the happy conservative

It’s very important to keep cultural perspective in ….. perspective.

Last week, my learned history entered a lengthy digression on Lewis and Clark’s interactions with the Indians. Native Americans. American Indians. American Indian Natives. Redskins. Bloodthirsty Animals. Savages. Great Bison Protectors. Stewards of the Land.

It depends, you see.

You can’t simply teach the Corps of Discovery from the perspective of the explorers’ journals. That view is tinted by the times and the culture. You have to get the American Savage Indian Redskins’ perspective as well. It’s not enough to say that the Americans got the land because they had the guns. It was because they had a specific cultural perspective about the Great Red-faced Ones. The Americans thought that the American way of rampant capitalism, abridged civil rights, environmental recklessness, and unconstrained and exponential growth in welfare and income was strictly “better”. From their perspective, anyway.

But you can’t teach it that way. You have to have culturally neutral perspective. The Native Indian peoples’ view of life was in no way better or worse than the Americans.

You certainly can’t make the argument that the American way was better because it provided better and cheaper goods and services for more people.

Why not? Because that ignores the cost of hundreds of millions of people on the environment. It’s very simple. As there are more people, there are fewer resources, and this necessarily makes everyone worse off. My professor used the example of the bison, which I thought was fitting. Under the Indians, we had buffalo and a few million people in the West. Now we have Microsoft, Vail, and Starbucks. How can you even begin to compare?

I was taking down every word, of course, but I still managed to tally the eight times my professor used the words “quote - unquote progress” in two hours.

Brian and I have decided that, given our status as college juniors, it would be culturally acceptable to wash down this week’s lecture with six of St. Louis’s finest. Or twelve, as we’re talking about slavery this week.