Tomorrow is Columbus Day. Or, rather, it is Columbus Day observed, one of those holidays that have been instituted for retailers to attempt a 3-day bonanza. It was on October 12th, 1492, that Columbus sighted Santo Domingo -- give or take a few days. The calendar has changed since then. It was an event that changed the world. Of course, everyone has known for a long time that Columbus was not the discoverer of America, or at least of these land masses that we now call America. In some sense you could say that he discovered America itself, since the maps drawn, very inaccurately, by Amerigo Vespucci, who had never left Italy, and which gave the lands of the western hemisphere their name, were based essentially on explorations by Columbus and his followers. Nevertheless, this land had been discovered before. Often. Thousands of years before Columbus, explorers from Asia had found and settled these continents, and become what Columbus was to name Indians, since he was convinced that he had reached those shores. However, as we have all been taught, he was not even the first European to make that perilous journey. Though in those days the world was so huge that news of it had not reached the southern Europe that was Columbus' home, Lief Ericson had even founded a Danish settlement in North America called Vinland. There is quite a bit of evidence that there were European explorers of an even earlier date, from Ireland and perhaps other Scandinavian countries, and possible traces of Phoenicians from an earlier time than that. It has struck me, noticing the differences in certain physical characteristics of eastern and western tribes of American Indians, that there may have been more settling from the west of Europe than we have ever imagined. However, that is merely my speculation, and is of no importance anyway when we are reminded that, in fact, we are all one race originating in Africa around a million years ago and spreading out from there to populate the whole world with human beings.
Whatever the goings and comings may have been previously, it is the discovery by Columbus more than 518 years ago that began the creation of our modern world. It seems not unfitting that that event should be commemorated. Much has changed since then, however, and Columbus Day is celebrated only as a peg to hang a sales campaign on if it is mentioned at all. In the state of California, the 500th anniversary of the event was celebrated by changing the name from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day, and I received a reminder from a Unitarian Universalist email list that it should be celebrated as such. Columbus himself has become someone to be ashamed of -- a part of our history to sweep under the mat, to pretend it never happened, or to mention it only with shamefaced embarrassment. An odd thing has happened to our history and our heroes in this postmodern age. Our heroes have become villains, and their monuments are covered with graffiti.
One of the attractions of the Southwest Unitarian Universalist Conference's district meetings was a bookstore maintained by a woman whose passion it was to do so. At every meeting the books were displayed and bought and sold. The stock reflected the opinions of its manager, as such stocks always do. At a meeting one time I noticed a woman carrying a book that she had purchased there called something like, When God Was a Woman. I am usually quite civilized. I do not accost strangers or insult their possessions as a general rule, but something came over me. Perhaps I was simply fed to the back teeth. "Ah," I said, "one of those fake histories." Her answer was, "I'm a historian, and all history is fake." Well, certainly I was completely silenced. I don't think I even had enough chutzpah left to sputter. Well, I may have rolled my eyes a bit. There is no question that the criticism of the way history has been written has basis in fact. Historians, like everyone else, do their work with certain biases, within certain cultures, with many preconceptions. However, before historians were taught that their entire discipline was a fake, there was an effort, however hopeless, at a certain level of objectivity. An attempt was made to ascertain facts, and the best historians even tried to understand and counterbalance the biases that they knew they had. Now the object of studying and writing history is to push a particular point of view. It is argued that this will counter the past imbalances, the untruths students have been told in the name of history, and that seems reasonable, except that heretofore facts were inadvertently selected to fit a particular world-view, unintentionally biasing conclusions, and now it is often intentional. The well-meaning error, it seems to me, is likely to be less false than the intentional one. We have, in our determined politicizing of history become intensely ahistorical. We ignore, besmirch, or destroy our monuments, and learn to debase our institutions and our leaders. Since that time Beacon Press published a book, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory subtitled, Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future. I do wish I had at least had that to refer to at the time.
I got excellent videotape on leadership, the best I have ever seen in its look at the qualities needed for leadership and the ways in which our present society keeps it from emerging -- or being successful if it does. It was used at a training session held in Boston for both lay and clergy leaders in the Unitarian Universalist faith. Unluckily, the trainer, Ed Friedman, used Christopher Columbus as his primary example of leadership. An attendee told me that much of the discussion time following the showing of the video was taken up in criticizing that choice because of the evil consequences of Columbus' discovery: the near destruction of the American Indian tribes, the institution of slavery based on racial differences -- there is no question that there were evil consequences. There were other consequences as well, one of which is the greatest experiment in freedom and democracy that the world has ever known.
It seems to me a peculiar phenomenon that we allow a history of which we have little or no understanding to distort and harm our present-day searches for justice, freedom and equality. The old bromide says that if you do not know history you are doomed to repeat it. I don't think that is necessarily true, though certainly the lessons of history can serve as warnings against repeated errors, but it seems to me that it is more true that if you don't understand your history you can never understand the world in which you live. That is most true when you intentionally distort it in order to manipulate the present, and when you use it to justify hatreds and historical vandalism that has no context.
Columbus himself actually killed and enslaved comparatively few people, and his original intentions were not even to conquer new territory, but simply to open a new route to trading partners in Asia. European traders, in order to obtain access to the riches of India and China had to somehow avoid the Islamic empires encircling Europe and blocking their eastward trade. The trip around the horn of Africa was long and dangerous, and Columbus was convinced, given his conviction (which was shared by most educated folk) that the world was round, that he could find a better, safer, even shorter way to those exotic lands by sailing west. It was world trade he was after, not land and slaves. What he found was richer far than what he sought, but even with his mistaken vision, even with his attitude of conquest which we no longer share, his courage and determination are worthy of our respect.
It didn't take long for others to understand how significant was his find, and their intention was conquest, colonialism, all the things that we see today as evil. What they saw, however -- and this is what we must learn to understand -- was glory, honor and riches. They had their whole culture behind them with no dissenting voice. The only dissent, the only question, came from the conquered, and that was irrelevant. Look at the whole sweep of human history. The conqueror, the warrior, was the hero. There was not only nothing wrong with taking any land you could get and spreading your influence and your living space as far as you could, but it was what was expected, if you could manage it. That includes the tribes of the New World as well. They might not have had a sense of personal property in the way that Europeans had it, being at least still partially nomadic, but they had a sense of territory which they fought for. For them, too, the warrior was the hero. Our values have changed; perhaps we can say that there has been moral advancement in our civilization. We no longer think it is a good thing to conquer and annex land and kill or enslave its people. Nevertheless that doesn't change the courage and determination, even the piety and patriotism, of those who did well what they thought was good and right.
Columbus was merely the first to endure the hot pink spray paint. In an effort to erase and forget all unhappy history, one school in New Orleans voted to change its name so that students would no longer have to be reminded of the great villain slaveholder, George Washington; could leave behind in his infamy the first president of our country. The Thomas Jefferson District of the Unitarian Universalist Association came within a hair of changing its name for the same reason, and the vote will not be left to stand unchallenged. Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence and the founder of religious freedom in our nation was too evil to be honored in this way because, like everyone else of his time and class, he was a slave owner. Probably the last authentic American hero, Martin Luther King, Jr., is seldom mentioned without reference to his sexual peccadilloes and his family sells the honor and integrity of his name from concession stands. The only hero who has escaped fairly well so far is Abraham Lincoln, and we've already learned too much about his bipolar disorder and his racist statements. Perhaps we'll have to change the name of the capital of the U.S., Washington D. C. (the District of Columbia), since it honors two of our fallen heroes at once. I'm sure we can find something innocuous like ...Oh, perhaps Capitol City would do. If we name it after someone else in an excess of trust, I'm sure our busy dehistorians and the media will find something wrong with that person. They will be able to, of course, since even heroes are human, and the hero of today, had we any such in an ahistorical society, will be sure to be a villain tomorrow when our values change again.
When we debase our monuments we debase as well the institutions which give our society its framework. It is one of the fragmenting forces in our society today. There is little left to which we can turn in trust and respect to tell us who we are and why we exist as a community or a nation. We are left with uneducated opinion and personal agendas. We govern by poll and by greed, and there are no common values which can lead us forward to a greater future and no common vision to give us direction. Our great heritage of liberty and justice, flawed as it has been, is being mired in distrust and cynicism.
I am not saying that we should ignore or deny the flaws of our forbears and leaders or the sad consequences as well as the glorious ones of their actions. They had and have flaws as all of us do, and it is interesting and instructive to learn of them. We need, however, to be neither obsessed by them nor eager to define an individual by the flaws we discover -- nor for that matter by flaws that were not flaws at the time that they flourished. Knowledge of history offers a sense of balance. To reject history for the sake of an agenda either of power or cynicism or even benevolence is to foster dis/integration.
So let us celebrate Columbus Day tomorrow. Let us honor his courage and vision that had the power to remake the world. Let us honor, too, with affection, his error of calculation, and instead of blaming him for the horrors of genocide and racism that followed in his path as unintended consequences, let us think how we can use those qualities that we must, in fairness, admire in him to eradicate the injustices that remain. Let us struggle against the temptation to cynicism and mistrust and try to keep our monuments and our institutions free of the vandalism of ignorance and fragmentation.