Isegoria

Razib Khan takes Elizabeth Kolbert’s review of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature as a jumping-off point to discuss relative angels and absolute demons:

Ironically Kolbert is repeating the Anglo-Protestant Black Legend about the Spaniards, rooted in the rivalries and sectarianism of the 16th and 18th centuries, but persisting down amongst English speaking secular intellectuals. The reality is that the Spaniards did not want to kill the indigenous peoples, they died of disease and the societal destabilization that disease entailed. Europeans who arrived from Iberia in the New World ideally wished to collect rents from peasants. The death of those peasants due to disease was a major inconvenience, which entailed the importation of black Africans who were resistant to the Old World diseases like malaria which were spreading across the American tropics. The violence done to native peoples was predominantly pathogenic, not physical.

This is not to deny that the Spaniards were brutal. They quite certainly were. But they need to be compared to their non-Spanish contemporaries. The Aztec Triple Alliance which Cortez overthrew famously went to war to obtain captives for human sacrifice, who were also later cannibalized. Cortez won his war with disease and native allies who were chafing under the brutal Aztec hegemony. Additionally, the Spanish authorities were ambivalent about the brutality and exploitation which was being meted out by the European settlers. Much of the material in the Black Legend derives from the polemics of the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. He made the case for the humanity of the native people who were now due the protection of the Spanish crown. This sort of dialogue and argument amongst the Spanish is itself an advancement across the arc of history. Consider the genocide which is celebrated in much of the Hebrew Bible as a contrast.* Was there an an Aztec Bartolomé de las Casas? Judging by what we know from antique Old World societies I doubt it.

The same point can be made about British slavery. It is correct that the enterprise of European civilization in the early modern period focused to a great extent on the trade in humans. But this is not exceptional. Kolbert alludes to Pinker’s mention of the Arab slave trade, but Europeans themselves long traded in humans from the north and east of the continent from antiquity down to the medieval period. This only dissipated when the supply of pagans outside of the Christian fringe was removed by the conversion of the last enclaves of the old religions (note, for example, that Slavs were common as slaves on both shores of the Mediterranean around the year 1000; cities like Venice rose to some extent on the slave trade). What was new was that in the early modern period there were those who made the case against slavery on humanitarian grounds. Though not all pre-modern civilizations had slavery, slavery as an institution was generally accepted as legitimate, if not always optimal (in contrast to cannibalism and human sacrifice, which were marginalized or banned by the world religions rather early on).

Finally, the last bone I have to pick with Elizabeth Kolbert is a general paradigmatic one. The reason that I suspect Steven Pinker does not talk much about European colonialism is that it was not exceptionally brutal, nor was it a very long period in much of the world. To make these assessments you need a thick understanding of world history which most people don’t have. The greatest mass death that occurred during the age of white European supremacy was that of the Taiping Rebellion. Though China was already coming under European pressure, and the Taipings claimed a Christian inspiration, the reality is that if you know Chinese history they were entirely explicable as the sort of disturbance which occurs near the end of a dynasty. In India the British decapitated much of the local elite, but primarily focused on extracting rents (the systematic brutality in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny was exceptional). I doubt that the British Raj was a time of greater violence than the political chaos of the 18th century, as the Mughal ascendancy collapsed and other powers arose to fill the vacuum and triggered a series of conflicts. And the European colonial adventures in Africa and the Middle East were fleeting at best, rarely lasting more than a century, and often far less.

I suspect that Kolbert’s emphasis on the European colonial experience of much of the world is influenced by the ubiquity of the postcolonial paradigm. Those who take postcolonial thinking as normative sometimes forget that not everyone shares their framework. I do not, and I would be willing to bet that Steven Pinker would also dissent from the presuppositions of postcolonialism. That means that the facts, the truths, that many take for granted are actually not taken for granted by all, and are disputed. One of the issues with postcolonial models is that they seem to view Europeans and European culture, and their colonial enterprises, as sui generis. This makes generalization from the West, as Pinker does, problematic. But for those of us who don’t see the West as qualitatively different there is far less of an issue.

A postcolonial model is ironically extremely Eurocentric, with a total blindness to what came before Europeans. To my knowledge they do not touch upon the genocide suffered by the Dzungar Mongols at the hands of the Manchus in the 18th century. The Manchu Empire, which in China proper were the Ching, was clearly a classic colonial enterprise. Ironically it served as the template for the nationalism of Republican and Communist China. Similarly, postcolonial theorists may discuss the British influence India, but they do not give the same space to the impact of West Asian Muslim elites via native Indian converts to Islam, as well as how they shaped Hindu society more broadly (e.g., West Asian Muslim elite norms of female modesty spread to Hindu elites, and to some extent remain in place in much of the subcontinent). But anyone who knows the structure of the Mughal Empire in the 17th century at its peak will observe that India was viewed to a great extent as a fat cow to be bled dry by Persians and Turks who arrived in large numbers during that period to staff the civilian and military apparatus of the Timurids, and were given preference to native born Muslims and Hindus, who were tacitly understood to be racially inferior.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »