Throughout his essays, Montaigne warns about using law to shape human behavior—he thinks it’s at least a waste of time and potentially an oppressive ethos. He doesn’t think human beings are capable of such constant virtue:
I find from experience that there is a difference between the leaps and sallies of the soul and a settled constant habit: and I am well aware that there is nothing we cannot do (indeed, even surpassing the Divinity, as somebody once said, since it is a greater thing to make oneself impassible than to be so as a property of one’s being) even combining the frailty of Man with the resolution and assurance of God. But only spasmodically. Sometimes there is in the lives of those heroes in Ancient times miraculous flashes which appear far to exceed our natural powers: but, truly, flashes they are; it is hard to believe that we can so steep and dye our soul in such elevated attributes that they become ordinary and natural to her.
We’re all capable of flashes of great, virtuous acts, but we cannot live this way infallibly. This creates the classic conundrum of Christian theology, where the virtuous life is either one filled with exemplary acts and atonement for failings or an abandonment of virtue altogether, with God’s favor reliant on faith.
Montaigne takes an unusual stance that seems to go against both approaches. While he loves exempla and no doubt hopes people will aspire to the most virtuous, noble behavior, for the most part he’s content with people settling into reliable, consistent rituals that fill our days not so much with meaning, but activity that distracts the mind from all the potential trouble it could find in the world. To get to a point of equipoise, beyond where all of the vexations of the world stir us, we need to soothe ourselves in comforting activities that restore our sense of ease:
Once that whirlwind is over, we can see that she spontaneously relaxes and comes down, not perhaps down to the lowest stage of all but at least to less than she was, so that we can be moved to anger more or less like any ordinary man by the loss of a hawk or by a broken glass …. The wise men say that to judge a man we properly we must principally look at his routine activities and surprise him in his everyday dress.
Montaigne would give up feats of grand virtuous behavior entirely in exchange for habits of small, but consistent, behavior. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be positive either, just as long as the routine isn’t a consistent vice:
Now it is one thing to bring your soul to accept such ideas: it is quite another to combine theory and practice. Yet it is not impossible. But what is virtually incredible is that you should combine them with such perseverance and constancy as to make it your regular routine in actions so far from common custom.
Writing his essays was one of Montaigne’s consistent habits. That I share with him, along with my need to consume eight shots of espresso per day, ideally half of those in a coffee shop where I can observe people from a safe distance for a bit. I also need to work out at an F45 gym nearly every day and even go to great lengths to find F45 studios when I travel. When recently in Tokyo, I purposefully chose a hotel within walking distance of Japan’s only such gym.
From here, Montaigne gets into tricky questions of God and free will. It seems like a strange turn, but it fits with the theme because it goes to the question of interpreting signs of destiny. If we cannot shape the world purely by force of will, then perhaps we should just surrender to the tidal forces of life. Montaigne first challenges the notion that we’re passive observers of life, not participants:
What we see happen is happening: but it could have happened otherwise. And God, in the book of the causes of events which he has in his foreknowledge, also includes such causes as we term fortuitous and voluntary, those which depend on the liberty which he has given to our free-will: he knows that we will go astray because we shall have willed to do so.
Straying is in our destiny–but that’s not because of larger forces controlling us, it’s just part of who we are. We can—and must — fight against these worst impulses, but not by being saints, but holding dearly to things that are banal but necessary to us. If you have the faith of Montaigne, it all makes logical sense … human beings fail, philosophy cannot make anyone perfect, and neither can law make everyone virtuous. It’s up to us to fill our lives with whatever silliness works.
What I find odd in Montaigne is that while he accepts human faults and sins, he also maintains his disdain for emotions. It feels at times that he is embracing the view of Slavov Zizek, that he’d prefer to live in a world where everyone does whatever they want, just as long as they don’t express themselves. How can someone be on a mission to know himself while denying the validity of his emotions? And how can our feelings be judged more harshly than our actions? At times it feels like a bizarre extension of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount—while Jesus saw no difference between coveting his neighbor’s wife and actually going through with the sexual act, Montaigne seems to be arguing that the coveting is worse than the sex. We can forgive actions taken, but not the slavery attached to people who feel.
This bothers me, obviously, because my approach to this project has always been to own my emotions. Sometimes I let them take me to uncomfortable places, sometimes I don’t, sometimes I change my mind either or both ways. What I reveal is always subject to change, but stigmatizing myself for having the feelings has never felt like an authentic option.
Being so judgmental towards feelings obviously has all kinds of odd consequences when extrapolated to ethics. But it also sets up an odd situation politically in this secular age. If you can’t legislate your way to virtuous behavior, and the capitalist market will not magically bring you there either, how does the arc of history bend towards justice? This is where individual quirky behavior overlaps with cultural mores and accepted practices, behaviors that change the culture slowly as the definition of what’s acceptable changes, such as the way smoking has become culturally unacceptable in the United States or how masking became widely expected during the pandemic (and still routinely, now, in Japan and other parts of Asia.)
We misunderstand the power of cultural mores to alter our day-to-day decisions. It doesn’t require gods … or laws … or market-based solutions. It just takes new habits, and human beings are remarkably adaptable to these tides of change.
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