by Peter Watson
This was more important than it might seem. Rationality, especially the ability to live in society, was held to be the criterion of civility. But if this could happen outside Christianity what happened to the age-old distinction between Christian and barbarian? ‘Inevitably it began to be blurred, and its significance as a divisive force to decline.’28
Even when it didn’t produce startlingly new ideas, the discovery of America forced Europeans back on themselves, causing them to confront concepts, traditions and problems which existed inside their own cultural traditions. For example, the veneration for classical antiquity meant that they were aware of other civilisations which had different values and attitudes to their own and in many ways had been superior. Some, like Joseph-François Lafiteau, even hoped that the ‘modern’ American ‘savages’ might provide an insight into what the classical world had been like. In fact, it was the existence and success of pagan antiquity which underpinned the two most notable treatises of the sixteenth century which attempted to incorporate America within a unified vision of history.
The first of these, Bartolomé de las Casas’s massive Apologética Historia, was written during the 1550s, never published in his lifetime and indeed not rediscovered until the twentieth century. It was written in anger and in response to Sepúlveda’s savage polemic against the Indians, Democrates Secundus, in which he compared Indians to monkeys. Las Casas argued that the Indian was an entirely rational individual, fully equipped to govern himself and therefore fit to receive the gospel. He paid proper due to the quality of Aztec, Inca and Mayan art and observed their ability to assimilate European ideas and practices that they found useful.29
José de Acosta’s De Procuranda Indorum Salute was written a little later than Las Casas’s treatise, in 1576. His most original contribution, which advanced the understanding of anthropology, was, first, to divide barbarians into three categories, and then to distinguish three kinds of ‘native’. At the top, he said, were those who, like the Chinese and Japanese, had stable republics, with laws and law courts, cities and books. Next came those who, like the Mexicans and Peruvians, lacked the art of writing and ‘civil and philosophical knowledge’, but possessed forms of government. Lowest were those who lived ‘without kings, without compacts, without magistrates or republic, and who changed their dwelling-place, or – if they were fixed – had those that resembled the cave of a wild beast’.30 Acosta based his work heavily on research, as we would say, which enabled him to distinguish between the Mexica and the Inca, who formed empires and lived in settlements and did not ‘wander about like beasts’, and the Chuncos, the Chiriguanes, the Yscayingos and all the peoples of Brazil, who were nomadic and lacked all known forms of civil organisation. The fact that Indians had some laws and customs, but that they were deficient or conflicted with Christian practices, showed he said that Satan had beaten Columbus to it in the discovery of the New World.
Again, these arguments are more important than they look at first sight. The old theories, that geography and climate were primarily responsible for cultural diversity, were being replaced. A new issue was migration. ‘If the inhabitants of America were indeed descendants of Noah, as orthodox thought insisted that they must be, it was clear that they must have forgotten the social virtues in the course of their wanderings. Acosta, who held that they came to the New World overland from Asia, believed that they had turned into hunters at some stage during their migration. Then, by degrees, some of them collected together in certain regions of America, recovered the habit of social life, and began to constitute polities.’
AGE-OLD GRUDGES
On the face of things, the discovery of millions of people living without the benefits of Christianity offered the church an unparalleled opportunity to extend its influence. But in practice the consequences were more complex. The Vatican had always claimed world-wide dominion, yet its scriptures showed no awareness of the New World and made no mention of it.31 Certain sceptics expressed the view that America was so bad that she was nowhere near ready to be brought into the mainstream of history, not yet ready to be Christianised or civilised and that syphilis was a divine punishment for the ‘premature’ discovery and the great cruelty meted out by the Spanish during the Conquest.32 The buffalo was an unsuccessful and pointless cross between a rhinoceros, a cow and goat. ‘Through the whole extent of America, from Cape Horn to Hudson’s Bay,’ wrote the Abbé Corneille de Pauw in the Encyclopédie, ‘there has never appeared a philosopher, an artist, a man of learning.’33
Did the fact that America was not mentioned in the scriptures mean, perhaps, that she was a special creation, emerging late from the deluge, or had she perhaps suffered her own quite different deluge, later than the one that had afflicted the Old World and from which she was now recovering? Why was the New World’s climate so different from Europe’s? The Great Lakes, for example, were on the same latitude as Europe but their waters froze for half the year. Why were the New World’s animals so different? Why were the people so primitive, and so thin on the ground? Why, in particular, were the people copper-coloured and not white or black? Most important of all, perhaps, where did these ‘savages’ come from? Were they descended perhaps from the lost tribes of Israel? Rabbi Manasseh Israel of Amsterdam believed that they were, finding ‘conclusive evidence’ in the similarity of Peruvian temples to Jewish synagogues. For some, the widespread practice of circumcision reinforced this explanation. Were they the lost Chinese perhaps who had drifted across the Pacific? Were they the descendants of Noah, that greatest of navigators? The American historian Henry Commager says that the most widely held theory, and the one that fitted best with common sense, was that they were Tartars, who had voyaged from Kamchatka in Russia to Alaska and had sailed down the western coast of the new continent, before spreading out.34
For some, America was a mistake, whose main characteristic was her backwardness. ‘Marvel not at the thin population of America,’ wrote Francis Bacon, ‘nor at the rudeness and ignorance of the people. For you must accept your inhabitants of America as a young people; younger a thousand years, at the least, than the rest of the world.’35 In France, the celebrated natural historian, the Comte de Buffon, no less, argued that America had emerged from the deluge later than the other continents, which explained the swampiness of the soil, the rank vegetation, and the density of the forests. Nothing could flourish there, he said, and the animals were ‘stunted’, mentally as well as physically, ‘For Nature has treated America less as a mother than as a step-mother, withholding from [the Native American] the sentiment of love or the desire to multiply. The savage is feeble and small in his organs of generation . . . He is much less strong in body than the European. He is also much less sensitive and yet more fearful and more cowardly.’ Even Immanuel Kant thought that Native Americans were incapable of civilisation.36
After Buffon, however, the slanders on America reached ‘a definitive climax’ with Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains ou Mémoires intéressants pour server à l’histoire de l’espèce humaine, by the ‘crotchety Prussian curate’, Cornelius de Pauw, published in Berlin in 1768 despite its French title. De Pauw was a typical encyclopaedist, sarcastic and immodest to a degree in the display of his detailed knowledge, in which he claimed to find America ‘degenerate’, with less sensibility, humanity, taste and instinct than the Old World. In the American climate, he said, many animals lose their tails, dogs lose their bark, the genitals of certain beasts cease to function. Even iron, what little there is of it, loses its strength, all due to the earthquakes, floods and conflagrations suffered on the continent.37
Another abbé, Joseph Pernety, dismissed de Pauw’s comments, arguing that even then these so-called ‘accursed and unhappy lands’ were providing Europeans with sugar, cocoa, coffee, cochineal and precious woods, that American men were ‘better proportioned for the American women than Europeans’, and that the ‘savage creatures’ of the Brazilian forest and Paraguay were more fearsome even than those of Africa.38
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In fact, the number of well-known figures who felt impelled to intervene in this dispute was remarkable. Voltaire thought the ‘marshy air’ of the Americas was very unhealthy, producing ‘a prodigious number of poisons’, resulting in an extraordinary shortage of food.39 In his poem, The Deserted Village (1769), Oliver Goldsmith, the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, described Georgia as a ‘parched and gloomy’ land, infested with scorpions, voiceless bats and rattlesnakes, ‘ferocious tigers waiting to pounce and even more ferocious Indians’. The dominant vegetation, he said, was ‘matted woods where birds forget to sing’. He repeated these calumnies in his History of the Earth and Animate Nature (eight volumes, 1774) which, despite its many mistakes, or because of them, enjoyed ‘an unlikely success’.40
The Americans fought back. One man who did have some answers to this massive condescension was Thomas Jefferson. His answer to the charge that nature was sterile and emaciated in the New World was to point to Pennsylvania, ‘a veritable garden of Eden, with its streams swarming with fish, its meadows with hundreds of song birds’. How could the soil of the New World be so thin when ‘all Europe comes to us for corn and tobacco and rice – every American dines better than most of the nobles of Europe’. How could the American climate be so enervating when, by then, statistical tables showed a higher rainfall in London and Paris than in Boston and Philadelphia?41 In 1780 a young French diplomat, the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, had the idea to canvas opinion from several governors of American states and sent them a series of questions about the organisation and resources of their respective commonwealths. Jefferson’s response was the most detailed, the most eloquent and by far the most famous – Notes on Virginia. There is something surreal about this book now but the issues it attacked were keenly felt at the time. Jefferson met Buffon and the European condescenders head on. He compared the work-rates of Europeans and Americans – as defined by actuarial statistics – to the advantage of the Americans. Buffon had claimed that the New World had nothing to compare with the ‘lordly elephant’ or the ‘mighty hippopotamus’, or the lion and the tiger. Nonsense, replied Jefferson, and pointed to the Great Claw or Megalonyx. ‘What are we to think of a creature whose claws were eight inches long, when those of the lion are not 1½ inches?’ Even by 1776, enough fossil bones of the mammoth had been found to show that it was indigenous to the New World and that it was a beast easily ‘five or six times’ larger than an elephant.42
Buffon and some of the other French philosophes had (from 3,500 miles away) called the Indians degenerate. Try fighting him, Jefferson responded. ‘You will sing a different tune.’43 He referred to the rhetoric and eloquence of Logan, chief of the Mingoes: this underlined that their minds, no less than their bodies, were as well adapted to their circumstances as were the Europeans.
Thomas Paine felt that the very ‘wilderness’ Europeans understood America to be would stimulate ‘the development of a totally human and brotherly society without historical quarrels’ to get in the way.44 The Old World, in comparison, was the imperfect one, the backward one. From Spanish America, the Chilean economist Manuel de Salas defended his country as ‘a privileged land . . . where wild beasts are not known, nor insects, nor poisonous reptiles’. He objected to the idea that Americans could not raise themselves to the level of the exact sciences, pointing to advances already being made in astronomy (Pedro Peralta), electricity (Benjamin Franklin) and history (Giovanni Ignazio Molina).
Similarly erudite was the Mexican Jesuit, Francisco Javier Clavigero who, in his Historia antigua de México, mounted a powerful counter-offensive against the sceptics of Aztec splendour. The history of the Toltecs, the Texcocans and the Aztecs offered as many examples of valour, patriotism, wisdom and virtue, he said, as did the histories of Greece and Rome. While he agreed that Aztec religion was ‘puerile, cruel and superstitious’, their architecture, though inferior to that of Europe, was ‘superior to that of most Asiatic and African peoples’.45
Herder was kinder than many towards America. His basic doctrine of the equality of cultures, plus the generalised sympathy of the romantic movement for the vanquished and the exotic, all helped improve the popularity of the Aztecs. In his famous Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91), Herder devoted chapter six of the sixth volume to the Americas, in which he noted the essential unity of humankind, argued that North America was better developed than Spanish America but said that the average American displayed an ‘almost childish goodness and innocence’. Herder was sympathetic without being any better informed than those who were more critical. His main worry, shared by Diderot, was that the brutal policy of the Spanish would, eventually, reduce all cultures to one, levelling out the diversity of the world and, in doing so, obliterate much of what history had achieved and meant.46
Goethe thought the country a blessed land, without feudal remains or ‘age-old grudges’. He was impressed that the country lived in the present and was ‘not disturbed within thy inner self’.47 His fellow Germans, Alexander von Humboldt, Georg Hegel, Friedrich von Schlegel and Arthur Schopenhauer, were equally forthright. Von Humboldt at least paid America the compliment of visiting it, both South and North, where he was much taken with the very great variety of nature, where he found the ‘ancient noisy conflicts’ felt closer, the plants differently distributed, the animals bigger, the rivers broader and deeper. He climbed mountains, explored rivers, collected unknown animals and plants, the latter growing – as he observed – with vivid hues unknown anywhere else.
In his history of the dispute of the New World, Antonello Gerbi says that the quarrel ‘reaches its peak [until then] in the antithesis between Humboldt and Hegel, and at the same time the point of widest divergence between the two extremes’.48 Hegel, known for perhaps the greatest overarching theory of history and philosophy ever produced, was always uncertain as to how to include America in the structure he thought he had identified. He could not ignore such a vast continent and he therefore found that the main division of the earth was into the New World and the Old, representing a philosophical division. The two worlds differed in everything, he said: the Old World is curled around the Mediterranean Sea like a horseshoe, the New World is elongated and in a north-south direction; the Old World is perfectly separated into three ‘properly articulated’ and integrated parts (Europe, Asia, Africa – Hegel often thought in threes), while the New World is split up, with a ‘miserable hinge’ joining the two parts.49 The great mountain chains and bigger rivers run in different directions (mountains east-west in the Old World, north-south in the New; rivers north-south in the Old World, east-west in the New). Many of these observations were less than accurate, of course, but on top of that Hegel argued that the New World had a youthful look that was not entirely praiseworthy: everything there was new, and by new he meant ‘immature and feeble’, its fauna weaker, its flora more monstrous. Its civilisations lacked the two great ‘instruments of progress’, iron and the horse, and while no continent in the Old World ever allowed itself to be totally subjugated, ‘the whole of America fell prey to Europe’.50
Friedrich Schlegel, a contemporary, also took the view that America was, biologically speaking, radically different from the Old World. He thought there were two kinds of humanity, those who had migrated from Asia, and the cannibals, ‘the only autochthonous Americans’.51 He also thought that the greatest division on earth was between the northern hemisphere and the southern, and that in both the Old World and the New the north was far more developed than the south. After the depredations of Napoleon, however, Schlegel did consider the possibilities of a European renewal in America, particularly for elites.
Finally, among the Germans, Schopenhauer argued that, nature-wise, ‘America always shows us the inferior analogue in regard to the mammals, and in compensation the superior analogue in regard to the birds and reptiles.’ He thought there were only three primitive (i.e., original) races – Caucasian, Ethiopian and Mongolian, all three belonging to the Old World. The Ameri
cans, therefore, he concluded, were ‘climatically modified Mongolians . . . In short, the will to live [his central idea], on its objectivisation in the Western hemisphere, felt itself very serpentine and very avian, not very mammiferous and not at all human.’52
Schopenhauer had added all this in a note appended to his major work, The World as Will and Representation, in 1859, the very year that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Darwin had familiarised himself with Alexander von Humboldt’s work while he was a young man and was very conscious that there had once been a great range of megafauna in America that had gone extinct. This was a mystery – it could not have been a great geological catastrophe because it didn’t show up in the record of the rocks, and if it had indeed occurred surely the small animals would have died out before the larger ones. Like Humboldt he used his powers of observation – to see that animals were abundant in some areas of the Americas, and not in others, as happened in Europe, meaning among other things that the great generalisations of people like Hegel had to be inaccurate oversimplifications. And some domesticated animals from Europe had gone wild in America, again due to environment. He did retain a few of Buffon’s prejudices but, as the world now knows, his main ideas of evolution were matured during his voyage on the Beagle, in particular while he was in the Galapagos Islands, off Ecuador, and in Patagonia. This is where he conceived his concepts of adaptation and the struggle for survival, leading to natural selection.53
