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.
Keep this in mind as we observe why philosophers of ancient and classical schools were obsessed with moderation. It was because of their understanding of the body and the theory about why illnesses emerged. Here’s how Hippocrates, in The Nature of Man, described the standard view in ancient Greece:
The Human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pains and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. Pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separated in the body and not mixed with others. The body depends heavily on the four humors because their balanced combination helps to keep people in good health. Having the right amount of humor is essential for health. The pathophysiology of disease is consequently brought on by humor excesses and/or deficiencies.
Shakespeare, who came directly after Montaigne, wrote his characters based on the template of the humors. This from the National Library of Medicine’s website:
The language of the four humors pervades Shakespeare’s plays, and their influence is felt above all in a belief that emotional states are physically determined. Carried by the bloodstream, the four humors bred the core passions of anger, grief, hope, and fear—the emotions conveyed so powerfully in Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies.
So, in this essay, we get ideas like this that seem very odd to us now, but were common wisdom in that age:
We are subject to a useless and harmful surfeit of humors: either of good humors—for even this the doctors fear; and because there is nothing stable in us, they say that too blithe and vigorous a perfection of health must be artificially reduced and abated for us, for fear that our nature, unable to settle in any certain position and having no room for improvement, may retreat in disorder and too suddenly; therefore they order purgings and bleedings for athletes to draw off this superabundance of health—or of evil humors, which is the ordinary cause of diseases.
And Montaigne then gives us a fascinating example of how we extrapolate knowledge of the time to a more social conclusion by continuing:
States are often seen to be sick of a similar repletion, and it has been customary to use various sorts of purgation. Sometimes a great multitude of families are sent away to relieve the country of them, and these go to seek accommodations elsewhere at the expense of others.
All of which is fascinating if you think about the fact that we’re still having international debates about migration patterns and refugees. Our ancient ideas about the movement of people are based on long-disposed theories about things within our bodies that need to be kept at an equilibrium. Foolish, outdated medical theories, abandoned after the discovery of germs, cause genocides.
Montaigne details just how common this practice was and how it also led to wars through much of history:
By this means the Romans built their colonies; for, feeling their city growing immoderately, they would relieve it of the least necessary people and send them to inhabit and cultivate their conquered lands. Sometimes also they deliberately fostered wars with certain of their enemies, not only to keep their men in condition, for fear that idleness, mother of corruption, might bring them some worse mischief— We bear the evils of long peace; fiercer than war, Luxury weighs us down (Juvenal) —but also to serve as a bloodletting for their republic and to cool off a bit the too vehement heat of their young men, to prune and clear the branches of that too lustily proliferating stock. To this effect they once used their war against the Carthaginians.
And if you think this type of language would never fly in our times, you haven’t been paying attention to how Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been arguing for retaining H-1B visas for tech companies. Personally, I think it’s a wonderful thing to have these types of visas, but then again, I’m basically an open borders freak. But the arguments these men are using in support echoes what Montaigne is talking about above. Musk liked a tweet last week that referred to American workers as “retarded.” Ramaswamy said American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” leading to a nation that does “not produce the best engineers.”
If you think this kind of rhetoric is going to stop with immigration, you haven’t been paying attention to Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defense. In his book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth argues our military is losing its meritocracy by focusing on diversity and allowing women into combat roles.
I’ve written elsewhere that people make a mistake viewing Montaigne’s talk of moderation as something soothing and temperate. This is a great example of how moderation can be very extreme. Moderate the impulses of the culture to put it back in balance—and more under the control of authority.
All the divisions in the United States could very well be an excuse for greater interventionism, especially in our own hemisphere, if the military actions lead to more white people in our country:
There are many in our times who reason in like fashion, wishing that this heated passion that is among us might be deflected into some war with our neighbors, for fear that these peccant humors which dominate our body at the moment, if they are not drained off elsewhere, may keep our fever still at its height and in the end bring on our total ruin. And indeed a foreign war is a much milder evil than a civil war.
It should not go unnoticed that the incoming administration is talking about adding two extremely white lands to the U.S.—Canada and Greenland—but only the canal zone in Panama, not the entire country. Brown people are not allowed. In fact, it’s quite interesting that the administration wishes to expand, but also stands against statehood for Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and all other American territories with non-white majorities.
Montaigne described such thought as “the weakness of our condition often pushes us to the necessity of using evil means to a good end.” And yes, sure, if you believed in humors theory, maybe it would all sound sensible. But today, its pure madness that we should immediately see as madness. But some people have clearly spent most of their lives playing Civilization computer games and now want to take the conquest to the real world.
I will give Montaigne this—he didn’t entirely buy into the humors theory. He believed that medical science didn’t know what it was doing with the body and that individuals were much better off trying their souls—their wills—to take the moderating actions:
For if we must go to excess, it is more excusable to do so for the health of the soul than for that of the body; as the Romans trained the people to valor and contempt for dangers and death by those furious spectacles of gladiators and fencers who fought to the death and cut up and killed each other in their presence: What seeks this impious practice of a savage game, This death of youths, this blood-fed lust—what other aim? (Prudentius)
That open-ended conclusion in the Prudentius quote, to me, points back to La Boetie’s Treatise on Involuntary Servitude, that the blood spectacles are nothing more than tools of the powerful to keep the public in line.
It’s not surprising that so much of what happens as public spectacle comes down to games for power. It’s just amusing (or perhaps horrifying is a better description) to me—we don’t even recognize the origins of our most ridiculous assumptions about the world that we allow to play out again and again, despite ample evidence of their horrors.
Leave a Reply