Nothing like Columbus day (Oct 10) here in the US to stimulate righteous self-flagellation by journalists showing their ethical bona fides. The standard article is one like in my local paper, where the author noted:How can we expect these young people to ever be the heroes of their own lives when we insist on giving them models like Columbus, whose concerns were fame and money, but we never mention the people like De las Casas who devoted their lives to fighting injustice?It is clearly a hard thing for intellectuals to acknowledge benefits from moral inferiors who never intended it. Columbus and his ilk may have wanted to save souls via Catholicism, but no doubt there was also a significant amount of materialistic greed and power motivating them, so any good effects such as the relative prosperity, tolerance, and scientific advancement created by Europeans in America was pure luck and not worth the cost.
I have had it with this type of hero and this type of teaching. This is what I want to say to my students:
You have been and will continue to be bombarded with images of heroes who are white, who are men, who are Christian, who are wealthy, who live a life totally different from your own. For the most part, history has been written about people unlike you.
To me, this is just the modern equivalent of "original sin", a concept that for centuries allowed the intelligentsia to engage in monumental self-pity about our inherent imperfection, but with the satisfying message that "we are all guilty". Of course, if everyone is guilty, no one is, so the real point of original sin was an exercise in morally superior one-upsmanship: he who most eloquently proclaims themself to be a member of miserable wretches is morally superior and cosmopolitan compared to someone with conventional ethnocentrism. Both Catholicism and Protestantism made original sin one of the bedrock ideas.
Intellectuals are now indifferent to organized religion, but the urge to embrace original sin is deep. Luckily, their has been a lot of misery in the history of man, and it's very comforting to think it has been caused by the conscious choice of selfish men, as opposed the unintended consequences of moralists and ideologues. Ethnocentrism is bad, but so is its opposite. There is nothing morally superior about ignorant natives, who generally had homocide rates well above those in Medieval Europe.
HedgeFundGuy - am 2005-10-10 01:04
Robert Schwartz (guest) meinte am 10. Oct, 06:37:
Your Local Paper
"The standard article is one like in my local paper"I am confused. The article seems to be from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. But your clock gives Vienna time and there are German things all over the home page. Where are you?
Paul N (guest) antwortete am 10. Oct, 07:18:
HedgeFundGuy, you're in Minnesota? I thought you were in NY for some reason.
Mahalanobis antwortete am 10. Oct, 11:37:
If
HedgeFundGuy and I were the same person, wouldn't I suffer from multiple personality disorder?
Robert Schwartz (guest) antwortete am 11. Oct, 18:25:
So there is more than one poster here and this is not the personal weblog of Michael Stasny?
Mahalanobis antwortete am 12. Oct, 18:14:
Yup
At the end of every post you' ll find the name of the contributor. HedgeFundGuy joined this blog about a year ago. Now people come to read his stories. I am soooo depressed.
-keith in mtn. view (guest) meinte am 10. Oct, 22:35:
Euro-stagnation was nothing new
An alternative perspective that places Columbus in context, relative to the simplistic Left-dominant anti-occidental prejudices, was provided by Glenn Reynolds, from the book "Admiral of the Ocean Sea : A Life of Christopher Columbus" by Samuel Eliot Morison he with a salient passage referencing the early Euro-malaise: At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger's press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: "A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future."
Reynolds goes on to further to notice that an article by Jim Bennett has identified the origin of the characteristic y negativity of the Academic Left: "This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a miniscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect."
It answers some of the same issues I have with my academic-oriented Calvinist Leftist parents anyhow, and links to those intellectual theologies of "original sin."
