel, no written language, no division of labor, little agriculture and scant permanent settlement; but there were endless, bloody wars. Whatever the problems it brought, the vilified Western culture also brought enormous, undreamed-of benefits, without which most of today's Indians would be infinitely poorer or not even alive.

Columbus should be honored, for in so doing, we honor Western Civilization. But the critics do not want to bestow such honor, because their real goal is to denigrate the values of Western Civilization and to glorify the primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism embodied in the tribal cultures of American Indians. They decry the glorification of the West as "cultural imperialism" and "Eurocentrism." We should, they claim, replace our reverence for Western Civilization with multiculturalism, which regards all cultures (including vicious tyrannies) as morally equal. In fact, they aren't. Some cultures are better than others: a free society is better than slavery; reason is better than brute force as a way to deal with other men; productivity is better than stagnation. In fact, Western Civilization stands for man at his best. It stands for the values that make human life possible: reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, productive achievement. The values of Western Civilization are values for all men; they cut across gender, ethnicity, and geography. We should honor Western Civilization not for the ethnocentric reason that some of us happen to have European ancestors but because it is the objectively superior culture.

Underlying the political collectivism of the anti-Columbus crowd is a racist view of human nature. They claim that one's identity is primarily ethnic: if one thinks his ancestors were good, he will supposedly feel good about himself; if he thinks his ancestors were bad, he will supposedly feel self-loathing. But it doesn't work; the achievements or failures of one's ancestors are monumentally irrelevant to one's actual worth as a person. Only the lack of a sense of self leads one to look to others to provide what passes for a sense of identity. Neither the deeds nor misdeeds of others are his own; he can take neither credit nor blame for what someone else chose to do. There are no racial achievements or racial failures, only individual achievements and individual failures. One cannot inherit moral worth or moral vice. "Self-esteem through others" is a self-contradiction.

Thus the sham of "preserving one's heritage" as a rational life goal. Thus the cruel hoax of "multicultural education" as an antidote to racism: it will continue to create more racism. Individualism is the only alternative to the racism of political correctness. We must recognize that everyone is a sovereign entity, with the power of choice and independent judgment. That is the ultimate value of Western Civilization, and it should be proudly proclaimed.

[G. Stolyarov II]

Dr. Berliner is a member of the Board of Directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Happy belated Columbus Day!

[E Rocc]

Suggested reading for the day: Thomas Sowell's Conquests and Cultures.

-Eric

[Trajan88]

Re: "Columbus is routinely vilified as a symbol of slavery and genocide...."

Hmmm. I think the Indians are guilty of slavery (rounding up horses for transportation and trade) and genocide (for the killing of the real native Americans... bison and other creatures that roamed the plains).

Trajan88; TAMU Class of '88; Law Hall (may it R.I.P.) Ramp 9 Mule; F.U.P.

[mc5cents]

Thank you G. My beliefs put to words in an eloquent way.

[quebecois]

The major unifying trait of the entire circus of political correctness is a passionate, irrational hatred of western culture and western man. The left views the ideals of western civilization as the primary roadblock to the establishment of globalist socialism, so they have made it their obsession to destroy us.

They have created environmentalism to deprive us of property rights so as to render us easier for the state to control (and to make us ashamed of our creative work...turning it into a violation of the pristine ecosystem).

They have created multiculturalism to relativize and de-emphasize western culture in america and the western world.

They support massive third world immigration so that the population that most embraces western culture will become a minority throughout the western world....in the hopes that the new populations can be propagandized with hatred of whites and the west.

They have created modern education (whole language, etc) so as to destroy the rational thinking ability of our children...rendering them igoroant of their heritage and more easily controlled.

I could go on...but you get the idea. Liberalism and political correctness are hate philosophies....and you, gentle freepers, are the target.

[TopQuark]

Very, very nice. A great, inciteful and integrated view of the multiple attack routs by the left. I haven't viewed environmentalism the way you suggested: it apperated to be an independently delusional development. But you are undoubtedly correct: even if the original impetus were different, the left would (and did) converge onto the main prize: curtailing western enterprise and creativity of the western man.

Thank you.

[secretagent]

After he failed to contact the emperor of China, the traders of India or the merchants of Japan, Columbus decided to pay for his voyage in the one important commodity he had found in ample supply - human lives. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit and sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands from wives. On board Columbus' slave ships, hundreds died; the sailors tossed the Indian bodies into the Atlantic.

Because Columbus captured more Indian slaves than he could transport to Spain in his small ships, he put them to work in mines and plantations which he, his family and followers created throughout the Caribbean. His marauding band hunted Indians for sport and profit - beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies as food for their hunting dogs. Within four years of Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola, his men had killed or exported one-third of the original Indian population of 300,000. Within another 50 years, the Taino people had been made extinct [editor's note: the old assumption that the Taino became extinct is now open to serious question] - the first casualties of the holocaust of American Indians. The plantation owners then turned to the American mainland and to Africa for new slaves to follow the tragic path of the Taino.

source

Columbus also gets criticized for his alleged personal involvement in the enslavement and murder of the Taino, which the author fails to rebut.

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

I thought about posting the following as a thread, but then decided against it since Columbus Day had passed -- accounts of Columbus from his contemporaries. Very very interesting. Stuff I never knew.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?021014crbo_books

[secretagent]

From the New Yorker article:

The charge of genocide is generally assumed to be a late-twentieth-century indictment of Columbus, but it was first levelled nearly five hundred years ago, by las Casas. Originally a slaveholder himself, las Casas spent a decade in Hispaniola—the island now occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic—before undergoing a conversion. He devoted the next fifty years—he lived to be ninety-two—to trying, in vain, to defend the New World's indigenous peoples. His "History of the Indies" is at once sympathetic to Columbus as an individual and frank about his culpability. Referring to a Taino prisoner whose ears were chopped off during the Second Voyage, las Casas writes, "This was the first case of injustice perpetrated here in the Indies on the mistaken and vain assumption that what was being enacted was justice. It marked the beginning of the spilling of blood, later to become a river of blood, first on this island and then in every corner of these Indies."

Columbus continued to express his fondness for the Taino—"They are a people very generous of spirit, so that they give everything that they are asked for with the best will in the world," he wrote—even as he devised new and more grotesque employments for them. The ostensible purpose of his Second Voyage was to convert the natives of Hispaniola; the real goals were to establish a permanent settlement there and to find gold, of which Hispaniola has very little. Columbus arrived on the island in the fall of 1493, with a fleet of seventeen vessels carrying some twelve hundred men. He then sailed on to explore Cuba. Most of the settlers, meanwhile, turned their attention directly to rape and extortion. Returning to Hispaniola in the fall of 1494, Columbus found the island in chaos, and decided to rectify the situation by further punishing the victims. He shipped five hundred Taino off to the slave market in Seville, then raised an army that marched across the island murdering villagers with guns, swords, and dogs. (Using pack hounds to rip the natives apart was, las Casas wrote, an innovation "thought up, invented, and put into effect by the Devil.") Finally, Columbus imposed a system of tribute under which each adult was required to supply the Spanish with enough gold dust to fill a "Flanders hawk's bell" every three months. It has been estimated that between mistreatment, imported diseases, and outright slaughter, more than a third of the indigenous people of Hispaniola had been killed by 1496.

Nothing new or "multicultural" about criticizing Columbus. Not everyone in his day approved of his treatment of the Indians, apparently.

[Ruth A.]

He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit and sent them to Spain

I saw the restored ships in Virginia in 1992. They are small. Considering the crew, the water and the food, they could not have taken many slaves at all. These ships were not equipped for slave trade as later ships would be.

[secretagent]

I saw the restored ships in Virginia in 1992. They are small. Considering the crew, the water and the food, they could not have taken many slaves at all. These ships were not equipped for slave trade as later ships would be.

Thanks. Perhaps you refer to the ships of the first voyage - the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

I don't know if you disagree with the alleged fact that Columbus sent slaves back to Spain. The text I found doesn't say that Columbus sent the 1200 slaves back on the first voyage.

[Ghlade]

"Prior to 1492 what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused, and undeveloped. The inhabitants were primarily hunter-gatherers, wandering across the land, living from hand to mouth and from day to day. There was virtually no change, no growth for thousands of years. With rare exception, life was nasty, brutish, and short: there was no wheel, no written language, no division of labor, little agriculture and scant permanent settlement; but there were endless, bloody wars."

Bull. What evidence we have for the lifestyles and cultures of Native American nations is scant and inconclusive, to be sure. However, to conclude from this that there was a monolithic, unchanging "Native American" culture is absurd. The various nations and peoples that populated "America" before Columbus' arrival were dynamic and diverse. We have ample physical evidence of complex trade routes in North America, and archeological data indicated that cultures rose and fell over time. Pre-Columbian America = Hobbesian State of Nature is just as much a fantasy as Modern America = "Great Satan." Western Civilization looks great on its own; you don't need to misrepresent other cultures to make it look better.

"The result, ultimately, was the United States of America."

Err, no. ONE result was the United States of America. Another was Canada, and another was Mexico, and another was Peru, etc. Columbus, to my knowledge, never set foot on what was to become the US.

"It was Columbus' discovery for Western Europe that led to the influx of ideas and people on which this nation was founded—and on which it still rests. The opening of America brought the ideas and achievements of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and the thousands of thinkers, writers, and inventors who followed."

Insofar as it brought *settlers* who possessed these ideas, I'm good with this. Not surprisingly, very few English, Spanish, Dutch, or Portugese colonists were teaching Aristotle or Newton to the Native Americans. There are exceptions of course. The Cherokees adapted to English civilization in a way that few other native peoples did. That they were so cruelly treated by the early U.S. is one of the great tragedies (and lost opportunities) in American history.