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Speaking of editorializing, the article's author took to Twitter [0] to defend her article's reverent/respectful tone and (nowadays-common) unspoken premise tha
by avn2109 8y ago
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.
[0] https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 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.
- duxup 8y agoI 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?
- mirimir 8y agoBecause 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.
- duxup 8y agoI don't think anyone describing the practice intended to be role playing / speaking as an Aztecs....
- mirimir 8y agoIt's not that they're role playing. It's that they're professionally neutral.
- duxup 8y agoI'm talking about people on Twitter who might call the practice 'horrible', they're not role playing Aztecs and they aren't writing a paper. 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.
- mirimir 8y agoI 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. Edit: Oops. Forgot key "don't" and "isn't".
- int_19h 8y agoThat'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".
- mirimir 8y agoI 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.
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago>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).
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoBecause all those things are very, very different? Its common to blur things and make 'everything ok' by ignoring how different things really are.
- mirimir 8y agoOK, 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?
- shoo 8y agoin 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.
- avn2109 8y agoIf 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.
- jacobr 8y agoRegarding 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: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8# https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8#
- sonnyblarney 8y agoThe 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.
- XalvinX 8y agoSince the American invasion of Iraq doesn't remotely fit the definition of "a war" I think they were, in fact, sacrifices...
- Cpoll 8y agoOnly 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.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago"the death of non-citizens don't factor into the cost-benefit analysis" This is absolutely false.
- horseLOGIC 8y agoIt 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: https://psmag.com/news/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-56433 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.
- golergka 8y agoThis 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.
- caf 8y agoIt'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.
- zaarn 8y agoAnd 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.
- spamizbad 8y ago> 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?
- golergka 8y agoIt 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17367827) merely two days ago and I don't expect to anything deeper than typical cliches anymore.
- spamizbad 8y ago
- nmca 8y agoIf you dwell on these things, I strongly suggest reading "The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe" https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=the+possibility+of+an+ongoing+moral+catastrophe&oq=the+possibility+of+an+ongoing+moral+cata https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=th...
- tomrod 8y ago> defend her article's reverent/respectful tone and (nowadays-common) unspoken premise that all cultures and ideologies are equally good and valid. 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 http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- adamsea 8y ago> 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?
- Malarkey73 8y agoThe 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.
- nyolfen 8y ago>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.
- horseLOGIC 8y agoYou 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.
- nyolfen 8y agothe 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.
- 8y ago
- mariodiana 8y agoPeople 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.
- horseLOGIC 8y agoI'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.