I’m a contrarian. The way that cashes out is that, while I consider myself a leftist and a progressive, I spend a lot of time critically analyzing left wing arguments and flavor-of-the-week takes on current events.
Apart from genuinely being unable to leave well enough alone, I do this because while my values can only be described as leftist in nature, the contemporary left and I actually have very little in common. I find the level of intellectual rigor on the left generally very low, and in my experience even most self-styled intellectuals on the left have largely given shockingly little thought to exactly what their principles are or why they hold them. For people who regularly make sweeping and historically unprecedented prescriptions for how governments and societies ought to operate, this seems like a very bad thing.
Because of how much of my attention goes to trying to carve out a niche on the left that I’m not embarrassed to identify with, I think I often run the risk of appearing not to have serious differences with the right, because I simply don’t discuss them as often. But, that’s really not the case. For instance: in light of the recent decision by Florida’s government to approve the use of PragerU content as supplemental materials in public schools, I want to emphasize that I really don’t think we need to teach kids that slavery is complicated and the people who perpetrated it were often good.
I’m not saying that’s not necessarily true. Of course, we know that people are complicated. If we had been born in the past, we like to think, we would be good people, just as we hopefully are now. At the very least, we would try to be. But anyone who imagines that they could have been raised in, say, 1450s Genoa, and would have just spontaneously developed into a firebrand abolitionist, is truly detached from reality.
I see being tolerant of slavery back then as being kind of like us moderns being tolerant of the third-world labor practices, or our reliance on underpaid immigrant labor, for many of our modern consumer conveniences. No, we don’t especially like it, and a few truly fanatical people actually orient their entire lives around not allowing themselves to benefit from it, but it’s there—indeed, it’s everywhere—and if we want to partake in the world, most of us can’t realistically reject it, or spend every waking moment stressing about our participation in our morally compromised global economy. In reality, most of us just don’t care about it. And big surprise, the old global economy was a lot worse, and people still participated in it, and mostly didn’t care about it. And big surprise, those who did often found ways of convincing themselves it wasn’t that bad.
They were wrong; it was that bad. And we’re wrong; it still is. Those things were bad, and the people who engaged in things like the slave trade were doing bad things. But (and here’s an idea we have a very, very hard time accepting) they were not necessarily bad people, anymore than we are necessarily bad people.
It is an uncomfortable reality we will always try to escape, that good people often do terrible things. We shouldn’t try to escape it—we should live with and acknowledge the fact that part of the human condition is having to kill things to survive (even if we no longer have to do it with our own hands), and being a good person probably shouldn’t mean living in a state of constant turmoil about the fact that the world isn’t perfect, or that you have your own part to play in the mess. At the same time, pretending the mess isn’t there or that it isn’t bad isn’t a good move either. We are caught in a double bind, and we may as well at least admit it.
Having said that, I really don’t appreciate this video from PragerU I recently came across in which two kids go back in time to talk to a highly sanitized Christopher Columbus, who explains that, while he is very happy to hear that slavery is no longer accepted in the modern world, people in his time simply had no choice, and in fact slavery wasn’t always that bad:
Columbus: Slavery is as old as time, and has taken place in every corner of the world—even amongst the people I just left. Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?! I don’t see the problem.
Now, to be clear, Columbus goes on to celebrate the fact that slavery is no longer necessary in the modern world, and notes that it’s unreasonable to judge people of his time by the moral standards of ours. If I lean into a charitable reading of this, I think I get what PragerU is trying to do here. They’re suggesting something along the lines of “slavery is a horrible solution, but at the time it was better than all the other feasible alternatives, so we probably shouldn’t be that surprised that people in the past did it, or think they’re all unreconstructed monsters for doing so. The truth is more complicated than that.”
It is more complicated than that. One thing you learn very quickly, in discussing almost anything worth discussing, is that it’s always more complicated than that. It is true, for instance, that Columbus seemed to have real respect and affinity for the Taino Indians he first encountered, and even developed what appear to be close personal friendships with some of them (though certainly not so much that he wasn’t perfectly happy to enslave them). It’s also true that he knew four languages, was extensively well-read despite being mostly without formal schooling, and that almost everything about the man’s biography suggests someone of immense authority, determination, and curiosity.
But that does not excuse what is, to say the least, a very generous reading of Columbus’ attitude toward slavery. Even by the standards of his time, Columbus was known for being particularly brutal, both to the natives he enslaved and to the colonists he governed in Hispaniola. Maybe this account is exaggerated. Experts debate to what extent Columbus can be regarded as unusually cruel for his time. But regardless, do we really need to rehabilitate this guy?
It really is okay for kids to be given the impression that slavery is unqualifiedly bad, the same way conservatives would, presumably, readily agree that sex isn’t a subject worth thinking about until a certain age. Arguments about its economic necessity are dubious—the fact of the matter is, we have no compelling reason to believe it wouldn’t have been practiced even if it wasn’t necessary. The truth is, most people who observed and lived their lives around slavery don’t seem to have considered it a great evil. In specific instances the church endorsed, and didn’t outright condemn slavery until 1839—though it did, in fairness, condemn the enslavement of Native Americans as early as 1537, 24 years after natives were first threatened with slavery or death by the Spanish if they didn’t convert. Accounts which describe slavery as a horrid and unconscionable institution are remarkably rare, considering how ubiquitous it was in the pre-modern world. Most people seem to have seen it it as the way the world worked, a way to make a buck, or as the unfortunate circumstance they had found themselves in. We have no reason to believe Columbus would have been overjoyed to find out that slavery had been abolished in the land he discovered, and was universally regarded as one of the most inhumane things one person could do to another. That’s not because he was evil—on that count, at least, he was just a normal person of his time. It was nonetheless the case, however, that even 15th century Spaniards thought Columbus behaved horribly to both colonists and slaves in Hispaniola, and for that reason lodged the complaints with the Spanish crown which are now used to substantiate the claim that Columbus really was not a man worthy of our admiration.
So, yes: there is a very interesting discussion to be had about how moral progress takes place, and why we eventually arrived at the conclusion that slavery is evil and should be abolished, no matter how economically useful it may have been. I just don’t think this is a discussion we need to induct kids into, at least not the kids this video is aimed at. We also probably don’t need to go around claiming that Renaissance European culture was objectively superior to whatever the natives were up to (note that the video dismisses the charges of brutality against Columbus as the slander of his competitors, but readily abandons skepticism about his claim that the Caribs were cannibals.) These sorts of discussions can simply be avoided.
You may say this is dishonest. It is. But then, all education involves certain lies by omission. When I was in grade school, I was not taught that Columbus was an evil colonizer, but I also wasn’t taught that he was doing the best he could when he enslaved and murdered the Arawaks (or, for that matter, his own people). They simply didn’t tell me about it—I got a sanitized version of Columbus’ explorations, the discovery of the Americas, culminating in the first Thanksgiving between the Pilgrims and the Indians (I even played a pilgrim in my school’s Thanksgiving play—something my Irish Catholic ancestors, in retrospect, would have been none too pleased with).
It was not real history, because I was too young and stupid to grasp real history. It was a framework of real events designed to prepare me for the more complicated truth later on, while also instilling basic liberal values: an appreciation of human ingenuity and perserverance, of multiculturalism, and of the American desire to achieve freedom from tyranny. In other words, it was indoctrination with values I will gladly defend to this day.
Compare that to being told that the man who discovered the land your nation is built upon was an evil colonizer on the one hand, or that slavery was maybe not so bad on the other. Do either of these narratives seem likely to lead to people with the kinds of values we want people in a liberal democracy to have?
Certainly, my early education was not perfect. But it neither impeded my ability as an adult to recognize that Columbus was, in fact, a remarkable autodidact who did accomplish a genuinely incredible and historic feat, far beyond the powers of most people who mock him today—nor my ability to simultaneously recognize that he was also a fucking bastard. Perhaps we would be better off if we aimed to educate people to be prepared to hold difficult, contradictory and unsatisfying truths such as these in their minds simultaneously, than if we simply try to induct our kids into our respective camps in the culture war.