Christopher Columbus has been turned into a whipping boy, a villain, and it has been fashionable since the 500th anniversary in 1992. Rather than being celebrated as an explorer, he was instead seen as some rank imperialist who was doing all he could, essentially, to rape, pillage, spread disease, and enslave people, and that's what you hear today. Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran an article pushing back, called Straight Talk About Christopher Columbus.
Dr. Mark Kalthoff, Professor and Chairman of the Department of History at Hillsdale College, gave a rather intriguing interview discussing European and American history. He says that in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the world wasn't a particularly tolerant or friendly place by many of the standards we appreciate today. Europeans themselves were looking to the West to travel across the Atlantic to get to the East because they couldn't go the short way, which was to turn back to go East because there were all these Muslims and Moors who were in their way. It turns out that wherever you went, the stronger people in the world made the weaker people suffer.
So, in Columbus' time, the Muslims and the Chinese were much more powerful than the poor Europeans, and as a result, Europeans were suffering; they were being enslaved, and millions died from plagues that were brought to them from farther East. The world of the 15th and 16th centuries was one in which powerful people routinely subjugated weaker people. We didn't have modern medicine, so disease killed people, and slavery was rampant the world over. The exceptional thing about Columbus isn't that he didn't do those things; he did some of those things, and so did everyone else.
The more exceptional thing was that, over time, the ideas he spread and those who followed in his wake in Christendom and Western Europe were the home of the place that gradually exterminated slavery. Gradually began to share ideas about free trade and express ideas of tolerance. This idea of tolerance, and being willing not just to say might makes right, is itself a Western idea that grew out of the civilization Columbus came from.
In some sense, he was a product of his time. But that doesn't make him the one to demonize. Let's understand the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and see whether European practices, as they traveled to North America, were particularly different from how Europeans were treated by, say, Muslims, Chinese, or others they might encounter.
One of the greatest temptations for students of history, and the highest responsibility for good professors, is to recognize that we are all living now and have concerns about our day and our age. Many of them are legitimate and understandable. But the job of the historian and honest student of history is not to take those high-minded views we have come to accept as normative in our day and sniff around the past to find who either exceeded or failed to live up to our standards of normative excellence.
But instead, try to understand the past and what circumstances, ideas, and events made it possible for people to hold ideas that seem foreign to us today, ideas that were once high and noble, that we have forgotten to cling to and need to relearn. In other cases, we have overcome obstacles that tripped up previous generations.
We are alive today; we're better than those who came before; therefore, we are entitled to judge them. C.S. Lewis called that outlook "chronological snobbery." The idea is that those who are further down the timeline are, by virtue of that process, more enlightened. That notion is also called presentism. That doesn't help much because it assumes that what we are doing now is better than what we did before, just because we're doing it now. It can justify a move to bad policy and a kind of presentist hubris we want to avoid.
-Dr. Mark Kalthoff
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