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History Is Not a Cartoon
Dick Dastardly and Snidely Whiplash were the ever-present evil villains of popular cartoons in the 1960s and ’70s. They were the constant presence that provided the contrast between unalloyed evil on the one hand, and defenseless and innocent misfortune on the other. As a general matter, I like moral clarity in entertainment. Whiplash and Dastardly serve a practical use in helping to sharpen the contrast between evil and good.
But somehow, what used to be a cartoonish character has been elevated into an entire worldview which is now being taught as a mainstay of American culture and history. Old-world Europeans and their present-day descendants are now constantly propagandized as the Snidely Whiplashes of our time.
I was talking to a 20-something evangelical Christian some months ago. He is employed as an educator. He is a graduate of a large, evangelical university and teaches in the public schools. He was surprised by our discussion because it ran so counter to the narrative he had running around inside his head regarding events from America’s past. The narrative in his head ran something along the following lines:
Unpleasant (and pale) Europeans migrated to the Americas and through their greedy, rapacious and insensitive ways, they displaced, mistreated and committed genocide against the innocent, happily agrarian and brownish indigenous people who were living in the Americas at that time. When
Snidelythe Europeans showed up, all was innocence, peace and light. But the vicious melanin-deprived Europeans went rampaging across the continent, spreading misery, pestilence and war. They went out of their way to victimize the indigenous people whenever they possibly could, sometimes for no other reason than that the sweet and innocent indigenous people possessed more melanin than the pasty-skinned Europeans. Modern day descendants of those Europeans may not have literally done those things themselves, but they are complicit in every bad thing ever done in history by the mere fact of their continued existence in a world that is no longer dominated by old world indigenous culture and values. Oh, and by the way, those residual values inherited from mean Europeans are also responsible for the on-going apocalyptic destruction of the planet, because private property and economic freedom cause variations in the weather. Or something.
You may think that my description is an exaggeration, but let me assure you, it is not. Some things are in there for comic effect, but the overarching set of presuppositions is entirely consistent with that young man’s indoctrination. Along similar lines, here is what sociology students at Berkeley (h/t to @drbastiat for this article) are apparently learning from their professors about the way of the world.
And yet, right now, the U.S. doesn’t have a just—or even functional—policy for immigrants and refugees. It’s still struggling to support Indigenous communities facing displacement from environmental calamities caused by colonial settlers.
Did you get that? Our indigenous communities are being displaced by environmental calamities caused by “colonial settlers.” Those 17th-century colonial settlers must have had one big honking carbon footprint. Somehow they initiated “environmental calamities” that were able to narrowly target specific races for hundreds of years.
Kidding aside, I hope you get my point – the melodrama I described that was running around in my young friend’s head wasn’t made up out of thin air.
Somewhere along the way, in my conversation with my young teacher friend, I commented on how S.C. Gwynne, in his history of the Comanche nation, shares a brief story in which some soldiers on the Texas frontier come across a group of Tonkawa Indians, sitting by a campfire over which they were roasting the leg of a dead Comanche warrior. The Tonkawas were planning to have roast Comanche for dinner. I made the observation to my friend that these soldiers would have been understandably shocked and appalled by this discovery since cannibalism was something that people coming out of a culture influenced by Judeo-Christian thinking would have abhorred. My young friend is a grown adult, in possession of a teaching credential, who has strong opinions about American history, but had never been told in 16 years of education that some of the indigenous people in the Americas were cannibals.
By the time I told him that the Incas drugged children with psychedelics before murdering them in sacrifice to their gods, he was speechless. And when I pointed out that the Aztecs would cut the beating heart out of their living human sacrifices and consume bits of the hearts in ceremonial cannibalism, he was reeling. Then I suggested that the Hurons would have born witness to the genocidal pursuits of the Iroquois, except for the fact that there are no Hurons in the world anymore, since every man, woman, and child was wiped out by the Iroquois. At this point, I thought I was going to have to get him some smelling salts.
When I asked my young friend if he thought the world we inherited would have been better if the depraved, cannibalistic, rapacious, and genocidal cultures that preceded colonization had been perpetuated and expanded, he was…confused.
The point of my comments up to this point is certainly not that Europeans were an unalloyed good or that indigenous people were an unalloyed bad. My point is that thinking in these cartoonish categories concerning history, categories that are more suitable for Dudley Do-Right than for actual grown adults, is an unlikely pathway to either wisdom or to human flourishing.
The European colonizers were wicked and flawed. Make no mistake. Some of them committed atrocities against their indigenous neighbors. But their indigenous neighbors also committed atrocities against the European settlers. Kidnapping, rape, torture, and mutilation were common occurrences on the frontier.
Side note: How many of these “indigenous” people were truly indigenous, or were rather descendants of earlier non-European migrations, is a question that is still very much open for debate among historians and archeologists. I use the term “indigenous” primarily to refer to anyone who was here before the Europeans arrived. Ancestors of allegedly indigenous people may themselves have pushed out people groups that were here before them. Actually, all of human history is characterized by the rise and fall of people groups. Everywhere and always.
The European settlers emerged from a culture that had been strongly influenced by Judeo-Christian thought and yet some of them, even many of them, did not live up to their Judeo-Christian cultural values. They sometimes responded in-kind or even initiated hostilities.
I don’t want any reader who was trained by our contemporary educational system to be too traumatized by what I’m about to write, but there are wicked people everywhere and in every color. Sorry to have to break it to you.
The lessons of history bear witness to the truth of the biblical understanding of the complete fallenness and depravity of humanity. All cultures exist along a continuum between better and worse, but they are never cartoonishly good or bad in the way our contemporary educational system would have us believe: moral virtue is simply not a straightforward artifact of ancestry or of pigmentation.
What makes one society better than another is the extent to which the values and principles a society promotes are in keeping with human flourishing. What makes a society worse is when God’s design for human flourishing is rejected or ignored, and the culture instead celebrates and promotes pursuits that are not worthy or good.
No society is perfect, but some societies and cultures are, in fact, better than others, and it is possible to make morally discerning distinctions.
My teacher friend had apparently never before considered the possibility that, when every single participant in history is already flawed by definition, perhaps we should reconsider the calculus for whom to revere and celebrate. Perhaps those of our forbears who, notwithstanding their inborn weakness still advocated for, and pursued, however inadequately, the true and the good – perhaps they should be honored instead of disparaged. Considering our own cultural and moral midgetry, perhaps the modern conceit of virtue signaling against the past isn’t such a bright idea. It is inevitably going to come out that we aren’t as virtuous as we tell ourselves while standing in front of the mirror basking in a glow of moral superiority. Nemesis ever followed Hubris. Future generations are going to laugh, looking back, at what undeserving self-righteous prigs we were.
This very same kind of cartoonish understanding of history also animates the entire “reparations” discussion that seems to be gathering momentum in our time. The Babylon Bee, on this question as on so many others, humorously identifies the fly in the reparations ointment.
In many ways, we have become the kind of culture that our ancestors would have deplored. The mask has come off and a culture of death is openly celebrated in the public square. The impression we would make on our own ancestors would likely be similar to the one made by those cannibalistic Tonkawas so long ago. Alas, we have slid very far toward the loser end of the cultural moral continuum.
We will continue to misidentify the heroes and villains in every age as long as we promote a cartoonish understanding of people and events. We are all Snidely Whiplash to one extent or another. We will only ever understand our world by looking, unabashed, through the explanatory lens provided by our creator.
Light is better than darkness. But there are still people who prefer cartoonish darkness to any smidgen of light. In a healthier culture, they would not be persons of influence.
Published in General
Destructive and sad for many reasons…and the real story of the meetings of cultures is so interesting, but doesn’t always lend itself to the Snidely Whiplash view of things. I wonder, do these people understand just how many of the European immigrants were themselves people who were fleeing desperate poverty and oppression?
I am almost halfway through A Splendid Savage by Steve Kemper.
Frederick Russell Burnham spent his early life scouting and hunting in the southwest, particularly Arizona, in the 1880s. The author does a great job describing the environment and the people there, including the Apaches. They were, of course, sinned against as well as sinners, but they could be brutal either on the war path or in everyday life. Atrocities during conflict are described but a couple examples of casual cruelty witnessed by Burnham should be sufficient. He watched a group of Apache women skin a fawn alive just for fun. He saw children trap pigeons and push thorns into their eyes.
The Apaches were extremely good warriors, yet, if memory serves, the Comanches were even tougher and drove them out of their own territory.
They were not flower children living in harmony with nature and each other.
And before that there was Dan Backslide! The former sneak of Roquefort Hall! Coward, bully, cad, and thief!
Choosing my words carefully, I have to believe that your young friend is one in a very large number.
And I have one question: (How) Did you manage to change his mind?
You are sooooo correct…Everyone, in every society and culture, has experienced these very human tendencies. There are NO cultures where greed, power, and a sense of personal superiority have not influenced the people to mistreat their “enemies.” No, colleges do not teach this. They haven’t for decades. So, we’re doomed to keep on thinking the dumb things that he was taught.
I would say that, at most, I softened his cartoonish views somewhat. He definitely softened in his general know-it-all vibe. He was genuinely shocked by this new information and it made him reconsider whether he was really operating with informed opinions.
On the other hand, some of his attraction to cartoonish, trendy ideas seems to be more a matter of sensibility than of anything else. He has an emotional attraction, or at least an emotional leaning, toward the kinds of narratives that have a cartoonish anti-European aroma. He will rush to embrace those kinds of narratives while requiring far less evidence than he needs for any alternative. So he’s still highly susceptible and attracted to those ideas and will generally still react positively to the melodramatic narratives of the left.
People do tend to be human, and go for the easy answer that makes them feel good. Thanks for the excellent post.
This is where the century-long de-emphasis on factual knowledge has gotten us.
The greatest villain of them all was Professor Fate. And the runner up is Maximillian “Max” Mean.
This song is interesting in this context: Mick Ryan’s Lament.
I’ve been reading through Francis Parkman’s magisterial France and England in North America, and just finished the Iroquois’s genocide of the Huron. Written in the 19th century, it tones down the extreme torture, violence, and cruelty, but it remains blood-chilling. Evil truly reigned in the pre-Christian era. I fear worse is coming in the post-Christian era.
Didn’t we see the results of post-Christian era – it’s started last century (e.g. Mao’s cultural revolution, Stalin’s Holodomor and Pol Pot’s killing field)
I don’t know if the Wyandotte would consider that every Huron has been wiped out. It depends on how you categorize the various groups that make up the Huron people, not all of which belonged to the Huron confederacy.
But was there genocide? Yes.
When Native Americans fought a war of annihilation, it often involved taking the women and young children and absorbing them into the victorious tribe. Still genocide.
There’s a chapter in The Lost State of Franklin that taught me a lot about Amerindian culture, specifically the Overhill Cherokee. The chiefs of a tribe were not kings. They often had trouble controlling the warriors. The Cherokee tribes in the book had two respected chiefs who were working for peace with the white settlers, and negotiated treaties that actually worked for both sides. Some of the warriors didn’t go along, and attacked an unarmed family of settlers, folks that routinely shared food with their Indian neighbors. The attack came when the white and Indian children were playing in the yard, and the whites were massacred. A few weeks later the two chiefs were meeting with Franklin officials under a flag of truce, and relatives of the massacred whites ambushed and killed them. After that, peace was impossible. The strongest voices for peace on the Indian side were dead, and no one on the white side dared go against the anger of the massacred families.
It is remarkable that large numbers of Americans, and probably Europeans, have come to believe that our civilization was uniquely bad, when if anything, it was uniquely good.
I do think that our civilization stopped being uniquely good, though it’s hard to put a precise date on it. Somewhere between the 1960s and the 2000s, I think.
It is deliberate. The only way to defeat us is to convince us that our society is not worth fighting for.
I recommend The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire, which makes the point that the British Empire was a good thing; far from perfect, as it is made up of human beings, but more good than evil. Gandhi thought so. And of course, the obligatory plug for one of my own narrations, The Good Country, that makes the case that the Midwest of 1800-1900 was the first truly democratic republic on the planet, made up of yeoman farmers and merchants, in contrast with the patrician South and the upperclass-dominated New England. The Good Country is quite a different story than my latest book, The Lost State of Franklin. The Tennessee Valley was settled by land speculators who established themselves as the upper class in the communities. That didn’t happen in the Midwest thanks to the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery and set homesteading rules that discouraged land speculating.
The same happened in Europe by the people who wiped out the builders of the stonehenge type monuments. They killed off the men and took the women and children.
Very few folks have studied history or lived abroad and even fewer in enough cultures to have a sense of how different the US was, and what it did to create the modern economy. What did it do? It was set up so the top couldn’t control how we made our living, lived our lives and built our neighborhoods and towns. Do folks believe that when we run the economy top down as every society before us did, we’ll still be prosperous? We won’t be, just as the world wasn’t in all history, (Greece an exception for the same reason) Who will run it and how we make our livings is difficult to see, but it won’t be the guys destroying the economy now. It’ll look like China is about to become, then poor, fragmented and probably dangerous. It’ll be so fast my grand Children may get to help rebuild. We could avoid the promised disaster if we could win the next election and set about destroying most of the state and federal bureaucracy, remove most of their power, raise some tariffs against all states we can’t get to join us. Very unlikely, so if the next election is stolen again, we could separate well run states and do the same thing our founders did without having to eliminate the Federal bureaucracy, because it won’t be ours. Our prosperity would lead others to join us, but that’s even less likely.
What about Simon Bar Sinister?