Megadeth Mexico

"Megadeath in Mexico"

A fascinating article by that title appears in Discovery's online site this issue (h/t Arts & Letters Daily). It's a good piece on how modern scientific research combines several disciplines (in this case, epidemology, botany, and history) to overturn the received wisdom of the ages. A combination of new documentary evidence, the clinical eye of an expert, and supporting evidence from other scientists can produce the need for serious revisions in the historic record, as well as advances in our understanding of medical history.

It's a very good read for those reasons, but that's not why I brought it up.

I bring it up as an ally to Karrde's recent piece on history and story-telling. It's tossed off almost as an aside in the Discovery piece, but the greatest threat to humanity coming to understand the truth is exactly what Karrde recognized it to be: humanity's unwillingness to hear it.

This raised two questions. First, were people prepared to absolve the Spanish of responsibility for one of the great evils of the colonial era? The destruction of ancient Mexico's culture by the Spanish invaders is an integral part of every Mexican's understanding of the country's history. The miseries of the plague years are taken as object lessons in the evils of colonialism. "My grandmother wrote histories, and the terrible things that the Spanish did were always a part of them," says Acuña-Soto.

In fact, as the new evidence shows, the Spanish didn't bring the disease, which was instead native; the Spanish didn't try to spread it as a means of destroying the native culture. In fact the King of Spain sent his personal physician to learn what they could teach him of native medicines, and while there this Spanish doctor invested a great deal of his effort (the written notes ran to fifty volumes) in trying to understand the causes of the disease and how it might be treated.

That's the truth, at least, it seems to be truth in the scientific sense: the best-supported interpretation of the facts given the present evidence.

Yet Mexican histories need Spain to be evil. It's part of the founding myth. Indeed, it is a critical part. The evil exploitations of Spain, heroically thrown off by the Mexicans, set the stage for the evil manipulations of the Hapsburgs and especially the Yanquis, the brave Mexican resistance to which define the post-European period of Mexican history. The national myth is entirely founded on the idea of foreign exploiters, European and American, striving to oppress the Mexican raza.

Destabilizing that founding myth wasn't the intent of the research. It isn't, indeed, very interesting to the scientists themselves, who toss off a brief paragraph about it in a long article on the more fascinating questions of evidence. I wonder if they really know what they are unleashing here.

No matter. It is done. Historians, not only Mexican ones, must now contend with the data. History is unique in being both art and science: the story-telling and myth-making contend with the scientific development of the facts. Here is an earthquake, the aftershocks of which will trouble many a thinker and writer for a long time to come.

UPDATE: Another such earthquake comes in a new book just reviewed by Mark Steyn.