They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000.
This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda, until they dug up the massive infant necropolis near the temple to Moloch (yes, that Moloch -- the Carthaginians were Canaanites).
Even the Romans made human sacrifices (not just gladiators, or feeding Christians to the lions). When things got particularly grim in the Punic wars, they sacrificed two Gauls and a Greek in the forum.
As a literary reader of the bible, I noticed that there are literally one hundred different passages in the bible where God says that he absolutely does not want his followers to sacrifice children to him or condemns other religions for this practice.
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?
That's a good point. There are similar laws in the Bible, like the law that you should definitely not shave your head to mourn a death, which seems silly without the context that its something Egyptians did.
Darryl Cooper's MartyrMade podcast does some interesting analysis of the history and common heritage just about every human culture has with human sacrifice and/or cannibalism sometime in our respective pasts: http://www.martyrmade.com/8-how-to-serve-man-sacrifice-canni...
One reason why there was so much repetition against human sacrifice in the Old Testament may be related to the fact that the Carthaginians, as a Phoenician civilization, were part of the Semitic language group, and so there may be more tendency for those cultures in that time to have those practices. It's easier to avoid falling into particular practices if those who do them are separated geographically, culturally, or linguistically from you. (For example, there probably aren't many people in Western countries looking to adopt sky burial traditions of far-off Tibetan groups.)
The Jews weren't merely fellow Semitic speakers, they were neigubours to the Phoenecians. And rivals.
In fact this is a point in favour of the Jews, in that even if such practices were not common among them; they would still have a strong reason to bother condemning them because there hated neighbours did it.
I've heard different interpretations, and we have multiple versions of the story. In the Quran, the boy is Abraham's other son, Ishmael.
I've always like the interpretations of Genesis (and other old ME epics) as folk memory. Myth as a way of telling history allegorically.
For example, people named in genesis often represent tribes, ethnicities and nationalities. Their names were literal personifications of contemporary peoples. The binding of Isaac represents a transition from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice, as a symbolic substitute continuing the same tradition.
I've even heard interpretations of the fall from eden where eden represents a hunter gatherer lifestyle in the fertile crescent, and the fall represents settled, agricultural life.
I don't know if this is off topic, but when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove something to God, that seems to be a mixed message alongside what you are posting.
God says, a few lines later, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”
Sorry if I was not clear, I do know the whole story, Abraham had to be committed to the act and visualize what would happen and had to take several steps along the way to fulfil God's command. The fact that it was revealed to be a test is not important in my evaluation of the command, which of course is just my opinion.
Yeah, it uh turns out God was was suffering from bipolar disorder. The official diagnosis was originally mentioned in a chapter in revelations. But his PR consultants thought that he probably better pull those verses out before it got published. But the good news is that Jesus got him to seek some good medical advice, and he's been on some great meds and things have been a bit better since, despite occasional lapses, most recently in the early-to-mid-20th century.
Infanticide was really really common- it was basically late stage abortion. The unfair price for this practice was ostracizing those who did the deed. Whores and Priests where the "wicked" ones, while the rest of humanity just closed its eyes and pretended to not see whats was going on.
Yes. The Romans they accepted as inevitable that vast numbers of infants would be killed all the time. The Carthagians would have also had to deal with this reality. Perhaps they did so by framing it as a sacrifice to Moloch -- a practice which the Romans found nearly as abhorrent as we do.
But then, given that the killings were happening anyway, the existence of an infant necropolis does not prove that sacrificing was going on.
His point wasn't about how to view the 'god of the old testament'. It was that child sacrifice was so widespread that it had to be mentioned several times.
If God in Genesis really wanted the sacrifice to happen, he wouldn't have stopped Abraham before it happened. Hebrews chapter 11 has a more detailed explanation of what was happening there in Genesis 22. You can't understand the story until you understand the whole context of what and who Isaac was supposed to be. It was never about child sacrifice, and it's countered by many comments by the same that child sacrifice is bad.
Besides that, this is getting off-topic as to the point that it was likely a widespread thing in the world.
No, Hebrews 11 only provides an interpretation for what happened in Genesis 22. Coincidentally, it's also the interpretation that's the most logical in light of the context; one can come to a similar conclusion without ever reading Hebrews 11. The context is provided by Genesis chapters 15 to 24, as well as all criticism on child sacrifice for the purpose of worship in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc. Now infanticide does happen in the Bible, and some of it is condoned by God, while some of it isn't. The times it is condoned by God, there are interesting situations and reasonable explanations. The times it isn't condoned by God, there is consistent logic as to why it was OK one time but not OK another time.
Now of course, all of this understanding by people of faith could be completely wrong. But there is often difficulty having dialogue on the matter because when skeptics criticize what they find to be odd behaviour or odd contradictions in the Bible, they often lack comprehensive knowledge of the Bible needed to come to logically valid conclusions (note I said logically valid, not logically sound). Bertrand Russell did it when he criticized Jesus for making the fig tree wither, he didn't understand what was happening there. He lacked Biblical context of certain passages about fig trees in the Old Testament, and he also lacked botanical context of how fig trees grew in Palestine.
When people make conclusions without getting the full picture, it is natural to come to strange conclusions. This applies to any area or body of knowledge and analysis from the study of physics to language acquisition. We wouldn't say that Bilbo was an evil character because his true colours were revealed when he saw the One Ring in Frodo's possession in Fellowship of the Ring. No, we'd understand what Bilbo went through with the ring and what kind of person he really is because we read The Hobbit first. And there are aspects of the One Ring and The Hobbit that we cannot fully understand without reading The Silmarillion first.
I believe I shouldn't try to have these types of discussions on HN. Sorry if it is too much. If you're interested in taking this discussion offline to really dig into it, let me know. :)
Romans very rarely practiced ritual human sacrifice (outside of gladiator games). The specific case of burying two Gauls and a Greek alive was an exception done by consulting the Sibylline books, a collection of prophetic instructions only to be used during extreme crisis like after the battle of Cannae during the second Punic War.
I disagree. What god is capital punishment meant to appease? It's supposedly there for people who are too dangerous to keep alive right? Human sacrifice seems to me like it was meant to bring better harvests or otherwise give the illusion of controlling a chaotic/random natural process.
I don't think so. I think it's current justification is typically framed in the form of 'punishment', and its historical justification was purely religious. And, coincidentally, was at least partially about giving the punished person a fair shot at redemption by punishing them while they were still on earth - which is literal god-appeasement.
Regardless, I think equating capital punishment with ritual sacrifice is a fair judgement. No matter how rational our rituals and systems for killing people seem, there's no reason to suggest that the Aztecs did not feel similarly about their rituals and systems. Law is not supposed to be a science, so it's also not free from cultural relativism, even if you're not a cultural relativist generally.
I consider all distinguishing characteristics between people or groups of people to be projections utilized by human minds to motivate and bring forth highly-ritualized purifying violence, which ranges in intensity from inconsequential name-calling to full-scale genocide. My best historical example of this from pre-modernity was the 13th Century Cathar Purge, where the War refrain "Kill them all and let God sort them out" originates, and continues forth until this day. Records point to a similar practice within the Aztec regime, with self-sacrifice a common action to sustain the empire.
Given the advanced bureaucratic practices common to empires in precolonial America, it seems the Aztecs simply required regular sacrificial deaths (via suicide or homicide) to maintain their office, in addition to regularly liquifying prisoners or the enslaved. Like a death camp which ran on self-motivated suicide, for reasons of cosmic accounting.
It's dismaying that user 5DFractalTetris' comments here are so heavily downvoted, since they're clearly civil, literate, grammatical, and made in good faith.
Personally I find 5DFractalTetris' claims to be preposterous and wrong, but IMHO downvotes should be reserved for something other than "I disagree with this comment."
it wouldnt make for a good interface, but I wonder if there is any value to having up/down vote for karma and i agree / disagree to allow users to express their level agreement with the comment.
"What god is capital punishment meant to appease?"
I have to agree just a shade with the premise.
A lot of punishment is morally oriented, and it's derived from our value system which is headed by 'God', or at least an interpretation of that.
Murderers are executed not just to keep them off the streets, but as a matter of punishment which is fundamentally pleasing to our moral code ... headed by God.
I think old-school capital punishment is at least distantly related to the concept of sacrifice.
"Civic religion" is a concept that some people subscribe to. It doesn't have gods per se, but it has abstract concepts (like e.g. justice) that can be similarly worshiped.
How are they different? (I don't mean this sarcastically)
In one world, we believe that a crime committed causes harm against a social construction. In the other...
To me, it seems like the crucial difference is whether the person responsible for the act is the one punished. It is not clear that is the objective of the modern (American) justice system. It is even less certain that was an issue with pre-Enlightenment justice systems.
Human nature seems to be more "someone has to pay!!" more than "the person responsible has to pay!"
> One is to appease "the gods". The other is to protect society
Defining 2 things then calling the definition different is not compelling.
The thinking that makes them less different is that they both serve "a greater good" (a just society or secular society) or "specific good" (of a community or divine favor). How you perceive the original intent or what terms you use are not relevant to the association.
Not sure why this was downvoted, but I support your question.
As modernists, we believe that it's important to punish the person who is responsible for a crime. It is not clear that is
1/ "Justice",
2/ shared by our ancestors,
3/ any more clear or moral than other belief systems.
It boils down to the purpose of the modern justice system. I've heard all the following reasons, each with deficiencies:
1) because doing wrong must be met with punishment (tautology)
2) because it keeps dangerous people off the street (not structurally optimized for)
3) because it makes our society safer (abstract/generic)
4) because it makes it clear that each individual is responsible for their actions (most believable to me)
I guess my question is this: why do we put people in jail (or kill them)? Personally, I don't think our justice system exists to make "good society" safer[0]; I think it's to control people so they behave in the same way those in charge want people to behave. (I.e., the initial motivation is amoral.)
[0] if so, victimless crimes wouldn't be so heavily regulated
Perhaps divine retribution is a better explanation than ritual sacrifice in theocratic regimes, in the case that a god or a group of gods require the death of the mortal body so the soul can face metaphysical justice for Earthly sin.
However, regardless of the metaphysical beliefs of a state, any entity of sufficient size & organization will often be recognized by an individual as possibly having godlike power over the individual's body. Whether or not that truth actually ritualizes state-sanctioned violence, or the diffused psychological impact of that violence can be called a sacrifice, is a matter of opinion; however, being that it is state-sanctioned it is obviously distinct from murder, and because these punishments often have no deterrent effect on the populace, their true nature is in camera obscura.
Perhaps in a modern context. I know that the ancient Chinese were big into sacrificing prisoners and captives of war. And the end result is eerily similar even when couched in terms of law and order. Sacrifice has both been used to appease or ask favor of the gods, and to assert ones rightness and an other’s wrongness. Capital punishment fits the second criterion to a tee.
Wikipedia cities a number of sources for between 130K and 60K:
> One conquistador, Andrés de Tapia, was given the task of counting the skulls on the "tzompantli" at Tenochtitlan and estimated that there were 136,000 skulls on it.[17] However, based on numbers given by Taipa and Fray Diego Durán, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano[18] has calculated that there were at most 60,000 skulls on the "Hueyi Tzompantli" (Great Skullrack) of Tenochtitlan. The "Hueyi Tzompantli" consisted of a massive masonry platform composed of “thirty long steps” measuring fully 60 meters in length by 30 meters wide at its summit. Atop of the aforementioned platform was erected an equally formidable wooden palisade and scaffolding consisting of between 60 and 70 massive uprights or timbers woven together with an impressive constellation of horizontal cross beams upon which were suspended the tens of thousands of decapitated human heads once impaled thereon.[19] There were at least five more skull racks in Tenochtitlan but by all accounts they were much smaller.
> They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000.
The sources of that image indicate "several thousand" in the article. Not 100k.
> Combining the two historically documented towers and the rack, INAH archaeologists now estimate that several thousand skulls must have been displayed at a time.
> This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda,
There is really no evidence of child sacrifice at Carthage. Not sure why this myth persists but the much more plausible explanation is that (wealthy) children who died of natural causes were cremated, a very common practice in the ancient world that goes back literally 10,000 years.
> Human sacrifice was alarmingly common.
Not so much.
And in fact what the Aztecs did was very unique: human sacrifice was institutionalized and carried out on an industrial scale. This is very different from servants/wives being forced to follow a warrior or the occasional prisoner of war being tossed into a pit. There's really nothing else like it in all of history until the modern Europeans invented death camps.
While this is still debated by a few hold outs, This is one where Wikipedia is out of date. Oxford and others released a paper in 2014 and it is now generally held by historians and archeologists that it did in fact happen. Archeoloists questioned Plutarch, and Plutarch won.
I'm familiar with the Oxford research. It's not conclusive and I don't think most archaeologists have signed on. We'll see how it holds up over time. Even if you accept Oxford, it's still the case that child sacrifice, if it did take place, was rare and reserved only for the very wealthy. The idea of Carthaginians all gathering in a stadium and hurling children into a pit of fire for Moloch is pure (Roman) myth.
Does this kind of question depend on what you consider to be the baseline of normal human behaviour? That defines what side of an argument evidence is required. Surely it is possible that human sacrifice was common throughout human history, and that the last couple of thousand years were the exception. How can you know?
Threads that are respectful, interesting and insightful like this are why I adore HN. Please don’t ever change.
That aside, As a historian, I think our skepticism of primary sources has gone way way way to far. Plutarch is ignored, because Roman. Cortez was ignored because Spanish. Do they have reason to exaggerate? Sure and they at times do. But the archeological evidence on both Carthage and Cortez was really clear.
We continue to find sites with mass sacrifices (not just of children) in Central and South America (Aztec, Mayan, and Inca) and instead of disregarding it due to the Spanish reports, students should understand that these incidents were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs.
>>were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs.
Maybe, maybe not. It didn't hurt that the Spaniards had powerful biological weapons on their side that decimated [1] the Aztec population. Same as what happened here in the United States with the native population. Had it been the natives spreading new infectious diseases to the arriving europeans, history would probably have been quite different.
Imagine going to a new land and upon contact with the natives a sizable portion of your people always dies off while the natives stay healthy and at full fighting strength. And even the ones that do not die off still get so sick that it completely incapacitates them for some time and hence unable to fight. They'd be very vulnerable to native attacks.
The news would spread like wild fire in Europe that everybody that travels to the new world dies because of sorcery or what not. Yep, history could have turned out very differently indeed.
>>When Hernando Cortes and his army conquered Mexico starting in 1519, there were roughly about 25 million people living in what is now Mexico. A hundred years later, after a series of epidemics decimated the local population, perhaps as few as 1.2 million natives survived. Records confirm there was a smallpox epidemic in 1519 and 1520, immediately after the Europeans arrived, killing between 5 and 8 million people<<
Even more than that. If news was able to make it back, the viruses also surely would have made it back to the European mainland at sime point, bringing Europe to its knees.
Native societies all across the americas were struck by plague even before Europeans got there, as the disease moved faster than colonists into the interior.
> Imagine going to a new land and upon contact with the natives a sizable portion of your people always dies off while the natives stay healthy and at full fighting strength.
One could argue that there was at least one example of South America's 'geographic genetics' fighting back against European encroachment and winning - The Darien Scheme, which ultimately broke Scotland, enabling rule by England back home.
History could have turned out differently, but wouldn't it require other factors to also change?
For instance, isn't European colonialism responsible for both the larger number of diseases the explorers had been carrying, but also the higher herd immunity? And that the native's relative isolation led them to be more exposed when confronted with foreign cultures?
I guess what I'm asking is, isn't this a little bit of a chicken/egg situation?
If the natives had been more aggressive in expansion, they may have had a higher exposure rate to other cultures and diseases and thereby a higher immunity to it as well as leading to more genetic diversity, and possibly having reached Europe first?
I guess the way I read your comment was implying that history could have easily been different (which you may or may not actually be stating), but the number of factors (genetic/cultural temperament, geology, etc) all have to line up over such a long period so as to basically be a fundamentally different world history than what has transpired, both before and after the actual colonisation period.
I overall agree with your point, that it was a large factor in the colonisation of the Americas, but even that aspect was far more determined or influenced by a huge range of factors that co-mingle into the history we know (and largely left to random natural processes and historical fiat).
I'm probably being overly pedantic (it is Saturday night on HN after all ;)), but I guess your statement read similarly to other "history-could-be-different" thought experiments, but seem fundamentally different (I'm contrasting that to the most common experiments, situations like the TV show High Castle and what if Germany won the war, or what if JFK hadn't been assasinated, etc).
Again, I'm not necessarily disagreeing, just following a mental thread of what would be needed in order for that change to be possible.
Having written and read all that, at the very least, I was assuming something that's probably different than what you're actually saying.
Your comment does make me wonder about some of the other accounts of European history where the Romans had a harder time invading (parts of Brittania, for example) where the cultures were written off as barbarian and completely deranged or had large myths associated with them, if disease played some part in the comparable success/failure of colonisation for those areas and the coloring of Western history in general.
The best theory I’ve seen goes as follows. Humans the world over have domesticated like a dozen beasts of burden [1]. Ever. Most of those animals are in the Old World. (The New World just had llamas.)
Domesticated beasts of burden mean (a) higher productivity, i.e. cities i.e. proximity between people and (b) proximity between people and animals. The latter provides a vector for novel diseases to form. The former provides a vector for them to spread.
The boost to productivity, meanwhile, meant the Old World had the resources to venture out. It’s more challenging to bootstrap a complex technological society with just alpaca.
I can definitely see how those innate technological advantages can stack up, and it's definitely a good theory. I can't think of anything that couldn't be explained by it, though I still believe there were a number of other factors working in tandem with the domestication of animals (I am generally curious as to why horses became extinct in North America as well as the general lack of native domesticated mammals, if there is any known reason for it; the climate seems well suited for them to thrive, but perhaps the size of the continent and it's general isolation didn't contribute to the selective pressures that benefited Eurasia, I'm just speculating outloud).
> I am generally curious as to why horses became extinct in North America
“The causes of [North American horses’] extinction have been debated. Given the suddenness of the event and because these mammals had been flourishing for millions of years previously, something quite unusual must have happened. The first main hypothesis attributes extinction to climate change. For example, in Alaska, beginning approximately 12,500 years ago, the grasses characteristic of a steppe ecosystem gave way to shrub tundra, which was covered with unpalatable plants. However, it has been proposed that the steppe-tundra vegetation transition in Beringia may have been a consequence, rather than a cause, of the extinction of megafaunal grazers.
The other hypothesis suggests extinction was linked to overexploitation of native prey by newly arrived humans. The extinctions were roughly simultaneous with the end of the most recent glacial advance and the appearance of the big game-hunting Clovis culture. Several studies have indicated humans probably arrived in Alaska at the same time or shortly before the local extinction of horses” [1].
> I think our skepticism of primary sources has gone way way way to far. Plutarch is ignored, because Roman. Cortez was ignored because Spanish. Do they have reason to exaggerate? Sure and they at times do.
When I think about that I have trouble with the idea that Cortez would have come up with THAT if he was trying to slander the Mesoamerican ruling class. As he would have had no cultural references to draw on.
> students should understand that these incidents were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs.
I keep thinking that to Mesoamerican peasants Catholicism was probably least offensive thing about the Spanish.
> these incidents were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs
yes. two sides to the Mezoamerican practice of human sacrifice.
the Aztecs carried out the sacrifices, but thousands of people from other local groups were the victims. and one must wonder how enthusiastic they were about the practice.
it's not so hard to see how the Spanish found local allies, initially, in their fight against the Aztecs.
Despite the many issues, I'd still suggest anyone interested in the Aztec empire at the time of the Spanish conquest to read The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Díaz was present not only on the Cortés expedition, but on the earlier expeditions led by Córdoba and Grijalva.
The article mentions, plausibly so, that the issue of human sacrifice was often exaggerated by the Spaniards. Nevertheless, it is clear that the practice (and self-mutilation, primarily of the ears) was an important aspect of not just Aztec life, but many of their neighbors' as well.
Díaz writes, "I have spent a long time talking about the great cue of Tlatelcoco and its courts. I will conclude by saying that it was the biggest temple in Mexico, though there were many other fine ones, for every four or five parishes or districts supported a shrine with idols; and since there were many districts I cannot keep a count of them all. [...] Every province had its own idols, and those of one province or city were no help in another. Therefore they had infinite numbers of idols and sacrificed to them all."
Discussion of deities and their numbers aside, Díaz' repeated report is that sacrifices of various sorts were widespread, and that evidence of human sacrifice, or the holding of prisoners intended for sacrifice, was found almost universally from the coast to Mexico.
Edit: Reading again, on the subject of tzompantli, or a similar arrangement for sacrificed remains, Díaz writes, "They strike open the...chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the still palpitating heart which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off the arms, thighs, and head, eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets. The head they hang up on a beam, and the body of the sacrificed man is not eaten but given to the beasts of prey."
The Spanish themselves conducted many religion-motivated rituals of human sacrifice in Europe and in the Americas.
In Europe, there was the Inquisition, with ritualistic torture using medieval torture devices, burning people to death, etc. Motivated by religious beliefs, just like the ones in the Americas.
The Spanish also conducted campaigns of extermination. Some recent ones: the Reconcentrado policy in Cuba, and the usage of chemical weapons in the Rif war.
“La Reconcentración” was a policy enabled by Gen. Weyler to force people in rural areas to move to nearby cities where they could be monitored, hoping to cut off the underground support network of the rebel Cuban forces fighting in the mountains. It had nothing to do with human sacrifices.
I expect so. But there is still an interesting point: witch and heretic-burning likely tap into much the same psychology as ancient human sacrifice. Even the rationales overlap:
"Devine will demands these deaths; we will ensure the safety of our community by ritually killing these people."
Then again, it makes sense to put things into historical perspective. When we are about to talk about how one group was murderous and cruel, and how odd it makes us feel, it makes sense to point out what was going on elsewhere. Especially when the exact group reporting on those things is involved in cruelties of their own and uses these reports to excuse their own cruelties.
Cortez him self was quite cruel, fond of torture - either when looking for gold or enemies.
People up thread discuss how good guy Cortez must have been, merely affected by Aztek sacrifices and saving locals. That is somehow on topic? Why the difference?
It is as if people were emotionally invested into this, despite this being hundred years old affair.
So yes, this matters because thread up there want to make adventure book out of this. It is not about trying to figure history, it is about treating it all as scary book.
People up thread merely noted that Cortez was likely correct, and we shouldn't have so hastily disbelieved his claims. They said nothing about him being a "good guy" etc.
His claims were not hastily disbelieved. That is not how history happened there, they were both taken as total truth and disbelieved. His claims were disbelieve for various reasons, notably that he extracted quite a few admissions under severe torture. Notably, disbelieved also by his contemporaries who watched it and wrote horrified reports. He tortured also because gold seeking, not just for human sacrifice cause. They became paranoid and over drunk with unlimited power. When people in group X kill each other and then you kill them all, you was unlikely to be merely horrified and trying to help victims. Your motivations are guaranteed to he more complicated, as much as believe in your good intentions make us feel good.
You can have human sacrifice without it being impossibly large and without it being treated like adventure movie plot and without jumping on every fantasy anyone ever wrote - which is what up thread is. You can belive scientific consensus which is based on multiple sources and findings without making feel good stuff about conquest.
And while you are expressing outrage over exceptional kills, it is fine to ask who the source is. Because it does put things into context as it turns out the report is not by independent third party, but by highly motivated player in political and violent struggle for control.
It seems that you're more concerned with giving value judgements to Aztecs and Spanish, and their comparison – but why is it relevant, or even interesting, at all? Just like in a case where article's author took to Twitter to announce that "human sacrifice wasn't horrific" (which it of course was), I just don't understand why people can't discuss history without fixating on moral value judgements. Do you have a horse in this race, or something?
It seems to me other way round. I did not judged either, but I wrote why certain reports could not be trusted. The "this particular thing is likely exaggerated" comments were downvoted at the time I read it - regard less of how factual they were and no they did not claimed Azteks not have human sacrifice at all.
That is discussing history without judgement. If you bring this as proof that Cortez was unfairly disbelieved, which people do, then it is absolutely relevant to bring why, the way he collected evidence and what his goals were. That is part of historical discussion too.
This whole discussion, meaning other (top) threads are primary about making civilization judgement. Except that, only Aztek (or communist for some odd reason) kills are allowed in that discussion. It is literally there, Europeans coming were clearly superior, because we don't talk about facts that break that nice vision - namely that potential victims of sacrifice ended up being tortured in order to extract evidence that they themselves killed people (or have gold).
So no, discussion turned into civilization moral judgement before me and at that point it is perfectly ok to discuss involved civilizations - or at least what they were doing at that time at that place.
-----------
Offtopic: I think you can actually judge past people. You can judge Aztek priest, who is in it in part for own gain or cruel Samurai, Nazi leader or Colombus or whoever specifically. You should not however buy one of these guys woldview, just because he is our tribe remotely, and claim his self serving violence and treatment of commoners are fair due to somebody else's action.
> In Europe, there was the Inquisition, with ritualistic torture using medieval torture devices, burning people to death, etc. Motivated by religious beliefs, just like the ones in the Americas.
Later, during the reign of terror they killed and tortured people based on non-religious or even anti religious beliefs.
Yes, old Catholics did much wrong but can we stop this very unnuanced "religious people did it" and conclude "people with power did it"?
When I see a bunch of skulls in one place like this, or in the catacombs, it makes me think of the accumulated experience of people. Not because of the brains in the skulls or whatever, but just that each skull represents a single human life. Most of the time these are adult skulls, guessing 30+ years each. That's a lot of living.
I just asked google to solve a couple of problems for me. What is the current population, and how many years do they experience in one hour on the wall clock?
Current world population according to Google: 7.6B
How many years in 7.6B hours: 867,579.9
So we are nearly at a point where there are a million years of human live/conciousness/etc experienced every hour.
You inspired me to calculate the total amount of human experience, ever. I arrived at a figure of about 2.7 trillion years, ten times as many years as there are stars in the Milky way. In seconds it's 10^20 - 0.1% of all the stars in the entire universe.
Now imagine computers living the entire total amount of human experience every second. And think of the things they'll be able to do in the very near future.
Speculative fiction .. or religion? Because if there were some way we could access the sum total of all human experience, wouldn't that method be as close to "God" as it was ever described?
One wonders if this is, indeed, the concept being described, over and over again in every religion (and science) ever ..
To what extent does mass+social media create collective subgroups of consciousness? What's the decay curve of a subgroup and how do subgroups compete, fork, merge or decay?
How do persistent records (oral memories, written records, national holidays, memorials, digital footprints, media archives, censorship) feed back into subgroups of collective consciousness?
How can collective consciousness be measured, monetized, directed, encouraged, suppressed, or otherwise manipulated for specific purposes, within a specific bounded timeframe of a single
hour or day?
How do time zones affect the "nature/flavor" of consciousness in each hour, as populations sleep and wake and work and rest and ...?
I made a comment like this not so long ago, also here on HN, mentioning how every 4.2 seconds we collectively live a bit more than 1000 years. It really gives a lot to think about, indeed.
Our understanding of Maya language and culture has been rewritten over the past 50 years, thanks to the leadership of an art teacher, Linda Schele, who found that hundreds of years of "accepted archaeology wisdom" was incomplete.
She was invited by NASA to speak at a symposium about alien civilizations. If we hope to understand other species, we can start by learning more about "other" humans.
Funny how saying an "art teacher" here leads to an automatic assumption that she's just some highschool teacher or similar. Turns out she's a professor.
At the time of her first visit to Palenque, she had a masters degree in Art and was teaching Studio Art at the university, was not yet a professor, and had no formal background in epigraphy. After her pioneering discoveries, she went back to grad school and specialized in Latin American studies.
> Still attending graduate school, Schele founded the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop in Texas in 1977 which consisted of 21 consecutive seminars concerning Maya hieroglyphic writing and introduced more people intrigued by the Maya field than many other books from that time that were considered "popular".[6] Twenty years later, the workshop expanded into what is known as the Maya Meetings at Texas, and includes a symposium of research papers by major scholars and the Forum on Hieroglyphic Writing.
> By this time in her life, Schele realized her destiny as a Mayanist; she enrolled as a graduate student in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas shortly before resigning from her position at South Alabama.[7] She was awarded a Doctorate in Latin American studies by the University of Texas in 1980. She continued her teaching career there, in the department of Art/Art History. At the time of her death, she was the John D. Murchison Regents Professor of Art in the department.
>Our understanding of Maya language and culture has been rewritten over the past 50 years, thanks to the leadership of an art teacher, Linda Schele, who found that hundreds of years of "accepted archaeology wisdom" was incomplete.
Says who?
>She was invited by NASA to speak at a symposium about alien civilizations.
Source?
Do you want me to buy a book too?
Edit: OK, the way you wrote your post got my skepticism alarm blaring. I was thinking you were talking about some ancient aliens insanity, but that wasn't your point at all. I apologize for the confrontational post.
> she revealed herself as a passionately communicative educator who believed the public deserved to share in the excitement of the work they were funding and delighted in presenting her discoveries directly to them. Others tapped into her inspirational gift for relating an ancient culture to our modern world and, amongst many keynote speeches at conferences and university commencements, NASA invited her to address their key staff on the relevance of understanding another world view. An outsider, in her own words an edgewalker, all her career, Linda had been an artist and teacher when the Maya captured her imagination. She had erupted into the field as a young woman just some strange little painter from Alabama in an academic discipline dominated by male archaeologists, just at the time when the investigation of the so called Mysterious Maya was about to become the most dynamic area in the rediscovery of the ancient past.
> it was to be at Palenque that she was first to play a crucial role in breaking the code of the Maya's hieroglyphic writing system. Her mission was to interpret and explain the historic Maya world of city states, kings, rulers, and religion to her own world. But, by working with the modern Maya peoples of Mexico and Guatemala, she began to understand the links between the Indian peoples own rich indigenous culture and their ancient past; and she began to hand back to these oppressed people the tools to repossess their history. This was what Linda Schele considered her most important work.
The review says that "most estimates of the frequency of human sacrifices in Tenochtitlan come from an unfounded assertion by the Franciscan friar Diego Valadés, who was born twenty-two years after the city fell. Valadés claimed that between 15,000 and 20,000 people were sacrificed in Tenochtitlan per year." Later, "Cortés’s confessor and the first formal historian of the Conquest of Mexico, raised the figure to 50,000."
"The number is remarkable for how preposterous it is: more than 137 sacrifices a day, five an hour, one every twelve minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Aztec sacrifice was a nonmechanized process that demanded extensive ritual preparation and an individually selected victim, and archaeologists have never found evidence to support the Spaniards’ figures. As [the book's author] points out, although human skulls have been retrieved from ritual burial grounds close to Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor (the city’s main temple), most of the sacrificial remains that have been found belong to animals—wolves mostly—and these remains don’t add up even to hundreds of victims, let alone thousands."
Also, regarding cannibalism, "owing to a [Spanish] royal law from 1503, an enemy fighter who practiced cannibalism could be enslaved for life, and shortly before Cortés left Cuba for Mexico a smallpox epidemic caused a drastic reduction in native manual labor in the Caribbean. The later narratives that were so insistent on the subject of cannibalism are always, in [the author's] view, related to the conquistador generation’s claim to cost-free indigenous servitude. This argument became especially important after the Crown abolished native slavery and gave indigenous subjects rights identical to those of Spaniards in the New Laws of 1542."
The Spanish reports of the scale of human sacrifice cannot be taken at face value for the reasons you say. On the other hand there is absolutely no question that the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican civilizations were practicing human sacrifice and at a considerable scale, because we have a lot of direct archeological evidence to that effect.
One wonders what people 400 years from now will think, looking back at the horror of abortion, and whether the numbers are believable or not. There will be around 1 million abortions just this year in the US, or 3000+ a day, more than 2 each minute. Also a non-mechanized process.
It's amazing what people can do when they put their mind to it. It's also amazing what people will rationalize when they put their mind to it.
Be specific. As it stands, your comment says basically nothing. Think about it from the perspective of a random reader who comes across your comment. How on earth will they know what you're talking about?
Are we sure it's really all human sacrifice and not just an ossuary?
For example a major tourist attraction underneath Paris is the The Catacombs where you can walk through tunnels paved with the skulls of over 6 million people. It's an amazing sight but would be extremely creepy without the context of a huge modern city above.
The large holes were created post mortem, so that doesn't necessarily reject the ossuary hypothesis. But the body of evidence supporting the human sacrifice hypothesis is really pretty strong.
It is difficult to celebrate historical achievements of our ancestors, when we read about them, passages similar to this.
".... Other Mesoamerican cultures also engaged in human sacrifice and built tzompantlis. But, "The Mexica certainly brought this to an extreme," says Vera Tiesler …."
"...
Gomóz Valdás found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children.
Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed. "If they are war captives, they aren't randomly grabbing the stragglers," Gómez Valdés says. The mix of ages and sexes also supports another Spanish claim, that many victims were slaves sold in the city's markets expressly to be sacrificed.
…"
But, yet, we do. And I guess, we are the descendants of the survivors, and in our chromosomes -- especially the ones inherited from the paternal lineage -- we have the 'winners' of the wars of the past...
I still can not comprehend, how a grown man can do stuff like this, especially to a woman or a child, staring into their eyes...
May be the people who performed these things, had to medicate themselves to alter their own consciousness of some sort. Otherwise, how could they?
If you ever visit Chichen Itza, you can see murals depicting their ceremonies. One of them shows how two teams would compete in some kind of sport involving hoops and balls, and the leader of the winning team would be sacrificed.
And everyone involved thought this was awesome, because it was a great honour something something the gods something sacrifice for your people something.
With our modern sensibilities and rationality, it's absolutely mindboggling.
It's really not mindboggling at all, in regards to modern sensibilities. It's still regularly going on today.
It's identical to blowing yourself up to kill infidels (argued as a great honor by those advocating it, you're the chosen one). And it's similar to crashing your plane into a ship as part of the Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgeki Tai, commiting suicide, sacrificing your life to defend the empire and emperor. To be clear, I'm not adding any commentary on the practices, merely noting the historically recent nature of very similar concepts.
One of the most universal tenets of popular religions, and typically most spiritual belief in general, is self-sacrifice.
With these forms of suicide, it's an other-world calling that is meant to be greater than the value of your own life. Modern sensibilities perhaps make it more shocking, however I don't see anything changing about this core concept and its practice in the next century. So long as most religions function on degrees of self-sacrifice, somewhere someone will be taking that to the next step and demanding people sacrifice their lives to some proclaimed higher calling.
I think that such self sacrifice among the Aztecs is very different to the politically and militarily oriented sacrifices you mention.
The former has no reasonable or practical reasoning.
The later - does, as I think any service member will understand. Every mission has some degree of likelihood that one will face death, some are just willing to up the ante to . a much greater level. The belief in some kind of 'special heaven' is not really the motivating force, it just kind of makes it easier to do.
> how a grown man can do stuff like this, especially to a woman..., staring into their eyes.
Why would the gender of the victim make the killing easier or harder? The act of ritualistic killing an other human being and pulling out their beating hearth uncomprehendable regardless of what gender the victim is. What ever method the priests used to bring themselves to perform such act its questionable if gender was any factor.
How do you know that the priest was all male? The Aztec had both female and male gods, and Wikipedia talks about male and female priests. The article does not claim that all the priests were male.
How could they? It was just their job. One of my brother's college friends ended up as a USAF bomber pilot in Iraq and over some beers one night he described his job. It sounded much like a video game. On the screen where many small blips and his job was to try to hit the areas where they were most dense.
What did the blips represent? "Each blip was a person."
No indication beyond that. Could have been kids, women, old people. This is a lot different than soldiers shooting other soldiers on a battlefield. These weren't battlefields at all, and no one was (or could have) firing back at him up there at 10,000 feet or whatever....
How the fuck could he perform this?
People can be programmed or convinced to be monsters.
do you think that anyone should be killed remotely just because they happen to be in village that some fuckers in Virginia or Maryland think is somehow related to the (by many accounts fictional) "Al Qaeda" or whatever else? How does that fit in with motherfucking "American Values"?
That rendering of the Templo Mayor really evokes a sense of existential dread in me...it’s one thing to see something like that in a video game or horror movie, but knowing it was real is deeply unsettling.
Ahhh..the good ole days. Articles like this always speak of these acts with almost a sense of awe or reverence. Sorry, but these societies were some of the most disturbing and violent ever and I find this almost giddy excitement over human sacrifice to be very off-putting.
>were some of the most disturbing and violent ever and I find this almost giddy excitement over human sacrifice to be very off-putting.
Heck, until past century the crowds gathered to watch hangings, guillotines and other executions all over Europe.
And just past century the Germans burned to death 6 million Jews, gypsies, leftists, and homosexuals.
Then there are the lynchings as a means of justice (in the West) and for blacks in the South, plus other types of "mob justice" in which whole communities would often participate (or stand and enjoy the show).
Those Aztec societies were cruel, but "giddy excitement over" death extends beyond them. And at least they have the excuse to not have had modern science, schooling, wikipedia, and all tons of culture back then...
Executions were of condemned criminals. The Western world, and many others, mobilized to stop Nazi Germany. Lynching was an illegal act. I'm not sure those really compare to industrial scale ritual sacrifice as a cornerstone of the society.
>The Western world, and many others, mobilized to stop Nazi Germany.
That was more of an effort to avoid Germany getting more powerful (and affecting them) than a humanitarian mission. Besides, half of the "western world" took side with the Nazis, including a full blown pro-Nazi government in occupied France (with tons of sympathizers pre- and during the occupation), Italy (of course), Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Norway, Ukraine, and so on.
>Lynching was an illegal act.
And yet few ever got into prison for it when it was practiced.
> "And yet few ever got into prison for it when it was practiced."
Unsurprising since the act was a public display of societal contempt for the legal system. Often the person to be lynched would be torn from a jail by the mob; demonstrating that the judicial system had no power when faced by the will of the mob.
The Western world did not believe in concentration camps for a few years after the war ended, IIRC, so it's impossible for them to mobilize to stop Holocaust - if that's what you mean.
I don't know if there are any other movies that depict the times so realisticly (atleast from a movie watcher's perspective though not from a historian's one).
The last scene showing Hernan Cortez's ship is the bridge between the old world and the "new world". The start of the decline of the Aztecs.
It's worth keeping in mind that whatever else Cortez's ship represented, it certainly wasn't the welfare of the next 10 generations of Native Americans in Mexico.
I think it's also worth keeping in mind that Cortez and those who got off his ships would've been rightly disturbed by the scale of human sacrifice and savagery displayed by the Aztecs. That doesn't justify enslavement, certainly, but their mindset would've been one of fear and defense and that's totally understandable to me.
And, a generation later, their domination of the area firmly established and plainly evident, what then was their mindset? Was it their "fear" and "defensiveness" that led them to continue wholesale rape and slaughter across Central America?
The Europeans did not remotely come close to killing Central and South Americans at the rate they killed themselves, moreover, the term 'rape' is not a useful pejorative, as there were no real natural resources of value that were removed from that area that would have affected the ability of the aboriginals to live.
Gold was removed in vast quantities, but has only a commercial value to those who have ascribed to it such arbitrary value. Otherwise it's just a pretty rock.
Of course - the masses who died from imported disease notwithstanding.
Well ... among the relatively small number of Europeans there around about that time, there probably was rape, which is bad; though you do realize that you're making this point in an article that is literally about the total, systematic and full cultural integration of mass slavery, mass murder, mass infanticide etc. by one group of aboriginals of their immediate aboriginal neighbours, on a scale approaching modern holocaust?
In fact, given > 100 000 skulls in 'one find', and we know this behaviour was common in the region over time, and that certainly not all skulls were preserved ... we're talking easily into the millions of murders, putting this 'on par' with the holocaust. Added the fact this was hundreds of years ago with a smaller population base than modern Europe, in relative terms, this cultural mass murder surpasses the holocaust in relative terms. And done on the basis of 'religion' to boot ...
No, I think you've lost the plot of this subthread. I'm not making a comparative argument about which civilization is better. I'm saying that Cortes didn't rescue Central America so much as perpetrate a genocide on it. We're talking about a movie, for what it's worth.
No, we're talking about historical (i.e. real) Cortez, which is evident from your very own reference to his 'rape' which has nothing to do with the film 'Apocalypto'.
The reference to 'rape' I interpreted metaphorically, and you indicated you meant it literally - which I don't think applies given the historical facts of Aztecs, Cortez et. al. in real history ... whereas one could arguably use the 'rape' in the metaphorical sense and it would in fact apply within reason, at least as a creative description.
Also, nobody has suggested Cortez was a great dude, rather, that he wasn't part of a 'death cult' that pulled the beating hearts out of hundreds of thousands of slaves, women, and children, and inserted straws for the gods to drink blood, skinned them alive and wore their skin for good luck etc. ... which is altogether another level of crazy. It requires a hefty dose of moral equivalence to even try to equate regular colonization/conquest, which is the most common type of geopolitical activity in history by far, with the 'death cult' Aztec stuff, which doesn't really seem to have any real historical parallel.
You see the cliff your argument is falling off of, right? "The most common type of geopolitical activity in history by far". My argument doesn't require me to somehow justify human sacrifice, but yours has taken you to the brink of rationalizing the genocide perpetrated by Cortés.
Being enslaved and raped is bad, but not quite as bad as being enslaved, raped, and also being used as a source of meat.
I think it was one of Neal Stephenson's characters who observed that it really brought into perspective what assholes the Aztecs were when you consider that bringing in the Spanish Inquisition was actually an improvement, vis-a-vis the cruelty of the dominant religion.
The Inquisitors tortured their victims, true enough, but they didn't eat them.
In addition to the 'not even comparable' level of atrocity, the scale of the direct victims of the Inquisition also paled in comparison to the full and complete systematic mass murder of the Aztec rituals.
At very least the eradication of the craziest death cult in history was a bonus for everyone.
No, they did not. Illness and plague wiped out most of South and Central America.
Wars of conquest did not kill remotely as many in comparison.
Moreover, were the Aztecs to have a land boundary to Spain, and were they able to defeat them, the Aztecs would have had no problem slicing up Spaniards and eating their beating hearts for dinner as well.
Apocalypto is a brilliant film designed as an emotional mass market play, but the production design was so great it's award worthy.
Mel Gibson's films usually give some insight into the nature of power and politics, which is really fun because so few attempt to bother with that kind of stuff.
Listen to the DVD voice-over with he and the director of that film, they give you some amazing information as to the backstory of the political setup of the city in which the scenes took place.
>The last scene showing Hernan Cortez's ship is the bridge between the old world and the "new world". The start of the decline of the Aztecs.
And the enslavement, murder, work to death, and rape of tens of millions of natives in the cruelest ways possible... whether they were part of the Aztec culture or way more peaceful tribes...
The first thing I found myself thinking while reading the article was, what was the appropriate response to a society like that? If you’re part of a 16th century expedition, and you’ve come across a nightmare society like this, what’s the right thing to do?
I’m not so quick to dismiss “conquer the country, ban human sacrifice, pave over the temples.” It might not be the worst option. :/
Thanks for reading and sharing my story on Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, the rack where the skulls of the sacrificed were displayed. But it's time for a discussion on why this practice was not "horrific" or "loaded [with] evil," as some of you have said https://t.co/GBZW1TXflv
It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking. How I see the world, filtered through centuries of colonial oppression and destruction, is irrelevant to understanding how they saw the world.
"but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking. How I see the world, filtered through centuries of colonial oppression and destruction, is irrelevant to understanding how they saw the world."
This is an utterly disturbing thought.
To think that 'wanting to be sacrificed' can be part of, you know, a normal kind of cultural artifact, like 'coffee' or 'metallurgy' - and that her ostensible view that 'I probably shouldn't sacrifice myself' is a function of 'colonial oppression'.
It's maximally postmodern and beyond bizarre.
Literally mass murdering children, peeling their skin away is now 'cool' - you know - so long as it's 'really authentically part of your culture' , and not, of course something some white guy did!
This article doesn't specifically mention cannibalism, but in my twenties I read a book that posited that "the lamb" of Christianity being a symbol of peace, as well as the Hindu reverence for the cow, were based on their ability to provide food security because they are grazers who are able to turn grass into protein. Grass is not a human food source. So this means they don't compete for the same food sources we do.
Aztecs had cook books full of recipes for things like "human ribs with hot peppers." Some old temples had bread fruit trees lining the avenue up to the temple. Bread fruit is another source of protein.
IIRC, the book posited that the Aztecs were cannibals because South America had no native animals like cows or sheep that fed predominantly on grass. Thus they were chronically short on protein and this helped make them a very war like people. If you are all going to die anyway because there is not enough food, dying in battle is both psychologically better for the culture and offers the chance that we win, we take we what we need and we feed our people.
Most wars are ultimately rooted in resource shortages. Real peace is ultimately rooted in problem solving to make sure there are enough resources to go around and that those resources get more or less equitably or "fairly" distributed, in some sense and to some degree. Society can survive economic inequality, but there comes a point past which economic inequality is too much of a hardship on some groups and this routinely goes bad places.
Edit: I confess to being an Ugly American who has a bad habit of lumping South America and Central America together and not making clear distinctions in that regards. Substitute "the lands of the Aztecs" for South America.
You can get protein from other sources than large mammals feeding on grass. In fact, they’re one of the less efficient ways to produce proteins if that’s what you are worried about.
Knowing what I know these days, a bigger reason for eating meat is that it is hard to get adequate B vitamins from a vegetarian diet. In most cases, it's not that hard to get adequate protein from a vegetarian diet.
I don't remember the book very well. I read it around 30 years ago. Back then, protein was generally considered to be The Big Issue. It was the basis for Diet for a Small Planet. When the book first came out, it emphasized protein complementarity to solve this issue for vegetarians. It was a political tome. Half of the book was about civil wars and the like (causing starvation). The other half was vegetarian recipes. The follow up book indicated the author had since concluded that it wasn't as challenging as she once thought to get adequate protein from a vegetarian diet.
So it is possible this book I read was basing its hypothesis on the dominant thought of that era that protein was some big limiter. Perhaps protein per se was not the critical detail. We (probably) won't ever really know.
What we do know is that the Aztecs were a very warlike people, human sacrifice was very widely practiced and they also routinely ate their victims, not solely as some barbaric religious ritual, but for dinner.
Sure, but even so they seem to have had domesticated turkeys and even chickens. It’s not immediately obvious to me that the average pre-Columbian South American would have had less meat (or protein) in their diet than the equivalent European of the same era.
> ... hard to get adequate B vitamins from a vegetarian diet
in particular, B12
OTOH, a quantity of other B vitamins can be made for us, in the gut, by intestinal flora as byproducts of their work on the food we've ingested. and properly prepared whole grain products can be a direct source of some b-vitamins (e.g. maize prepared with lime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization)
a reasonably large supply of B12 can be stored in the liver for future use by the body during lean times (perhaps multiple years' worth).
I imagine that in a sparsly populated pre-industrial society human_labor/protein would dominate hectare_of_grass/protein in which case larger animals make sense.
The Aztecs may have had trouble getting enough protein for the simple reason that they were primarily a heavily agrarian culture dependent on Corn (Maize) as their primary staple. Of course it seems like most agrarian cultures, regardless of their staple crops, have suffered from this same problem.
I'd say that lambs are more associated with docility than with peace, and it's a very fair association to anyone who has ever had any contact with sheep. Animal symbolism seems to have much more to do with animal traits, animal behavior or supposed animal behavior (e.g. strength with bulls, courage with lions and altruism with the pelican) than anything else and I see no reason to break that pattern. Furthermore, if it were the case that the reverence of some animals were due to degree is which they are useful, compared to the degree to which they are removed from preferred human ecological niches, then the most revered animals on the earth should probably have been fish.
>IIRC, the book posited that the Aztecs were cannibals because South America had no native animals like cows or sheep that fed predominantly on grass. Thus they were chronically short on protein and this helped make them a very war like people.
the corn/maize/squash dietary kit was remarkably complete in nutrition (eg, all necessary amino acids/"complete protein"); it's one of the reasons that tenochtitlan was one of the most densely populated places on earth upon arrival of the spanish. this thesis is completely bunk.
in fact, cursory googling found this:
> In the late 1970s the anthropologist Michael Harner suggested that the Aztecs had resorted to large-scale, organized cannibalism to make up for a supposed protein deficiency in the diet. This idea gained limited support from some scholars, but has been shown to be based on unfounded assumptions about eating habits, agriculture and demographics, making it a highly unlikely scenario.[38]
you're totally right. they actually did. insects and beans are traditional foods in Mexico. and corn and beans are complementary protein sources.
what's more, the technical process of transforming untreated corn meal into a food humans can digest and extract B vitamins from is one of the many triumphs of ancient Mesoamerican cuisine. they figured out how to do all of this centuries before the Spanish arrived, and i would guess, before human sacrifice attained a massive scale in the Aztec era.
i find it very difficult to believe that cannibalism was nutritionally necessary.
I wonder whether they put the head there on its skeleton form, or when it still has it flesh, eyes, brains, etc. which make the images more scary. I imagine having a wall made of decapitated head and its bloody mess is very disturbing. Anyone had any reference on information on this?
>Over two seasons of excavations, INAH archaeologists collected 180 mostly complete skulls from the tower as well as thousands of skull fragments. Now, those finds sit in a lab next to the Templo Mayor ruins, being painstakingly examined by a team led by INAH anthropologist Jorge Gómez Valdés. Cut marks on the skulls leave no doubt they were defleshed after death, and the decapitation technique appears clean and uniform. "[Mexica priests] had extremely impressive anatomical knowledge, which was passed down from generation to generation," Chávez Balderas says.
They were not aztecs! They were mexicas.And to put things into context the university of oxford is older than Mexico-tenochtitlan(1325 of our age). Repeat with me mexicas.
I know this comment won't be accepted too well here, but as people become vegetarians/vegans even, but more importantly start seeing animals as other beings with souls - it becomes clear how barbaric our society STILL is. Again, only visible to some people that have rejected some pretty common norms.
It is interesting because in those times it was politically and socially acceptable to be OK with other humans being sacrificed.
A man explained how he hit a deer today, and I just filled with sadness, but his immediate POV was getting his car fixed, his tire no longer aligned and how his drive is wobbly.
As a species we really don't have a built in moral system, it's nearly 100% socially driven morals.
I saw a car hit a deer on I-95 at least a decade ago. It was horrifying, and it looked like the passengers could have died. They were okay, but the level of wreckage and the fact that it happened on a highway made it clear how dangerous that can be.
So it’s interesting to read you not really caring that this guy went through a potentially horrifying event, and then judging him for not treating the story of his own experience with the same emotions you felt.
None of this is to say anyone wants deers to be hit by cars. My question is how would you make this different? That guy being sad isn’t going to bring the deer back to life, and it’s not going to prevent the next deer from being hit by a car either. And going vegan won’t prevent it. Why does his emotional behavior reaction matter enough to make a judgment on him?
> but more importantly start seeing animals as other beings with souls
Let's stipulate that non-human animals have a "soul," whatever you believe a soul to be.
How to you judge the soul of, say, a raccoon; a creature than has been called the psychopath of the animal world? A raccoon is never happier than when it's slaughtering a nest full of cute, helpless babies. Red-tailed hawks are such a menace to other species that crows make it their business to hound these magnificent raptors incessantly, injuring and killing when possible.
Is there a place for these creatures in your moral paradigm? What solution do you offer for the utterly ubiquitous violence that has been occurring among all these "souls" for hundreds of millions of years?
We manage deer populations, factoring in hunting and other predation, disease, losses to automobiles, etc., and we thus have stable populations of deer. There is no rational reason to indulge some great sadness when a car hits a deer.
Raccoons don't have the capacity for moral judgement but humans do. It doesn't make sense to think of a raccoon's actions as a part of a moral framework but it does for humans. In fact, we already do. What vegans/vegetarians are doing is extending that logic to be more consistent in our diet.
Prove to us that raccoons have no capacity for moral judgment. Those clear dividing lines between humans and other animals are in reality not supported by much evidence.
"Prove to us that raccoons have no capacity for moral judgment."
Is that something I really need to prove? My argument is that we SHOULD make moral judgement about human behavior regardless of what raccoons do. I agree that there is not much difference between humans and others animals if we choose to examine it.
Anytime you make a significant claim, especially a disputed one that is central to your thesis, it is helpful to at least attempt to back it up. Most people won’t call you on not doing it or talk about burden of proof, they’ll just dismiss your claim with the same lack of effort you put into making it.
Do you believe all other forms of life have souls?
I'm curious because you made the vegetarian and vegan argument which I always find interesting. I was raised Hindu (now atheist) and the religion has a belief that all forms of life have a soul and have consciousness. As a consequence of this you accept that in order to live, your life relies on extinguishing other forms of life. I always find it weird that when people talk about diet, animal rights, and souls, there is an arbitrary distinction between animals and the rest of organism (plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.). The concept of a soul is an abstract non-scientific belief, so given its an abstract concept with no scientific basis, why do we make a distinction between one form of life and another?
In the west, the generally accepted public narrative is that only humans have souls, not other organisms. And whether or not it is acceptable to eat something is frequently more or less tied to intelligence.
I really enjoyed your above comment. I sometimes give push back to the vegan moral superiority stance where they act like eating animals is evil, but eating plants is totally fine. I tend to view all organisms as "having a soul" so to speak and I don't think there is anything inherently morally superior from that perspective in eating only plants, not animals. (I think there are some other bases for arguing that it is morally superior wrt to preventing war, etc.)
But when you see these arguments in public (among "westerners," for lack of a better word), they are almost always based on the idea that plants don't have brains, thus they don't have awareness, so this somehow makes it not a problem to kill them that we might live, where killing animals is posited to be a bad thing.
If you take that argument to its logical conclusion, than perhaps it is morally acceptable to eat other people if they are in a vegetative state. It is one of my objections to such framing.
There is no reason to believe anything that would be described as a soul exists. Logically everything is an emergent property of complex systems including plants, animals, and us.
Not being able to distinguish eating an orange, a chicken, a human, a human in a vegetative state etc is just a failure of analysis.
There is no moral dimension to eating an orange and we don't eat people even when their brain is irretrievably ruined out of inherent disgust,desire not to catch a disease, and moral respect for those they may have left behind.
Eating animals is legitimately complicated. We probably shouldn't do it any more
" Logically everything is an emergent property of complex systems including plants, animals, and us."
I'm sorry, but I fully disagree, please see my note above.
This is a materialist view that presupposes that there is only matter/energy and laws that govern it - and only with that (unproven) presupposition first in place, can anything such as you have described be 'logically inferred'.
For example - you mention 'morality' - from the purely physical perspective, you are merely a random wave form, there can be no intelligence, experience, consciousness - let alone morality from that perspective.
It is considerably logical that our current version of materialism is a very helpful tool for understanding some material aspects of the universe, but that by it's own definition is not very useful in terms of understanding life itself.
Materialism is like a ruler we can use to measure stuff. But it gives us little information on 'who is using the ruler'.
'Soul' or 'spirit' or whatever - are the words that we use to crudely describe that which seems to otherwise differentiate life from other stuff, beyond merely 'complexity'.
Although we have been thinking about the matter for at least 12000 years we have no reasonable theory for things that aren't matter or energy that isn't hand waving and nonsense. The most prevalent current theories are extrapolations from what goat herds who believed illnesses and earthquakes were caused by evil spirits.
As an example most people would agree that chemistry is just applied physics but most people don't do substantial chemistry by simulating all the particles involved not because they believe that chemicals are somehow magical in a way that isn't capturable by physics but because its challenging and intractable.
Further if we did arrive at some theory that described qualities and entities not presently qualified by physics those things including souls would become part of the universe because the term universe grows to encompass everything we presently understand.
The logical conclusion is that a soul if it did exist would be made of matter/energy/information like everything else that can possibly exist.
It would of course be truly shocking if a heretofore incompressible aspect of the universe just happened to mirror thousands of years of superstition.
It would be like if we travelled to another star system and found its denizens were the cast of Harry Potter complete with billions of years of history culminating with a multipart war against Voldemorte.
If you want to posit things out of scope of present understanding you ought to provide some support for them which is notably absent from the above hand waving.
I await an interesting reply but fear it will merely be a critique of my small minded instance that debates consist of facts and arguments.
Your specific frame of reference is called 'scientific materialism', it's been around since the Enlightenment, and like any metaphysical frame of reference, it requires it's own basic assumptions. For example: "The universe is made of this stuff we call matter and energy and those behave according to a specific set of laws". This is unproven, unverifiable etc.. (By the way, you snuck one in there 'information' - which is an abstraction).
It's a useful tool, but it has some problems.
For example - in the context of scientific materialism - we cannot even be 'alive', let alone have 'intelligence' or have 'morality' if we are merely a bag of randomness. A bag of random particles in the Universe must be random at every level.
Here's a paradox for you: "prove to me that you are alive". Basically, you can't. Life is the most important thing there is, and yet we don't even know what we is. If an alien being made of metal parts landed and 'asked for our leader' we'd have a hard time determining whether it was 'life' or not.
Our entire civilization and existence is framed around the concept of life, and of what is not life.
FYI - this 'gaping hole' in Materialism has given rise to kind of a new field called 'Emergence' which is the beginning of the materialists journey to try to understand how complicated interesting things seem to arise from simpler ones - though the field has no answers, the point is good because it recognizes the 'hole' I mention.
"The logical conclusion is that a soul if it did exist would be made of matter/energy/information like everything else that can possibly exist."
Not really. Humans understood that gravity existed, or how it worked very crudely, and dealt with it ... for thousands of years before we even had a word for it, or were able to characterize it rationally in any way.
We have a rough ways of grasping issues while be develop better tools.
So - I did not indicate anything to validate thousands of years of specific superstitions (chemical processes, or magical cures etc.). But the fact that there are words for 'Spirit' 'Soul' or 'Animus' etc. which have developed independently across cultures over various civilizations is a pretty strong reason to indicate that 'something interesting is going on there'.
It's funny because when one steps back for the very specific and narrow view of Materialism, it's an easy concept, it's just that most people are conditioned to narrowly accept current interpretations of 'energy, matter' etc. as 'Truth' that it's hard to consider another view.
The 'hand waiving' is made by those that simply make up and invent premises such as 'The Universe Is Made Of Matter and Energy and Behaves According to Mathematically Describable Laws" - which is unproven and cannot be proven - and then pass it of as an incontestable fact, and then derive all of their arguments based on this supposition ... especially when this definition of the Universe literally denies the very existence of life.
Scientific Materialism was invented by humans do describe: the material. It should be no surprise that it starts to fail when we apply it to other, more existential concepts.
Science is not Truth. It's just a tool, an interpretation. That's it.
It doesn't deny life it simply lacks the tools to fully describe life in the same way that someone who has discovered numbers addition and subtraction lacks the tools to fully understand algebra.
I personally think tying of the soul to intelligence seems a weird distinction. Does that mean that if person goes into a vegetative state, they have lost their soul? Do animals that are less intelligent have a less likelihood of a soul? If you can breed animals without mental faculties are they soul-less? Does the fact that we can't understand if plants are intelligent meant they lack souls? These seem like petty distinctions.
To me there is a notion that life has some intrinsic value to it. In parallel there is a notion that to exist as life, humans have to rely on destroying life. To me these are equally important, recognizing that life has worth but also to exist you must end life. I find this paradoxical duality to be beautiful.
Now from a practical point of view there are social rules for how you end life. So some cultures thought it was ok to eat all forms of life as long as that life wasn't part of your tribe (societies with cannibalism), other societies thought it was ok to eat all forms of life except for your pets (most Americans), some exclude animals based on religious beliefs (pork in Islam and judaism, meat and beef in Hinduism), and some think it is ok to eat all forms of life that are non-animals (vegetarians).
I think its hard for any of these groups to claim moral superiority. The truth is in order to exist we need to destroy life, but at the same time, most can see that life is precious.
My feeling is that the practice of saying grace before a meal is rooted in the awareness that "something died that I might live -- and there but for the grace of god go I." When we die, unless we are intentionally preserved, we also get consumed, even if only by microorganisms and plants growing in the soil where our body decomposed.
As far as I know, other animals don't give pause over that detail. We seem to be the only animal who has this uncomfortable awareness and wrestles with it in various forms.
A. I'm an environmental studies major and anytime I present evidence that plants are aware of suffering, it is ignored and dismissed.
B. I was homeless for nearly 6 years. A so-called ethical vegan I knew (who wasn't actually a full-time vegan and ate vegetarian, not vegan, as convenience suited them) happily and enthusiastically added to my suffering during that time. Given how often ethical vegans gleefully psychologically torture their non vegan fellow humans over their failure to be vegan, I have zero reason to believe this individual's cruelty towards me was some wild aberration in the veg- community.
Please note the other comment here by someone using terms like no reason to believe,logically and a failure of analysis. The subtext of the framing celebrates this western idea that intelligence is everything.
So we can presumably agree to disagree at this point.
"I'm an environmental studies major and anytime I present evidence that plants are aware of suffering, it is ignored and dismissed."
As it should be. When you say "pain" and "suffering" you mean in in no similar way to your own pain and suffering whereas vegans do. You're co-opting the language of ethics to try and point out hypocrisy. Also, let's apply some logic here and acknowledge that far more plants are "harmed" to make animal food products than plant food products, thus it's still consistent for ethical people to eat a plant based diet.
"I have zero reason to believe this individual's cruelty towards me was some wild aberration in the veg- community."
Vegans are defined by caring for the well being of others. That gives us every reason to think that a vegan would care more than anyone else about the well being of others. Your anecdote about a vegan who was mean to you once is something you shouldn't use to draw conclusions about an entire group of people.
I had the fortune to grow up simultaneously in a few variations of christianity. None of them dealt adequately with the argument why animals don't have souls, nor referred to the bible. It was just stated.
Also, none of the dealt with why a person who had never encountered the bible would go de facto to hell.
If we were really made in god's image, then he'd expect us to follow logic, thank you.
> If we were really made in god's image, then he'd expect us to follow logic, thank you.
There's literally nothing in the scriptures (that I've read) supporting this, while there's plenty of evidence God itself is batshit insane, or at least suffers from bipolar disorder, paranoia, and obsessive jealousy. As such, it's entirely plausible to me that we are, indeed, made in such a god's image...
" The concept of a soul is an abstract non-scientific belief, so given its an abstract concept with no scientific basis, why do we make a distinction between one form of life and another?"
A 'soul' is a rational and scientific concept, it's just not materialist or rather, the kind of science we are used to daily.
As far as souls, more complicated, but maybe one simple answer is that more complex and intelligent forms of life have a deeper access to 'the soul' and that it's not like a step function, rather ... some kind of increasing gradient from inanimate matter, to plants, to animals, to humans, to the 'next level' of life.
My second answer relates to the first, i.e. 'Scientific' in sense that his is literally how we divide the universe at least biologically, i.e. life/not life, then domain, kingdom etc..
Please reconsider the notion that 'soul' has no scientific basis, as many would consider that the 'soul' or 'spirit' or 'animus' or whatever is literally the thing that distinguishes us from inanimate material - otherwise - according to a purely materialist perspective you cannot be alive i.e. there is no such thing as life - you are merely a random bag of particles that appears to be alive :).
If you believe that you are alive, that there is love, intelligence, happiness, experience, consciousness, and that you are not simply a purely random bag of particles, then it logically follows you must 'believe in something' that is not bound by strict materialist ideals. This metaphysical concept is not new, and we have some words for that, usually: 'soul' or 'animus' or 'spirit' or whatever. It's not irrational and it's not unscientific, it just by definition does not fit within materialist framework. And to be more clear - materialist science holds as a presupposition that 'everything is a random wave/particle/big of energy' - it is not a 'proof' kind of thing. It holds as a presupposition that 'there is nothing more'. In essence, materialist science starts with a premise of denying all other views, and then goes on to try to explain everything through the lego-blocks of matter type theories. Which don't explain life very well at all.
Sorry for all that. Short answer: Animals are on the spectrum of life, as are we, and there's clearly a relationship there and we can therefore infer a degree of their experience and status in all of this to some extent.
As a sidepoint, I'm going to have to argue that while a soul can be considered a rational concept, it is by know means scientific. I have not aware of any peer reviewed research utilizing the scientific method to show that a soul exists.
But to get to your main point, my question again is why are plants excluded from this state? I really don't get it. You call out that animals are different because they aren't inanimate beings, but neither are plants. Plants are complex, highly evolved multi cellular organisms that are certainly not inanimate.
If the argument is that animals are a life form that are closer form of life to humans so that's why you shouldn't eat them, I can buy that argument. It's a similar moral argument for why you shouldn't eat humans.
But that's a lot different from claiming that animals have souls/spirit/animus and plants don't. From any biological perspective plants are just as alive as animals. Plants communicate, respond to touch, many even actively kill other organisms (venus fly traps, bird catcher trees, etc.), they've been experimentally verified to exhibit some type of memory, and they respond to all sorts of stimuli (for example, turning towards the sun). Rationally, isn't that pretty darn alive? It seems shortsighted to think that plants lack a spirit/soul.
"If the argument is that animals are a life form that are closer form of life to humans so that's why you shouldn't eat them, I can buy that argument. ...
But that's a lot different from claiming that animals have souls/spirit/animus and plants don't"
It's not, it's pretty close to the same thing as we pragmatically view life as something beyond material.
In Scientific Materialism - you are merely a random bag of particles. There literally can be no 'life' in randomness.
By very definition, you cannot exist in those terms.
'Soul/spirit/animus' etc. are crude words we all use to describe that which animates life beyond the pure randomness of our material explanations.
Though you can try to describe life in biological terms, and it's practical ... it's has some major flaws. Surely, after 4 decades of Star Trek we can all cognize forms of life which don't fit our classical biological view. More abstract notions of life would therefore have to be designed and they inch closer and closer to a metaphysical perspective that just doesn't work as Materialism.
So, if you consider the word 'Soul' to mean some concrete idea, but which is totally imaginary, like 'some God' or whatever, then sure - I see your point - but really, the existence of the terminology 'Soul/Spirit' etc. is simply grasping at something more meta, they are used to describe effectively life. Ergo - 'same scale'.
We've used and understood gravity in very crude terms for 1000's of years and yet we did not specifically understand the mechanics of it. It didn't mean we were wrong so much as we just had a crude grasp of it.
Scientific Materialism is a really useful tool, but it's not a Truth. It has it's limits and these issues highlight those limits quite well.
>> As a species we really don't have a built in moral system, it's nearly 100% socially driven morals.
Our built is moral system is biology. We as a species are omnivores which means we have a predisposition to be O.K. with killing and processing game for food.
I think its more of a miracle we are able to put our personal morals above biology and opt out of it.
I am not a vegan/vegetarian, but I do think that future generations will view meat-eating as immoral and see their ancestors as barbaric for eating animals. We already see this in the West with respect to limited categories of animals (whales, dolphins, dogs, cats). Probably the shift will involve a philosophical change in assigning moral status based on ability to experience pain (rather than the higher bar of self-awareness/higher consciousness) coupled with advances in food technology (including cellular agriculture/cultured "meat").
>based on ability to experience pain (rather than the higher bar of self-awareness/higher consciousness)
But without talking about consciousness what does experience pain mean. Insects respond to and attempt to avoid certain stimuli, but that's not really the same thing.
The existence of a "soul" (or "light" or "sol" or whatever variation) isn't scientifically established.
What is scientifically established is the existence of a CNS which means the species is able to experience pain. Mussels, clams, and mushrooms do not have a CNS, and one could argue they are therefore vegan.
Apologies for that terminology, I personally believe in that, so for anyone else, scratch that note and replace with (start seeing animals that have the same right to live here as humans) and being more pedantic, if you believe humans being animals, scratch the distinction, and replace with animals of the species of human. I'm sure I'm offending more people in trying to fix this comment lol.
Extending the right to live to cattle, will quickly kill large part of them off, as businesses will stop providing food and care to them with no expected returns and the cattle isn't adapted enough to survive in the wild.
Extending the right to live to wild animals is essentially void (if we aren't going to exterminate all the carnivores) and will probably cause a couple of ecological disasters as population control hunting will be off limits too.
Oh I'm not offended, I just don't understand the concept, and as it seems that you have an at least somewhat defined understanding (or maybe as you call it 'belief'), I thought maybe you could explain. Of course I realize that there are many people who see some sort of relation between 'living creatures' and 'souls', but I rarely find someone who wants to explain in any depth (well, organized religions have large bodies of dogma that explain the details, but I tend to find them unsatisfying as at some point they rely on 'because we say so'; and apart from that, I don't think your argument comes from any mainstream religion's theology anyway).
What I mean is - why do some living creatures have 'souls' (and, I think I can conclude from your argument, should not be killed by others? Maybe only not by others with souls? Not sure if there are living beings without souls?) Like, insects - do they have souls? And micro-organisms, say, fungi?
How dare those evil conquistadors demonize such a beautiful tradition of cutting out a person's still beating heart and using their skull to create amazing architecture?
I submit that if we are any different today, it is only in degree or manner, not in kind. 56 million abortion a year worldwide is still a ritual killing of human beings. Only difference is stage of development, and not building edifices
or masks out of the remains. On the other hand, we still engage in a manner of adornment by reusing the fetal remains in our medical research, and other profitable consumer goods.
Human sacrifice occurred in the Americas, that is well established. But similar things did happen elsewhere. In Europe, Asia and Asia... at massive scale.
What is the Roman Catholic Inquisition exactly? It can be oversimplified to burning people so God is happy. It is a form of human sacrifice. Up to 300,000 people died that way.
So if we are going to talk about human sacrifice let's apply the term consistently.
I would read about the inquisitions first. The Spanish Inquisition killed about 5,000 as an execution of the civil law, not a religious ritual. The law was bad, but the interrogations were in an attempt to only censure or punish the “guilty,” and to the correct degree. It’s quite a different situation. Here is a link to the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
You are referring to law created by a theocratic form of government during a time when there was no separation between church and state.
You can argue there was a law, and different rules, and a bunch of abstract concepts... in the end it is someone being killed for making God angry, and the form of execution is no different than a ritual.
For example, if we sent an average Hacker News reader back to the time of the Inquisition, they would start trying to share their scientific knowledge with others, talking about the laws of physics, chemistry, etc. Immediately after, they would be accused of witchcraft (chemistry back then was alchemy, a form of witchcraft) and that person would be tortured and then killed in a bonfire. That system is the one you seem to be defending now.
It was not my intention to create a flamewar and I will stop commenting on this.
The reason I am defensive when it comes to these articles is because they are actively used by hate groups to validate a perspective of the world where some nations are unworthy of their lives, freedom and right to self determination. Presenting these articles without an accompanying them with the context of the time does not help that situation.
I would suggest reading the article first. Monarchy isn’t theocracy. The Spanish Inquisition in particular was a power grab by the crown in a time when “two swords” feudalism was giving way to absolute secular monarchy, even in Catholic countries. The (partial) motivation in rooting out heresy was done in a belief that false teaching was dangerous for ignorant people, not to earn God’s approval for the ruler or the country. Grouping actions, circumstances, motivations and outcomes this disparate into a more precise term like “ritual” only creates a need for a new word.
You have a really cartoonish view on this. They were not killed because it made God angry. You have to put context on it.
You have to understand that religion was really important (maybe the most important thing) for the people of that period, and you have to know that their religion was threatened for centuries inside their own borders, you have to know about "La reconquista".
In a time of period were your territory was just regained from Moors after centuries of occupation and threatens to your life and beliefs. The only logical move was to identify those who were still Moors in the shadows, from their point of view they were the remains of the invaders they were still dangerous.
You have to know about the kind of punishments for the law breakers (not only religion laws) on that period of time, you have to know that the inquisition was the organization that investigated the cases to identify those who were false conversions (those who were still a threaten from their point of view), then when someone was found guilty for breaking their laws the state was responsable for imparting justice, their justice is very different from today's justice, we have learned a lot, but you can't properly understand their actions if you don't understand the context.
Are you saying we shouldn’t discuss an archaeological find because it makes a part of one civilization look bad? That kind of anti-science thinking is dangerous.
I understand what you mean. Christianity can be seen in a different light if we recognized it as being centered around human sacrifice to a monotheistic god. But I think the problem has more to do with too much veneration for Western religion than it does with biased labeling of Native American religious practices.
This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda, until they dug up the massive infant necropolis near the temple to Moloch (yes, that Moloch -- the Carthaginians were Canaanites).
Even the Romans made human sacrifices (not just gladiators, or feeding Christians to the lions). When things got particularly grim in the Punic wars, they sacrificed two Gauls and a Greek in the forum.
Human sacrifice was alarmingly common.
https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice
That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that this practice was disturbingly widespread in the ancient world.
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.
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.
>It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking.
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.
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".
Your own refusal to address the primary assertion of my post concedes your agreement.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Good old western civilization, no blood on our hands.
Perhaps the whole idea of "culture/ideology" is flawed and progress happens not within a culture but by specifically rejecting cultural and ideological norms.
i would argue that for those on the receiving end, the difference matters very little.
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.
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.
Surely the Ethiopian famine and the Cambodian famine could be disregarded if you applied this rule consistently.
And the Bengal famine is arguably something caused by a Western democracy that wasn't directly a result of the wartime conditions.
How about your government? Those hands are a smidge less than clean.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8#
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.
This is absolutely false.
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:
https://psmag.com/news/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-56433
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.
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".
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).
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.
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.
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.
> But the Mexica would not have seen death when they looked at the tzompantli. They would have seen life.
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?
To take issue with their description because they are not either of those things seems silly....or just a sort of academic trolling for attention.
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.
Edit: Oops. Forgot key "don't" and "isn't".
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.
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.
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?
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..."
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.
The "Dogma of Otherness"[0] is important for humanity, but needs to be carefully applied to resist Popper's paradox of tolerance.[1]
[0] http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=th...
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?
One reason why there was so much repetition against human sacrifice in the Old Testament may be related to the fact that the Carthaginians, as a Phoenician civilization, were part of the Semitic language group, and so there may be more tendency for those cultures in that time to have those practices. It's easier to avoid falling into particular practices if those who do them are separated geographically, culturally, or linguistically from you. (For example, there probably aren't many people in Western countries looking to adopt sky burial traditions of far-off Tibetan groups.)
In fact this is a point in favour of the Jews, in that even if such practices were not common among them; they would still have a strong reason to bother condemning them because there hated neighbours did it.
That is quite literally a story about a custom of child sacrifice, with a later minute change of heart.
It wasn't a later minute change of hearth, it was basically a dramatic way to drive home the message DO NOT SACRIFICE humans!
It's got the "hook" "Abraham is going to sacrifice", to get everyone's attention. And then the powerful message "don't do that".
I've always like the interpretations of Genesis (and other old ME epics) as folk memory. Myth as a way of telling history allegorically.
For example, people named in genesis often represent tribes, ethnicities and nationalities. Their names were literal personifications of contemporary peoples. The binding of Isaac represents a transition from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice, as a symbolic substitute continuing the same tradition.
I've even heard interpretations of the fall from eden where eden represents a hunter gatherer lifestyle in the fertile crescent, and the fall represents settled, agricultural life.
God says, a few lines later, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Trembling
But then, given that the killings were happening anyway, the existence of an infant necropolis does not prove that sacrificing was going on.
There is certain smugness emanating from judo-christian corner in this thread, I was responding to that.
Besides that, this is getting off-topic as to the point that it was likely a widespread thing in the world.
Maybe it really wanted to, but then changed its mind :-)
Now of course, all of this understanding by people of faith could be completely wrong. But there is often difficulty having dialogue on the matter because when skeptics criticize what they find to be odd behaviour or odd contradictions in the Bible, they often lack comprehensive knowledge of the Bible needed to come to logically valid conclusions (note I said logically valid, not logically sound). Bertrand Russell did it when he criticized Jesus for making the fig tree wither, he didn't understand what was happening there. He lacked Biblical context of certain passages about fig trees in the Old Testament, and he also lacked botanical context of how fig trees grew in Palestine.
When people make conclusions without getting the full picture, it is natural to come to strange conclusions. This applies to any area or body of knowledge and analysis from the study of physics to language acquisition. We wouldn't say that Bilbo was an evil character because his true colours were revealed when he saw the One Ring in Frodo's possession in Fellowship of the Ring. No, we'd understand what Bilbo went through with the ring and what kind of person he really is because we read The Hobbit first. And there are aspects of the One Ring and The Hobbit that we cannot fully understand without reading The Silmarillion first.
I believe I shouldn't try to have these types of discussions on HN. Sorry if it is too much. If you're interested in taking this discussion offline to really dig into it, let me know. :)
Regardless, I think equating capital punishment with ritual sacrifice is a fair judgement. No matter how rational our rituals and systems for killing people seem, there's no reason to suggest that the Aztecs did not feel similarly about their rituals and systems. Law is not supposed to be a science, so it's also not free from cultural relativism, even if you're not a cultural relativist generally.
Given the advanced bureaucratic practices common to empires in precolonial America, it seems the Aztecs simply required regular sacrificial deaths (via suicide or homicide) to maintain their office, in addition to regularly liquifying prisoners or the enslaved. Like a death camp which ran on self-motivated suicide, for reasons of cosmic accounting.
Personally I find 5DFractalTetris' claims to be preposterous and wrong, but IMHO downvotes should be reserved for something other than "I disagree with this comment."
I have to agree just a shade with the premise.
A lot of punishment is morally oriented, and it's derived from our value system which is headed by 'God', or at least an interpretation of that.
Murderers are executed not just to keep them off the streets, but as a matter of punishment which is fundamentally pleasing to our moral code ... headed by God.
I think old-school capital punishment is at least distantly related to the concept of sacrifice.
Though I wouldn't want to equate the two.
In one world, we believe that a crime committed causes harm against a social construction. In the other...
To me, it seems like the crucial difference is whether the person responsible for the act is the one punished. It is not clear that is the objective of the modern (American) justice system. It is even less certain that was an issue with pre-Enlightenment justice systems.
Human nature seems to be more "someone has to pay!!" more than "the person responsible has to pay!"
Defining 2 things then calling the definition different is not compelling.
The thinking that makes them less different is that they both serve "a greater good" (a just society or secular society) or "specific good" (of a community or divine favor). How you perceive the original intent or what terms you use are not relevant to the association.
As modernists, we believe that it's important to punish the person who is responsible for a crime. It is not clear that is
1/ "Justice",
2/ shared by our ancestors,
3/ any more clear or moral than other belief systems.
It boils down to the purpose of the modern justice system. I've heard all the following reasons, each with deficiencies:
1) because doing wrong must be met with punishment (tautology)
2) because it keeps dangerous people off the street (not structurally optimized for)
3) because it makes our society safer (abstract/generic)
4) because it makes it clear that each individual is responsible for their actions (most believable to me)
I guess my question is this: why do we put people in jail (or kill them)? Personally, I don't think our justice system exists to make "good society" safer[0]; I think it's to control people so they behave in the same way those in charge want people to behave. (I.e., the initial motivation is amoral.)
[0] if so, victimless crimes wouldn't be so heavily regulated
However, regardless of the metaphysical beliefs of a state, any entity of sufficient size & organization will often be recognized by an individual as possibly having godlike power over the individual's body. Whether or not that truth actually ritualizes state-sanctioned violence, or the diffused psychological impact of that violence can be called a sacrifice, is a matter of opinion; however, being that it is state-sanctioned it is obviously distinct from murder, and because these punishments often have no deterrent effect on the populace, their true nature is in camera obscura.
The big difference between war and human sacrifice is that the target of human sacrifice is not a threat or a random bystander.
> One conquistador, Andrés de Tapia, was given the task of counting the skulls on the "tzompantli" at Tenochtitlan and estimated that there were 136,000 skulls on it.[17] However, based on numbers given by Taipa and Fray Diego Durán, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano[18] has calculated that there were at most 60,000 skulls on the "Hueyi Tzompantli" (Great Skullrack) of Tenochtitlan. The "Hueyi Tzompantli" consisted of a massive masonry platform composed of “thirty long steps” measuring fully 60 meters in length by 30 meters wide at its summit. Atop of the aforementioned platform was erected an equally formidable wooden palisade and scaffolding consisting of between 60 and 70 massive uprights or timbers woven together with an impressive constellation of horizontal cross beams upon which were suspended the tens of thousands of decapitated human heads once impaled thereon.[19] There were at least five more skull racks in Tenochtitlan but by all accounts they were much smaller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli#Aztec
The sources of that image indicate "several thousand" in the article. Not 100k.
> Combining the two historically documented towers and the rack, INAH archaeologists now estimate that several thousand skulls must have been displayed at a time.
There is really no evidence of child sacrifice at Carthage. Not sure why this myth persists but the much more plausible explanation is that (wealthy) children who died of natural causes were cremated, a very common practice in the ancient world that goes back literally 10,000 years.
> Human sacrifice was alarmingly common.
Not so much.
And in fact what the Aztecs did was very unique: human sacrifice was institutionalized and carried out on an industrial scale. This is very different from servants/wives being forced to follow a warrior or the occasional prisoner of war being tossed into a pit. There's really nothing else like it in all of history until the modern Europeans invented death camps.
Check out Antiquity 2012, 2014, and 2017.
I'm familiar with the Oxford research. It's not conclusive and I don't think most archaeologists have signed on. We'll see how it holds up over time. Even if you accept Oxford, it's still the case that child sacrifice, if it did take place, was rare and reserved only for the very wealthy. The idea of Carthaginians all gathering in a stadium and hurling children into a pit of fire for Moloch is pure (Roman) myth.
That aside, As a historian, I think our skepticism of primary sources has gone way way way to far. Plutarch is ignored, because Roman. Cortez was ignored because Spanish. Do they have reason to exaggerate? Sure and they at times do. But the archeological evidence on both Carthage and Cortez was really clear.
We continue to find sites with mass sacrifices (not just of children) in Central and South America (Aztec, Mayan, and Inca) and instead of disregarding it due to the Spanish reports, students should understand that these incidents were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs.
Maybe, maybe not. It didn't hurt that the Spaniards had powerful biological weapons on their side that decimated [1] the Aztec population. Same as what happened here in the United States with the native population. Had it been the natives spreading new infectious diseases to the arriving europeans, history would probably have been quite different.
Imagine going to a new land and upon contact with the natives a sizable portion of your people always dies off while the natives stay healthy and at full fighting strength. And even the ones that do not die off still get so sick that it completely incapacitates them for some time and hence unable to fight. They'd be very vulnerable to native attacks.
The news would spread like wild fire in Europe that everybody that travels to the new world dies because of sorcery or what not. Yep, history could have turned out very differently indeed.
[1]http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2013/07/30/guest-post-wha...
This is the relevant part:
>>When Hernando Cortes and his army conquered Mexico starting in 1519, there were roughly about 25 million people living in what is now Mexico. A hundred years later, after a series of epidemics decimated the local population, perhaps as few as 1.2 million natives survived. Records confirm there was a smallpox epidemic in 1519 and 1520, immediately after the Europeans arrived, killing between 5 and 8 million people<<
Native societies all across the americas were struck by plague even before Europeans got there, as the disease moved faster than colonists into the interior.
One could argue that there was at least one example of South America's 'geographic genetics' fighting back against European encroachment and winning - The Darien Scheme, which ultimately broke Scotland, enabling rule by England back home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
I guess what I'm asking is, isn't this a little bit of a chicken/egg situation? If the natives had been more aggressive in expansion, they may have had a higher exposure rate to other cultures and diseases and thereby a higher immunity to it as well as leading to more genetic diversity, and possibly having reached Europe first?
I guess the way I read your comment was implying that history could have easily been different (which you may or may not actually be stating), but the number of factors (genetic/cultural temperament, geology, etc) all have to line up over such a long period so as to basically be a fundamentally different world history than what has transpired, both before and after the actual colonisation period.
I overall agree with your point, that it was a large factor in the colonisation of the Americas, but even that aspect was far more determined or influenced by a huge range of factors that co-mingle into the history we know (and largely left to random natural processes and historical fiat).
I'm probably being overly pedantic (it is Saturday night on HN after all ;)), but I guess your statement read similarly to other "history-could-be-different" thought experiments, but seem fundamentally different (I'm contrasting that to the most common experiments, situations like the TV show High Castle and what if Germany won the war, or what if JFK hadn't been assasinated, etc).
Again, I'm not necessarily disagreeing, just following a mental thread of what would be needed in order for that change to be possible. Having written and read all that, at the very least, I was assuming something that's probably different than what you're actually saying.
Your comment does make me wonder about some of the other accounts of European history where the Romans had a harder time invading (parts of Brittania, for example) where the cultures were written off as barbarian and completely deranged or had large myths associated with them, if disease played some part in the comparable success/failure of colonisation for those areas and the coloring of Western history in general.
Domesticated beasts of burden mean (a) higher productivity, i.e. cities i.e. proximity between people and (b) proximity between people and animals. The latter provides a vector for novel diseases to form. The former provides a vector for them to spread.
The boost to productivity, meanwhile, meant the Old World had the resources to venture out. It’s more challenging to bootstrap a complex technological society with just alpaca.
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/animal-domestication-table-dates-p...
“The causes of [North American horses’] extinction have been debated. Given the suddenness of the event and because these mammals had been flourishing for millions of years previously, something quite unusual must have happened. The first main hypothesis attributes extinction to climate change. For example, in Alaska, beginning approximately 12,500 years ago, the grasses characteristic of a steppe ecosystem gave way to shrub tundra, which was covered with unpalatable plants. However, it has been proposed that the steppe-tundra vegetation transition in Beringia may have been a consequence, rather than a cause, of the extinction of megafaunal grazers.
The other hypothesis suggests extinction was linked to overexploitation of native prey by newly arrived humans. The extinctions were roughly simultaneous with the end of the most recent glacial advance and the appearance of the big game-hunting Clovis culture. Several studies have indicated humans probably arrived in Alaska at the same time or shortly before the local extinction of horses” [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_United_States
When I think about that I have trouble with the idea that Cortez would have come up with THAT if he was trying to slander the Mesoamerican ruling class. As he would have had no cultural references to draw on.
> students should understand that these incidents were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs.
I keep thinking that to Mesoamerican peasants Catholicism was probably least offensive thing about the Spanish.
yes. two sides to the Mezoamerican practice of human sacrifice.
the Aztecs carried out the sacrifices, but thousands of people from other local groups were the victims. and one must wonder how enthusiastic they were about the practice.
it's not so hard to see how the Spanish found local allies, initially, in their fight against the Aztecs.
The article mentions, plausibly so, that the issue of human sacrifice was often exaggerated by the Spaniards. Nevertheless, it is clear that the practice (and self-mutilation, primarily of the ears) was an important aspect of not just Aztec life, but many of their neighbors' as well.
Díaz writes, "I have spent a long time talking about the great cue of Tlatelcoco and its courts. I will conclude by saying that it was the biggest temple in Mexico, though there were many other fine ones, for every four or five parishes or districts supported a shrine with idols; and since there were many districts I cannot keep a count of them all. [...] Every province had its own idols, and those of one province or city were no help in another. Therefore they had infinite numbers of idols and sacrificed to them all."
Discussion of deities and their numbers aside, Díaz' repeated report is that sacrifices of various sorts were widespread, and that evidence of human sacrifice, or the holding of prisoners intended for sacrifice, was found almost universally from the coast to Mexico.
Edit: Reading again, on the subject of tzompantli, or a similar arrangement for sacrificed remains, Díaz writes, "They strike open the...chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the still palpitating heart which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off the arms, thighs, and head, eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets. The head they hang up on a beam, and the body of the sacrificed man is not eaten but given to the beasts of prey."
In Europe, there was the Inquisition, with ritualistic torture using medieval torture devices, burning people to death, etc. Motivated by religious beliefs, just like the ones in the Americas.
The Spanish also conducted campaigns of extermination. Some recent ones: the Reconcentrado policy in Cuba, and the usage of chemical weapons in the Rif war.
Just an example: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/1898/reconcentrado-2.jpg <- Spain, a Western country, did this
Going back to your post: maybe their portrayal is accurate, but Spain was not any better.
"Devine will demands these deaths; we will ensure the safety of our community by ritually killing these people."
Cortez him self was quite cruel, fond of torture - either when looking for gold or enemies.
It’s just an article about Aztecs.
It is as if people were emotionally invested into this, despite this being hundred years old affair.
So yes, this matters because thread up there want to make adventure book out of this. It is not about trying to figure history, it is about treating it all as scary book.
You can have human sacrifice without it being impossibly large and without it being treated like adventure movie plot and without jumping on every fantasy anyone ever wrote - which is what up thread is. You can belive scientific consensus which is based on multiple sources and findings without making feel good stuff about conquest.
And while you are expressing outrage over exceptional kills, it is fine to ask who the source is. Because it does put things into context as it turns out the report is not by independent third party, but by highly motivated player in political and violent struggle for control.
That is discussing history without judgement. If you bring this as proof that Cortez was unfairly disbelieved, which people do, then it is absolutely relevant to bring why, the way he collected evidence and what his goals were. That is part of historical discussion too.
This whole discussion, meaning other (top) threads are primary about making civilization judgement. Except that, only Aztek (or communist for some odd reason) kills are allowed in that discussion. It is literally there, Europeans coming were clearly superior, because we don't talk about facts that break that nice vision - namely that potential victims of sacrifice ended up being tortured in order to extract evidence that they themselves killed people (or have gold).
So no, discussion turned into civilization moral judgement before me and at that point it is perfectly ok to discuss involved civilizations - or at least what they were doing at that time at that place.
-----------
Offtopic: I think you can actually judge past people. You can judge Aztek priest, who is in it in part for own gain or cruel Samurai, Nazi leader or Colombus or whoever specifically. You should not however buy one of these guys woldview, just because he is our tribe remotely, and claim his self serving violence and treatment of commoners are fair due to somebody else's action.
Later, during the reign of terror they killed and tortured people based on non-religious or even anti religious beliefs.
Yes, old Catholics did much wrong but can we stop this very unnuanced "religious people did it" and conclude "people with power did it"?
So has everyone else, so singling out them and pretending it is about "religion" or "the Catholics" is wrong.
I just asked google to solve a couple of problems for me. What is the current population, and how many years do they experience in one hour on the wall clock?
Current world population according to Google: 7.6B How many years in 7.6B hours: 867,579.9
So we are nearly at a point where there are a million years of human live/conciousness/etc experienced every hour.
That's a lot.
I can't even comprehend the scale.
Especially, it feels like fertile ground for speculative fiction about what would happen if it were collectivizable...
One wonders if this is, indeed, the concept being described, over and over again in every religion (and science) ever ..
To what extent does mass+social media create collective subgroups of consciousness? What's the decay curve of a subgroup and how do subgroups compete, fork, merge or decay?
How do persistent records (oral memories, written records, national holidays, memorials, digital footprints, media archives, censorship) feed back into subgroups of collective consciousness?
How can collective consciousness be measured, monetized, directed, encouraged, suppressed, or otherwise manipulated for specific purposes, within a specific bounded timeframe of a single hour or day?
How do time zones affect the "nature/flavor" of consciousness in each hour, as populations sleep and wake and work and rest and ...?
There's a documentary and several books about her work: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kF4lue30vgg & https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ag5fGFwWwBU
She was invited by NASA to speak at a symposium about alien civilizations. If we hope to understand other species, we can start by learning more about "other" humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Schele
> Still attending graduate school, Schele founded the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop in Texas in 1977 which consisted of 21 consecutive seminars concerning Maya hieroglyphic writing and introduced more people intrigued by the Maya field than many other books from that time that were considered "popular".[6] Twenty years later, the workshop expanded into what is known as the Maya Meetings at Texas, and includes a symposium of research papers by major scholars and the Forum on Hieroglyphic Writing.
> By this time in her life, Schele realized her destiny as a Mayanist; she enrolled as a graduate student in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas shortly before resigning from her position at South Alabama.[7] She was awarded a Doctorate in Latin American studies by the University of Texas in 1980. She continued her teaching career there, in the department of Art/Art History. At the time of her death, she was the John D. Murchison Regents Professor of Art in the department.
Says who?
>She was invited by NASA to speak at a symposium about alien civilizations.
Source?
Do you want me to buy a book too?
Edit: OK, the way you wrote your post got my skepticism alarm blaring. I was thinking you were talking about some ancient aliens insanity, but that wasn't your point at all. I apologize for the confrontational post.
> she revealed herself as a passionately communicative educator who believed the public deserved to share in the excitement of the work they were funding and delighted in presenting her discoveries directly to them. Others tapped into her inspirational gift for relating an ancient culture to our modern world and, amongst many keynote speeches at conferences and university commencements, NASA invited her to address their key staff on the relevance of understanding another world view. An outsider, in her own words an edgewalker, all her career, Linda had been an artist and teacher when the Maya captured her imagination. She had erupted into the field as a young woman just some strange little painter from Alabama in an academic discipline dominated by male archaeologists, just at the time when the investigation of the so called Mysterious Maya was about to become the most dynamic area in the rediscovery of the ancient past.
> it was to be at Palenque that she was first to play a crucial role in breaking the code of the Maya's hieroglyphic writing system. Her mission was to interpret and explain the historic Maya world of city states, kings, rulers, and religion to her own world. But, by working with the modern Maya peoples of Mexico and Guatemala, she began to understand the links between the Indian peoples own rich indigenous culture and their ancient past; and she began to hand back to these oppressed people the tools to repossess their history. This was what Linda Schele considered her most important work.
The review says that "most estimates of the frequency of human sacrifices in Tenochtitlan come from an unfounded assertion by the Franciscan friar Diego Valadés, who was born twenty-two years after the city fell. Valadés claimed that between 15,000 and 20,000 people were sacrificed in Tenochtitlan per year." Later, "Cortés’s confessor and the first formal historian of the Conquest of Mexico, raised the figure to 50,000."
"The number is remarkable for how preposterous it is: more than 137 sacrifices a day, five an hour, one every twelve minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Aztec sacrifice was a nonmechanized process that demanded extensive ritual preparation and an individually selected victim, and archaeologists have never found evidence to support the Spaniards’ figures. As [the book's author] points out, although human skulls have been retrieved from ritual burial grounds close to Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor (the city’s main temple), most of the sacrificial remains that have been found belong to animals—wolves mostly—and these remains don’t add up even to hundreds of victims, let alone thousands."
Also, regarding cannibalism, "owing to a [Spanish] royal law from 1503, an enemy fighter who practiced cannibalism could be enslaved for life, and shortly before Cortés left Cuba for Mexico a smallpox epidemic caused a drastic reduction in native manual labor in the Caribbean. The later narratives that were so insistent on the subject of cannibalism are always, in [the author's] view, related to the conquistador generation’s claim to cost-free indigenous servitude. This argument became especially important after the Crown abolished native slavery and gave indigenous subjects rights identical to those of Spaniards in the New Laws of 1542."
It's amazing what people can do when they put their mind to it. It's also amazing what people will rationalize when they put their mind to it.
For example a major tourist attraction underneath Paris is the The Catacombs where you can walk through tunnels paved with the skulls of over 6 million people. It's an amazing sight but would be extremely creepy without the context of a huge modern city above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris
of course, that is not the last word. but, it's consistent with other evidence that large wooden poles bearing multiple skulls did exist.
And Mexicas just happened to all die between 25 and 35 and be men ?
They very clearly were killed.
".... Other Mesoamerican cultures also engaged in human sacrifice and built tzompantlis. But, "The Mexica certainly brought this to an extreme," says Vera Tiesler …."
"... Gomóz Valdás found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children.
Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed. "If they are war captives, they aren't randomly grabbing the stragglers," Gómez Valdés says. The mix of ages and sexes also supports another Spanish claim, that many victims were slaves sold in the city's markets expressly to be sacrificed.
…"
But, yet, we do. And I guess, we are the descendants of the survivors, and in our chromosomes -- especially the ones inherited from the paternal lineage -- we have the 'winners' of the wars of the past...
I still can not comprehend, how a grown man can do stuff like this, especially to a woman or a child, staring into their eyes...
May be the people who performed these things, had to medicate themselves to alter their own consciousness of some sort. Otherwise, how could they?
And everyone involved thought this was awesome, because it was a great honour something something the gods something sacrifice for your people something.
With our modern sensibilities and rationality, it's absolutely mindboggling.
It's identical to blowing yourself up to kill infidels (argued as a great honor by those advocating it, you're the chosen one). And it's similar to crashing your plane into a ship as part of the Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgeki Tai, commiting suicide, sacrificing your life to defend the empire and emperor. To be clear, I'm not adding any commentary on the practices, merely noting the historically recent nature of very similar concepts.
One of the most universal tenets of popular religions, and typically most spiritual belief in general, is self-sacrifice.
With these forms of suicide, it's an other-world calling that is meant to be greater than the value of your own life. Modern sensibilities perhaps make it more shocking, however I don't see anything changing about this core concept and its practice in the next century. So long as most religions function on degrees of self-sacrifice, somewhere someone will be taking that to the next step and demanding people sacrifice their lives to some proclaimed higher calling.
The former has no reasonable or practical reasoning.
The later - does, as I think any service member will understand. Every mission has some degree of likelihood that one will face death, some are just willing to up the ante to . a much greater level. The belief in some kind of 'special heaven' is not really the motivating force, it just kind of makes it easier to do.
Why would the gender of the victim make the killing easier or harder? The act of ritualistic killing an other human being and pulling out their beating hearth uncomprehendable regardless of what gender the victim is. What ever method the priests used to bring themselves to perform such act its questionable if gender was any factor.
How do you know that the priest was all male? The Aztec had both female and male gods, and Wikipedia talks about male and female priests. The article does not claim that all the priests were male.
What did the blips represent? "Each blip was a person."
No indication beyond that. Could have been kids, women, old people. This is a lot different than soldiers shooting other soldiers on a battlefield. These weren't battlefields at all, and no one was (or could have) firing back at him up there at 10,000 feet or whatever....
How the fuck could he perform this?
People can be programmed or convinced to be monsters.
I have a really biased view on their culture, because whenever I read about it the human sacrifice element is constantly in the back of my mind.
Heck, until past century the crowds gathered to watch hangings, guillotines and other executions all over Europe.
And just past century the Germans burned to death 6 million Jews, gypsies, leftists, and homosexuals.
Then there are the lynchings as a means of justice (in the West) and for blacks in the South, plus other types of "mob justice" in which whole communities would often participate (or stand and enjoy the show).
Those Aztec societies were cruel, but "giddy excitement over" death extends beyond them. And at least they have the excuse to not have had modern science, schooling, wikipedia, and all tons of culture back then...
It was worse than that. The total number of holocaust victims was about 17 million, the Jews were just the biggest group at around 6 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims
That was more of an effort to avoid Germany getting more powerful (and affecting them) than a humanitarian mission. Besides, half of the "western world" took side with the Nazis, including a full blown pro-Nazi government in occupied France (with tons of sympathizers pre- and during the occupation), Italy (of course), Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Norway, Ukraine, and so on.
>Lynching was an illegal act.
And yet few ever got into prison for it when it was practiced.
Unsurprising since the act was a public display of societal contempt for the legal system. Often the person to be lynched would be torn from a jail by the mob; demonstrating that the judicial system had no power when faced by the will of the mob.
I don't know if there are any other movies that depict the times so realisticly (atleast from a movie watcher's perspective though not from a historian's one).
The last scene showing Hernan Cortez's ship is the bridge between the old world and the "new world". The start of the decline of the Aztecs.
Gold was removed in vast quantities, but has only a commercial value to those who have ascribed to it such arbitrary value. Otherwise it's just a pretty rock.
Of course - the masses who died from imported disease notwithstanding.
In fact, given > 100 000 skulls in 'one find', and we know this behaviour was common in the region over time, and that certainly not all skulls were preserved ... we're talking easily into the millions of murders, putting this 'on par' with the holocaust. Added the fact this was hundreds of years ago with a smaller population base than modern Europe, in relative terms, this cultural mass murder surpasses the holocaust in relative terms. And done on the basis of 'religion' to boot ...
The reference to 'rape' I interpreted metaphorically, and you indicated you meant it literally - which I don't think applies given the historical facts of Aztecs, Cortez et. al. in real history ... whereas one could arguably use the 'rape' in the metaphorical sense and it would in fact apply within reason, at least as a creative description.
Also, nobody has suggested Cortez was a great dude, rather, that he wasn't part of a 'death cult' that pulled the beating hearts out of hundreds of thousands of slaves, women, and children, and inserted straws for the gods to drink blood, skinned them alive and wore their skin for good luck etc. ... which is altogether another level of crazy. It requires a hefty dose of moral equivalence to even try to equate regular colonization/conquest, which is the most common type of geopolitical activity in history by far, with the 'death cult' Aztec stuff, which doesn't really seem to have any real historical parallel.
I think it was one of Neal Stephenson's characters who observed that it really brought into perspective what assholes the Aztecs were when you consider that bringing in the Spanish Inquisition was actually an improvement, vis-a-vis the cruelty of the dominant religion.
The Inquisitors tortured their victims, true enough, but they didn't eat them.
At very least the eradication of the craziest death cult in history was a bonus for everyone.
Wars of conquest did not kill remotely as many in comparison.
Moreover, were the Aztecs to have a land boundary to Spain, and were they able to defeat them, the Aztecs would have had no problem slicing up Spaniards and eating their beating hearts for dinner as well.
So the better team definitely won in this case.
I wish we humans can outgrow the inherent evil in ourselves, but I doubt we ever will.
Mel Gibson's films usually give some insight into the nature of power and politics, which is really fun because so few attempt to bother with that kind of stuff.
Listen to the DVD voice-over with he and the director of that film, they give you some amazing information as to the backstory of the political setup of the city in which the scenes took place.
And the enslavement, murder, work to death, and rape of tens of millions of natives in the cruelest ways possible... whether they were part of the Aztec culture or way more peaceful tribes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas
The first thing I found myself thinking while reading the article was, what was the appropriate response to a society like that? If you’re part of a 16th century expedition, and you’ve come across a nightmare society like this, what’s the right thing to do?
I’m not so quick to dismiss “conquer the country, ban human sacrifice, pave over the temples.” It might not be the worst option. :/
Here is the perspective of the article's author: https://mobile.twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/10101786813340...
I found it to be... illuminating.
They weren't the ones who committed genocide on the entire continent.
Thanks for reading and sharing my story on Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, the rack where the skulls of the sacrificed were displayed. But it's time for a discussion on why this practice was not "horrific" or "loaded [with] evil," as some of you have said https://t.co/GBZW1TXflv
https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822
It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking. How I see the world, filtered through centuries of colonial oppression and destruction, is irrelevant to understanding how they saw the world.
https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178688254730244
(Credit: https://www.unz.com/isteve/makes-ya-think/)
This is an utterly disturbing thought.
To think that 'wanting to be sacrificed' can be part of, you know, a normal kind of cultural artifact, like 'coffee' or 'metallurgy' - and that her ostensible view that 'I probably shouldn't sacrifice myself' is a function of 'colonial oppression'.
It's maximally postmodern and beyond bizarre.
Literally mass murdering children, peeling their skin away is now 'cool' - you know - so long as it's 'really authentically part of your culture' , and not, of course something some white guy did!
2018.
Aztecs had cook books full of recipes for things like "human ribs with hot peppers." Some old temples had bread fruit trees lining the avenue up to the temple. Bread fruit is another source of protein.
IIRC, the book posited that the Aztecs were cannibals because South America had no native animals like cows or sheep that fed predominantly on grass. Thus they were chronically short on protein and this helped make them a very war like people. If you are all going to die anyway because there is not enough food, dying in battle is both psychologically better for the culture and offers the chance that we win, we take we what we need and we feed our people.
Most wars are ultimately rooted in resource shortages. Real peace is ultimately rooted in problem solving to make sure there are enough resources to go around and that those resources get more or less equitably or "fairly" distributed, in some sense and to some degree. Society can survive economic inequality, but there comes a point past which economic inequality is too much of a hardship on some groups and this routinely goes bad places.
Edit: I confess to being an Ugly American who has a bad habit of lumping South America and Central America together and not making clear distinctions in that regards. Substitute "the lands of the Aztecs" for South America.
The idea was popularized by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Harner
In this paper: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525...
It was immediately rebutted a year later: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5901/8ba520161d2cb4ff55dd91...
And more recently in 2005: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mdia;c=mdi...
Skim the 2005 paper if you're interested in a TL;DR
P.S. The capital of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlan, is underneath what is now Mexico City (not South America).
I don't remember the book very well. I read it around 30 years ago. Back then, protein was generally considered to be The Big Issue. It was the basis for Diet for a Small Planet. When the book first came out, it emphasized protein complementarity to solve this issue for vegetarians. It was a political tome. Half of the book was about civil wars and the like (causing starvation). The other half was vegetarian recipes. The follow up book indicated the author had since concluded that it wasn't as challenging as she once thought to get adequate protein from a vegetarian diet.
So it is possible this book I read was basing its hypothesis on the dominant thought of that era that protein was some big limiter. Perhaps protein per se was not the critical detail. We (probably) won't ever really know.
What we do know is that the Aztecs were a very warlike people, human sacrifice was very widely practiced and they also routinely ate their victims, not solely as some barbaric religious ritual, but for dinner.
in particular, B12
OTOH, a quantity of other B vitamins can be made for us, in the gut, by intestinal flora as byproducts of their work on the food we've ingested. and properly prepared whole grain products can be a direct source of some b-vitamins (e.g. maize prepared with lime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization)
a reasonably large supply of B12 can be stored in the liver for future use by the body during lean times (perhaps multiple years' worth).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys
the corn/maize/squash dietary kit was remarkably complete in nutrition (eg, all necessary amino acids/"complete protein"); it's one of the reasons that tenochtitlan was one of the most densely populated places on earth upon arrival of the spanish. this thesis is completely bunk.
in fact, cursory googling found this:
> In the late 1970s the anthropologist Michael Harner suggested that the Aztecs had resorted to large-scale, organized cannibalism to make up for a supposed protein deficiency in the diet. This idea gained limited support from some scholars, but has been shown to be based on unfounded assumptions about eating habits, agriculture and demographics, making it a highly unlikely scenario.[38]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_cuisine
what's more, the technical process of transforming untreated corn meal into a food humans can digest and extract B vitamins from is one of the many triumphs of ancient Mesoamerican cuisine. they figured out how to do all of this centuries before the Spanish arrived, and i would guess, before human sacrifice attained a massive scale in the Aztec era.
i find it very difficult to believe that cannibalism was nutritionally necessary.
maize is a grass. so are wheat and rice.
It is interesting because in those times it was politically and socially acceptable to be OK with other humans being sacrificed.
A man explained how he hit a deer today, and I just filled with sadness, but his immediate POV was getting his car fixed, his tire no longer aligned and how his drive is wobbly.
As a species we really don't have a built in moral system, it's nearly 100% socially driven morals.
So it’s interesting to read you not really caring that this guy went through a potentially horrifying event, and then judging him for not treating the story of his own experience with the same emotions you felt.
None of this is to say anyone wants deers to be hit by cars. My question is how would you make this different? That guy being sad isn’t going to bring the deer back to life, and it’s not going to prevent the next deer from being hit by a car either. And going vegan won’t prevent it. Why does his emotional behavior reaction matter enough to make a judgment on him?
Let's stipulate that non-human animals have a "soul," whatever you believe a soul to be.
How to you judge the soul of, say, a raccoon; a creature than has been called the psychopath of the animal world? A raccoon is never happier than when it's slaughtering a nest full of cute, helpless babies. Red-tailed hawks are such a menace to other species that crows make it their business to hound these magnificent raptors incessantly, injuring and killing when possible.
Is there a place for these creatures in your moral paradigm? What solution do you offer for the utterly ubiquitous violence that has been occurring among all these "souls" for hundreds of millions of years?
We manage deer populations, factoring in hunting and other predation, disease, losses to automobiles, etc., and we thus have stable populations of deer. There is no rational reason to indulge some great sadness when a car hits a deer.
I also reject the premise that an act may be evil if propagated by a human but ok if done by a being without moral judgment.
Is that something I really need to prove? My argument is that we SHOULD make moral judgement about human behavior regardless of what raccoons do. I agree that there is not much difference between humans and others animals if we choose to examine it.
I'm curious because you made the vegetarian and vegan argument which I always find interesting. I was raised Hindu (now atheist) and the religion has a belief that all forms of life have a soul and have consciousness. As a consequence of this you accept that in order to live, your life relies on extinguishing other forms of life. I always find it weird that when people talk about diet, animal rights, and souls, there is an arbitrary distinction between animals and the rest of organism (plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.). The concept of a soul is an abstract non-scientific belief, so given its an abstract concept with no scientific basis, why do we make a distinction between one form of life and another?
I really enjoyed your above comment. I sometimes give push back to the vegan moral superiority stance where they act like eating animals is evil, but eating plants is totally fine. I tend to view all organisms as "having a soul" so to speak and I don't think there is anything inherently morally superior from that perspective in eating only plants, not animals. (I think there are some other bases for arguing that it is morally superior wrt to preventing war, etc.)
But when you see these arguments in public (among "westerners," for lack of a better word), they are almost always based on the idea that plants don't have brains, thus they don't have awareness, so this somehow makes it not a problem to kill them that we might live, where killing animals is posited to be a bad thing.
If you take that argument to its logical conclusion, than perhaps it is morally acceptable to eat other people if they are in a vegetative state. It is one of my objections to such framing.
Not being able to distinguish eating an orange, a chicken, a human, a human in a vegetative state etc is just a failure of analysis.
There is no moral dimension to eating an orange and we don't eat people even when their brain is irretrievably ruined out of inherent disgust,desire not to catch a disease, and moral respect for those they may have left behind.
Eating animals is legitimately complicated. We probably shouldn't do it any more
I'm sorry, but I fully disagree, please see my note above.
This is a materialist view that presupposes that there is only matter/energy and laws that govern it - and only with that (unproven) presupposition first in place, can anything such as you have described be 'logically inferred'.
For example - you mention 'morality' - from the purely physical perspective, you are merely a random wave form, there can be no intelligence, experience, consciousness - let alone morality from that perspective.
It is considerably logical that our current version of materialism is a very helpful tool for understanding some material aspects of the universe, but that by it's own definition is not very useful in terms of understanding life itself.
Materialism is like a ruler we can use to measure stuff. But it gives us little information on 'who is using the ruler'.
'Soul' or 'spirit' or whatever - are the words that we use to crudely describe that which seems to otherwise differentiate life from other stuff, beyond merely 'complexity'.
As an example most people would agree that chemistry is just applied physics but most people don't do substantial chemistry by simulating all the particles involved not because they believe that chemicals are somehow magical in a way that isn't capturable by physics but because its challenging and intractable.
Further if we did arrive at some theory that described qualities and entities not presently qualified by physics those things including souls would become part of the universe because the term universe grows to encompass everything we presently understand.
The logical conclusion is that a soul if it did exist would be made of matter/energy/information like everything else that can possibly exist.
It would of course be truly shocking if a heretofore incompressible aspect of the universe just happened to mirror thousands of years of superstition.
It would be like if we travelled to another star system and found its denizens were the cast of Harry Potter complete with billions of years of history culminating with a multipart war against Voldemorte.
If you want to posit things out of scope of present understanding you ought to provide some support for them which is notably absent from the above hand waving.
I await an interesting reply but fear it will merely be a critique of my small minded instance that debates consist of facts and arguments.
Your specific frame of reference is called 'scientific materialism', it's been around since the Enlightenment, and like any metaphysical frame of reference, it requires it's own basic assumptions. For example: "The universe is made of this stuff we call matter and energy and those behave according to a specific set of laws". This is unproven, unverifiable etc.. (By the way, you snuck one in there 'information' - which is an abstraction).
It's a useful tool, but it has some problems.
For example - in the context of scientific materialism - we cannot even be 'alive', let alone have 'intelligence' or have 'morality' if we are merely a bag of randomness. A bag of random particles in the Universe must be random at every level.
Here's a paradox for you: "prove to me that you are alive". Basically, you can't. Life is the most important thing there is, and yet we don't even know what we is. If an alien being made of metal parts landed and 'asked for our leader' we'd have a hard time determining whether it was 'life' or not.
Our entire civilization and existence is framed around the concept of life, and of what is not life.
FYI - this 'gaping hole' in Materialism has given rise to kind of a new field called 'Emergence' which is the beginning of the materialists journey to try to understand how complicated interesting things seem to arise from simpler ones - though the field has no answers, the point is good because it recognizes the 'hole' I mention.
"The logical conclusion is that a soul if it did exist would be made of matter/energy/information like everything else that can possibly exist."
Not really. Humans understood that gravity existed, or how it worked very crudely, and dealt with it ... for thousands of years before we even had a word for it, or were able to characterize it rationally in any way.
We have a rough ways of grasping issues while be develop better tools.
So - I did not indicate anything to validate thousands of years of specific superstitions (chemical processes, or magical cures etc.). But the fact that there are words for 'Spirit' 'Soul' or 'Animus' etc. which have developed independently across cultures over various civilizations is a pretty strong reason to indicate that 'something interesting is going on there'.
It's funny because when one steps back for the very specific and narrow view of Materialism, it's an easy concept, it's just that most people are conditioned to narrowly accept current interpretations of 'energy, matter' etc. as 'Truth' that it's hard to consider another view.
The 'hand waiving' is made by those that simply make up and invent premises such as 'The Universe Is Made Of Matter and Energy and Behaves According to Mathematically Describable Laws" - which is unproven and cannot be proven - and then pass it of as an incontestable fact, and then derive all of their arguments based on this supposition ... especially when this definition of the Universe literally denies the very existence of life.
Scientific Materialism was invented by humans do describe: the material. It should be no surprise that it starts to fail when we apply it to other, more existential concepts.
Science is not Truth. It's just a tool, an interpretation. That's it.
I personally think tying of the soul to intelligence seems a weird distinction. Does that mean that if person goes into a vegetative state, they have lost their soul? Do animals that are less intelligent have a less likelihood of a soul? If you can breed animals without mental faculties are they soul-less? Does the fact that we can't understand if plants are intelligent meant they lack souls? These seem like petty distinctions.
To me there is a notion that life has some intrinsic value to it. In parallel there is a notion that to exist as life, humans have to rely on destroying life. To me these are equally important, recognizing that life has worth but also to exist you must end life. I find this paradoxical duality to be beautiful.
Now from a practical point of view there are social rules for how you end life. So some cultures thought it was ok to eat all forms of life as long as that life wasn't part of your tribe (societies with cannibalism), other societies thought it was ok to eat all forms of life except for your pets (most Americans), some exclude animals based on religious beliefs (pork in Islam and judaism, meat and beef in Hinduism), and some think it is ok to eat all forms of life that are non-animals (vegetarians).
I think its hard for any of these groups to claim moral superiority. The truth is in order to exist we need to destroy life, but at the same time, most can see that life is precious.
As far as I know, other animals don't give pause over that detail. We seem to be the only animal who has this uncomfortable awareness and wrestles with it in various forms.
I'm afraid this is a strawman argument. Most vegans/vegetarians choose to spare other animals based on their capacity to suffer.
A. I'm an environmental studies major and anytime I present evidence that plants are aware of suffering, it is ignored and dismissed.
B. I was homeless for nearly 6 years. A so-called ethical vegan I knew (who wasn't actually a full-time vegan and ate vegetarian, not vegan, as convenience suited them) happily and enthusiastically added to my suffering during that time. Given how often ethical vegans gleefully psychologically torture their non vegan fellow humans over their failure to be vegan, I have zero reason to believe this individual's cruelty towards me was some wild aberration in the veg- community.
Please note the other comment here by someone using terms like no reason to believe, logically and a failure of analysis. The subtext of the framing celebrates this western idea that intelligence is everything.
So we can presumably agree to disagree at this point.
As it should be. When you say "pain" and "suffering" you mean in in no similar way to your own pain and suffering whereas vegans do. You're co-opting the language of ethics to try and point out hypocrisy. Also, let's apply some logic here and acknowledge that far more plants are "harmed" to make animal food products than plant food products, thus it's still consistent for ethical people to eat a plant based diet.
"I have zero reason to believe this individual's cruelty towards me was some wild aberration in the veg- community."
Vegans are defined by caring for the well being of others. That gives us every reason to think that a vegan would care more than anyone else about the well being of others. Your anecdote about a vegan who was mean to you once is something you shouldn't use to draw conclusions about an entire group of people.
Downplaying what was done to me when you were not there in no way fits with your claim of superior kindness and caring. It quite contradicts it.
Also, none of the dealt with why a person who had never encountered the bible would go de facto to hell.
If we were really made in god's image, then he'd expect us to follow logic, thank you.
There's literally nothing in the scriptures (that I've read) supporting this, while there's plenty of evidence God itself is batshit insane, or at least suffers from bipolar disorder, paranoia, and obsessive jealousy. As such, it's entirely plausible to me that we are, indeed, made in such a god's image...
A 'soul' is a rational and scientific concept, it's just not materialist or rather, the kind of science we are used to daily.
As far as souls, more complicated, but maybe one simple answer is that more complex and intelligent forms of life have a deeper access to 'the soul' and that it's not like a step function, rather ... some kind of increasing gradient from inanimate matter, to plants, to animals, to humans, to the 'next level' of life.
My second answer relates to the first, i.e. 'Scientific' in sense that his is literally how we divide the universe at least biologically, i.e. life/not life, then domain, kingdom etc..
Please reconsider the notion that 'soul' has no scientific basis, as many would consider that the 'soul' or 'spirit' or 'animus' or whatever is literally the thing that distinguishes us from inanimate material - otherwise - according to a purely materialist perspective you cannot be alive i.e. there is no such thing as life - you are merely a random bag of particles that appears to be alive :).
If you believe that you are alive, that there is love, intelligence, happiness, experience, consciousness, and that you are not simply a purely random bag of particles, then it logically follows you must 'believe in something' that is not bound by strict materialist ideals. This metaphysical concept is not new, and we have some words for that, usually: 'soul' or 'animus' or 'spirit' or whatever. It's not irrational and it's not unscientific, it just by definition does not fit within materialist framework. And to be more clear - materialist science holds as a presupposition that 'everything is a random wave/particle/big of energy' - it is not a 'proof' kind of thing. It holds as a presupposition that 'there is nothing more'. In essence, materialist science starts with a premise of denying all other views, and then goes on to try to explain everything through the lego-blocks of matter type theories. Which don't explain life very well at all.
Sorry for all that. Short answer: Animals are on the spectrum of life, as are we, and there's clearly a relationship there and we can therefore infer a degree of their experience and status in all of this to some extent.
But to get to your main point, my question again is why are plants excluded from this state? I really don't get it. You call out that animals are different because they aren't inanimate beings, but neither are plants. Plants are complex, highly evolved multi cellular organisms that are certainly not inanimate.
If the argument is that animals are a life form that are closer form of life to humans so that's why you shouldn't eat them, I can buy that argument. It's a similar moral argument for why you shouldn't eat humans.
But that's a lot different from claiming that animals have souls/spirit/animus and plants don't. From any biological perspective plants are just as alive as animals. Plants communicate, respond to touch, many even actively kill other organisms (venus fly traps, bird catcher trees, etc.), they've been experimentally verified to exhibit some type of memory, and they respond to all sorts of stimuli (for example, turning towards the sun). Rationally, isn't that pretty darn alive? It seems shortsighted to think that plants lack a spirit/soul.
But that's a lot different from claiming that animals have souls/spirit/animus and plants don't"
It's not, it's pretty close to the same thing as we pragmatically view life as something beyond material.
In Scientific Materialism - you are merely a random bag of particles. There literally can be no 'life' in randomness.
By very definition, you cannot exist in those terms.
'Soul/spirit/animus' etc. are crude words we all use to describe that which animates life beyond the pure randomness of our material explanations.
Though you can try to describe life in biological terms, and it's practical ... it's has some major flaws. Surely, after 4 decades of Star Trek we can all cognize forms of life which don't fit our classical biological view. More abstract notions of life would therefore have to be designed and they inch closer and closer to a metaphysical perspective that just doesn't work as Materialism.
So, if you consider the word 'Soul' to mean some concrete idea, but which is totally imaginary, like 'some God' or whatever, then sure - I see your point - but really, the existence of the terminology 'Soul/Spirit' etc. is simply grasping at something more meta, they are used to describe effectively life. Ergo - 'same scale'.
We've used and understood gravity in very crude terms for 1000's of years and yet we did not specifically understand the mechanics of it. It didn't mean we were wrong so much as we just had a crude grasp of it.
Scientific Materialism is a really useful tool, but it's not a Truth. It has it's limits and these issues highlight those limits quite well.
Our built is moral system is biology. We as a species are omnivores which means we have a predisposition to be O.K. with killing and processing game for food.
I think its more of a miracle we are able to put our personal morals above biology and opt out of it.
But without talking about consciousness what does experience pain mean. Insects respond to and attempt to avoid certain stimuli, but that's not really the same thing.
What is scientifically established is the existence of a CNS which means the species is able to experience pain. Mussels, clams, and mushrooms do not have a CNS, and one could argue they are therefore vegan.
Extending the right to live to wild animals is essentially void (if we aren't going to exterminate all the carnivores) and will probably cause a couple of ecological disasters as population control hunting will be off limits too.
What I mean is - why do some living creatures have 'souls' (and, I think I can conclude from your argument, should not be killed by others? Maybe only not by others with souls? Not sure if there are living beings without souls?) Like, insects - do they have souls? And micro-organisms, say, fungi?
What is the Roman Catholic Inquisition exactly? It can be oversimplified to burning people so God is happy. It is a form of human sacrifice. Up to 300,000 people died that way.
So if we are going to talk about human sacrifice let's apply the term consistently.
You can argue there was a law, and different rules, and a bunch of abstract concepts... in the end it is someone being killed for making God angry, and the form of execution is no different than a ritual.
For example, if we sent an average Hacker News reader back to the time of the Inquisition, they would start trying to share their scientific knowledge with others, talking about the laws of physics, chemistry, etc. Immediately after, they would be accused of witchcraft (chemistry back then was alchemy, a form of witchcraft) and that person would be tortured and then killed in a bonfire. That system is the one you seem to be defending now.
The reason I am defensive when it comes to these articles is because they are actively used by hate groups to validate a perspective of the world where some nations are unworthy of their lives, freedom and right to self determination. Presenting these articles without an accompanying them with the context of the time does not help that situation.
You have to understand that religion was really important (maybe the most important thing) for the people of that period, and you have to know that their religion was threatened for centuries inside their own borders, you have to know about "La reconquista".
In a time of period were your territory was just regained from Moors after centuries of occupation and threatens to your life and beliefs. The only logical move was to identify those who were still Moors in the shadows, from their point of view they were the remains of the invaders they were still dangerous.
You have to know about the kind of punishments for the law breakers (not only religion laws) on that period of time, you have to know that the inquisition was the organization that investigated the cases to identify those who were false conversions (those who were still a threaten from their point of view), then when someone was found guilty for breaking their laws the state was responsable for imparting justice, their justice is very different from today's justice, we have learned a lot, but you can't properly understand their actions if you don't understand the context.
You can use the term all you want, try to not use it in a biased manner.
Often depictions of human sacrifice in the Americas are used to justify the exploitation of the native people of the Americas.