Imperialism: The Perversion of Networked Human Ingenuity
Anyone who argues that one culture conquering and exploiting another is a good thing is clearly misguided at best, on the simple logic that they almost certainly would not want their own culture conquered and exploited by another. If someone clearly doesn’t believe what they’re saying, neither should you.
But they have an insidious argument that needs to be dissected, because it contains a kernel of truth that their most vocal opponents completely deny and therefore cannot counter.
(I mean, other than the fact that the most passionate and vocal opponents of colonialism focus solely on European and American imperialism and completely ignore the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Syrian, Chinese, Japanese, Aztec, Mongolian, Turkish, and Ottoman empires. Even the Jews’ own holy scriptures contain records of an Israeli empire over their neighboring countries in their heyday.)
No, I mean the argument that the strongest African nations today are the ones who were conquered by European powers, and the weakest nations in the world today are the isolated bush peoples who have only been most recently found by the First World nations.
Again, let me reiterate that I think one culture conquering and subjugating and exploiting another culture is bad. It is the worst way for two cultures to interact. There is no excuse for it.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the two cultures are at least interacting on some level, even if it is in the worst way possible.
Whenever any two cultures interact, there is an exchange of ideas. Even when conquered, a people learns from their conquerors, observing their technology and adopting what they want. The conquered culture may even come into contact with the ideas of third-party cultures through their conquerors, whether those be other conquered cultures or rival empires and their conquered cultures.
This is a sick and twisted perversion of a global trade and communications network, but it is still a network. It would be far better for everyone if the exchange of technologies, ideas, and resources was entirely voluntarily.
The Native Americans recognized the value of European horses and especially European firearms, and refused to trade with any European who would not offer them firearms in exchange, because they knew that trader preferred to leave them relatively helpless. Had they not adopted horses and guns, they certainly would have suffered worse and faster defeats against Western expansion.
But would they have ever discovered firearms if not for the Europeans?
Hell, the Europeans only discovered firearms because of cultural exchange with the Chinese empire, which had discovered the ancestor of gunpowder.
The wholesome truth hidden under the perversion of imperialism is this:
Cultures best grow when exchanging with other cultures, and the more radically different those cultures are, the more likely that each of them has something to teach the other.
Humans network our intelligence. Increase the size of the network (and increase the freedom of flow through voluntary exchange rather than imperial theft and dominance), and you increase our racial intelligence.
It’s not about a thousand monkeys hammering on a thousand typewriters trying to randomly recreate the works of Shakespeare.
It’s about a thousand people writing Shakespeare fanfiction, and then getting together to read each other’s work, to critically examine what does and doesn’t make for a satisfying story, so that the whole community informs each member and each member can apply the lessons learned. And then they do it again, and again, and again, improving the body of common knowledge each time.
