Despite the title, this essay is really about customs, and his unusual political views. It starts with his distaste for novelty:
I abhor novelty, no matter what visage it presents, and am right to do so, for I have seen some of its disastrous effects. That novelty which has for so many years beset us is not solely responsible, but one can say with every likelihood that it has incidentally caused and given birth to them all. Even for the evils and destruction which have subsequently happened without it and despite it, it must accept responsibility.
Those are strange words to American eyes. Even when we take into account that Michel de Montaigne was speaking from the perspective of a nation torn asunder by waves of religious wars, to blame it all on novelty seems off. We’re a nation committed to innovation. We’re built on revolution and our economy is based on constant technological change.
America is no longer the cultural behemoth we were a generation or two ago, but our economic innovation continues to dominate the world, and our political ideals still have power, even if they are being challenged on our shores.
Given his conservative — even reactionary — instincts, does Montaigne have anything useful to tell us about political philosophy? Yes, and it’s actually a fairly subtle story, more so than this essay might imply in one reading. I don’t believe that I fully understood all that Montaigne was saying here until I read Etienne de La Boetie’s treatise “The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude,” which this essay borrows from liberally.
Montaigne believes that customs have a powerful hold on civilizations. But he’s also not fond of that power. He writes:
There is nothing that custom may not do and cannot do; and Pindar rightly calls her (so I have been told) the Queen and Empress of the World …. But the principal activity of custom is so to seize us and to grip us in her claws that it is hardly in our power to struggle free and to come back into ourselves, where we can reason and argue about her ordinances.
This sounds very much like what La Boetie wrote in his own essay:
Nevertheless it is clear enough that the powerful influence of custom is in no respect more compelling than in this, namely, habituation to subjection. It is said that Mithridates trained himself to drink poison. Like him we learn to swallow, and not to find bitter, the venom of servitude. It cannot be denied that nature is influential in shaping us to her will and making us reveal our rich or meager endowment; yet it must be admitted that she has less power over us than custom, for the reason that native endowment, no matter how good, is dissipated unless encouraged, whereas environment always shapes us in its own way, whatever that may be, in spite of nature’s gifts.
Montaigne even borrows the example of Mithridates in this essay. And he goes on, for a several pages, detailing one odd custom after another taken up by some culture of the world just to prove that habit is what drives human behavior, not reason.
Montaigne then asks us to take a look at maxims. What makes the sayings so wise? Why should we accept their moral teachings?
If (as those of us have been led to do who make a study of ourselves) each man, on hearing a wise maxim, immediately looked to see how it properly applied to him, he would find that it was not so much a pithy saying as a whiplash applied to the habitual stupidity of his faculty of judgment.
In other words, these maxims exist not to convince us, but to remind us just how faulty our default reasoning can be. The sayings serve as a cultural straitjacket, to keep us from rationalizing an action that is not in the culture’s collective interest. Montaigne then draws the conclusion that human beings are basically capable of rationalizing anything. There is no universal morality; every culture will create its own customs. His next step is to advise cultural leaders to use every tool at their disposal to influence these cultural mores so as to make abhorrent practices that demean human dignity, such as incest:
Public opinion should condemn them; poets and everyone else should give dreadful accounts of them. By this remedy even the fairest daughters would not attract the lust of their fathers, nor would outstandingly handsome brothers that of their sisters, since the myths of Thyestes, of Oedipus and of Macareus would have planted moral beliefs in the tender minds of children by the charm of the poetry. Indeed, chastity is a fair virtue; its usefulness is well recognized: yet it is as hard to treat it and to justify it from Nature as it is easy to do so from tradition, law and precept. Basic universal precepts of reason are difficult to investigate thoroughly: don’t skim through them quickly or do not even dare to handle them, throwing themselves straightway into the sanctuary of tradition, where they can preen themselves on easy victories.
Montaigne is arguing here not for laws to govern the morality, but cultural moral suasion instead. Let the popular culture judge an act as unacceptable and the customs will adjust. This is similar to what 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger believed, that the culture shifts due to five different types of paradigm shifts: works of art, acts of statesmen, nearness of a god, sacrifice of a god and the words of a thinker. The quote from Montaigne above deals with all of them.
To Montaigne this is how a lasting and meaningful cultural change comes about, by changing habits and mores. But while he wants to create a more reason-based culture, he doesn’t want to use laws to reach that destination. Consider how public opinion about gay marriage shifted dramatically even before the Supreme Court took action to make it legal, or how Diversity, Equity and Inclusion became cultural watch words not through government decree, but a powerful cultural shift that seemed to happen overnight.
Then Montaigne moves onto the question of governance. If customs are overruled and political power is exercised on cultures that feel alienated from the laws of the dominant culture, strife becomes inevitable:
What could be stranger than seeing a people obliged to obey laws which they have never understood; in all their household concerns, marriages, gifts, wills, buying and selling, they are bound by laws which they cannot know, being neither written nor published in their own language: they must pay to have them interpreted and applied – not following in this the ingenious notion of Isocrates (who advised his king to make all trade and business free, unfettered and profitable but all quarrels and disputes onerous, loading them with heavy taxes); they prefer the monstrous notion of making a trade of reason itself and treating laws like merchandise. I am pleased that it was (as our historians state) a Gascon gentleman from my part of the country whom Fortune led to be the first to object when Charlemagne wished to impose Imperial Roman Law on us.
Montaigne is making a case for cultures governed by strong customs and mores, with minimal, easily understandable laws. But now that he’s make a case for limited government, Montaigne takes his essay in a radically new direction. While he finds many customs of the world random and ridiculous, he pretty much wants all laws as they exist now—everywhere—to remain in place:
It is greatly to be doubted whether any obvious good can come from changing any traditional law, whatever it may be, compared with the evil of changing it; for a polity is like a building made of diverse pieces interlocked together, joined in such a way that it is impossible to move one without the whole structure feeling it.
This brings us back to the Montaigne quote that began this essay – abhorring novelty. Montaigne propagates this meme by arguing that innovators are bad enough, the copycats who follow closely behind bear the strongest responsibility for popularizing the dangerous ideas:
But if innovators do most harm, those who copy them are more at fault for rushing to follow examples after they have experienced the horror of them and punished them. And if there are degrees of honour even in the doing of evil, then they must concede to the others the glory of innovation and the courage to make the first attempt.
So we’ve reached an odd crossroads in Montaigne’s political thinking. It seems contradictory. How can you speak fondly of world-disclosing paradigm shifts, but then critique attempts to change laws that directly affect how people live? He digs himself a bit deeper with this thought:
To speak frankly, it seems to me that there is a great deal of self-love and arrogance in judging so highly of your opinions that you are obliged to disturb the public peace in order to establish them, thereby introducing those many unavoidable evils and that horrifying moral corruption which, in matters of great importance, civil wars and political upheavals bring in their wake – introducing them moreover into your own country.
Montaigne believes in great cultural shifts that have revolutionary power, but finds revolutionary ideas and the effect of those ideas horrifying. He’s correct in believing that ideas are powerful. This could, in turn, lead to civil wars, moral corruption or perhaps even regimes worse than those cast out. But does he really believe in doing nothing in the face of evil? No, and he tries to find a middle ground:
Nevertheless Fortune ever reserves her authority far above our arguments; she sometimes presents us with a need so pressing that the laws simply must find room for it. If you are resisting the growth of an innovation which has recently been introduced by violence, it is a dangerous and unfair obligation to be restrained by rules everywhere and all the time in your struggle against those who run loose, for whom anything is licit which advances their cause, and for whom law and order means seeking their own advantage: To trust an untrustworthy man is to give him power to harm.
It’s very interesting to contrast this essay with the one by his dear friend Etienne de La Boetie. There’s no seeming contradiction in La Boetie’s essay. He argues forcefully against tyranny in all forms and believes that human being only accept the power of tyrants due to customs. Montaigne is much more political than La Boetie was when he wrote his piece (perhaps as young as 17.)
Montaigne knows what he can and cannot get away with. So he goes after habits and culture but leaves the law alone. Then he ends with a slap not at the law itself, but the untrustworthy man who can use the law to do harm.
In other words, in his own roundabout fashion, he reached the same destination as his friend. But I want to close by adding one additional thought that another pass through the Sebond essay is raising for me.
There’s this debate that has been going on for decades now about whether Montaigne was actually an atheist, carefully cloaking his most radical ideas. I don’t believe that, but I do think that Montaigne’s religion was unusual and is probably closer to deism, the belief system that there is a God, but the Creator has not interfered with us since, and certainly did not pass down books and beliefs to explain himself.
Montaigne believed that God can be found in nature, in the beauty of the world, the way our ecosystems interact, and in the wonderful behavior of animals. And so, if you plug that thought back into this essay, you start to understand better why he doesn’t want to change laws—because Montaigne thinks all laws are basically ridiculous, they have no basis in truth, and the ways of the world are much better understood simply by observing how people live, comparing cultures and learning from each other.
We human beings can only exist in an endless state of becoming, making mistakes and learning from them. Only God, in Montaigne’s view, has consistent Being. And only by being still, patient, appreciative and open can we begin to see and hear the world the Creator intended us to discover and teach one another about.
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