I have read dozens of articles celebrating the respect for Nature evident in the cultures of various Indigenous peoples around the world. One such piece published in The N.Y. Times of Nov. 26 and written by Ross Douthat was entitled: “What Is Indigenous Power?”
Implicit throughout the article is its author’s disdain for “Columbus and all other European discoverers” as well as his endorsement of “sustainability against industrial capitalism.” Like most everyone on the Left today, Douthat is consumed by “white-progressive historical guilt” and “general pessimism about the American project.” Given the relentless promotion of this perspective throughout most every aspect of our culture, it is hardly surprising that a significant percentage of Westerners have come to take it for granted. Yet it is a perspective that is both logistically inane and historically inaccurate.
As I have pointed out in several blogs, the British banned the slave trade from the Commonwealth early in the 19th C. and proceeded to patrol the coast of Africa for decades thereafter, freeing thousands consigned to servitude by slave traders who were in fact Black! The Civil War was fought on behalf of the same moral considerations, though contemporary “intellectuals” have managed to impugn even Abraham Lincoln who apparently committed the heinous crime of making statements not utterly consistent with 21st C. Post-Modernism. No one is exonerating European colonialists of their many sins, but Critical Race Theory, which makes White Westerners history’s greatest villains, is literally of no more value than what comes out of the backside of a bull!
So also is the Leftist narrative which makes the Indigenous of North America the innocent victims of Colonialist aggression! Read Lawrence H. Keeley’s “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage” and you will learn that warfare was a constant amongst most of the world’s Indigenous, those conflicts frequently resulting in the slaughter of a far greater portion of the vanquished than that perpetrated by Western Europeans in their various colonialist victories.
But just as the notion of the “noble savage” is a myth, so also is the idea proffered by Douthat and so many others that the Indigenous of the Americas had a fundamental respect for sustainability, that they had failed to develop any significant degree of technology because they revered Nature. Yes, many of them believed the natural realm to be inhabited by Spirits both malevolent and otherwise, but their failure to exploit that realm was a result of the fact that concepts as simple as the pragmatic applications of the wheel had yet to be discovered as recently as a few hundred years ago by most of the tribes of the Americas. They were not environmentally conscientious. They were simply, irrefutably, unevolved.
Am I saying all Indigenous people are therefore stupid? Of course not! Life is more complicated than that. But historical facts are historical facts and the effort of contemporary Leftists to equate Cultural Primitivism with Environmental Progressivism is truly absurd, just as absurd as their contention that the White Western Europeans who sought to eradicate slavery 200 years ago are History’s greatest villains, though slavery remains an issue in many parts of Africa today where people of color continue to subjugate other people of color for a variety of political reasons.
The most ludicrous and ultimately hypocritical aspect of the contemporary Left’s religious celebration of Sustainability over Technology is that those of that persuasion seem in no hurry to abandon their homes and computers and automobiles and the multitude of other life-enhancing benefits born of Western Man’s apparently evil addiction to Technology. At the same time they seem utterly impervious to the Irony of the fact that those millions of migrants seeking to exchange the horrors of their homelands for a new life in Western Europe or North America, represent an unequivocal repudiation of their simplistic abhorrence for what they have declared to be the ugly, heartless, exploitative, patriarchal, misogynistic, racist West!