William T. Vollman's review of This Is Not Miami, by Fernanda Melchior—in the New York Times Book Review for 14 May 2023—juxtaposes two phrases that seem to me to require more than the mere pass through implied by the only conjunctive statement: "And never mind." First Vollman correctly says that Hernan Cortés is a "conqueror-torturer." Then, on the other side of the "never mind," equally correctly, he says that the people whom Cortés conquered-tortured were "human-sacrificing Aztec overlords" (13).
What I think needs unpacking in those two phrases is the alienness of the past, which seems to be impossible for contemporary folks in the US to consider, accept, and contend with. From the left side of the political spectrum, the past is always the subject of outraged moral judgments that make the behaviors of the past so reprehensible that they are perceived to be entirely alien to the present—so beyond the pale that the only possible response to the past is pure opprobrium. From the right side of the political spectrum, the past is an anodyne story of greatness, when men were men and women weren't, and America was great. The inevitable conclusion to that perspective seems much like Buck Turgidson's response to Soviet ambassador Alexi de Sadesky's description of the Doomsday Bomb: "Gee I wish we had us one of those."
Maybe because I come to the question of the relation of past to present from the perspective of the left, it seems to me that the right side of the equation is simply nonsense. Just one day of living in the past as it really was would make even the most rabid of the MAGA crowd think again. Smallpox, anyone? How about the complete subordination of women to men, so that a woman could not own property under her own authority, or have her own bank account, or . . . fill in the blank for whatever right you value the most. Want to return to the day when a Black man even glancing at a white woman led to a lynching? Or to a time when Native Americans who objected to their own exploitation were slaughtered and then their bodies dumped in an oil barrel? If you see those behaviors as fine and dandy, then you're welcome to join the neo-nazis. But please stay out of the present.
From the perspective of the left, it's important to recognize the validity of L. P. Hartley's comment in The Go-Between, that "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." That truth just cannot be dismissed by the cursory "And never mind" of Vollman's review. Seeing things from the left, as I said, I know only too well that it's difficult to curb the impulse to judge the past by terms that are current in the present. But the past, in its different epochs and its different cultural milieus, has its own evaluative criteria.
Foucault argues that history proceeds by discontinuities rather than by narratives of the same. And that's the grounds on which I see the connection between Cortés and the Aztec overlords. It is a necessary and uncontested aspect of Aztec ways of being, not only that humans should be sacrificed to the gods, without which practice the whole universe would be endangered, but that the struggles of the gods should be reenacted in the game of ulama, a "ball" game in which the heads of the losers of the game became the "ball" used in the game.
No doubt we in the present recoil at that practice, just as we recoil at the practices of the Spanish conquistadores, whose actions against the natives of the so-called New World are disgusting. And yet, just as the practices of the Aztecs were necessary for maintaining the universe, so too the practices of the conquistadores were essential to the expectations of their culture. I am not at all persuaded by the idea that Europeans came to the New World in order to spread the truth of Christianity and save the souls of the poor benighted "natives." Pelf and wealth seem to me the clear underlying motives, as is the case with Cortés, certainly, whose exploits converted him from mere soldier to the Marques del Valle. But the way that the Spaniards approached the natives simply relfected the way that the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula took place, in the same way that the treatment of Native Americans by the English settlers of North America reflected the way that the "Plantation" of Ireland took place.
The underlying point is pretty simple: people do what people are supposed to do, and what they are supposed to do is given by the complex intersection of what Foucault calls discursive practices that form the grounds from which a culture springs. Our discursive practices arise from moments of disruption, again according to Foucault, which make the past the "foreign country" that Hartley writes about. If Cortés or Montezuma had behaved as we do in 2023, they would have been housed in an insane asylum—of which, of course, there were none in 1520. Instead, they would have been treated by their respective priesthoods for possession. Conversely, if St. Joan of Arc were with us today, she would be in an insane asylum rather than in the panoply of Catholic saints.
The problem of a proper evaluation of the past becomes a serious problem, then, because it seems inevitably to lead to an ethical relativism that smacks of weak-kneed liberalism, in the older, mid-twentieth-century sense of liberalism as something that makes it impossible to make any judgments at all.
Perhaps that is true.
But I like to think of it differently. A solid consideration of the past requires very careful study of the past and its difference from the present. I think of Ta-Nehisi Coates's problematic response to Queen Nzinga in Between the World and Me as a case in point. His initial response to her power is to admire her because, when the Dutch ambassador with whom she was negotiating tried to humiliate her, she showed "her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body" (45). In the ruthless power games of the 17th century, Nziga outperformed the Dutch man. She was for Coates, then, "a weapon" to wield against the equally ruthless power games of twentieth-century American race relations.
In his first response to the Queen, Coates was a bit like the MAGA crowd, seeing in the practices of the past a mirror to what the present ought to be.
And then Coates thought again—or rather, he took a class in which his professor, Linda Heywood, reframed Queen Nziga's behavior. When Heywood "told the story of Nziga," says Coates, "she told it without any fantastic gloss, and it hit me hard as a sucker punch." What hits him is that, in the realitiy of the present, he would be Nziga's avatar, but rather he would be like her adviser, "broken down into a chair so that a queen, heir to everything she'd ever seen, could sit" (54). That idea runs so deeply counter to the practices of the modern world that it produces a response equivalent to my response to Cortés or Montezuma. Revulsion.
I think, however, that neither the initial nor the secondary response is a full one. Yes Cortés and Montezuma and Nziga behave in reprehensible ways. But they behave in ways that are essential and necessary. If Cortés is going to perform as he is expected to perform; if Montezuma is going to act as his religion requires him to act; if Nziga is going to overwhelm her antagonist, then all three must, absolutely must behave as they do. My judgment that such behavior is simply unacceptable in the modern world is, ultimately, irrelevant to the historical moment of 1520 or 1640. I am not being a relativist, in other words, but a contextualist, fully aware of the evil of the past but also fully aware that such a judgment is couched in terms of the present.
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