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“caricatured as simply villainous or cowardly” if they do not.
43
Without such
consistency of action and clarity of motive, the reader would likely lose sight
of the transcendent singularity of purpose that romance associates with the
various cultural values its heroes enact. This accounts for another inter-
esting oddity of the
Esquisse
. When Condorcet treats the history of global
exploration and colonization, he protects the viability of this universal
reference point by forging a stark moral divide between the explorers and
those who patronized their ventures. Seafarers like da Gama and Colum-
bus were drawn by a “noble curiosity” to investigate the world, but “the
kings and ruffians who were to profit from their labours” were motivated
by “base, pitiless greed” and “stupid, fierce fanaticism.” Although it would
seem implausible to suppose that these adventurers (who risked much more
than their patrons) were any less culpable, such moral ambiguity would not
sustain the singularity of historical purpose that Condorcet wished to illus-
trate. If the path marked by the march of progress could not be clearly
traced out, the scientific ends of history would lose their sense of preor-
dination. Thus the scientific motive needs to be clearly set apart from its
opposite, just as its ancestral manifestations need to anticipate its modern
ones. Thus in exonerating these explorers of responsibility for the evils of
colonialism, Condorcet also shapes their motives into scientific ones, mak-
ing their inspiration a desire to attain “a knowledge of the natural world
that can furnish new truths and destroy accredited errors in the sciences.”
As reason's servants, they were agents of a scientific destiny not of their own
making. By increasing activities of trade, these explorers had “given new
wings to industry and navigation,” and these benefits were in turn destined
to be extended “by a necessary chain of influence, to all the sciences and to
all the arts,” enabling “free nations to resist tyrants” and “enslaved people
to break their chains or at least to relax the chains of feudalism.”
44
Not so the wicked. The parochial interests of the European powers that
sponsored these voyages put them on the outside of reason's destiny. It is
not the global character of the colonizing motive itself that is evil; rather, it
is the fact these European powers acted in accordance with the inverse of
natural universalism—the false universalism of Christianity.
The unfortunate creatures who lived in these new lands were treated as
though they were not human beings because they were not Christians.
This prejudice, which had an even more degrading effect on the tyrants
than on their victims, smothered any feeling of remorse that might have
touched these greedy and barbarous men, spewed up from the depths
