Comment by benbreen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benbreen | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I just wanted to add to this that it's not as if the Spaniards were appalled by violence itself, just by the cultural difference in how it was applied. As Montaigne pointed out, early modern Europeans were at least as cruel toward enemies and captives, they just expressed it in different ways: i.e. via public executions of witches and heretics, or the tortures of the Inquisition and secular courts. Admittedly Montaigne is writing here about Tupis from Brazil rather than Aztecs, but his point applies in both cases I think:

"After having treated their prisoners well for a long time, giving them all the provisions that they could one, he who is the chief calls a great assembly of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner and on the other end, several feet away, out of harm's way, and gives to his best friend the arm to hold; and the two of them, in the presence of the assembled group, slash him to death with their swords. That done, they roast him and eat him together, sending portions to their absent friends. They do this, not as is supposed, for nourishment as did the ancient Scythians; it represents instead an extreme form of vengeance. The proof of this is that when they saw that the Portuguese, who had allied themselves with their adversaries, executed their captives differently, burying them up to the waist and firing numerous arrows into the remainder of the body, hanging them afterward, [the Tupi] viewed these people from another world, who had spread the knowledge of many vices among their neighbors, and who were much more masterly than they in every sort of evil, must have chosen this sort of revenge for a reason. Thinking that it must be more bitter than their own, they abandoned their ancient way to imitate this one.

I am not so concerned that we should remark on the barbaric horror of such a deed, but that, while we quite rightly judge their faults, we are blind to our own."

http://www2.fiu.edu/~harveyb/oncannibal.htm

> I just wanted to add to this that it's not as if the Spaniards were appalled by violence itself, just by the cultural difference in how it was applied

Yes exactly. Here we have two cultures still heavily under the influence of their own general religions, and the ways that each allowed or dealt with applying violence. Each reflected the cultural view of what "reality" was. In Europe, shamanism had been replaced with Christianity, which had its own concept of the real world — one that was a prelude to an afterlife, in which one would be judged. For the Aztecs (and for other New World peoples too) reality was in no insignificant part determined by the knowledge of priestly shamans, their experiences, and the experiences that people had during rituals. All three of those were heavily influenced (according to Watson and others) by the natural presence of the world's strongest hallucinogens that were unknown in Europe. Add to that much more extreme weather, and you have the recipe for understanding the world as a potentially violent, terrifying place. If blood sacrifice or even human sacrifice seems to appease the capricious gods of that reality, then of course it makes perfect sense to do it.

>As Montaigne pointed out, early modern Europeans were at least as cruel toward enemies and captives, they just expressed it in different ways: i.e. via public executions of witches and heretics, or the tortures of the Inquisition and secular courts.

Yes, this was my instant thought. What a naive Eurocentric way to think of history to insinuate that everyone except the Europeans were just barbaric savages who killed and devalued life. As if the Europeans weren't fresh off their own multi-year killing sprees for this and that reason that equally would have baffled Native Americans.

I don't think the poster was insinuating that - if he's read Bernal Diaz, he no doubt has few illusions about medieval europeans. They literally did stuff like murdering fat people so they could use their fat to treat the wounds of their horses. Nobody could read 'The Conquest of New Spain' and come away with the impression that Cortez was anything but an absolutely awful, atrociously evil person.

Then why would he say things like:

>What you see is two cultures separated by an almost unimaginable amount of time, distance, and history. The clash that occurred would have been hard to prevent whenever it happened.

Because surely there was more they had in common than that made them different.

I don't know. Bernal Diaz definitely saw a lot of commonalities between the Aztecs and the Spanish. I think the two differences that stuck out for me were the Spanish were way more fanatical, and also way more likely to go back on agreements if it would benefit them. I don't know what was going on in Spanish politics at the time - but if Cortez is typical, it must have been an absolute nest of vipers.

I was not insinuating anything in particular, merely pointing out the vast differences in the cultures and, to an important extent, their inability to reason about each other in a constructive way.

As I said, the clash would have been hard to prevent. The biological consequences of foreign diseases are an important way things wouldn't have been other than tragic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com