America

From 1492 until the American Revolution, and in some sense continuing into the twenty-first century, America evoked the image of Indians. Archaeologists believe that the American continent was first inhabited by human beings who walked from Siberia to Alaska over the Bering Strait on a frozen land bridge about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. However, what the Indians represent in the global imagination is a fairly static image informed by media portrayals that starkly depict the Indians either as barbaric savages or as noble stewards of the land living in harmony with nature. These images have a long genealogy.

First attempts to explain America.

Although the Americas were undoubtedly visited by the Vikings around the year 1000, the "discovery" of America is attributed to Christopher Columbus, whose voyage to America in 1492 captured the European imagination. Ironically, to Columbus's dying day, he insisted that what he had found was part of Asia. Thus, perceptions of America have been mistaken from the very beginning. (Sixteenth-century mapmakers, recognizing Columbus's mistake, named the New World not after him, but after Amerigo Vespucci—hence the name America—whom they credited as the first to realize that the New World was its own continent.)

The Indians of America were misrepresented from the very beginning and ever since their discovery. Not only did Columbus believe America was someplace else—hence the name Indians—but his description of its inhabitants was fanciful, too. He claimed to discover cannibals, Cyclopes, Amazons, Sirens, dog-faced peoples, people with no hair, and people with tails. These bizarre claims were suggested to him by centuries of fanciful tales passed on through medieval times by supposedly reliable authorities. In short, Columbus claimed to find what he was looking for. This began a pattern of preformed opinions dictating what is supposedly found in America. He saw the land as potential wealth and its people as possible converts or slaves. For him, as for most of the early conquistadores and missionaries, the Indians had no independent status, no integrity of their own. They were just to be used.

The Spanish Renaissance philosophers who first reflected on the discovery of the Indians did little better in appreciating them. Two positions dominated the Spanish debates. The first position, arguing that the Indians did not possess the faculty of reason, went so far as to argue that the Indians were the concrete embodiment of Aristotle's natural slave. According to this view, the Indians could be incorporated into Europe's traditional Christian-Aristotelian worldview but only in its lowest place. God created the Indians as naturally inferior, the argument went, so it was just and right that the Spanish subjugate them. The second view saw the Indians as rational—as evidenced by their languages, economics, and politics—but as underdeveloped and needing Spanish tutelage. Because they were human, the Indians had to be governed by consent—not their formal, explicit consent, but rather what they would consent to after they came to understand the natural law, which of course the Spanish thought they possessed. In short, because the Spanish were so confident in their worldview, it never occurred to them that they might be incorrect or possess only a partial truth. Their cultural confidence led them to reject the Americans as barbaric.

America as the home of natural man.

In 1580 the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) began a path-breaking new way of thinking about the Indians. A skeptic and a keen observer of human diversity, Montaigne argued that "each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in." Unlike the Spanish, Montaigne doubts the standards of his own place and time. In his famous essay "Of Cannibals" (Essays) he describes Indian society as the best society that ever was, real or imagined, because they are "still very close to their original naturalness" and thus live in a "state of purity" according to "les loix naturelles." He claims their society, held together with "little artifice and human solder," is as pure and natural as a society can be. His account claims that these Indians do fight and eat their captives, but he says they do so not for economic gain but as a kind of aristocratic struggle for mastery. He describes their warfare as "wholly noble" and "as excusable and beautiful as this human disease can be." This is the origin of the image of the noble savage.

Montaigne knows, however, that his account of the Indians' tranquility and bliss is fictitious. He concedes the barbarous horror of some of their actions, writing, "I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of [their] acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own." Here Montaigne reveals his true intentions in describing the Indians: he uses them as an image with which to expose the horrors and cruelty of his own world. This usage of the Indians as a countercultural marker was to become the norm. While Montaigne's account of the Indians is in the end neither anthropologically accurate nor fully desirable, he is the first to misrepresent the Indians in a positive fashion.

After Montaigne, no major philosopher in Europe doubted the Indians' naturalness. To the contrary, the Indians came to represent natural man par excellence. From Montaigne until the end of the Enlightenment, every major philosopher agreed with John Locke's (1632–1704) famous statement that "in the beginning all the world was America" (Second Treatise of Government). America represented Europe's past. In ending one debate, however, Montaigne began a new one. While every major thinker agreed that the Indians represented mankind's natural state, debate arose over the interpretation of the natural state: was it a brutishness to overcome or an innocence to recapture?

Among these philosophers the debate evolved in a single direction. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) first argued that mankind's natural state is a horrible state of war to be avoided at all costs. Locke and Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), countered that the state of nature is pacific but undesirable. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778), and Denis Diderot (1713–1784) later praised the Indians as naturally good and happy, in contrast to European artificiality and corruption. These varied representations, it should be noted, do not correspond to any changes in Indian societies, nor do they respond to new information about the Indians. In truth, the available evidence was barely consulted at all by any of the great thinkers. Rather, these philosophers clearly used their descriptions of the Indians as support for their own ends. As dissatisfaction with Europe increased, so did praise of the Indians grow as an alternative, more desirable and more natural, way of living.

In sum, contemporaneous representations of the American Indians really reflect Europe's own debates, not the reality of America. They have left the legacies of brutishness and of the noble savage, which remain in the twenty-first century. But there is another legacy of these debates. In using the Indians of America to promote their own visions of freedom and legitimate institutions, the philosophers set in motion a train of thought and actions that would lead to revolution. The first of these revolutions took place in America and led to the founding of the United States.