Conquest and Erasure

In the summer of 1562, in a town on the Yucatan peninsula, a Franciscan friar named Diego de Landa gathered the sacred books of the Maya, the painted folding-screen codices in which that civilization had recorded its astronomy, its history, its calendar, and its gods, and burned them in a great fire. By his own account he destroyed dozens, and the surviving accounts suggest thousands of manuscripts and images went into the flames as idolatry. Of the entire written literature of the Maya, a people who had tracked Venus across centuries and built one of the most sophisticated calendars in human history, four books survive. Four. We opened an earlier chapter mourning the Library of Alexandria; here, on the far side of the world and a thousand years later, is its twin, and the man who lit it believed he was doing God's work.

That fire is the emblem of this chapter, because the collision of the two human worlds, when it finally came, was not only a conquest of bodies but an erasure of minds. When Columbus made landfall in 1492, the sealed hemispheres of Part VII were joined at last, and the joining was a catastrophe with few equals in the whole of the human story. The deadliest weapon the newcomers carried was one they did not know they had and could not have controlled: disease. Smallpox, measles, and the other Old World plagues, meeting populations with no inherited resistance, swept through the Americas ahead of the conquerors themselves and killed, over the following century, something on the order of nine in ten of everyone who lived there. Whole nations died before they ever saw a European face. It was, overwhelmingly, an accident of biology rather than a plan, and that makes it no less total; the civilizations we spent the last chapter admiring, the Aztec and the Inca and a thousand others, were shattered as much by invisible germs as by steel and horse and gun.

The collision moved more than germs, and its ledger runs in both directions. Out of the Americas flowed crops that would remake the diet of the entire Old World and feed a population boom from Ireland to China: the potato, maize, the tomato, cassava, the chili, chocolate, tobacco. Into the Americas came wheat and horses and cattle, and the plantation, and with the plantation came the age's other great atrocity. To work the sugar and cotton fields of a hemisphere emptied by disease, European powers shipped, across roughly four centuries, some twelve million enslaved Africans over the Atlantic in the holds of ships, of whom well over a million died on the crossing alone, in a traffic in human beings so vast and so systematic that it stands beside the conquest itself as one of the founding crimes of the modern world, and one of its founding engines of wealth. The same interconnection that had carried silk and printing and the plague now carried, on an industrial scale, human beings in chains. The making of the modern world was not only an acceleration of knowledge and riches. It was built, in large and undeniable part, on plague, on plunder, and on bondage, and an honest history has to hold the wonder and the horror in the same hand.

But atop that biological catastrophe came a deliberate one, and it is the thread this book has been following. The conquerors and the missionaries who came after set out, quite consciously, to erase the knowledge of the peoples they had broken, to burn their books, smash their idols, forbid their languages, and overwrite their entire way of understanding the world with the one true account. What could not be killed by accident was to be unmade on purpose. And it was justified, every time, in the language we have heard before: the old knowledge was devil-worship, the old gods were demons, the serpent-wisdom of the Americas was Satan wearing feathers. The demonization of forbidden knowledge, which we watched harden in late antiquity, now crossed an ocean and became a program of cultural annihilation that would run, in the residential schools and the stolen generations and the outlawed ceremonies, for four more centuries.

And we should not imagine this was done only to distant peoples across the sea. In these very same centuries, at home in Europe, the same machinery turned on Europe's own. Between roughly 1450 and 1750, tens of thousands of people, perhaps three-quarters of them women, were tried and executed as witches, and a great many of them were exactly the village healers, the midwives, the herb-women, the keepers of a folk knowledge of the body and the plants that had been passed down, mostly by women, since before history. The witch trials were many things, a panic, a settling of scores, a theology of fear, but among them they were an act of knowledge-suppression, the violent replacement of an old, embodied, largely female tradition of healing with a new licensed and male one. The Inquisition kept its Index of forbidden books; the age kept its bonfires. Everywhere the pattern held: a new order, consolidating its power, decided what might be known and by whom, and burned the rest.

This is the darkest face of the modern rupture, and we have not softened it, because it should not be softened. And yet, as we insisted before, the honest reading is not that knowledge is the innocent victim of a cartoon villain. It is that human institutions, in the very act of becoming powerful, seem almost compelled to control what may be known, to treat the unfamiliar and the inherited-from-elsewhere as a threat to be neutralized, whether the institution is a church, an empire, or, as we will see, a modern state or science itself. The tragedy of conquest and erasure is that it was carried out, in large part, by people certain they were bringing light. That certainty is the danger. Hold it in mind, because the age that dawned next made exactly the opposite wager, that no authority's certainty should be trusted, and that the only real light comes from testing everything against the world. That wager was about to remake the human mind, and then the whole planet.