Doctrine of Discovery
Seems like we have a couple of threads, one dealing with the discovery of the graves of children at Canadian Residential Schools, and the other about the Royals on the Rocks that are dancing around this fundamental doctrine that was expressed in the 1400s. I know I have been working with a formulation about Critical Race Theory which also appears to have this Doctrine of Discovery as its foundation.
Simply put, the doctrine of discovery claims that European civilization and Christianity were superior to all other cultures, races, and religions.
The doctrine has its roots in a series of 15th-century papal bulls, which merged the interests of European colonialism, including the African slave trade, with Christian missionary zeal. The most relevant edict for the American context was issued by Pope Alexander VI in May 1493, with the express purpose of validating Spain’s ownership of “undiscovered” lands in the Americas following the voyages of Christopher Columbus the year prior.
That history may seem irrelevant to us today, but in giving Europeans a divine right to seize the lands of non-Christian peoples anywhere in the world, it furnished the foundational lie that America was “discovered” and enshrined the innocence of “settlers” in the story white Christian Americans told about themselves.
If Europeans were superior to all others, enslavement and colonial conquest were merely the means of improving the temporal and eternal lot of Indigenous peoples. So conceived, no actual atrocities could possibly tilt the scales of justice against these immeasurable goods.
This doctrine also implied that if certain people did not convert to Christianity, Europeans (and Americans) would have the right to enslave indigenous people or even kill them in the name of Christ. Even Luther reached a point where he wanted to see Jews who refused to convert be executed---shades of Holocaust, anyone?
It got written into the Declaration of Independence and into our Constitution even. Did you know that even to this day Native American Nations cannot repurchase land that had traditionally been theirs without the approval of the United States Interior Department?
Critical Race Theory is a discipline that looks at how the use of laws has fostered the continued systematic racism in the United States. It has gotten many Republican citizens all up in arms now because they claim it is inciting more racism. Oddly, I understand Australia is considering a law banning it in their own country.
Maybe all need to work through how this false doctrine has seeped into our own lives today and work to eradicate it. True, the papacy needs to disavow such a doctrine, but we all suffer from it too.
Links:
https://religionnews.com/2021/07/02/lets-celebrate-this-fourth-of-july-without-the-myth-of-white-christian-innocence/?fbclid=IwAR2rdKJi_zfYYiQ4xyUhNfJCSBqWaQQuS6kKJUYQd0d-NyHTT3WvurHF8og
https://www.christianheadlines.com/blog/catholic-bishop-of-syracuse-decries-doctrine-of-discovery-suggests-pope-do-the-same.html
https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/christopher-columbus-and-the-doctrine-of-discovery-5-things-to-know
https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1122&context=mjrl
Simply put, the doctrine of discovery claims that European civilization and Christianity were superior to all other cultures, races, and religions.
The doctrine has its roots in a series of 15th-century papal bulls, which merged the interests of European colonialism, including the African slave trade, with Christian missionary zeal. The most relevant edict for the American context was issued by Pope Alexander VI in May 1493, with the express purpose of validating Spain’s ownership of “undiscovered” lands in the Americas following the voyages of Christopher Columbus the year prior.
That history may seem irrelevant to us today, but in giving Europeans a divine right to seize the lands of non-Christian peoples anywhere in the world, it furnished the foundational lie that America was “discovered” and enshrined the innocence of “settlers” in the story white Christian Americans told about themselves.
If Europeans were superior to all others, enslavement and colonial conquest were merely the means of improving the temporal and eternal lot of Indigenous peoples. So conceived, no actual atrocities could possibly tilt the scales of justice against these immeasurable goods.
This doctrine also implied that if certain people did not convert to Christianity, Europeans (and Americans) would have the right to enslave indigenous people or even kill them in the name of Christ. Even Luther reached a point where he wanted to see Jews who refused to convert be executed---shades of Holocaust, anyone?
It got written into the Declaration of Independence and into our Constitution even. Did you know that even to this day Native American Nations cannot repurchase land that had traditionally been theirs without the approval of the United States Interior Department?
Critical Race Theory is a discipline that looks at how the use of laws has fostered the continued systematic racism in the United States. It has gotten many Republican citizens all up in arms now because they claim it is inciting more racism. Oddly, I understand Australia is considering a law banning it in their own country.
Maybe all need to work through how this false doctrine has seeped into our own lives today and work to eradicate it. True, the papacy needs to disavow such a doctrine, but we all suffer from it too.
Links:
https://religionnews.com/2021/07/02/lets-celebrate-this-fourth-of-july-without-the-myth-of-white-christian-innocence/?fbclid=IwAR2rdKJi_zfYYiQ4xyUhNfJCSBqWaQQuS6kKJUYQd0d-NyHTT3WvurHF8og
https://www.christianheadlines.com/blog/catholic-bishop-of-syracuse-decries-doctrine-of-discovery-suggests-pope-do-the-same.html
https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/christopher-columbus-and-the-doctrine-of-discovery-5-things-to-know
https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1122&context=mjrl
Comments
I know that the rights and wrongs of the conquest were debated through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Samuel Johnson, arguing against colonialism in the middle of the eighteenth century, took it that the main argument in favour was that the land had been ceded by American nations by treaty, and his chief counter argument was that no nation would sign such a treaty except by force or fraud. He didn't bother to refute any doctrine of discovery, presumably because it didn't form a major part of UK colonial ideology.
It is not the case that the European nations spent the colonial period peaceably coexisting side by side within Europe.
The Spanish, in particular, were quite keen on the doctrine of discovery according to the links I provided. BTW, while we have talked about the residential schools in Canada, the missions of California were known to be responsible for the enslavement of Native Americans and thousands of deaths. https://hoodline.com/2016/03/the-lesser-told-story-of-the-california-missions/
A key feature of the Mabo case here, the founding decision for the recognition of native title, is that the doctrine of terra nullius had no part to play. The title of the First Peoples was a valid title by itself.
Likely. I am not qualified to speak about how it impacted Africa, though.
'The Europeans showed up with superior technology and inferior values and ethics, found people and places they could exploit and did exactly that. They'd been doing the same to reach other for centuries. The Euros' main problem is that they believe that humans are more special than other living things, that non-white people are bad, that the natural environment is dead and should be packaged up and sold.'
I've tried to find the program and link to this unsuccessfully. Was looking again yesterday. No luck.
I tool away that the binary living-dead, capitalist-socialist, human-world thinking is foundational to most of my thinking and needs to be revised.
The thing that sets my teeth on edge about this is the massive ignorance it enshrines as fact. The notion that the Aztecs or Zulus or Mongols had superior values and ethics leaves me gob-smacked.
I thought the point is that their values were their own, whether superior or not.
Gosh, that intrigues me. I need to go for a long walk to digest it.
I never get that impression. It really seems that the suggestion is that Edenic cultures were destroyed by soulless Europeans who might have learned proper spiritual values if they had come to learn instead of to pillage. The facts seem more stacked toward the view that humanity in general is, in Robinson Jeffers' words, "a clever servant, insufferable master."
That's one view, the noble savage, but it seems old-fasioned to me, or New Age. The Easter Islanders cut down their own trees, I think.
And it's been hypothesised that the centrality of the buffalo in Sioux society was because their ancestors wiped out all other substantial animals on the plains.
They had a unique aqueduct system unmatched by few cultures. They practiced hygiene techniques while Europe was dealing with plagues. They had a calendar system. Their religion emphasized maintaining balance in a hectic world
through a comprehensive and systematic programme of human sacrifice.
Unfortunately the book I'd want to consult is currently sitting behind a sofa. Religious conversion was one justification the Spanish conquerors put forward to other Europeans, including Spanish critics (mostly Dominicans and Jesuits of which Bartolome de las Casas was only the most famous). The evils of human sacrifice was another. The idea that the Spanish had the right to conquest by discovery was not I think one of them: the idea that the Romans or Alexander the Great had only had the right to conquer parts of the world that they didn't previously know about would be fairly ridiculous. The basic underlying theory was the universally honoured theory of viae victis (What the victor says goes.)
Samuel Johnson in his anti-colonialist tract distinguishes two moral questions: one being whether an appropriation of land by nation A is theft from the indigenous inhabitants (he thinks it is), and whether an appropriation of land by nation A is a violation of nation B's rights under the principle of honour among thieves. (If France invades New England, it wrongs both the English (by violating treaties between the conquerors) and the rightful possessors of New England.) The Papal Decrees dividing the world between Spain and Portugal address solely the latter question.
As I said, according to wikipedia that Doctrine of Discovery as such as giving European powers a legal title to the New World against the original inhabitants was a nineteenth century invention. It should be rejected as bad law, doubly so in that it is a bad interpretation of the precedent decrees it is citing. (Especially as the Protestant powers and the French never gave what was in fact a Spanish-Portuguese treaty any attention.)
NP, you have got to filter that stuff out of your analyses. It is two sides of a nineteenth century European attitude, both of which are well out of date. It reminds be of the British left, wailing about all the bad stuff the Empire is responsible for in reaction to their proto-fascist imperialist right. It still makes Britain the center of our historical universe. It might be the centre of my faux-Irish one too, I'll grant you, but that doesn't stop it being a distortion.
Not sure who in this thread is claiming this. Could you provide some citations ?
Is it easier to criticize the powerless or the powerful? So much justification of suppression, stealing from, killing of the powerless because their powerlessness means sinful. As much justification of going after the powerful because they did the stealing and killing.
The victorious also get to claim their cultural versions of religion are superior. Suppress and outlaw languages, culture and religion. Let's not get hung up on strawman human-sacrificing Aztecs. They hardly represent the many cultures "encountered" by colonist-settlers (or as Kurt Vonnegut called them "sea pirates).
You may be right - I've not read the papal documents in question. But I'd be wary of accepting any synthesis put together by someone who isn't a serious historian.
Your summary here claims a papal doctrine of religious, cultural and racial superiority.
That the Vatican believed in religious superiority seems obvious. Don't Muslims believe that Islam is a superior religion ? Isn't a true religion necessarily superior to a false one ?
But is there an explicit claim of racial superiority in the papal bulls ? Or is that just a reading-back into medieval history of later ideas ?
My guess - and it's no more than that - would be that the source doctrine here is one that says that it's wrong for a Christian nation to attack/occupy another Christian nation's colonies, in the same way as it's wrong to attack another Christian nation itself.
NP said it, as good as.
Its important to be factually correct though. By all means criticise Europeans now (including we settlers) but if you make factual errors you blunt the tip of your attack. Its easily deflected. You don't need to compare the various cultures to criticise colonialism or its current manifestations. You don't have to do it to point out its exploitation and continuing negative effects. You don't have to compare them to attack our continuing destruction of the environment. You don't have to compare them to look to indigenous land practices and ways of being in working out how we can do things better. Make those arguments, rather than running down the culture of the people you have to convince to make a change.
Aside from the Spanish presence on southern Vancouver Island, the papal decisions didn't touch Canada. There was no connection between the bulls and the Crown's proclamations, and the Calder decision of 1973 overturned other rulings that the proclamations (such as that of 1763) extinguished aboriginal title. The 1823 US Supreme Court decisions assumed a doctrine-of-discovery-like attitude and linked this to the papal bulls, but that doesn't apply outside the USA.
It's clear that European powers operated under the assumption that they could take over, but I'm not sure if we can blame that on Alexander VI. And the Spanish exercised dreadful licence aka crimes against humanity but that was their call as a state.
Aztec sacrificial and belligerent activities would fall under the description of genocide and other states could have invoked the responsibility to protect but it's perhaps eccentric to project current international law back five centuries and give Cortez clearance.
I wouldn't put things in quite that way, but that's still not saying what you claiming it's saying above.
To put it delicately, this is not the first thread in which NP has pretty much conveyed that Europeans have ruined the world. It's an ongoing theme.
@chrisstiles
That's his paraphrase of someone else? His own claim seems to be down-thread: "No doubt this was the motive of many other peoples too. The Euros made it into an efficient and highly profitable thing."
Fair enough, but then it seems you either chose not to engage with NP, or just deal with the immediate argument he makes?
While not wishing to exonerate Christianity from criticism in these matters, secular values were also corrupted by the greed of imperialists and slave traders. ISTM that racism is the necessary consequence of the enlightenment, for if there are rights owned equally by all human beings the continuance of colonial exploitation and slavery requires that the colonised and slaves be less than human, and is no better exemplified than by the foundational documents of the United States.
ISTM that "the foundational documents of the United States" are a bit problematical here. Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence included the assertion that one of the crimes of King George III was foisting slavery onto the colonies. It was deleted by the Continental Congress before adopting it, which may be seen as support for your position. But the cognitive dissonance exhibited in Jefferson's original statement strikes me as a more telling reflection of humanity's tenuous relationship with moral values in the face of economic interest. My unhappiness with NP's view is the notion that what I see as human frailty is somehow specifically or especially the province of western civilization.
I always found it unfortunate that his victory at the debate of Valladolid was taken by many Spanish officials as a sign to implement the losers' side. I have spent a half-hour rereading some of his writings. While he has since been put up for canonization, I suspect that he would have preferred to have been heeded, rather than honoured.
Yes. With the typo, it should be "I took". I'm learning that most cultures (all?) have aspects to admire, and aspects which are destructive to other cultures. When a culture gets powerful it appears it starts to reify its superiority as based on something better than the peoples it wants to take stuff from. This may be an evolutionary hangover from early, small society times. I'm also reminded of Jane Goodall's documentation of chimpanzee genocide.
Side note: it's not required is it, to believe the arguments you may want to discuss?
I entirely endorse this more nuanced view, and your concluding remarks about the generality of human frailty- the Atlantic slave trade, after all, was a joint venture between Europeans and West Africans, for example.
"Joint venture" is overstating the case, I think. Europeans were the ones creating demand, carrying out transportation, and banking most of the profits. Some west Africans enabled it, but this seems rather like describing the international heroin trade as a joint venture between organised crime and Afghan farmers.
The Africsn kingdoms were essentially forced into participating in the slave trade by a prisoner's dilemma situation.
Sorry, I genuinely don't follow. Are you talking about this thread here and now, or previous threads? And what precisely am I supposed to have not engaged with?
Because the last time I saw this come up I was part of the group of people that pointed out how, actually, non-Europeans were not entirely brilliant at living with nature because there are several instances of non-Europeans driving megafauna extinct.
To which I'd now add that if you want an excellent example of a civilisation failing to live within its natural means, try the Maya.
I'm talking about this thread, in which he doesn't seem to make claims of quite that sort -- though of course if you think that argument with him is ultimately futile then that is also your perogative.
While I have some sympathy with your position in that it rightfully, IMO, seeks to keep Europeans on the hook, African support for the Atlantic trade cannot be underestimated. Slavery was an endemic feature of those societies and remains a problem, particularly in Mauritania. Secondly, the trade preceded the colonisation of Africa, though not of the Americas. Thirdly, European presence on the mainland across West Africa never exceeded 50 at any one time in the eighteenth century, and was mostly confined to the coastal 'castles', such as Elmina and Cape Coast, due to malaria and yellow fever. (As the sailors sang: "Remember, Remember the Bight of Benin/ None comes out, though many go in). Fourthly, the castles were essentially human warehouses, indefensible from the land, and serviced by the townships they helped sustain. Local fishermen took out the slaves in their canoes to sea-going ships off-shore. Fifthly, in 1817, ten years after the British outlawed the trade, the Asantahene (Paramount Chief of Ashanti in modern Ghana), sent a letter to the British government requesting its revival. Sixthly, it was not uncommon for African slavers to visit the operation in the Americas. To argue that 'some' West Africans were involved seems to me misleading. Indeed, a greater proportion of West Africans were pr4obabl
Such uncomfortable facts rarely find expression, and are the cause of considerable anguish for African-Americans visiting Ghana, because they have the misimpression that their ancestors were rounded up by Europeans. It is only when they are being guided round slave castles that the truth of the historical process emerges. As a consequence, a sanitised version has been developed for tourist purposes and Americans are shown around slave castles in segregated groups by curators. Cultural dissonance can create less fraught confrontations, as when a group of Christians from the UK apologised to the Ga Mantse (paramount chief) of Accra for the slave trade. That his forebears were involved in the trade was not mentioned. Slavery is not a topic Ghanaians are anxious to discuss. The Brits are by no means the only ones who need to confront the past.
Ahem. I thought your position was that he hadn't made any argument, but had merely paraphrased someone else's?
I can hardly be blamed for not engaging with an argument that hasn't been made. You're going to have sort out what you think is happening here.
But I also don't particularly feel the need to add much to what others have said on the topic. Europeans had superior technology - for reasons which I would generally adopt from Guns, Germs and Steel. That is, I would not claim that Europeans were somehow inherently superior. But I think that claiming they were somehow inherently inferior is just the same kind of error in the opposite direction.
Any such large class of human being is perfectly capable of demonstrating both the best and worst of human behaviour, given the opportunity or circumstances. The idea that Europeans were unique in exploiting other groups of people is nothing more than ahistorical nonsense. It's simply that technology provided Europeans with more opportunity to do so and a wider reach. And the rest of the stuff about Europeans and nature was dealt with last time, as I've said.
No. I don't think he was making the argument that Simon Toad was claiming that people in this thread were making, and he's clarified his position above.
A show I like to watch is the PBS Finding Your Roots. Often, when the hosts interviews a celebrity African American they can only go back to the last generation that had been enslaved in the US since the names of the slaves were not listed in any official census. Usually, a slave was just listed as either male or female and what age, after all, they were only 3/5ths human according to our constitution--they were denied their names. There are some unofficial sources like diaries or folklore that may go back to another generation. DNA samples have been able to help some of the guests to go back to the general area in Africa where their family may have come from.
To think that entire families were ripped apart to feed the demand for slaves in Europe and America is astounding. We need to eradicate the remaining pockets of slavery throughout the world.
I am confused about how America especially will deal with it, especially when it comes to mixed race identity.
We white people need to take responsibility, but how much black/native/ethnic blood removes that responsibility and puts the person into the "victim" (I dislike the word though) category eg in need of reparations or apology and in no need of giving reparations (eg through taxation) or of making apologies not only on behalf of white people in general but their ancestors in particular?
There was an article recently that was fascinating, heart breaking, totally understandable but scarily close to invoking the "one drop of blood" rule regarding ethnicity.
Someone can be biologically more than half white but (understandably) identify fully as black. I don't know if that causes problems in not taking responsibility for the actions of ancestors (the majority of her ancestors) or if the fact that her ancestors (less than half) were the direct victims nullifies any "guilt" or responsibility she would hold, either for her (white slaver) ancestors in particular or white racist society in general?
"I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument...
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
According to... the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power... I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people... as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children."
Full article: https://nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monuments-racism.html
America is full of immigrants. Do people owe reparations based on the fraction of their ancestors that were Americans before the civil war? If you can show that one of your white ancestors worked to end slavery, does that get you partially off the hook? That all seems like nonsense to me.
Black people are currently screwed over by the system, and I don't think it makes much difference whether those people are the descendants of slaves, or are immigrants from Somalia.