“Gulliver’s Travels” is a first contact novel. Obviously inspired by the Age of Discovery, it creates four occasions during which a traveler comes to a culture that he had not known existed and which did not know that he and his kind existed. Never mind the political satire; Swift is telling four stories of how cultures collide. The small people, the Lilliputians, figure out how to tame him, because power is all that interests them, and he allows them to believe he will not hurt them, which is certainly the case, because he has no reason to. And so they treat him as an admiral, their own Othello. Then the very big people in the second island he visits figure out how they can use him, which is as an entertainment and a pet, which he finds disgusting, but where he has no choice because any one of them could easily crush him. He is too small, as Aristotle would say, to be part of the arrangement whereby people of relatively the same size have to form a polity lest they can choose sides against one another. Then, on the third island, Gulliver meets a passel of fantasists who think they can improve humanity but create, instead, disastrous results, such as old people who linger on into extended debility, and then, in the fourth island, he meets the horses, who try to treat him as a human being, as someone with moral dignity, and this is the most unsettling of all his encounters because he can’t live up to their expectations, and so returns home a broken man. As critics have long argued, the four alternative worlds are a sequence, the first three of them as inferior to the life in Great Britain, their home culture, because each of them are parodies of England, and the fourth culture is much superior to his own in that people have resigned themselves or else achieved a kind of serenity because they are not ambitious, the previous three cultures dominated, in turn, by power, pleasure and fantasy. What is clear is that other previously unknown other societies are either superior or inferior to our present society, and so that is just the way it is.
There are fictional portrayals of encounters between alternative societies not previously encountered who make contact and are found to be technologically inferior or superior from one another. If humans are culturally and technologically more advanced than are the aliens they encounter, then the more powerful group will plunder and pillage so as to get land and resources or else may instead imagine a Prime Directive which will protect the less advanced people to be protected from the intrusive people. What would happen should an alien species land on Earth? The aliens who land on Earth in Arthur C Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” are munificent, requiring only that people abolish bullfighting, Clarke obviously thinking that all elevated species in the universe would regard hurting animals for aesthetic reasons to be outrageous. On the other hand, we can imagine aliens to be predatory and destructive, crushing us for their own reasons, as is the case in H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”. Or, yet again, people and species superior enough to our own will wish to educate us, in which case our inferior kind would be transformed in ways we can hardly imagine, and so I wonder why the people who get onto the alien spacecraft in Spiekberg’s “Encounters of the Third Kind” do so, given that they will go mad or no longer recognize themselves, however benevolent are the intentions of the higher culture. That may be the reason Carl Sagan allows the aliens in “Contact” to create an environment for the human visitor that allows no information about the superior beings. If that were the alien plan, though, why bother making contact in the first place? It is also possible that the result of an alien interjection will just create mischief, as is the case with the alien visitor in Nicolas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth”, societies transformed, when all the alien had wanted to do was get enough water so as to save his home planet. Alien species are therefore like the possible ways in which God would do it or would choose to do it when He intervened with human kind: beneficent, or punishing, or even a bit silly.
Science fiction outdoes Swift only in one respect. It gives you a sense of how eerie and truly strange are the ways of the aliens. Sometimes that is accomplished by the simple device of making them like a creature from a more primitive Earth, which is what happens in “Alien”, where they are like dinosaurs and so have reptilian emotions. Or they are made hyper-rational, like robots, because then they are more logical than we are and so cold without being disgusting. The robots who return to the drowned New York in Spielberg/Kubrick’s “Artificial Intelligence” are trying to understand what humans were like before they became extinct and so rescue the Pinocchio character because he is an informant about a dead civilization even though he is a very early form of robot and so has a highly undeveloped soul.
The most successful of the science fiction versions of the first contact story that I know of is Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rama”, which manages to allow you to grasp what an advanced technology would seem like to mere humans. They would see some reasoning at work in the productions of the aliens, and yet not grasp either the underlying mechanisms of the technology or the motivations of the aliens, only that they are disturbing and fearsome because they are so strange. For all that, though, their rationality suggests they may be friendly and approachable. The reader is left to his quandary.
We know, of course, that there are real life encounters between peoples which had never before been encountered with one another and so are first contacts. The American Indians and the Europeans had never met (or at least had forgotten the meeting of the Vikings and the Newfoundlanders), nor had Australian Aborigines ever met Europeans and visa versa. What happened in fact in these encounters? The inferior technological people get slaughtered or decimated from disease or otherwise subjugated. The real history of Polynesian exploration makes clear that the concept of non-interference is quaint. The British never left the Samoans alone, or we the Hawaiians. If, on the other hand, as has happened with the Maori in New Zealand after their fierce but futile warfare, is that the Maori were reduced in number and wealth and is nowadays recovering from being a set of social outcasts and a lower class people.
The Age of Discovery which unexpectedly introduced Europeans to Africans, to North Americans and to South Americans who had no knowledge of Europe differs from the prior and future contacts between Europe and other major civilizations. Contact between China and Europe was sporadic but there is no way to speak of a first contact because there was always trade between China and the West. Marco Polo fit fairly easily into the Emperor’s Court in China because there were cultural differences rather than a cultural lag between Europe and China. Europe and Islamic civilization were at war from the very earliest days of Islam and, indeed, Pirenne would say that what we think of as European civilization is created out of its wars with Islam. The contacts after 1492 were therefore different in kind from what happened before. The technologically and culturally superior and inferior cultures caught unaware of the other at the time of the signal event of the mutual discovery initiated by the superior culture. The Aztecs did not send out ships that would find their way to Europe. Pocahontas was presented at the English Court without ever becoming a lady in waiting.
There are a number of what we might call sociological rules of what would happen as a result of a first contact, all of which are derived from the basic definition of the process already alluded to: that there is a great technological gap between the cultures and structures of the two parties. First, resistance by the technologically inferior people is futile. The strengths of the alien invaders are very clear and the extent of those strengths unknown. If they have a musket, what other weapons of mass destruction might they possess? If they are in some sense visitors from the gods, and that metaphor is as good as any, any resistance may itself be cause for more outrage. Gods are to be appeased, not opposed, such is their power. It is always possible to engage in mass suicide, but that seems a choice reserved for already well organized peoples, such as the Jews at Masada and the Japanese at Okinawa.
It may be possible to negotiate a temporary truce so as to provide time to see if a takeover is inevitable and one would simply be bloodied or worse in the course of resistance. The intruding race may acquiesce in such a case so as not to risk too much. But there is never any question that one or the other side will achieve a total victory and that the inferior group will become servants or slaves or dead. So what if you take a few of the intruders with you? Montezuma allowed Cortez into his city perhaps partly because he needed time to think how to handle this visitor from the gods; he also did so because there was no way to assess the weapons available to Cortez, however few were his soldiers in number and however familiar they may have seemed in other respects, acting, we may presume, in numerous ungodly ways. Maybe that is the way it is with these gods.
Second, there is nothing to negotiate beyond that temporary truce. Whatever the inferior group has is there for the taking by the superior group. So what is to be traded? What did the North American Indians have to negotiate with the white men? They wanted their land to remain free of wholesale intrusion, and wholesale intrusion was what the white men wanted. Indians kept ceding land, but the whites wanted all the arable and not so arable land. Even if it were possible for the Indians to have ceded only mining rights, that would still have required communities of whites to extract the wealth. (The alternative would have been Indians inveigled to become miners for nominal wages. That would have been better?) Either way, even the beginnings of a commercial economy would have left a big footprint. The history of broken treaties over a course of two hundred years shows that the treaties were useless.
The Amerindian enclaves known as reservations do not have the resilience of, for example, Jewish ghettos. The Jews had been in contact with the gentiles back to the time when the early Christians still thought of themselves as Jews. The two could coexist, the Jews useful to even if religiously anathema to the Christians. The Jews were therefore subject only to occasional pogroms to restore some imagined balance between the Jewish creditors and the Gentile debtors and to show who was boss and to express some understandable and temporary outrage against the Christ killers. The idea that it was necessary to perpetuate a genocide that would finally settle the matter was a consummation many may have devoutly wished for, but it took a political party both nihilistic and Millenarian to actually try to pull it off.
Amerindian reservations did not become places of economic prosperity in the midst of a now alien environment. Rather, they became places to die or in which to stay drunk. The old Indian schools that inculcated assimilation may have been the most humane and successful Indian program the U. S. government ever tried. That was the case until long after the end of the Indian times, when it became feasible for people claiming Indian ancestry to dredge up old treaties as ways of arguing in the white man’s courts for the right to build casinos, a right then contracted to developers.
A third general principle of first contacts is that the conquered peoples rapidly fall into place within the social structures of the conquering peoples. A system of social status reinforces the brute power the conquering people wield at the beginning of their reign. What other choice is there, if resistance is futile? One might speculate that there would be the need, instead, for long term wars to gradually pacify the natives. That does not happen because an insurgency requires an alternative world view as well as an alternative and relatively resilient social structure, neither of which are available to people who have not emerged into the Bronze Age. Native religions continue under the guise of official adherence to the newly arrived churches, and groups quickly find their place in the pecking order of color and manners and language instituted by the conquerors. Mexican Indians become peasants working the plantations set up by the Spanish or work, more like slaves, on the plantations set up “for their own benefit” by the Church, which believed that work makes you free, at least in spirit. In Africa, the British install indirect rule and so need to supply only regional advisors and administrators to supervise the development of a money economy and a judicial system and an educational system and all the other things that the British, for good reason, thought was necessary for the development of a more humane and more prosperous society.
Fourth, the conquered people fester. They first become mercenaries, which is what happened to the tribes that Cortez quickly picked up on his march inland, and who may have thought that Cortez was their Gulliver. Then the conquered people become parasites on the conquering community because they do not have an independent economic or cultural infrastructure to fall back upon when the conquerors leave and they have not assimilated the ways of the conquerors well enough to continue their development on their own. East African cash crop agriculture was largely unsuccessful, which is usually the case in tropical climates, and so East African agriculture retreated into subsistence agriculture. The Portuguese and the British and the Germans extracted what they could, and when their geopolitical interests changed they left, just as the Arabs had before them, and the lives of the East Africans does not seem to have been greatly improved by the encounter. They are subject to pestilence, rampaging armies (now made up of fellow Africans), starvation and superstition.
The natives were not able to continue the use of the coastal ports as centers for regional trade perhaps because, unlike in Lowlands Europe, they did not have a productive near coast agriculture to provide the wealth that could be invested in commerce. Economists may be right in thinking that modernization is rooted in agricultural productivity. Only successful agriculture can keep people from running to the cities and turning them into slums because whatever low pay they got is worth more than what they would have made back in the village. (This is a complicated issue. English villagers did run to the new factories in the cities. Were they responding to the carrot of wages even higher than the economic value of remaining on the land or were they responding to the stick of the enclosure movement which drove them off the land?)
Culture also moved to the side of the conquerors. The religions that now dominate Africa are not the nationalistic religions that replaced the missionary churches nor the tradition steeped versions of the religions of the conquerors that had their turn next. The religions that thrive in Africa now are as orthodox forms of Christianity and Islam as is to be found anywhere in the world. The Catholic Church in Latin America purged its religion of its aspirations to embody the desires of people for this worldly liberation, and is gradually pruning it of its superstitions (a lengthy process not accomplished in Europe until, let us say, the time of the Counter-Reformation).That is why the next Pope might be from Africa or Latin America, and why Evangelical Christianity, another embodiment of the conquerors, makes headway by praising this worldly aspirations.
Recent elaborations of the stories of the first contacts between human races find ways to characterize the conquerors as evil. The first way is to tell the story of the conquered races by placing it in the context of the wonderful civilizations that preceded the coming of the conquerors, these laid waste or unappreciated by the conquerors, or having disappeared for unknown reasons before the arrival of the conquerors. This story, of course, is a revival of the legends that the conquerors themselves told of El Dorado, the mountain of gold, the fountain of youth, and so on. This storyline is also the background for the Book of Mormon, with its tales of a civilization something like that of Palestine at the time of Jesus. Why would the American continent have been left out of the redemption of humanity? That is just a grander version of the idea that great civilizations must have existed outside the knowledge of Europe, for otherwise history is subject to the godless processes of social evolution.
The second storyline is that the decline of the natives to their present condition was brought about by the conquerors only partly because they exploited the labor and the resources of the natives and mostly because the diseases the conquerors brought with them destroyed the native populations. And indeed African slaves were brought to the Caribbean to replace the native Amerindians who died, for whatever reasons, on the plantations.
The trouble with this double whammy, as that has been presented by the journalist Charles Mann, in his book “1491”, is the lack of evidence for either the great civilizations or the great plagues. Yes, there are mud cities in Africa, and yes, the Aztecs were on the brink of a written language. That, however, is the end of it. The gardens Mann talks about on the East Coast of Africa are a sign of a gardening people not yet advanced to the point of a full scale agriculture such as is found in Egypt long before the times of the Bible. The Indians of the Great Plains had for the most part not even reached that point, remaining hunting and gathering societies. The child sacrifice practiced by the Aztecs is known in the time recounted in “Genesis” only as, possibly, an archaic, ironic and silent reference useful for interpreting the story of Abraham and Isaac. The Incas have no wheels and so depend on runners to connect their empire, which means the empire was probably a very loose confederation. Now, maybe they were better off for living in their Eden, in what some anthropologists call their primitive socialism, where nobody had much more than anyone else and no one wanted much more, but that is different from saying that they had great civilizations that were somehow lost.
If these people were undone by a great plague or a series of them that were set off by the arrival of the Europeans, where are the records, given that such a holocaust would not be lost on the literate civilizations which conquered them? Those who wrote their accounts of the early colonial world of Mexico provide no such information. And if the good Fathers were trying to cover the catastrophe up, where are and what became of the oral histories or the masks and statues that the survivors might have created? Oral histories can survive only if they last enough to be written down.
The truth of the matter is that there is no putting down a good story of epic upheavals of earth and of pestilence to mark a change of times. We look to the sky to find a star of Bethlehem because such a splendid event must shake the roof of heaven; we blame hurricanes and disease on the intrusions of mankind into nature, this time to identify a villain rather than a savior. The changes wrought on the Western hemisphere, and on those other places of first contact, are more likely though not as dramatically explained by the quotidian working out of the social relationships between those who are on the two sides of some great cultural and social divide. On the ground, the weaker party just either adjusts or dies in the attempt.