The Achievement of Columbus
12 October 2020
Monday
Christopher Columbus (31 October 1451 – 20 May 1506)
There is a list on Wikipedia of seventy European and American voyages of scientific exploration from the French Geodesic Mission of 1735-1739 to the Valdivia mission of 1898-1899. This list does not include the voyages of exploration during the Age of Discovery, but these voyages of exploration, while not organized for strictly scientific purposes, did constitute, among other things, a form of scientific research. One could say that exploration is a form of experimentation, or one could say that experimentation is a form of exploration; in a sense, the two activities are mutually convertible.
Late medieval and early modern voyages of discovery were undertaken with mixed motives. Among these motives were the motives to explore and to discover and to understand, but there were also motives to win new lands for Christendom and to convert any peoples discovered to Christianity, to find riches (mainly gold and spices), to obtain titles of nobility, and to seize political power. Columbus sought all of these things, but it is notable that, while he did open up the New World to Christian conversion, economic exploitation, and the unending quest for power, he achieved virtually none of these things for himself or for his heirs, despite his intentions and his efforts. Columbus’ lasting contribution was to navigation and discovery and cartography, while others exploited the discoveries of Columbus to receive riches, glory, and titles.
Although I can attempt to assimilate the voyages of Columbus to the scientific revolution, there is no question that Columbus conceptualized his own life and his voyages in providential terms, and his motives were only incidentally scientific if scientific at all. Certainly Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and others also had mixed motives, and indeed a mixed mindset arising from the collision of a medieval conceptual framework with early modern discoveries that added to this conceptual framework while challenging it, and eventually destroying it. Of these early modern pioneers, Columbus had the greatest sense of mission — the idea that he was a man of a great destiny — and perhaps it was this sense of mission that prompted him to extract such spectacular concessions from the Spanish crown: the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Governor General of islands discovered and these titles to be inherited in perpetuity by his heirs. If Columbus’ plan had unfolded according to his design, the entirety of the Americas today would still be ruled by the descendants of Columbus.
The Age of Discovery was part of the Scientific Revolution, the leading edge of the scientific revolution, as it were, thus part of the origins story of a still-nascent scientific civilization. Today we still fall far short of being a properly scientific civilization, and how much further the European civilization of the time of Columbus fell short of this is obvious when we read Columbus’ own account of his explorations and discoveries, in which he insists that he found the route to India and China, and he insists equally on the large amount of gold that he found, when he had, in fact, discovered very little gold. Despite this, Columbus is, or deserves to be, one of the culture heroes of a scientific-civilization-yet-to-be no matter how completely he failed to understand what he accomplished.
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To celebrate Columbus Day I visited one of my favorite beaches on the Oregon coast, Cape Meares. While yesterday, Sunday, was stormy all day, with strong winds and heavy rain, today was beautiful — warm with no wind, a blue sky, and even the ocean was not as cold as I expected when I walked in the surf. When I arrived there were only three people on the beach besides myself; when I left, there were about ten people on the beach.
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Happy Columbus Day!
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The First Planetary Civilization
31 March 2018
Saturday
The famous Virgin of the Navigators by Alejo Fernández, on display in Sevilla, like the Tordesillas meridian is one of the great ideological expressions of the Age of Discovery.
Some time ago I wrote Modernism without Industrialism: Europe 1500-1800, in which I identified the period from approximately 1500 to 1800 in western civilization as a distinctive kind of civilization, which I have in subsequent posts simply called “modernism without industrialism.” For present purposes it doesn’t matter whether this is a distinctive kind of civilization, co-equal with other distinctive kinds of civilization, or whether it is a developmental stage in a larger civilization under which it is subsumed. This is an interesting question in the theory of civilization, but it will not bear upon what I have to say here. Whether we take the period 1500-1800 as a stage in the larger development of western civilization, or as a civilization in its own right, it is a period that can be described in terms of properties that do not apply to other periods.
The first two of what I have elsewhere called the “three revolutions” — the scientific revolution, the political revolutions, and the industrial revolution — transformed this period in novel ways, and the last of these three revolutions terminates the period decisively as a new way of life results from industrialization pre-empting the interesting social experiment of modernism without industrialism. Without the preemption of industrialization, this experiment might have continued, and the world today would be a different place than the world we known — it would be a counterfactual planetary high-level equilibrium trap.
There is another great revolution that occurred in this period, and that is the Age of Discovery, when explorers and merchants and conquerors set out from Europe and circled the planet for the first time since our Paleolithic ancestors settled the planet entire, without knowing what they had done. That the explorers and merchants and conquerors of the Age of Discovery knew what they were doing is evidenced by the maps they made and what they wrote about their experiences. They discovered that humanity is one species on one planet, and they knew that this is what they had discovered, though assimilating that knowledge was another matter; we still struggle with this knowledge today.
The Age of Discovery bounds the beginning of this period as the industrial revolution bounds the ending of this period, and, to a large extent, defines the period, since exploration and discovery is what initiates the human recognition of itself as a whole and the planet as a whole. Europe had been building out a shipping capacity in excess of its internal needs since the late Middle Ages, and it was the exaptation of this shipping infrastructure with its attendant technologies and expertise that made the Age of Discovery possible. Once the proof of concept was provided by Columbus, Magellan, and the other early explorers, initiating the Columbian Exchange, the planet opened to global commerce with astonishing rapidity.
What this global transportation infrastructure meant was that this distinctive period of civilization might be called the First Planetary Civilization, since throughout this period trade and communications take place on a global scale, and this in turn makes global empires possible for the first time. There were, of course, many survivals from the medieval period that characterize this first planetary civilization, but there were also perhaps as many novel features of this civilization as well. This was a civilization in possession of science, though science at a small scale, and not yet exploited for human purposes to the extent that science today is exploited for human purposes. This was a civilization in which merchants and industries had a distinctive place, and the political system was no longer dominated by rural manorial estates and their local feudal lords. Planetary-scale concerns now shaped the policies of increasingly centralized regimes, that would only become more centralized as the period drew to a close in the time of the Sun King. And while political regimes were marked by increasing centralization and the rationalization of institutions, it was also a time of great lawlessness, as the expansion of European civilization into the western hemisphere was also an age of piracy.
Since the industrial revolution we have also had a planetary civilization, but the planetary civilization that began to take form in the wake of the industrial revolution is distinct from the first planetary civilization that characterized the period from 1500 to 1800. The planetary civilization we have been building since the industrial revolution might be called the second planetary civilization, and it has been marked by the spread of popular sovereignty and Enlightenment ideals (and, I would argue, the gradual adoption of the Enlightenment project as the central project of planetary civilization), the mechanization and then the electrification of the global transportation and communications network (further accelerating the rapidity of commerce), the planetary propagation of cultural and social influences, and the rise of commerce and industry to a position rivaling that of nation-states. Merchants no longer merely have a place in civilization, but they often dictate to others the place that they will hold in the social order.
Are these successive first and second planetary civilizations an accident of terrestrial history, that could be and probably are different wherever other civilizations are to be found in the universe (if they are to be found)? Or are these first and second planetary civilizations sufficiently distinctive as kinds of civilization that they ought to be present in any taxonomy of civilizations because they are likely to be exemplified wherever there are worlds with civilizations? One of the ways in which to approach the problem mentioned above, that of whether the First Planetary Civilization of 1500-1800 is a kind of civilization in its own right, or whether it is a developmental stage in a larger formation of civilization, would be to identify as a distinctive kind of civilization any formation of civilization that can be formalized to the point of potential applicability to any civilization anywhere, whether on Earth or elsewhere. In this way, a scientific theory of civilization that is sufficiently comprehensive to address any and all civilizations can shed light on the particular problems of human civilization, even if that was not the motivation for formulating a science of civilization.
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Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon 