De las Casas, Destruction of the Indies, excerpt 1

Assigned: pp. 1–6Open original PDF ↗

1 Introduction to de las Casas

Bartolomé de las Casas spent twelve years in the Americas; was a slave owner, participated in human trafficking, slave raids, and so forth, before, in 1514, having a radical change of heart. (As late as 1516, to be clear, he was advocating for the enslavement and trafficking of Africans.) He returned to Spain with the intention of convincing the King of Spain to end the encomienda system, and in the Americas attempted to pass reform, create more congenial and humane institutions, and so forth. In 1523 he became a Dominican friar. I would say he is interesting for three things:

• his work in attempting to, at a very immediate level, improve conditions for American Indians,
• his historical work in attempting to document his times, and
• his theological and philosophical work in arguing in defense of the rights of Indians.

We’re mainly interested in these second two, and mostly the third.

2 Rights: the classical view, the classical problem, and some modern revolutions

As background, it’s worth bearing a few things in mind. It’s a tangle of three ‘classical’ ideas (ideas you find, more or less, in Plato and Aristotle and their inheritors).

1. that what makes humans distinct from other animals is that we have reason
2. that having reason—and specifically inasmuch as reason involves one’s capacity to shape their own life—entitles us to a certain level of recognition, or respect
3. that actually only very few people have reason, or have it in the appropriate way

It is possible to hold these views consistently, but you have to do some conceptual massaging, and prototypically in 1, what it means to “have” reason. That is, for example, the Aristotelian solution: All humans ‘have’ reason (ekhein logon), but not all humans have the capacity to wield it, or grant it practical-rational authority, or have reason but in a fully developed way.

Aristotle doesn’t have anything like a robust version of 2, but he does have, infamously, a robust version of a complement of 2, namely the view (from his Politics) that there are some people who lack the capcity to employ reason to direct their lives, and who therefore would be better off as slaves—they are what Aristotle calls “natural slaves.”

Whatever its philosophical merits (zero, if you’re curious), the argument is historically significant because it served (with Aristotle’s name customarily attached to it) as a basis for justifying institutions of enslavement throughout the modern period (including, of course, and quite explicitly, in the United States). The basic underlying idea here is that humans differ by nature in ways that should matter politically. But naturalism of this sort has the characteristic inner tension that it defines humans by something that it then goes on to reject most humans actually have. (Imagine defining humans as those who can run a mile under four minutes, for example.)

During the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth centuries, political philosophers in Europe rejected the Aristotelian claim and with it the underlying naturalism (the view that politics should be guided by differences in human natures). The causes leading to this relatively wholesale rejection of political naturalism are exceedingly complex, but a few of the critical nodes in that constellation are two things exemplified in someone like Las Casas:

• arguments against the Aristotelian standard (for natural slaves), and
• experiences of the atrocities of the treatment of others as if they met the Aristotelian standard.

I don’t think these two alone get you the radical overthrow of classical political theory that arrives with Hobbes in the seventeenth century, but they are both critical, and, importantly, the first alone doesn’t do it.

To that effect, note the first two passages here on p. 1:

• in yellow: marvelous discovery;
• in green: terror.

3 Ideas of authority and of writing

At the time Las Casas is writing, political authority and legitimacy are undergoing a radical remaking in Europe. Two rather pressing questions are:

• Just what is the authority of the Catholic pope? and
• Just what is the authority of ‘eternal law’?

The preferred medieval European self-interpretation, you might say, is that human law is merely a ‘determination’ (application, roughly) of eternal, natural law (rules for human conduct derivable from reason) for some particular human community. So no person has ultimate authority; only the law does.

But what is the ‘eternal law’ and who is authorized to ascertain what it is? You can probably guess that this relatively pristine conception of law was, if not immediately, certainly eventually corrupted to the extent that talk of eternal law just referred to whatever the pope or the Catholic Church more generally thought it was, with the resulting power structure, in Europe, of a sort of ‘super king’ in the pope, who effectively ruled over actual kings (and those two friends tell two friends, and so on).

This model, in so many words, begins to deteriorate in the modern period, beginning with the idea that kings have direct dispensation for their authority (the so-called ‘divine right of kings’ model, a modern institution).

Las Casas addresses this text to the Spanish prince, Phillip, “in charge of matters relating to the Indies” (2n.6). It’s an interesting episode in the history of the so-called ‘mirror for princes’ genre inasmuch as the acknowledgment of the need for wisdom in rulers is of different salience before and after the deterioration of the eternal law model of political legitimacy.

All this in any event as background for capturing the meaning of this passage on p. 2. Notice the complex, simultaneous appeal to the ‘meaning of divine scripture’ and the judgment of a king.

And now see how Las Casas uses this as background to motivate his views about the treatment of Indians in the green passage on p. 3.

4 ‘These universal and infinite peoples’

Las Casas is interesting among early modern European writers on indigenous Americans for his championing them as not only basically human but as, in certain respects, exemplary. See this passage on p. 5.

It’s worth emphasizing that the ‘encounter with the other’ that is the conflict of Europe and America at the time is shocking sometimes in one or two quite different registers—quite simply:

• that these people are so weird and unlike “us,” namely that
  • that these people are so awful (unintelligent, immoral, etc.), or
  • that these people are so exceptional (intelligent, moral, etc.).

Sometimes—particularly through the complex concept of ‘innocence’—the same writer will make both sorts of claims. But the important point to emphasize here is that “the Europeans” (as if they, any more than “Americans,” were a monolithic bunch) didn’t show up, despise the indigenous people for their backward ways, and go about slaughtering them. More generally, the challenge (on both sides) was attempting to fathom how these others were weird, awful, and exceptional, and yet human like “us.”

Note how the exaltation of the character of indigenous people complements the vilification of Spaniards; see pp. 5–6 and the green passage on p. 6.

It’s possible (but, this being a philosophy class, we’re not equipped to say either way) Las Casas is exaggerating, but if we bracket that question and simply attend to the sort of destruction, the sort of experience, he describes, it is astonishing; and certainly that is the rhetorical effect he’s after. It’s not just that conquistadors did, in his view, some bad things, but that the did things that were categorically of a different sort from ordinary bad stuff. Thus, instead of saying they killed so many people, he describes them as having depopulated entire areas, having left land blank.