The human mind is naturally poetic. We look for analogies constantly to explain the natures of large, complex systems. The mind itself is perhaps our greatest metaphor, seen in different ages as analogous to God, steam machines and, currently, to computers. We have extended that analogy so completely these days that we have, in a sense, become gods by creating forms of artificial intelligence.
Our tendency toward metaphor is a helpful trait mostly, but it also leads us to make questionable leaps of judgment when the bases of analogy are fallacious. Montaigne provides a good example of this when he takes the knowledge of nature during his time and attempts to apply it to the body politic.
Throughout the entire system governing the works of Nature, there is an amazing analogy and correspondence which shows that it is neither fortuitous nor controlled by a variety of masters. The maladies and characteristics of our bodies are also present in States and polities. We are subject to a surfeit of humours which serves no purpose and is harmful.
So, following the barbaric medical ideas of his time, Montaigne believes that the political equivalent of forced bleeding might be helpful from time to time:
Ailing political systems often display a similar surplus, and they usually resort to various types of purges to address it. Sometimes, to take the load off the country, a great multitude of families are given leave to seek better conditions elsewhere, to some other nation’s detriment.
It’s an odd metaphor, but interesting to equate a refugee crisis with a barbaric purge or forced bleeding. Today, we mostly consider such events in terms of the human toll and with the societal impact felt by nations that accept the refugees. But there is something odd and primal going on in nations that set off the crisis through war, famine and political instability. Europe last year witnessed people who looked like them and held down jobs suddenly becoming homeless as war erupted in Ukraine, for example. If the metaphors seem out of place, so to do the effects of war.
Maybe that’s a useful feeling to hold, that war seems like an out of time and place practice in our world and we should not accept it as normal. The most disheartening thing to me about the continuing war in Ukraine is the way we’ve grown to accept that this horrible event will drag on indefinitely and perhaps even expand into something more horrific. Anything that makes us feel that what is happening is abnormal and unacceptable to our consciousness is valuable.
We should equally value and encourage attempts to use poetry to describe scientific understanding. Literary critic Angus Fletcher wrote a wonderful book about 15 years ago entitled “Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare.” In it, he draws parallels from Galileo’s discoveries and the changing literary metaphors that soon followed. Fletcher wrote:
The prime question for this history must surely be the way civilizations change, as they encounter new cultural pressures to think of human life and its context in terms, precisely, of its instability. A willingness to accept the encounter runs largely alien to our human penchant for keeping things just the way they have always been …. Poetry and science need at the very least to respect each other’s powers and concerns, so that we may come to understand their deeper purposes, not to say their shared implication that the idea of meaning itself must always change, as they move to occupy different spaces in our mental world.
I think it’s also useful to consider how language has the power to reshape the way we see the world and can create people who think and behave differently. For example, there has been a strong focus the last few years in changing the way we describe each other and the ways we interact with the world through a process called diversity, equity, and inclusion. This has led to a counterattack to this effort, which is called an act on “wokeism.”
Philosopher Richard Rorty helped clarify my thinking on this issue through this nearly 30-year-old quote:
What was glimpsed at the end of the eighteenth century was that anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed. What Hegel describes as the process of spirit gradually becoming self-conscious of its intrinsic nature is better described as the process of European linguistic practices changing at a faster and faster rate. The phenomenon Hegel describes is that of more people offering more radical redescriptions of more things than ever before, of young people going through half a dozen spiritual gestalt-switches before reaching adulthood. What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.
So changing the way we think and talk about each other isn’t some petty exercise in punishing one another over word choice, it’s an important effort to shift human consciousness towards a way of seeing and understanding each other that can bring about healing and generate a lasting cultural shift. Perhaps we should all aspire to that kind of awakening.
The rest of Montaigne’s essay concerns a more timeless literary topic—using ends to justify the means. There is one amusing example given here—of how Sparta allowed slaves to get wildly drunk to show to the populace how disgusting they looked, discouraging similar behavior. With St. Patrick’s Day rapidly approaching, we will renew our annual effort to use people in their 20s to show this same phenomenon, and we will continue until it becomes unprofitable. Which means annually and forever.
I do have to point out one strange section, where Montaigne seems to extol the virtue of gladiators to build public character:
If we really must indulge in depravity, we are more to be excused if we do so for the good of the soul than for the good of the body: as did the Romans who trained their citizens in valour and in contempt for death and danger by those frenzied spectacles of gladiators and swordsmen who fought to the death, hacking at each other and killing each other while they looked on.
And if you think Montaigne misunderstood the nature of these spectacles, not true, he describes them in gruesome detail:
It was indeed a wonderful and very fruitful example for training the people that they should have every day before their eyes a hundred, two hundred or even a thousand pairs of men bearing arms, hacking each other to pieces with such extreme strength of courage that never was heard a single word of weakness or of pity, never a back was turned, never was an opponent’s blow cowardly dodged even but rather were necks offered to swords and presented to blows. Several of them who were mortally covered with many a wound, before lying down to die in the arena sent messages to the spectators to inquire whether they were pleased with their service. It was not enough that they should fight and die with constancy: they had to do it cheerfully: with the result that if they were seen to be reluctant to die there was booing and cursing.
The gladiators exemplified a permanent-war culture that conditioned the populace for blood. We can’t claim too much moral superiority today in the age of MME, the National Football League and pro wrestling, but it still seems odd for a sage like Montaigne to find moral purpose in this low entertainment.
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