A real world culture developing like the Tsalal

[Falecius]

I think this part in particular needs to be emphasized. If it has its place in the world, everyone will rationalize it as the way things are done long after the original reason for it is gone. Like child sacrifice in Carthage.

I suppose you are aware that child sacrifice in Carthage is probably a myth (I say probably, not certainly, because from what read, evidence is inconclusive and its interpretation not entirely clear. Scholars lean often to the skeptic side out of principle). However, the number of infant bones in the Tophet is probably too high for sacrifice to be the likeliest explanation.

 

[Tanc49]

There's a difference between the very fringe activity of grinding up a person who had been dead for centuries in many cases, and the ritual slaughter and cannibalisation of tens of thousands.

You're just being a contrarian here.

A bit of a contrarian I'll admit but it seems to be more widespread than a fringe activity

 

[Blackhills]

The Iroquois did torture captives brutally from time to time, but that didn't really make them unique from most contemporary cultures, particularly in Europe where some countries, most famously England, had a knack for executing condemned prisoners in slow and grotesque ways, and publicly displaying their remains.

Yes, I'll give you that, the pre-modern English indeed had quite a strong penal law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered

 

[Flashman]

Yes, I'll give you that, the pre-modern English indeed had quite a strong penal law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered

Is a cruel punishment for criminals really that much better than the average slaughter of 20,000 per annum?

The Aztecs come closer then any other civilization ever to being a "bad guy" by any reasonable standard of modern morality.

 

[Blackhills]

Is a cruel punishment for criminals really that much better than the average slaughter of 20,000 per annum?

The Aztecs come closer then any other civilization ever to being a "bad guy" by any reasonable standard of modern morality.

No, I was not comparing the two. I was just agreeing with his point that yes, there were in pre-modern Europe (and here emphatising the English exemple) some cruel activities. But I do agree with you here that this still very below Aztec levels.
Anyways, we're debating not the Aztecs, but Iroquois cultural practices, when the English popped in the conversation.

 

[DG Valdron]

A couple of comments.

First, the Tsalal were not a single culture, but a series of cultures. The Tcho, the Yag, Ptahr, Hali, Zhu, Ghault and on saw themselves as very distinctive peoples. So within that context its fairly inaccurate.

Second, the dysfunctionality in Tsalal cultures is inconsistent with our own cultural norms in the 21st century. But even in the 20th and 19th centuries many prevailing norms worldwide were quite horrific, going back a long ways. Civilization is capable of doing utterly awful things to its own citizens, and especially to foreigners.

I suppose we can go 'Oh geez cannibalism is beyond the pale' - and the Irish famine isn't? The Bengal famine isn't? Churchill gassing rebellious kurds wasn't? The way that the Russians treated their serfs? Or the way that landlords treated Scots in the 18th century?

We've built entire civilizations and cultures around foundations of slavery. Rape is a universal human institution of aeons duration - do you conceive just how recently the concept arose that a woman was entitled to her own body? Previously, rape was a property crime against the man - father or husband, who owned the woman's body, and in many cultures the remedy was compensation? Even torture was an institutional human art form, and our commitment to civilization was such that at the first moderately hard test on 9/11, that commitment went out the window and we were waterboarding again. Has anyone ever created a societies as sick and paranoid and utterly destructive to the human soul as Stalin and Mao did.

I remember reading about lynchings in the deep south, and it was terrifying - it wasn't just that black people were murdered, but that they were literally tortured for hours, torn to pieces... and the people doing these horrific things were no different than you or me, they considered themselves good and moral people... yet they burned human beings alive, dismembered, disembowelled, its astonishing.

Aren't we just fooling ourselves when we say 'We are better than that.' Maybe we aren't. Or more accurately, maybe when the circumstances are right, when needs or impulses drive, we are just that bad.

 

[oshron]

A couple of comments.

First, the Tsalal were not a single culture, but a series of cultures. The Tcho, the Yag, Ptahr, Hali, Zhu, Ghault and on saw themselves as very distinctive peoples. So within that context its fairly inaccurate.

Second, the dysfunctionality in Tsalal cultures is inconsistent with our own cultural norms in the 21st century. But even in the 20th and 19th centuries many prevailing norms worldwide were quite horrific, going back a long ways. Civilization is capable of doing utterly awful things to its own citizens, and especially to foreigners.

I suppose we can go 'Oh geez cannibalism is beyond the pale' - and the Irish famine isn't? The Bengal famine isn't? Churchill gassing rebellious kurds wasn't? The way that the Russians treated their serfs? Or the way that landlords treated Scots in the 18th century?

We've built entire civilizations and cultures around foundations of slavery. Rape is a universal human institution of aeons duration - do you conceive just how recently the concept arose that a woman was entitled to her own body? Previously, rape was a property crime against the man - father or husband, who owned the woman's body, and in many cultures the remedy was compensation? Even torture was an institutional human art form, and our commitment to civilization was such that at the first moderately hard test on 9/11, that commitment went out the window and we were waterboarding again. Has anyone ever created a societies as sick and paranoid and utterly destructive to the human soul as Stalin and Mao did.

I remember reading about lynchings in the deep south, and it was terrifying - it wasn't just that black people were murdered, but that they were literally tortured for hours, torn to pieces... and the people doing these horrific things were no different than you or me, they considered themselves good and moral people... yet they burned human beings alive, dismembered, disembowelled, its astonishing.

Aren't we just fooling ourselves when we say 'We are better than that.' Maybe we aren't. Or more accurately, maybe when the circumstances are right, when needs or impulses drive, we are just that bad.

the master himself weighs in--great post

 

[Balaur]

I think people are more willing to overlook horror when it's "Us" rather than "Them" doing it and/or "Them" being the victims. Humans are very, very good at normalizing utterly fucked up shit.

 

[Timaeus]

Second, the dysfunctionality in Tsalal cultures is inconsistent with our own cultural norms in the 21st century.

Heck, even now there are fucked up cultural norms outside the West. And I'm not exactly sure about the West, either.

 

[Balaur]

Heck, even now there are fucked up cultural norms outside the West. And I'm not exactly sure about the West, either.

Yeah, a lot of stuff that we do is pretty twisted, it's just got enough of a veneer of decency over it that people normally look the other way.

 

[CountPeter]

Is a cruel punishment for criminals really that much better than the average slaughter of 20,000 per annum?

The Aztecs come closer then any other civilization ever to being a "bad guy" by any reasonable standard of modern morality.

I'm not too sure on the last part.
I mean don't get me wrong, sacrifice is hardly something I advocate, but I might if I truly believed that everyone and everything on the earth would die if I didn't.

Considering it was known to be an honour to die for this cause and much of it was relatively voluntary, it's worth remembering that this is how the Aztecs viewed things.

 

[Daztur]

IIRC the number of people sacrificed by the Aztecs per capita was roughly the same as the number of people executed in contemporary England.

 

[Skallagrim]

IIRC the number of people sacrificed by the Aztecs per capita was roughly the same as the number of people executed in contemporary England.

You are forgetting that the Aztecs also executed people they considered criminals etc. -- and that's in addition to the sacrifices, which specifically used "worthy" victims, not lowly criminals. (That "worthiness", however, does not generally imply that is was voluntary, as @CountPeter writes. Victims of human sacrifice were mostly enemy soldiers captured for that purpose. They were "worthy" because they were esteemed opponents, and the Aztecs saw it as an honour for them... but the victims evidently did not think so. There were also in-group victims, selected for certain ceremonies, but I gather that it's unclear just how voluntary it really was, even for them. It was more likely a case of "accept your fate wth dignity, or the dishonour means your entire family gets killed or exiled".)

I keep saying this: comparing the large-scale human sacrifice of the Aztecs to atrocities in other premodern cultures doesn't generally hold water, because the Aztecs typically committed those other atrocities as well, and has the large-scale human sacrifice to boot. Pretty much any "tu quoque!" you can come up with (slavery, rape, ruthless punishments for criminals, extreme bloodsport where the losers get killed etc. etc.) is rather pointless, because the Aztecs did all those things and had the human sacrifice.

Maybe, if the Romans writing about (some of) the Celts were entirely accurate, they came pretty close. But it is called into question nowadays whether those Roman accounts of mass human sacrifice in Celtic societies were not wildly exaggerated (much as the stories of Carthaginian child sacrifice were probably Roman propaganda). Generally, we can just say that human sacrifice - as far as we know - was uniquely... popular in some Mesoamerican societies. And since that sort of thing is generally considered pretty horrific, we can consider those societies as being relatively closest to what a real "horror story culture" would look like.

If the Aztecs had refrained from some or all other common atrocities - if they had, for instance, been morally opposed to slavery and rape and torture in a non-religious context - one might legitimately claim that their sins were no worse those of many other cultures, and that they were just... different sins. But the fact that the Aztecs were not specifically enlightened in those other areas either just makes them look, well... "just as bad as everyone else... plus they ritually kill thousands of people each year".