My Take | Rediscovering an ancient Chinese openness and tolerance

While reading Xiang Shuchen’s eye-opening book, Chinese Cosmopolitanism, I unexpectedly found an answer to a question that had long intrigued me. Given the unprecedented genocidal violence and cruelty inflicted on the Amerindians from the 15th century onwards, did those Europeans who helped justify and administer the systems of oppression ever have second thoughts or an occasional guilty conscience? After all, most of them – the merchants, administrators, and court mandarins – were not psychopathic conquistadors who thought they were doing God’s work.

It turned out that some actually did, especially at the beginning and even during the height of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Indeed, they questioned how they could justify the ruthless conquest of unoffending peoples who lived far away and were minding their own business.

Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the Amerindians, powerful and ready philosophical and theological justifications – Xiang calls the combination Western “metaphysics” dating back over many centuries to the ancient Greeks – had already laid the foundations for an ideology of conquest. Once the modern technologies of the sail and war became available, imperialism was inevitable.

This metaphysics established not only the difference between animals and humans in the hierarchy of beings, but civilised people and barbarians, and additionally, the fully human and the merely subhuman.

For centuries thereafter, those outside Christendom were uncivilised or semi-civilised, and therefore, not fully human. Subjugating – or harshly “educating” – them was therefore little different from domesticating animals.

In what I call an apt phenomenological description of how Western imperialist-racists saw other people, the original inhabitants were seen as part of the indigenous flora and fauna of nature, rather than fully developed people with their own social and cultural norms and institutions, that is, people with a history.