[lemiant]

This is analogous to arguing against exploring the Americas because Europe had poverty.

It seems to me that over a couple hundred year time horizon the new land, resources, technologies and economies of scale added by the new world were clearly a net benefit to europeans as a whole and paid back the initial investment many times over.

[johnea]

If Europe had ended poverty before enslaving the rest of the world, it would be a much better world now.

How could anyone argue against that?

A people that were interested in raising others around them out of poverty, before setting off to devastate and enslave other continents, would probably have treated the people they found on those continents much more humanly.

If the european colonial diaspora had set out to advance other places, as opposed to exploiting them, we probably wouldn't have global poverty today.

The "return on investment" of colonizing north america was made by exporting tobacco to europe, clear cutting the north american continent, near extincting major mega-fauna and replacing them with invasive species, and shipping africans to the americas for slave labor.

Considering that a net positive is a dubious conclusion. But of course we have to ask: net positive for whom?

And of course, misses the point of the original comment: that there are no resources to be exploited 40 light years from earth! It's a one way trip...

[cupcakecommons]

Incredibly anti-historical take.

[mistrial9]

> before enslaving the rest of the world

try a broad History of Slavery before asserting that the Age of Exploration was just one big slave-fest, please. Its a bigoted statement to meld them together without the actions of other civilizations taken into account.

[lo_zamoyski]

This is such a silly take. Europe enslaved the world? Sorry, but slavery was an institution long before some Europeans took part in it (emphasis on "took part" as it was cooperative, involving African, Arab, etc. slave traders), and continues to be practiced long after those European empires abolished it within their own empires. The abolitionist movement was also European, and certainly Western. And how can you know if the world would have been better? That's a counterfactual you either cannot know, or one that fails to account for all the good that was also transmitted through colonialism, or absorbed by the colonial powers. It wasn't black and white. And even where the bad is concerned, while there is not argument for chattel slavery, good can come out of bad things. Furthermore, you are reducing European influence to one aspect of one aspect, not even just colonialism, which is not even uniquely European, but slavery per se. This is ridiculous.

Your argument w.r.t. poverty is also the same boring reductive fallacy that people who argue against beautiful architecture and art make ("You could have fed so many people with that money!"). Guess what: you can do both. You don't "solve poverty" by spending a sum of money on food over art. Those people will be hungry soon. That's one. Two, Man does not live by bread alone. Beauty matters. We don't live to eat. We eat to live. And yes, we can both care for the starving and invest in things other than helping the poor.

The idea that Europe is responsible for global poverty is also obtuse, historically illiterate, and devoid of common sense. There was plenty of poverty in the world before the evil European showed up. If anything, Western commerce, whatever its flaws, has lifted many out of poverty. Yes, capitalism, whatever its flaws, has lifted many, especially the West, out of poverty and into a good deal of material comfort. Look at the 20th century alone. It's better to be poor today than poor a century or a few centuries ago. The average man today is far better off today materially than he has ever been, than even the materially better off in previous centuries were.

Our ancestors weren't perfect, and we should not repeat their errors, but it takes a certain kind of ingratitude and blindness to fail to appreciate the cumulative good they did leave us, an ingratitude and blindness seemingly particular to snarky, ideologically infected oikophobes in the West. Believe me: Africans aren't generally seething with hatred at the good of the West the way people in the West do. If anything, they are more likely to despise the malaise and decadence they see in the West today, that the West is trying to force down the throats of everyone else. They are looking to replicate what is actually good in the West in their own countries.