The Spaniards of the early sixteenth century did not know that they were living with collective trauma. Living conditions that we would never imagine for ourselves nor for our loved ones or neighbours were accepted as normal and every day. Death was always close at hand. Life was embraced and celebrated as a very conditional given. Those people must have been extremely passionate, in their lives, their work, their loves, their rage. I do not believe that the Spanish of that era took life for granted the way we do in our comfortable and cossetted lives in the twenty-first century.
Death was always present. At birth, mother or child, or both, were often at risk and quite often both perished in the act of childbirth. There were no immunizations, nor practices of hygiene, medical or domestic. No one washed their hands. Only the strong survived infancy, childhood. In poorer families adequate nutrition was never a guarantee and there were no food banks or social safety nets. Apart from the charity of the church there was no recourse during food scarcity but to go hungry, starve and die.
Death surrounded and inhabited daily life. People died usually before their time from disease and years of neglect. Criminals were executed for the smallest offenses. And then there was the Inquisition. Not one single Spaniard grew up without witnessing and being touched by death. No one would ever have thought of this as trauma or as traumatizing. It was part of the natural order of things.
This isn't to say that these people weren't traumatized either, since simply getting used to horror and tragedy is no more than a coping strategy. You simply coped by living hard, drinking hard, loving hard, partying hard and fighting hard. Life was a matter of survival and people lived naturally in survival mode. This apparently has been the real norm for the vast majority of humans that have lived throughout the tens of thousands of years of our species' troubled history.
So, given that we are so much more enlightened, educated, knowledgeable and privileged and sheltered from the horrible realities of life, does this make us somehow better than they? I would assume that these people who lived in other times and survived such horrors that we could scarcely imagine were gifted also with a kind of visceral brute strength that became necessary to their survival. I know by my own experience of life which, for a white person living in North America in the early part of the twenty-first century, I have seen, experienced and been touched by more than my share of death and horror. People like me, we have what I call a horrible knowledge of life. It is impossible to communicate with average middle class people, much less expect them to understand the things that have been real to us, such waking nightmares from which they have always recoiled in terror. And naturally they tend to recoil from us. But this same horrible knowledge of life, for people who lived in earlier and less forgiving times, was not only normal, but necessary to their survival and by extension our own survival.
These were the people, young men of limited education and world knowledge, extreme ignorance of other peoples, bred in hate and intolerance for people different from them, all consumed with a hunger for glory, power and riches, who embarked on those small ships to shed blood and spread the disease of European civilization to the people of the Americas.
They were constrained by greed and motivated by the shutting down of trade routes from the Orient, since Constantinople had fallen to the Muslims. Mexico and South America would be just the dragon's lair of gold, pearls and diamonds, awaiting their consumption and in turn to consume the likes of them.
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