In primary school, I won a coloring contest for the best picture of the “discoverer” of America, Christopher Columbus. My prize was a large teddy bear (coincidentally, a cultural icon named for another enemy of native peoples in the American history pantheon—Theodore Roosevelt). When I was older, I learned that the Spanish arrival in the “new world,” was a genocide in the name of God, gold, and glory.
This was not the story that we learned in our history books in primary school or in popular culture. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that we didn’t get the whole story. We got the God, gold, and glory part. Columbus and other European explorers were brave men, heroes of our one-nation-under-God origin story. The deaths of millions of native peoples were not part of that story.
Perhaps this is because the native peoples, in the eyes of the Spanish colonizers and in the subsequent mythologization of the discovery of America, were not just savages. They were less than fully human. Killing them and stealing their land was not a crime because they were not really people. This may sound unbelievable to our contemporary ears—more like an excuse than an actual belief—but it was, in fact, a serious argument, albeit one based on racist and ethnocentric European understandings of what it meant to be human.
Some Europeans at the time did question it, notably the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas. But the Spanish were so confounded by the question that in 1550, experts, including Las Casas, spent months debating the humanity of the indigenous peoples of the Americas before the crown and its judges.
Today, the tide has begun to turn on the longstanding narrative of the “discovery” of America. Now we have Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day in the United States. We like to think that we are beyond that kind of thinking now.
Yet the kinds of beliefs that justified the conquistadors’ murder and abuse of countless native peoples—beliefs that some people are less human than others—are still alive and kicking. If the wars of subsequent centuries up to the present day have taught us anything, it is that dehumanization of the enemy remains an undying trope, a rhetorical zombie that just keeps rising from the grave and tearing us limb from limb. At this very moment, that zombie is ravaging lives in Palestine, where, as the New York Times reports, the “ability [of Palestinian and Israeli foes] to see each other as human has been lost.”[1]
Through the lens of warfare and genocide, human nature is a veritable horror story. What we should take away from that story is the question that we have to ask ourselves. If we refuse to believe that some humans are less human than others, and, by extension, that some human behaviors are outside human nature, where does this leave us?
In thinking about these issues, I keep returning to Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil. Arendt explores how the atrocities committed by Adolf Eichmann can be understood as acts of complacency rather than something outside “normal” human behavior. The point is not that people are simply automatons doing what society tells them (Nazi resisters are evidence to the contrary), but that the greatest atrocities are made possible by behaviors, desires, and psychological mechanisms that are very ordinary. What Arendt argued about Nazis might also be argued about the conquistadors.
Can we imagine both the victims and the perpetrators of genocides as fully human, not outside human nature but a part of it? We might not like what we see in the mirror when we do this, but the alternative is a story about ourselves that is as much a fantasy as the “discovery” of America.
[1] Cohen, Roger. “Between Israelis and Palestinians, a Lethal Psychological Chasm Grows.” The New York Times. November 20, 2023.