Montaigne and Moctezuma

It occurred to me by some untraceable set of associations that the erudite, reasonable, Michael Montaigne, a man who influenced such figures as Descartes on the one hand and Isaac Asimov on the other, coincided on the map of time with the Aztec Empire more or less—roughly as my life coincided with that of Victorian England: as one disappeared the other began. In 1519, fourteen years before Montaigne saw sunlight, Hernándo Cortés arrived at the gates of Tenochtitlan; a year later, with his allies, the Tlaxcala Confederacy, he conquered the city. Twenty-five years later, when Montaigne was twelve (1545), the second wave of smallpox began the process of destroying the Aztec population in earnest. Such are the gifts of higher civilization to the lower as they roll benevolently across the world. The Aztecs are remembered chiefly for emperor Moctezuma and practicing human sacrifice—the Spanish for “discovering America,” the Inquisition, and that famous Spanish fly. Fate’s whip bestows its cruel blows on collective reputations without mercy, as it were. The destruction of enemy armies by ritual methods, as the Aztecs practiced it, is shameful; we assign the functionally identical activity, when it takes place as collateral damage, to the fog of war and glitches in technology.  

Une foi, un loi, un roi

Reading the essays of Montaigne causes me to focus on sixteenth century France, the French religious wars (the Catholic League battling the Huguenots, a 36-year conflict that marred French life between 1562 and 1598) and reminds me that living in interesting times means living in times when faiths, laws, and kings compete. And, of course, it is always much worse, meaning much more interesting, when rulers are relatively weak, when ideas are hopelessly confused, and it is difficult to tell which way the trend is actually running.

The real message in that old French slogan is that, in the absence of an overweening unity at a high enough level to matter, social life will be rent, uncertainty will rule, power will continue to shift, and economic life will invariably suffer. Nobilities in tension with kings, bourgeoisie in conflict with the nobles, and tradition hanging on hard-pressed by reforming change. It would all be resolved, ultimately, in the French revolution which, in a way, swept the messy playing board clean. During this warring period an interesting early form of secularism arose; it was called politique, or the rule of pragmatism, practiced by moderates of both sides. Never mind faith, belief, or ideology. Lets get the (then still non-existent) trains to run on time. Our times here, it seems to me, might benefit from a bit of politique.

Montaigne lived in Aquitaine, the southwestern corner of France. That region was under Bourbon influence, which leaned in the Huguenot (Protestant) direction. He was nominally Catholic, temperamentally Stoic, and his detached and reasonable attitude well suited his times in turmoil. When trends are chaotic—and you have the means—by all means the tower of solitude where, sitting in relative peace, you write your blogs.

Needed That

Studies in France have virtually no other end than the making of money—said Michele de Montaigne in his essay, "On schoolmasters' learning," in the second half of the sixteenth century. Found that a refreshing corrective to the narrowing of mental arteries always present, especially in those of some age, a symptom of which is to imagine that our times are more saturated with decadence than others.

Motivation … For Humility

At a conference ages and ages ago—the subject concerned remote reading of electric meters using computers, radios, and software—I asked the kind of question from the floor that speakers rarely get but usually enjoy answering. The speaker said: “You want motivation, do you? Well, I’ll give you motivation.”

In that brief preamble to his answer, the speaker indirectly informed me that among the hackers, to whose community I’d long actually belonged, the word “motivation” also meant “a rationale.”

This morning I woke up with a strong motivation for humility. The dreaming self is, too, capable of thought. And the thought on awakening was: “How can we who must pass liquids, solids, and vent gases at right regular intervals behave as if we were the lords of the universe?” Our behavior toward our bodies reveals the very paradox of life. How sacred we hold machines that need their batteries recharged at very frequent intervals, machines that we must aerate at the rate of 12 times every minute—or Katie bar the door. Cut me some slack, but I’m reading Montaigne’s Essays (Brigitte’s Christmas gift to me) and the French Stoic was not averse to delving into odd things such as this. He mentions his own extreme reluctance to reveal his private parts (“unless moved by passion,” as he puts it). We surround our eliminative functions in physical and mental shrouds. Even in public bathrooms, as we enter them, we put on mental gowns of privacy and sort of look right through all others present; we have no ears for sounds we hear next door; we do not see part of that shoe under the economically abbreviated partition which belongs to that odd sound. During a 1,400 mile round trip at 70-miles an hour—during which the smallest mechanical failure, if it happens to take place in the right place and at an unlucky time would render these machines of ours inert and bleeding masses of expiring protoplasm—such sights and sound do indeed occur. But all this we carry in a kind of special luggage labeled “officially invisible”—while our minds contemplate news of lithium monopolies from thousands of miles away or alternately listen to breathtaking arias recorded in the 1920s…

Let us be comprehensive by all means. Those breathtaking young things yearning for love in Jane Austen novels, ah, yes, they too. All of us. Prisoners of matter. But are we? Really? Ultimately? Aye, there is the rub.