There’s a conflict in Montaigne concerning culture. He uses this essay to return to the matter of the importance of culture, but also to complain about how fashion and trends take hold of people and drive them to change behavior rapidly. Oh how Montaigne would hate our age, when even the way people speak seems to change day by day.

So Montaigne takes a journey back through the ancients to talk about some of their customs. It’s an amusing and entertaining read. But like I already wrote, there’s tension in it, because Montaigne believes in culture, thinks it should determine how we behave day by day instead of law. And yet, he despises novelty and doesn’t want the culture to change rapidly. He wants a stable culture where people dress, behave and treat people the same way day by day.

And again, he knows that people are variable, that they have no stable internal core that drives them to be the same day by day. So he knows that they will change and he knows the culture must, in some sense, adapt to the world around us, otherwise we’re tempted to use laws to shape the world to our whims.

So where does that leave the individual in Montaigne’s thoughts? To believe in stability and variability, one must embrace eccentricity. Let people have their personal foibles and habits, be accepting of it, just don’t have individual oddity reshape the culture. That seems to be what Montaigne is saying.

This, however, also minimizes the importance of art. Marcel Proust takes the opposite position — that the great artist creates the audience for the work of art, that people who might fully appreciate Pablo Picasso, for example, did not exist until Picasso burst on the scene and started changing people’s tastes, to the point that the culture then embraced him.

Montaigne would not agree. He would accept Picasso having his artistic sensibilities and creating whatever art he felt like, but would not approve of a revolution in the way we saw painting and how people appreciated it. So, on this score, Montaigne is a hopelessly stodgy human being who is incapable of appreciating innovation and how people are changed by the influences of those who dare to be different.

Does this therefore make Montaigne useless for modern readers? On a cultural level, yes. I don’t believe you can read Montaigne as a serious cultural or political thinker given this core belief. He has simply been proven wrong too many times — and the hermetically sealed world he aimed to live in has probably never been possible.

But on a micro level, regarding how an individual chooses to live within in rapidly changing culture, I do believe Montaigne continues to have value. We cannot all be world changing artists. But we can all hold a few idiosyncrasies that separate us from the crowd and allow us to maintain our individuality.

Montaigne provides a path for everyone to have a bit of artistic sensibility even if we lack artistic talent. This can help us from becoming slaves to a culture, losing all sense of agency and changing our looks, thoughts and beliefs as rapidly as the tides of culture demand.

I, of course, have many eccentricities that likely have very little influence on the world, but they do provide a strange sense of stability. By holding to the things I find important, I create my own values and therefore can ignore the value judgments of others. In my opinion, this is the only way to stay sane in a world quickly losing all semblance of order.