I learned this from the amazing book, The Dawn of Everything, by Davids Graeber and Wengrow. Enlightenment ideas were born in the fiery confluence of two cultures.
This really shouldn’t surprise us. Great advances often result from a confrontation with the other. The crusades, Alexander’s campaigns, and the rise of the Mongols–all catalyzed new flowerings of culture, East fertilizing West and vice versa. The Islamic Golden Age resulted from abundant Arabic engagement with the wisdom of Greek antiquity, and during the crusades the West rediscovered its own lost heritage in the Caliphate’s libraries. We always break new ground when given an opportunity to see ourselves through the eyes of the stranger.
Of course, these examples all involved shocking violence on a grand scale, and the meeting of indigenous America and colonial Europe would prove to be no different. However, in certain regions, there was a honeymoon phase, when intellectual exchange prevailed. Before settlement began in earnest, when it was just a few intrepid explorers and missionaries. Columbus just went and massacred a bunch of guys and brought home a bunch of gold–and sure enough, Iberia contributed little to the Enlightenment. France, on the other hand-
The French Jesuit missionaries went to America to convert the natives to Christianity. It was their sacred duty to learn the language of their hosts to fluency, grok their way of life and model of the universe, in order to convert them to the gospel. Straight off the bat it would seem to be a given that some productive cross-pollination would result from this. A whole cohort of smart, curious, high-openness people, living in the closest communion with people who couldn’t be more different from them, and bringing the resultant insights home? How could not both sides be totally transformed by the contact?
Anyway, they went to convince everyone of the truth of Christianity, and it turned out to be a more difficult challenge than they’d bargained for, as the tribal people did not necessarily agree that they were fallen and filthy and in need of salvation in the first place, as most civilized people begrudgingly do. Also, the tribals were sharp–far from the slack-jawed savages of popular expectation. Jesuits were shocked by their intelligence and rhetorical facility.
Father Le Jeune, Superior of the Jesuits in Canada in the 1630s: ‘There are almost none of them incapable of conversing or reasoning very well, and in good terms, on matters within their knowledge. The councils, held almost every day in the Villages, and on almost all matters, improve their capacity for talking’…Some Jesuits went further, remarking–not without a trace of frustration–that New World savages seemed rather cleverer overall than the people they were used to dealing with at home (e.g. ‘they nearly all show more intelligence in their business, speeches, courtesies, intercourse, tricks, and subtleties, than do the shrewdest citizens and merchants in France’)…
Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence. Still, persuasiveness need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to which one privileges any of these has everything to do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumed dispositions of their audience. It was largely the speakers of Iroquoian languages such as the Wendat, or the five Haudenosaunee nations to their south, who appear to have placed such weight on reasoned debate – even finding it a form of pleasurable entertainment in own right. This fact alone had major historical repercussions. Because it appears to have been exactly this form of debate – rational, sceptical, empirical, conversational in tone – which before long came to be identified with the European Enlightenment as well.
It was just these Wendat, or Huron, who lived in what would later be called New France, and is now Quebec. And it is no coincidence that France became the epicentre of the intellectual flowering that would follow.
Notably, although Wendat women had dominion over large aspects of daily life, they had almost no say in councils. This is a reminder that tribal cultures were not utopian idylls, and many of them were somewhere along the development of dominator culture.
Anyway, it is a large story, that of colonization, and so the Daves zero in on the Wendat’s relations with the French, which makes sense, because they were close allies for several decades, so there was plenty of time to talk; and from there, they extra-zero in on this one fellow by the name of Kandiaronk.
Kandiaronk was a great Wendat statesman who was one of the most important players in the region at that time. He was unusually brilliant: all who met him agreed that he was one of the smartest people they’d ever met. And he engaged in extensive dialogue and debate with the French, particularly this guy Lahontan, who was also no slouch.
Lahontan goes back to France and writes a book of his dialogues with Kandiaronk, whose name is changed to Adario, and arguments embellished a little bit, the gaps of memory filled in, but there is every reason to believe Lahontan did his best to capture the essence of Kandiaronk’s critique of European mores–the main ideas of which were shared by most indigenous Americans. They found the Europeans totally grotesque and miserable. Kandiaronk, more than any of them, knew just how bad it was, because he probably had been to France himself. Although there is no record of him doing so, it is known that the Wendat sent an emissary to France, and it would have made sense to send Kandiaronk, owing to his linguistic mastery, and his position as speaker of the council.
Here are a few excerpts from Lahontan’s dialogue:
Lahontan: This is why the wicked need to be punished, and the good need to be rewarded. Otherwise, murder, robbery and defamation would spread everywhere, and, in a word, we would become the most miserable people upon the face of the earth.
Adario: For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?
~
Adario : I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?
Lahontan: Try for once in your life to actually listen. Can’t you see, my dear friend, that the nations of Europe could not survive without gold and silver – or some similar precious symbol. Without it, nobles, priests, merchants and any number of others who lack the strength to work the soil would simply die of hunger. Our kings would not be kings; what soldiers would we have? Who would work for kings, or anybody else? …It would plunge Europe into chaos and create the most dismal confusion imaginable.
Adario: You honestly think you’re going to sway me by appealing to the needs of nobles, merchants and priests? If you abandoned conceptions of mine and thine, yes, such distinctions between men would dissolve; a levelling equality would then take its place among you as it now does among the Wendat. And yes, for the first thirty years after the banishing of self-interest, no doubt you would indeed see a certain desolation as those who are only qualified to eat, drink, sleep and take pleasure would languish and die. But their progeny would be fit for our way of living. Over and over I have set forth the qualities that we Wendat believe ought to define humanity – wisdom, reason, equity, etc. – and demonstrated that the existence of separate material interests knocks all these on the head. A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason.
~
There’s much more like this, and the key point, according to the Daves, is that notions like freedom and equality were introduced to the European consciousness by just these sorts of discussions on the frontier of two worlds. Nowadays, we take freedom and equality as self-evidently good, albeit unattainable in their absolute form, and therefore subject to compromise. But the dominant European attitude prior to this great meeting of waters was totally different. What enshrined freedom, equality, brotherhood as transcendent moral objects was the sheer unanswerability of the indigenous critique.
Lahontan’s books…were to have an enormous impact on European sensibilities. Kandiaronk’s opinions were translated into German, English, Dutch and Italian, and continued in print, in multiple editions, for over a century. Any self-respecting intellectual of the eighteenth century would have been almost certain to have read them.
It took a while for the spiritual implications to set in (hence why the colonial period was already reaching completion by the advent of romanticism) but the sociopolitical stuff was obvious and immediately impactful. It is hard to imagine a more interesting set of ideas to debate in the salon. And straightaway you get the revolutions in France and America and the rise of liberalism: our bloody and grasping attempts to bring tribal-type harmony to a large, habitually authoritarian, and increasingly mechanical civilization. The dominant world order of today is, in fact, the unhappy marriage of these two umwelts.
Not only Rousseau but Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, Jefferson, Kant, Hume, and basically anyone who was anyone would have been on intimate terms with the indigenous critique of old European norms and assumptions. Leibniz lived with and befriended Lahontan himself during the latter’s final years. That’s only one degree of separation from the greatest meeting of cultures in history–exactly the sort which has always galvanized intellectual progress. Few 13th-century scientists personally fought in the crusades, yet still found themselves germinated by what was looted. Surely the printing press and the total alienness of the American cultures would have intensified this process in a big way, shaking a lot of old stagnant ideas up, and this is consistent with what ended up happening in Europe.
It took a while for the spiritual implications to set in (hence why the colonial period was already reaching completion by the advent of romanticism) but the sociopolitical stuff was obvious and immediately impactful. It is hard to imagine a more interesting set of ideas to debate in the salon. And straightaway you get the revolutions in France and America and the rise of liberalism: our bloody and grasping attempts to bring tribal-type harmony to a large, habitually authoritarian, and increasingly mechanical civilization. The dominant world order of today is, in fact, the unhappy marriage of these two umwelts.
These two cultures which diverged at least twenty thousand years ago had lots to say to one another, and were respectively transformed beyond recognition and obliterated, in the contact. It is an objective historical fact that the Enlightenment began in America, when Europe met the tribe. And America, its empire, the world it ‘leads,’ is the truest legacy of the Enlightenment. The indigenous people got killed, and their old culture is no longer a living historical force, but they didn’t die for nothing–they made a deeper mark than you think. The reason you don’t see their influence on our way of thinking is that it is so pervasive as to be invisible.