Columbus and our common civilization

The charges against Christopher Columbus, in the debate over whether to remove his statue from atop the traffic circle named in his honor, are straightforward: He massacred, enslaved and exploited large numbers of native people. Those charges are substantially true, especially in his later voyages. It would be remarkable if they weren’t true since he was, in effect, following the playbook of European conquest going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Yet if you read Columbus’ own account of his first and most famous voyage — an account that incidentally reveals him as an insufferable egotist and worldclass suckup — you’ll find complex attitudes toward the Indian populations revealed.

Sometimes he regards them as innocent children, other times as mere obstacles in his quest for wealth and glory. He certainly doesn’t recognize their full humanity. Except for a few clergymen — the Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas comes to mind — no Europeans did. This was 1492. The Enlightenment was still two centuries away, and Columbus was no moral visionary.

But against whom are we judging him?

Consider his first encounter with natives on Oct. 13: The Tainos who rush out to greet him are fascinated by the weapons his men carry, playfully grabbing their swords by the blades and cutting their hands. They’re desperate to form an alliance, and soon begin swimming out to Columbus’ ships to trade with his crew. The crew is only too happy to oblige.

But when Columbus notices that the sailors are taking advantage of the natives, exchanging useless trinkets for valuable goods, he orders that future trades be of equal worth.

Columbus also notices that many Taino men bear horrific scars on their faces and bodies. When he asks, by way of hand gestures, how they got their wounds, the Tainos answer that tribes from neighboring islands — the Caribs — regularly raid the Taino village, killing and torturing the men, and kidnapping and enslaving the young women, which explains why the Tainos hid their young women when Columbus came ashore.

So should we judge Columbus against the Carib chiefs? Or is that, you know, bad form — holding dark-skinned people from indigenous cultures to the same moral standards as we hold light-skinned people who symbolize the West?

Perhaps we should judge Columbus against the Aztec rulers whose empire was then in full flower, and who were engaging in wars of conquest and enslavement with their neighbors — once, according to their own oral tradition, sacrificing as many as 80,000 war captives during a four-day celebratory festival. The Aztecs, after all, were Columbus’ contemporaries. How do they stack up on our current moral scale?

But a deeper question must also be asked: Even if Columbus were more predatory than the cruelest Carib chief, or more bloodthirsty than the deadliest Aztec emperor — and he’s not, in either case, by a long shot — why would we take down his statue? I can think of good arguments against erecting a new one. But taking down an existing one? That would be nothing more (or less) than a triumph of gesture over meaning, of appearances over honesty, of feeling over thinking.

Civilizations build monuments. (That’s one way you can tell they’re civilizations rather than blips in the historical record.) They build them because monuments tell stories.

Not all the stories are nice ones, but taken together, they form an epic narrative — a narrative that reminds a civilized people of how they got to be who they are.

The problem is that every civilization that’s ever existed has had an ugly underside. Poke around deep enough, and you’ll find shallow graves. A civilizational narrative that seeks to whitewash that fact is not being truthful to itself.

Which returns us to Columbus. For better or worse, he’s a big part of how we got to be who we are. The fact that his statue is casting a shadow over Midtown isn’t a claim about the nobility of his spirit, or the integrity of his motives; it’s simply an acknowledgment of his importance to our civilizational narrative.

If he goes, a piece of all of us goes with him.