why am I supposed to feel guilty about the inevitable?

[thanate]

So I've been reading this 1491 book, and the entire first section is about how all the first contact reports tell of a densely populated New World, with villages as tightly packed as suburbs today down the northeastern coast, the mississippi river, and all through various places in south and central America, all full of amazingly well-nourished and healthy people. The English didn't initially think of colonization because there wasn't any room to colonize, and if they overstayed their welcome, they would be not-so-gently reminded of it by haordes of armed warriors. The Spanish, who were all about conquest so they could bring back riches (most easily transported in precious metal form) to gain status back home, succeeded in some highly improbable conquests mainly due to the side-effects of their arrival.

Because the Europeans, besides their inferior nutrition, were also (to American eyes) horribly scarred and disfigured by disease. And these diseases, for a hoast of biological reasons, were things that none of the peoples in America were well-equipped to fight. So in successive waves of epidemic (smallpox, influenza, measels, typhus, hepatitis A, all those other things you got vaccinated for as a kid, or didn't even need to because you got it as a kid and it wasn't about to kill you) that carried along trade routes and between warring clans, possibly as much as 95 percent of the people who were already here got wiped out. Most of them had never even *seen* a euorpean, anyway.
Now, there's this huge fight in the academic world about what the pre-contact population of the Americas was, and it turns out that one of the shocking and horrifying to Old Academia ideas is that there might have been more people in the Americas than in Europe at the time. And I sad, er, what? Given the relative geography, I'd sure hope there were... Now admittedly, there's utterly no way to get a good estimate for what the population actually was; our numbers on how many people were there once we got there are extremely sketchy and estimated; many cultures disappeared so completely that we have no idea what their population densities might have been. And then you get to the sketchy mathematics-- if you say that the estimated number we have is 5 percent of the former total, that gets you a hugely and wildly different number than if you say it was 4 or 6 percent. So there's some cause for intellectual argument.

The problem is that a lot of the argument is somewhat less than intellectual. People get passionate about this. They insult each other's intelligence and morality. And it seems that many of them believe this is a vital moral issue. Because to minimize the numbers is to minimize the european guilt for killing everyone, or maybe just for taking their land, because it's not like it was being used much or anything. As opposed to the inflated numbers being obviously an invention of those who have some political agenda in the other direction. And being me, I look at this and want to knock their heads together. I mean, how dumb.

First off, just from the first contact reports alone, we know there were huge epidemics. How huge, no one will acutally be sure. But at the time there was no one in the entire world who really understood contagion, and then with the biological similarity between the peoples of the New World (with a more than 30% chance any two native Americans would have identically genetically programmed immune systems, as opposed to about a 2% chance in Europeans) any plague that hits some people would have a horrifying effect. The same thing still happens today in isolated Amazonian populations, although with modern medicine and vaccinations we're down to a death rate of only (only!) 8% from measels (this is from the 1990s.) And the same thing happened in Siberia, when the Russians first showed up there. Think of that planet in Serenity, the one where everyone died. Only in a real world, without the bizarre sterility of the place (and obviously without the psychotic bellicose surviors.) And once there had been contact between the continents, there was literally no way to stop it. It's awful, but how can you assign blame about something that was effectively inevitable. It's unreasonable to postulate a world in which there was no contact between hemispheres for another four centures, until someone's medical technology could get up to the point of preventing some of this.

And then, I run into a wall trying to think about the possiblilty. I mean, if the English hadn't colonized, there wouldn't have been an America, to which my ancestors (straggling in from the early Virginia colony all the way up to 1910) would not have met each other, and there would be no me to think about it. And I get all confused, too, in thinking about conquest. Most of my ancestors came from the British Isles somewhere, which means that they're a huge tangle of conquoror and conquored, most (though still not all) of whom get along with each other, often to the point of making no distinctions between themselves. And admittedly the last major invasion of outsiders happend in 1066, and the slinging of racial insults and forced relocations and suchlike didn't quite catch on so well as they did in the new world (in centuries when "they ought to have known better") but still. One can only hope that in 800 years or so, we various populations of the americas will be so well adjusted...


Ok, must get up and dressed so I can go out in the woods and watch other people examine the defused mines we found yesterday. Yippee. um.

Comments

[ssdevilducky.livejournal.com]

why am I supposed to feel guilty about the inevitable?
It is the way our society is set up at the moment, dividing everything into two groups, we are either the victims (good) or the oppressors (bad). Instead of seeing both as humans with good and bad in the individual as well as the group (however you define good and bad) we tend to sanctify one and demonize the other.
If my great-great-great grandparent hurt another of my great-great-great grandparent it does not make me noble or a villan it makes me human. Unfortunately guilt today is marketable and profitable.
But until I get that time machine working and can change the past, I'll try to only feel guilty about what I have done or not done, not that I succeed, but I'll try.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know that. It was meant as a rhetorical quesiton, ie, I was scrambling for a subject line on the way off to work, and that was what I came up with. I just think it's dumb that people get all worked up about it in that way... there's a big gap between feeling sorry and feeling guilty, and I don't think the latter applies to things you personally had no control over. Sometimes it's not possible to get reparation, and the [descendents of the] wronged party needs to let it go, instead of penalizing people who had nothing to do with it.

[ssdevilducky.livejournal.com]

there's a big gap between feeling sorry and feeling guilty, and I don't think the latter applies to things you personally had no control over.

I don't believe guilt should apply either, unfortunately, some people disagree with that. In particular some teachers I had when I was a bit younger.

[astormorray.livejournal.com]

It's too bad that the native populations didn't have any horrible, disfiguring diseases to pass on to us, then we'd all be on more equal footing.

[ssdevilducky.livejournal.com]

It sounds rather odd though, wishing someone had "less easy" life or history so that if/when a disaster came it would be less of a shock.

Actually like all human groups they did have some horrible disfiguring diseases to pass back, they just were not as direct or deadly as say small pox. Frankly if their diseases were the crews would have been likely died before they reached Europe again.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons the europeans had so many nasty things, and were better able to deal with them, was that they lived with domesticated animals, and so occasionally horsepox mutated into smallpox, and anthrax jumped from pig to human and all that. There were only about three domesticated animals in all the Americas (primarily dogs, llamas & alpaccas in the andes, and some kind of bird, I think, that I hadn't heard of before & promptly forgot the name of in central america someplace) and they just didn't have the range of nasty diseases to pass on. And even had they done so, the europeans had more genetic immunity as a population-- fresh epidemics in europe only took out at most about a third of those infected.

But there's some fairly convincing evidence that syphillus originated in the Americas.

[melaniesuzanne.livejournal.com]

I have nothing erudite to add but you've definitely made me think. Although, I thought the concept of contagion was around by 1491...

[ssdevilducky.livejournal.com]

To an extent it was, germ and biological warfare have been used for thousands of years. What was probably not known, that seemingly healthy people can be carriers of some of the deadliest diseases without showing any symptoms (think AIDS today and/or Typhoid Mary), and the generational concept of having better immunity due to historic survival from diseases.
Saw part of a good TV special, where in middle ages a large town (in France I think) caught the plague, so the rest of the area effectively "walled" them off from the rest of the country and as a result the descendants of the very few survivors are genetically predisposed to be very disease resistant.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Not even so much generational immunity, as just genetically diverse immune systems. The number one problem is that you've got a bunch of pre-programmed codes for what your cells recognize as evil and foreign, and if something's not on your list then the white blood cells don't even get a chance at it, and you get sick. And if your neighbor has too close to the same genetics as you, he gets sick too, and if your immune system (as native american ones tend to be) is better at fighting parasites than diseases once you've got them, then you're pretty much in for it as a society.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

In Europe, yes. But that was more of a "look this city has the plage. We'll wall it up until that's done with" kind of thing, and there was none of that mindset in the Americas. And even in Europe they didn't actually understand what was going on, and had no concept of incubation periods, or anything like that. The problem was that because of the extreme succeptibility of the native populations, they would literally have had to keep from having any physical contact with the Europeans at all. I mean, think of the stuff they keep saying about trying to contain potential bird flu, or mad cow disease. All it takes is to get the disease in, and it's too late.

[skittblink.livejournal.com]

People get stupid about that whole debate thing- I've read about the same topic and really, no one's sure how many people there were. I don't think individual people need to feel guilty about the acts of their ancestors, but I don't think that means that society as a whole does not have to answer to groups that were badly treated in the past.