Nostalgia by Anthony Esolen

Author:Anthony Esolen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gateway Editions

Racism, Baby Style

The Golden Age is an allegory of Eden, and Eden recounts the fall of man, to which we are all subject. Jesus says that unless we become as little children, we shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. But we would have this transformation on the cheap. These days, one of the most vicious ways of pretending you can have it is to suppose that there were ever races that were pure and gentle until they were overwhelmed by the rapacity of people coming from Europe.

I am not saying that all cultures are the same. That is patent nonsense. I am not saying that the history of man has not been a saga of triumph and shame, of rare heroism and the more common venality, avarice, vindictiveness, and folly. I have been at pains to illustrate that saga and to insist that it continues in the same vein because human nature has not changed. Man is born a sinner and dies a sinner unless the grace of God transforms him into a saint, the very saint which the progressive denies or traduces or flees. I am not saying that Europeans treated the natives of the Western Hemisphere with any greater gentleness and justice than the natives would have treated them, had they been in their place. I am not denying that the study of other cultures is a good thing. I have spent my entire adult life studying other cultures.

I am denying the Enlightenment myths of the unspoiled savage and of secular moral advancement. We do not fall from Arcadia into Athens and Rome and London and Washington. We do not, in our essential humanity, rise from Arcadia into Washington. We make slow cultural progress in certain respects, and in the past century we have made quick progress in technology, but man is the same. If he advances in one virtue he lapses in another. There is one stunning exception to this historical fact—but I will reserve that to a later chapter.

Meanwhile, I cite here an author, friendly to the Indian tribes of North America, who cast a disapproving eye on the sorry treatment of the red man by the white. The Indian, wrote Edward Eggleston, cherished his freedom, yet lived under the yoke of “traditional custom and tyrannical public sentiment.” Only rarely could the individual of strong will break loose from it. Freed by his hunting-and-gathering way of life, from tilling the soil and tending to large domesticated animals, the Indian enjoyed considerable free time. How did he dispose of it? Some excitement, wrote Eggleston, was necessary:

The intervals between hunting and war-parties were filled up by an inconceivable number of ungraceful dances of various kinds, all regulated by a rather complicated etiquette, many mixed with superstition, and some ending in debauch. There were feasts of many sorts, at which those not invited might crowd the door-ways as spectators, or strip off the bark sides of the cabins to see the ceremonies; and there were athletic games, and

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