Kumbaya Delusions

Whoever is in charge over at Ben and Jerry's is either of a mind with the ice cream company's eponymous founders, or figures that continuing their progressive-rote schtick would be good marketing. The recent tweet, vulgarly timed to coincide with the national celebration of America's independence, repeats the self-loathing narrative that America was 'stolen from its rightful owners.'

Self-loathing, astoundingly narcissistic, and downright stupid, if we are to be honest.

I won't go into the history of the hundreds and hundreds of tribes that warred with each other, enslaved each other, took each other's lands, women, and children before the Europeans landed on these shores - I already covered this a few months ago, here.

Columnist Piers Morgan singled out a subsequent comment: "Here’s why we need to start with Mount Rushmore," prompting me to ponder what America might look like absent the arrival, a couple hundred years after the first European settlers, of the Enlightenment values that are the bedrock of the Constitution, and by extension the nation itself.

That it took the better part of a century to actualize the ideals of the Constitution is a tragedy, but one that, if judged against the six thousand year breadth of human civilization, was actually a remarkably rapid evolution of human morals and principles. Would the Americas, if left alone, have evolved out of the slavery practiced by its indigenous populations as promptly? Would the Americas have evolved into modern nations in parallel with Europe?

Would the principles of limited government and individual sovereignty have emerged at all, had not the American Experiment been attempted? Would the French Revolution have happened? Would the dozens (hundreds?) of countries that emulated the US Constitution have found their way absent its existence?

Would the repudiation of colonialism have unfolded as it did?

Would liberty, free trade, capitalism, and the leaps-and-bounds improvements in human living conditions have emerged as they did if the Americas were never visited by the people of Western Europe?

Figuring alternate unfoldings of history is nigh-on impossible even across a couple decades, and it'd be an act of unjustified hubris on my part to create a five hundred year timeline predicated on Europe not colonizing the Americas. My goal here is to illustrate that the "stolen land" scolds are engaging in a massive argument from perfection - if they are even thinking, that is, to any depth greater than the shallow puddle of self-congratulation they wallow in.

For I believe that, absent the wisdom of such as Locke, Hobbes, Smith, Rousseau, Kant, and, yes, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Adams, Madison, Paine, Hamilton, and the rest, the principles upon which you and I and Ben and Jerry thrive may not have become the foundational doctrine that build this and so many other free, Western nations. I certainly don't believe they'd have emerged spontaneously in the Americas.

Does this justify colonialism? Colonialism was an artifact of history, just as empire was, just as feudalism was, just as the divine right of kings was, and just as slavery was. Through the lens of our modern morals and ethics, they all fail, but we overstep if we presume that those modern morals can be applied retroactively. Human societies evolve, of that there is no doubt, and anyone who judges one side of a past conflict against a utopian ideal rather than within the context of its time is wallowing in arrogant conceit, and nothing more.

Humans across most of history accumulated their wealth by conquest and plunder. Human living conditions improved quite slowly as a result, and sometimes even regressed (after Rome fell into decay, as one example). It's only when we realized that trading with each other, that mutually beneficial interactions, would produce better outcomes than might-makes-right taking, that our living standards started rapidly improving. The poorest in the first world today enjoy luxuries that even the richest people of a century ago could not even dream.

Would as rapid an acceleration of living standards have occurred absent the formation of the United States of America? Difficult to know, but anyone who pushes the "stolen land" narrative must be asked the question, rather than be allowed to peddle nirvana fallacies.