Comment by thinking4real | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thinking4real | Hacker News Reader

“Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms”

“He closes with a provocative thesis: namely, that the present worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to Locke or Newtonian physics, but to Indians, “living, breathing role models of human liberty.””

Oh lord. Revisionists begetting revisionists.

I had a buddy in college who insisted that Natives were ‘almost as technologically advanced as europeans’ and if not for a few miscalculations in battle, would have effectively flung them off and advanced to a society beyond our wildest dreams.

Of course, he failed to respond when I mentioned that there were no modern weapons and the mystical technology he assumed to exist amounted to little more than what Europeans had had for tens of thousands of years.

It’s really sad how much hyperbole gets thrown into the revisionism of prehistoric civilizations. It’s not doing the descendants of these people any favors to make up fictitious reinventions of their technological advancements.

The argument that contact with and spreading knowledge about Indian (as Mann settles on calling them, after evidently being repeatedly dressed down by actual indigenous folks for trying to use more currently-PC terms) societies and systems of government played a major role in kicking off enlightenment political thinking isn't so far fetched.

I don't recall his claiming that they had military tech that was anywhere near as developed as Europeans, and most of his coverage of thriving, complex, urbanized (by the global standards of the time) societies in the Precolumbian Americas is focused south of the Rio, for the simple reason that that's where most of those seem to have been (though he does cover Cahokia and related sites in the modern US, as well)

The closest I recall him coming to claiming Native Americans were more advanced than Europeans was that Europeans simply failed to recognize some patterns and practices as deliberate and well-considered, as was the case with certain crop management patterns in the Eastern forests and heavy use of fire-as-a-land-management-tool all over the continent. But that's not exactly a claim that they were more advanced. Oh, and he does mention repeated contemporary reports that the natives seemed remarkably tall and able-bodied compared to Europeans, and makes some efforts to figure out why that might have been (and some of that does tie back into government and social structures)

I'm fairly sensitive to bullshit revisionism of the "noble savage" and/or "ackshually Europeans were the backwards primitives" sort, and didn't get either vibe at all from Mann's 1491 or 1493. In fact he explicitly counters the former in a lot of ways, similar to what you see in anti-noble-savage works like War Before Civilization.

Regarding military power, Mann does argue, IIRC, that the gap wasn’t as large as might be supposed. He also argues that the conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas by small forces of Spanish conquistadors was not enabled by military superiority but rather by upsetting existing political balance. In both cases, the conquistadors aligned with subjugated factions within the existing imperial systems to overthrow the dominant power. E.g., in Mexico, Moctezuma had captured and imprisoned Cortez and his forces and could have easily wiped them out. The emperor’s delay ultimately allowed Cortez to align with vassal states, and that alliance overthrew the empire. That’s not to say that the Aztec empire’s military was the equal of Spain’s, but Cortez’s small band of conquistadors would not have defeated the Aztecs head-to-head.

Right. It's not that the military tech wasn't better, it's that, given the massive logistical advantages of indigenous Americans (consider what a supply chain looked like for even a tiny European force in the Americas!), the role of disease-induced chaos putting much of indigenous society & politics into something resembling death convulsions before many of them even saw Europeans, plus some straight realpolitik "heads I win, tails you lose" moves from the Europeans, it was a pretty minor factor in the whole thing. Just the weapon-tech advantage wouldn't have been anywhere near enough for the conquest to go even as smoothly as it did, thanks largely to the logistics disadvantage of the Europeans (and the conquest wasn't terribly smooth, anyway—Europeans lost plenty of battles over a span of centuries before mostly subjugating the Americas).

There is a great account of the conquest of Mexico in "Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España" by one Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who was a member of Cortés' troop of conquistadores:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_verdadera_de_la_conqu...

I think this is probably recounted by other sources but he talks also about the "noche triste", the night that the conquistadores had to run for their lives from Tenochtitlan, pursued by a mob driven to rage after the murder of the emperor Moctezuma:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Noche_Triste

Although on that night the conquistadores were probably at a disadvantage, for being weighed down with all the gold they tried to take with them as they ran. Encumberance is a bitch.

In general, it seems true that the Spanish survived by the skin of their teeth, driven by their lust for richess and mainly thanks to the support of the local vassal states like the Tlaxcalans. Military superiority is not just who has the best weapons and even in the Old World battles are not always won by the most technologically advanced society. For example, see the Battle of Isandlwana:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Isandlwana

That might be revisionism from the perspective of the history you get from Disney movies but I don't think Mann is at all out of mainstream history here and I think you're doing him a disservice by comparing him to your friend. I'd hope anybody doing an american history course in US high schools these days would know that, say, the Iroquois practiced farming though the bits in 1491 about the way they burned out underbrush to encourage large animals deeper into the forest or tried to encourage Chestnut trees over others was new to me.

And people like Ben Franklin certainly wrote about Indians as models of liberty, in his case in contrast to the Germans he though were subservient by nature. And Rousseau certainly had a lot to say about them. What ended up being the US political system had many influences. I think the Corsican 1755 constitution is an underrated influence but also the lack of hereditary nobility among the natives. I think it's easy to underestimate how natural a nobility seems when all the societies you know have it, until you meet one that doesn't.

>“Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms”

These farms didn't look like European farms, but it's hard to think of, for example: settlements in the Amazon being anything less than a living, breathing, fruit orchard. The eastern seaboard of the US had huge groves of nut trees, as well as cleared out hunting grounds. The farms were just sustainable, and worked within the environment instead of against it (example: planting in a desert, piping in massive amounts of water, and obliterating entire country-sized hydrology systems.)

Perhaps what you are in, is "denial".

> example: planting in a desert, piping in massive amounts of water

The pre-Columbian Pima had irrigation agriculture in what is now Phoenix (aka "a desert").

Compare the pre-Columbian Pima and the contemporary Americans and describe the differences in scale. You have taken my sentence out of context by removing, "and obliterating entire country-sized hydrology systems."

You may be right about technology, but the political system in the US and its Constitution was based on, among other things, that of the Iroquois Confederacy. The premise that Native Americans influenced the global spread of democracy by way of US political hegemony isn't entirely revisionist.

How exactly did you tie the US constitution to democracy and then that to US hegemony influencing spread of democracy?

Democracy as a concept has nothing to do with US. US had one of the first constitutions, but the concept did exist before.

The US was an early example of the idea of a democratically elected government, and just so happened to come about by fighting, then winning a war against not only a monarchy, but arguably the most powerful monarchy that has ever existed. Before that, democracy seemed perhaps a good idea, but you're going to have naysayers who want to see a proven example. Proven track records are why anyone listens to anybody when it comes to influence.

By the time of the US war of independence, Parliament had been supreme in Britain for about a century, since the glorious revolution.

Britain certainly wasn’t yet a democracy as the franchise was so limited, to the few percent who owned property or met various other criteria.

The answer to that question was in the first sentence, and you could easily look up articles that explore the idea in greater detail. Here is one: https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blogs/native-voices/how-t...

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