Fascinating. I wonder what the purpose of the drugs were. Coca is a stimulant so was it a religious experience? But the alcohol is a depressant. Overall I'm wondering if the objective was analgesia or for a religious experience.
They were probably used because the Inca needed to sacrifice for religion but they were still humane. We're talking about people, not very different or separated in time from you and I, but with different religious practices.
It only takes a little distance to see that religious practices elsewhere lead to death even today, and one would hope that those would not be painful deaths.
I wonder if all these sacrifices were because of a lack of food. Better to give your kid to the gods than to watch them slowly starve to death during a bad winter.
"In especially uncertain times, such as when an emperor died, or when volcanoes erupted or severe earthquakes or famine struck, priests sacrificed captured warriors or specially raised, perfectly formed children to the gods."
If they were to be sacrificed anyway, then this is a mercy. It's much better to be drugged and killed than to have your still-beating heart excised from your body like the Maya sometimes did.
Don't conflate today's ethics (and especially your particular ethics that is derived from your lived experience in this day and age) with those of the past, they are highly different and cannot be reasonably compared. In the past it was seen as, if we don't sacrifice this child, our entire civilization might die. This was especially justified by those people of the past if there was prolonged drought or suffering where many people were already dying. Due to a lack of scientific context, they simply did not know any better, so we should not map our ethics today onto those of the past.
People justify conscription all the time, which is a particularly bad form of slavery. There is a difference between someone being evil and someone being wrong.
No, I don't think there is. Anyone about to do evil will cook up a batch of kool-aid to transform the act of evil into a "mere" act of being wrong, and the "mere" act of being wrong can certainly lead to being evil in short order. I do not think this distinction exists with anywhere near the level of clarity that would be required to redeem the concept of moral relativism.
Slavery still exists today. It's everywhere we just choose to ignore it for the small chance that one of us will become insanely wealthy. It's just greed. Everyone is capable of it in any time.
I like to ponder what future societies will be appalled by that we consider totally routine.
My guesses are something to do with animal rights or water usage. Maybe filling big pools with water just so you can swim around will be seen as disgusting waste.
> Maybe filling big pools with water just so you can swim around will be seen as disgusting waste.
I have seen that being discussed recently, but I wonder: is it really a significant waste?
How much water does it consume, compared to say having a garden, or a green lawn?
Most pools have filtration systems and rarely require to be fully emptied then refilled.
It seems a class-based attack on people who can own pools, and therefore a dogwhistle, because the same attack could be made on taking a shower every day.
Most people don't have water efficient gardens, and may refuse the concept.
Also, after reading the article:
> But some of those agencies are walking back the rules as they make a surprising discovery: Pools aren’t the water wasters some have made them out to be.
So I insist: it isn't a large waste. It's a politically motivated move, and therefore a dogwhistle.
I believe it would be better to invite pool owners to reduce evaporation by adopting a system to cover the pool, than to shame them: otherwise, we should shame people having a lawn (and people taking a shower, and people wasting electricity on videogames...)
That’s interesting about a pool compared to a lawn, though I was thinking about a municipal pool in a UK context (barely anyone has a swimming pool and lawns don’t need watering). Maybe we’ll reach a point where the idea of using that much water for recreation seems overly indulgent?
I would clarify that in order to escape the charge of relativism and utilitarianism.
There is no "today ethics" or "yesterday ethics" or "particular ethics". There is merely the objective good, the objective privation of that good (evil), and the science of moral good, i.e., ethics. Otherwise, there is moral good or evil to speak of, only a collection of arbitrary tastes, rendering justice nothing more than the opinion of the powerful (to borrow from Thrasymachus).
Child sacrifice is unjustifiable per se. Meaning, there is no circumstance that justifies child sacrifice because no circumstance can justify an intrinsically evil act. In that sense, we are right to condemn child sacrifice as such.
However, we should also interpret history in context. Someone else mentioned that your stance allows (chattel) slavery to be justified. That is only if we adopt a relativistic or utilitarian stance. (Chattel) slavery is evil as such and unjustifiable as such, but it also has been the norm for most of human history. If any of us were born a thousand or a few thousand years ago, we might even come to hold that slavery is wrong (as, for example, the Church always has), but given how pervasive its practice was, how historically entrenched it was, you would likely also believe that it was simply an unfortunate and endemic fact of human existence in this world (after all, we human beings exploit each other in all sorts of ways, all the time, beginning with the smallest of ways we hardly even notice). And that's if you even payed it any attention given how normal it must have seemed to most people in the world. (For this reason, I think the oikophobic condemnations of "the West", which have become especially rabid in recent years, are preposterous. If anything, it is the West that has, historically, catalyzed the eradication of such practices as chattel slavery and human sacrifice across globe. It is childish and ignorant to believe that the world was populated by gentle peoples before the dark, corrupting forces of "the West" (this villain is given various names) landed on their shores, bringing with them Original Sin.)
This is a good comment, compared to the others in this thread. However this line
> There is merely the objective good
again falls into the trap of Kantian ethics. You might believe that there is an objective morality, but others may not [0]. It is a long held debate over whether there is objective versus subjective morality, with good (and poor) arguments on both sides. The utilitarian might say there is no such "evil as such and unjustifiabil[ity] as such" because they could find many scenarios where it is justified, as in the example above of causing an entire civilization to avoid harm were a child to be sacrificed. Let me also state that I am not a staunch utilitarian, yet nor I am I a Kantian, I (as likely most of us) am somewhere in between.
I will agree with you on the "condemnations of the West" points you made though, as I think it's really a strictly Western and perhaps even American view that sees Westerners as being the worst perpetrators, over and above all other civilizations on the plant. No, being humans, any civilization has committed atrocities.
I'm more on the cultural left than 95% of people, and this is ridiculous. We not only can use our ethics to judge events of the past, it is a moral imperative to do so to ensure we don't repeat its mistakes.
It wasnt the ~200 conquistadors who massacred Aztec after the fall of Tenochtitlan. It was their ~200,000 strong Native American allies who fought with them. For ~200 years, their people, families, relatives, ancestors were dragged away by Aztecs to be used in sacrifices and to be eaten during droughts as livestock. That kind of builds up a lot of sentiments in people.
I don't think your claim about numbers killed by the spanish inquisition vs aztecs on a single day are accurate, although it's a weird thing to compare. (and the inquisition is a mostly separate thing from colonization?) And generally I'm not sure how you compare mass brutality ("infinitely less brutal"?), but the Spanish invasion of the Americas, beginning with Columbus, was shockingly shockingly brutal on many occasions.
But what I'm really curious about is why people are so obsessed with comparing mass brutality like this.
It seems like it's always to excuse it, right? Like, if it's not singular, it is okay? If someone says "Oh, the Nazis actually didn't kill so many more people than X, you know, as a % of population" -- does whether this is true or not even matter to our assessment of nazi genocide? What might be the motivation of someone making this claim? Or their implied suggestion as the significance of the comparison?
I would say that it's true that people sometimes romantisize all pre-contact American civilizations, some of which at some times/places were indeed also brutal empires. But the reason we pay more attention to, say, the brutality of the Spanish invasion of the Americas than to the Incas brutality is becuase it's the Spanish colonization that resulted in the world system we have today, and has lasting implications for it. If the Inca Empire (which was actually pretty new when the invasion began) had won and its descendent societies still ruled today, we'd be talking about different things.And if the Incan empire had invaded Europe and decimated it and still ruled parts of it today, well, yeah, we'd be talking about pretty different things. Nothing very puzzling about that.
Why is it a weird thing? Imagine a world where Europe/Asia/Africa don't exist, and Aztecs/Incas are left to their devices. If anything, the conquest saved rivers of blood from being spilled over the coming many many centuries.
And sure, conquest was brutal and Columbus in reality did horrible things to natives - but the atrocities he and other conquistadors committed pale when compared to what the natives did themselves, and at least the conquest had put the continent on a path that ended the atrocities.
Also, regarding why I specifically compare the number of victims of Spanish inquisition and Aztec sacrifice rituals: these both are religion-related death tolls. I think it is appropriate to talk about that in a thread about child sacrifices.
According to this article. “When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated in 1487 the Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days”
Note that the Aztecs likely exaggerated their sacrifice counts[0]:
>Some post-conquest sources report that at the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed about 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days. This number is considered by Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, to be an exaggeration. Hassig states "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.[15] The higher estimate would average 15 sacrifices per minute during the four-day consecration. Four tables were arranged at the top so that the victims could be jettisoned down the sides of the temple.[22] Additionally, some historians argue that these numbers were inaccurate as most written account of Aztec sacrifices were made by Spanish sources to justify Spain's conquest.[23] Nonetheless, according to Codex Telleriano-Remensis, old Aztecs who talked with the missionaries told about a much lower figure for the reconsecration of the temple, approximately 4,000 victims in total.
Also, it seems like we'd wanna count the 40,000 to 240,000 Aztecs slaughtered by the Spaniards[1].
The native allies were the main sources of victims for those mass sacrifices, so I think their motivation to fight and kill their former masters was rather high.
This is directly opposite of excusemaking for genocide.
The Spanish never had an intention to exterminate the local population: they needed people to exploit the land they had conquered. The massive death toll was a result of an influx of diseases from the old world, and not due to some extermination policy they had.
On the other had, the natives did perpetrate genocides on a regular basis, and the conquest did put an end to it. So I believe that in the end life actually improved for the majority of those natives who did survive the waves of diseases, compared to what they could hope for under their traditional way of life.
Someone else compared 84k death to 3k death in this thread, so it seems to have a good historical and archaeological basis.
The figures can be discussed, but all this means then is that we're in agreement and "Now we're just haggling about the price"
Genocide (or at least the destruction of the native culture) may be a morally consistent position for those who believe in utilitarianism: if you don't like the idea of child sacrifice, it may be better to destroy a culture that favors child sacrifice.
I am not keying on that piece of flak shot in the air to cover the genocide normalization. Instead I ignored it, because it's rhetorical redirection. The claim at hand is the one I quoted: however bad they were, they were infinitely less brutal than native civilizations. Using the Spanish Inquisition as a rhetorical high-score of the violence that Spanish forces exported, instead of the actual colonial operations in question is dishonest and shitty.
Under no meaningful comparison can you claim that native civilizations were less brutal than the Spanish (and to a lesser extent, Portuguese and later French and British) extraction operations. "Look! The Inquisition! Three thousand people, that's it!" Columbus's second voyage kidnapped 500 Taino from Hispaniola alone and 300 of them died on the way back to Europe, and that was just the start of things. By 1542, las Casas--a Spaniard--estimated that the Spanish had killed between twelve and fifteen million natives, and while that number is probably not well-sourced by las Casas, modern research suggests that that number, if it is inaccurate, is likely to be so on the low end when you tally up the whole thing.
"Look! Three thousand! The Aztecs! But the Aztecs!" The Mexica? Yeah, they sucked a whole lot. It's not a huge surprise that the Tlaxcaltecs and others thought the Spanish were a good bet, because the Mexica were downright vile. So yanno, let's scratch the whole thing off, call that one fair-is-fair (it's not but okay). Now how about the other millions to tens of millions killed by the Spanish alone and forced into slavery?
Because these genocide-softpedaling assertions are hiding the ball.
Here's las Casas himself. Read it, if you have the stomach.
“They [the Spanish] forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders, shouting, ‘Wriggle, you little perisher.’
What was that about the implied nobility of destroying a culture that has a problem with child sacrifice? Shit, this wasn't even for any reason in particular, it's nihilistic murder for the heck of it. And the Taino, to the best of my knowledge, didn't practice any form of human sacrifice at all. What's your high-minded lesswrong-dot-com excuse here?
"Critics have claimed it's exaggerated". Okay. You'll note that the only citation to that claim is a political science professor in a political science journal who's asserting that las Casas exaggerated in order to establish a rationale for the Spanish crown to intervene. Even if true? How fucked up did it have to be on-the-ground to make that seem like the right tactic?
Even if I steelman this attempt at an argument to its fullest, "exaggerated" doesn't mean "didn't happen"--if you go actually read the article that Wikipedia page cites, von Vacano does not claim that it's false--and we have other contemporary accounts of the Spanish acts of genocide on Hispaniola alone.
Somewhere in the mid hundreds-of-thousands to a million Taino, depending on which ends of the estimate make sense to you, lived on Hispaniola when the Spanish showed up.
