Defending Columbus with Guns, Germs, and Steel

Tomorrow evening, Harvard students will fill the Yard to commemorate Columbus Day with a solemn vigil. As we know from recent experience, the classically Harvardian proclivity for candlelight and contested readings doesn’t usually end well. But rather than bungle a potentially ecumenical exercise (like mourning 9/11), the students organizing for tomorrow’s holiday plan to subvert the heroic celebration of 1492 that frames an orthodox reading of American history.
I write to challenge this juvenile exercise and its organizers, whose good intentions are drowned out by their emotionally-charged, unqualified understanding of Columbus’ role in redefining the relationship between the hemispheres.
First of all: somebody from Eurasia was going to discover the Americas eventually – if not in 1492, then almost certainly in 1592, 1692, or 1992. (Although the textbooks of my generally liberal educational canon have cautioned me against using discover, it’s safe to say that the permanent integration of hemispheres belongs in a category separate from the sporadic Viking and Polynesian voyages before it.) But as an age of new mercantile competition dawned in Europe, the possibility of transatlantic exploration became inevitability.
By 1492, an exasperated Columbus had secured the support of Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers of a country with an ample Atlantic coastline who wanted to head off the challenge of a neighboring country with even more Atlantic coastline. Notwithstanding some shadings of Catholic missionary impulse, their motivation was economic – and perfectly continuous with their history of pursuing economic engagements across the Eastern Hemisphere. Nobody was contemplating genocide.
Enter guns, germs, and steel. As Jared Diamond explains elegantly in his landmark 1997 work of big history, the absence of animal domestication in the pre-Columbian Americas left natives immunologically innocent in the face of diseases that Columbus and his ancestors got from their sheep, cows, and pigs. Despite some undeniable spurts of racist carnage, the passage of a few decades saw most natives of the Caribbean – and the entire continental expanse – succumb to Eurasian infections.
Without at least a late twentieth-century understanding of immunological evolution, there is no way that Columbus could have anticipated this tragedy – and once the first European set foot on Hispaniola, it’s unlikely that anything but the most progressive twenty-first century treatment could have averted a pandemic. Columbus himself died in 1506, but the Columbian exchange had only just begun. Some of its chief architects, the conquistadores Cortes and Pizarro, are considerably less defensible.
But can Columbus, who stumbled upon the a few islands in the Caribbean, be blamed for their calculated sins on the mainland? An affirmative answer is not only intellectually dishonest, but ignorant of the brilliant diversity of Native American identity. The Tainos of Hispaniola had nothing to do with the Aztecs of Mexico, and neither had anything to do with the Lakota of the Great Plains: generalizing the experiences of all Native Americans from one group’s first encounter with the West is patently unfair, and certainly anything but progressive. To insinuate that Columbus infected all of them, Cortes slaughtered all of them, or (most absurdly) that Columbus slaughtered all of them is to deny the enormity of the New World landscape.
Moreover, the contention that we should feel guilty for having displaced “native” peoples is fraught with inconsistency, and smacks of Western condescension. The Arawakian “indigenes” of the Caribbean islands originated in present-day Venezuela, and probably replaced and assimilated an earlier group that was, in principle, more “indigenous” than anybody Columbus ever met. By the same token, it is not as though Europeans, Africans, or Asians possessed birthrights to their “native” continents that stopped short of the Atlantic.
If you’re a “native” European, your Indo-European ancestors probably marginalized and assimilated the continent’s hunter-gatherer inhabitants; if you’re “natively” Chinese, your ancestors probably marginalized and assimilated the tribal Thai and Austronesian peoples on your country’s southern flank. Accordingly, Spaniards (and their African slaves) marginalized and assimilated the natives of the Caribbean, Mexico, and the Andes – producing vibrant creole societies whose members are perfectly happy and proud to speak Spanish and practice the faith of Ferdinand and Isabella. These population movements form the backbone of natural human history – and to write off any such case as genocide begs the question of whether anyone of any color is entirely innocent.
Finally, a note on Columbus Day and my own identity. My ancestors, Jews from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, never asked for Christopher Columbus’ voyage or for his eponymous exchange of cultures, human genomes, diseases, and crops (although they probably appreciated the potatoes). In a sense, they were actually the test case for the brutality exacted by Western Europeans across the world’s darker continents.
But no matter what intentions they carried when they first dropped anchor on Caribbean coasts, I have little choice but to applaud their achievement. Without it, I would never have been anything more than the incinerated afterthought of an imaginary grandchild. Perhaps I’m not selfless enough to mourn my own birth at the expense of others’ – but if that fails to cut the muster for vigil-goers, I suggest they take a second look at the guns, germs, and steel behind Columbus Day’s inevitability.