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Space/Science » in reply to "Historical baggage" for cultural evolution is a lot like "genetic baggage" for biological evolution

Excellent points about the selected elite
ER — (archived)

Most people have an idealized view of our colonial forebears. There were religious fanatics, common criminals, indentured servants, slaves; adventurers, and even those who came here escaping religious and political oppression were often pretty intolerant of those outside their own in-group once they were established. They certainly didn't always get along with the aboriginals, either.

The initial wave of immigration lasted 200 years and brought over mostly Northern European Protestants and Africans, then the Industrial Revolution brought over many more groups to work in the factories, build the railroads, etc. Even Asia contributed thousands. As the country expanded westward, it didn't simply occupy a wilderness sparsely inhabited by savages, it moved into an already settled and organized hinterland where the Spanish and then the expanding Mexican culture already had very solidly established itself. A look at the Spanish place names on a map of the US west of the Mississippi gives evidence of this. Many western "whites" had ancestors settled in the Southwest that predated the Jamestown Colony. In my own state of Florida, there were permanent Spanish missions, forts and communities in the 16th through 18th centuries that flourished there until they were driven out by the English in colonial times. Even the highly evolved Plains Indian culture did not exist before the 1700s, and it was based on a European horse technology already established on the Great Plains for centuries.

We're in the middle of another immigration event right now, and it seems jarring and catastrophic, but I submit this is America's normal condition, not an aberration. The Anglo Saxons were just one of the groups, and they won't be the last. This is exactly the kind of cultural insight our starship crews should not be deprived of by an indoctrination that ignores their true history.

An aside: I remember a conversation once when I lived in California with an Anglo-Saxon colleague who mentioned he had been a parishioner of the first Catholic church in the United States west of the Mississippi River, in St Louis. When I mentioned there had been Catholic churches all over the West for centuries predating his, he was stunned. It wasn't that he didn't know, or that he was racist or Anglocentric, it's just that in his view of the country, subconsciously, they simply didn't count.

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