Hunt: The fact of the matter is that we can't tell facts from interpretation these days
If the Native Americans ever had a rally with people chanting “White People Will Not Replace Us,” we are unaware of it, and they would have been wrong. White people did replace most of them, about 90% by scholars’ best estimates.
Exact numbers are impossible to come by, but we know that smallpox, measles, influenza, yellow fever, mumps, malaria, pertussis, typhus, bubonic plague, along with war, and oppression killed off about 90% of the people who were here when Columbus arrived.
Those are the facts as we can piece them together. But how do we interpret these facts? Here are some possibilities. I am endorsing none of them. This list is not exhaustive. I am just illustrating how diverse these interpretations can be.
1. Europeans were both culturally and possibly genetically superior to the indigenous peoples they found when they came to the Americas. This is just Darwinism at work. The fittest people with the most advanced civilization survived. The weak died.
2. The triumph of the Europeans was the Will of God, Manifest Destiny. God meant for the people who conquered the New World to do so.
3. The indigenous peoples who inhabited the Americas gave no diseases to the Europeans. It was the Eurpoeans who infected the Natives. The Europeans were a filthy and diseased people. Hygiene was poor. Their arrival spread pestilence. To be exposed to Eurpoeans was lethal. Can you imagine any nation today knowingly allowing people this diseased to be let loose among a much healthier population? The result was catastrophic for indigenous peoples. When the Europeans realized what was happening, instead of being horrified at unleashing disease among people without immunities, they celebrated the decline of the Native peoples and took their land.
4. Europeans were like invasive species in plants or animals. When they were transplanted to soil to which they were not native, they took over. Europeans were the gypsy moths and stink bugs of the Americas. They were introduced from another continent and ended up where they did not belong. They were a destructive, invasive species. As the gypsy moths have done untold damage to forests, so the Europeans did untold damage to the native people and their cultures.
You can make up your own interpretations of the history of European and indigenous encounters, but we need to be able to separate facts from interpretations.
At this point in American history, we are not doing that very well. We have election deniers and Holocaust deniers and climate change deniers and all manner of conspiracy theories. Teachers have reported to me that many students cannot tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction, a documentary from a feature movie. There is a problem if you think Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker are real people but the moon landing was faked, if you think the QAnon conspiracy is real but climate change is a hoax. I am told Artificial Intelligence may make the problem worse.
When people make assertions, we must insist that they have evidence. Press them to produce it. Don’t let them get by with simply asking us to trust them.
The other step we need to take is to be able to separate interpretation from fact. I am afraid that religion has done us a disservice when it comes to separating faith from fact, and this has led to sloppiness in separating fact from interpretation in other areas of life.
I am a Christian. It is an historical fact that there was a man in first century Palestine named Jesus who was executed by the Roman state. It is faith, interpretation, that he miraculously rose from the dead. It is faith that he was the son of God. That cannot be proved.
Times of chaos, stress and fear give rise to a blurring of the lines between fact and conjecture, between facts and interpretations of those facts. We have to push back against those forces of lies and confusion. Make people accountable for what they are saying and writing. Call them out. It is painful and even dangerous, but it needs to be done.
This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: Hunt: The fact is that we can't tell facts from interpretation
