The Columbus Myth Myth

I’m too lazy to link to any of the many articles commenting on the culture wars swirling around Mr. European Hegemonist himself, Christopher Columbus. But I would like to complain, a little, about the myth of the Columbus myth.

We are taught that we were taught that Christopher Columbus was a great and good man who knew the world was round rather than flat and who discovered America, thus laying the groundwork for democracy around the world, along with apple pie and baseball (still the thing back in those days, rather than a thing).

In fact, we were taught that Columbus was not the first man to think that the world was round—that was a classic exploded myth, that even little kids knew about, along with the notion that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree. We also knew that Columbus never knew that he had discovered the “New World”, and the question of whether Columbus “discovered” the Indians or the other way round was a standard joke. Furthermore, Columbus was really not associated at all with American ideals—quite reasonably, since they didn’t exist in his time.

Further furthermore, most the really unsavory parts of Columbus’ biography—the murderous conquests, the obsessive search for gold (aka “the white man’s disease”), his brutal record of mismanagement as viceroy and governor of the Indies, his eventual imprisonment, the furious and vicious squabbling between the various members of Spanish imperial government, who seemed to spend all their time trying to destroy one another—all this was known, to me at least, at the age of nine, thanks to Landmark Books.

I suppose most young readers develop fixations of some sort. My fixation was Landmark Books. I would read any Landmark book regardless of content. I can’t at all remember what started me off, but I read every one of them that I could get my hands on. The best of them, in retrospect, involved the history of science—Louis Agassiz developing the theory of the ice age and Mary Anning, the Englishwoman who discovered the first ichthyosaur skeleton, along with many other Jurassic fossils, developing the initial understanding of the significance of the fossil record.¹ But a great many of the books, for whatever reason, were about the early Spanish explorers, and I read them all, including such little-known characters as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who spent a good deal of time wandering around in what is now Texas and, like Columbus, also spent some time in the slammer.

The point is, the facts were there, most of them, available to anyone nerdy enough to read a book written more or less at the fifth-grade level. All the myth-slayers of the Sixties and after could have known this as kids. They were brainwashed not by society so much as by their own ignorance.

The second half of the Columbus Myth Myth is the myth of the Noble Savage, cranked up a hundred times above the level achieved when Bartolomé de las Casas wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542. The notion, of course, is that civilization is evil and “innocence”, being co-extensive with “Nature”, is effectively divine, According to the New Dispensation, the Western Hemisphere, until Columbus showed up, was one, great, thriving Eden, unacquainted with sin.² This sentimentality is very closely linked with modern environmentalism, which worships unspoiled nature while observing it in air-conditioned comfort, I have yet to hear of an environmentalist ready to abandon electricity.³ And if you get electricity, I think you get sin as well. It’s sort of a package deal.

As for the significance of Columbus, he demonstrated the feasibility of “blue water sailing” across immense tracts of ocean, making four round-trips to the New World, something no civilization had ever done before and something that no civilization could have done before. Scarcely 25 years after Columbus’ first voyage, Ferdinand Magellan sailed entirely around the globe, a “world historical event” virtually without precedent. The discovery of the New World would help mightily in the transformation of the Old.

For the “Indians”, of course, this was a world historical event they could have done without. For centuries, their descendants benefited little from their membership in “the West”. It is only since the Second World War that the benefits of modern civilization have begun to substantially change the lives of the bottom 90%. Yet I do not doubt the superiority of the “examined life”, for only the examined life has moral significance. And only civilization can provide the economic underpinning that makes the examined life possible, and only modern western civilization—what the latter-day European clercs like to call, with limitless scorn, “Reagan-Thatcherite neoliberalism”⁴—can provide the sustained economic growth that can enable “everyone” to enjoy the leisure of a Socrates.