Speaking of editorializing, the article's author took to Twitter [0] to defend her article's reverent/respectful tone and (nowadays-common) unspoken premise that all cultures and ideologies are equally good and valid.
You'd think it'd be easy to use ritual vivisection, human sacrifice at scale, organized child murder, and cannibalism [1] as an absolutely unambiguous black-and-white line by which to demarcate civilization from barbarian savagery. But amazingly she's willing to defend the latter in writing.
In my opinion this constitutes dispositive evidence that the article's author is absolutely batty.
The article uses the same "tone" that we regularly use to write about the Romans - who crucified people, ritually strangled prisoners during their triumphs, kept slaves, and made people fight to death for their fun. That said I'm not sure the Gauls or Parthians or Carthaginians were saintly.
I don't think the author is implying that the Aztecs were better or the same or worse than Tlaxcala or Cortez conquistador. The neutral tone is adopted for European and Native American ancestors alike because of the separation of time not cultural sensitivity. And so we adopt this historical voice because we realise that the past was bloody and awful and the same society that had Cicero also had Crassus crucifying 6000 slaves along the Via Appia during the same lifetime. And the same people who built towers of skulls were enslaved and wiped out by Cortes.
But honestly it's not a competition. You adopt the neutral tone to avoid endless whataboutery.
You presumably quote that as if there was a contradiction there, but there isn't.
We have fairly recent cases of children willingly blowing themselves up in Syria. All it really takes is the promise of a glorious afterlife, possibly combined with a life of deprivation in the here and now.
Being sacrificed to the Aztec gods was a great honor, it was probably voluntary in the majority of cases. As a rule of thumb, you don't want to sacrifice the unwilling, it kinda ruins the show.
the children sacrificed by the aztecs were captives, prisoners of war, etc. there is zero evidence suggesting anyone voluntarily sacrificed themselves. it was a demonstration of power and terror by the state dressed up in religious garb.
No child (or adult..) on this planet has ever willing blown their self up and that is exactly why we as an “evolved” society have various consent laws.
First of all, people kill themselves for all kinds of reasons, all the time. Secondly, people are willing to sacrifice their lives for a perceived greater good. Martyrs are revered in many cultures around the world, including Christian culture.
The fact that some martyrs use modern explosives is just an "implementation detail".
Kids aren't martyrs blowing theirselves up to commit murder for some to them imcomphrehisble “greater good” but kids do do what they’re told by sick fuck adults.
Your own refusal to address the primary assertion of my post concedes your agreement.
Kids don't always do what they're told, but they're inclined to believe what they're told. Acting out on a false belief nevertheless can be done willingly.
Similarly, the parent telling their child to do such a thing also believes that their child is getting a ticket to paradise, along with themselves and the whole family. Isn't an eternity in paradise worth it? From that perspective, there's nothing sick or evil about it, it's just a very different perception of how the world works. If you were born in a different time and place, you may share those same beliefs.
> Your own refusal to address the primary assertion of my post concedes your agreement.
I don't disagree that these things are abhorrent, but that's because we happen to share a different system of beliefs. I don't agree with your simplistic explanation that these people are just "sick fucks".
Agreed! Am currently reading Charles McCann's '1491' and '1493' which are about the "discovery" and colonisation of the Americas.
A major point he makes is that the Spanish Inquisition and the European religion wars were underway at the same time, and that both American and European societies were horrifically violent, in comparison to modern day.
People have completely confused the technique of disinterestedness in the service of scientific inquiry with the legitimacy—and necessity—of moral judgment.
When a person puts on his or her "scientist's hat," the thing to do is to set aside moral judgment in order to get a clearer and more complete look at the culture one is investigating. That's because bias is blindness. Preconceived notions cause people to jump to conclusions and miss important details of the culture (or history) they're studying.
The mistake is that far too many people fail to realize that at some point you take the hat off. You stop being a scientist and start being a civilized human being. Radical cultural relativism is monstrous.
I'm not sure I get your point. When I research human sacrifice, I must tacitly condemn it, because that's the civilized thing to do?
Human sacrifice is really just obsolete technology. It just doesn't really work, as the Aztecs had to figure out. It's not like they did it for fun, that would be far more objectionable.
We "civilized" people use different technology, but we still sacrifice people to it - just think of how many people die in traffic.
in modern western society, we tend to have a regard for the lives of [certain] individuals in the short term, at the expense of lives of others in the longer term, not to mention relatively little regard for the environment, or other species.
other societies may have been held together as engines that required the input of thousands of human lives to be sacrificed to appease the gods, our society functionally appears to require the sacrifice of the future of the planet for the appeasement of quarterly targets. i'm editorialising a bit, but you get the idea, particularly if you've read a few papers discussing "business as usual" economic-environmental modelling scenarios projecting out to the end of the century.
i'm not arguing that either mode of operating a society is laudable, but much of modern western society's focus on short term materialist and individualist goals may produce misery for our species and other species on a truly obscene scale never before experienced in human history.
If your cultural relativism/multiculturalism/whatever-you-want-to-call-it leads you to equate/compare "institutionalized torture killing of children" with "pollution," that's a hint that you've made some drastic reasoning errors.
It's such a silly, unreasonable ideology that it basically refutes itself when you get anywhere near a corner case like this.
Some cultures/ideologies really are better than others. If you need me, I'll be right here in my Western Civilization, happily not vivisecting anyone.
Western Civilization considers it a human right to be able kill the most vulnerable humans under the pretext that they aren't ready yet to have human rights.
As njarboe wrote, only recently, and it is by no means restricted to the West (see China or Soviet Russia). The only reason why it is shocking vis-a-vis the West is because it is a radical break with the ethical principles the West has acknowledged (and yes, often practiced poorly) for almost the last two millennia.
The most demented part of it is that as horrific as the practice was historically, as the article here shows, the reasons, as crazy as they were, were at least centered around existential and cosmic concerns. Today, we sacrifice out of inconvenience, or because we "made a mistake", and someone has to pay, but not the guilt party, of course. But because we are still influenced by those "old principles", most of us cannot even consciously face what we are doing. We dehumanize the victims through piss-poor pseudo-intellectual gymnastics so that it all computes in our psychotic calculus of moral purity.
Now compare the possibly hundreds of thousands the Aztecs sacrifices to the 60+ million sacrificed in the US alone since 1973.
So not only do we sacrifice at a far grander scale than ever before, we deny that we do so because we're too cowardly to look the truth in the face. We're not the Aztecs! We have the decency of performing our sacrifices discreetly, out of sight, by other names, and with a _sophisticated_ detachment. We're civilized, damn it!
> Some cultures/ideologies really are better than others. If you need me, I'll be right here in my Western Civilization, happily not vivisecting anyone.
Good old western civilization, no blood on our hands.
Well, you know, they were either "not human" (or 3/5 in some cases) or "terrorists" or "reds" (those millions in Laos and Cambodia must have fell in that category, one would hope) or something like that. Not sure how they categorized those 200,000 or so peasants in Guatemala, but hey, out of sight, out mind, eh?
In recent US history as well as ancient history, "them" vs "us" has been enough justification to satisfy the public in any time period. It's not that few in the US cared about bombing "commies" in Laos and Cambodia, it's that being "red" made much less difference than being "them". This is tribalism at its finest (or worst, take your pick).
The genocide of native americans, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill starving million in India because he thought them to be less human, the transatlantic slave trade....all just minor blemishes in an otherwise great culture.
Perhaps the whole idea of "culture/ideology" is flawed and progress happens not within a culture but by specifically rejecting cultural and ideological norms.
That itself is a culture/ideology though. That is sort of the culture of the west in fact, to move forward, and whatever isn't helping move forward gets left behind.
for people who are dying of starvation versus people who are being explicitly human-sacrificed, from their perspective do you think it particularly matters if they are dying from the neglect and sheer indifference of others, or from direct intentional malice?
i would argue that for those on the receiving end, the difference matters very little.
Depends. If it's the Aztecs we're talking about, I'm sure they'd prefer to die of starvation in at least some cases - Aztec deities were fairly inventive as far as their sacrifices went, and at least one of them required the victim to be flayed alive, for example.
point taken. if we keep at this long enough we can end up with some utilitarian equations to trade-off the relative costs of different forms of human misery.
Yes, active involvement in situation to make it worse and lack of involvement in situation to make it better are valued in a drastically different ways in most moral systems.
Oddly enough, the people who are actually dying of starvation always seem to be located in Marxist countries rather than the evil capitalist Western countries. Just bad luck, I guess.
i totally agree that there have been avoidable and horrific famines in marxist countries due to inept attempts at central management of agriculture. these days, there's also a bit of ugly conflict popping up along ethnic lines in some countries where populations are under stress for access to enough farmland for subsistence agriculture vs grazing (environmental pressure will be part of this).
i dont think there's much distinction between marxist countries and capitalist western countries when it comes towards climate change, we all love nice cheap coal and oil now.
Sure. Soviet Famine of 1921 (5 million). Soviet Famine of 1932-33 (7-10 million minimum, perhaps many more). Soviet Famine of 1947 (1 million or so). Chinese Famine of 1959-1961 (15-43 million). Cambodian Famine of 1974-79 (2 million). Ethiopian Famine of 1984-85 (400,000). North Korean Famine of 1996 (3.5 million).
Number of famines in the capitalist west over the same time period: zero.
Note that I'm not counting food shortages caused by active or recent warfare in either case, thus neither the German "Hunger Winter" of 1946-47 (several hundred thousand) nor the Siege of Leningrad Famine of 1941-44 (about a million) are included.
> And where is a place you would define as Marxist in 2018?
Venezuela will do until something closer comes along. And sure enough, they're on the brink of famine.
You forgot the Great Bengali famine of 1943 (3 million) under British rule in India.
The British had the habit of ducking responsibility for all the famines that killed millions in India under their rule by blaming it on overpopulation. That there were no major famines after Indian independence is conveniently ignored.
Regarding Civilization or savagery, which is this: Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright calmly asserting that U.S. policy objectives were worth the sacrifice of half a million Iraqi children:
The term 'sacrifice' is used in different contexts. A 'sacrifice' to a god for whatever reason is a literal sacrifice, talking about the 'cost of war' in terms of 'sacrifice' is a metaphor.
Only because we now know that human sacrifices don't please the gods and improve our fortunes. Otherwise, it breaks down in exactly the same way: We kill some children, but we're okay with that, because it will benefit us.
If it's a metaphor, it can only be because there's no sacrifice at all, the death of non-citizens don't factor into the cost-benefit analysis.
It can easily be "worth it" if by sacrificing half a million children you get to save half a million and one child. Despite what you might want to believe, Mrs. Albright is neither stupid nor evil.
It's also really an unfair question because you don't get to see the result of your policy before enacting it.
Moreover, those deaths probably never happened, at least not in those numbers, and they were used as an argument for war:
Like the supposed 1 million deaths from the Second Iraq War, those numbers are based on surveys which are highly flawed.
Further, the poor perception of the Second Iraq War supported the lack of action in Syria under the Obama administration. Nobody knows how many lives could've saved (and how many sacrificed) if there had been an early intervention in Syria.
I can get giving people in different situations various levels of leeway as far as comparing my decisions sitting at my computer here to their decisions and such. But damn... what does she even mean by "horrific"... how is that even a thing you would bother to dispute?
Because what "horrific" means depends on your culture. So sure, it's horrific for you and me. But it arguably wasn't horrific for Aztecs back then. Or even for their victims. Analogous in the Western tradition is the belief that honorable soldiers should freely give their lives to protect comrades and country. To me, that's also horrific, but whatever.
That's non-controversial, but it's not the argument that the linked Twitter feed makes. It says that not only that culture didn't see it as horrific, but that we can't morally judge what they did "through our Western colonial lens" by saying that it was horrific.
Last time I've seen similar reasoning, it was when a person was attacking the term FGM (female genital mutilation) on the basis that it is "colonialist misjudgment of a different culture".
>but that we can't morally judge what they did "through our Western colonial lens" by saying that it was horrific.
We can, but it is pointless (the culture is now dead and gone) and it does raise questions about objective and absolute morality, of which many people disagree.
It also can easily lead into very messy discussion about modern day actions which in some sub cultures (and other cultures that may one day exist) would look equally horrendous. For example, we often are fine with abortion because of our standard as to at what point a human counts as a human. How can one objectively say our standard is okay, but someone whose standard is to not start counting til a year old isn't?
Or to bring up another hot button issue, look at MGM and the differences in how it is treated compared to FGM. You can barely even mention these concepts without risking a flame war (that is still a term, isn't it... feels like I never hear anyone use it anymore).
> We can, but it is pointless (the culture is now dead and gone)
You know what they say: those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This necessitates the moral judgments, as well.
> It also can easily lead into very messy discussion about modern day actions
All discussions about ethical philosophy end up that way. But, again, such discussions kinda need to be had for us to evolve. I understand that it's simply out of scope for, say, archaeologists, and I don't expect to find moral assessments in their work. But I also don't see why it's wrong for the rest of us to apply them in a completely different context.
Sure, FGM and MGM are very different. I consider FGM (and all the associated misogynistic crap) to be utterly horrible. However, there's a range of FGM practices. And at the least-extreme end, it's not that different from MGM. Neither prevents orgasm, and both interfere with victims' sexuality.
So what disturbs me is how accepted MGM is. And how those who criticize it are dismissed as crazies. That's exactly the situation for FGM in societies where it's the norm.
And again, FGM is undoubtedly a far^N more serious issue. And I support efforts to pressure and educate societies that practice it. Just as I supported efforts to end apartheid in South Africa. Or slavery in northern Africa, India, etc.
>Because all those things are very, very different?
For a comparison, murdering someone is very very different than punching them, but we still making punching your toddler illegal even though we agree it isn't nearly as bad as murdering your toddler.
So things that are very very different can still be quite illegal if they are horrible enough, so why doesn't that apply to those cases? It all comes down to subjective and often illogical judgments made by a society.
I don't believe that Lizzie Wade is arguing that "we can't morally judge what they did". Rather, she's arguing that being judgmental is not very useful for archeologists. Because it blocks understanding. As she says:
> But the Mexica would not have seen death when they looked at the tzompantli. They would have seen life.
OK, here's another example. For about 40 years, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a global game of nuclear chicken. The winning strategy was Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). And it was only luck that an exchange wasn't triggered by accident.
So imagine how people in 2600 (if there are any) will see that. If anthropologists discover some artifact that brings it to general attention, anyway. "Horrific" is pretty likely, no?
I don't have any problem with them calling it horrific, horrible, or whatever. People are entitled to their opinions, and have the right to state them. Although Twitter also has the right to delete them.
But anyway, what I'm taking issue with is the argument that archaeologists et alia don't have the right to be nonjudgmental. Also that being nonjudgmental isn't the norm for archaeology as a profession.
I don't expect your average Twitter user to know that. But at least, they should understand the concept, if explained well enough. After all, it's also the norm for physicians, attorneys, and psychologists. Even judges, who are supposed to interpret law objectively.
This seems like an excellent example of postmodernist notion of moral relativism getting too far.
Of course Aztecs didn't see this practice as evil - but why would we care? We have our own moral system, and I don't see any reason not to use it in this case.
It's an unprovable, but I'd bet a considerable sum that there were more than a few Aztecs who had some serious doubts about the whole human sacrifice thing.
Voicing those doubts, of course, seems like it would have been an excellent way to find yourself next at the sharp end of the priest's knife.
And I'm sure you'll find a non-zero number of Americans who think we should do human sacrifice again but think that voicing those doubts about not doing human sacrifice would have them at the sharp end of a twitter shitstorm, resulting in eternal unemployability for jobs paying above minimum wage.
> This seems like an excellent example of postmodernist notion of moral relativism getting too far.
I mean, if we want to be morally objective... what does the war on terror's body count say about the United States relative to the Aztecs? We're 10x as evil?
It says nothing, because this variable is not enough to make any kind of moral judgement. In fact, I just had almost exactly the same discussion here on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17367827) merely two days ago and I don't expect to anything deeper than typical cliches anymore.
You're just replacing moral relativism with counterfactual thinking. Just because you can imagine an alternate scenario where things might have been worse, that doesn't provide moral justification for an action. This is especially true since we know what the original justification for the invasion of Iraq and I can't imagine it being aligned with any counterfactual thinking on the subject.
The type of thinking you espouse can be used to justify virtually any military action, including war crimes. All you'd have to say is "it could have been worse..."
No, I'm imagining the whole space of the alternatives not just "it could've been worse". You clearly are constructing a strawman out of my argument and it doesn't feel that well-constructed, because my argument is not about giving a judgement to a particular situation (especially Iraq) but about the whole method you use for such judgements.
Again, what you’re describing is counterfactual thinking. It doesn’t stop being counterfactual just because you considered lots of stuff.
And if you want to make the extraordinary claim of “Imagining the whole space of the alternatives” you should provide some evidence of such. Because right now, most experts who have attempted that have come to the conclusion that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a mistake: not merely one of bad planning or execution, but rather it never should have been attempted to begin with. This includes some of its biggest architects and boosters.
> You'd think it'd be easy to use ritual vivisection, human sacrifice at scale, organized child murder, and cannibalism [1] as an absolutely unambiguous black-and-white line by which to demarcate civilization from barbarian savagery.
We might as well add to that list treating humans like property, the mass murder, mass rape, and mass killing of civilians by invading armies, child labor, genocide, things like pogroms and lynchings, separating children from parents at scale, etc ...
So, who is exactly left on the “civilized” side of the line now?
You'd think it'd be easy to use ritual vivisection, human sacrifice at scale, organized child murder, and cannibalism [1] as an absolutely unambiguous black-and-white line by which to demarcate civilization from barbarian savagery. But amazingly she's willing to defend the latter in writing.
In my opinion this constitutes dispositive evidence that the article's author is absolutely batty.
[0] https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822
[1] She has conveniently omitted from her article any mention of the American natives' widespread and well-documented cannibalism.