CONCERNING THE ORIGINS OF CULTURES

Abstract

No doubt my story [concerning the origins of cultures] would be more inspirational if I could set aside [a] cost/benefit approach to cannibalism and return to the old theory of moral progress. Most of us would prefer to believe that the Aztecs remained cannibals simply because their morals were mined in primitive impulses while the Old World states tabooed human flesh because their morals had risen in the great onwards-and-upwards movement of civilization. But I'm afraid this preference arises from provincial if not hypocritical misconceptions. Neither the prohibition of cannibalism nor the decline of human sacrifice in the Old World had the slightest effect on the rate at which the Old World states and empires killed each other's citizens. As everyone knows, the scale of warfare has increased steadily from prehistoric times to the present, and record numbers of casualties due to armed conflict have been produced precisely by those states in which Christianity has been the major religion. Heaps of corpses left to rot on the battlefield are no less dead than corpses dismembered for a feast. Today, hovering on the brink of a third world war, we are scarcely in a position to look down on the Aztecs. In our nuclear age the world survives only because each side is convinced that the moral standards of the other are low enough to sanction the annihilation of hundreds of millions of people in retaliation for a first strike. Thanks to radioactivity the survivors will not even be able to bury the dead, let alone eat them.