Consider the Following

Columbus – good, bad?  Somewhere in between, and what can we learn?  Columbus is credited with one of the greatest cultural migrations and exchanges in history.  His adventurous personality provides the backdrop for the discovery of the New World.  Was he first – no, but history is often fickle and rewards those with a tenuous claim to the advancements of antiquity.  Certain individuals stand at the crossroads of history – Columbus is one of those individuals. If you were to go to the Encyclopedia Britannica – Columbus is just shy of deity.  If you were to read Bartolome de Las Casa – a priest who immigrated to Columbus’ new world (Hispaniola) in 1502 – he is responsible for the genocide of the Arawak Indians and is evil incarnate. 

 So where does Columbus fall on the spectrum of good or bad?  A few facts: Columbus first adventured westward with 3 ships and about 100 men, and he believed that the world was round and small. He was invested in the skills associated with an expedition, mapping, potentially discovering peoples and proselyting. However, make no mistake his primary motive was economic – Gold. Gold that would sustain his future adventures, gold that would pay back his investors, gold that would give him glory.  The self-interest we currently now exhibit, was no less imbued to those in previous times.  Bezos’s primary objective in creating Amazon was not to make a better marketplace for the world but to create individual wealth.  The same could be said about Gates, Jobs, Buffet, and in a previous generation – Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt. Is this a condemnable trait in Columbus? Columbus’ 2nd expedition back to the New World – 17 ships and 1200 men. Why the substantial increase? It appears that Columbus spun a tail of gold fields and docile natives. Investors lined up. In a sense, he now had stockholders – investors who expected a return. It seems that Columbus’s exaggeration/marketing had ultimately put him between a rock and a hard place,- for there were no fields of Gold. Similar to today’s Enron Corp or Worldcom – whose CEOs lied about their company’s profits. Or Theranos in 2003 founded by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes – who claimed a new blood testing technology that actually never existed. The company grew to a value of $9 Billion before the dominos began to fall.  The founder is now serving an 11-year prison sentence. Columbus’s failure to procure the gold inevitably led to a 2nd source of wealth – slave labor. The Arawak Indians at the age of 14 and older were charged with finding and gathering gold, failure to do so resulted in death. Over the next 2 years, 125,000 Arawak’s had been killed, eventually leading to the genocide of the Arawak Indian tribe. An unintended consequence fashioned by the greed of Columbus and his men?  

This brings up a few questions – would you or I have seen and treated the natives any differently?  Are not most of our lives focused on the pursuit of wealth whether subsistence or abundance? Would we have seen their ignorance of swords and relatively gentle nature as areas we could exploit for our advantage? The natives had no concept of private property – ownership of tools or land seemed preposterous to them.  Their demeanor and mentality betrayed them and gave the Europeans total control which led to total cruelty. Is this just part of humanity, after all, we are social beings – we group ourselves together and then compete for resources. History has revealed that from the beginning of time, conflicts resolved by war have resulted in the victors and the defeated/subjugated. This IS just part of the human experience – reality.  

Let’s change the scenario – Was Columbus just an evil man?  Say Columbus doesn’t cross the Atlantic, say his neighbor Bob goes instead. What is the likelihood of Bob treating the natives any differently? If Bob went to the same schools as Columbus did, and was raised in the same culture with the same mindset?  What is the chance that Bob does the same thing – (genocide) in terms of the natives?  If we agree that Bob would likely have done the same thing – then can we condemn Columbus?  If the Arawak Indians had crossed the Atlantic and had superior weapons would they have subjugated the Europeans?  Tribal warfare in the New World was common and brutal. 

So where do we stand? Is it possible that you could have seen the natives as more than possible servants? Could you have assessed their generosity, reverence for nature, and ignorance of advanced weapons, and concluded they had much they could teach? Could you recognize the beauty and majesty and humanity of these new and different people? 

There was a social experiment in 2007 where Joshua Bell, one of the top musicians in the world, played his violin in a Washington DC Metro station. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 min during rush hour. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. Two days before his playing in the subway, Bell sold out a theater in Boston with the average seat costing $100. The social experiment was about perception, taste, and priorities of people – in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: do we perceive beauty? At the end of the 45 min. 6 people stopped and stayed for a while – 20 gave him money but continued to walk at their normal pace. He collected $32.  The one who paid the most attention was a 3-year-old boy, his mother tugged him along, and as the mother pulled harder the child continued to walk turning his head all of the time. This action was repeated by several other children.   How does this connect to Columbus?  Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context? Why didn’t Columbus recognize the beauty, majesty, humility, and reverence of the Indians?  Would we have?