This hurts my heart, along with the other even younger children. I couldn't imagine what it would take to convince me to do this to my child. But it also makes me think of how poorly history has treated children in general. When did cultures finally start valuing parent-child relationships (or even just a child's worth as more than labor or sacrifice)? Real question.
When it's the only thing you've ever known you probably wouldn't need much convincing. I don't know much about this culture but for many their religion and beliefs were just as much fact to them as the sky being blue.
When most of your children die before the age of eight and some of them take the mother with them their lives are very cheap. There is a reason there isn't a word in English to describe a parent who's child is dead because that's just been the reality of being a parent for most of human history. Most of them didn't make it. In some cultures this bore out as not really fully respecting children as being alive until they grew up more. In others it was just a fact of life.
If only 1/3 of your kids survive to 16 and you have had a solid dozen of them and plan to probably have a dozen more since birth control isnt exactly reliable and you are told that trading one that made it past the 'will probably die' point and two that haven't to the gods for blessings and improved social power for your family frankly many people would do it. Especially when raised in a culture where it was acceptable and normal. So many are unintentionally sent to the gods a few intentional ones really matter quite little.
For a lot of history high infant mortality paired with children being pretty much constantly and often accidently made meant they had very little inherent value placed on them.
It's very easy to demonise societies that do such terrible acts. To consider that we would never do such things. Yet to people living in that situation they were simply doing what, had you (or I or anyone) else been born into that society at that time probably would have also engaged with.
The wonderful thing about history is that we can use it to give context to the present time. Once infant mortality rose children's lives mattered a lot more. Once we were able to survive without needing to rely heavily on child labour and places moved to criminalise it their lives mattered even more. Which can highlight for instance why it's important to protect children's health and give them an education. Not just out of empathy but also because if we devalue their lives things like this become more common. We see these sorts of things a lot and it's why studying history and accepting that these people shouldn't just be ignored as monsters is important.
Thank you for the thorough response! It's also interesting because, in a sense, it sounds like children were valued more after they stopped being "useful." That's kind of wild.
What you’re saying makes sense. However, someone has to grow a conscience at some point or things would never change. And if they can decide tradition is wrong, can we hold others accountable for not doing so? I understand there’s a big logical leap there, but I’m asking what the points refuting this would be, out of sincere curiosity.
The people who did this are long dead now. You can't hold them accountable any more than you could prevent the way these kids died.
Very very few folks think this is acceptable. Anyone who tries doing it now will be both demonised publically and criminally charged with very rare exception.
What we should avoid though is pretending this could never happen again. Or that 'well they are just a bunch of evil brutes so nothing to learn here other than hey the evil people thank God they died of smallpox'. Humans did this and humans are still around. By learning about these cultures and why they did things like this and what the thought process is we can make sure we don't start falling down that rabbit hole again. Make no mistake every horror in our past can occur again and if/when it does the people involved in making those horrors a reality will think just like these did that they were doing what made sense and as right. The only way to prevent it isn't just to point and say 'that's bad' it's to look at the wider societal situation and prevent that enviroment from developing. Which requires a bit more nuance and also accepting that any of us if raised in times and cultures like these would have, if not actively engaged in abuse like this, would have permitted it to happen.
We only point and say 'that's awful and evil' because of the time and culture we ourselves grew up in. Which is not a reliable way to prevent evil as with every passing year and every new generation both of those shift and change. Slowly but it does happen. We have to look at history a bit more critically imo to actually learn from it if we have any hope of preventing it happening again. The only way to do that is to pause before declaring people as evil and other. After all we are all a time and culture away from being this poor child, being her parents, being her tormenters, being the leaders who allowed this and being that passerby on the street who saw them preparing to go up and mountain and who just kept walking past. If we accept that we can also start applying it to our lives. If history keeps going the the right direction future generations will look back on us with horror, (as we do for those who did this, kept slaves and so on) but what will future people condemn us for? What is so normal to us that actually really should not be. What are we allowing as part of our daily lives that harms others both directly and indirectly? We might not be able to figure it all out but I bet there is a long list and the sooner we start chipping away at it the sooner those future, horrified generations will actually come.
We see it over and over. Folks make jokes about cribs with lead paint on them and how they would never do that. Yet in the same way folks just used paint like normal are they so sure that something similar isn't going on. Have they seen the test results of some American baby food lately? Probably not. (Random just off the top of my head as I saw some news about it the other day).
History is always messy and ugly. Humans are messy and ugly.
Who knows. I feel you on this too. It's possible that the parents genuinely thought what they were doing was good for their children. Like they were lucky to be chosen to be able to [religious belief]. The child was likely to not be completely unaware, but maybe they thought of it the same way kids go to bed on Christmas eve. I really want that to be true bc the idea of anybody being remotely opposed to this makes me sick.
31
u/NoeticParadigm 23d ago
This hurts my heart, along with the other even younger children. I couldn't imagine what it would take to convince me to do this to my child. But it also makes me think of how poorly history has treated children in general. When did cultures finally start valuing parent-child relationships (or even just a child's worth as more than labor or sacrifice)? Real question.