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December 30 新年，长征录一九三五年长征途中毛泽东的行军告示：
我们必须准备走大路、小路、直路和弯路！走过白天是黑夜路，走过黑夜是白天路，走过天涯还有路！走上坡路、下坡路、岔路和斜路，还要准备走绝路，走完绝路，我们再赶路！我们必须准备走绝路，走完绝路，再赶路！ December 13 走吧在某先生处寄宿一晚，五小时后去机场。一切废话即将过去，日后记住的唯有告别。出行十一天，记得润润病难好，末末多像K，小机灵变成老糊涂，The Constant Gardener，007，PS2的热战，Tim M的卡车，利齿钢牙的大腕，疑似走失的福猫，死了的Bobo，活着的Birdie，福建的轻笑，土豆的歌声。记得从俄克拉何马坐灰狗去丹佛，全车人天南地北四海五湖，黑人有之，白人有之，加拿大人有之，墨西哥人有之，老太太有之，小娃娃有之，我也有之。单看身份组成，简直就是一车侵占伊拉克的美国雇佣军。记得丹佛的三天自由行，两条腿走路，一张嘴问人。我承认自己是喜欢一人一包一地游的，但智力所限，路总是越走越黑，越走越长，也越走越凉。每每走到夜色已降，天昏地暗，节日气氛被满树联灯重重围困，只等得东方红来太阳升。 剃胡刀丢了。这是爸爸的礼物，已经用了五年。暂留须为记，回家再刮。 不要和女性争辩，因为这跟鸡蛋和鸡的次序关系一样无聊。革命不分先后，只要都能下饭。这是二零零六年的尽头，理解零岁，和谐万岁。 December 11 血海，鼻头昨天在UCD半天，在步行街半天，闷头直走，四处乱窜。傍晚很累，想起多日未沾酒，一时兴起，去酒吧喝了三杯。回宾馆倒头就睡，醒来半夜两点半，发现半床鲜血，处处暗红，顿时五雷轰顶，满脑子想的都是天哪，我究竟干了些什么。过了一分钟才发现是自己的鼻血，由于睡姿莫测，手脚翻腾，搞得一片血海。反应这么厉害，看来情报人员是做不成了。该红酒名叫007 Spytini，配方是伏特加、桔汁和七喜。
今天周日，周日休息。 December 08 又回来了已到丹佛，暂时无处可去，在咖啡馆休整。在灰狗上很舒适，多数下层人民总是友善的，多数闲散时光总是可爱的。感谢刘叔，知道你忙；感谢军哥，知道你累；感谢土豆，知道你烦。过去百日，三处借宿，没有你们不行。
今天计划未定，一切看情况，车到山前。窗外天光一点点亮起来，此处已经完全不识。十一年后还旧地，我又回来了。 December 04 走新路，读旧文在芝加哥的第三天。后天一早走。
最喜欢的电影之一：讲述Howard Zinn一生的记录片。单是名字就非常喜欢：You Can't Be Neutral On a Moving Train。
Columbus and Western Civilization
by Howard Zinn
George Orwell, who was a very wise man, wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past." In other words, those who dominate our society are in a position to write our histories. And if they can do that, they can decide our futures. That is why the telling of the Columbus story is important.
Let me make a confession. I knew very little about Columbus until about 12 years ago, when I began writing my book A People's History of the United States of America. I had a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University--that is, I had the proper training of a historian, and what I knew about Columbus was pretty much what I had learned in elementary school.
But when I began to write my People's History, I decided I must learn about Columbus. I had already concluded that I did not want to write just another overview of American history-- I knew my point of view would be different. I was going to write about the United States from the point of view of those people who had been largely neglected in the history books: the indigenous Americans, the black slaves, the women, the working people, whether native or immigrant.
I wanted to tell the story of the nation's industrial progress from the standpoint, not of Rochefeller and Carnegie and Vanderbilt, but of the people who worked in their mines, their oil fields, who lost their limbs or their lives building the railroads.
I wanted to tell the story of wars, not from the standpoint of generals and presidents, not from the standpoint of those military heroes whose statues you see all over this country, but through the eyes of the GIs, or through the eyes of "the enemy". Yes, why not look at the Mexican War, that great military triumph of the United States, from the viewpoint of the Mexicans?
And so, how must I tell the story of Columbus? I concluded, I must see him through the eyes of people who were here when he arrived, the people he called "Indians" because he thought he was in Asia.
Well, they left no memoirs, no histories. Their culture was an oral culture, not a written one. Besides, they had been wiped out in a few decades after Columbus' arrival. So I was compelled to turn to the next best thing: The Spaniards who were on the scene at the time. First, Columbus himself. He had kept a journal.
His journal was revealing. He described the people who greeted him when landed in the Bahamas--they were Arawak Indians, some times called Tainos--and told how they waded out into the sea to greet him and his men, who must have looked and sounded like people from another world, and brought them gifts of various kinds. He described them as peaceable, gentle, and said: "They do not bear arms, and do not know for I showed them a sword--they took it by the edge and cut themselves."
Throughout his journal, over the next months, Columbus spoke of the native Americans with what seemed like admiring awe: "They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest--without knowledge of what is evil--nor do they murder or steal...they love their neighbors as themselves and they have the sweetest talk in the world...always laughing."
And in a letter he wrote to one of his Spanish patrons, Columbus said: "They are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have, none of them, in the midst of all this, in his journal, Columbus writes: "They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
Yes, this was how Columbus saw the Indians--not as hospitable hosts, but "servants," to "do whatever we want."
And what did Columbus want? This is not hard to determine. In the first two weeks of journal entries, there is one word that recurs seventy-five times: GOLD.
In the standard accounts of Columbus what is emphasized again and again is his religious feeling, his desire to convert the natives to Christianity, his reverence for the Bible. Yes, he was concerned about God. But more about Gold. Just one additional letter. His was a limited alphabet. Yes, all over the islands of Hispaniola, where he, his brothers, his men, spent most of their time, he erected crosses.
But also, all over the island, they built gallows--340 of them by the year 1500. Crosses and gallows--that deadly historic juxtaposition.
In his quest for gold, Columbus, seeing bits of gold among the Indians, concluded there were huge amounts of it. He ordered the natives to find a certain amount of gold within a certain period of time. And if they did not meet their quota, their arms were hacked off. The others were to learn from this and deliver the gold.
Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian who was Columbus' admiring biographer, acknowledged this. He wrote: "Whoever thought up this ghastly system, Columbus was responsible for it, as the only means of producing gold for export.... Those who fled to the mountains were hunted with hounds, and those who escaped, starvation and disease took toll, while thousands of poor creatures in desperation took cassava poison to end their miseries."
Morison continues: "So the policy and acts of Columbus for which he alone was responsible began the depopulation of the terrestrial paradise that was Hispaniola in 1492. Of the original natives, estimated by modern ethnologist at 300,000 in number, one-third were killed off between 1494 and 1496. By 1508, an enumeration showed only 60,000 alive...in 1548 Oviedo (Morison is referring to Fernandex de Oviedo, the official Spanish historian of conquest) doubted whether 500 Indians remained.
But Columbus could not obtain enough gold to send home to impress the King and Queen and his Spanish financiers, so he decided to send back to Spain another kind of loot: slaves. They rounded up about 1200 natives, selected 500, and these were sent, jammed together, on the voyage across the Atlantic. Two hundred died on the way, of cold, of sickness.
In Columbus' journal, an entry of September 1498 reads: "From here one might send, in the name of Holy Trinity, as many slaves as could be sold..."
What the Spaniards did to the Indians is told in horrifying detail by Bartolome de las Casas, whose writing give the most thorough
account of the Spanish-Indian encounter. Las Casas was a Dominican priest who came to the New World a few years after Columbus, spent forty years on Hispaniola and nearby islands, and became the leading advocate in Spain for the rights of the natives. Las Casas, in his book The Devastation of the Indies, writes of Arawaks: "...of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity...yet into this sheepfold...there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening beasts.... Their reason for killing and destroying... is that Christian's have an ultimate aim which is to acquire gold..."
The cruelties multiplied. Las Casas saw soldier stabbing Indians for sport, dashing babies' heads on rocks. And when the Indians resisted, the Spaniards hunted them down, equipped for killings with horses, armor plate, lances, pikes, rifles, crossbows, and vicious dogs. Indians who took things belonging to Spaniards--they were not accustomed to the concept of private ownership and gave freely of their own possessions--were beheaded, or burned at the stake.
Las Casas' testimony was corroborated by other eyewitnesses. A group of Dominican friars, addressing the Spanish monarchy in 1519, hoping for the Spanish government to intercede, told about unspeakable atrocities, children thrown to dogs to be devoured, new-born babies born to women prisoners flung into the jungle to die.
Forced labor in the mines and on the land led to much sickness and death. Many children died because their mothers, overworked and starved, had no milk for them. Las Casas, in Cuba, estimated that 7000 children died in three months.
The greatest toll was taken by sickness, because the Europeans brought with them disease against which the native had no immunity: typhoid, typhus, diphtheria, smallpox.
As in any military conquest, women came in for especially brutal treatment. One Italian nobleman named Cuneo recorder an early sexual encounter. The "Admiral" he refers to is Columbus, who, as part of his agreement with Spanish monarchy, insisted he be made an Admiral. Cueno wrote:
There is other evidence which adds up to a picture of widespread rape of native women. Samuel Eliot Morison: "In the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola they found young beautiful women, who everywhere were naked, in most places accessible, and presumably complaisant." Who presumes this? Morison, and so many others.
Morison saw the conquest as so many writers after him have done, as one of the great romantic adventures of world history. He seemed to get carries away by what appeared to him a masculine conquest. He wrote:
The language of Cueno ("we came to an agreement"), and of Morison ("gracefully yield") written almost five hundred years apart, surely suggests how persistent through modern history has been the mythology that rationalizes sexual brutality but seeing it as "complaisant."
So, I read Columbus' journal, I read Las Casas. I also read Hans Koning's pioneering work of our time--Columbus: His Enterprise, which, at the time I wrote my People's History was the only contemporary account I could find which departed from the standard treatment.
When my book appeared, I began to get letters from all over the country about it. Here was a book of 600 pages, starting with Columbus, about one subject: Columbus. I could have interpreted this to mean, that since this was the very beginning of the book, that's all these people had read. But no, it seemed that the Columbus story was simply the part of my book that readers found most startling. Because ever American, from elementary school on, learns the Columbus story, and learns it the same way: "In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety Two, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue.
How many of you have heard of Tigard, Oregon? Well, I didn't until, about seven years ago, I began receiving, every semester, a bunch of letters, twenty or thirty, from students at one high school in Tigard, Oregon. It seems that their teacher was having them (knowing high schools, I almost said "forcing them") read my People's History. He was photocopying a number of the chapters and giving them to the students. And then he had them write letters to me, with comments and questions. Roughly half of them thanked me for giving them data which they had never seen before. The others were angry, or wondered how I got such information, and how I had arrived at such outrageous conclusions.
One high school student named Bethany wrote: "Out of all the articles that I've read of yours I found 'Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress' the most shocking." Another student named Brian, seventeen years old, wrote: "An example of the confusion I feel after reading your article concerns Columbus coming to America.... According to you, it seems he came for women, slaves, and gold. You've said you have gained a lot of this information from Columbus' own journal. I am wondering if there is such a journal, and if so, why isn't it part of our history. Why isn't any of what you say in my history book, or in history books people have access to each day."
I pondered this letter, It could be interpreted to mean that the writer was indignant that no other history books had told him what I did. Or, as more likely, he was saying: "I don't believe a word of what you wrote! You made this up!"
I am not surprised at such reactions. It tells something about the claims of pluralism and diversity in American culture, the pride in our "free society," that generation after generation has learned exactly the same set of facts about Columbus, and finished their education with the same glaring omissions.
A school teacher in Portland, Oregon named Bill Bigelow has undertaken a crusade to change the way the Columbus story is taught all over America. He tells of how he sometimes starts a new class. He goes over to a girls in the front row, and takes her purse. She says: "You took my purse!" Bigelow responds: "No, I discovered it."
Bill Bigelow did a study of recent children's books on Columbus. He found them remarkably alike in their repetition of the traditional point of view. A typical fifth grade biography of Columbus begins: "There once was a boy who loved the salty sea." Well! I can imagine a children's biography of Attila the Hun beginning with the sentence "There once was a boy who loved horses."
Another children's book in Bigelow's study, this time for second graders: "The King and queen looked at the gold and the Indians. They listened in wonder to Columbus' stories of adventure. Then they all went to church to pray and sing. Tears of joy filled Columbus' eyes."
I once spoke about Columbus to a workshop of school teachers, and one of them suggested that school children were to young to hear of the horrors recounted by Las Casas and others. Other disagreed, said children's stories include plenty of violence, but the perpetrators are witches and monsters and "bad people," not national heroes who have holidays named after them.
Some of the teachers made suggestions on how the truth could be told in a way that would not frighten children unnecessarily, but that would avoid the falsification of history taking place.
The arguments about children "not being ready to heard the truth does not account for the fact that in American society, when the children grow up, they still are not told the truth. As I said earlier, right up through graduate school I was not presented with the information that would counter the myths told to me in the early grades. And it is clear that my experience is typical, judging from the shocked reactions to my book that I have from readers of all ages.
If you look in an adult book, the Columbus Encyclopedia (my edition was put together in 1950, but all the relevant information was available then, including Morison's biography), there is a long entry on Columbus (about 1,000 words) but you find no mention of the atrocities committed by him and his men.
In the 1986 edition of the Columbia History of the World, there are several mentions of Columbus, but nothing about what he did to the natives. Several pages are devoted to "Spain and Portugal in America," in which the treatment of the native population is presented as a matter of controversy, among the theologians at the time, and among historians today. You can get the flavor of this "balanced approach," containing a nugget of reality, by following passage from that History.
Despite this scholarly language---"contradictory conclusions...academic disputed...insoluble question"---there is no real dispute about the facts of enslavement, forced labor, rape, murder, the taking of hostages, the ravages of disease carried from Europe, and the wiping out of huge numbers of native people. The only dispute is over how much emphasis is to be placed on these facts, and how they carry over into the issue of our time.
For instance, Samuel Eliot Morison does spend some time detailing the treatment of the natives by Columbus and his men, and uses the word "genocide" to describe the overall effect of the "discovery." But he buries this in a midst of long, admiring treatment of Columbus, and sums up his view in the concluding paragraphs of his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, as follows:
Yes, his seamanship!
Let me make myself clear. I am not interested in either denouncing or exalting Columbus. It is too late for that. We are not writing a letter of recommendation for him to decide his qualification for undertaking another voyage to another part of the universe. To me, the Columbus story is important for what it tells us about ourselves, about our time, about the decisions we make for our country, for the next century.
Why this great controversy today about Columbus and the celebration of the quincentennial? Why the indignation of native Americans and others about the glorification of that conqueror? Why the heated defense of Columbus by others? The intensity of the debate can only be because it is not about 1492, it is about 1992.
We can get a clue to this if we look back a hundred years to 1892, the year of the quadricentennial. There were great celebrations in Chicago and New York. In New York there were five days of parades, fireworks, military marches, naval pageants, a million visitors to the city, a memorial statue unveiled at a corner of Central Park, now to be known as Columbus Circle. A celebratory meeting took
place at Carnegie Hall, addressed by Chauncey DePew.
You might not know the name of Chauncey DePew, unless you recently looked at Gustavus Myers' classic work, A History of the Great American Fortune. In that book, Chauncey DePew is described as the front man for Cornelius Vanderbilt and his New York Central railroad. DePew traveled to Albany, the capital of New York State, which satchels of money and free railroad passes for members of the New York Sate Legislature, and came away with subsidies and land grants for the New York Central.
DePew saw the Columbus festivities as a celebration of wealth and prosperity--you might say "marks the wealth and the civilization of a great people...it marks the things that belong to their comfort and their ease, their pleasure and their luxuries...and their power."
We might know that at that time he said this, there was much suffering among the working poor of America, huddled in the city slums, their children sick and undernourished. The plight of people who worked on the land--which at this time was a considerable part of the population--was desperate, leading to the anger of the Farmers' Alliances and the rise of the People's (Populist) Party. And the following year, 1893 was a year of economic crisis and widespread misery.
DePew must have sensed, as he stood on the platform at Carnegie Hall, some murmurings of discontent at the smugness that accompanied that spirit of historical inquiry which doubts everything; that modern spirit which destroys all the illusions and all the heroes which have been the inspirations of patriotism through all the centuries.
So, to celebrate Columbus was to be patriotic. To doubt was to be unpatriotic. And what did "patriotism" mean to DePew? It meant the glorification of expansion and conquest--which Columbus represented and which America represented. It was just six years after his speech that the United States, expelling Spain from Cuba, began its own long occupation (sporadically military, continuously political and economic) of Cuba, took Puerto Rico and Hawaii, and began its bloody war against the Filipinos to take over their country.
That "patriotism" which was tied to the celebration of Columbus and the celebration of conquest, was reinforced in the Second World War by the emergence of the United States as the superpower, all the old European empires now in decline. At that time, Henry Luce, the powerful president-maker and multimillionaire, owner of Time, Life, and Fortune (not just the publication, but the things!) wrote that the twentieth century was turning into "American Century," in which the United States would have its way in the world.
George Bush, accepting the presidential nomination in 1988, said: "This has been called the American Century because in it we were the dominant force of good in the world.... Now we are on the verge of a new century, and what country's name will it bear? I say it will be another American Century."
What arrogance! That the twenty-first century, when we should be getting away from the murderous jingoism of the century, should already be anticipated as an American century, or as any one nation's century. Bush must think of himself as a new Columbus, "discovering" and planting his nation's flag on new world, because he called for a U.S. colony on the moon early in the next century. And forecast a mission to Mars in the year 2019.
The "patriotism" that Chauncey DePew invoked in celebrating Columbus was profoundly tied to the notion of inferiority of the conquered peoples. Columbus' attacks on the Indians were justified by the status as sub-humans. The taking of Texas and much of Mexico by the United States just before the civil War was done with the same racist rationale. Sam Houston, the first governor of Texas, proclaimed: "The Anglo-Saxon race must pervade the whole southern extremity of the whole southern extremity of this vast continent. The Mexicans are no better than the Indians and I see no reasons why we should not take their land."
At the start of the twentieth century, the violence of the new American expansionism into the Caribbean and the Pacific was accepted because we were dealing with lesser beings.
In the year 1990, Chauncey DePew, now a U.S. Senator, spoke again in Carnegie Hall, this time to support Theodore Roosevelt's candidacy for vice-president. Celebrating the conquest of the Philippines as a beginning of the American penetration of China and more, he proclaimed: "The guns of Dewery in Manila Bay were heard across Asia and Africa, they echoed through the palace at Peking and brought to the Oriental mind a new potent force among western nations. We, in common with the countries of Europe, are striving to enter the limitless markets of the east.... These people respect nothing but power. I believe the Philippines will be enormous markets and sources of wealth."
Theodore Roosevelt, who appears endlessly on lists of our "great presidents," and whose face is one of the four colossal sculptures of American presidents (along with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln) carved into Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, was "a crime against white civilization." In his book The strenuous Live, Roosevelt wrote:
"Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion...that the barbarians recede or are conquered...is due solely
to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct."
An army officer in the Philippines put it even more bluntly: "There is no use mincing words... We exterminated the American Indians and I guess most of us are proud of it...and we must have no scruples about extermination this other race standing in the way of progress and enlightenment, if it is necessary..."
The official historian of the Indies in the early sixteenth century, Fernandes de Oviedo, did not deny what was done to natives by the conquistadors. He described "innumerable cruel deaths as countless as the stars." But this was acceptable, because "to use gunpowder against pagans is to offer incense to the Lord."
(One is reminded of President McKinley's decision to send the army and navy to take the Philippines, saying it was the duty of the United States to "Christianize and civilize" the Filipinos.)
Against las Casas' please for mercy to the Indians, the theologian Juan Gines de Sepulveda declared: "How can we doubt that these people, so uncivilized, so barbaric, so contaminated with so many sins and obscenities, have been justly conquered."
Sepulveda in the year 1531 visited his former college in Spain and was outraged by seeing the students there protesting Spain's war against Turkey. The students were saying: "All war...is contrast to the Catholic religion."
This led him to write philosophical defense of the Spanish treatment of the Indians. He quoted Aristotle, who wrote in his Politics that some people were "slaves by nature," who "would be hunted down like wild beasts in order to bring them to the correct way of life."
Las Casas responded: "Let us send Aristotle packing, for we have in our favor the command of Christ: Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself."
The dehumanization of the "enemy" has been a necessary accompaniment to wars conquest. It is easier to explain atrocities if they are committed against infidels, or people of an inferior race. Slavery and racial segregation in the United States, and European imperialism in Asia and Africa, were justified in this way.
The bombings in Vietnamese villages by the United States, the search and destroy missions, the My Lau massacre, were all made palatable to their perpetrators by the idea that the victims were not human. They were "gooks" or "Communists," and deserved what they received.
In the Gulf War, the dehumanization of the Iraqis consisted of not recognizing their existence. We were not bombing women, children, not bombing and shelling ordinary Iraqi young men in the act of flight and surrender. We were acting against a Hitler-like monster, Saddam Hussein, although the people we were killing were the Iraqi victims of this monster. When General Colin Powell asked about Iraqi causalities he said that was "really not a matter I am terribly interested in."
The American people were led to accept the violence of the war in Iraq because the Iraqis were made invisible--because the United States only used "smart bombs." The major media ignored the enormous death toll in Iraq, ignored the report of the Harvard medical team that visited Iraq shortly after the war and found that tens of thousands of Iraqi children were dying because of the bombing of the water supply and the resultant epidemic of disease.
The celebrations of Columbus are declared to be celebrations not just of his maritime exploits but of "progress," of his arrival in the Bahamas as the beginning of that much-praised five hundred years of "Western civilization." But those concepts need to be re-examined. When Gandhi was once asked what he though about Western civilization, he replied: "It's a good idea."
The point is not to deny the benefits of "progress" and "civilization"--advances in technology, knowledge, science, health, education, and standards of living. But there is a question to be asked: progress yes, but at what human cost?
Is progress simply to be measured in the statistics of industrial and technological change, without regard to the consequences of that "progress" for human beings? Would we accept a Russian justification of Stalin's rule, including enormous toll in human suffering, on the ground that he made Russian a great industrial power?
I recall that in my high school classes in American history when we came to the period after the Civil War, roughly the years between that War and World War I, it was looked on as the Gilded Age, the period of the great Industrial Revolution, when the United States became an economic giant. I remember how thrilled we were to learn of the dramatic growth of the steel and oil industries, of the building of the great fortunes, of the criss-crossing of the country by the railroads.
We were not told of the human cost of this great industrial progress: how the huge production of cotton came from the labor of black slaves; how the textile industry was built up by the labor of young girls who went into the mills at twelve and died at twenty-five; how the railroads were constructed by Irish and Chinese immigrants who were literally worked to death, in the heat of summer and cold of winter; how working people, immigrants and native born, had to go out on strike and win the eight-hour day; how the children of the working-class, in the slums of the city, had to drink polluted water, and how they died early of malnutrition and disease. All this in the name of "progress."
And yes, there are huge benefits from industrialization, science, technology, medicine. But so far, in these five hundred years of Western civilization, of Western domination of the rest of the world, most of those benefits have gone to a small part of the human race. For billions of people in the Third World, they still face starvation, homelessness, disease, the early deaths of their children.
Did the Columbus expedition mark the transition from savagery to civilization? What of the Indian civilizations which had been build up over thousands of years before Columbus came? Las Casas and others marveled at the spirit of sharing and generosity which marked the Indians societies, the communal building in which they lived , their aesthetic sensibilities, the egalitarianism among men and women.
The British colonist in North America were startled at the democracy of the Iroquois--the tribes who occupied much of New York and Pennsylvania. The American historian Gary Nash described Iroquois culture: "No laws and ordinances, sheriffs and constables, judges and juries, or courts or jails--the apparatus of authority in European societies--were to be found in the northeast woodlands prior to European arrival. Yet boundaries of acceptable behavior were firmly set. Through priding themselves on the autonomous individual, the Iroquois maintained a strict sense of right and wrong..."
In the course of westward expansion, the new nation, the United States, stole the Indians' land, killed them when they resisted, destroyed their sources of food and shelter, pushed them into smaller and smaller sections of the country, went about the systematic destruction of Indian society. At the time of the Black Hawk War in the 1830s--one of hundreds of wars waged against the Indians of North America--Lewis Cas, the governor of the Michigan territory, referred to his taking of millions of acres from the Indians as "the progress of civilization." He said: "A barbarous people cannot live in contact with a civilized community."
We get the sense of how "barbarous" these Indians were when, in the 1880s, Congress prepared legislation to break up the communal lands in which Indians still lived, into small private possessions, what today some people would call admiringly, "privatization." Senator Henry Dawes, author of this legislation, "visited the Cherokee Nation, and described what he found: "...there was not a family in the whole nation that had not a home of it's own. There was not a pauper in the nation, and the nation did not owe a dollar...it built its own schools and its hospitals. Yet they defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common...there is not enterprise to make you home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization."
That selfishness at the bottom of "civilization" is connected with what drove Columbus on, and what is much-praised today, as American political leaders and the media speak about how the West will do great favor to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe by introducing "the profit motive."
Granted, there may be certain ways in which the incentive of profit may be helpful in economic development, but that incentive, in the history of the "free market" in the West, has had horrendous consequences. It led, throughout the centuries of "Western Civilization," to a ruthless imperialism.
In Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, written in the 1890s, after some time spent in the Upper Congo of Africa, he describes the work done by black men in chains on behalf of white men who were interested only in ivory. He writes: "The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it... To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe."
The uncontrolled drive for profit has led to enormous human suffering, exploitation, slavery, cruelty in the workplace, dangerous working conditions, child labor, the destruction of land and forests, the poisoning of the air we breath, the water we drink, the food we eat.
In his 1933 autobiography, Chief Luther Standing Bear wrote: "True the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress? I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization."
The present threats to the environment have caused a reconsideration among scientists and other scholars of the value of "progress" as it has been so far defined. In December in 1991, there was a two-day conference at MIT, in which fifty scientists and historians discussed the idea of progress in Western thought. Here is part of the report on that conference in the Boston Globe.
One of the participants, historian Leo Marx, said the working toward a more harmonious coexistence with nature is itself is itself a kind of progress, but different than the traditional one in which people try to overpower nature.
So, to look back at Columbus in a critical way is to raise all these question about progress, civilization, our relations with one another, our relationship to the natural world.
You probably have heard--as I have, quite often--that it is wrong for us to treat Columbus story the way we do. What they say is: "You are taking Columbus out of context, looking at him with the eyes of the twentieth century. You must not superimpose the values of our time on events that took place 500 years ago. That is ahistorical."
I find this argument strange. Does it mean that cruelty, exploitation, greed, enslavement, violence against helpless people, are values peculiar to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? And that we in the twentieth century, are beyond that? Are there not certain human values which are common to the age of Columbus and to our own? Proof of this is that both in his time and in ours there were enslavers and exploiters; in both his time and ours there were those who protested against this, on behalf of human rights.
It is encouraging that, in this year of the quincentennial, there is a wave of protest, unprecedented in all the years of celebration of Columbus, all over the United States, and throughout the Americas. Much of this protest is being led by Indians, who are organizing conferences and meetings, who are engaging in acts of civil disobedience, who are trying to educated the American public about what really happened five hundred years ago, and what it tells us about the issues of our time.
There is a new generation of teachers in out schools, and many of them are insisting that the Columbus story be told from the point of view of view of the native Americans. In the fall of 1990 I was telephoned from Los Angeles by a talk-show host who wanted to discuss Columbus. Also on the line was a high school student in that city, named Blake Lindsey, who had insisted on addressing the Los Angeles City council to oppose the traditional Columbus Day celebrations. She told them of the genocide committed by the Spaniards against the Arawak Indians. The city council did not respond.
Someone called in on that talk show, introducing herself as a women who had emigrated from Haiti. She said: "That girl is right--we have no Indians left--in our last uprising against government the people knocked down the statue of Columbus and now it is in the basement of the city hall in Por-au-Prince." The caller finished by saying: "Why don't we build statues for the aborigines?"
Despite the textbooks still in use, more teachers are questioning, more students are questioning. Bill Begelow reports on the reactions of his students after he introduces them to reading material which contradicts the traditional histories. One student wrote: "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.... That story is about as complete as Swiss cheese."
Another wrote a critique of her American history textbook to the publisher, Allyn and Bacon, pointing to many important omissions in that text. She said: "I'll just pick one topic to keep it simple. How about Columbus?"
Another student: "It seemed to me as if the publishers had just printed up some glory story that was supposed to make us feel more patriotic about our country.... They want us to look at our country as great and powerful and forever right.... We're being fed lies."
When students discover that in the very fist history they learn--the story of Columbus--they have not been told the whole truth, it leads to a healthy skepticism about all of their historical education. One of Begelow's students, named Rebecca, wrote: "What does it matter who discovered America, really?... But the thought that I've been lied to all my life about this, and who knows what else, really makes me angry."
This new critical thinking in the schools and in the colleges seems to frighten those who have glorified what is called "Western civilization." Reagan's Secretary of Education, William Bennett, in his 1984 "Report on the Humanities in Higher Education," writes of Western civilization as "our common culture...its highest ideas and aspirations."
One of the most ferocious defenders of Western civilization is philosopher Allan Bloom, who wrote The Closing of the American Mind in the spirit of panic at what the social movements of the Sixties had done to change the educational atmosphere of American universities. He was frightened by the students demonstrations he saw at Cornell, which he saw as a terrible interference with education.
Bloom's idea of education was a small group of very smart students, in an elite university, studying Plato and Aristotle, and refusing to be disturbed in their contemplation by the noise outside their windows of students rallying against racism or protesting against the war in Vietnam.
As I read him, I was reminded of some of my colleagues, when I was teaching in a black college in Atlanta, George at a time of the civil rights movement, who shook their heads in disapproval when our students left their classes to sit-in, to be arrested, in protest against racial segregation. These students were neglecting their education, they said. In fact, these students were learning more in a few weeks of participation in social struggle than they could learn in a year of going to class.
What a narrow, stunted understanding of education! It corresponds perfectly to the view of history which insists that Western civilization is the summit of human achievement. As Bloom wrote in his book: "...only in the Western nations, i.e. those influenced by Greek philosophy, is there some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one's own way." Well, if this willingness to doubt the hallmark of Greek philosophy, then Bloom and his fellow idolizers of Western civilization are ignorant of that philosophy.
If Western civilization is considered the high point of human progress, the United States is the best representative of this civilization. Here is Allen Bloom again: "This is the American moment in the world history.... America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its political foundings on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us..."
Yes, tell black people and native Americans and the homeless and those without health insurance, and all the victims abroad of
American foreign policy that America "tells one story...freedom and equality."
Western civilization is complex. It represents many things, some decent, some horrifying. We would have to pause before celebrating it uncritically when we note that David Duke, the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan member and ex-Nazi says that people have got him wrong.
"The common strain in my thinking," he told a reporter, "is my love for Western civilization."
We who insist on looking critically at the Columbus story, and indeed at everything in our traditional histories, are often accused of insisting on Political Correctness, to the detriment of free speech. I find this odd. It is the guardian of the old stories, the orthodox histories, who refuse to widen the spectrum of ideas, to take in new books, new approaches, new information, new views of history. They, who claim to believe in "free markets" do not believe in a free marketplace of ideas, any more than they believe in a free marketplace of goods and services. In both material goods and in ideas, they want the market dominated by those who have always held power and wealth. They worry that if new ideas enter the marketplace, people may begin to rethink the social arrangements that have given us so much sufferings, so much violence, so much war these last five hundred years of "civilization."
Of course we had all that before Columbus arrived in this hemisphere, but resources were puny, people were isolated from one another, and the possibilities were narrow. In recent centuries, however, the world has become amazingly small, our possibilities for creating a decent society have enormously magnified, and so the excuses for hunger, ignorance, violence, racism, no longer exist.
In rethinking our history, we are not just looking at the past, but at the present, and trying to look at it from a point of view of those who have been left out of the benefits of so-called civilizations. It is a simple but profoundly important thing we are trying to accomplish, to look at the world from other points of view. We need to do that, as we come into the next century, if we want this coming century to be different, if we want it to be, not an American century, or a Western century, or a white century, or a male century, or any nation's, any group's century, but a century for the human race. December 01 一切留到最后，好在还有明天转数学文《从理工科思维的角度看人性》：
人性这个词向来是非常“文科思维”的，所谓文科思维也可以称为艺术思维，因此，文科思维可以用一系列的复杂的语文来对人性这个词进行描述，而结果经常是让人不得要领。本贴子将从理工科思维的角度来研究人性。
那么，从理工科思维的角度看，人不过就是一种生物，或者一种高级的哺乳动物。因此，我们在研究人性的时候，当然也就是要研究这种动物，这种生物的性质，它肯定也包括了一般的生物的共性，因此在下面的研究中我们也经常观察其它的一些生物来对人性作一些推断。 而任何一种生物，物种是由什么决定的呢？是由它的遗传密码决定的，或者叫脱氧核糖核酸，或者叫DNA。是DNA中的信息，也就是众多碱基对的排列，决定了各种生物的特性。 因此，人性，在理工科角度看来，就是DNA性，就是包含在人类的身体的每一个细胞中的DNA的密码特性。或者，我们也可以称之为先天的特性，是生来具有的特性。 那么，在描述人的DNA性的时候，有一句古话说得特别好，就是“饱暖思淫欲”，就是说，任何一个人，从他的DNA性来说，首先要有足够的食物供应，或者能量供应，这叫“饱”，还要有适应的温度，被称之为“暖”，当一个人有了足够的能量供应，还有适合的，让他感到舒服的湿度之后，他会思考什么呢？思考交配。而交配的目的是什么呢？繁殖。因此，“饱暖思淫欲”也可以用更精确的话，说成“饱暖思繁殖”。而这并不仅仅是人的DNA性，而是任何生物的DNA性。 可以说，生物和非生物的本质区别，在于生物能够繁殖，能够将它的DNA密码一代又一代地传下去。因此，在饱暖和繁殖这两件事情中，繁殖才是根本，而饱暖是为了繁殖而创造条件，因为，繁殖就需要有足够的能量和适合的温度。甚至可以说，没有繁殖，就没有生物。因此，繁殖性，即是最基本的生物性，当然也就是最基本的人性，或者人的DNA性。 任何物种如果没有繁殖的欲望和能力，必将灭绝。而任何物种的基本的DNA的排列，导致了这种物种的大多数的个体，都会有繁殖的愿望。极少数的DNA的变异，导致了某些个体丧失了繁殖的愿望，这样的个体当然只好趋近于灭绝。 而物种要想繁殖，就必须要有合作。首先交配就是一种合作，公和母之间的合作。还不光如此，哺乳动物及鸟类动物中，光是交配还是不足以让繁殖成功的。这一点和一些鱼类不一样。许多鱼类，交配以后雌鱼将受精卵产在水草中，就再也不管了。但是，还有许多动物，也包括一些鱼类，刚出来的幼体是不能够适应大自然的环境的，因此需要成虫来照料。因此，繁殖的整个程序并不仅仅是交配，而是包括了将幼体抚养长大的一个系统工程。 而这种照料幼体的程序，一定是事先编好在物种的DNA中的，因此必然是先天的，属于基本的DNA性。因此，通过交配生下孩子，将孩子抚养成人，一定也存在在人的DNA中，这种特性是利它的，这个它，就是孩子，因此，人的DNA性就包括了利它性。 这种利它性是不是只包括在母体而不包括在公体中呢？是不是男的就没有利它性呢？我们知道，当一个妇女怀孕，直到生产，直到婴儿长大前，在原始社会中，如果没有他人的照料，她将是处在危险之中的，处于更容易被野兽侵袭的危险境地，如果有其它的自然灾害发生，如洪水，地震等灾难，孕妇将更容易受到威胁。因此，保卫孕妇的安全更是男人的责任。再孩子生出后，在长大成人前，也是需要父母的保护的，这在其它的物种中也不鲜见。因此，相信这种由繁殖性导致的利它性，也一定是存在在男人的DNA中的。 我们将这种繁殖后代，将后代养大，希望后代能够存活下去，这样一种基本的DNA性，或者基本人性，称之为“为后代性”。 “为后代性”并不只是人类才有，许多物种都是有的。比如说，鸟类，经常有鸟类中无论公母都共同合作将幼鸟抚养成人的，因此也是鸟类的DNA性。 再回来研究一般的生物，除了“为后代性”外，还有哪些特性呢？观察到许多生物，都似乎知道“团结就是力量”的道理。这里面典型的例子是蚂蚁和蚂蜂，能够群起向天敌发起攻击，不惜牺牲个体来保卫自己的群体的安全。这些特性肯定也是存在于DNA中的，也是许多物种都有的DNA特性。此外，在生存的过程中，许多物种都知道合作，比如可以见到许多蚂蚁合作搬运一块骨头的情况。一个蚂蚁搬不动一根骨头，一群蚂蚁就可以了。因此，合作能够做出不合作所不能做之事。我们将上面的“团结就是力量”及“合作”的DNA性，简称为“合作性”。 而人也是这样。早期的人类为了抵御大自然的各种灾难，为了防范野兽的攻击，为了谋生，如狩猎，都需要合作，需要团结。因此，合作性也是基本的人性，基本的DNA特性。在原始人群中，一个人可能对付不了一只老虎，一群人就可以对付了。 当然，“为后代性”中间也就包括了“合作性”，因此这二者是紧密联系的，而最基本的来源，就是繁殖性。 下面再讲千百年来，在阶级社会中，意识形态反复宣传的人的“为私性”，什么“人不为已，天诛地灭”，发展到资本主义，则是所有的“经济人”为了自己的利益最大化而努力奋斗，经济人理论提供了新自由主义经济学的基本的基石。而一些文人反复地宣传，使人们产生印象，就是“为私性”才是人类的最基本的人性，而“为公性”则是乌托邦，则是不可能的，则是反人性的，邪恶的。 首先要承认，任何一个人，甚至其它的生物的个体，能够有好吃的就不愿意去吃差的，能够饱就不希望饿着，能够保暖就不愿意冻着，甚至有个体为自己获得食物而争斗的现象，这些现象可以称之为“为私性”。 我们将上面讨论的“合作性”及“为后代性”统称为“为公性”，或者“利它性”。因此，可以认为，人的基本人性，或者说“利己性”和“利它性”，都存在于DNA中，或者说，利己和利它，为私和为公，都是基本人性。 不同的人DNA也不同，有可能这类人“利己性”强一些，那类人“利它性”强一些。 问题在于，哪一类特性是人类最本质一些的呢？我们前面提到了，繁殖性是任何物种的基本特性，没有繁殖就没有生物。而人的利它性，为公性，或者合作性，为后代性，都是来源于繁殖性。因此，可以认为，利它性，为公性，合作性，为后代性，才是人性中最本质的，而利己性，为私性，才是人性中不太本质，更为表象的。 那么，在现代资本主义社会，为什么利己性获得了最大的推崇呢？被认为是人类的最本质的属性呢？原因就在这个市场经济中，每一个经济人努力使自己的利益最大化，导致了一种物质调配上的均衡，这种均衡使得生产力迅速发展，尤其是在人类发现不可再生能源之后，人在讨价还价的利己的争夺中，正好使得人类的生产力从效率上讲达到了最大化。这难道不好吗？ 但是这种最大化却导致了对大自然的疯狂破坏！对自然资源的疯狂掠夺！ 这是为什么呢？市场经济的一个重要特征，就是讨价还价，就是各个利益集团，各个经济人，都在为自己的利益讨价还价。什么叫市场？市场就是一个讨价还价的场所嘛。而资本主义社会的议会，也是一个讨价还价的场所，各个不同阶层的代表在那里讨价还价，来达到某种程度上的均衡。 但是，这个讨价还价中间，我们发现了“缺席者”。“缺席者”是谁？人类的后代。人类的后代没有出生，当然没有办法来讨价还价。 也就是说，市场经济倒是使得现世的，能够参与讨价还价的人们得益了，但是还没有出生的不具备讨价还价能力的人们的利益却受损了。 设想，如果人类在几百年以后的后代，能够组成一个代表团，来到现世，来到议会上，和人们大声争吵，坚决抗议现世的人们把原本归他们所有的许多资源，许多生存条件，都破坏掉了，完全是为了现世人的利益，他们会抗议：“轮到我们出生的时候，我们能够掌握的资源已经不多了，地球已经被破坏得不适合我们生存了。”当然，这样的代表着后代的代表团不可能存在，因为他们还没有出生。 但是，确实有可能存在着“代表着后代的代表团”的，这是因为人类的本性，“为后代性”，“利它性”，这样一种DNA特性，会通过各种方式显露出来的，会产生为后代的代表人物的。否则，我们为什么能够看到动物保护主义组织的抗议？为什么能看到绿色和平组织？ 我们为什么能够看到历史上的许多革命先烈为了后代的利益前扑后继？因此，共产党人应当组成这样一个为后代的代表团，这样的行为是基本人性的表现。 从上面的讨论中我们知道，“为私性”和“为公性”都是人的DNA性，都是人性，而“为公性”更基础一些的。现在来谈“幸福”这件事情。可以认为，当人的“为私性”和“为公性”都得到了合理舒张的时候，这个人是幸福的。在什么情况下不幸福，会感到痛苦呢？是在某一方面受到压抑的时候。这种压抑，许多时候来自于后天的教育，后天对人脑的欺骗宣传，错误的信息灌输，尤其是扭曲人性的宣传。 而最扭曲人性的宣传，就是说服一个人相信，“为私性”是最基本的，“为公性”是扯淡，是不可能的。当一个人真的相信了这一点，通过各种手段的确使自己的利益最大化了，成了百万富翁了，不关心它人不关心社会，认为关心自己才是好的对的，但是在这种情况下，他的DNA性被扭曲了。 任何被扭曲了DNA性的人，都会受到DNA，也就是基本人性的反抗，反抗的结果，就是使自己没有感到幸福，没有感到快乐。的确有不少富人，明明已经挣了大钱，发了大财，但是“为公性”受到压制，导致心理感觉痛苦，甚至要通过不断行善来舒缓这种痛苦，这就是身体内部的DNA反抗他的“反人性”而造成。 再进一步说明为什么繁殖性是基本的人性。如果大家得到一个消息，由于外星人在地球撒了一种药，从今天开始所有的人失去繁殖能力，相信整个人类世界都将处于绝望痛苦状态，这说明人类并不认为自己过好这一辈子就是好。 为什么在美国，这样一个资本主义文化达到极致的地方，自杀率相当高？心理病态的人特别多？就是因为社会的宣传实际上已经反了人性，扭曲了人性，对抗了人性中的“为公性”造成。 本来，“合作性”是一个非常基本的DNA性，本来毛泽东在建国后发起的合作化运动，是在舒缓和释放中华民族中的被压抑多年的基本人性，但是却在这些年被丑化，一些文人们反复宣传的不是“团结就是力量”，“合作就是力量”，而是宣传“不团结不合作就是力量”了，他们反复宣传合作，就会饿死，不合作，就能够吃得饱，这完全违反基本生物学的常识。 下面我再讲讲“生育最大化文化”。我们知道中华民族经过几千年的艰难发展，从几百万人发展到今天的十三亿人，而在新中国之前，在各种战乱的情况下，也还是发展到了五亿五千万人，而象美洲的印第安人，同样经过几千年的发展，却只有几千万人，因此被西方的殖民者搞了种族灭绝呢？为什么历史上的许多种族都灭绝了呢？为什么犹太人发展了几千年，却只有几百万人呢？这是因为中华民族发展了一个“生育最大化文化”。 所谓生育最大化文化，就是一切以最快速地发展人口为目标的文化。因此，所有的能够生育的女人，必须早早结婚，而且必须在有生之年尽可能多地生孩子。为了生出的孩子健康，就必须有健康的生殖器，就不能够将生殖器当作玩物，因此为了防止性病传染，就必须要推广“万恶淫为首”的观念。外国的文学一讲到某一个主人公最后好了，那都是发了大财，有了许多财富，“从此过着幸福的生活”。而中国的文学如果主人公最后好了，那一定是“人丁兴旺，五男二女”。也就是说，中国历史上的人一富裕就多生孩子，多子多福，这种观念就是生育最大化文化。 那么，发展到今天，我们不需要生育最大化了，需要节制生育了，我们是不是就可以搞乱淫了呢？我认为，如果有人代表未出生的后代的利益，就应当推广“生育健康化”文化。就是说，任何一个婴儿，在出生前，母亲的子宫就是他的宾馆，他的五星级饭店，他的睡觉的床，他的床单。那么，如果你是一个经济人，你懂得讨价还价，你愿意来到一个宾馆，发现这个床单上已经满是屎尿，被许多人弄脏吗？你还是盼望一个洁白的，干净的，崭新的，除了你的兄弟姐妹睡过之外，并没有受到任何其它的乱七八糟的人糟踏的床单呢？ 前面已经讲过，在市场经济中，一个未出生的后代，是讨价还价的缺席者，最容易受到伤害，但是从人类的繁殖性这种DNA性出发，一个妇女应当知道为自己的未出生的后代保存一个完好的，舒服的环境，禁止无关人士的糟踏，这就是人的基本的“为后代性”的抒发，这就是“生育健康化”文化的体现。 而任何一个负责任的男的，他也并不会去随意糟踏我们后代安睡的“摇篮”，这也将是这样的男人的“为后代”的基本人性的体现。他在寻找配偶的时候，要为自己的后代寻找一个洁白干净崭新的“床单”，也就是基本人性的体现。 从这里我们可以推导出为什么“性解放”属于资本主义社会的“腐朽文化”。 讲到这里，本贴子从完全理工科思维的角度出发，对于近年来的错误宣传进行了拨乱反正。 因此，当黄继光扑向敌人的枪眼，当董存瑞用炸药包与敌人同归于尽，当雷锋为人民服务贡献青春，当所有这一切被一些文人们咒骂成“反人性”的时候，理工科思维的研究表明，那正是他们基本的人性，基本的DNA性的表现。 当一些妇女端庄贤淑自重，被一些文人们骂为保守，不解放的时候，这些妇女们的行为其实是基本的人性，“为后代性”，在起作用。 这么一来，所有的中华民族的美德，现在都可以从唯物主义的角度出发，建基在完全理工科思维的基础之上了，完全是类似于物理学家的推导，而不是一种空中楼阁，一些华而不实的闪亮词句，却是一些冷冰冰的分析推导出来的结论。 |
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