Note: Since this is the first occasion on which I’m relying primarily on the Internet home page to distribute these questions, I’m giving you an extra two days to turn in your essays.
If you submit an essay, please remember to indicate on it which question you are responding to.
1. Rogin suggests that the subjugation of the Indians revealed a totalitarian
side of American society (p11). He attributes this partly to economic motives,
but also partly to the psychology of the liberal way of life in America.
Briefly explain his psychoanalysis. Do you agree with it? Do you think
westward expansion was totalitarian? Could this characterization of the
totalitarianism of the American liberal persona be applied to other historical
periods and events? If so, what might be some examples?
2. Describe Todorov’s typology of otherness (“alterity”). Use it to characterize the final stage of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s thinking about Spanish-Indian relations (as described in “Typology of Relations with the Other”). Apply it as well to what Todorov says about Cortés in “Understanding, Taking Possession, and Destroying”. Explain the ethical ideal embedded in the typology. Do you agree with it?
3. Is Las Casas defending human sacrifice? Why/why not? According to Todorov at least, Las Casas seems to reject the argument that human sacrifice justifies armed intervention in a nation or culture’s affairs by outsiders. Are there any circumstances in which armed intervention in the affairs of another nation or culture would be justified, according to Las Casas’s perspectivism? Does Las Casas himself provide such an example when he enjoins the Spanish monarchy to overthrow the rule of the conquistadors? Would Las Casas think NATO justified in using armed force to stop “ethnic cleansing”?
4. Rogin and Todorov each seek to understand how the genocide of the European conquest of the Americas was possible, and each derives from his inquiry lessons meant to apply to the present. Compare their respective explanations and moral lessons.
5. Explain how Todorov is, in fact, discussing liberal values and liberal ethics. Is the problem of being liberal and multiculturalist similar to that of being Christian and a cultural relativist? Explain.
6. Your question (please speak with me before proceeding).