Who gets to call others barbarous?

Who gets to call another society barbarous, and what does that judgement reveal about ourselves? In the final episode of our Montaigne series, Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson discuss custom, European self-criticism, cruelty, compassion and the tension between honour and political expedience.

Through Of Cannibals, Of Cruelty and related essays, we ask how scepticism about custom can coexist with moral judgement, and how disagreement becomes a licence to dehumanise others.

Join the conversation: can a society hold strong convictions without turning custom into nature and opponents into barbarians?
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Montaigne, Episode 3 of 3. Hosted by Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson.

Transcript

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Who Gets Called Barbarous

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome back to Beyond the Text with me, Samuel Woodall. And me, Jack Thompson, who was distracted. Who gets to call who barbarous, Jack? Well, can come can comparison expose European cruelty without romanticising the people Europe has conquered? So Montaigne had a provocation in his work. Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice. And in terms of modern examples of custom masquerading as nature, we see it um kind of quite often. But it avoids collapsing 16th century colonial violence into a casual analogy in this situation. So Montaigne does not simply say that every practice is equally good. He asks who is judging by what's a standard and with what violence behind the judgment.

Montaigne And France’s Violence

SPEAKER_01 1:04

So we're going to lay out some historical context. Jack, if you want, I could just maybe run through a few dates and then we'll go into the question. So when we look at um of cannibals, one of the essay, it draws on reports of the uh Chupinamba tribe of Brazil, including travel writing associated with French ventures in the region. Montaigne reports speaking through an interpreter with three indigenous visitors at Rouen, commonly dated to 1562. His evidence is therefore layered travel narratives, a servant who had lived overseas, an interpreter, memory, and classical comparison. The essay is not transparent ethnography. It is a European literary argument that uses partial knowledge of another society to estrange Europe from itself. But we've got to think of the home context. The wars of religion had begun in 1562, as Jack mentioned in a previous episode, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre uh in 1572, made confessional cruelty impossible to treat as an exotic practice. It's happening at home. Montaigne was a Catholic with Protestant family connections and political relationships on both sides. He opposed zeal that dissolved ordinary human bonds. This is a factional background. Rival confessional identities claim truths important enough to license cruelty against neighbours. So of the cannibals, Jack.

What “Of Cannibals” Argues

SPEAKER_01 2:34

What do you know? What can you unpack for us?

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Yes, there's a it's a really quite a surprising essay. Um so so if I were to summarize it, it's about um Montaigne's perception of uh how we understand ourselves versus how we understand foreign uh people and especially the the cannibals in this case. So he he's very interested in how we judge custom, that's the underlying subject. And he makes a very provocative case that the cannibals are actually more humane than the French. Very true, very true. He makes a very good case, actually. But what's what's in important about this essay is that he's um not uncritical about the cannibals. Um not like Rousseau. I think Rousseau is much more uncritical of the tribal people, of the fetishizes them and such it to the state of nature, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Yes, sort of fetishization of the natural state.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Yes. So he goes to some lens to understand um tribal warfare and violence, but also family ties in in terms of some very basic notions of courage and kinship, kinship, sorry. Um and he essentially he he he he emphasizes that this is very natural in contrast is what is unnatural in uh the conducts of so-called civilized peoples. Um I think the most in uh the most provocative point of contrast is when he says the cannibals content themselves to eat the flesh of the dead, but we um torture the flesh of the living. Yeah, yeah. Then you put it in those terms and you start to think, yeah, interesting. So what why is it that we react so strongly in the one case but completely unsafe for the other? But clearly one is so much more, so much more terrible.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

He creates an an an he creates an other, doesn't he, if we're gonna use the sort of postmodern language. Creates an other language into a mirror for European inequality and dependence.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Precisely. Um it's very um it's it's it's and it's all about prompting, we talked in the previous quote, about understanding and making principles one's own. And it's just very much in the same veins, like uh, you know, you you you have a certain biased view and uh um bias is a vague word, a disproportionate view of another culture and of your own, because you don't understand your own culture, you don't understand why you think the way you do, and that's not to say that I don't think Montaigne is a relativist. Throughout the essay, he he had recourse to natural reason. Yeah, what what natural reason can understand?

SPEAKER_01 5:35

That that appeal to reason is a very proto-Enlightenment notion, and I know the theme for this month is enlightenment, and it is a very proto-Enth notion, but does Montaigne genuinely encounter another people himself, or does he use an imagined version of them to conduct an argument with Europe? That's a good question. Because he's still creating images like Rousseau would do later on, but just his own sort of unique version.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

I I suspect Montaigne is much more realist. He writes in that essay that he spoke to someone who had one of these cannibal as his slave, and he tried to communicate with this cannibal through the the the person who wanted him with the interpreter, functioning of the interpreter, but he comments that the interpreter was useless in conveying the sense of his question. Um sorry, it's really quite humorous, but it it's I think it tells me that he really has tried to engage very seriously with these people. I don't think he's had a fan a totally fantastical view. Um, especially because yeah, he I think he he's come down to trying to understand nature, a bit like Hobbes, actually. We talk about Hobbes in previous podcasts. Hobbes tries to understand the state of war as something natural in a amoral category, not immoral, amoral. Montaigne's doing the same thing with respect to the primitive people. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Then

Relativism, Reason, And The Interpreter

SPEAKER_01 7:00

that state of war point's interesting because we're now going to turn to cruelty um and cruelty toleration and faction. Now, my PhD, I look at faction in depth. Um, and Montaigne says some interesting things in his essay of cruelty. He offers no Hobbesian science of sovereignty and no later party theory that we see with people like Rapan, who I study. But what he offers is a precondition for managing faction, perhaps fallible judgment, mixed loyalties, and a refusal to make opponents morally unreal. So this essay of cruelty, Jack, it treats cruelty as an especially hateful vice and extends compassion beyond humans, even to animals. Um, placed beside the essay we've just discussed. It supplies a moral standard. Scepticism about custom does not require indifference to suffering. Montaigne's policies are often associated with the politics who prioritise civil peace and dynastic order over the complete victory of perhaps a religious faction when we're looking at the civil wars of his day. Um do not they do not turn him into a modern secular liberal. He remained Catholic, accepted monarchy, and sought practical coexistence but in a confessional world. His contribution, I guess, is a style of judgment. He recognises virtue in opponents, vice in allies, and the danger of interpreting disagreement as permission for unlimited violence. But maybe you could expand on that essay of cruelty yourself.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

It's a curious essay because when you read it, you you're actually waiting for him to get to the point. Um the title. Well it did, it takes him uh it takes him like about half the essay to even raise the problem of cruelty. It's it would I find it a strange one to read, but he he's uh really he he's talking about an innate disposition in this essay. Um and so so one of the themes that comes up, I think, maybe even in another essay, but I can't think which one, or maybe it was only this essay on cruelty, was um how to be virtuous versus to simply be good. Yeah. So when I say I'm good, what I might mean is like I have a just a natural tendency to be a certain way, but virtuous cannot struggle. I have a natural counter-tendency and I'm struggling against it. Interesting, yeah. And so he he it's a it's a commentary on that dynamic, and then he this takes him to the subject of cruelty because he observes in himself, I'm really averse to cruelty, like naturally. Yep. Um I find all this really repulsive. I can't believe there are people who don't. Yeah. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

So placing himself as the subject again.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Yes, yes. Um, so and also that there is commentary indeed on the animals and um and their relationship, how how cruelty isn't it's basically a purely human, a spiritual phenomenon, really, to desire to harm another being for its own for the sake of harming them. For taking up for the sake of taking pleasure in harming them. This is a uniquely human thing. It's very interesting, uh, more pessimistic insight into our nature. Um, and he closes with an exhortation, a very

Cruelty, Virtue, And Compassion

SPEAKER_00 10:19

enlightenment, sort of enlightenment exhortation to uh a kind of harmony and common good. I forget precisely how he worded it, but it quite quite compelling.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

A certain conquest of animals, and and he also goes on in another essay, I think. I I don't know how far you got with this one, Jack, in terms of coaches um and the conquest of America. Um the ideas of of like customs switching to empire. It broadens the argument from one Brazilian society to the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru. And he condemns uh conquest driven by gold, trade, and glory. These are ideas that come up again and again, uh, even into the Enlightenment in terms of uh imperial uh expansion. Contrasting European violence with the sophistication of the societies destroyed, this starts to feel a little bit Rousseau, and actually he recognises material and uh military asymmetry rather than treating conquest as proof of some cultural superiority, and yeah, of coaches remains ultimately limited by secondhand sources like you were describing in terms of the terms of the translator, um, an idealization of societies. But he gives Europe a powerful self-critique, um, but can't necessarily speak for indigenous people himself. So maybe just adding that as a supplement there, perhaps you could expand on of cruelty and sort of his way of thinking. Um expand uh with respect to two of of cruelty and everything we've discussed in this episode so far.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Um yeah, but I uh um I you know I would I would be interested in connecting it perhaps to another essay um which is on the I think called on the on the on the virtuous on the honor honourable and the useful or the useful and the honourable, I think it's yeah sort of goes further in trying to chart out what it means to be sort of to have a have have a preference for the good uh versus what is merely expedient. Yeah, how does he do that? Well he he observes that there are sort of two laws, as it were. There's a political law of political

Conquest, Gold, And “Of Coaches”

SPEAKER_00 12:33

expedience that he associates with nations, and and then there's uh the law of of honour, uh which is closer to dignity or or or conscience, and these are often in conflict. Um that comes up in many of the essays, but um what's very interesting here is how he you know the length he goes to show that what we think is useful um is often not as useful, and actually the passive honor is the the the the more simple, the more perfect, with some exceptions. Um he has a bit of a political sensibility which he got from his office. Public office, if we discussed, but also I think his reading of uh um the famous Italian political series, Machiavelli. Yeah. Yeah. Um so there is a across the essays, there is a developing idea of custom, the its uses and limitations, primarily its limitations. The naivety it's it's in other with respect to understanding ourselves and the world around us. Also the naivety with respect to um understanding what it means to have good conduct, uh, you know, uh rather than to to acquire a virtuous nature, let's say, through practice. Um and I I yeah, I think you're trying to connect this to this this discovery of the new world and an emerging empire and and and settlements and so forth. Um difficult. Um yeah, do you have do you have any any thoughts about bringing those together?

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Yeah, I mean there's a certain admiration for natural people, as I say, in the same way that this kind of uh state of nature that someone like Rousseau will bring up uh will create a sort of uh noble savage idea, um which sort of flattens.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

This is yes, this is um a good a good point. Um

Honour Versus Expedience In Politics

SPEAKER_00 14:36

the contract is between nature and custom, I think that's the most important thing. So you saw that again natural disposition versus cultivated virtue, yeah. Umor versus utility. So the canon will have a natural sense of honour, and which also means a natural sense of justice. So they do go to war for a sake of a natural honour, natural retributive justice. Yeah, yeah. Um and you find all of these things very amenable to reason and to

Nature, Difference, And A “Monstrous” Child

SPEAKER_00 15:07

nature. Um there's a very beautiful, I want to close on this maybe. There's a very beautiful essay, which I think is worth reading, um, on uh on the on a defective child, on a malformed child. A monstrous child is terrible. Translated it's translated in penguin by a monstrous child, but that's not an that's not a good translation of the French. It's a bit too uh it's it's too negative.

SPEAKER_01 15:27

A bit too yeah, a bit too graphic graphic almost.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Yeah, exactly. Um, but basically the deformed child, um, he described it in some pleasant detail. Um point of view of trying to understand the suffering of this this child, actually. Um but then he he has um he actually has a very beautiful sort of lesson he takes from this as well, this is part of nature, like nature has found a way to make this work, um and clearly God sees things in a higher view than we do. Yep, yeah. Uh in terms of seeing the unity of nature, the unity of the cosmos, the the integrity of the natural world, and our in our limited understanding of sort of of what we're familiar with, uh limits our imagination, so we can't see how nature might be bigger, grander, more pure, even.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

Uh so that's that's that's another interesting slant on this this question of nature and that idea of that idea of unity is a nice place for us to end on this series because we began with an unstable self. Uh we moved through morality and trained judgment, and we've ended with the political stakes here of judging

Reading Club Question And Farewell

SPEAKER_01 16:35

others. Um and as you may know, there is an asynchronous reading club that you can join. Uh you can become part of the beyond the text ecosystem and join the forum where we will be putting a question up there can a society hold strong convictions without turning custom into nature and opponents into barbarians? So get online, go to uh the history of ideas club club dot code dot dot com, the historyofideasclub.com, and get your comments in the box because we're looking and we'll be watching and we'll be responding. So uh get online and get commenting and get enjoying our podcast because next to come will be Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So thank you, Jack. Thank you, Sam, and we'll see you on Monday. Bye, Jack. Amazing.