Moral relativism is applied solely to Amerindians and never to Europeans. History requires constructive values, not rigid doctrines.
Last month, historian Mary Del Priore needed police protection to present História das Mestiçagens no Brasil (A History of Racial Mixing in Brazil), a volume of essays she co-edited with Gian Melo. The book stands out as a serious scholarly work that challenges the Brazilian Black movement’s rigid stance that racial mixing should be condemned, being seen only as a product of slave owners’ rapes. This friendly faction of society does not hesitate to threaten physical harm; recently, troublemakers at a federal university assaulted a history student simply for wearing a “Death in June” band T-shirt, with no repercussions. Even after clarifying it was a band shirt and not a Nazi symbol, the attackers rationalized the attack by alleging the student had called someone a “monkey.”
The situation is tiring; thirteen years ago, sociologist Demétrio Magnoli was physically blocked from speaking at a literary event simply because he opposed racial quotas, as the reader can verify here, in a publication funded by the discredited Ford Foundation applauding the hooligans and branding Magnoli a racist. At this juncture, one can only sigh and ask: Quousque tandem? How long must this continue?
Regarding history, as with science
In the previous article, I noted that from the 19th century onward, the scientific community abandoned the Christian notion of a mathematically precise Creator and quietly adopted materialism—a worldview compatible both with Enlightenment deism and Darwinian atheism. The issue with such implicit premises is that they go unchallenged unless explicitly voiced. When a powerful institution supports a belief, criticism has a definite target.
In natural sciences, the main institution targeted was the Catholic Church. Following the Galileo conflict, however, the Church reconciled with science, producing figures like Fr. Lemaître. Moreover, contributing to canonizations by testifying to miracles does not tarnish scientists’ reputations, even if such claims conflict with materialist assumptions. Yet, scientific contributions are overlooked in favor of a widespread perception of a split between science and religion. On the materialist side, no leading scientific authority robustly defends materialism; instead, we see isolated promoters like Sagan and Dawkins who simply assume materialism, yet are portrayed as scientific exemplars. Meanwhile, media outlets spread horoscopes, crystal healing, and other New Age myths.
It struck me that something similar happens with History, where the state replaces the Church. Official historiography is easy to criticize, but critics rarely propose clear, challengable alternatives. The Ford Foundation supports a spectrum of individuals: from Florestan Fernandes (1920–1995), who recognized that racial mixing was more complex than mere rape, to NGOs staffed by zealots acting as vandals and slanderers. The institutional framework is opaque, lacking a comprehensive vision and focusing mainly on condemning positive narratives promoted by the government or major academics like Gilberto Freyre. This translates into a form of “Paulo Freire-style” indoctrination in schools, teaching children to be “critical” because “contentism” is condemned.
Uncritical embrace of decolonialism
The result is an arrogant certainty typical of the woke: they possess no real knowledge—since there is no “contentist” curriculum—but still claim the right to lecture as “critical” thinkers. This conceit is an end in itself, making it difficult for such minds to grasp genuine study. Objectivity is openly attacked.
Conversely, one can also accept uncritically the decolonial narrative promoted by the Ford Foundation and like-minded groups—that Brazil should never have been discovered by the Portuguese nor its people existed. According to this view, Spain’s discovery of Mexico is the ultimate crime… yet the real genocide of Indigenous peoples by Anglophones in territories once Mexican is barely mentioned. The human sacrifices by the Aztecs against other Amerindians receive minimal attention; what matters is that the Americas should not have been “discovered” by Iberian monarchies. This is no “discovery” but an “invasion,” they claim. Brazil is branded the world’s most racist country due to slavery, while the USA, which held onto slavery longer and entered WWII still discriminating against blacks, is encouraged as a model for Brazil’s improvement.
Endorsement by a capable historian
It is possible to adopt this implicit creed without being ignorant or inept. Consider the book A heresia dos índios [The heresy of the Amerindians] (1995) by historian Ronaldo Vainfas. In this study, Vainfas undertakes the formidable task of using 20th-century anthropological knowledge and Portuguese Inquisition archives to reconstruct a piece of 16th-century Brazilian history from a bizarre tale found in trial documentation.
The story involves Fernão Cabral, a Portuguese slave owner in Jaguaripe, Bahia. In 1585, he became known as “Tupã” or God to a group of rebellious Amerindians seeking to enslave the Portuguese and honor Tupã-Açu (Great God) in their own church. This church had its own “Pope,” an Amerindian man named Antônio, baptized but having fled into the forests. Within this place, Amerindians worshipped an anthropomorphic stone called Tupã-Açu and celebrated occasions featuring tobacco, alcohol, and dancing. Indigenous people abandoned other plantations and Jesuit missions for Cabral’s lands, where they took multiple wives and ate meat on Fridays, according to their old customs. When other landowners objected, the government finally dismantled the Amerindian church, and normalcy was restored.
This episode might have faded into oblivion if the Holy Office’s first Visitation had not occurred in 1591. Many denounced Fernão Cabral, so the inquisitor—accustomed to dealing with Judaizing New Christians, impostor priests, bigamists, and sodomites—faced the baffling Tupi worldview shared by mestizos and settlers. The inquisitor believed the tattooed men’s main offense was eating meat on Fridays, unaware these tattoos resulted from anthropophagic rituals.
Moralizing without foundation
Undeniably, this is impressive scholarship unattainable by the typical “woke” activist. Still, the author’s moral judgments—lacking solid argumentation—stand out. The epigraph sets the tone: “Peoples and indigenous groups vanished from the face of the earth as a consequence of what is today called, in a sheepish euphemism, the encounter between Old World and New World societies.” It is an odd choice for a work focused not on Indigenous genocide but on their forced acculturation. In Brazil, abundant tear-jerking works explore acculturation; far fewer address actual extermination. Words dilute their meaning.
Despite rigorous research, the book’s ethos is that Brazil should not have been discovered, that “colonialism” is evil, and the Indigenous pre-Columbian religion—imbued with “anti-Christian and anti-slavery [sic!] content”—was virtuous. The Tupi pursued the “Land Without Evil”—hence their nomadic lifestyle—while the Portuguese turned Brazil into a “Land of Endless Evils.” Near the conclusion, the author admits: “It is with some embarrassment that I must acknowledge this supreme victory of the colonial system—capable of invading Tupi mythology itself and colonizing its collective imagination: the Tupinambá ‘Land Without Evil’ would transform into a slave-holding utopia” (p. 277). Vainfas’s vague phrasing suggests the Tupi did not own slaves. The original “Land Without Evil” was free of slavery, resembling the Land of Cockaigne, where food comes unbidden and work is unnecessary. The new “Land Without Evil” having white slaves merely reflects a primal drive for revenge.
After pages of condemning inquisitors’ persecution of Indigenous peoples (while noting the Portuguese generally were less prone to such acts), Vainfas writes: “There is no doubt that [the inquisitorial visitor] Heitor Furtado defeated the arrogant lord of Jaguaripe in the theater of the Inquisition, despite never truly understanding the nature of the [Indigenous] sanctity. It sufficed for him, however, to label it idolatry and, consequently, heresy; it sufficed to force Fernão Cabral to bow before him—the visitor—pleading for mercy. In the Baroque theater of the Inquisition, the performance of heresy mattered more, I believe, than the victory of the faith” (p. 238, emphasis added). That is, the inquisitors acted from pure cruelty rather than higher purpose.
However, the label “heresy” obsessed Vainfas, despite it never occurring in Heitor Furtado’s documents regarding Indigenous peoples. Pagans were idolaters but not heretics, as heresy applies only to baptized Christians who later reject Christ. An apostate who abandons Christianity after baptism is not a heretic. This fixation undermined the book’s title—announcing a concept never established. Vainfas portrays Indigenous religion as a new syncretism merging Jesuit Marian devotion with pre-Columbian rites centered on an anthropomorphic rattle. Christ is never mentioned; only Great God (the stone), God (Fernão Cabral), Mother of God (an Indigenous woman), and Santinho (an Indigenous man) appear.
What troubles me most is the moralizing tone offered without prior reasoning or backing. Given his evidence, one might view pre-contact Tupi life as harsh. The Tupi celebrated acquiring multiple names and jenipapo tattoos, each symbolizing a warrior they killed and consumed in ritual cannibalism. Their existence revolved around following a pajé (shaman or independent priest) who guided their migrations and wars by communicating with spirits. All this aimed at reaching the Land Without Evil, thought to lie on the coast before the Portuguese arrived. Since the coast was inhabited, achieving this involved war, gaining names, tattoos, and slaves. Would anyone desire a life resembling a Tarantino twist on Waiting for Godot?
Is this lifestyle honorable? Both Vainfas and I detest slavery. I would add that senseless warfare, cannibalism, and premature death are equally objectionable. Did Tupi society hold any hope to end such ills? Could the Land Without Evil, where arrows hunted on their own, be reached?
I find it ironic that the phrase “it’s their culture” applies only to so-called Westerners—that is, Europeans and their unmixed descendants in the Americas and Africa. No one claims murdering Jews as part of German culture or the auto-de-fé as a Spanish tradition. Europeans are held to a standard of moral elevation, while Amerindians are granted moral relativism and the brutal, agonizing existence their culture entailed.
Evaluation grounded in data
An important topic I have discussed before here at SCF is that the Spanish colonial model was far more institutionalized and state-directed than the Portuguese; likewise, the Portuguese model was more organized than the Dutch. While the Spanish Inquisition maintained tribunals in the Americas, the Portuguese Inquisition had none, even under the Spanish Habsburgs. As a result, accusations against landowners abusing others in Brazil had to await visits from Inquisition agents.
Vainfas’s study reveals that sheltering apostate Amerindians was among Fernão Cabral’s two offenses that outraged Bahia’s populace; the other was the brutal killing of a pregnant Amerindian woman. Enraged that his wife and the woman Isabel were gossiping, Cabral ordered Isabel thrown alive into a furnace, warning anyone who opposed would suffer the same fate. Her appeals to the Virgin Mary were ignored. This event in Jaguaripe was infamous even in the City of Bahia, about 100 km away. Although servant mistreatment fell outside the Inquisition’s domain, accusers sometimes engaged in interpretive gymnastics to present such abuses as inquisitorial concerns, as historian Luiz Mott shows in “Tortura de escravos e heresias na Casa da Torre” (Slave Torture and Heresies at the House of Tower).
Whether one approves or not, Vainfas convincingly shows that typical Luso-Brazilian landowners saw themselves as gods on their estates, with only the Inquisition able to check their power. Fernão Cabral spent nearly a year imprisoned, was sentenced to two years of exile, and fined heavily, equivalent to the cost of twenty African slaves. He likely escaped execution only because he was an Old Christian. Still, this was a concession. The story’s lesson is that the Portuguese Inquisition functioned as a vital counterbalance to Brazil’s all-powerful private lords—not found in Spanish America. To portray the Inquisition as sheer evil obscures Brazil’s real power dynamics, portraying despots as victims of cruel fanaticism and ignoring the inquisitors’ political and social motives. This perspective offers little aid to historical understanding.
Historical judgments should be grounded in affirmative values—such as respect for the dignity of past peoples and power distributions within societies. This stance enables crafting a constructive national agenda and fosters a true grasp of reality.
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