“In North America white men have created for themselves a white republic with the most shameful laws of slavery.”
— Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)
In 2019 we celebrate the 250th birthday of the scientist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt, the true “discoverer” of America according to Simon Bolívar, who knew him personally. Between 1799 and 1804, Alexander von Humboldt, accompanied by the French botanist Aimé Bonpland,
traveled through the colonies of Spanish America, exploring regions
that today belong to Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and Cuba. Back
in Europe, Humboldt began publishing several books recounting his
adventures in America, revealing the natural and cultural riches of
South America to a curious and fascinated European public.
While writing about the wonders of the tropical
nature of America and the cultural wealth of its original peoples,
Humboldt denounced — like no other before him — the horrors of slavery,
the oppression of Indigenous peoples, and the injustices of the colonial
system. Its importance for our time is due precisely to his ability to
see the interrelations between the environment, society, politics and
the economy. He was the first modern Western thinker to scientifically
describe the planet as a living organism where humans, plants, animals,
soils and climate interact and influence each other. The novelty of this
vision at his time, when a mechanistic view of nature still prevailed,
was revolutionary. For Humboldt, poetry and science were two
complementary and necessary ways of understanding the world. His
influence on poets, writers, and scientists was enormous. Goethe loved
spending hours talking to his younger friend Humboldt. Both “Faust” and
his studies of plants might not have existed as we know them today had
it not been for Humboldt’s influence.
Charles Darwin took several of
Humboldt’s books with him on his Beagle voyage, with which he was in
constant dialogue. Without Humboldt, Darwin would hardly have written
the Origin of Species, nor would Thoreau hardly have written Walden.
Humboldt was probably the last scientist capable of
understanding almost all scientific thinking of his day, and used this
knowledge to show how different phenomena relate to each other in an
approach that we would call today «interdisciplinary».
While exploring the Valencia Lake region in
present-day Venezuela, for example, Humboldt began to understand the
relationship between agriculture and climate change. He wrote:
“When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters, with an imprudent precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant. The beds of the rivers, remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents, whenever great rains fall on the heights. The sword and moss disappearing with the brush-wood from the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course; and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive filtrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, bear down the loosened soil and form those sudden inundations that devastate the country.”
Humboldt drew attention to the fact that forests
increase the ability of soils to retain water and how they contribute to
regulate climate. Understanding these interrelationships and how they
contribute to climate change is a key part of the work of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — what Humboldt did
more than 100 years ago. Moreover, Humboldt clearly denounced the
colonial system and the capitalist mode of production — without using
this term — as the main mode responsible for the destruction of the
environment and consequent impacts on climate: European farmers and
their production turned to the interests of the metropolis, using slave
labor and expelling Indigenous peoples from their lands. Humboldt
clearly denounced European colonial “barbarism” and presented a vision
of South American Indigenous peoples and black slaves differently from
the dominant assumptions of their time. Humboldt not only rejected the
endemic racism and the supposed “superiority” of the “white race”, but
declared that the cultures of Indigenous peoples are as creative and
diverse as European cultures. In addition, Humboldt vehemently attacked
Count Buffon, one of the leading proponents of European “scientific
racism,” and exposed the ridicule of his ideas.
The progress of science in the 19th century has
inevitably led to even greater specializations and the relative
isolation of various scientific disciplines, thus hindering an integral
view of the planet that Humboldt still could have. This situation is
still prevalent today, since the greatest difficulty we have is
integrating the enormous amount of knowledge that we accumulated in
several fields into an overview — a fundamental task that could
contribute immensely to our future. Once again, the work of the IPCC is a
concrete and current example of this attempt. However, by its very
nature, the IPCC cannot clearly and precisely include the political and
economic dimensions in its studies — or even superficially allude to the
problems posed by the capitalist economy, not to mention condemning
capitalism itself.
If, on one hand, Humboldt’s world-view, combining
philosophy, poetry and natural sciences, was possible only at the time
he lived; on the other hand, in a certain way, Humboldt came “too soon”.
He died before Germany began its experiments with colonies in Africa,
especially in Namibia, and the consequent upsurge of “scientific” racism
in Germany and throughout Europe.
The Count de Gobineau, who would retake the banner of
Bouffon racism so ridiculed by Humboldt, was born in 1816 — Humboldt
was then 47 — and lived until 1882, so over 20 years after Humboldt
died, over 20 years of “work” spreading racist theories with no one with
the same reputation and ability as Alexander von Humboldt to contradict
him. The connection between German colonialism in Africa and the later
emergence of the Nazi movement has been amply demonstrated by historians
such as David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen in “The Kaiser’s
Holocaust.” With the rise of Nazism in Germany in the late 1920s, how
could the thinking of Humboldt, the most celebrated German scientist of
the 19th century, be reconciled with the Nazi ideology? In fact, at the
end of the 19th century, Humboldt had already become an embarrassing
character for Europe’s cultural capitalist elite. Consequently, his work
had to be expunged from its most visionary part: its denunciation of
colonialism, economic exploitation of the environment, and of human
beings — especially Indigenous peoples and slaves. We had to forget that
the most celebrated scientist of all time attacked racism and defended
the Indigenous peoples and black slaves from capitalist economic
exploitation, precisely so that the exploitation of third world
countries by the same European powers denounced by Humboldt could
continue.
I may be mistaken, but I do not think that Karl Marx –
an exact contemporary of the Count de Gonineau – studied the writings
of Humboldt in depth. I believe that Marxism would have acquired another
understanding of colonialism, racism and the supposed “superiority” of
European civilization and the “white race” over Indigenous and black
peoples. The ideas of Hegel on all that – a contemporary of Humboldt who
greatly influenced Marx – were much closer to the thinking of Count de
Gobineau than to the revolutionary vision of Humboldt.
Perhaps the most relevant contribution of Humboldt to
the understanding of our own times comes from the relationship between
him, Simon Bolivar (image on the right), and Thomas Jefferson (image
below). On his return from the voyage through Spanish America in 1804,
Humboldt spent a short time in the United States where he met Thomas
Jefferson, the then celebrated President of the U.S.A. Jefferson shared
the same interests in natural sciences as Humboldt, and also had an
encyclopaedic mind. The two got along very well, talking for hours when
Humboldt was a guest at the White House. But there was an irreconcilable
fundamental question between the two: slavery. Thomas Jefferson, one of
the founding fathers of the new republic that claimed to be the
homeland of liberty and equality was not only the owner of slaves, but
also advocated the importance of maintaining slavery for the economic
development of the United States. Humboldt denounced the horror and
hypocrisy underlying such an idea of “economic development”. Jefferson
also agreed with Buffon’s ideas about the “inferiority” of the “black
race”, which Humboldt considered idiotic.
Shortly after his return to Paris, Humboldt was
introduced to a young gentleman, newly arrived from the Spanish colonies
of America: Simon Bolívar, the future “liberator”. Bolivar reported how
the meeting with Humboldt opened his eyes to the wonders and potential
of his own country: the future Venezuela.
As Bolívar wrote in his famous “Letter of Jamaica”, it was Humboldt who really showed him his own continent, America.
The two met again some months later in Rome – and at
this time Bolívar already spoke about the independence of Spanish
America. At this moment, the advice and wisdom of Humboldt were
fundamental for the political maturity of young Bolívar. While in Rome,
Bolivar would swear an oath to free America, and then return to his
country.
Bolívar’s fight for the independence of the Spanish
colonies did not go unnoticed by Thomas Jefferson, who corresponded with
Humboldt, requesting information about the revolutionary movement led
by Bolivar as it unfolded — questions that Humboldt could answer “better
than any other”, as Jefferson wrote. But Jefferson’s relationship with
the struggle for liberation from the Spanish colonies was rather
ambiguous. If on one hand, Jefferson considered important the
establishment of republics and the end of control by the Spanish
monarchy in the American territory, he also feared the consequences of
this liberation on the U.S. economy. While Spain maintained its control
over the colonies, the U.S. economy benefited from the export of grains
and wheat to Spanish America, since the agriculture of the colonies was
entirely geared to the financial interests of the metropolis or, as we
would say today, was an economy based on the export of a few products to
the world market. With independence, the colonies could produce their
own food, which was a blow to U.S. exports.
The independence of Spanish America posed
another, much greater danger to the United States — a danger that
Jefferson understood very well: he hoped the colonies would remain
separate and not unite in one country, for as “a single mass they will
be a very powerful neighbour”, Jefferson admitted.
And since then, this has been the great nightmare of
the US: a united, independent and powerful South America. It is the main
reason behind the United States’ aggression towards Venezuela today.
Venezuela has oil and other natural resources coveted by the large
multinational corporations intrinsically linked to the elite that
governs the United States. But this fact does not fully explain the
U.S.A’s intense aversion and hostility towards Venezuela. The deepest
and oldest reason dates back to Humboldt’s time, to the liberation wars
of Bolivar and the Jefferson administration: the necessity of
preventing, by all means, the union of South America, of not allowing
its development to be independent and sovereign. Since his election in
1999, Hugo Chavez suffered three violent attacks: the 2002 coup, the
2002-2003 “strike” and the 2004 “recall” referendum, not to mention the
permanent attempts to destabilize and strangle Venezuelan economy. But
Chávez also contributed most to Latin American integration: UNASUR and
CELAC were initiatives led mainly by Venezuela under his government, the
most dangerous challenge to U.S. hegemony in the region since the Cuban
revolution. Hugo Chávez and Venezuela dared to revive Simon Bolivar’s
dream of an independent, united, sovereign and powerful South America.
The empire cannot bear this affront — nor this threat.
Simon Bolívar, unlike Jefferson, freed all
his slaves and put in the constitution of the first country he liberated
from Spanish rule the prohibition of slavery, hence Humboldt’s
admiration in the quotation at the beginning of this text. Humboldt
accompanied and encouraged the struggles for Spanish America’s
independence until the end of his life. Between Jefferson and Bolivar,
between a nation that frees its slaves and another that feeds on them,
Humboldt chose the side of Bolivar and his project.
In the 20th century, Humboldt would have defended and
supported the liberation movements of the European colonies in Africa
and Asia, exchanged letters with Ho Chi Min and defended Vietnam; he
would have welcomed the Cuban revolution and been friends with Fidel
Castro and Che Guevara. Humboldt would have admired Hugo Chavez and the
Bolivarian project, ALBA. There is no doubt that, today, Humboldt would
be defending Venezuela against the aggressions of the “Republic of white
men”. Gabriel Garcia Marquez knew this, that’s why Humboldt appears in
his novel “The General in his Labyrinth” and is also mentioned in “One
Hundred Years of Solitude”.
Perhaps the planned events of the “Humboldt Year”,
mainly by institutions in Germany, will not speak of this Humboldt.
Perhaps they will describe him as a character of the past, with little
relevance to the present or to the future, but then this could be
considered the most glaring example of Europe’s betrayal of its own
Enlightenment ideals today. When we see the elite of Europe joining the
lies of the Empire about Venezuela, when we see Europe joining the coup
against the legitimately elected government of Nicolas Maduro — it is
clear that this aggression is not only against the Venezuelan people,
but also against the best of European culture. Celebrating Humboldt
today and at the same time not defending Venezuela will be yet another
example of the hypocrisy and lack of intellectual honesty that seems to
have become the hallmark of our time.
It will perhaps be up to Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia
to move the celebrations of the “Humboldt Year” forward since Alexander
von Humboldt and his legacy live much more among these Latin American
peoples than in a neoliberal Europe increasingly submissive to the
interests of the Empire and the “white supremacy” it represents.
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This article was originally published on Alai. Translated from Spanish by Tamanna Kohi.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Franklin Frederick, Global Research, 2019
