“The genocide and enslavement of pre-Columbian peoples by the European invaders, though no different in kind from, say, the extermination of the indigenous Khosian by Bantu invaders in Africa, or the activities of the Mongols and Tartars in Europe and Asia, or the Polynesians in the East Indies, were horrible events. But it is we, the survivors, who see them as horrible. It was partly the latent capacity to see them as horrible that enabled the colonists to triumph over the pre-Columbian peoples in the first place. The Greco-Roman humanism and Judeo-Christian conscience that combined under Charlemagne and his successors to create Christendom was not only the force that enabled modern Europe to overcome tribalism and dominate the world. It was also the origin of the idea of the Rights of Man and the reason why we can recognize the horror of what our conquistador ancestors perpetrated.
Suppose the indigenous Mesoamerican and Andean politics had continued their evolution without interference from Europe. The ancient Middle East, where pyramid/priest/irrigation/emperor cultures persisted for millennia with occasional changes of dynasty, is probably a sound analogy. The political ethics of such cultures have little of our modern squeamishness and ambiguity. They celebrate with gusto on magnificent ritual stelae their bloody victories, conquests, enslavements, and human sacrifices, and show a robust disregard for the rights of conquered peoples At the time they were overthrown by the Spanish, the Aztecs and the Incas were themselves freshly returned from the destruction of other civilizations; their altars were not yet dry from their enemies’ blood. (Indeed, part of the success of Cortés and Pizarro was that they could enlist the help of the resentful remnants of enslaved and conquered peoples like the Tlascalans.) Nor is there any historical warrant for believing that the passage of a mere five hundred years would have much sophisticated the ethics of those empires. It took at least two thousand years for riverine civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus, the Ganges, and the Yellow River to develop the more humane ideas of the Hebrew prophets, the Vedic tradition, the Greek philosophers and Roman lawyers, and the Buddhists. If the Spanish had tried, and failed, to conquer the Aztecs and Incas, and if those empires had survived into the present day, there would no doubt be splendid frescoes and bas-reliefs of the enslavement, dismemberment, and ritual sacrifice of those strange demons from the sea, unless, in our alternative history, we can imagine that the moral qualms of Europe might have come to infect them across the Atlantic. But would Europe have learnt to interpret its morality in political terms if it had not conquered America?
The irony is manifold. It is not the just that it was those most beautiful images of human love, the Virgin and Christ-child, and the crucified savior, that gave the Europeans the faith and cohesion to crush the Amerindians. Nor is it only that the succeeding civilization, founded upon such atrocities, was for the first time in human history capable of repenting its past conquests. The irony is that it took those particular conquests to arouse the latent political conscience of the world, to translate the personal ethics, evolved at such cost and expense of time in the Old World, into the beginnings of a decent political morality. In other words, the true value of Columbus’s journey and the conquest of the New World may be that they helped to create the very ethics that could condemn them. Certainly the wealth that they created made possible large populations of the middle class in Europe and America, that class which may be unique in giving serious thought to such matters as intercultural ethics (unless the small but important Confucian mandarinate of China qualifies). And this is for all peoples, not just “Westerners,” cause for a dark and complex kind of celebration, that we are all now better able to recognize how bloody are our hands, how extravagant was the cost of our survival, and how valuable we must be, purchased thus.”
If civilization requires the conquest and exploitation of others, if a rich culture’s very existence requires that there be a sufficiently large enough portion of the world converted, often by violent coercion, to capitalist economies so that large populations of ‘information workers’ can thrive, it seems like it would be quite difficult for anyone who has the leisure to think, write and rally about the question of American exploitation not to have inherited blood on their hands. A lot of people end up radically anti-capitalist and anti-Western Civ because of this, but is Western capitalism really the only form that human acquisition by exploitation of nature and each other can take? It seems that a lesson of history is that of the Athenians and Melians, that the powerful will crush the weak for their own benefit. It seems imperialist state expansion has been very much the trajectory that a group of humans inevitably decide upon and force on the rest. Turner’s point is that exploitative and violent power is something that simply will happen in the run of human affairs, and so perhaps we should accept it as a given, and make the best of the situation.
It’s hard not to be aware of the costs of one’s own life (and comfort) on other human beings, present and past. But the alternative is not some sort of peaceful tribe existing in natural plenty, but some different morally ambiguous situation for some other successfully conquering people. I think then that one’s moral ambiguity should be accepted, but need not necessitate one living in opposition to an inevitability, in abnegation of positive life goals. I think life based around a negative idea will ultimately be hollow, and will in fact rely on what is opposed for coherence and significance. This is not to say that reform within the given inevitabilities is not worthwhile. But devoting one’s life to resistance of the inevitable seems worthwhile only as an aesthetic idea, but thin experiential gruel. I think that this does point to a reasonable alternative to radical despair, the embrace the positive ideas in life: family, friendship, work, and the spiritual knowledge of mortality. And also the dark knowledge of the cost at which all this has been purchased.
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