Against Christian Civilization
by Paul Kingsnorth, First Things:
The last time I was in America, which was last autumn, I visited the battlefield at Little Bighorn. It was a beautiful snowy day. The landscape was vast and white and still. When we pulled into the battlefield site, hardly anyone was there. A couple of park rangers, a few other visitors. It made the place feel even more eerie than it probably would at any other time.
Standing in the snow, looking up the ridge at the monuments and the graves, I tried to imagine the psychic reality of living through the end of your culture. I tried to imagine being an Indian who faced not only the trauma of land theft and a future of being forced onto reservations, but also the harder-to-bear psychic wound of losing your entire metaphysics. Of seeing everything you thought you knew about the world, about your people, about your land, about the shape of the universe, its gods and spirits, disintegrating beneath you. I realized as I stood there that America did not just take the Indians’ land—it took their entire world, outer and inner.
Of course, America is hardly the first or only society to have done something like this. A grand sweep of human history seems to demonstrate that this is how humans operate basically all the time. They expand, they seek new lands, and if they find people already on them, conflict ensues. A technologically advanced society will inevitably displace and possibly destroy a less advanced culture. Technological advancement, of course, does not imply spiritual or cultural advancement, however common it is to hear these things elided. But it’s hard to find a country that doesn’t have at least one example of a people whose world was wiped out by newcomers. My own country, Britain, has several. My first novel was a three-hundred-page exploration of the psyche of an Anglo-Saxon pagan losing his world to Norman and Christian conquest.
But the fact that the pattern is common does not make it any less traumatic for those who lose everything. What are they to do? Fight back and hope to win? Fight back knowing they will lose, but go down with their world? Become part of the new culture and turn their back on the old? Or become part of the new world and seek to retain what can be retained? Maybe the answer depends on personality, and on circumstance.