Thread by @mccormick_ted

In which the 18th-century Enlightenment is used to explain the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Americas

Don’t worry, both have been turned into cartoons first, so no actual history has been harmed

https://twitter.com/conceptualjames/status/1176872426111680512

The gap between James’s actual knowledge and his intellectual arrogance should be a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Into this vast chasm falls everything from introductory-level facts and context to the very flow of time itself, never to be heard from again

Now oddly enough there are connections between Spanish expansion and science. Navigational technology (much of it derived from Muslim and Jewish sources) was essential to crossing the Atlantic. Needless to say this has no link whatever either to Enlightenment or to liberalism.

But the apparent ease with which the Spanish conquest happened had relatively little to do with their “liberal” mastery of science or with any quickly corrected presumption of their divinity. It had everything to do with violence and, especially, disease.

Moreover, work that stresses the significance of Spanish science in the early modern period (long neglected in triumphalist accounts of the Scientific Revolution, as James seems not to be aware) also stresses that it resulted from (rather than silly driving) colonial experience.

And it resulted in great part from engagement with/use of indigenous knowledge. (See work by Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Londa Schiebinger, Jorge Cañizare-Esguerra, et al.) The idea of liberal(!) conquistadores bring Science to benighted natives is not only racist but plainly false.

No one who is actually interested in the history of science, or of empire, or of Spain — no one who thought he was talking to people genuinely interested in these things — would say something so patently silly.

Nor would anyone who knew or cared much about the Enlightenment, what it was, or when it happened. The only reason to spout such ignorance is to affirm sheer faith in a kind of Western superiority that you lack the basic factual knowledge even to plausibly narrate. It’s pathetic.

Maybe before crowing about one’s mastery of conversational technique, one should work on having something worth saying out loud. Something that doesn’t so aggressively lower the intellectual quality of discussions about history, science, empire, and their links.

This ain’t it.

*bringing

I’m bringing the typos

*Cañizares-Esguerra

Like I said, I’ve got the typos covered

“Romanticizing” supposedly primitive (closer to nature) cultures was one of the most characteristic and enduring products of the Enlightenment. (Consider reading Diderot sometime.) It’s not a postmodern invention.

How “we” handled the power of technology post-Enlightenment was through rampant industrialization and global, mechanized warfare, as well as in part through the technologically assisted brutalization of subject populations. This idea that liberalism tamed science is fantasy.

You know who else would have you believe the Spanish could have had different ethics? The Spaniard Las Casas, who wrote on the subject and publicly debated Sepulveda on it in 1550. There *were* ethical debates, printed and viva vice, at the time. This is basic textbook knowledge.

The idea that everyone then must have thought one way (because they didn’t have liberalism yet!) should be too inane to require refutation. But it is easily refuted by anyone with a basic grounding in major events, in any case.

Behold, Enlightenment liberal Dominican monk Bartholomé de Las Casas, and his famous book, Justice as Fairness

*1551

*viva voce

Pinning this one on autocorrect

James’s whole thread, and others like it, is a tissue of cheaply made and easily punctured fantasies — about empire, science, Enlightenment, postmodernism (natch), and how these all relate. It’s Western superiority fanfic, nothing more. History is far more interesting.

But these easily exposed fictions aren’t mistakes; they’re lies. They come from someone who purports to judge academic scholarship; who claims to be concerned with truth even as he fakes history; who pretends to know how to “disagree better” from a position of wilful ignorance.

If this clown is your idea of intellectual rigour, I hope for your sake that you’re in on the joke.

*simply

It’s typos upon typos