Hernán Cortés, the emeritus conquistador of Mesoamerica, made history in 1519, when he reached the New World, with six hundred men and eleven ships. Upon his arrival, he burned all but one of his ships. This way, his men would be properly motivated to forge on and take on the tens of thousands of eagle warriors of the Aztec. The Spaniards were armored, they had horses, firearms, good Spanish steel and the will to use it. Cortes was seeking to advance the True Faith and bring back the Gold his Catholic Majesty Charles V the King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor coveted.
And his mighty brand of motivation worked. It worked like a mother-loving charm. Just two years later, he would defeat, subjugate, and conquer the Aztec Empire. It was the Year of Our Lord 1521, and Mesoamerica was Spanish.
Borrowing a page from Cortes’ How to Prevent your Men from Going Back to Spain and Conquer America in 2 years, Allie, the patriarch of the 21st century fugitive Robinsons, featured in Apple TV+ The Mosquito Coast, did the very same thing. After fleeing the consequences of their actions, his family reaches a rain forest refuge / environmental commune in Guatemala, Casa Roja. Quite ominously Marxist if you asked me, but what do I know, right! His wife and daughter, being sick of being uprooted for the seventh time in 13 years, decide to pack up and flee. Allie finds out and puts a cramp figuratively, or takes the cork literally out of their boat, scuttling her in full view of his family, now marooned in the middle of a community they don’t want to be a part of, and had wanted to get away from.
But we better leave it to Arnold Toynbee, this seminal 20th century British historian, to explain such matters to us. Speaking about how the Church became the vessel that transported Greco-Roman civilization from antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond, he said:
In fact, the (Roman) Empire fell and the (Christian) Church survived just because the Church gave leadership and enlisted loyalty whereas the Empire had long failed to do either the one or the other. Thus, the Church, a survival from the dying society, became the womb from which in due course the new one was born.
Arnold Toynbee, Introduction of the 12 volume History of Civilizations, p. 29
OMG, right. I am usually not given to hyperbole, but nobody ever phrased it better. Toynbee was right to the tee.
We have reason to rejoice, ladies and gents. Give this man (Toynbee, not Putin) a prize. He’s a genius!
All civilizations rise and decay according to their merits or lack thereof. When they do, it’s mostly because of self-murder or suicide than through the fault of others.
But once they die, new ones emerge from their skeletons. So that each death and every skeleton brings about and nurtures a new beginning, a new life that springs joyfully from a putrid carcass, to follow its destiny.
So, perhaps the lesson here is not to be over despondent or afraid of the future. Maybe we should welcome West’s demise as an opportunity for other civilizations to do better.
After all, when Cortes defeated the Aztec, he replaced one society with another. And perhaps that is the meaning and vector or History. So Who are We to stand in Its Way?! Especially when we all pretend we are into Recycling. Why not Recycle Big or Go Home, right, right?!
Götterdämmerung 