Ricardo Duchesne:
>An excellent source on the Mayan collapse is Culbert, T.P. If I
>recall, he argues, it was environmental-overexploitation. My view is
>the Mayan collapse should not be seen as a unique historical event,
>since collapse has been a general happening among all pre-capitalist
>civilizations. If a complex society expands via conquest, at
>some point its expansionary limits will be reached, and decline will
>be irreversible.
>
The classic Mayan civilization collapsed a thousand years ago and there is
no proof of what caused it. All that one can do is speculate about it. Some
think it was because of overexploitation of the soil, while others think it
was from diseases such as yellow fever, invasions from the north or other
factors. There is nothing to go by except hieroglyphs and soil samples. The
reason that the "Mayans self-destructed because they were not ecological"
argument is important to people like Simon Schama is that it serves to
create an amalgam between the invader and the invaded. Why complain about
wanton slaughter of the buffalo or DDT when the Mayans were just as
self-destructive? The only problem is that we have eye-witnesses to 19th
century American history, but none with respect to the Yucatan peninsula a
thousand years ago. These arguments about how the indigenous peoples
slaughtered the saber-tooth tiger into extinction and Mayan
anti-environmental practices go hand in hand with the argument that disease
killed most Indians rather than Spanish bayonets and American rifles.
Hence, the genocide of the South and North American Indian becomes a moral
non-issue. I can understand the importance of this for bourgeois ideology,
since the recognition that American society is based on genocide is rather
disquieting.
>
>The reason for the Pleistocene extinctions was human hunting. Big game
>animals were hunted to extinction by GROWING bands of hunters and
>gatherers. Population pressure is indicated by such facts as
>bands being forced to travel over longer distances for food, to
>change from consuming large animals to smaller ones, to practice food
>storage, etc. Eventually they were forced to adopt agriculture.
This is just a bald assertion. What is the archaeological evidence for this?
>
>The question Proyect needs to answer is what ethical criteria he uses
>to claim what the Europeans did was "terrible".
The same criteria that is used to judge Nazis and other peoples who carry
out genocide. It is immoral to steal people's land and murder them in the
process. Just as it is wrong to enslave them. The United States and Western
Europe can be characterized in the epigraph that precedes Balzac's "Pere
Goriot": "Behind every great fortune there is a great theft."
Louis Proyect
