"What happened?"

"The pale Europeans got ahead of Africa and the Americas on technology in a couple key places, especially weapons, and went around conquering and killing or enslaving a lot of people. Things have gotten more peaceful the last century or so but there are still a lot of awful aftereffects."

"We're going to handle things better," Eli says. "We are bringing civilization to the savages."

"Okay, see, it's not that I have any specific reason to disbelieve you, and I'm sure you're telling the truth as far as you know, but also that's exactly what people in Continentem said right before kidnapping children from their parents and destroying historical records and priceless religious art and things like that."

"...Really?" Eli says. "That seems like not at all how one would bring civilization to the savages. --I guess if 'kidnapping children from their parents' is a harsh word for 'schools'..."

"It's a word for schools where you don't get a choice about going and aren't allowed to see your parents."

"Well, if they have a choice about going, they might not go! And then they would miss out on the benefits of civilization."

"If the benefits of civilization don't sound attractive enough to interest them, maybe they don't need them that much! You can convince people to get clean water and, and the telegraph or whatever without imposing it on them by force!"

"Technology is one thing but they'll still have an inferior culture-- ignorant, passive, incapable of adapting to change, unwilling to labor..."

"That's also what the people who did awful stuff said, more or less. Look, what would you do if people from, I don't know, Antarctica showed up and said you had to abandon your language and your art and your philosophy and everything and adopt theirs? You'd want to look at it and take the parts you liked and reject the parts you didn't, right?"

"No? I would ignore them because Anglia is no doubt much more civilized than Antarctica."

"Okay, and what if some Anglians go to civilize somewhere else and the people there say 'no, we're ignoring you'? Will the Anglians do what they would want the Antarctica people to do in that case?"

"Well, no. But we're right and the Antarcticans are not. I am sure if I met people from the Lost Continent of Atlantis who were more civilized than I and I were taken off to a school I would thank them."

"What evidence do you have that you're right? And what evidence would you have to see to be convinced another civilization was better? Whatever it is, if it's really good evidence it will be convincing to other people and you won't need violence, you can just tell them information and sell them things."

"--I'm not sure. We have great literature and art and natural philosophy and ethics and a high level of technological advancement, but I don't want to commit to those being the important things before I've thought about it. And I'm not sure that other civilizations would necessarily be convinced. A child wants to go play Getting Tied Up with their friends, but it's better for them to go to school. Parents don't convince kids that school is important, they just force them to go to school, and later on the children are grateful."

Bruce liked school as soon as he tried it but he can see the general principle there. "That makes sense, but--there's an asymmetry between parents and children, right? Because parents have been children and know what it's like and children have never been parents, and children genuinely don't know enough to survive without parents. And even then parents still overstep their authority sometimes and do things that harm their children. But with different cultures, there isn't that. All the societies that exist can exist independently because they have been, and there isn't that shared experience where you know what it's like to be someone from another culture. So I don't think the analogy goes as far as it has to. Also, like, I'm not trying to work this out from first principles here. I have the benefit of hindsight; my ancestors did this stuff and now we bitterly regret it."

"I suppose. It might help to write up what you can remember."

"I've got a bunch of history stuff in my notepile, let me dig it up and I'll expand on it from there." He starts sorting through the papers until he finds the US History section, which has the most relevant details.

"Why would you enslave dark-skinned people? That's silly. One thing we won't do is assume people are uncivilized based on their skin tone."

"Skin tone happened to be correlated with where people lived and how much technology they had. They used skin tone as a marker, but justified it to themselves by claiming Black people were stupid because they hadn't invented as much stuff."

"Well, obviously once you educate them the savages will be as intelligent as anyone else. Anglians are superior in culture, not by nature."

"Then wouldn't everyone else be intelligent enough to know whether it's a good idea to adopt your culture or not? And maybe even have come up with some good culture of their own that Anglians might want to emulate?"

"Raw intelligence isn't all that matters. I am less intelligent than Archimedes but I know more math than he does because I have been educated. Education and culture are the things that matter."

"Education and culture are super important, I'm not disputing that. I'm not even disputing the possible benefits of, of exporting your culture to other people. I'm just saying that if it's worth doing it's worth doing voluntarily. If you showed Archimedes some new math, you wouldn't need to force him to believe it, he'd be able to see that it was true. And if you showed, I don't know, modern Anglian agricultural techniques to a Greek farmer, he'd be able to see whether they were useful for the land he was cultivating or not. You don't need to force anything on anyone, people can tell what's good when they see it."

"Not always. A lot of people objected to the smallpox vaccine. Said that smallpox was the natural way of things, or that it was blasphemous against the goddess Variola, or that the vaccine was made from cows and therefore would turn you into a cow. --We didn't, in fact, forcibly inject all of them, but in a country where everyone believes that instead of just some people..."