RE: In light of this past Columbus day
October 11, 2012 at 8:42 am
(This post was last modified: October 11, 2012 at 9:01 am by Anomalocaris.)
No, even if he is valued for absolutely nothing else, he should still be valued for precisely the much maligned "invasion". Putting America on the map doesn't mean jack shit without the invasion. The invasion of America by Europe is the seminal event in human history that made modernity possible.
You can't make omelets without breaking eggs. Thanks to columbus, the world had the opportunity to break the eggs. So we now have omelets.
The alternative inevitably meant by the course dear to revisionists is it is good to have useless knowledge that a few, theoretically nice in some head in cloud romantic sense but essentially untouchable, eggs exist, while the world, figuratively speaking, starves.
The essential fact is Columbus was a skilled seat of the pants navigator but hopeless cartographer. If he had good cartographic skills he would not have made the huge mistake in his estimate of the size of the earth to start with. So were it not for this cartographic ineptitude, he wouldn't have ever embarked on his voyages of discover. China would have been seen, entirely correctly, to lie way too far to the west to be reached by sailing ships of the era.
You can't make omelets without breaking eggs. Thanks to columbus, the world had the opportunity to break the eggs. So we now have omelets.
The alternative inevitably meant by the course dear to revisionists is it is good to have useless knowledge that a few, theoretically nice in some head in cloud romantic sense but essentially untouchable, eggs exist, while the world, figuratively speaking, starves.
The essential fact is Columbus was a skilled seat of the pants navigator but hopeless cartographer. If he had good cartographic skills he would not have made the huge mistake in his estimate of the size of the earth to start with. So were it not for this cartographic ineptitude, he wouldn't have ever embarked on his voyages of discover. China would have been seen, entirely correctly, to lie way too far to the west to be reached by sailing ships of the era.
