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Friday: amazing conversations
Jul. 9th, 2021 11:11 pmI met L. at Acton Coffee House at 9:30; we talked nonstop until noon, and even then, it was hard to leave. Definitely a To Be Continued!
I missed talking to K., however, we caught up later in the day which was delightful. She is really enjoying listening to a podcast about the Fall of Civilizations. I’ve got all kinds of issues with the entire frame of a “Fall”. Generally speaking, life goes on after the “Fall”, with most of the same people, in most of the same places, doing most of the same things. Also, most “Falls” involved a big push by someone else, generally but not always military. So why don’t we present this as either Lost a Conflict With This Other Power or, conversely, Lack of Clear Succession Led to Intra-Elite Strife. Basically, those are the two ways these things go. There are usually interesting details (epidemic of New to Them Disease Leaves Them Vulnerable to People They Had Been Squabbling With for Generations, or, Series of Droughts / Harvest Failures Caused Waves of Destabilizing Migration). The worst kind of “Mysterious / Sudden Fall” story is when the descendants are _still living in the area_ and are _quite happy to tell what happened_, but people show up, assume that the locals could not possibly have anything to do with Those Amazing Architectural Accomplishments and imagine some previous group that has Vanished Dramatically.
But I got to thinking about the Spanish and the Aztecs in particular, and the behavior of the Spanish more generally, and I realized that the scope of atrocities committed in a relatively small number of decades (genocide, torture, slavery, starvation, etc.) was really, really unique and absolutely astonishing — and _recognized_ as unique and horrifying at the time (look, I get that the world wasn’t a super nice, kind, gentle place in the late 15th century; I’m just pointing out what observers at the time pointed out — this was stunningly off the scale batshit crazy evil). I have zero recollection of it being taught that way, and specifically, while we spent a fair amount of time in various classes talking about things like the Third Reich / Nazi Germany / WW2, and Why Would Anyone Do That / Go Along With That / Justify That, I don’t remember any kind of comparable discussion of But Why Would Anyone Do What the Conquistadores did? I talked to R. about it briefly — his understanding of what led to to what happened when those horrifying people arrived in the Americas is even more inaccurate and disjointed than mine, which suggests to me this is not a matter of me having some kind of weird and unique hole in my education, but rather a broader erasure.
I don’t know enough about the time and the people in question to be able to provide any kind of plausible answer, however, I will note that the Iberian peninsula had a lot of smaller powers on it that engaged in a lot of back-and-forth of a violent nature, and there were an awful lot of people around happy to help out with the violence who did not have anything that any of us would recognize as a conscience or morals or scruples of any sort. They were pretty motivated by gold, accustomed to opportunistically cobbling together coalitions to accomplish goals and then turning on their recent “allies”. Finally, all the back-and-forthing led to an approach to governance that turned over control of populations and the economic benefits of exploiting those populations to recent victors (the encomienda system), with not a whole lot of oversight. Take some of these mercenaries, displace them to a very different cultural context which did not have anything like that level of back-and-forth violence and gaining and losing of territory, weakened dramatically by smallpox and whatever else the mercenaries brought over with them, and you can kind of understand how the atrocities of the late 1400s / early 1500s happened. Kind of.
Anyway. Lots to think about, and probably a whole lot of things that I should learn more about so I can try to piece together a framework and sequence and timeline for understanding what happened, so I can maybe understand why peoples did what they did.
Fancy Friday happened; lots of people, I started a little later, and that worked out well.
I had a visit with M, but it was raining so no walk.
I did the long walk by myself (later, after the rain stopped).
ETA: This is the day that MIL arrived, while I was playing hooky at the coffee shop with L.
I missed talking to K., however, we caught up later in the day which was delightful. She is really enjoying listening to a podcast about the Fall of Civilizations. I’ve got all kinds of issues with the entire frame of a “Fall”. Generally speaking, life goes on after the “Fall”, with most of the same people, in most of the same places, doing most of the same things. Also, most “Falls” involved a big push by someone else, generally but not always military. So why don’t we present this as either Lost a Conflict With This Other Power or, conversely, Lack of Clear Succession Led to Intra-Elite Strife. Basically, those are the two ways these things go. There are usually interesting details (epidemic of New to Them Disease Leaves Them Vulnerable to People They Had Been Squabbling With for Generations, or, Series of Droughts / Harvest Failures Caused Waves of Destabilizing Migration). The worst kind of “Mysterious / Sudden Fall” story is when the descendants are _still living in the area_ and are _quite happy to tell what happened_, but people show up, assume that the locals could not possibly have anything to do with Those Amazing Architectural Accomplishments and imagine some previous group that has Vanished Dramatically.
But I got to thinking about the Spanish and the Aztecs in particular, and the behavior of the Spanish more generally, and I realized that the scope of atrocities committed in a relatively small number of decades (genocide, torture, slavery, starvation, etc.) was really, really unique and absolutely astonishing — and _recognized_ as unique and horrifying at the time (look, I get that the world wasn’t a super nice, kind, gentle place in the late 15th century; I’m just pointing out what observers at the time pointed out — this was stunningly off the scale batshit crazy evil). I have zero recollection of it being taught that way, and specifically, while we spent a fair amount of time in various classes talking about things like the Third Reich / Nazi Germany / WW2, and Why Would Anyone Do That / Go Along With That / Justify That, I don’t remember any kind of comparable discussion of But Why Would Anyone Do What the Conquistadores did? I talked to R. about it briefly — his understanding of what led to to what happened when those horrifying people arrived in the Americas is even more inaccurate and disjointed than mine, which suggests to me this is not a matter of me having some kind of weird and unique hole in my education, but rather a broader erasure.
I don’t know enough about the time and the people in question to be able to provide any kind of plausible answer, however, I will note that the Iberian peninsula had a lot of smaller powers on it that engaged in a lot of back-and-forth of a violent nature, and there were an awful lot of people around happy to help out with the violence who did not have anything that any of us would recognize as a conscience or morals or scruples of any sort. They were pretty motivated by gold, accustomed to opportunistically cobbling together coalitions to accomplish goals and then turning on their recent “allies”. Finally, all the back-and-forthing led to an approach to governance that turned over control of populations and the economic benefits of exploiting those populations to recent victors (the encomienda system), with not a whole lot of oversight. Take some of these mercenaries, displace them to a very different cultural context which did not have anything like that level of back-and-forth violence and gaining and losing of territory, weakened dramatically by smallpox and whatever else the mercenaries brought over with them, and you can kind of understand how the atrocities of the late 1400s / early 1500s happened. Kind of.
Anyway. Lots to think about, and probably a whole lot of things that I should learn more about so I can try to piece together a framework and sequence and timeline for understanding what happened, so I can maybe understand why peoples did what they did.
Fancy Friday happened; lots of people, I started a little later, and that worked out well.
I had a visit with M, but it was raining so no walk.
I did the long walk by myself (later, after the rain stopped).
ETA: This is the day that MIL arrived, while I was playing hooky at the coffee shop with L.