Syncretism is critical to understanding the triumph of Western and Northern Europe. For example, superior military technology was the most important single reason why Europe won. But Europeans did not concoct this new technology from scratch. Cannons and gunpowder came from China. Ships with lateen sails that could sail against the wind probably reached Europe from the Arabs. Other military ideas came from the massed cavalry forces from the east that repeatedly threatened European farmers and cities. European nations refined these concepts further, added their own advances in archery, drill, and siege warfare, came up with grape-shot and eventually rifling, and cast bigger cannons and learned to mount them on ships. Eventually they became world-class military powers.
Unfortunately, U.S. history textbooks do not talk about syncretism. Nor do they credit the Muslims for preserving Greek wisdom, adding ideas from China, India, and Africa, and then teaching the resulting knowledge to Europe via Spain. Instead, they show Prince Henry of Portugal inventing navigation more or less from scratch. So students can critique their textbooks for overlooking obvious syncretism.
The same processes of borrowing and syncretism gave Europe advantages in social technology that proved at least as important as its military superiority. “Arabic” numerals came into Europe from the Arabs, who called them “Indian numerals,” because they came from India. Zero and the decimal system also developed in India, as well as China, Peru, and probably elsewhere. These advances made mathematics available to everyone. Italians then invented double-entry bookkeeping. Bureaucracy has a bad name today, but actually it, too, is a powerful social invention. If one person supervises ten subordinates, each of whom supervises ten subordinates, with just a few levels one individual can supervise millions. Add in a few rules, measures of performance, and the idea that information flows up while decisions flow down. Now rulers and merchants can manage far-flung enterprises efficiently. The printing press and the widespread literacy it facilitated also played a key role.
The foregoing paragraphs hardly suffice to explain the triumph of the West.18 Teachers need not become expert on why Europe won, however. They can set their students forth on a quest. The class might brainstorm the question. Each student might then pick one factor, research its impact, and present to the class its role. Merely getting the class to brainstorm the question for a few minutes may be all that a teacher has time to do, especially in a U.S. history course, but even that simple activity prods students to realize that here is a historical question that has historical answers.
In the Americas, three cultures—Western Europe, West Africa, and Native America—increasingly interacted after 1492. More syncretism resulted from these encounters. Textbooks present the “frontier” as a border between civilization and the wilderness. In reality, it was a wide band. Within this band, interculturation was the rule. From medical remedies to trails to canoes to crops to style of warfare to relations between the sexes, European and African Americans learned from Native Americans.
However, Native cultures changed even more. The transformation of the Plains cultures was only the tip of a cultural change iceberg. Natives traded for many elements of European technology, supplying slaves, deer-skins, and beaver pelts in exchange. In the long run, they lost important elements of their own cultures. American Indians and non-Indians began to conclude that Native cultures were inferior.
THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE
The first edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me attacked textbooks for leaving out the Columbian exchange. After 1492, crops, animals, gold and silver, diseases, and ideas began to cross the oceans regularly. One result was syncretism everywhere—in what people ate, for example. Imagine Szechuan cuisine without its “heat”—chile peppers. Or spaghetti and pizza with no tomato sauce. Or Irish meals with no potatoes. Contact with the Americas made all this possible.
The introduction of diseases new to the Western Hemisphere also helps explain why Europe was able not only to subdue Native Americans, but also largely to displace them. Although he only started the process, the Columbian exchange is the key reason why Columbus was so important—why, in fact, archaeologists and historians of the Americas consider BC (“Before Columbus,” usually written “pre-Columbian”) as a milepost for dividing time almost as useful as BC (“Before Christ”).
Astonishingly, most textbooks published before 2000 did not treat the Columbian exchange. Now most do. This improvement, long overdue, means that teachers must retool to keep up. Again, teachers can set their class loose on the point. Each student can choose a topic from this list:
cows
racially based slavery
pigs
capitalism
sheep
democracy
horses
hierarchy
chickens
corn
goats, other animals
potato
gold
cotton
silver
rice
syphilis
beans
the poxes
tomato
bubonic plague
chiles, other spices
anthrax, tuberculosis, cholera
wheat
guns
“wilderness” as a concept
the Bible, Christianity
steel tools
Then the student learns where the item probably came from, how it affected trade, and its impact on the hemisphere to which it was new.19
Some of the items that went each way were ideas. Our textbooks, improved as they are, still omit ideas from their treatments of the Columbian exchange, especially ideas that flowed from Native to European cultures. Perhaps some lingering white supremacy makes it hard for authors to credit American Indians with much influence on our civilization. Nevertheless, impact they did have. The relative lack of hierarchy in many American Indian societies shook European philosophers and helped lead to democracy, for example. Students can find short quotes from Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and other philosophers about the liberty American Indians enjoyed, how they governed themselves, and how the philosophers were affected by seeing American Indians in Europe.
The conquest of the Americas in turn helps explain why Europe beat the Muslims and Chinese and achieved world dominance. Again, the Columbus chapter in Lies My Teacher Told Me explains these matters. Gold and silver from the Americas helped European nations to outdo Islamic countries economically. Crops from the Americas prompted a population explosion, helping northern European nations to outdo the southern nations that had been dominant. More important yet were the changes in how Europeans thought about the world that stemmed from their encounters with Americans.
Syncretism is a crucial concept for Native Americans. Workshops with American Indian groups have convinced me that most Natives don’t know the word or the idea (which they might understand without knowing the term itself). Therefore, many Native Americans mistakenly conclude that their main alternatives today are acculturation to the dominant (non-Indian) culture or reversion to Native American culture as it was before cultural imperialism damaged it. They know the latter is impossible: We cannot turn the clock back to 1890, let alone 1491. Therefore, many American Indians have a sense of futility, which contributes to problems of alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide among the young.
Young Native Americans need not choose “Indian” culture or “non-Indian” culture. Instead, they can—and should—choose syncretism. All cultures—Native American cultures, too—move forward (or die). Abenaki students in Vermont, for example, may not speak Abenaki, but other aspects of Abenaki culture are still available to them, including values and aesthetic ideas. For that matter, several American Indian tribes in the U.S. and Canada are now making heroic efforts to preserve and revive their languages. Ireland, Israel, and other places show that even “dead” languages can be revived.20 Abenakis can select which ideas from “non-Indian” culture to adopt and adapt, and which elements from Abenaki culture to retain and adapt. They can
then develop new ideas and forms. Native Americans need to realize that the dominant culture is syncretic as well, not completely non-Indian. From place names to foodstuffs to basic values, American culture differs from European cultures partly owing to its incorporation of ideas from American Indian cultures.21
Native Americans cannot easily convince themselves that they still have important roles to play in American culture if non-Natives pooh-pooh the idea. When students understand the important influences that Native American cultures have had in the past, they can more readily believe that Natives still have important contributions to make to the larger society. For that reason, and because it’s accurate history as well, all students need to understand the role of syncretism in U.S. history. Students can end their study of Native American history by finding ways that Native Americans are making syncretic contributions to our society today. Each student can identify and learn about one living distinguished Native person—in the arts, education, sciences, whatever. Most non-Natives have never heard music by Indigenous or Robert Tree Cody, seen sculptures by Alan Houser or Nalenik Temela, or watched a movie by Sherman Alexie. When they do, some become fans.
October and November are the two worst months to be Native American in our schools, thanks to Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. Teachers can transform these holidays into opportunities to learn new perspectives about Native American history. On Columbus Day 2003, a 7th grader in Connecticut, having read the Columbus chapter in Lies My Teacher Told Me, was moved to gather several of his friends and get them to try to break into their middle school and hold class! Teachers who are unwilling to incite such lawlessness can plant a seed by pondering, on the day before Columbus Day weekend, “Why hasn’t the United States renamed Columbus Day ‘Native American Day,’ as South Dakota has done?” This question can lead students to a passionate debate, prompting them to study how Columbus Day got to be a holiday, the pros and cons of Columbus’s voyages, and the various ways Native Americans have affected American society. The day after Columbus Day would then be a fine occasion to host a Native American as guest speaker.
IDEOLOGICAL RESULTS OF EUROPE’S VICTORY
Europe’s unprecedented power—and the global dominance to which it led—had to be rationalized, or else cognitive dissonance would have set in. Columbus provides the first example. Initially he is full of praise for the Arawaks—“well built” and “of quick intelligence.”
They have very good customs, and the king maintains a very marvelous state, of a style so orderly that it is a pleasure to see it, and they have good memories and they wish to see everything and ask what it is and for what it is used.
Later, when Columbus was justifying his enslavement of them, the Indians were “cruel” and “stupid,” “a people warlike and numerous, whose customs and religion are very different from ours.”
Europeans did the same thing in their assessment of African cultures. At one point, they had known that Timbuktu was a center of learning, with a university and a library. Later, as European nations proceeded to take over all of Africa except Ethiopia, Europeans (and Americans) perceived Africa as backward. Timbuktu lay forgotten. Ethnocentrism had set in.
Eurocentrism is a special case of ethnocentrism. Indeed, imagining Europe as a continent itself exemplifies Eurocentrism. A continent is a “large land mass, mostly surrounded by water.” By any consistent definition, Asia is the continent, of which Europe is only a peninsula, or perhaps a series of peninsulas (Scandinavia, Iberia, Italy, the Balkans). Europe has no justifiable eastern boundary; the Urals are a modest mountain range that does not come within 2,000 miles of the southern edge of Asia. Yet Europe not only is “a continent,” to many Americans, it is “the continent,” as in “continental cuisine.”
Europe became the point of reference for our terms for much of the rest of the world. Americans usually write “Near East” for Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and so on, and “Far East” for China and Japan. This makes sense to an Italian, for Baghdad lies fewer than 2,000 miles from Rome, while Beijing is more than 5,000 miles away. From San Francisco, however, Baghdad is 7,500 miles, and that’s only by flying over the North Pole; no commercial airplane flies this route. Reaching Baghdad by normal means requires a journey of almost 9,000 miles. Beijing, on the other hand, is less than 6,000 miles. Why should China and Japan be known by how far they are from Europe? Why not call them “East Asia”? Iraq, Israel, and their vicinity might be called “Southwest Asia.” Europe itself might better be known as “Far West Asia.”
“New World” is another Eurocentric term, of course—new to Europe, not to American Indians. Other Eurocentric terms include “discover,” “savages,” and “settlers.”
CULTURAL DIFFUSION AND SYNCRETISM CONTINUE
It is vital for today’s students to learn the terms “ethnocentrism” and “Eurocentrism” and reduce their own levels of these maladies. Air travel, radio and television, and now the web have multiplied the rate of borrowing that cultures do from one another. Any society that fails to learn from its planetary neighbors is destined to become a cultural backwater. The United States needs to reduce ethnocentrism so our society can continue to adopt and adapt ideas from other cultures. Yet in the introduction to this chapter, I pointed out that the U.S. is more ethnocentric than other nations.
A good way to combat ethnocentrism is to learn a lot about one other society. In a world history course or in middle-school social studies, teachers can invite each student to choose a favorite country they might fantasize about visiting. Where would they go? Why? What is most interesting about the country? Then, when the next issue arises—health care, women’s rights, pollution—students can find out how their country handles it. What does their country think about our policies in the Middle East? (Oops! I should have written “Southwest Asia!”) About our young people?
Another interesting exercise is to use the term “American exceptionalism,” discussed in the introduction, in its unbiased form. Each student can find two ways that the U.S. is exceptional—one positive, one negative. Positive and negative as categories are a bit too simple, but putting the assignment that way helps students grasp that “exceptional” need not always be good. These examples might be characterized as “negative,” though that might also be too simple:
The U.S. wound up with the smallest proportion of Native people in the Americas (except possibly Uruguay).
The U.S. is the only nation to have fought a Civil War over slavery.22
The U.S. remains the only nation ever to have used nuclear weapons on another nation.
The U.S. spends about as much for military expenses as all other nations combined.23
As that last item implies, some exceptional characteristics can be statistical. Another way to combat ethnocentrism is to ask students to locate current figures on such measures of social progress as life expectancy, infant mortality, “most livable countries,”24 and proportion of the national legislature that is female. In many cases, the United States is no longer first and is falling in the ratings.
For example, the U.S. ranks 139th out of 172 nations in the proportion of its voting-age population who actually vote—not dead last, but probably lowest among industrialized nations.25 How do other nations do so much better? Maybe tactics as simple as moving election dates to weekends or opening polling places near work places would help. If we look at other countries with eyes that are not clouded by ethnocentrism, we can emulate their effective practices.26
Students will also find that Americans use more energy per capita than residents of any other nation. We also consume more calories per capita. As a result of this combination, we lead the world in obesity.27 Maybe we have things to learn about diet and exercise from Taiwanese, Dutch, Kenyans, or others. The U.S. also has the highest murder rate of any Western industrialized nation. Meanwhile, Americans incarcerate more of our citizens, proportionately, than any other country except North Korea.28 Maybe we can learn from other nations that either have far lower rates of crimin
al behavior or incarcerate wrongdoers for much shorter periods.
The U.S. spends more money per capita on health care than any other country. More than 15% of our gross domestic product goes to health care. Yet according to David Wallechinsky, journalist and coauthor of The Book of Lists,
43 countries have more doctors per capita, including France, Switzerland, Mongolia, and Lebanon. 49 have more hospital beds per capita than the U.S.—the United Kingdom, Italy, and Ireland, for example. 33 nations, including Cuba, have a lower infant death rate than the U.S., and 28 have a lower maternal death rate. We rank 30th in life expectancy for women and 28th for men.29
Health care surely offers an area where Americans might glean ideas from other societies.
When students understand the historical reasons why nations won, they become less likely to fall for half-baked psychological reasons. At the other end of the academic year, students can usefully be asked, “Based on your knowledge of the U.S. and other nations over time, how long will Western dominance endure?” This question reminds them that Egypt, the Mayans, and Rome, the Indus River Valley civilization—all the earlier civilizations that dominated the globe—no longer do so. Their declines, like their ascensions, were historically caused. Students who have thought about such matters become more thoughtful citizens—not only of their own country but of the world.
FOCUSED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (NYC: Norton, 1997), has been annotated in the text above. If Diamond “hooks” you, read the chapter on him in James Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (NYC: Guilford, 2000), for a critique.
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 20