THE BROWN UNIVERSITY faculty voted last week to change the name of Columbus Day to “Fall Weekend” after a student group complained about the great explorer’s “conquests and treatment of Native Americans.” The name of a holiday seems a silly topic to care about, one way or another, given all that is going on in the world.

But we do debate it –– in part, because it’s something we can all understand, unlike, say, unsecured derivatives, toxic assets and Timothy Geithner’s bank bailout scheme. That makes it enticing fodder for talk radio and newspapers columnists.

Still, it’s not entirely silly. There is something real at stake here, and not just because constant attacks on the great Italian explorer Christopher Columbus hurt the feelings of many of my Italian-American friends in Rhode Island.

What’s at the center of this debate, and others like it, is whether we believe in our civilization anymore. Growing numbers of people seem to be losing faith in it.

To my mind, Columbus Day was never really about the man himself, or the historic events of 1492 and their immediate aftermath. It was about what he symbolized: courage, intelligence, endurance, a willingness to risk everything seeking new worlds. Columbus Day was a celebration of Western Civilization and, ultimately, the most magnificent country that arose in the New World, the United States of America.

The disparagement of Columbus, much like the disparagement of the Founders so popular in recent years, seems designed to break down the faith of young people, and in time most Americans, that this really is an exceptional place, a country that has achieved unique things in world history because of one thing: freedom.

If America can be made to appear relentlessly evil and overreaching, even before its birth — built on the cruel slaughter of natives and the harsh chains of slavery — freedom becomes easier to trade in for other systems that favor stronger government controls on individuals.

Some of my favorite writers — notably Herman Melville and Mark Twain — explore the dark underbelly of gung-ho America, its smugness and jingoism, its cunning, foolishness and hypocrisy. It was their job to hold up the mirror to us, and it is our job (if we care about others) to look at the ways our society has failed to live up to its ideals.

But America is not about only those failings.

People who do not consult that history may not know this, but the world has for thousands (really, millions) of years been a dark, nasty and brutal place, and what the United States achieved in advancing individual rights and material well-being in the blink of an eye is nothing short of astonishing.

It takes a particularly obtuse mind to focus exclusively on Columbus’s manifold failings and sins, and be blind to the immense good that came out of Europe’s exploration of the world.

Western Civilization did not invent slavery; its ideals ultimately ended it. If the Western lust for exploration and gain was a disaster for many natives, it also meant the dissemination of the noble Judeo-Christian ideals (not, admittedly, always realized in our world) of peace, service to others and the infinite value of every individual. It meant the spread of the printed word, the wheel, advanced agriculture and a culture of reason, questioning and intellectual and physical exploration.

In time, it meant one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment: America’s Declaration of Independence, which insisted that all people are created equal and have a natural right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The compacted power of that document, like compressed matter before the Big Bang, unleashed ideas that are still reverberating around the world, challenging tyrants and instilling hope in the oppressed.

America has its grave faults, but billions of people on the planet arguably owe their lives to technology, medicine, goods, agricultural techniques, uses of energy and ideas of wealth creation that Americans developed, or helped develop. American ideals have spread education, freedom and happiness to many. American soldiers have stemmed the advance of tyranny.

None of this would be any comfort to natives who fell victim to the conquistadors and, in later times, U.S. citizens spreading west. Americans’ brutal treatment of Indians was as monstrous a crime against humanity as their treatment of African-Americans, Abraham Lincoln rightfully believed. But the values embedded in the Declaration have helped address these wrongs.

And, for all the evil that Europeans spread throughout the world, I still believe the greatest ideals of Western Civilization are well worth honoring: the respect for the value of every individual, the advancement of women’s rights, the promotion of material well-being, and the freedom to explore ideas, speak out and, to the greatest extent possible, control one’s destiny.

Edward Achorn is The Journal’s deputy editorial-pages editor ( eachorn@projo.com).