Of Fear and Strangers, page 5
Las Casas didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of this public reading, proclaimed in a language foreign to the listeners, made by a gang of “cruel, pitiless, and bloodthirsty tyrants.” At times, these robbers, in the dead of night, leagues away from a sleeping village, dutifully read the Requerimiento before commencing their pillage. Even if the locals had heard and understood this proclamation, was there a nation on earth, he asked, who would not act as the Indians did when ordered to summarily relinquish their king and God? Las Casas dismissed Aristotle and the Pope, so as to ask his reader to look inward and consider whether the natives’ actions were different from anyone else’s. The ones fighting a “just” war, he bravely concluded, were the Indians who acted in defense of their families and their lands.
Illustration from Las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552
Over the course of two decades, Las Casas furiously attacked the assumption that these New World strangers were Spain’s enemies. They were more moral than his own tribe. And over the years, his advocacy only grew more militant. Guiltily, he also repented for an earlier sin; he had supported bringing in African slaves to the Spanish colonies, in the hopes that they would save the weakened, decimated Indians. In retrospect, he recognized that this was a despicable act of complicity, an ignorant utterance, and perhaps unforgivable in the eyes of God. In penance, he redoubled his attacks on the brutal regime his nation had instituted abroad.
Somehow, Las Casas was allowed to keep up this crusade. Scholars have suggested that the King did not mind challenges that kept his restless, far-off colonists on their back foot. Furthermore, the Dominican had won favor in high places. In 1537, when Pope Paul III declared that the Indians were fully rational beings, some discerned Father Las Casas’s fingerprints on the decree. In 1550, the priest also took part in an epochal debate staged before King Philip at Valladolid. There he took on, among others, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a distinguished lawyer who, despite never having traveled to the New World, confidently rolled out Aristotle’s notion of natural slavery. While there was no official victor, only Las Casas’s arguments were printed in the official proceedings.
In 1552, Las Casas cemented his legacy with the publication of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. “Everything that has happened,” it began, “since the marvelous discovery of the Americas … has been so extraordinary, that the whole story remains quite incredible to anyone who has not experienced it first-hand.” As the reader readied for exotic delights, he quickly discovered that what was nearly impossible to convey were Spanish “massacres,” “atrocities,” and “horrific excesses,” which annihilated “whole kingdoms.” Las Casas hammered this home: our nation has been the enemy of righteousness. We met the “simplest,” kindest people, and what did our countrymen do? “They hacked them to pieces,” he wrote, “slicing open their bellies with their swords … they grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mother’s breasts, dashed them headlong into the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river.…” If that was not grisly enough, he went on to describe how the Spaniards hanged and burned thirteen victims at a time, in honor of Jesus and his apostles, taking sadistic pleasure in binding them in a griddle of wood, so as to “grill them over a slow fire.” When images and language seemed to fail him, Las Casas grasped at numbers. After forty years of Spanish occupation, he estimated that twelve million natives had perished. Of three million pre-Columbian natives on Hispaniola alone, Las Casas reported, two hundred remained.
All this slaughter had been lost on the moral imagination of the West, the Dominican concluded, due to a confusion of identities. Spanish Christians were supposed to possess virtue, reason, and civilization; the indigenous strangers were enemies of all that was right and good. In truth, we were “ravening wolves” who devoured these lambs. The Spanish colonist was “like someone out of his mind and gone crazy. His mind is not his own, it is enveloped in clouds.…” “Such a type,” he continued, “is hardhearted, merciless, does not have faith, does not love peace, lacks love.…” Pointing to Saint Paul, he protested that these beings were also merely “strange in ways of speaking.” They were God’s children, while the subjects of the king were savages.
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies infuriated the conquistadors. Gentle, kind Indians? Cortés scoffed in widely published letters that emphasized the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. Bernal Díaz, one of Cortés’s men, described Montezuma’s priests striding by him in a trance, their hair wild and stiff, caked in human blood. These natives smiled, he reported, but were ever ready to snatch out your heart. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda went further: he argued that Spanish domination was just, for the conquerors were saving natives from homegrown tyranny and the sacrificial altar.
These rebuttals may have forced Las Casas to rethink his initial idealization of the natives and strive for a more complex, less Manichean position. What if we looked past tribal or national labels? What if we judged all inhabitants in the New World equally? What if only one standard applied? The Aztecs revered their God; they were devout, law-abiding men and women whose sacrifices showed that they passionately worshipped the divine. Such devotion made them more religious than most Spaniards, whose hunger for lucre drove them to heinous acts. As for human sacrifice, Las Casas did not hesitate to condemn it as a monstrosity. Still, this rite paled in comparison to the extermination of whole peoples.
With that, the Dominican’s moral journey landed him in a startling place. Who was “barbarous” and who was “civilized” seemed to depend not on sharing the same God, tribe, nation, or heritage but simply on one’s actions. The same moral principles could be applied to everyone. This breathtaking conclusion went against the powerful dividing practices that had long unified Spain. Everyone should be judged by the same principles; therefore, strangers were not necessarily the enemies of righteousness. We, the Christians, may be. Las Casas thus began to consider a moral system that applied to devotees of any religion. All this from a Dominican who never wavered in his own conviction that there was one true God, that Jesus Christ was his son, and that in that final hour, He would judge all.
Las Casas had no single word for the blood-crazed degradation that his kinsmen had perpetrated upon these New World strangers. Instead, he deployed hundreds of words strung together into a scream. Readers found it hard to look away from the lurid, stunning set pieces he created; they broke the heart of even the stoniest reader. He used the Christian language of universal souls and mortal sins against the Spanish, and brought to life a monster, the Great Goddess of Greed. Gold, silver, and self-interest led to the desire for more, more, and more again. Material lust drove his nation to treat these innocent strangers like devils and, despite a bloodbath, nary a soul protested.
“A MIRROR DOES NOT develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it,” wrote the novelist E. M. Forster. “It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver—in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness.…” Bartolomé de Las Casas applied a layer of reflecting paint onto the ideologies that made violence against strangers legitimate. He questioned the assumption that the foreigners were to be feared and hated, and declared that by labeling these strangers as subhuman, his own people had granted themselves license to do whatever served their own interest. By undermining the assumed righteousness of his own tribe, he opened up the dizzying possibility that ethics should not be distorted by tribal identity. Thus Las Casas became a central figure in an emerging modern ethic that, over time, would see such justifications as xenophobic.
Las Casas broke through a cordon sanitaire of prejudices that defended Imperial Spain from examining its self-defining practices in the New World. He forced his readers to reflect on a national identity so rigidly tied to a fantasy of blood and purity that it sanctified crimes against others. After flipping the equation and declaring the New World inhabitants to be good and his own tribe to be evil, he moved past that. Applying an impartial moral calculus, Father Las Casas concluded simply, ye shall know them by their acts. By that criteria, those who ritually sacrificed and ate humans were still more virtuous than his brothers and sisters who had laid waste to whole nations.
Publication of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies led to Las Casas falling out of favor at home. Around Europe, however, newly created printing presses rushed out his revelations, accompanied by gruesome illustrations. Thus began what became known as the “Black Legend,” a condensation of Spanish history into hooded inquisitors and bloodthirsty conquistadors. For some two centuries thereafter, it stood as a stark warning of bigotry run amuck. Rivals like the French, the British, the Dutch, and the Germans used the Black Legend to distinguish themselves from their southern rivals. Protestants took Spain to be the prime example of Catholic zealotry. When the English sent Sir Walter Raleigh out to create a colony in the New World, each of his men received a copy of Las Casas’s book, which was intended to convey to the sailors and all they met that the English were not the Spanish.
The problem, however, was hardly restricted to Spain. Las Casas’s message filtered out into a Europe torn by its own wars of religion. In 1619, the new Holy Roman Emperor rescinded laws protecting religious freedom and decreed that the realm would be Catholic alone. Bohemia revolted, as did many other Central European Protestant nations. These battles were then joined by Sweden, France, Belgium, Spain, and England. During thirty years of war, death prospered. In 1648, all the inter-Christian killing finally ceased with the Treaty of Westphalia.
The philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel proposed that history moves in pendulum swings, as thesis is met by antithesis. Over the next decades, these dark chapters of the persecution of minorities at home and slaughters abroad can be seen as engendering such a reaction. After reading critics of the Spanish empire, the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, in a famed essay on cannibals, summoned Saint Paul and wrote, “each man calls barbarians whatever is not his own practice.” Beyond such sheer relativism, a politics and ethics was needed that did not descend so easily into rank prejudice. In search of that framework, early modern thinkers turned to two related principles: radical egalitarianism and toleration.
A central architect of these views was the doctor, political operative, and philosopher John Locke. Raised as a Calvinist, Locke was nonetheless distressed by the “I heard it from God” insurrectionists he encountered during Oliver Cromwell’s reign. He struggled to find a rational basis by which the state would make way for differing faiths, while outlawing dangerous sects. God and natural law had created all human beings as equals, he believed, but could he justify this? The doctor and philosopher spent the next twenty years doing precisely that, and in the process inaugurated the Western notion of a natural, fallible, brain-based mind.
Understanding, for Locke, commenced at the same starting place for all humans. The mind began as a blank slate, then built up an associative web of knowledge from sensory inputs and memory. That meant human understanding was always partial and contingent, never more. Since absolute truths were unknowable, the state had no right to limit the liberty of others. Strange, even repugnant beliefs, as Locke wrote in his famous letters on toleration, needed to be accepted, as long as they did not threaten others or the state.
In 1688, the Glorious Revolution enshrined Locke’s credos and solidified a place in the public square for strange faiths that differed from the official Anglican Church. Religious groups, even those commanded by “fanatical enthusiasts,” were allowed to pursue their beliefs. Quakers, Lutherans, Calvinists, Diggers, Levelers, and more would not be defined as outsiders or enemies. Even if these religions might seem to be “false,” even if the followers might resemble the Devil’s spawn, diverse religious minorities would be politically accepted. Liberal toleration demanded that in contradistinction to the Spanish Inquisition, nations accommodate an array of dissidents who were, in their minds, capacities for knowledge, and essences, nothing more or less than equal.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the secularizing Enlightenment gathered momentum, radical egalitarian tracts and disputations on toleration flourished. When in need of a powerful example of error, they often employed the Black Legend. François-Marie Arouet, famed as Voltaire, turned to Las Casas to help his readers grasp the nature of intolerance. The cries over Aztec human sacrifice were a smokescreen, he concluded, much hyped to cover up the greater crimes of the Spanish Catholics. Baron de Montesquieu also used the Spanish Conquest to make his point: he depicted Cortés as a hypocrite who spoke of freedom and justice while committing barbarities, and he pressed forward a daring position. Differences between the French and the Aztecs were not intrinsic. What one man or woman believed simply came, following Locke’s psychology, from local inputs. Humans were equal; only in their cultures did they differ.
In 1770, many of these Enlightenment strands came together in the first Western history of colonialization. Published anonymously in Amsterdam, the book became one of the most avidly read works of the time. A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, despite its heft, ran through fifty French, fifty-four English, twenty-nine German, fifteen Russian, and eleven Italian editions. Readers gobbled up accounts of far-off members of their species who lived so differently that it was hardly imaginable.
The author was Abbé Raynal, though he was no priest. Educated by Jesuits, Guillaume Thomas Raynal left the church to become a journalist and editor in prerevolutionary Paris. The immense success of his anonymously published six-volume magnum opus must have thrilled him, until his identity was leaked. As sales skyrocketed, the Catholic Church banned his book, which guaranteed continued success on the black market and Raynal’s exile. Somehow his clandestine collaborator, the brilliant polymath Denis Diderot, remained undiscovered.
The discoveries and conquests of the Dutch, English, and French each warranted one section in this work. The Spanish required three, and within them the authors were scathing. The conquest of the New World demonstrated the mad extremism of both the Catholics and the Aztecs. Religion was a universal source of zealotry, a prescription for seeing others as fallen and demonic. To pound home this point, Raynal and Diderot turned to their hero, Bartolomé de Las Casas, who:
summoned his nation to the tribunal of the whole universe, and made the two hemispheres shudder with horror. O Las Casas! Thou were greater by thy humanity, than all thy countrymen by their conquests. Should it happen in future ages, that these unfortunate regions which they have invaded be peopled again, and that a system of laws, manners and liberty should be established among them, the first statue that they would erect would be thine. We would see thee interposing between the American and the Spaniard, and presenting thy breast to the dagger of one, in order to save the other.
Guillaume Thomas Raynal
Natural law established human equality and freedom from tyranny, these philosophes believed, and as Western nations spread out to foreign lands, this meant that toleration must be exercised, even with very strange strangers. Only in that way could one transcend subjective prejudice, think and judge and act free of one’s biases. Raynal and Diderot called for a new dawn, in which these secular morals would hold back prejudice and make space for an array of foreigners, all of whom in their essence were equivalent.
Raynal and Diderot were not just utopian dreamers; they were among a chorus of radical prophets. Only six years after their book appeared, a revolution took place and the American Declaration of Independence enshrined these same beliefs. Thomas Jefferson returned from France, took out a quill, and wrote: “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men were created equal.” It was a good start. He passed his draft on to Benjamin Franklin, who crossed out “sacred and undeniable” and inserted “self-evident,” an irreligious phrase that took its authority from what was natural. And so, the ringing first words of this document insisted that a rejection of universal equality was bigoted, deluded, and false.
A secular ideal was being born in which a tolerant nation-state, predicated on universal human equality, might resist the easy demonization of inner and outer strangers. In the beginning, though, the only ones to be tolerated in fact were odd, weird, or deviant white freemen. Yet, even if the American founders wished it to be so, their hymns to liberty, equality, and toleration could not be so easily confined. These uplifting proclamations would be taken up in revolutionary France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. They would inspire the first successful revolt by enslaved peoples, who in 1791 rose up in Saint-Domingue. In 1787, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in Great Britain, and in 1794, the French outlawed slavery. Throughout Europe, Enlightenment reformers began to call for the civil emancipation of Jews.
Over the next century, promises of equality and toleration would rise, recede, and need to be renewed. For the powerful forces that led to the demonizing and degradation of strangers did not disappear. In the coming contest of ideas, however, there were new tools by which one could fight. “Zealots” and “fanatics” practiced “intolerance,” and in so doing, like Cortés and the Inquisitors, they committed crimes. To be intolerant was no longer just an idle accusation; it pointed back to horrifying histories of persecution and murder. A tradition now linked the poet of Hebrews and Saint Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians to Father Las Casas, Michel de Montaigne, John Locke, Denis Diderot, Abbé Raynal, abolitionists, and more. As partisan quarrels and conflicts repeatedly ignited, some would take a stand, placing themselves among Las Casas’s progeny, as they demanded that Westerners consider an expanded moral community, one that did not stop at national or religious borders and therefore did not restage the tragedies of the past.
