Given that Stanford seems to have a lot of thoughts about Europeans in the colonial period, one wonders whether they have any opinion about the relative moral virtue of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe and its history. But moral judgements at Stanford and other universities apply only to one side: the colonizers, the Europeans, the Christians, the Americans in sum, the West. We don t ask any questions about whether non-Western groups in history may have also done bad things perhaps because of how uncomfortable it would be for a left-wing university to take a look at the history of the Americas before the supposedly evil Europeans arrived.
The Americas were an incredibly cruel place. In the Aztec Empire, one of the best-developed American civilizations, human sacrifice was a centrally important state practice. Conservative estimates put the scale of the sacrifice in the range of tens of thousands per year, for centuries. Living people had their chests slashed open by priests, their hearts torn out, and their mutilated bodies thrown down the temple steps.
The Australian historian Inga Clendinnen details the Aztec ritual of child sacrifice:
The children were kept by the priests for some weeks before their deaths (those kindergartens of doomed infants are difficult to contemplate). Then, as the appropriate festivals arrived, they were magnificently dressed, paraded in litters, and, as they wept, their throats were slit: gifted to Tlaloc the Rain God as bloodied flowers of maize. (They were thought then to enter the gentle paradise of Tlaloc, which may have assuaged the parents grief.) The pathos of their fate as they were paraded moved the watchers to tears, while their own tears were thought to augur rain.
It should not be controversial to say that the sixteenth-century Catholic or Spanish visions of the world aren t remotely comparable to the cult of Tlaloc. The Inquisition was one of the worst periods in pre-modern Europe, especially for Jews. But there are single weeks in Aztec history during which more were sacrificed than were killed in centuries of the Spanish Inquisition (estimated in the thousands).
It s a good thing for humanity that the Aztec moral vision of the world that slitting babies throats makes crops grow is no longer current. And while nobody is taking a victory lap about the deaths of Mexica (the main Aztec group) or any other indigenous groups, the Christian transformation of Mexico was for the better. And we should also recognize that it wasn t the Spanish alone that put an end to the Aztecs. The conquest would have never succeeded if not for other Mesoamericans, former victims of Aztec cruelty, who joined with the Spanish.
As is clear to anyone, Christianization and colonization didn t make Mexico a perfect society, but I, like so many others, have no regrets that Aztec sacrifices are in history textbooks, and not the evening news.
The Aztec state, by modern estimates, was probably the most lethal state in history on a percentage basis, with greater figures dying in war than in any other. And yet, the Aztec state looks almost serene compared to the rates of war death in non-state societies, many of them in the Americas. The Kato people in Northern California had by a considerable margin the most violent society in human history.
Maybe the correct way to think of all this anti-colonialism thought is the same way we think of Putin’s various pronouncements on Ukraine. Of course he doesn’t believe half of what he claims. He’s not an idiot. Similarly, I’m thinking that the various virtue signaling is strictly to placate the rubes, in this case the young SJW types and some of the ideologues. The people really pushing it don’t think about the truth of their claims too deeply. What it’s about is power and how these ideas help them grasp it. How many Aztec priests believed the tears of children brought rain? Fewer than most, I bet. But they understood what their power rested on, I also bet.
