Dale Wyngarden: We need to learn from the past to survive the future
The conscience of our country is mired in a new civil war. At its core, the battle lines are drawn over acknowledging history’s inhumanity and the lingering consequences for our today, or suppressing it as an irrelevant impediment to our pursuit of greatness. Those in the former camp are characterized as “woke.” I’d assume the opposing group are “asleep.”
Both sides are full of people eager to wave the banner of Christianity. It is also ironic that some of western civilization’s most shameful history came at the hands of its most Christian nations. At the dawn of Christianity, Israel lived under the yoke of the Roman Empire. In 70 AD, Jerusalem tempted fate and rebelled. Rome crushed the rebellion and destroyed the Temple.
A second revolt in 132 AD was also crushed. Jews were banished from Jerusalem, and the city was renamed Aelia Capitolina. This wasn’t antisemitism. Rome was exceedingly tolerant of local religions within its empire. What it didn’t tolerate was revolt, and quashing revolt, ruthlessly, is the business of empires.
But the story changed two centuries later when the still-powerful Roman Empire embraced the emerging Christian movement as the religion of empire. Christianity showed no such tolerance, and 17 centuries of persecution, ghettoization and occasional genocide followed. God forbid humanity ever forgets its darkest era when the nation that birthed the Reformation also produced the Holocaust, when the extermination of 6 million human beings was literally turned into a national industry.
As Portuguese explorers began smelling riches along the African coast, blessings to plunder came easily from monarchs and Christendom alike. Beginning in 1452, a series of Papal edicts gave license to what became the Doctrine of Discovery. Explorers and Conquistadors, when discovering lands of Saracens or heathens, were free to loot, plunder, appropriate lands and enslave the people.
The doctrine ultimately gave rise to European colonization of Africa, the slave trade, and conquest of the Americas with near or sometimes total genocide of indigenous people. In 1823, our own Supreme Court upheld the absolute right of Europeans to claim new world lands.
Native Americans had rights of occupancy, which were revocable, but not ownership. Many of our ancestors bought cheap land upon arrival in the new world, not from the natives who had occupied it for thousands of years, but from the U.S. government.
For five centuries, Africa and the Americas pumped wealth into Europe. In exchange, they got Christianity, cultural annihilation, smallpox and syphilis.
In the spring of this year, after 571 years of shaping European attitudes toward third-world people, the Vatican issued a repudiation of its Doctrines of Discovery. If Vatican shoulders are broad enough for recognition and contrition of past mistakes, ours should be too.
A civil war that killed more Americans than all the wars from the Revolutionary through Korean combined makes it more difficult to minimize the impact of slavery. Still, there are those who’d argue once the shackles fell from four million people, so did the consequences of enslavement.
But with scant education, no land ownership, few trade skills, and no business background, Emancipation frequently meant trading slavery for sharecropping. Even the finest freed blacksmith, without $1 to buy a hammer or $2 to buy an anvil, went back to working for someone else. Very possibly a plantation owner. I grew up in a town where isolating and suppressing blacks a century after slavery ended still reverberated, and made us the worse for it.
Our technologies grow by leaps. Progress in civility seems mired. I sometimes worry the human race will consume itself to extinction, foul our fragile planet beyond livability, destroy each other over control of diminishing resources, or overwhelm capacities for sustainability. I’m not suggesting that children be punished for the sins of the fathers. But I am convinced that unless we understand when and why humanity has jumped the rails of civility in the past, there isn’t much hope of fully emerging from myriad tribalisms to a sustainable human race. Let’s hope in the battle for human hearts and minds the woke side wins.
— Community Columnist Dale Wyngarden is a resident of the city of Holland. He can be reached at wyngarden@ameritech.net.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Dale Wyngarden: We need to learn from the past to survive the future
