The farther one moved from Greece toward the distant edges of the world, the more strange and different are the lands and life-forms encountered there. Thus, Greece, Herodotus confidently tells his audience, sits at the stable center of the world, with “far the best and most temperate climate.” The most distant lands, he says, will likely have those things the Greeks think the finest and the rarest. He follows this ancient mythic geographic schema of distance determining the degree of cultural and geographical divergence from the comforting Greek norm at the center of the world throughout the Histories. The most remote lands also are where the strangest and most primitive tribes of fierce and ennobled savages are found. Nearer at hand are barbaric peoples, the nomadic livestock breeders, like the Scythians to the north, who are less savage but still practice ritual forms of cannibalism typical of highly uncivilized barbarians. Closest to Greece are those barbarians who are more or less civilized like the Greeks, with more or less sophisticated customs and belief systems.
The Romans took over this schema verbatim, though they knew of distant civilizations like China. It persisted through the Christianization of the Roman Empire. After the European invasion of the Americas, European thinkers simply carried over ancient stereotypes to the native peoples there. They were lawless and cruel, always at war, and had no conception of property, therefore European Christians were justified in killing them, enslaving them, and taking their land. This was at a time when European Christians were constantly at war with each other, torturing and executing offenders in public, and were busily trying to steal each other's land and property. Down to modernity, they also invaded other civilizations that had laws and property, from the Middle East to the Pacific Ocean. (Just as the Greeks and Romans had.) By that time, when Europeans had explored the entire world, it was no longer plausible to fantasize one-eyed people who walked upside down, and the main criterion for conquest was that a country wasn't Christian - though again, this didn't stop Christian countries from invading each other. What's going on here is projection: by describing the savage, the barbarian, we are describing ourselves.
And the mentality is still with us:
Think of all the different ways twenty-first-century politicians, military generals, and talking heads on cable news programs draw on a language of savagery to describe the West’s violent, dangerously opposed enemies in the “primitive” mountain ranges and “tribally controlled” territories of Afghanistan or Pakistan. People over there are stuck in the “Stone Age”; they are possessed of a “medieval” mentality. A distinctively Westernized language of savagery, dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks and their civilization-defining conflicts with the “barbarian” hordes of the Persian Empire, might have something to do with where these mental pictures in our heads originated.
