12. A Menagerie of Happy Men

12 A Menagerieof Happy Men 1. The Efjace1nent of the Individual And men delighted in being driven like a herd of animals .•. -Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov Was the Indian satisfied with his lot? Such is the grave ques tion that we must answer if we wish to pass judgment on the social system of the Incas. We know that the monarch supplied his sub jects with everything they needed; but happiness consists in a state of consciousness, not in an accumulation of products. At the very outset of our investigation we immediately find our selves confronted with an obstacle. The chroniclers speak of the "rich" and the "poor." 1 What meaning are we to give to these words? We know that Peru is not to be considered as a communist state. Hence, the Indians who had received gifts or grants from the Inca could be regarded as rich, while those who had lost their crops because of a frost, a flood, or a drought, and who were being fed from the reserve stocks in the national granaries were really the poor. Others to be called poor were the aged, the disabled, or the ill, who were supported by their communities,2 and the Indians who had no children to help them in their work.8 In brief, a sub sistence minimum was assured to every individual, absolute desti tution was unknown, and great inequalities of fortune were and remained exceptiona1. 4 A man could not become completely im poverished, but it only rarely happened that anyone grew rich. The 198 A Menagerie of Happy Men 199 words "wealth" and "poverty" thus had merely a relative signifi cance. "Equality in poverty made all the Indians rich," says Morua. 5 Evidently the Inca system, thus compounded of traditional survivals and rational ideas, presents a very complex picture.

This may be troublesome for the sociologist, but the historically realized forms of social organization are rarely simple. Hence, attempts to compare the Peruvian to other economic systems are doomed to failure. Depending upon the angle from which one examines Peru, one will find in it analogies to this or that other state. This explains why we find modern authors, according to their individual bent, comparing Peru sometimes to England be cause of its aggressive qualities and its power of adaptation and assimilation;6 sometimes to pre-1914 Germany because of the character of the emperor;7 and sometimes to Turkey because of the preservation of agrarian communities and the concentration of political power. 8 The only great empire that existed in pre Columbian central America at the time of the arrival of the Span iards, that of Mexico, differed profoundly from Peru. The Aztecs lived under a quasi-feudal regime. Their wars and their worship were bloody, their trade had spread far and wide, and their scien tific knowledge was extensive.

Among no other peoples in the New World do we find, as we do in the realm of the Incas, a slow and gradual absorption of the individual by the state. The poison was not given to the Indians in massive doses that would have provoked a reaction, but was administered drop by drop, until it brought about the loss of per sonality. Man was made for the state, and not the state for man. This is indeed socialism in the full sense of the word, and it is a great mistake to refuse to consider the Peruvian empire as a so cialist state on the ground that it was a state built on conquest-as if socialism and imperialism could not go hand in hand-or that its policy was inspired, not by motives of altruism, but by the rightly understood personal interests of the monarch-as if social ism and altruism were synonymous terms. Did the poison carry its antidote with it? Was the system of quasi property created by gifts and grants capable of evolving and grow200 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru ing? Perhaps if the Spanish conquerors had not come when they did, we should have witnessed, side by side with the gradual social ization of the masses, a progressive individualization of the elite, with the gulf between the two classes becoming ever deeper. It must be recognized, however, that the regime did not collapse of itself. The civil war that 'was devastating the empire at the time of the discovery of Peru would probably not have brought about any change in the social order if it had gone on to its end without the intervention of the white man.

That the Peruvian system was often imposed by force is not to be denied. But, because of the support lent them by the religion and as a result of their own shrewd policy, the Incas achieved the miracle of transforming fear into love. Their divine character, as evidenced by the victories of their armies and the magnificence of their court; the gifts that they distributed so generously among the chiefs; the order and peace that they caused to prevail-all combined to win for them, little by little, the hearts of their sub jects. The Indian had nothing to do but obey;· and whoever has formed the habit of passive obedience ends by being no longer able to act for himself and comes to love the yoke that is laid upon him. Nothing is easier than to obey a master who is perhaps ex acting, but who rules over all the details of life, assures one's daily bread, and makes it possible to banish all concern from the mind.

"The Incas were extremely well loved," declares Cieza de Leon. 9 "Without any doubt, the respect and affection that these people had for their Incas was great," says Acosta. 1o The result of socialization is clearly apparent. The Peruvian government knew how to hold in check passions destructive of the social order and to prevent the revival of primitive anarchy. The Incas banished the two great causes of popular disaffection, poverty and idleness) and they left only a small place for ambition and greed. But, by the same token, they dried up the two springs of progress, initiative and a provident concern for the future. What initiative, indeed, could the Indian have when the regi mentation was so minutely detailed as to require that chicha should be made with newly harvested maize and that the still-green ears of this grain should not be eaten? 11 The Indian did not have A Menagerie of Happy Men 201 to do any thinking for himself. The government thought and acted for him, and if its action was suspended, social life would stop short. Under the rule of the Incas this inertia expressed itself in the stagnation of commerce that we have already noted, in the lack of vitality and the absence of originality in the arts, in dogmatism in science)2 and in the rareness of even the sitnplest inventions.1 3 We now understand the reason for the murder of Atahualpa.

Pizarro knew that the Inca, once free, had only to make a sign to raise an army of tens of thousands. By striking off the head, the conqueror would have the body at his mercy.14 This passivity has continued to exist since the fall of the empire. Even today the Indians take no interest in political or economic movements 15 and, being incapable of defending themselves, fre quently elect a Spanish cacique, who fills the role of the former "protector of the natives" of the colonial era,16 or else they take as their chief one of their own number who has been able to im pose himself upon them by his strength and cunning. 17 Ambition has been so thoroughly destroyed that, with certain exceptions, the red man in our time only rarely attempts to rise in the social scale and leaves it to the whites and the mestizos to perform public functions and share in the honors. "An almost complete absence of initiative and decision is the characteristic trait of the Indian,"

wrote Monnier. 1s On the other hand, the Peruvians were great imitators and quickly learned to use the Spanish weapons and to make war in the European way}9 The sense of hierarchy has likewise continued. Not only do the Indians give themselves leaders, but in many regions a veritable gobernaci6n menor has been set up, very powerful though not official, directed by the white hacendado) that is, the owner of an agricultural enterprise, who administers his estates with the aid of a series of native bailiffs, still known as curacas.20 As for a provident concern for the future, how could that have been developed among a people whose public granaries were crammed with provisions and whose public officials were author ized to distribute them in case of need? There was never any need to think beyond the necessities of the moment. "The Indians to day," remarks Ondegardo, "never think of getting a new garment 202 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru until the old one is in tatters." 21 "They take no thought for the morrow," says Cabeza de Vaca.22 And 'within the past century E.

Grandidier has made precisely the same observation. 23 On the rare occasions when the Indian does seek to build up a reserve for himself, he squanders it at once.24 But what is even more serious is that the substitution of the state for the individual in the economic domain destroyed the spirit of charity. The native Peruvian, expecting the state to do everything, no longer had to concern himself with his fellow man and had to come to his aid only if required by law. The members of a community were compelled to work on the land for the benefit of those who were incapacitated; but when this task had been per formed, they were free from all further obligation. They had to help their neighbors if ordered to do so by their chiefs, but they were obliged to do nothing on their own initiative. That is why, by the time of the Spanish conquest, the most elementary human itarian feelings were in danger of disappearing entirely. Ondegardo writes: Thus, children were not obliged' to provide for their parents in their old age; no one had to succor the needy-which seems to me to be an invention of the Evil One to rob the Indians of charity ... Today, even if some Indians should come upon one of their fellows with a broken leg, though there might be twenty of them and all might live in a village close by, they would do nothing more than notify the community, so that the unfortunate man could be sent for, this being the community's concern. 2.5 This absence of charity accentuates the utilitarian character of Peruvian institutions. Today the family is still regarded as a busi ness enterprise or rather as a labor force; children are treated as so much capital, and marriage is considered as a contract of mutual aid.26 Thus, the inhabitant of the high Andean plateau became mild natured and servile. Rude manners and customs continued to exist only in places where the sovereign had not yet been able to estab lish a prolonged domination. The Aymaras to the northeast of A Menagerie of Happy Men 203 Lake Titicaca, whose territory layoff the beaten track of migra tion and the natural routes of conquest, remained vindictive and cruel-very different from the Quechuas. 27 The Inca gave his people a slave mentality.

It is not surprising that this great empire, organized on the most rigid lines, should have been monotonous and melancholy. Cieza de Leon apologizes for endlessly repeating the same observations throughout his Peruvian journey. In most of the provinces, he says, the natives used to copy one another so effectively that they could be looked upon as "all identical." 28 The uniformity of the architecture surprised Humboldt, and the regularity of life as tonished Lorente. "The Indians, like children, differed from one another more in external appearance than by virtue of distinctive personal qualities." 29 Everything was alike; men resembled each other as if they 'were all brothers, says Prescott. 30 In every isolated basin of the plateau the life led by the common people day after day was as monotonous as the climate and the landscape; and every thing that deviated from the ordinary, everything strange or un foreseen, was regarded as supernatural. This is the final result toward which all the great socialist reformers have tended. In Utopia as in Icaria, and as in the colonies of converted Indians in Paraguay, a distressing uniformity holds sway. "Thus conceived, socialism appears as the most insufferable dream of mediocrity and ugliness that mankind has ever had." 31 It must be admitted that from this point of view the Indian character appears in a scarcely favorable light, even if we make allowance for the exaggerations of many of the Spanish chroniclers.

"Fear is the only moral principle [of the native]," says Del HoYO.32 The natives of the province of Collao are "so accustomed to per forming menial tasks that they do everything that is necessary without being told." 33 Camara, by no means tender toward the vanquished, characterizes them as a deceitful, cruel, ungrateful people, without honor, without decency, without charity, without virtue;34 and Morua sets them down as dirty, lazy, mendacious, and unstable. 35 On the other hand, the author of an unsigned report is lavish in his praise of the Indians, whom he finds gentle, affectionate, peace-loving, compassionate, obedient, and loyal.36 204 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru Ulloa and De Pauw insist' upon regarding the Indian as a brute, while D'Orbigny, on the contrary, endeavors to restore his good name. 37 All through the eighteenth century great controversies raged between Jesuits and Franciscans, as they had in the seven teenth century between Franciscans and Dominicans, over the vir tues of the American savages.38 Even today Bandelier and Bing ham paint the inhabitants of the shores of Lake Titicaca in completely different colors.39 But, however bewildering these divergent evaluations may be, all the authors recognize the natives' servility. Now, if this is so, it is certainly the consequence of the Inca system, for Ondegardo observes that-the only peoples capable of being governed were those who had been subjugated by the Incas, a succession of expeditions having had no effect upon the others. 40 Garcia Calder6n raises the question whether the creation of the empire was made possible by the weakness and ignorance of the Indians or by the success of the Incas in disciplining their subjects to the point of giving them an instinct for obedience and servitude. 41 The desperate resistance of the Caras, whose environ ment was identical with that of their conquerors, establishes the second as the more likely possibility. Be that as it may, the charac ter of the Indian has remained essentially the same to our own day: laziness-or, more exactly, indolence-timidity, drunkenness, uncleanliness, on the one hand,42 and, on the other, a gentleness or sweetness of disposition that D'Orbigny calls "unfailing," 43 submissiveness, servility, resistance to fatigue, and a certain util itarian turn of mind. These are indeed the distinctive features of an enslaved and besotted race.

It was at the price of this degradation of the individual that a certain measure of well-being was achieved in the Inca empire. It is highly probable that this well-being was not regarded by the Inca as an end in itself, but simply as a means of raising the productivity of labor and assuring greater glory and profit for himself. 44 Never theless, it is a proof of intelligence on the ruler's part to have un derstood that it was to his interest to act for the good of the people as a whole. Yet all the shortcomings we have noted are matters of slight im portance beside the hidden flaw that lies within every socialist A Menagerie of Happy Men 205 system, the basic defect before which learned men, ready to make their way into the City of the Future, have been impelled, like SchaefHe,45 to draw back. Socialism, in killing the spirit of in dividual initiative and providence, arrests the march of human progress. The life of the nation, hemmed in by a complicated net work of narrow rules and regulations, tends toward an extreme rigidity, until it finally becomes, as it were, crystallized. 46 Were the Incas able to avoid this disadvantage by creating an elite? It would seem that they did, for the specialization of intelli gence is as understandable as that of physical strength or of memory. Just as the quipucamayus) accustomed from father to son, throughout their lives, to the accurate collection of facts and figures, attained an extraordinary mastery of their art, so the amautas were bound to develop their intellectual faculties to the highest point. 47 Intelligence, it is said, is not the privilege of a particular class; yet both heredity and environment must favor its rise, and it was among the members of the upper class that it had the best chance of developing, and not among the ignorant and brutish masses. The Incas did not reign long enough, however, for us to be able to note any progress in these respects, and the inven tive faculties of the amautas seem to have remained rather medi ocre. The Peruvians appear to have had, above all, and almost exclusively, a genius for organization. Enlightened guidance and inflexible discipline, even if inventive faculties are lacking, better assure the well-being of a people than the noblest discoveries when these are applied by apostles of the class struggle.

As for these people themselves, they were and are creatures of routine. Their habits remain immutable, and if the Indian today is legally a free man, he remains a serf "by virtue of the continued existence of authoritarian ways of life." 48 2. The Heresy of Happiness Does he, then, forget what he recognized only a little while ago, the unknown, the new, the dangerous, the heresy of happiness of which the others are only the disguises? Heresy of happiness! Heresy of heresies! -Louis Artus, La maison du tou 206 A Socialist Empire: The Incas oj Peru We can now answer the question we have asked: Was the Indian happy? It must be supposed that he was, since he yearns for the past with so much ardor. He labored contentedly for a master whom he held to be divine. He had only to obey, without going to the trouble of thinking. If his horizon was limited, he was unaware of it, since he knew no other; and if he could not raise himself socially, he in no way suffered on that account, for he did not con ceive that such a rise was possible. His life followed its peaceful course, its monotony broken by periodic holiday festivals and by such events as marriage, military service, and compulsory labor service, all in strict accordance with regulations. 49 The Indian had his joys and his sorrows at fixed dates. Only illness and death per sisted in escaping government regulation.

Military discipline and economic organization were two mani festations of the same tendency. Both sought, by different means, but with equal rigor to eliminate chance. · It was a negative kind of happiness, with few great adversities and few great joys. The empire produced what D'Argenson called a "menagerie of happy men." But let us not be too harsh in our judgment of this result. It is no small thing to have prevented the worst physical suffering, that of hunger and cold. Only rarely did Peru know actual want, whereas France in 1694 and again in 1709 underwent cruel famines. 50 Nor is it a small thing to have suppressed crime and to have established perfect order and absolute security. "These bar barian kings," says Acosta, had made their subjects slaves and were enjoying the fruits of their labor. In this lay the monarchs' greatest wealth. But what demands admiration is that they made use of them with such method and organ ization that this servitude was transformed into a very happy ex istence. 51 How could these people, whom we have seen singing as they worked, have been unhappy?

We may believe, then, that the natives were happy.,52It is of little consequence that their existence was poor and bare. Happiness is A Menagerie of Happy Men 207 subjective, and the only comparison the Peruvian could make with his unsubdued neighbors, grappling with material difficulties, struggling against both man and Nature-was enough in itself to make that happiness real. Even acquiescence in the established order, the correct perform ance of the imposed task, the feeling-kept alive by the poets of being a cell in a marvelous organism, were sources of joy that kept the separation of the masses and the elite and the limitation of desires from occasioning any envy or discontent. "The man who envies another injures himself," said the Inca Pachacutec. 53 What the inhabitants of the plateau look back to wistfully today, limited as their desires may now be, is the time when those desires were even more limited. We have heard the same lament expressed in Ecuador and in Morocco: the foreigner has given the native new desires that have become his torment. In our civilized countries desires increase more rapidly than the means of satisfying them.

That is why so many persons who enjoy ever-increasing well-being never stop complaining and become, in reality, constantly more unhappy, through nobody's fault but their own. As for individual liberty, the only ones who could long for it were those who had known it in the countries lately subdued. It is restful to feel that the various activities of daily life are kept in a prescribed and orderly routine; and merely by not seeking to break the barriers, one comes, in time, to feel oneself free. If, therefore, virtue and well-being, the sources of happiness, are the end and aim of life, the Inca may be said to have produced a masterpiece. The Indian's soul was lulled to sleep by the monot onous rhythm of a too well-regulated existence. But if, on the contrary, it is the development of the personality that is regarded as the goal of all human existence, then the Peru vian system was the most disastrous of social experiments. The Inca plunged his subjects into a sleep that was akin to death. He robbed them of all human dignity. It is true that there are times in one's life when one is tired of struggling, when one does not want even to have to think any longer, and when one envies those 'who have only to obey an intelligence greater than their own; but the desire to destroy oneself in this way, by allowing oneself to be absorbed 208 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru in the mass, can be no more than the unwholesome fruit of hours of distress. The wish to surpass oneself continually, the constant effort toward improvement-this is what is important. The essen tial thing in life for the individual today is to have the sensation of climbing.

And, for the sovereign, wisdom does not consist in having found a perfect system, but in searching for it unremittingly. He who thinks he has attained his goal is by that very fact condemned to stagnation. In South A merica a so-called happiness was obtained only through the annihilation of the human personality; and if each of us were asked in which country he would prefer to have lived, preColumbian Peru or sixteenth-century Spain, probably very few would choose the former. 54 In the Inca state only the members of the ruling class, and more especially the chief, could live a full life; outside of him and his family, men were no longer men, but cogs in the economic machine or figures in the official statistics. 55 13 The Spanish Antithesis 1. The Invasion of the Barbarians Our world has just discovered another world ... nQ less great, full, and well-limbed than itself, yet so new and so infantile that it is still being taught its ABC; not fifty years ago it knew neither letters, nor weights and measures, nor clothes, nor wheat, nor vines. It was still quite naked at the breast, and lived only on what its nursing mother provided .... I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of this new world by our contagion, and that we will have sold it our opinions and our arts very dear. It was an infant world. . . .