The idea that slavery is “wrong” and that people less competent to avoid being at the short end of a stick is a Western morality. It has little precedent in the traditions of indigenous people anywhere, who have as long a tradition of abusing others as does the West. Having created the idea that humankind is equal in value, Europeans did get hoist on their own petard and ended up extending that equality to conquered peoples as well.
Still, from a historical perspective, the idea that there is some over-arching Morality or Absolute Right Way is fundamentally derived from religion–and in the European tradition, the teachings of Jesus Christ are the ones at the root of this idea that we should be nice to each other. It does not draw from natural law (which, if one looks at the animal kingdom is pretty much narcissistic and dog eat dog).
What is in our Nature is survival at any cost in order that we may be more reproductively successful with our own genes. Our Nature has driven conquerors everywhere to drive out weaker people (themselves conquerors where they could) and replace that regime with their own. Where philosophy and religion have not been developed to supersede that Nature, Nature raw in tooth and claw reigns. In the Western/European world, it was an altruistic philosophy based on the teachings of Christ which eventually helped tame our savage Nature.
Garbage; our morality has a strong instinctive base; the vision of nature as being all about savagely using or destroying one another is flawed at best.
As for Christian “morality”; that can pretty much be summed up as “anyone who isn’t exactly like you is infinitely evil and must be converted or killed. Anything is justified if it supports the Faith.” It is the opposite of what you claim. Somewhat overcoming the evil of Christianity has been a major aspect of modern moral progress.
So? Groups typically tell themselves their gods are on their side. Since gods don’t exist they will conveniently approve whatever you want to approve, and you don’t need to take things like other people or objective reality in general into consideration. Trying to base your morality on gods doesn’t make you less of a moral relativist; it makes you more of one.
If you really followed Christian morality, you’d attempt to track down and murder me for being an atheist.
This website explains why this subject isn’t just about Europeans taking away Indians’ lands, but doing ungodly things all in the name of the All Mighty Dollar.
I’m glad that I live here, and I would most assuredly not exist if it hadn’t been for Columbus’s “discovery”. But in an alternative universe, where things had things played out differently (without unquestionably brutally and disregard for human life, let alone disgusting levels of greed), I’m sure my counterpart would still be making the best of things and being grateful for the land mass they inhabit. The world would have continued to spin without Europeans’ colonization and their significant (if not altogether purposeful) role in the extermination of entire peoples. People assume that was an inevitable thing, but it was not. Not all Indians died from smallpox (just like all Europeans didn’t die from malaria or syphylis or the number of other New World diseases they hadn’t encountered before).
I think what happened was the Europeans came here so fast and in such numbers that the Indians could not see any alternative but to fight. And fighting meant they were an impediment to European expansion and that they needed be done “away with”. Perhaps if Europeans had arrived in trickles instead of gushes, and there had been more respect for the indigenous ways and culture (and likewise, respect from the Indians towards the Europeans) then the minority Native American groups COULD have been absorbed, just like indigenous cultures in Europe had been absorbed by their respective invaders. I dunno. I just don’t accept all the moral relativism that gets trumps out in these kinds of threads, but don’t seem to get trumped out when we’re talking about present-day societies with the same kind of wacked out values that Columbus and crew had. If you look at the world, you’ll see that as a species, we really haven’t advanced that much from 500 years ago in terms of how we treat “the other”.
I’m reading a book about Alaska right now, and the Russian fur traders made early Americans’ behavior towards aborigines look downright benevolent. It seems that such treatmentof aboriginal peoples was the norm in those days.
I have often thought, tho, about what could have happened had we had the foresight to allocate - say - 10% of each state to natives - and keep our promise. Hell, with 90% of our current resources, we would still be terribly dominant. But that kind of reasoning works best in retrospect.
That’s pretty much what happened, though. Outside of the US, Canada, and the Caribbean, the various Indian groups did get absorbed, to a greater or lesser extent.
I’ll take our hypocrites and monsters over anyone else’s. It is well-documented that “Indians” identified themselves not as a race but as members of particular tribes and that intertribal war was as brutal and greed-motivated as anything the whites inflicted. They held slaves, practiced torture, and conducted themselves according to superstition and not reason. I’m not interested in defending Christianity, but at least Christians only pretend to eat a body. The Iroquois actually ate them.
I’m not trying to denigrate the Indians, just to put things in reasonable perspective here.
Regarding the charge of hypocrisy, it’s impossible to tell how the Indians represented themselves to others in pre-Columbian times, since they had no written language. Some tribes probably went around claiming to be morally superior, and some probably claimed to be crazy badasses who would kill you as soon as look at you.
Is there some society somewhere that meets with your lofty expectations? I expect not, or else you wouldn’t still be in the United States.
I don’t believe history would play out any differently if it were going on today. This “moral standards of the past” stuff is just crap. Right now, the U.S. needs oil, and the countries that might deny us oil are the ones where innocent people are being killed and displaced by our troops. We’ve got plenty of evidence that we’re using the planet’s resources faster than they can be replaced and fouling the air and water for future generations, and there’s no widespread consensus to develop a more sustainable society.
In the 18th and 19th centuries there were people who believed displacement of the Indians was wrong, just as many people believed slavery was wrong and today many people believe that foreign wars in Iraq and Vietnam and Afghanistan are wrong. However, the people who stand to benefit the most from atrocities are always able to create rationalizations that the majority of people are happy to accept in order to get the goods without the guilt.
If “moral relativism” means “It’s bad when someone does it and I don’t benefit” or “It’s bad but I bear no responsibility,” then I think it fairly applied to this question.
By the way, it’s not too late to give the U.S. back to the Indians. Even if this UN resolution fails to pass http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=36809, there are native America societies that are willing to receive land deeds and monetary compensation from all of the hand-wringing moral absolutists.