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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Pre-Columbian Central American societies seem to have been some of the most violent in human history. They also established highly complex civilizations with rituals, a strong rule of law and a deeply ingrained culture that existed to manage, sanction and possibly limit (or at least constrain) that violence.

This is misleading in my opinion. It's likely that pre-conquest Mesoamerican religions failed to go through the Axial Revolution that happened primarily in Greece, Israel, Japan, and China between the 8th and 3rd centuries BCE. The main thrust of this revolution was the shift from a cyclical view of history to a "progressive" one. In other words religions and culture began to adopt the idea that individual humans and humanity as a whole could actually improve themselves, and weren't doomed to toil endlessly on a repeating wheel of brutality.

The classic example in the West is Socrates, "An unexamined life is not worth living." It's hard to overstate how much this type of cognitive revolution changes the way society works, or how baked into the modern world this view is. Nowadays we take it for granted that improvement and progress can happen, and indeed those who don't seek to improve themselves are seen as morally inferior.


On the other side of the world, Mesoamercian religion was highly cyclical and as far as I can tell never had a true axial revolution. Ritual sacrifices and as you put it "A strong rule of law" to contain violence stayed necessary because that's how it was. Without an understanding of self improvement, Might makes Right is the only thing that works.

All this to say, I disagree with the framing:

Pre-Columbian Central American societies seem to have been some of the most violent in human history.

I'd argue they were just as violent as many other pre-axial civilizations, we just have better records since we encountered them well after our own Axial revolution.

It's likely that pre-conquest Mesoamerican religions failed to go through the Axial Revolution that happened primarily in Greece, Israel, Japan, and China between the 8th and 3rd centuries BCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_monarchy#Vision_of_history discusses this too, with history starting when the monarchy emerges - and then all you need to do is maintain that forever

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