'Intelligent Design' in the Human Sciences?

There has been much noble activism on the part of science educators over the past several years to combat the forces of darkness that would have public school children in the United States believe that bacterial flagella are 'irreducibly complex', that evolution is disproved by the fact that no 'missing links' have been found, and so on. A large part of the task of these educators is really elementary philosophy of science: to explain what a theory is, how it might be disproven, the difference between deduction and induction, and so on.

Keep up the good work, I say, but in the meantime might there also be room for a comparable campaign to elevate the sophistication of students' understanding of historical processes? I do not mean a campaign to ensure that students have adequately committed to memory a certain core set of historical facts (which facts belong in this core will always remain a subject of dispute). What I mean is that there should perhaps be a campaign to disabuse students, at some point in their teen years, of the childish view of history as a sequence of outcome-driven acts (to speak like an administrator) undertaken by exceptional individuals, where the ultimate outcome is the overall present state of the world.

The need for this becomes clear to me every year around Columbus Day, when the various factions gather, with law-like predictability, to either praise or denounce the legacy of this one man. As if there were anything there to take sides on! Columbus was a Genoan merchant, one of many, in an Asian-dominated world economy, and he managed to secure the funding for an expeditionary voyage that would open up new trade routes with the Far East. He came to some islands along the way, and met some people there, and said some things about them that would not go over well today, but were entirely in keeping with 15th-century Iberian anthropology (which was no more or less universalist than that of any contemporary empire in Asia or Mesoamerica). The misery of the reservation system, the Trail of Tears, and even the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortés some decades later are simply not Columbus's doing.

Jack Forbes calls Columbus a 'cannibal', by which, it turns out, he means not a member of the Carib people (who really were anthropophagous and whom Columbus really did have reason to fear), nor yet a person who literally eats people at all. Instead, Forbes maintains that Columbus's legacy shows him (retrospectively?) to be a sort of Wetiko, a mythical creature of the Algonkian cultural sphere (as if this had anything to do with the Caribbean!) that falls from its originally human state, loses all contact with the human social world, and lives isolated in the forest, gnawing on human flesh and even on its own limbs and lips. One can appreciate the despondency that drives Forbes's work, but at the same time denounce the naïveté of the implied understanding of historical agency. One must, moreover, work to ensure that this understanding be un-learned, preferably as early as high school, but certainly by the end of an undergraduate education.

To put things in perspective: the Pacific islands were only settled around 1500 years ago. If you agree with the official line of the Chilean school system, the Polynesian seafarers eventually made it as far as the South American coast. Whether they did or not (and there is in fact no solid evidence that they did), it is reasonable to suppose that they easily could have, and that if they had made such an expedition in, say, 700 or 800 CE, this would not have been a categorically different development than the one that took place 7 or 8 centuries later. Columbus's expedition, I mean to say, needs to be understood as a very recent development in the 70,000 year history of human migration: the blind, ignorant scavenging of homo sapiens that brought them to displace homo erectus from Asia, that later brought the Austronesians to displace the indigenous Australoid peoples from most of Southeast Asia, and so on. This is what history looks like when you imagine it from a perspective in the distant past and then watch it unfold, rather than looking back just a few hundred years or so from the present, and imagining that everything that people did or had done to them in that sliver of time was always inexorably destined, like the frames of a movie, to bring us to the present moment.

Seeing things in this way extinguishes any sense of a need for a special holiday to honor Columbus, but it also enables us to break out of the false dichotomy as between boosterism and demonization. And this, in turn, is, I think, a minimum condition of the attainment of something that might be called 'historical literacy', on analogy to what groups like the National Center for Science Education hope to bring about for our society's general understanding of how science works.

In both cases, in fact, what is to be fought against is a variety of 'intelligent design'. In the case of interest to us, it is the attribution of such a design to Columbus himself: a plan for the New World, for which he carried the blueprint, and which he set on its course with everything that was to come in clear view. In both cases of intelligent design, the properly scientific account of things is resisted for the same reason: because its acceptance is supposed, consciously or unconsciously, to imply meaninglessness, 'randomness' (as the kids say), disorder. In the case of history, dropping ID would require the loss of myths that likely have an even stronger hold on our understanding of ourselves than the myth of supernatural creation. How much easier it is, after all, to call upon a few sinister actors in the course of human history as an explanation of why things have gone so wrong, than to acknowledge that ethnic cleansing is simply what our species does, that it is not the result of individual moral failures, and that the chapter of it for which Columbus stands by way of metonymy is nothing exceptional. But as I never tire of repeating, there are surely more effective means of prevention than to stand slack-jawed at every new atrocity and to exclaim how exceptional it is.

Comments

[Stephen Menn]

I don't get it. Why shouldn't Columbus be responsible for what he did as governor of Hispaniola? (You seem to trivialize what he did--what he *said* about the people he met isn't the main problem.) And why not say that what he did there (and similar things on the other islands) helped give a model for what Cortes did in Mexico--even if they were both also influenced by things the Spanish had done earlier in the Canaries or during the Reconquista?

Homo sapiens may have helped drive homo erectus to extinction by out-competing them for food or pushing them off of their hunting and food-gathering territories or the like, but it seems very unlikely that they worked them to death on plantations and in mines. The case seems different.

[Justin Smith]

I'm willing to hold Columbus personally responsible for his own moral failures. But to the extent that we are considering him in connection with the subsequent colonization of the New World, his moral character doesn't really tell us anything interesting. It is not *because* Columbus mistreated New World natives that the Trail of Tears and the reservation system became possible several centuries later. If it hadn't been Columbus, it would have been someone else, and that person probably would have made use of slave labor, again not because New World natives were perceived as inferior and thus worthy of enslavement, but because slavery, relying mostly on the importation of Eastern Europeans and Caucasians, was already a key part of the European economy before the encounter with the Native Americans.

Homo sapiens might have simply displaced h. erectus with no violence, but in other cases of ancient displacement there was certainly violence and enslavement on a massive scale, including the Indo-Europeanization of Europe and the Austronesianization of maritime Southeast Asia. I think what enables us to approach these processes lucidly and scientifically, in contrast with the case of America, is just temporal distance (I reflected on this a while ago here http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2010/09/a-double-standard-in-judgments-about-the-past.html ). But my sense is that an important part of what I'm calling historical literacy would include the ability to approach historical events in the recent past with the same sort of lucidity.