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This article, and many of the comments here, hint at a deeper and more interesting phenomenon: the need to have things be either all good or all bad. That is,
by IsaacSchlueter 17y ago
This article, and many of the comments here, hint at a deeper and more interesting phenomenon: the need to have things be either all good or all bad. That is, either (A) western civilization is good, and the things it has done were good, and the things it values are good values, etc., or (B) it's bad, and the things it has done were bad, and the things it values are bad values, etc.
Once this dichotomy is accepted, any evidence of goodness is proof of A, and any evidence of badness is proof of B. If A is accepted, then nothing can be bad, and if B is accepted, then nothing can be good. You get one guy saying "Medicine good!" and another saying "Slavery bad!" and they shout at each other forever.
In fact, A and B are both all-or-nothing cognitive distortions.
It's quite possible for the Native Americans to have been savages, and the Europeans to have been savages (with better weapons), and for one group of awful people to have murdered another group of awful people.
Losing doesn't make someone good, and neither does winning.
Having nice things today doesn't mean that genocide 400 years ago was a good idea.
Being good doesn't mean we came from good people or entirely good traditions. Neither does being bad.
Having some good traits doesn't mean we have nothing left to learn, or that we can't get better. In fact, good people can even learn things from bad people, or good cultures can learn things from bad cultures. Even if modern western culture is, on the net, much better for humans than aboriginal American culture, we can still probably learn a lot from it.
There's a lot of richness between these blacks and whites. Perfection is not required for goodness.
- themilkmandan 17y agoYes, all this black-or-white talk about genocide misses a lot of the subtleties. How about a nuanced analysis of the Jewish Holocaust? Nobody brings up enough the fact that Hitler built some damn good roads.
- seldo 17y agoYou're missing the point. It's not that genocide is sometimes good, it's that civilizations that commit genocide also do good things. The Germany that produced the Jewish holocaust also invented rocket science, which indirectly led us to the space program, satellites, and a big chunk of our modern communications network. Does this excuse genocide? No. Does it make it difficult to label German civilization as "all good" or "all bad"? It absolutely does.
- tfh 17y ago>The Germany that produced the Jewish holocaust also invented rocket science.. You get into trouble by saying that in Germany my friend :)
- mahmud 17y agoToday's Germany is a fictitious entity, a comedic prop setup by a philosophe prankster.
- oconnor0 17y agoTrue, and the article is a little simplistic on that front, but a modern communications network does not morally justifies the holocaust. Neither does making lots of money & whatever else the Unobtainium was going to do justify wholesale slaughter & genocide of the Na'vi.
- seldo 17y agoBut that's exactly what I said. It doesn't excuse the holocaust. But it also makes it hard to say that Germany in the 1940s was an evil regime that contributed nothing to the world. Both are true: they were evil bastards, and they gave us rocket science. The real world is tricky like that.
- borism 17y agoAnd I thought rocket science was invented by chinese (like pretty much everything else).
- ippisl 17y agoI would label those technological advances in a different dimensions than moral acts. And usually the meaning of bad and good regards morals , not other fields of human behaviour. And since as a nation their positive moral acts was so little relative to their negative moral actions you can call them "bad".
- IsaacSchlueter 17y agoYou missed the point, and then made exactly the error I was pointing at. And you did so in a way that gets very close to Godwin's Law without quite invoking it. Nicely done. I'm not suggesting that Hitler's good roads made the holocaust less bad. I'm suggesting that the Holocaust didn't make the good roads less good. Things aren't either all good or all bad. That includes the Conquistadors, Hitler, the Nazis, your children, a puppy, the Na'vi, the Native Americans, and everyone else.
- bobbyi 17y agoCan you quote the portion of the article that you interpret as saying that Western civilization has never done anything good?
- catzaa 17y agoThe world is a lot more complex than that. Germany was not treated well after the First World War. It was almost certain that there will be another war and a dictator would come to power (the only question was when, and what the dictator's name would be). This does not mean that everything the German army did was good or justified (e.g. the Holocaust). And neither was the allies knights in shining armour (firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo comes to mind). My grandparents (although not German citizens) were fiercely supportive of Germany in WW2, as where many people. This stemmed mostly from the UK’s treatment of people in its colonies.
- billswift 17y agoYou mean after the First World War. That's why I argued elsewhere that Woodrow Wilson deserves a big chunk of the blame for the rise of Nazi Germany, maybe even more than Hitler, since without his meddling in Europe during the Great War Hitler quite possibly would never have gotten anywhere.
- tfh 17y ago> It's quite possible for the Native Americans to have been savages, and the Europeans to have been savages (with better weapons), and for one group of awful people to have murdered another group of awful people. I don't understand what do you mean with that. I don't think there's an absolute good or bad. But according to the fact that Europeans are the ones who came to America and slaughtered the Natives, they are the bad ones. The Natives did not something bad by defending themselves. In that situation and if you value human life over material benefit you have to admit "Europeans bad!".
- IsaacSchlueter 17y agoLet's say there are two murderers, Frank and Bob. Frank murders Bob. Is Bob therefor less bad than Frank? What if Bob had murdered 1000 children, and Frank wasn't a murderer until he murdered Bob? Does being a victim cleanse your sins?
- kylemathews 17y ago> Does being a victim cleanse your sins? Only if you subscribe to simplistic narratives about how the world works.
- tfh 17y agoBeing a victim does not cleanse your sins. I'm sure that the Natives Americans were not perfect human beings. No one is. Being killed does not make the Natives good but the Europeans bad. I hope for you that you agree with that last sentence.
- mixmax 17y ago"There is no right or wrong, only popular opinion" Tyler Durden, Fight club.
- turkishrevenge 17y agoThere is a definite wrong when one group directly benefits materially from the exploitation of another, no matter how you spin it. The practice of rape, pillage and plunder is without a doubt a bad thing.
- IsaacSchlueter 17y agoI'm not defending rape, pillage, or plunder. I'm defending rationality, and criticizing the all-or-nothing cognitive distortion.
- turkishrevenge 17y agoNo, you're talking in vague abstractions without referencing specific period of brutality in humanity's history. Platitudes prevent you from making an actual judgment about a given event. > "It's quite possible for the Native Americans to have been savages, and the Europeans to have been savages (with better weapons), and for one group of awful people to have murdered another group of awful people." Conquistadors, went to the Americas and slaughtered millions. Regardless of your assertion that both could be "savages", one group initiated and subsequently conducted systematic violence against another group over several decades. You're honestly saying you can't judge that as "bad"? What if you were among one of those indigenous groups that were killed? I know I would not appreciate it... But of course we can't make concrete judgments about that.
- IsaacSchlueter 17y agoHoly crap, I can't believe this. Let me say this for the record: The slaughter of Native Americans by the Conquistadors was a terrible thing. Awful. Tragic. An abomination. Also, and completely not taking anything away from the awful abominableness of that terrible tragedy, the Native Americans had lots of other problems with their culture, and were in many ways, quite savage. The Conquistadors had really good food, and the technological know-how to cross the oceans, which are both quite good and important things. Being a murderer doesn't mean your ships aren't great. Having great ships doesn't make you less of a murderer. My point is that you can't just say "they did this awful thing, therefor everything about their culture was horrible". My point is also that you can't just say "they had this awful thing done to them, therefor everything about their culture was better." We can judge the act as bad without thinking that it somehow pollutes everything that is good about the culture that did the heinous thing. We can also judge the act as bad without thinking that being the victim of a heinous act somehow erases everything that is bad in the victim. The real world is complicated, and all-or-nothing thinking is irrationally and unforgivably lazy.
- Tichy 17y agoSou you think being all but exterminated was for the better of the native Americans? Maybe you are trying to argue for something good, but dead people are dead. They don't benefit from a civilization that emerged a couple of decades later.
- billswift 17y agoAnd they would be dead now even if no one had killed them back then. And those that killed them are all dead now. And no doubt more Amerindians were killed by other Amerindians over the centuries than ever had any contact at all with Europeans. This is like all the whining about slavery. Slavery has been one of the most widespread practices in the world. Europeans were the ones who have come closest to putting a stop to it. And in fact it is only European derived morality that makes slavery and genocide wrong.
- Tichy 17y agoSo essentially you are calling for anarchy?
- armandososa 17y agoAnarchy is the only logical and natural state of being, every other attempt to bring order to chaos is unnatural. Imho.
- Tichy 17y agoSome societal constructs seem to have benefits, though. I am happy that I don't have to carry a gun at all times and don't have to fight for my territory and my life every day.
- billswift 17y agoThere's nothing inherently wrong with society - it's government, and modern societies' love affairs with them, that suck.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- timwiseman 17y agoThis is certainly one of the most insightful comments I have seen here. I would not call either Native Americans or Europeans awful, though. As you correctly point out, neither group (in fact no group in all of history) was either pristine and perfect or wholly bad.
- dejb 17y agoHow great would it be to see movies that reflected this dichotomy you mentioned. Where you could come out of the film not being sure who the 'good guys' were.
- marcofloriano 17y agoSwordfish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_(film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_(film)
- mcantelon 17y agoWhere in the article is the claim that western civilization is all bad? The author seems to merely be pointing out that western society largely denies the magnitude of the human and environmental cost of its prosperity.
- cabalamat 17y agoThe article states that "Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas". On the whole, I think this is untrue. For European countries that had colonies, as often as not the colonies had a negative effect on their economies. If you look at European states today, ones that didn't have colonies (e.g. Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Greece) are just as prosperous on the whole as ones that did (e.g. UK, France, Spain), or the ones that were owned by other European countries (e.g. Ireland, Finland, Slovenia). Spain in particular suffered a good deal of long-term economic harm from its colonies as the importation of gold crowded out the real economy. Germany and Italy had short-lived colonial empires that didn't run at a profit. Probably the British did gain overall from their colonies, but much of their American colonies were lost in the 1770s. Jamaica OTOH made the fortunes of many wealthy British families.
- mcantelon 17y ago>The article states that "Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas" Whether Europe was successful or not in profiting from the genocide, genocide did happen and I think the author is merely saying that the western world for the most part doesn't own up to this. Regarding the profitability of colonialism, while I agree that it's debatable whether Europe itself was massively enriched by the colonies, Europeans profited. European immigrants to North America were able to create an empire by consolidating their power over the indigenous residents then leveraging North America's land and natural resources.