6

Culture as community creation, property and patrimony

Critique of overspecialized artistry and star system as elitist and separative in bases and consequences

Holistic view of culture as synergy of collective value-systems and practices of the community

Interrelation and balance of aesthetics and functionality

Community's cultural identity and enrichment as a component of collective self-respect and as basis for assimilation

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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Varying Cultural Practices

A Matter of Collective Free Choice*

By  Alain de Botton

Author, The Consolations of Philosophy

[The abovenamed book by Alain de Botton is a must-read for all who seriously seek self-improvement by way of shedding the hitherto unchallenged fallacies in many of the world’s dominant cultures and sub-cultures, fallacies that insidiously control many of us in the way we think and live. Following is an abridged version of the chapter on Michel de Montaigne, titled “Inadequacy.” It is included in this compilation of highly recommended readings for participants in the 2nd Philippine Convergence for Human Synergy, on the theme of “knowing well the walls that divide humans” and the fallacy of believing that “my/our” way is the only right way, the much better way, and all others are just stupid or savage. Our apologies to both the author and his publisher, Vintage International, for our failure to secure prior permission to upload this excerpt here. --Facilitator]

IN THE SUMMER of 1580, Michel de Montaigne acted on the desire of a lifetime , and made his first journey outside France, setting off on a horseback to Rome via Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He travelled in the company of four young noblemen, including his brother, Bertrand de Mattecoulon, and a dozen servants. They were to be away from home for seventeen months, covering 3,000 miles. Among other towns, the party rode through Basle, Baden, Schaffhausen, Augsburg, Innsbruck, Verona, Venice, Padua, Bologna, Florence and Sienna – finally reaching Rome towards the evening of the last day of November 1580.

As the party travelled, Montaigne observed how people’s ideas of what was normal altered sharply from province to province. In inns in the Swiss cantons, they thought it normal that beds should be raised high off the ground, so that one needed steps to climb into them, that there should be pretty curtains around them, and that travelers should have rooms to themselves.
A few miles away, in Germany, it was thought normal that beds should be low on the ground, have no curtains and that travelers should sleep four to a room. Innkeepers there offered offered feather quilts rather than the sheets one found in French inns. In Basle, people didn’t mix water with their wine and had six or seven courses for dinner, and in Baden they ate only fish on Wednesdays. The smallest Swiss village was guarded by at least two policemen, the Germans rang their bells every quarter of an hour, in certain towns, every minute. In Lindau, they served soup made of quinces, the meat dish came before the soup, and the bread was made with fennel.
French travelers were prone to be very upset by the differences. In hotels, they kept away from sideboards with strange foods, requesting the normal dishes they knew at home. They tried to talk to anyone who has made the error of not speaking their language, and picked gingerly at the fennel bread. Montaigne watched them from his table:

“Once out of their villages, they feel like fish out of water. Wherever they go they cling to their ways and curse foreign ones. If they come across a fellow-countryman…they celebrate the event… With a morose and taciturn prudence they travel about wrapped up in their cloaks and protecting themselves from the contagion of an unknown clime.”

In the middle of the fifteenth century, in the southern German states, a new method of heating homes has been developed: the Kastenofen, a freestanding box-shaped iron stove made up of rectangular plates bolted together, in which coal or wood could be burnt. In the long winters, the advantages were great. Closed stoves could dispense four times the heat of an open fire, yet demanded less fuel and no chimney-sweeps. The heat was absorbed by the casing and spread slowly and evenly through the air. Poles were fixed around the stoves for airing and drying laundry, and families could use their stoves as seating areas throughout the winter.
But the French were not impressed. They found open fires cheaper to build; they accused German stoves of not providing a source of light and withdrawing too much moisture from the air, lending an oppressive feeling to a room.

The subject was a matter of regional incomprehension. In Augsburg in October 1580,Montaigne met a German who delivered a lengthy critique of the way French people heated their heated their houses with open fires, and who then went on to adumbrate the advantages of the iron stove. In Augsburg in October 1850, Montaigne met a German who delivered a lengthy critique of the way French people heated their houses with open fires, and who then went on to adumbrate the advantages of the iron stove. On hearing that Montaigne would be spending only a few days in the town (he had arrived on the 15th and was to leave on the 19th), he expressed pity for him, citing among the chief inconveniences of leaving Augsburg the ‘heavyheadedness’ he would suffer on returning to open fires – the very same ‘heavyheadedness’ which the French had long condemned iron stoves for provoking.
Montaigne examined the issue at close quarters. In Baden, he was assigned a room with an iron stove, and once he had grown used to a certain smell it released, spent a comfortable night. He noted that the stove enabled him to dress without putting on a furred gown, and months later, on a cold night in Italy, expressed regret at the absence of stoves in his inn.

On his return home, he weighed up the respective qualities of each heating system:
“It is true that the stoves give out an oppressive heat and that the materials of which they are built produce a smell when hot which cause headaches in those who are not used to them. On the other hand, since the heat they give out is even, constant and spread all-over, without the visible flame, smoke and the draught produced by our chimneys, it has plenty of grounds for standing comparison with ours.”
So what annoyed Montaigne were the firm, unexamined convictions of both the Augsburg gentleman and the French that their own system of heating was superior. Had Montaigne returned from Germany and installed in his library an iron stove from Augsburg, his countrymen would have greeted the object with the suspicion that they accorded anything new:

“Each nation has many customs and practices which are not only unknown to another nation but barbarous and a cause of wonder.”
When there was of course nothing barbarous or wondrous about either a stove or a fireplace. The definition of normality proposed by any given society seems to capture only a fraction of what is in fact reasonable, unfairly condemning vast areas of experience to an alien status. By pointing out to the man from Augsburg and his Gascon neighbors that an iron stove and an open fireplace had a legitimate place in the vast realm of acceptable heating systems. Montaigne was attempting to broaden his readers’ (narrow) conception of the normal – and following in the footsteps of his favorite philosopher:

“When they asked Socrates where he came from, he did not say ‘From Athens,’ but ‘From the world’.”

The world (had earlier) revealed itself far more peculiar than anyone in Europe had ever expected. On Friday 12 October 1492, forty years before Montaigne’s birth, Christopher Columbus reached one of the islands on the archipelago of the Bahamas at the entrance of the gulf of Florida, and made contact with some Guanahani Indians, who had never heard of Jesus and walked about without any clothes on. Montaigne took an avid interest. In (his) library there were several books on the life of the Indian tribes of America… He read that in South America, people liked to eat spiders, grasshoppers, ants, lizards and bats: “They cook them and serve them up in various sauces.” There were American tribes in which virgins openly displayed their private parts, brides had orgies on their wedding day, men were allowed to marry each other, and the dead were boiled, pounded into a gruel, mixed with wine and drunk by their relatives at spirited parties. There were countries in which women stood up to pee and the men squatted down, in which men let their hair grow on the front of their body, but shaved their back. There were countries in which men were circumcised, while in others, they had a horror of the tip of the penis ever seeing the light of day and so ‘scrupulously stretched the foreskin over it and tied it together with little cords.’ There were nations in which you greeted people by turning your back to them. xxx Every country seemed to have a different conception of beauty.

xxx

Montaigne did not find any of it abnormal. (But) he was in the minority.
Soon after Columbus’s discovery, Spanish and Portuguese colonists arrived from Europe to exploit the new lands and decided that the natives were little better than animals. The Catholic knight Villegagnon spoke of them as ‘beasts with a human face’; the Calvinist minister Richer argued they had no moral sense; and the doctor Laurent Joubert, after examining five Brazilian women, asserted that they had no periods and therefore categorically did not belong to the human race.

Having stripped them of their humanity, the Spanish began to slaughter them like animals. By 1534, forty-two years after Columbus’s arrival, the Aztec and Inca tribes had been destroyed, and their peoples enslaved or murdered. The Indians were undermined by their own hospitality and by the weakness of their arms. They opened their villages and cities to the Spanish, to find their guests turning on them when they were least prepared. Their primitive were no match for Spanish cannons and swords, and the conquistadores showed no mercy towards their victims. They killed children, slit open the bellies of pregnant women, gouged out eyes, roasted whole families alive and set fire to villages in the night. They trained dogs to go into the jungles where the Indians had fled and to tear them to pieces.

The Spanish had butchered the Indians with a clean conscience because they were confident that they knew what a normal human being was. Their reason told them it was someone who wore breeches, had one wife, didn’t eat spiders and slept in a bed:

“We could understand nothing of their language; their manners and even their features and clothing were different from ours. Which of us didn’t take them for brutes and savages? Which of us did not attribute their silence to dullness and brutish ignorance? After all, they…were unaware of our hand-kissings and our low and complex bows.”

They might have seemed like human beings: “Ah, but they were no breeches…”
Montaigne bemoaned the intellectual arrogance at play.

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