Let’s take back Columbus Day
In recognition of Columbus Day, Fox News Opinion is carrying my essay on the achievements of Western civilization. As I explain there (and at length in my book, The Enemies of Christopher Columbus), the spread of that civilization across a savage wilderness deserves to be celebrated, and Columbus Day is that celebration. The 1492 voyage was epochal not only because Columbus revealed to Europe the existence of vast lands in this hemisphere, he also showed others how to get here and return safely. The rest is history.
Here are two paragraphs from my article:
Western civilization’s stress on the value of reason led inexorably to its distinctive individualism. Western thinkers were first to declare that every individual, no matter what his skin color or ancestry, is fully human, possessed of reason and free will—a being of self-made character who deserves to be judged accordingly, not as a member of a racial or tribal collective. And thanks to John Locke and the Founding Fathers, individuals were recognized as possessing individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—rights that made slavery indefensible and led to its eradication, at the cost of a civil war.
These are the facts we are no longer taught—and the measure of that educational failure is the disdain with which Columbus’s holiday is regarded in the country that owes its existence to his courage. It is time to take back Columbus Day, as an occasion to publicly rejoice, not in the bloodshed that occurred before Columbus’s arrival and after, but in our commitment to the life-serving values of Western civilization: reason and individualism. We do so by honoring the great explorer who opened the way for that civilization to flourish in the New World.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
