Against Human Veneration

In the pursuit of well researched, deeply contemplative articles for this medium of communication, I end up not publishing very many articles. Therefore, in the spirit of just getting something on this stupid blog, I wanted to post this short discussion about the problems bequeathed to our society by the consistent and counterproductive veneration of notable people historical figures. Today is Columbus Day. Even better today is National Indigenous People’s Day. And rightly so as we continue to debate about the role flawed men and women of history should play in our present-day culture. For those that have read the eminent historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, this excerpt from the log of Columbus after his arrival in the New World that Zinn puts on the first page of his book should be very memorable…

“They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned… They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features… They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

I think it is helpful to reread Columbus’ words and let the abhorrent, almost unfathomably horrible nature of this person really sink in. It is no wonder why many who are familiar with this period in history would question celebrating Columbus in our present climate. Why should we designate a holiday for a man who wrote off the lives of thousands of people and considered them useful only for exploitation?

To be fair, this is not the fault of Columbus. That can be found in our faulty narrative of history. It seems the baseline is to assume that great men and women shape history and that their roles in accelerating human progress should be celebrated as to inspire those living today. When in reality individual human beings only play bit-part roles in history and wherever one would point to an exceptional person, one whose role in history could only have been fulfilled by that individual, I will point to an army of other people who could and would have fit that same exact role. It seemed innocent enough to designate a holiday for a great explorer. And hey, sequence of events wise, he had an important role to play in our current cushy existence. (along with the infrastructure and desire to expand trade) Yet, would anyone be able to sufficiently maintain the position that if it were not Columbus that set sail in 1492 it would not have been some other exploitative asshole in 1493? Maintenance of the position is preposterous. And that is the point. The people who discovered new worlds and created new technologies are not special. Newton invented calculus… right but so did Leibniz and some ancient Babylonian mathematicians as well. Humanity progresses in line with a narrative and the ideations that rule the day. If the Portuguese monarchy didn’t fund the expedition of Columbus, some other fool would be the one that we have complex feelings about today.

Sure we could celebrate Columbus for his spirit of exploration and discovery but he was simultaneously a sadistic piece of shit who committed unspeakable atrocities against a vulnerable population. If we would have conceived Columbus Day as, for example, International Explorers day and have it revolve around an idea and not a person we would not have to solve all these complex issues that surround the remembrance of such an unsavory character. Focus on the individual fosters controversy between those who see aspersions cast upon their favorite Italian explorer as an affront to their identity and those who hate to see things change against those who think any person from history that does not live up to the standards of modern morality should be thrown on the waste heap of history never to be spoken of again. When in all likelihood, maybe it is important to consider historical figures for their accomplishments as well as the very negative aspects of their character and the very negative consequences of their abhorrent actions. It is important to consider a person like Columbus divorced from the mythos of the man himself. First off, he was one man. He did not sail across the Atlantic in a one-man vessel. His expedition had three massive ships and hundreds of people. His claim to fame was funded by the ruling class of a nation-state who provided the ships, the men, the weapons, and provisions required to make the journey. Contemplation about how events were shaped back then by the relationships of nation states who ruled on the divine right of command could be inspired by a day devoted to one person, but it would be much more efficacious to think of the ideas that fostered the evolution of Columbus in the first place. How is it that this societal structure was so successful(beyond the threat of violence that maintained such a system)?

We must cease and desist with naming buildings, foundations, hospitals, and especially days of the year after people. As noted earlier, some could argue that we do this in order to motivate current citizens towards good deeds with the hope that they will be remembered in the future for what they accomplished. For me, this gives way more credit than is deserved to those that accomplished what we celebrate. Human beings are merely tiny cogs in the complex, ticking narrative and ideas that rule the time in which they lived. Anyone that has made significant contributions to human progress utilizing their intelligence, education, courage, and guile did so not because they were so special, nor because no one else in their moment of history could have been the one to accomplish the same effect. There are no great men or women in history, there are only great ideas. These ideas do not belong to the people that generated them but belong to the culture and time in which this person was able to flourish. Consider the founders of this country. Many of them owned slaves while running around complaining about the lack of representation and exploitation by the British monarchy. Yet we have lionized these figures to a point just sort of deification. Further, their ideas were not even original. Our founders owe much of the intellectual force of their ideas to the works of other Western philosophers of the previous century. We could solve all the sticky issues surrounding their celebration by ceasing to celebrate them at all and focus only on the ideas that they made them important historical figures in the first place.

Consider the riots and violence that occurred in Charlottesville last year. In the debate over which statues should stand and which should fall, a cogent case was made against the founding fathers by the biggest nincompoop we have going, President Trump. It is the sign of the times when our buffoon of buffoons is able to make the most progressive stance yet against abolishing the veneration of the founders. In trying to question why we should tear down confederate statues despite them being a part of our history, he wondered why we shouldn’t then tear down statues of people like Thomas Jefferson because of his misdeeds. Exactly. If from the time of our nation’s founding we focused on the ideas that created and held our society together instead of perpetuating the false notion that is somehow the work of a great man or woman we would be much better off culturally. Because society focuses on glorifying and disparaging human beings from history, it allows for concepts of identity to insert themselves where they are not relevant. The perpetuation of Columbus Day is now tied into the dying screams of eurocentric identity and the fear of shifting demographics in the US. Instead of just condemning the bad ideas and celebrating the good ones, we just end up fighting over a stupid statue. This issue has come to bear on campuses all over the country. For example, UC Berkeley just had to rename their law school because of the reframing of the man which it was named after.

I was reminded by thoughts on this issue by a local example recently. I do not in any way want to equivocate between a murderous colonialist and a contemporary tech founder but continuing to pay homage to people instead of ideas will always cause future problems. Recently, Zuckerberg gave a bunch of money to found a new hospital. They named it the Zuckerberg something or other. This is a clear case of veneration of a human being because of their exceptional accomplishments. But how is it that he came about this massive wealth and ability to donate it in the first place? Well, because he code and he stole an idea from other people so he could exploit the relationships of human beings for profit. Who’s to say that a few decades from now, (when the exploitation of this technology precipitates the downfall of liberal democracy) we won’t see protests asking for his name to be removed from that building? I am mostly kidding but yet his accomplishment is becoming wealthy by exploiting the personal lives and innate human need for validation from other human beings. Further, I use him as an example to dispel this notion of the exceptional person. He had affluent parents and the finest education. Sounds like he reached his potential instead of overcoming all the odds to succeed. In other words, he got lucky. For those that are afforded all the opportunity, it is not some great accomplishment to fulfill your potential. You owe your success to the intellectual infrastructure of our society and the work of your progenitors. And society is nothing but a bunch of ideas that hold us together. Enough with the statues of historical figures, buildings named after benefactors, and schools of thought named for those that happened to be the first to publish. These people could and would have easily been anybody else. People are not special, ideas are. The monuments will all burn eventually anyways, but the ideas will remain.