The natural state of humanity, unlike what French philosophers of the Enlightenment believed, is actually quite crap. Here’s one example:
Across the Roman world, wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight. Others might be dropped down drains, there to perish in the hundreds. The odd eccentric philosopher aside, few had ever queried this practice. Indeed, there were cities who by ancient law had made a positive virtue of it: condemning to death deformed infants for the good of the state… Girls in particular were liable to be winnowed ruthlessly. Those who were rescued from the wayside would invariably be raised as slaves. Brothels were full of women who, as infants, had been abandoned by their parents… Only a few peoples—the odd German tribe and, inevitably, the Jews—had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children. Pretty much everyone else had always taken it for granted. Until, that was, the emergence of a Christian people.
Tom Holland, Dominion
Even to read this is painful, eh? The horror we feel when contemplating these scenes is the measure of how far we have been carried away from our natural state.
Christians were told by their Savior that every life is priceless, so they stunned contemporaries by trawling these garbage heaps, rescuing the babies, and raising them with care and dignity. Our attitude towards children today was born back then. Not immediately, of course. Such an enormous change cannot be instant but we are treasuring our babies and dedicating ourselves to raising them because we were set on this path by those early Christians.
I read a book a few years ago, and I wish I remembered the title, by a woman who escaped from a fundamentalist Muslim country. Recently escaped, not a millennium ago. She told how when a baby was born to a woman in her family, the mother, feeling that she had enough children already, drowned the baby in a bucket and sat down to her sewing in unperturbed calmness. This is the natural state of humanity. Aztecs ate their surplus babies. Developed sophisticated recipes, and all. The Incas drugged small children for months while fattening them up to guarantee a beautifully looking sacrifice.
Our attitude towards children is a civilizational achievement of the highest caliber. We are like aliens from another galaxy compared to where humanity initially was on the issue of babies.
Clarissa's Blog 
Can we modify it to say the state of humanity in what is now called the west? Not that I’ve studied much Indian history, but I am from India originally, and the Indian civilization had all of its scientific/cultural achievements explicitly by Hindu priests, as a tribute to god.
That is one of the reasons why I’m also interested in reading about how religion (any religion) is essential for society. Take away god and you take the life out of a society. I want to explore this idea further. Thanks for these posts, I’m loving it!
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Yes, I only know about the Western civilization. It’s not possible to explore every civilization in depth, unfortunately, so one must limit oneself at some point.
You now see why students love my teaching. They don’t normally hear this anywhere, and it’s really interesting stuff. I don’t even have to be any good. The material practically teaches itself.
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“Aztecs ate their surplus babies. Developed sophisticated recipes, and all. The Incas drugged small children for months while fattening them up to guarantee a beautifully looking sacrifice.”
I can’t find anything at all about Aztecs eating babies.
As for Incans fattening children before exposing them, the evidence seems to be an analysis of the hair of three mummies. Maybe it’s true but it seems slender evidence.
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Caribs (a primitive tribe in the Caribbean) raped the women of the neighboring tribe (tainos, the first tribe that Columbus encounters in the new world) to impregnate them and then eat the resulting babies.
It is actually quite a feat of human consciousness that, after observing all this, Spaniards eventually decided that the indigenous were fully human. Aztecs actually seem to be the only culture in history that ate human flesh not for ritual but for gastronomic purposes.
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Not to detract from the overall message, but… After I expressed some doubt about two lurid claims of indigenous barbarism, you’ve responded with a third example, for which again there seems to be no evidence beyond anecdote. (How do we know this isn’t just a taino superstition regarding their Carib enemies?)
I’m aware that human beings have done all kinds of unbelievably horrid things. I’m also aware that people tell tall tales. Can you at least say the general source of these claims? Do these all come from reports by early Spanish explorers, conquistadors, Jesuits reporting on the native peoples, etc?
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Yes, these are reports of the explorers. What else can it possibly be?
I never heard anybody dispute claims of widespread cannibalism and human sacrifices among the indigenous. Even Howard Zinn doesn’t dispute them, as far as I recall. The interesting question is why would anybody assume that cannibalism wouldn’t be widespread in the New World. What would prevent it from arising?
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In this account of the recent academic dispute over whether Caribs were cannibals
https://bigthink.com/the-present/columbus-cannibalism/
I read that the same people who informed Columbus of Carib cannibalism, also told him that there were islands inhabited by one-eyed dog-faced tribes.
And the following article
https://www.persee.fr/doc/jsa_0037-9174_1984_num_70_1_2239
begins by describing how Isabella’s decree that cannibals could be sold as slaves, created an incentive for populations to be classified that way.
So forgive me if I’m a little cautious about accepting lurid stories from hundreds of years ago.
“What would prevent [cannibalism] from arising?”
This is an interesting question. One might propose that it requires one of those pan-human Axial-Age religions to create a genuine taboo against any form of cannibalism at all. And yet I think the pagan Romans also viewed cannibalism as monstrous.
On the other hand, in any environment where starvation is a constant threat, there’s some possibility that culture will end up allowing the eating of humans under some circumstances. Wikipedia’s article on “cannibalism in Australia” suggests it was more common here (before colonization) than I had realized.
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I don’t read Anglo sources on this subject because they are extremely tendentious for obvious reasons.
Queen Isabella put Columbus to jail for enslaving the indigenous and did everything to prevent the indigenous from being enslaved. And they weren’t. Which is an extraordinary achievement for a medieval culture.
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“The horror we feel when contemplating these scenes”
Again, this seems based in consciousness, a key part of which is being able to imagine alternate versions of oneself (like the song “If I were a rich man”) which can also lead to empathy, the ability to imagine oneself in another’s place. Modern humans feel terrible about what happened to unwanted babies in Rome because we can imagine how we might feel in their place. The adults who threw them away…. didn’t or couldn’t.
There is evidence that at least some pre-industrial peoples do not have what we might consider ‘consciousness’ (or subjectivity or whatever else you want to call it).
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Wait, what??
I’m assuming you know something I don’t here, but… where did this conclusion come from?
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Check out ‘The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’ by Julian Jaynes.
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“where did this conclusion come from?”
One of the defining features of consciousness is self-awareness in a web in inter-twining relationships from ‘living’ vs ‘dead’ to ‘mammal’ vs ‘bird’ through ‘homo sapiens’ vs ‘pan troglodytes’ ‘American vs ‘Mexican’ and ‘Smith’ vs ‘Jones’ down to ‘me’ vs ‘you’.
A member of an Amazonian tribe in the 16th century also was aware of this web and their place within it but it was entirely reactive… unquestioned and unquestionable reality.
One of the defining features of consciousness is the ability to… play with this reality. I remember reading part of an ethnography from Sub-Saharan Africa. The anthropologist was trying to work out the kinship system used and the terms used within it with his primary consultant. At one point the conversation goes:
Anthro: If you had a sister, what would you call her husband?
African: I don’t have a sister.
Anthro: I know, but if you did, then…
African: But I don’t. (and so on and so on for a long period of time).
The native had no ability (or desire) to imagine a different reality from the one he was in, no ability to mentally place himself in a different familial context. Eventually the anthro figured out how to ask: “A man has a sister, she gets married, he calls her husband (X)” That was easy but imagining a non-existent sister…. not so much.
There are lots of similar stories of pre-industrial peoples inability or unwillingness to imagine different circumstances for themselves or even to think through different possible reactions to various stimuli. Responses are mostly automatic and given.
This doesn’t mean they’re stupid or anything just that they relate to the world in a very different way than we do now (and in a similar way to that of Europeans a few thousand years ago).
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Yes, our subjectivity is not the default. It’s a product of many centuries of developing in this particular direction.
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