On customs

The idea that customs determine a big part of our lives runs like a thread through Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne devotes even explicitly three essays to the theme but also in other essays the subject receives much attention. Searching the word “custom” in the Adelaide translation of the Essays (see Sources below) gives 275 hits. It is not surprising that customs were so important for Montaigne and he wasn’t alone in the 16th century in giving attention to them, for it was a time of change. This made that the world of his days was confronted with new ideas and other ways of life. First there was the rediscovery of classical antiquity and so the rediscovery of the world and works of Rome and Old Greece: the Renaissance. Then there was the discovery of another continent on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, which was called the New World - the world of the Indians with their “exotic” ways of living. And last but not least there was an important change of the world view within the world of the Europeans themselves: the rise of a new religion - Protestantism. Not only the views on the world changed but the discovery of the art of printing made that new ideas could spread rapidly.

Customs can be of three kinds. First they can be ways how things are done in a certain society, like greetings or political institutions. Second, they can be individual habits like making a walk every day after lunch. And thirdly they can be traditions, like midsummer celebrations or eating doughnut balls on New Year’s Eve, as the Dutch do. Montaigne pays attention to all these kinds of customs. Even more, for him customs are essential for understanding man. They are the key to culture. But it is dangerous to see the way man behaves as the way man is. Behaviour that is normal for us can be “not done” for other people; or others behave simply habitually in a different manner. Montaigne devotes pages and pages of his essay “Of custom” (essay 23; in other editions #22) in telling us how things can be done in a different manner than the French of his days did. Here is the beginning of his list of “unusual” habits in order to give an impression: “There are peoples, where, his wife and children excepted, no one speaks to the king but through a tube. In one and the same nation, the virgins discover those parts that modesty should persuade them to hide, and the married women carefully cover and conceal them. To which, this custom, in another place, has some relation, where chastity, but in marriage, is of no esteem, for unmarried women may prostitute themselves to as many as they please, and being got with child, may lawfully take physic, in the sight of every one, to destroy their fruit. And, in another place, if a tradesman marry, all of the same condition, who are invited to the wedding, lie with the bride before him; and the greater number of them there is, the greater is her honour, and the opinion of her ability and strength: if an officer marry, ’tis the same, the same with a labourer, or one of mean condition; but then it belongs to the lord of the place to perform that office; and yet a severe loyalty during marriage is afterward strictly enjoined. ....” Etc.

Being aware that the same things – approaching a king, marriage and so on – can be done in different ways makes that Montaigne gives us the warning not to be prejudiced that only what we do is right simply because everybody around us does it our way and simply because we have done it always that way. That a custom has become “second nature” doesn’t mean that it belongs to the nature of man. In the end, a custom is acquired, not innate. Montaigne gives this warning already in the first paragraph of the essay “Of Custom”, where he warns us also that a custom can be even unnatural: “[I]n truth, custom is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She, by little and little, slily and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage or the power so much as to lift up our eyes. We see her, at every turn, forcing and violating the rules of nature”.

Think of this, Montaigne wants to say, when you meet people from other cultures, those whom we call “barbarians” – a word borrowed from Old Greek that originally meant only “not-Greek”, “those whom we don’t understand”–. “Barbarians are no more a wonder to us, than we are to them” (id.) Or as Montaigne says in “Of Cannibals” (essay 31 resp. 30): “[E]very one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.”

The world of today is even more in flux than the world in Montaigne’s days. Then it was exceptional to meet someone from a culture different from yours. Today it has become normal in a large part of the world even in the sense that an increasingly number of societies has become multicultural. But often we see other cultures with other customs still as “barbarian”. “We” still have “always the perfect religion, ... the perfect government, ... the most exact and accomplished usage of all things.” (ibid.) If this is so, Montaigne still has us a lot to say.

Sources

- Essays of Montaigne, on website https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/montaigne/michel/essays/complete.html#book1.46

- Guillaume Cazeaux, Montaigne et la coutume. Sesto San Giovanni: Éditions Mimésis, 2015.