Editor:
Your opinion column by Thomas Bowden about Columbus Day and 9/11 in the Oct. 12 edition was a factually inaccurate poorly argued offense to the very canons of “Western” thought it attempts to defend. While there may be good reasons to celebrate Columbus Day and there are certainly great reasons to support many “Western” values, this column is a pretty poor place to find them.
Let’s begin with the factual inaccuracies. In the first sentence of the first paragraph, Mr. Bowden tells us that Columbus “discovered vast uncharted territories that awaited the spread of Western civilization.” We should all know that many people ? Native Americans and Norse for sure, perhaps Polynesians and Africans ? had traveled and lived in the western hemisphere before 1492, so by ?discovered? here he must mean ?discovered by white Europeans.? It would have been quite a surprise for a Mayan tax collector to learn that his country was ?uncharted.? All this is pretty normal usage, however. To say that these territories and/or the people living in them ?awaited? anything is more problematic. Would you describe the Jews of Warsaw in 1935 as ?awaiting? the Holocaust? While it would be technically accurate, it sounds strange and does not ring true.
In the second paragraph Mr. Bowden turns to 9/11 and tells us that that attack was committed out of hatred for America?s values. ?Islamic totalitarians who hate the distinctive values of Western civilization that America so proudly embraces? targeted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as symbols of those values. He does not provide any evidence for this claim, which is somewhat ironic given his iconic treatment of ?Western? reason and science descending from Aristotle.
While I would be sympathetic to an argument that the criminals and killers of Al Quaeda are likely to also be liars, their writings and publications have for the past decade consistently proclaimed two specific grievances against the United States: the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia?s holy cities and American support for Israeli actions in Palestine. During this decade, no terrorist attacks have been directed against countries like Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, New Zealand, Ireland, Iceland, Finland and Canada, which certainly share many of the distinctive values of Western civilization that Mr. Bowden cherishes (?reason, science, individual rights, and capitalism?). In light of these facts, it would be appropriate in the tradition of Western rationalistic and scientific reasoning for Mr. Bowden to provide some evidence or argument for his insight into the motives of our enemies.
In the third paragraph, Mr. Bowden makes a kind of argument that Aristotle did not think very highly of at all. He points to people in the Islamic world who support or romanticize bin Laden or call the United States the Great Satan and claims that this shows ?how widely that same festering hatred of Western values is felt in the Muslim world.? Aristotle calls this type of argument a rhetorical syllogism, or enthymeme, and contrasts it to the deductive syllogism that constitutes the foundation of Aristotelian scientific reasoning. An enthymeme is an argument that does not explicitly state one of the premises that must be agreed on for the argument?s conclusion to be valid. Here, Mr. Bowden assumes something like ?if somebody supports bin Laden or calls the United States the Great Satan, it is because she hates Western values.?? As Aristotle points out, many times the missing premise is controversial or is just an assumption of that which the argument purports to prove. Obviously, a person could have many reasons for supporting bin Laden and some argument or evidence will be necessary to show that one particular reason is universally valid across the Muslim world.
Mr. Bowden then does better for a while in his discussion of post-911 America?s liberal and conservative stumbling blocks to progress. But when he starts talking about Columbus Day again he completely loses it. ?We need not evade or excuse Columbus?s flaws?his religious zealotry, his enslavement and oppression of natives?to recognize that he made history by finding new territory for a civilization that would soon show mankind how to overcome forever the age-old scourges of slavery, war, and forced religious conversion.? I thought at first that Mr. Bowden was being ironic here, since forced religious conversion, slavery and war, probably in that order, were in fact Columbus?s first and primary activities after arriving in the Caribbean! And nobody who has ever been to Dachau or Auschwitz could ever describe the course of history from 1492 to 1942 as the overcoming of slavery, war and forced religious conversion. It just hasn?t happened that way and we just don?t live in the world Mr. Bowden describes.
Unembarrassed by his lack of logical acumen or historical knowledge, Mr. Bowden then turns to the physical sciences and praises the ?philosophers and mathematicians? who have demonstrated that ?the universe is knowable and predictable.? Alas, Mr. Bowden is no better versed in contemporary physics. One of the great developments in 20th century theoretical physics just is precisely the idea that the universe is in fact neither knowable nor predictable. If you polled the Nobel Prize winners in physics since 1932, when Werner Heisenburg was honored, very few if any would posit a deterministic much less a fully knowable universe. Mr. Bowden goes on, however, to comment how man?s scrutiny of the universe now reaches to ?the tiniest atom.? Actually, Mr. Bowden, we are currently scrutinizing quantum interactions on a scale that bears the same relation to the structure of an atom that our Milky Way Galaxy does to the universe as a whole.
Finally, the work of Jared Diamond lurks like Banquo behind Mr. Bowden?s entire essay. Mr. Diamond?s ?Guns, Germs and Steel? is widely regarded as an important argument about why some groups of people (Europeans) were able to colonize, conquer and enslave other groups of people (Natives). I am not sure if Mr. Bowden is unaware of Mr. Diamond?s arguments, but since Mr. Bowden neither replies to them nor offers much in the way of evidence or argument of his own, it is hard for anyone who is familiar with Mr. Diamond?s detailed and logical arguments to brush them aside in favor of Mr. Bowden?s vague emotional appeals. Ironically, all Aristotle?s arguments about evidence and scientific reasoning, the very foundation of the western civilization Mr. Bowden is so concerned to defend, would be squarely on the side of Mr. Diamond in this debate.
Mr. Bowden?s column exhibits little or no grasp of history, logic, theoretical physics or trends in contemporary thought. I certainly agree with him that the values of Western civilization are to be preferred to the values of Fundamentalist Wahabi Islam (and to the values of Fundamentalist Southern Baptist Protestantism for that matter), but he does an exceptionally miserable job connecting Columbus Day to that debate.
Eric DeWeese
Sweet Home