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I'm very much grateful civilization was brought here by bold pioneers from a small patch of Europe and believe our existence can be improved by following on their footsteps.
The distant mixed-race offspring of those Amerindians who were here half a millenium ago have in their hands a far better continent than the one their forefathers had.
The Amerindian lived in a pathetic little village whose buildings rotted away in a few years. He had very little social mobility and his tribe only had a handful of occupations. His life was short, crude and brutish and he could perish at random from any disease. He engaged in neverending tribal wars and glorified bloodshed. He liberally and irresponsibly employed fires in hunting - Amerindians were never paladins of environmentalism. The meager production of his village remained there; he could never share it with outsiders and also partake in the fruits of their labor.
He had no knowledge of why anything happened in the environment around him. His worldview on nature and everything else was exactly the same of everyone else in his village and his ancestors. There was no space for reflection and intellectual change: he could not compare his ideas with those of anyone else nor create anything new. All that he had was a tiny shard of ideas, shared with other villages of the same ethnicity but never traded and never discussed, an isolated and unchanging intellectual world. Sure, those ideas made him comfortable with his reality, but at the cost of isolation, ignorance and practices such as eating the flesh of enemies to assimilate their strength.
He had some cultural production, but nothing truly outstanding, and even if it were, nobody else could ever enjoy it because of the village's autarkic nature. The only Amerindian epics are those written about them by outsiders.
His distant children blended together with pale and dark outsiders from far across the ocean through quite physical intimacy and love and built something greater and better. Now the Amerindian's great-great-great-...-grandchild lives in cozy Gothic Petrópolis or gleaming futuristic BrasÃlia. His life is easier, longer and more predictable. Of his morality, I'd say it's superior to the Amerindian's. His existence is no longer isolated and egotistical: his physical and creative labor can contribute to all of mankind's material and intellectual prosperity. His goods may be enjoyed by distant outsiders today, and his scientific or artistic deeds may potentially enrich the lives of foreigners for centuries to come. And this goes both ways. He can know of and reflect on the thoughts and experiences of many others from the distant past to the present. He can even ponder on the legitimacy of civilization, a privilege only those living in civilization have.
Should he believe that eating corpses makes him stronger so he can sleep better at night (ignorance is bliss), or should he learn and think of something higher even if it doesn't make him immediately happy? Perhaps this transition from savagery to civilization is not one of good-to-bad or bad-to-good but one of childhood to maturity.
I value the works of art produced by those who have conquered this land. It's a good thing the historical process of colonization happened and I can enjoy them. Science, too, but little has been made here. Science has value, like art: I find it beautiful to see man acquiring the raw empirical information which awaits around him and creates theoretical models to understand it. It used to be called "natural philosophy". Science and art are two great reasons to let civilization thrive.