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?

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.

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.

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.