It's not often, and with less than overwhelming enthusiasm, one feels called to defend actor, director, and crank, Mel Gibson. Despite his undoubted talent both in front of and behind the camera, his tendency to boil up religious and political thoughts of a less than savoury character with his own sadomasochistic fantasies, often make for a pretty off-putting experience at the cinema, in my opinion.

But some times an easy target gets struck by undeserved slings and arrows. And such is the case with the recent criticism of his epic on the decline of the Mayan civilisation, "Apocalypto".

Much like his bloody epic about the death of Christ, a new Mel Gibson production about the collapse of the Mayan civilization is angering members of the culture it depicts even before it hits the screen.

"Gibson replays, in glorious big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, needed, rescue," said Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture.

Richard Hansen, an archaeologist who Gibson consulted on the making of the film, defends the historical accuracy of the work, the entire script is spoken in Yucatec Maya. And having seen the film, and having at least some knowledge of the period, I think this is as realistic a portrait, by a mile, that we could ever expect from Hollywood.

Gibson's drink fuelled rant against the Jewish conspiracy notwithstanding, he's never fit into the mould of a white supremacist or racist. He actually seems to be more of a romantic of the soil and tribal life. And in this he's actually closer to the thinking that underpins that of his critics than they are aware. His main criticism of Mayan city based civilisation seems to be that it was too much like modern Western civilisation in fact, and that it had strayed from the idyllic village culture it sprang from.

Which brings us to the frankly bizarre idea that if, as was very clearly the case, in this as most any other civilisation that was able to dominate its surroundings, the "Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans", and that that represents "an offensive and racist notion". Frankly, wouldn't it be far more insulting to depict them as some sort of hippie commune by way of Disney? They weren't care bears. They were human beings, with all the flaws and foibles of humans everywhere and at all times. And the society they built was no child friendly theme park by any stretch of the imagination.

The fact that Hernán Cortés (a man who would probably only be beaten to the top spot on a native American list of greatest arseholes of all time, by his second cousin, Francisco Pizarro) and his conquistadores were thoroughly nasty bastards, doesn't automatically confer sainthood to the Mayan and Aztec civilisations, any more than Bush and his neoconservative cohorts being war criminals, and dumb to boot, makes al Quaida and the beheaders of Iraq paragons of virtue.

In fact, I'll go so far as saying that while I regret the loss of the Mayan and Aztec civilisations, as one would the destruction of an interesting museum piece, and regret the suffering of the individual members of those civilisations, as anyone with a bit of empathy would, I can't honestly muster a shred of sympathy for those civilisations themselves, or wish for their survival and success.

Constant warfare for the sake of capturing prisoners to sacrifice, by cutting out their hearts, somehow doesn't inspire unalloyed affection.

One of the best traits of Western civilisation has been its curiosity, its voracious drive to learn about new things and new peoples and places. It's the reason the best scholars on the early Koran and the earliest sources are in Europe, not Saudi-Arabia.

But some times that curiosity, especially when coupled with an ideological grievance or indifference towards one's own society, turns into a Rousseauian worship of "the other" as nobler and better and possessing greater qualities than the modern society that produced the writer. The usual gist of it is that the closer some person or culture is to a usually undefined "natural state", the better it is.

This is of course bunk. Most civilisations of the past failed for a simple reason, they didn't use what resources they had to protect and enrich their populations. So they either collapsed from within or were conquered from without. And most of them went without gifting much of value to posterity.

Anthropologist Roger Sandall is of like mind and has a go at the late lamented Mayan culture.

Roger Sandall

Let’s take Jared Diamond by the horns. He would like us to believe that the decline and fall of the Maya was a tragic loss, and a sadly overgrown sculpture in the jungle ornaments the cover of his book Collapse.

But I don’t care if the Maya civilization did collapse. I don’t think we should shed a single retrospective tear. It might be interesting to know how or why it fell—whether from war or drought or disease or soil exhaustion—but I don’t much care about that either. Because quite frankly, as civilizations go, the Mayan civilization in Mexico didn’t amount to much.
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It is simply not the case that the Maya once lived in warm, loving, supportive communities, reciting nature poetry and drinking jasmine tea… and then somehow lost their way. Instead they were doing what bellicose tribal populations have always done—straining the carrying capacity of the land, warring with neighbours, and trying in grisly ways to appease their gods.
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I suppose it all depends on what you expect a civilization to offer. The Maya, and the Aztecs too, offered barbarism plus pyramids. Personally I don’t think that’s enough. What we expect of any civilization worth the name is something that lifts us up, something elevating if not ennobling—something that looks beyond the endless cyclical violence of the barbaric past, however interesting its art may be.

The myth of "the noble savage", popularised in Parisian salons by Rousseau, is just that. Of the many dumb ideas to come out of Western civilisation, this one ranks up there with the weakest of them. And its incorporation in modern academic thought, and its transmission on to the very subjects of that myth is, if not on par with, then at least in the tradition of the gifts to native peoples around the world of dirty blankets full of infectious diseases.