We know the proximate reason why Christopher Columbus is a scandal and his holiday is in the middle of being replaced by Indigenous Peoples Day.
It's because the left has chosen to do so. Because, see, Columbus was a white supremacist oppressor and the people of the Americas were his victims.
Actually, I learned today, this campaign against Columbus goes all the way back to Friedrich Engels in 1847.
But what's the big deal? Conquest and empire has been the song of the Earth for since the dawn of time. Those helpless savages in Hispaniola that Columbus infected with his merry men weren't just parachuted in by God. They had conquered the island in their turn and taken it from some other tribe that is, like the Unknown Soldier, known only to God.
OK, let us conjure up a different Narrative, one that retreats from the delicious culture of name and shame, and looks with a more neutral eye on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
The go-to book is War Before Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley. He tells us what life was like in the good old days, that happy time, according to Shaw in Fabian Essays, shortly after the first man, Adam, seized the best patch of land he could find. But actually, pace Bernie, the big question about patches of land in the good old days was defense. Each little tribe defended its patch of land from all others. Or, with the dawn raid or a massacre, it might attempt to wipe out the neighbors and take over their patch of land and their women.
The rule was simple. Land was life in the food that could be hunted or grown on it. Lose your land and you lost your food, your tribe, your women, and your life. Actually, the same applies to chimpanzees and, I dare say, lions and tigers and bears oh my.
Notice that our pal Fritz above has it half right. Columbus does represent the unleashing of big commerce and the world market. And he spelled the end of the little tribe on its little patch of land.
It seemed to Educated Youth in the mid 19th century that in the future the old fight between one tribe and another, or one feudal lord against another, would be replaced by the fight between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians, and property owners against the propertyless.
Only they were wrong. That is the fundamental fact of our age. They were pontificating at Year 50 of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years in which per-capita income has increased by 30 times. And there has never been anything like it, ever. But why were they wrong?
They were wrong because the modern exchange economy has fundamentally changed the relationship between man and man -- and man and woman. Life is no longer a question of defending your patch of land and its life-giving food from all comers, as it was in the hunter-gatherer age. Nor is it a question of attaching yourself to a powerful landowner who would protect you from the armies of other powerful landowners in return for your surrender to his power. Today landowners and their land and its food is an afterthought, a footnote to history. Now the reality is big commerce, the exchange economy.
But now the propertyless are no longer extra mouths to feed; they are now consumers and producers. Now the key to riches is no longer the accumulation of land and the power of an army to defend the borders. Now the key to riches is the latest innovation that can conquer world markets with some new generation of products that every person in the world can buy: something like cheap cotton textiles that the poor could afford; steam transportation that the poor could almost afford. Now we have cell-phones that the sardine fishermen on the west coast of India can afford. The point is that the property owners can only profit from their property if the property can be put to use making products and services for the propertyless.
And so it is that the old necessities of power -- the power to defend your patch of earth -- have dissolved. Now power issues from the ability to deliver products and services to the masses, so there is no longer a "struggle of the propertyless against the property owners." Instead all people are bound to other people in the vast arena of producing the products and services to be sold or delivered to others.
The transition period in all this that illustrates the point was the era of the British Empire. It was not a traditional empire that controlled a great land mass. It was not a marauding host like the host of Genghis Khan. It was a trading, commercial empire. The jewel in this crown was, of course, India, which started out as a few trading posts, at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. But then local Indian traders wanted to enjoy the benefits of living within the walls and under the law of a trading polity, and the Brits started playing politics and war with the neighboring princes, and then the British in India developed into that curious, and amazing thing where 100,000 British administrators bestrode India like a colossus until, with the 20th century and the Amritsar massacre, it all became scandalous.
It was not just scandalous, but expensive. Never mind about patches of land and armies to defend them. Try global commerce and navies to keep the pirates under control.
Ironically the socialists, that abhorred empire, were the proprietors of the two last great land empires, the Soviet Union and Maoist China. They set up impenetrable borders with the rest of the world and starved. Now both empires have transitioned into something less on the border front, and a lot more on the exchange and global commerce front.
And this is the irony with socialism and progressivism and all its works. The fact of the world today is that political and military power is no longer the vital element that keeps a people from annihilation by invasion or massacre, and that is why the bourgeoisie and the billionaire are not that interested in power.
In this video with feminist rebel Camille Paglia psychologist Jordan Peterson continually puzzles over the left's worship of power. He shakes his head and doesn't understand it.
The answer is, of course, right in front of us. The left worships power because it can't believe that the modern world is not like all other worlds, where power was everything, indeed, the only thing. It cannot believe that the propertyless and the property owners are not in an existential fight to the death.
They should read their Hegel, whose Master and Slave narrative teaches us that the relation of Master and Slave is not as simple as we might think.
But the truth is that the nature of wealth and power has changed utterly. Wealth and power are no longer good rich acres, or a pile of gold. Wealth today is the present value of products and services that a corporation such as Apple or Amazon can deliver to the world in the next few years. And as for power, who cares? Why not spend the pile of gold on spaceships and go to Mars?
Meanwhile, what should we do about the Antifa idiots that want to erase history and make Columbus into a scandal, when he was actually the beacon of the future?
It's because the left has chosen to do so. Because, see, Columbus was a white supremacist oppressor and the people of the Americas were his victims.
Actually, I learned today, this campaign against Columbus goes all the way back to Friedrich Engels in 1847.
According to Engels, Columbus’s westward journeys unleashed the era of “big commerce,” the world market, and the birth of the bourgeoisie. “The discovery of America was connected with the advent of machinery,” he wrote in 1847, “and with that the struggle became necessary which we are conducting today, the struggle of the propertyless against the property owners.”The KKK were anti-Columbus too, because Catholicism.
But what's the big deal? Conquest and empire has been the song of the Earth for since the dawn of time. Those helpless savages in Hispaniola that Columbus infected with his merry men weren't just parachuted in by God. They had conquered the island in their turn and taken it from some other tribe that is, like the Unknown Soldier, known only to God.
OK, let us conjure up a different Narrative, one that retreats from the delicious culture of name and shame, and looks with a more neutral eye on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
The go-to book is War Before Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley. He tells us what life was like in the good old days, that happy time, according to Shaw in Fabian Essays, shortly after the first man, Adam, seized the best patch of land he could find. But actually, pace Bernie, the big question about patches of land in the good old days was defense. Each little tribe defended its patch of land from all others. Or, with the dawn raid or a massacre, it might attempt to wipe out the neighbors and take over their patch of land and their women.
The rule was simple. Land was life in the food that could be hunted or grown on it. Lose your land and you lost your food, your tribe, your women, and your life. Actually, the same applies to chimpanzees and, I dare say, lions and tigers and bears oh my.
Notice that our pal Fritz above has it half right. Columbus does represent the unleashing of big commerce and the world market. And he spelled the end of the little tribe on its little patch of land.
It seemed to Educated Youth in the mid 19th century that in the future the old fight between one tribe and another, or one feudal lord against another, would be replaced by the fight between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians, and property owners against the propertyless.
Only they were wrong. That is the fundamental fact of our age. They were pontificating at Year 50 of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years in which per-capita income has increased by 30 times. And there has never been anything like it, ever. But why were they wrong?
They were wrong because the modern exchange economy has fundamentally changed the relationship between man and man -- and man and woman. Life is no longer a question of defending your patch of land and its life-giving food from all comers, as it was in the hunter-gatherer age. Nor is it a question of attaching yourself to a powerful landowner who would protect you from the armies of other powerful landowners in return for your surrender to his power. Today landowners and their land and its food is an afterthought, a footnote to history. Now the reality is big commerce, the exchange economy.
But now the propertyless are no longer extra mouths to feed; they are now consumers and producers. Now the key to riches is no longer the accumulation of land and the power of an army to defend the borders. Now the key to riches is the latest innovation that can conquer world markets with some new generation of products that every person in the world can buy: something like cheap cotton textiles that the poor could afford; steam transportation that the poor could almost afford. Now we have cell-phones that the sardine fishermen on the west coast of India can afford. The point is that the property owners can only profit from their property if the property can be put to use making products and services for the propertyless.
And so it is that the old necessities of power -- the power to defend your patch of earth -- have dissolved. Now power issues from the ability to deliver products and services to the masses, so there is no longer a "struggle of the propertyless against the property owners." Instead all people are bound to other people in the vast arena of producing the products and services to be sold or delivered to others.
The transition period in all this that illustrates the point was the era of the British Empire. It was not a traditional empire that controlled a great land mass. It was not a marauding host like the host of Genghis Khan. It was a trading, commercial empire. The jewel in this crown was, of course, India, which started out as a few trading posts, at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. But then local Indian traders wanted to enjoy the benefits of living within the walls and under the law of a trading polity, and the Brits started playing politics and war with the neighboring princes, and then the British in India developed into that curious, and amazing thing where 100,000 British administrators bestrode India like a colossus until, with the 20th century and the Amritsar massacre, it all became scandalous.
It was not just scandalous, but expensive. Never mind about patches of land and armies to defend them. Try global commerce and navies to keep the pirates under control.
Ironically the socialists, that abhorred empire, were the proprietors of the two last great land empires, the Soviet Union and Maoist China. They set up impenetrable borders with the rest of the world and starved. Now both empires have transitioned into something less on the border front, and a lot more on the exchange and global commerce front.
And this is the irony with socialism and progressivism and all its works. The fact of the world today is that political and military power is no longer the vital element that keeps a people from annihilation by invasion or massacre, and that is why the bourgeoisie and the billionaire are not that interested in power.
In this video with feminist rebel Camille Paglia psychologist Jordan Peterson continually puzzles over the left's worship of power. He shakes his head and doesn't understand it.
The answer is, of course, right in front of us. The left worships power because it can't believe that the modern world is not like all other worlds, where power was everything, indeed, the only thing. It cannot believe that the propertyless and the property owners are not in an existential fight to the death.
They should read their Hegel, whose Master and Slave narrative teaches us that the relation of Master and Slave is not as simple as we might think.
But the truth is that the nature of wealth and power has changed utterly. Wealth and power are no longer good rich acres, or a pile of gold. Wealth today is the present value of products and services that a corporation such as Apple or Amazon can deliver to the world in the next few years. And as for power, who cares? Why not spend the pile of gold on spaceships and go to Mars?
Meanwhile, what should we do about the Antifa idiots that want to erase history and make Columbus into a scandal, when he was actually the beacon of the future?
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