A few months ago, I finished The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston -- at least, I have reached the point where the main plot line has concluded, and I have no interest in finishing the last few chapters, for reasons I will get into shortly. It is a mediocre book, which, given the material it had to work with, makes it immensely disappointing.
The book's main flaw is its lack of focus. It starts off well, being the story of a mysterious, legendary lost city deep in the jungles of Honduras and of the adventurers who contributed to it finally being found. This part could just as easily have been an Indiana Jones adventure, and when I first bought the CD's to keep my mind occupied during a long drive, I thought it was a fictional work in exactly that genre.
As the book progressed, though, it became all to clear that Preston was more interested in proving himself to be a liberal in good standing than to tell a good story.
Perhaps the least problematic part of Preston flaunting his liberal credential is when he is apologetic for the whole mission as not being sufficiently academic. It's not that academic credentials are unimportant; it's that they are more important in some parts of science than in others. For example, skilled amateurs have made, and continue to make, many important contributions to astronomy, frequently being the first to spot a comet or nova and often recording the only record of a transient lunar phenomenon. Amateurs are frequently the ones who find fossils, and indeed objects of archaeological interest; as long as they do not do irreparable harm to the finds, this is a help, not a hindrance, to science. In all these cases, careful, knowledgeable amateurs give the professionals more "eyes" than they would otherwise have, and they allow the professionals to concentrate their efforts in places where their expertise is truly essential. Really good scientists understand and acknowledge this.
Stepping up from that is Preston's "sensitivity" to cultural imperialism. Yes, that is a real thing, but it doesn't really apply here. In parts of the book, Preston is very "sensitive" to the claims that no, of course what they found was not the legendary "White City" (Ciudad Blanca); that is a myth told by the ignorant, and to claim to have found it is mere exploitative sensationalism, like claiming to have found Atlantis or Camelot. At other points, Preston is "sensitive" to charges that the expedition really discovered nothing; the natives knew it was there all along, and the legend of Ciudad Blanca proves that.
But these two extremes obviously contradict each other, and neither of them are exactly true. Ciudad Blanca is real in the same way Troy is real (discovered by Heinrich Schliemann), the kraken is real (in the form of giant squids), the unicorn is real (it is a distorted description of a rhinoceros), and Santa Clause is real (St. Nicholas of Myra was a real man who lived from AD 270 to AD 343 in what is today Turkey); confusion and fiction do not remove the fact that each of these is "based on a true story." The locals knew there was something out in the jungle, the works of a great native civilization, and some of them knew where at least parts of it could be found. However, their story of the curse was at best a dim memory of the disease that arrived in the New World with Europeans (and traveled through it much faster than they did), and the animal behavior at the main archaeological site indicated that no human being of any kind had visited the spot for generations -- possibly since the location was abandoned centuries ago. So there was a kernel of truth in the folktale, but only a kernel, and archaeology was necessary to learn the full truth. That is not cultural imperialism; it is not an attempt to shoehorn another people's culture or history into a narrative to serve our own purposes, it is instead simply a matter of trying to learn as much as possible about their culture and history. That a few self-serving individuals say otherwise is to be expected, but their claims need to be evaluated in the light of reason, not merely affirmed for ideological reasons.
Worse than even this, though, is Preston's shameful display of "white guilt".
Now let me be quite clear on this. Yes, the Europeans who came to the Americas did many cruel things to those who were already living here. But don't be stupid about this: choose any time and place at random, and you are almost certain to find that at that time and place those with the power to be cruel were in fact being cruel. We are a species of stinkers. If the conquistadors were more cruel to the natives of Central America than the other way around, it was only because circumstances gave them certain remarkable advantages, not that the New World was some hippy paradise of pacifists, like FernGully. Now anyone is right to feel shame for his own misdeeds, and in diminishing proportions for the misdeeds of those with whom he identifies -- those of his family, those of his religion, those of his nation, those of his race. Race really does come near the very end of any such list; our connections to those with very superficial resemblances to us is very tenuous indeed. If Preston is Christian (his religion, if any, is unclear), he has better grounds to be ashamed of cruelty by Christians, both because he identifies with them, and because he could claim that Christians, with the benefits of the Gospel and the Sacraments, really should know better. Naturally, there is no hint whatsoever of that argument.
But that only applies to deliberate cruelty, not to the diseases that were unwittingly spread from one location to another. When the conquistadors came to the Americas, no one had a decent understanding of disease, as is clear from the fact that European populations would continue to suffer greatly from very preventable diseases. In particular, the conquistadors had absolutely no reason to believe -- at least until it was too late -- that the natives of the New World would be much, much more vulnerable to diseases common among Europeans. Nor did they have any reason to want to devastate the Americas; even the most selfish and worldly of them wanted to govern a prosperous territory, not a destitute one in a state of collapse. Believe the stories about blankets intentionally exposed to smallpox centuries later if you like, but those stories had nothing to do with this first contact.
"No," you may say, "That's not good enough. What matters is that a civilization was destroyed, not the intentions of those who carried the disease." I disagree; blaming people, regardless of color, merely for being sick really is reprehensible. If that is still your position, though, you will have to blame Native Americans for the destruction of Ciudad Blanca's civilization. No white man would penetrate that part of Honduras until long after the pandemic had done its worst; it was instead carried by Native American refugees.
In conclusion, this book is a wasted opportunity. It could have been about adventure; it could have been about colorful personalities in an exotic location; it could have been about science and history. It dabbles in each of these, but refuses to concentrate on any one of them; and it ruins even that weak mix with a heavy dose of off-putting virtue signaling.
No comments:
Post a Comment