> But I often think of the story of King Mesha of Moab in the Book of Kings, who, on the verge of defeat and destruction before the Israelites,...
I too think about it sometimes. I even have a draft of an effortpost “Steelmanning Moloch”. Or maybe “The real left-liberal case for child sacrifice”.
You can get pretty far with just two premises: a) Israelites did not actually discover (or receive from G-d) some true human morality, despite very earnestly claiming they did (for a hilarious exploration of this, check out Aaronson’s blog and e-mail exchange between some overzealous Rabbi and Steven Weinberg); b) Israelites have a persistent trait of demonizing their opponents (and obscuring crucial context). This is not even a dig at Israelites but rather a corollary of them being the only party of that heavily contested region in the ancient world that survived as an ethnoreligious community and propagated (some version of) its values on the global scale, including the claim to universal moral truth and a penchant for slander. Maybe Canaanites would have had even more to say, were they to survive as such. Clearly ancient Hebrews did something right, but it’s very much a just world hypothesis to stipulate that what they did right was finding Objective Good. Evolutionarily superior ethic, perhaps.
With that in mind, I think a cynical inquirer can ask a few questions regarding Moloch/Baal, and gradual elimination of his cult. Such as: what would a nation so brutal at war, so mired in us-vs-them mentality, so… jealous as Israelites of Old Testament find atrocious in the foreign ritual of child sacrifice? And why would a nation so concerned with self-propagation, so aware of the value of generations to come, so eager to threaten sinners with punishment befalling their descendants – why would it constantly worry about the practice spreading and infecting their own?
The devil is, as usual, in the details. Who got their children sacrificed? And when?
It’s not something hidden. It’s all in the Wiki.
I guess the tendency is clear enough: ruling class, in the situation of having led the nation into a ruinous war.
Israeli priestly (and, to a lesser degree, aristocratic) castes, on the other hand, have never been into sacrificing their own. They were rather contemptuous of the am ha'aretz, however. And they were always wary of the sheeple going astray: intermarrying with other races, worshipping “idols” (instead of the vague nation-building entity the elite calls God); and perhaps demanding sacrifice, instead of sacrificing their possessions. Commoners were chastized, brow-beaten, and pruned until they lost all will to resist.
Interpret this as a selection pressure for institutions and phenotypes; repeat for over a hundred generations, with the same gradual technology-driven increase in material prosperity and accompanying expansion of the circle of concern. What sort of elite would rule one society and what the other? Which society would be more democratic?
Could you imagine disgraced George W. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Frum, Kristol and others having to sacrifice their own firstborn children on the lawn of the White House, broadcast in prime time, as punishment for thousands of brainwashed American commoners dead and millions made poorer or madder as a result of a futile war? Could you imagine elite families having more to fear than hiccups in money accumulation and status jokeying, this briar patch they beg to not be thrown into?
