Columbus the Man

Charles C. W. Cooke explodes some of the more poplar myths surrounding Columbus Day in a piece at NRO.  Here is a sample:

Strike two: Contra Mr. Gershwin, “they” did not all laugh “at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round” — primarily because they already knew that. As Stephen Jay Gould has observed, “there never was a period of ‘flat earth darkness’ among scholars.” They had accepted the spherical theory from the time of Socrates, and it had reigned without interruption ever since. Insinuations to the contrary, still pervasive in the public imagination, derive first from 17th-century Protestant attempts to paint Catholics as backwards, and then from the 19th-century atheist movement, which picked up the falsehood and propagated it to demonstrate the supposed benightedness of the religious.

 And on the fact that Columbus really didn't do anything spectacular because the New World had already been discovered hundreds of years before:

Three strikes, but not out. The explosion of certain parts of the Columbus myth, along with some more recent discoveries about his less noble proclivities, has led many to disown the man and a few more to protest against the national holiday in his honor. Berkeley, Brown, and — ironically — Columbia universities have abolished recognition of Columbus Day entirely, while others have substituted nebulous celebrations of “diversity” on that day. Journey into any trendy progressive enclave and you will find that Christopher Columbus is persona non grata. 

This, like most political correctness, is a grievous mistake. As the historian William J. Connell argues, Columbus may not have been the first of the voyagers to discover America, but he was undoubtedly the most important. “His arrival,” Connell argues, “marks where we as a country and a hemisphere began our identity.” Unlike previous landings, Columbus’s mattered. It was the first to lead to a permanent settlement and the first enduring landing from a civilization that boasted modern ideas such as a belief in science, reason, individual achievement, and Christianity. Ultimately, Columbus’s story serves as the introduction to a story of immeasurable historical importance. To dismiss celebration of the man because he didn’t make it to America first would be akin to declaring that we must scorn Isaac Newton’s contribution to science because he wasn’t actually hit by an apple.

Cooke, however, goes off course in this assesment of Columbus the man:

Heinous as this behavior was [e.i., enslaving Indians, transporting slaves, and having his men terrorize the locals], to impose modern morality on the past is to exhibit historical illiteracy. Contrary to the picture painted by modern progressives, thePinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria did not sail nonchalantly through a barrier of enlightened protesters — (Don’t) Occupy America! — on their way to the shore, only to ignore their modernity. Columbus was a man of his time, and we should judge him by the standards of that age, regardless of how we assess them today.

But to counter progressivism with more progressivsm ("Columbus was a man of his time") doesn't help the situation at all.  In fact, historicism, the idea that all thought is inexorably bound to the times in which that thought was conceived (which of course the idea of historicism is itself exempted), is a chief impediment to education and political philosophy.  The idea that morality is time-bound casts aside the idea of a transcendent, permanent moral order, e.g., that slavery is always wrong, etc., and in its place stands whatever might happen be the opinion of the majority at the time.

Columbus certainly had his flaws, and we can judge them just as we can judge the good he did.