QOTD

Proof that reporters always have been communitarian agitators, from Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in his recent biography of the man after whom two continents were named, Amerigo, at page 150-51:

Vespucci was explicit about the models he had in mind when he attempted to interpret the Indians' unashamed nakedness. They dwelled, he said, in an Eden or a Golden Age. This was also the way Castile's court humanist, Peter Martyr of Anghiera, thought. Publicizing Columbus's discoveries in a work published in 1500, he asserted that on Columbus's islands, "the land belongs to all, just like the sun and water. Mine and thine, the seeds of all evils, do not exist for these people. . . They live in a golden age. . . in open gardens, without laws or books, without judges, and they naturally follow goodness and consider odious anyone who corrupts himself by practicing evil." On his second voyage, after publication of this work, Vespucci transferred Peter Martyr's judgment almost word for word to Brazil, alleging that they practiced a kind of primitive communism. It was not true. . .

[Yet it] was subversive stuff. There was a theological implication almost too devastating to acknowledge: Had a state of prelapsarian innocence survived original sin in some hitherto unfrequented paradise? Any suggestion that there were some people exempt from original sin challenged the entire basis of Christian morality. And for perplexed humanists, the problem of how to understand the myth of the Golden Age was a burning issue. Was there really an era of morally superior people, such as the classical poets sang of, in the past, and if so, did vestiges of it survive beyond the corrosive touch of commerce? If it was just a myth about the past, the Golden Age could become a programmatic utopia--a vision of a possible future in which inequality and injustice would vanish.