More than a century ago, America celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher ColumbusYs voyage of discovery by hosting an enormous worldYs fair on the shores of Lake Michigan. Nowadays, however, an embarrassed, guilty silence descends on the nation each Columbus Day.

WeYve been taught that Columbus opened the way for European settlers to unleash a stream of horrors on a virgin continent: slavery, racism, warfare, epidemic and the oppression of Indians.

This modern view of Columbus represents an unjust attack upon both our country and the civilization that made it possible. Western civilization did not originate slavery, racism, warfare or disease — but with America as its exemplar, that civilization created the antidotes. How? By means of a set of ideas that set Western civilization apart from all others: reason and individualism.

Throughout history, prior to the birth of Western civilization in ancient Greece, the world seemed impervious to human understanding. People believed that animistic spirits or capricious deities had supernatural powers to cure diseases, grow crops and guide the hunterYs arrow toward his prey.

This pervasive mysticism had practical consequences: festering disease, perpetual poverty and a desperate quest for survival that made offensive warfare against human beings seem as natural as hunting animals. Such was the plight of AmericaYs Indians before 1492 — and such was EuropeYs own plight, once the civilizations of Greece and Rome had given way to the mysticism of Christianity and the barbarian tribes.

It was Western philosophers, scientists, statesmen and businessmen who liberated mankind from mysticismYs grip. Once scientists revealed a world of natural laws open to human understanding, medical research soon penetrated the mysteries of disease.

On a much wider scale, the Industrial Revolution employed science, technology and engineering to create material goods in profusion, so that even people of average ability could become affluent by historical standards. By demonstrating how wealth can be created in abundance, America and the West supplied a moral alternative to the bloody tribal warfare of past eras.

Western civilizationYs stress on the value of reason led to its distinctive individualism. Western thinkers were first to declare that every individual, no matter what his ancestry, is fully human, possessed of reason and free will.

These are the facts we are no longer taught, and the measure of that failure is the disdain with which ColumbusYs holiday is regarded in the country that owes its existence to his courage.

It is time to take back Columbus Day as an occasion to publicly rejoice, not in the bloodshed that occurred before ColumbusYs arrival and after, but in our commitment to the life-serving values of Western civilization: reason and individualism. We do so by honoring the great explorer who opened the way for that civilization to flourish.

Thomas A. Bowden is an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.