Todorov Reflection

A few things with regards to our discussion of Todorov. First, I think we were absolutely right in our apparent consensus that understanding does not have to lead to sympathy and certainly not to empathy. If you fundamentally disagree with someone's actions and their reasoning for their actions, it stands to reason the more you understand about them the more there is to dislike. However, I'm not convinced that this completely covers the case of Cortez. In the course of the discussion there was an excellent point made that while Cortez understood the how of Aztec society he didn't understand the why. I'm not entirely convinced that this completely explains the actions of Cortez, however. While I agree that Cortez didn't necessarily understand the motivations behind the rituals and customs of the Aztecs, I'm also not convinced that it would have mattered if he did. I really don't think that he viewed the Aztecs as humans, but rather as some other species, who weren't really capable of reasoning. Had he had any interest in the whys of the Aztecs, I think he and the other Spaniards would have, like Columbus, recorded them as naturalists' observations, instead of ethnographic observations (a concept which didn't exist at the time), and that these would not have elicited any sense of sympathy from them.