Anglosphere North America

We who live in anglosphere North America — that is, the United States and Canada, and not Mexico — are the fortunate recipients of the world’s most valuable inheritance.  This legacy has been granted due to works noble and low, efforts voluntary and coerced, by intent and by accident, and through the interplay of our anglosphere heritage with other cultures.  Let’s face it — western civilization rocks, it kicks ass, and in the past it has kicked several asses, not all of the fairly or rightfully.

It should not be controversial to acknowledge that much of the foundation of our society was extracted from slave labor of an explicit or an insidious type. In this, it should also be simple to say that anglosphere western civilization is not alone, and not even among the worst society in exploitative histories.  The native American cultures were a mixed bag of noble savage and barbarous savage.  The latinosphere arm of western civilization was far more cruel to indigenous peoples.  Whereas the north featured displacement and treachery with “only” the occasional massacre, the southern end of things was bent on a program of genocide via  apocalyptic slaughter and a breeding out of the population.  Meanwhile, the north has prospered due to its superior foundational culture, while the south has languished in poverty, internal war, and disease, and predictably so, due to the inferior cultural inheritance.  This should also not be controversial.  No less a latinosphere luminary than Simon Bolivar has said so, explicitly, in terms not as kind as mine.  We must face facts in order to make sense.

The fact is that we blundered into North America and did a lot of damage, and did a lot of good.  It is heartening to see a recent profusion of books with titles such as The First Americans, The Hohokam Millennium, and In Search of Ancient North America.  These are not in obscure university collections, but for sale on Amazon in a rapidly growing segment.  This is the sort of opportunity for introspection which offers a great promise, a real cause for optimism.  Why?

Western Civilization is regarded for better and for worse as the standard of civilization itself.  “Western Civilization — but I repeat myself,” as some smart aleck put it.  It is easy therefore to view ourselves as the one true unchanging metric against which behavior is to be measured.  It is also, somewhat puzzlingly , a standard against which other cultures are not held to account, but released from accountability.  If Muslims behead dissent and enslave women, well, that’s their culture.  Meanwhile, if the President of Harvard says that women may have a statistically lower propensity to do well in mathematics, he is hounded from his job in a pop-culture pogrom.  Off with his head.  This misapplication of standards while refusing to acknowledge the underlying conflict is a dangerously retrogressive set of behaviors.  It punishes real progress in a human sense while rewarding the very worst elements in our species with a “pass”, and what gets rewarded gets repeated.

How easy it should be, then, to apply some of the same differentiation to our own forebears.  The men and women who made their way from Europe to the Americas in creaking deathtraps were not perfect, and they did not have the benefit, however mixed, of morality dispensed from the learned heads of Harvard, Yale, or Columbia.  Instead, they were people such as John Harvard, Elihu Yale, and Christopher Columbus.  We should find it easy to give credit for the massive things they got right and to forgive at length their transgressions for which many have paid an awful price.  Slavery is of course the most handy example, but far from the only one, and yet our world is not so scarred by the past that we have no choice but to rend our garments and stone each other until we are conquered by the most savage nobility, that unforgiving and inhumane and conquering empire of Islam.  No doubt there are those for whom this conquest is a manifest goal, and a great many more for whom it is a perverse, furtive desire, the object of longing in the torturer’s heart.  But for far many more, there must be a way to acknowledge that those who brought us here may be eligible for our scorn, but are also worthy of our mercy.  Those who went before should be entitled to at least the lenience that we grant others who live in the internet age.

We as the anglosphere burst into North America and, wrapped in contemporary struggles against man, nature, time, and chaos itself, set out to create a brilliant future, and succeeded wildly.  This was accomplished through much right and noble struggle, and through no small degree of savage and shameful exploitation.  And here we all are, all of us together.  Is there yet a native child on a reservation or a descendant of slaves in some hellish city who does not read and write?  Who does not enjoy at least the opportunity to share in an innoculated, educated, peaceful society?

A recent renaissance in the earlier history of North America is a wonderful opportunity to take a balanced, appreciative view of those who lived and died, who killed and built, who wandered and settled long before the white man came.  We may take the same view of the white man who came into that midst and proceeded to do exactly as the natives had.  History is made by many forces fleeting and accidental, but once it is made, no force however implacably driven may cause it to be unmade.  This is the world as it is.  We should get to know the folks who inhabit it, and who live on through us.