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I.
As I mentioned back in July, I’ve been listening to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast by Paul Cooper. In his latest episode he tells the tragic tale of the fall of the Aztecs. The tale of how Hernán Cortés, with just a few hundred men, and more importantly a combination of diplomacy and disease, toppled one of the world’s great civilizations in just three years. The tale of how Cortés was able to accomplish all this in such a short time, with so few men, is fascinating and appalling in equal measure.
On the other side, the doom of the Aztecs and Montezuma is both tragic, and unavoidable. Certainly they could have handled the invasion of Cortés better. By striking at the right moment they probably could have defeated him, but even if they had, the eventual outcome would not have changed. In any case, it’s hard to place much blame on either the Aztecs or Montezuma, they just had no idea what they were dealing with. And it’s really this aspect I want to focus on, how abruptly the world changed from one they largely understood to one that only existed in their nightmares. I want to focus on the more general category of sudden catastrophe. Those times when history turned on a dime.
Interestingly, the podcast actually contained two examples of this phenomenon. There was, of course, the story of Cortés and Montezuma, but Cooper actually began the podcast by talking about the Chicxulub Asteroid, and the impact which ended the 180 million year reign of the dinosaurs, in a single moment of unimaginable destruction. He mentioned this, both because the asteroid impacted very near the empire of the Aztecs (albeit millions of years previously), and because it’s another example of things turning on a dime.
I understand that dinosaurs did not have the intelligence to appreciate or even notice the tiny light in the sky that would eventually end their existence, but it’s interesting to imagine what it might have been like if they had. If, say, they had possessed the intelligence of our hominid ancestors. They might have recognized that the light in the sky was something new. As it got closer and brighter they might have wondered what that meant. But would they have ever imagined that in a few short days or hours that their world would be completely and utterly destroyed? It’s only in the last century or two that we would have understood that.
Montezuma was in a very similar position, though he had a few years as opposed to a few days, but there is still an enormous amount of dramatic irony to the story. Where we can see the impending and enormous catastrophe at the end of the story, but even at the moment of his death he still could probably only see a fraction of the oncoming calamity.
Montezuma was born in 1466, so 26 years before Columbus’ arrival, into a long string of Central American civilizations stretching back thousands of years. More consequentially, when he was born the two worlds, old and new, had been separated for more than ten thousand years beyond that. If we limit ourselves to considering just the Aztec Empire, it had been ascendent for at least a century, and reached its greatest size during Montezuma’s reign, where he ruled from the center of the largest city in the Americas. All of which is to say that things looked great for him in the years leading up to contact with the Europeans. He was the leader of his known world’s greatest empire. He had vanquished all of his rivals, and everyone treated him like a god, which absent the Spaniards he might as well have been. But in their presence it would all turn out to be meaningless.
Even though Columbus arrived in 1492, it actually wasn’t until 1517 that Montezuma first heard of the Europeans when Juan de Grijalva landed on San Juan de Ulúa. Montezuma ordered a watch to be kept, and I’m sure he was curious, but I don’t think he had an inkling that three years later, as a result of these new people, he would be dead. That one year after that his empire would be overthrown and that within 60 years 95% of his people would be dead from disease. If he had known, it’s unclear what he should have done. In many respects he was just as powerless as the dinosaurs had been 65 million years earlier.
Certainly had Montezuma known what was coming he would have been very fatalistic, and many of the earlier historians blamed Aztec fatalism for contributing to the ease with which Cortés conquered them. This fatalism supposedly had nothing to do with the new arrivals, and was derived from the appearance of a comet, and the ending of an Aztec era. But not only has that theory been entirely abandoned by more recent scholars, it’s belied by the circumstances of the story. When Cortés first arrived at the Aztec capital Montezuma welcomed him in, thinking that he was engaging in wise diplomacy with representatives of a foreign state. Had he been fatalistic he would have attacked and destroyed them, regardless of the casualties. But he still thought that his empire was going to continue as it always had, and he was far more worried about his vassal states and what it might look like if he lost thousands of men to kill a few hundred, so he welcomed them in instead. Meaning that fatalism, which I am often accused of, probably wasn’t present and didn’t contribute to the Aztecs defeat, and if it had been present, it might have helped.
II.
As we examine the story of Montezuma, and others like it we notice that there are three distinct stages. And that these stages are the same one’s described by Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, in his famous quote:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
Rumsfeld took some flack for that statement at the time, and that whole framework is based on the Johari Window. (Which I’ve referenced before.) But I’ve always thought it represents something very important. In this case it perfectly describes the distinct stages of sudden catastrophes.
The first stage is the unknown unknowns stage. It’s Montezuma in 1516, thinking he ruled over the greatest empire in history, and never suspecting that amongst all the things he was ignorant about, were empires far greater than his own. Empires who not only possessed superior technology, but whose citizens were carriers for a host of horrible diseases against which his people lacked all immunity.
The second stage is that brief period between the first evidence that something new is happening, but before it’s clear how bad it is. In Rumsfeld’s construction it’s the known unknown stage. In Montezuma’s case it’s 1517-1519, when he’s aware of the arrival of the Europeans, but he’s not sure what kind of threat they pose. When his power to respond is still at its maximum, but unfortunately his knowledge, while not as bad as the first stage, is still near the nadir.
The final stage is when the new reality has finally set in, the known known stage. The empire has fallen, Montezuma is dead, the first of the epidemics have started and the Spanish are in charge. Montezuma himself wasn’t around for this, but lots of Aztecs were. And while they still didn’t know everything they knew enough to know that Europeans were bad news.
On top of the above some catastrophes are easier to foresee and prevent than others. Returning to the dinosaurs, that catastrophe would have been impossible to prevent even if the dinosaurs could have understood what was going on. On the other end of the spectrum, as long as we’re on the subject of Rumsfeld, the catastrophe that was the Iraq War should have been relatively easy to foresee and prevent, particularly since it was a catastrophe of our own making. The tragedy of the Aztecs is somewhere in between, though certainly closer to the dinosaur end than the Iraq War end.
III.
What is a person living in 2020 supposed to do with all of the above? To work backwards, first we should be doing everything we can to make future catastrophes easier to see and prevent. This is a huge topic all on its own, but perhaps one example will suffice. In 1998 both Deep Impact and Armageddon were released to theaters, and it was noted at the time, that the budget for either movie would be sufficient to find all of the asteroids over a certain size that might impact the Earth. In other words for the cost of producing the movie we could prevent the events in the movie from coming to pass. Instead we made two of them. The search for asteroids is ongoing, currently the goal is to identify 90% of all asteroids larger than 460 feet in diameter by 2020 (which probably won’t happen). But if an asteroid does smash into the earth and we could have found it, but spent the money instead on making a movie about it happening, we’re going to feel pretty silly.
From there we’re not doing as well as we could on those catastrophes in the known knowns category. The chief example here is the opioid epidemic. We’ve known that opium and its derivatives are addictive since at least 1750 and yet we somehow forgot that or choose to overlook it recently and started prescribing truly insane amounts of it to people. (See my previous post about that here.) And even once we recognized the scope of the problem I think it’s fair to say that we’ve been slow to act. Which is not to say the problem isn’t complicated with a lot of moving parts. More that it’s a catastrophe in the easiest stage to deal with, it’s a known known. And if we can’t deal with catastrophes at this stage what hope is there for dealing with them early enough to prevent the damage.
The next category, known unknowns is where most of the excitement is. This is where people fight over things which might be catastrophic. Whether it’s rising right-wing extremism, inequality, AI risk, pornography or nuclear weapons. This is important work, and I hope in my own small way to contribute to it. For those with more resources, philanthropists, foundations, government, etc. I would like to see even more money and time spent on it. But it’s really the next category that represents the primary focus of this post: the unknown unknowns.
As I said, this is precisely what Montezuma was facing when he was born in 1466, and when he ascended the throne in 1502. The forces that would desolate an entire continent’s worth of people were already in motion and he had no idea. I think it’s valuable to consider what Montezuma could have done. Particularly, without assuming any additional knowledge about future events.
As it turns out science and technology in general would have been extraordinarily helpful. The Aztecs did not know the Earth was round. They did not know how diseases were transmitted. (Many anthropologists have claimed that the way the Native Americans dealt with sick people helped to spread the many epidemics.) Their metallurgy was not particularly advanced, meaning both their weapons and armor suffered. Obviously I could go on, but you get the idea.
The foregoing becomes very important if we assume that we’re in the same position as Montezuma, that there’s some unknown unknown out there waiting to pounce and spread death on a scale never imagined. Perhaps you think we’re not in this position, I doubt it. In fact, I would say that we are in exactly the same position Montezuma was, we just aren’t sure if we’re in the equivalent of 1516, 1492, or 1300. Which is to say we don’t know if something is just around the corner, if it has already started, but is decades away from manifesting, or if it’s hundreds of years in the future. But I don’t think the various time horizons, make as much difference as you think, also to be honest, just like Montezuma, I think we’re going to be surprised how powerless we feel when the crisis point arises.
If there is hope, then it lies in science and technology, and we have to do more than talk about how cool it is, we have to use it in a muscular and aggressive fashion. Facebook and Uber are not going to save us, but fusion and putting people on Mars might. And despite our best efforts unknown unknowns are still difficult to deal with and there is no sure path to success. But there’s many reasons to believe that our current path is less sure than most. We are all of us Aztecs, and sooner or later Cortés will arrive.
One thing you can be certain of, at the end of each post I’m going to make a plea for donations. It’s a known known if you will. If you feel even the slightest twinge of guilt, that’s also a known known, and it can be defeated far easier than Cortés.
I too listened to the podcast, sadly there’s no transcript and given it’s slightly over 4 hours long, it is difficult to reference anything in particular or double check that I heard something right.
But what came to mind after hearing your take on it was how surprisingly weak I found the Aztecs to be….and how detailed the actual story was. The analogy I thought about was contrasting AOL to Amazon. As I’m sure you are old enough to remember, AOL was once one of the biggest companies in the world. Back in the day the early settlers on the Internet when it was still new for ‘regular people’ were dial-up ISP services. AOL littered mailboxes and magazines with ‘free’ CD-ROMS and got millions of people to pay them to go online. Among early old-timers, ‘AOLer’ was a term of abuse for the newly digitized but at one time AOL was a powerhouse company akin to something like Amazon today. Now, of course, it is almost nothing although there are still people who cling to their AOL.com email addresses.
The structure of the ’empire’ he described seems quite a bit like AOL to me. The ’empire’ consisted of a lot of vassal states who had to pay tribute to the Empire but also had to contribute men to their ‘games’ (which seemed almost like The Hunger Games). Law, culture, connection seemed more or less absent other then runners who relayed commands. Cortes exploited this weakness of the Empire holding a very loose grip on its territory and making most people outside the capital not really like them. AOL likewise had a huge revenue stream from monthly subscriptions but their strength was deceptively weak. First the Internet itself weakened their ‘walled garden’ by offering content and chat wider than AOL’s curated content could provide. Second, competitors were able to pick off their ‘value added’ functions such as search and email.
Contrast the Aztec Empire with, say, Rome. Rome took territory but ultimately made the residents of the territory citizens and incorporated their system to them. Even outside invaders often found it easier to simply become more Roman over time. Cortes did not simply use a few superior weapons and con the ‘natives’ into thinking he was a god of some sort and march into the capital. He, with some luck, systematically exploited the Aztecs for the enemies they made.
Now consider Amazon. I think a difference here between AOL and Amazon is that Amazon systematically took over the underlying structure of their territory. They not only sold some books but took over publishing, supply chains, even the backbone of the web itself. Amazon is not vulnerable in ways that AOL was.
I think it’s important to keep in mind superficial lessons from history can be just as problematic as ignoring it. The Aztecs were a very localistic Empire while the Spanish were very globalist and came from a place where globalists were by far the most successful and stable sources of government and innovation. In looking at other Empires it’s important to wonder just how alike are different types of falls.
Amazon is big, AOL was big. AOL fell, Amazon could also fall. But I suspect Amazon’s fall would be less like a Cortes and more like a giant meteor impact. To wipe out the dinosaurs it was necessary to not only destroy their networks but the entire ecosystem. One wonders if the Spanish never arrived, how long would the Aztecs have lasted?
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but plan to give it a try based on your comments and those of Boonton. A couple observations based on my limited knowledge of the history and my much less limited knowledge of immunology:
1. My understanding was that early Americans had a good grasp of how to use metallurgy for it’s excellent tensile strength, something Europeans didn’t understand yet. Indeed, they made some impressive suspension bridges the Conquistadors went brave enough to use because they didn’t understand them. They just missed the boat on other properties Europeans figured out.
2. I was also under the impression that guns weren’t a major benefit to the Europeans at first. Before flintlocks, you had to keep an open flame fuse, which was unreliable, and tended to be entirely useless in the wet climates of central and South America where they went up against bows and javelins. They were also less accurate in the days before rifling and standardized precision barrel manufacturing. Add to that the long reload times and guns, whole initially frightening, were probably more of a liability on net than they were an asset.
3. Whatever Cortez did probably didn’t matter much in the long run, since the 95% die-off was baked into the cake. It didn’t matter much how well the natives dealt with sick people, because the problem was that they had a limited HLA set due to coming from a small founder population. The only way they could have overcome that would be to introduce a more disparate variety of HLA into their gene pool over hundreds of years. But to get access to those HLA they’d need contact with people who carried them, which would mean contact with civilization-killing disease…
This brings me to a major point you should probably talk more about in your pursuit of eschatology: what about when there’s nothing you can do? You fool yourself into thinking the problem was Cortez and if maybe you could stop him or make better decisions early on then you could have emerged victorious. But the problem wasn’t the soldiers. The pigs roaming the countryside carrying disease killed far more people, including women and children, than the soldiers ever could.
Had they known THAT could they have prevented collapse? Probably not. Pandemic disease would have come one way or another. I know it’s popular to blame the Spanish – and they’re not nice people in this story – but they weren’t as powerful or technologically advanced as I think we give them credit for. They just happened to be present to record the collapse of a civilization and got to claim credit for it. Plenty of other civilizations collapsed near the same time but no foreigners were around to document it.
I suspect the 95% was not quite built into the cards. We know from ebola death rates are far higher in areas where you have poor health, famine, war etc. Forced slavery and gold mining is probably not good for your immune system. If contact had happened slower I suspect there would have been waves of plague but the population wouldn’t have collapsed.
When I talk about Montezuma, I am interested in the fate of the empire, but that’s of secondary concern to the fate of the inhabitants. It wasn’t just Montezuma that had no idea what was coming, it was every man, woman and child living in the New World. Contact was a singularity regardless of your perspective.
The 95% might not have been baked in, and as you say the Europeans could have moved then needle on that, but it doesn’t feel like the aboriginal Americans could have.
Or it’s more simple than that. Contact between civilizations where one side is genocidal AND has superior weapons is going to end badly in most cases. How applicable is this today where the technological capacity of everyone on earth is well known is a question.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moctezuma_II#/media/File:Aztecexpansion.png I’m getting less impressed by this Empire. It had impressive cities and structures but Rome it was not. Today it would basically be a state in Mexico.
Also it was not 95% being wiped out. The city Tenochtitlán was reduced to 40% after all the fighting was done. That’s just the capital city, the larger Aztec Empire was 5-6 million people. Since many of them were states under the Aztecs and since the Spanish had a policy of encouraging intermarriage it gets fuzy to figure out how many died, had their lives cut short, and are still around today as descendants.
The estimate is that between 95-98% of ALL Native American people were wiped out as a result of the Columbian Exchange, not just the people of Mexico. Some estimates put the population of the Americas in 1491 as greater than that of the rest of the world combined, yet a few generations later they were wandering bands if nomads, not because they had always been that way, but because that’s what happened when apocalyptic levels of disease wiped them out.
The podcast mentions some disease interfering, but seems more interested in focusing on Cortez. He barely mentions it, but is some like the major advantage the Europeans had for conquest were cavalry and cannons, with some benefit from steel armor as well.
As to death by disease being baked into the cake: yes, it was. I won’t explain it here because it would take thousands of words, but if you want you can go read up on HLA diversity and how the NA lack of HLA diversity meant any disease that affected one person would affect them all to a surprisingly similar degree.
This was a historical artifact created by the fact that the vast majority of them came from a small founder population. Their MHC literally couldn’t pick up certain period sequences, so their immune system couldn’t recognize certain diseases.
Here’s a short explanation that avoids the kind of immunology you learn in graduate-level courses: imagine you took just the people most susceptible to dying from the Plague that wiped out a large fraction of Europeans, and put them on an island for a few hundred years to grow out the population. They don’t get contact with outside people to enrich their gene pool, so the resulting population of fifty million people has the same generic susceptibility to plague that the original founders had. What do we expect if we then introduce plague rats to that population?
Nearly all of them will die of the new illness. This is effectively what happened in the Americas. There was some contact with people like the Phoenicians and Vikings, but their generic contributions to HLA diversity would have been negligible. Contrast that with the European experience, where they had rich interactions with their neighbors and got a note diverse HLA complement. Even devastating diseases didn’t kill off at even a 50% rate. It’s a subtle genetic point, but it means it didn’t matter who made first contact, the pathogenic genocide would have happened sooner or later.
It was baked into the genetic cake.
Sorry about the typos, especially genetic getting transformed to generic so often…
Did you follow the link? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics#/media/File:Acuna-Soto_EID-v8n4p360_Fig1.png) it’s specifically a graph of population decline from epidemics in Mexico in the years immediately after contact, and it was 95%. I guess you can question the data, but I didn’t pull it out of thin air.
And the point is not that the Aztecs were particularly impressive. But that Black Swan events can be particularly extreme both in consequences and suddenness.
Seems right, the decline of the city was immediately after the battle it seems but that’s just a drop in the ocean. One might imagine then if the population had the immunity levels Europeans did it would have played out quite differently.