“The risk was not that I should do wrong but do nothing. Nobody forecast that I would turn out bad, only useless. What they foretold was idleness not wickedness.”

Today, education is often framed in a similar manner – with career goals and future earnings used as benchmarks of success.  But to Montaigne, the purpose of education is “not for gain” or “for external advantages.” Montaigne sees education as the way we become most fully human, “to enrich and furnish himself inwardly.”

It’s important to remember that Montaigne’s essay focuses on what he calls “noble families.” In fact, Montaigne was skeptical of the value of education “in mean and lowborn hands.” Montaigne believed that education should help inform “conducting a war, governing a people or gaining the friendship of a prince or a foreign nation.” He had little use for the kind of education aimed toward “constructing a dialectical argument, pleading an appeal, or prescribing a mass of pills.”

But it would be a mistake to conclude that Montaigne’s essay has value only for the governing elites of a society. To the contrary, in a democracy, decisions about foreign policy, war and peace and political economy fall to all citizens who elect their representatives and hold them accountable. Meanwhile, the societal urge to use education as a means for creating professional classes continues to grow. I think it would be fair to extrapolate Montaigne into a discussion about challenging and confronting a culture of atomized experts.

How do you create a critical mass of people in a culture – whether it’s a small ruling elite or a democratic mass – capable of weighing expert opinions and making crucial decisions about the direction of a nation? Montaigne believed that you cannot create this class through specialized knowledge and by stuffing heads with facts. Rather, he believed that the best means for sculpting minds capable of critical judgments is to start off with a solid block of philosophy. He wrote:

“Since it is philosophy that teaches us to live, and since there is a lesson in it for childhood as well as for the other ages, why is it not imparted to children? They teach us to live, when life is past. A hundred students have caught the syphilis before they came to Aristotle’s lesson on temperance …. Philosophy has lessons for the birth of men as well as for their decrepitude.”

Montaigne believes that joy is a critical element of learning and he thinks philosophy is an important part of the mix:

“I do not want the boy to be made a prisoner. I do not want him to be given up to the surly humors of a choleric schoolmaster. I do not want to spoil the mind by keeping him in torture and at hard labor, as others do, fourteen or fifteen hours a day, like a porter ….  It is very wrong to portray (philosophy) as inaccessible to children, with a surly, frowning, and terrifying face. Who has masked her with this false face, pale and hideous? There is nothing more gay, more lusty, more sprightly, and I might almost say more frolicsome. She preaches nothing but merry-making and a good time. A sad and dejected look shows that she does not dwell there.”

For Montaigne, philosophy-based education does not mean focusing on “thorny matters of dialectics.” What he has in mind has more in common with what we now call critical thinking. And Montaigne’s form of critical thinking gives great weight to doubt.

“Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle’s principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicurians. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. As Dante wrote ‘Only fools have made up their minds and are certain: For doubting pleases me as much as knowing.’’

Physical education is crucial to the full mind and body approach of Montaigne, and he sees a link between philosophy and physical health as well:

“The soul in which philosophy dwells should by its health make even the body healthy. It should make its tranquility and gladness shine out from within; should form in its own mold the outward demeanor, and consequently arm it with graceful pride, an active and joyous bearing, and a contented good-natured countenance. The surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness; her state is like that of things above the moon, ever serene.”

He continues with a quote from Seneca: “We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom.”  Montaigne then defines this freedom this way:

“Let him know that he knows, at least.  He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later … The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.”

What Montaigne is aiming for is the creation of citizen-jurors, educated people capable of judging and integrating what we now call information and making sense of it.

“Let him be taught not so much the histories as the how to judge them. That, in my opinion, is of all matters the one to which we apply our minds in the most varying degree. I have read in Livy a hundred things that another man has not read in him. Plutarch has read in him a hundred besides the ones I could read, and perhaps besides what the author had put in. For some it is a purely grammatical study; for others, the skeleton of philosophy, in which the most abstruse parts of our nature are penetrated.”

Where does this approach lead?  Montaigne believes that it all adds up to a form of free-thinking individualism – people so unshackled from intellectual authority that they are capable of admitting their own errors.  Montaigne is often quite conservative, but this description of the enlightened, free thinking citizen is a model for how a modern democrat should behave:

 “Let his conscience and his virtue shine forth in his speech, and be guided only by reason. Let him be made to understand that to confess the flaw he discovers in his own argument, though it be still unnoticed except by himself, is an act of judgment and sincerity, which are the principal qualities he seeks; that obstinacy and contention are vulgar qualities, most often seen in the meanest souls; that to change his mind and correct himself, to give up a bad position at the height of his ardor, are rare, strong, and philosophical qualities.”

I didn’t mind the talking part of therapy so much as the talking-about-myself part — my last psychiatrist noted that my personality changed markedly when the subject turned to ideas. Ideas change the tenor of my voice and the speed of my delivery … and I care about them quite a bit more than the tired stories of my childhood.

I kept wanting to bring ideas into the discussions and somehow in my frantic Amazon Kindle book buying spree, I came across Rorty. His words had special resonance for me because his subject was the personal narrative, that same, frustrating topic that I felt obliged to recall for 45 minutes every week. Writing a particularly insightful analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche, Rorty interpreted Nietzsche to believe that the process of understanding your personal narrative is akin to creating an entirely new language:

The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency, tracking one’s causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new language – that is, of thinking up some new metaphors. For any literal description of one’s individuality, which is to say any use of an inherited language-game for this purpose, will necessarily fail.

Defining myself as a writer, I found this description fascinating. Rorty went on:

To fail as a poet – and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being – is to accept somebody else’s description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems. So the only way to trace home the causes of one’s being as one is would be to tell a story about one’s causes in a new language.

I read these passages to my therapist and he agreed that this was the basic aim of psychoanalysis — to perform an exegesis of your inner narrative and to reject it for a new one, a narrative that is purely your own, not borrowed from your parents or anyone else, and not weighed down with ancient misconceptions.

I continued to struggle with this concept because it seemed somewhat artificial to me. I can accept that my current personal narrative is a fallacy, but how do I know that the new narrative won’t be just as much of a fiction? Unless the narrative has some kind of foundation, it can’t have meaning. Or so I thought. Interestingly enough, in between the two quotes noted above, Rorty actually addressed this issue:

Only poets, Nietzsche suspected, can truly appreciate contingency. The rest of us are doomed to remain philosophers, to insist that there is really only one true lading-list, one true description of the human situation, one universal context of our lives.

I wanted that description of the human condition and couldn’t accept the validity of psychotherapy without it. My doctor basically prescribed that I take up writing not only as a profession, but an avocation as well — I needed to find time to write for me, he said. It was good advice, but I didn’t think there was anything more to learn from him, my 10 insurance paid-for sessions for 2010 had run out, and I decided that I was going to ween off the antidepressant and focus on that one big idea, write for me.

At the same time, still eager to find that definition of the human condition, I dove into the deep end of philosophy. In the past year, I’ve read a staggering amount of it — not just Nietzsche, but also Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Kant, Descartes and several contemporary philosophers too, including Charles Taylor. This long trail of great thinkers somehow led to Montaigne.

The trail to Montaigne also included a prolonged effort to ween off Cymbalta, which finally succeeded at the close of 2010. Newly energized, I finally felt capable of taking on that major writing project. And then it occurred to me that if I really wanted to learn from Montaigne, I needed to do more than read his words, I needed to chart his path, take on his life’s work with my own writing project.

Montaigne would never pledge something as foolhardy as recrafting his entire corpus in 107 days, but that was the gimmick I adopted at the start and that I’ve remained faithful to all the way to the end, which is today. I’ve been trying to come to terms with my own narrative through Montaigne’s. Today, I have to assay my success.

According to Rorty, Nietzsche would have advised me, if deemed worthy, to keep reading him but stop reading all other philosophers and to take up poetry thereafter. Montaigne is just as skeptical about the value of philosophy — but he also understood the hunger that leads some people to it:

No desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge. We assay all the means that can lead us to it. When reason fails us we make use of experience – By repeated practice, and with example showing the way, experience constructs an art…. It is only our individual weakness which makes us satisfied with what has been discovered by others or by ourselves in this hunt for knowledge: an abler man will not be satisfied with it. There is always room for a successor – yes, even for ourselves – and a different way to proceed.

Montaigne’s essays are packed with excerpts from and descriptions of great thinkers of the past. He understood not just the hunger to learn from others, but also the desire to seek out that elusive universal context for living:

No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty, as Apollo made clear enough to us by his speaking (as always) ambiguously, obscurely and obliquely, not glutting us but keeping us wondering and occupied.

From Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, I took away limitations of language to express what is deep within us. But as Montaigne points out, the deeper one dives into philosophy, the more entangled one becomes in the language games:

Our controversies are verbal ones. I ask what is nature, pleasure, circle or substitution. The question is about words: it is paid in the same coin. – ‘A stone is a body.’ – But if you argue more closely: ‘And what is a body?’ – ‘Substance.’ – ‘And what is substance?’ And so on; you will eventually corner your opponent on the last page of his lexicon. We change one word for another, often for one less known. I know what ‘Man’ is better than I know what is animal, mortal or reasonable. In order to satisfy one doubt they give me three; it is a Hydra’s head.

What does Montaigne recommend instead? Well, it actually reads quite a bit like modern psychoanalysis:

Anyone who recalls the ills he has undergone, those which have threatened him and the trivial incidents which have moved him from one condition to another, makes himself thereby ready for future mutations and the exploring of his condition. (Even the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our own; a life whether imperial or plebeian is always a life affected by everything that can happen to a man.) We tell ourselves all that we chiefly need: let us listen to it. Is a man not stupid if he remembers having been so often wrong in his judgement yet does not become deeply distrustful of it thereafter?

Learning to be distrustful of one’s judgment is important, but not sufficient, says Montaigne:
I learn to distrust my trot in general and set about improving it. To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing: we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads.

I realize that this is a translation of Montaigne, but I can’t help but connect it to Samuel Johnson’s famous quote that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Giving away a massive writing project like this one for free — even if you are only getting the first draft — would likely fall under both Montaigne’s and Johnson’s definitions of a blockhead.

Returning to Montaigne, he suggests in his final essay an alternate course for philosophy, one that becomes, as Nietzsche later suggests, more like an autobiography. Not long after Montaigne, Descartes comes along — then later Kant — turning philosophy into a grand species and name system of thought. Montaigne sees that philosophy has lead people to contemplate when they should be paying attention and enjoying:

Go on then, just to see: get that fellow over there to tell you one of these days what notions and musings he stuffs into his head, for the sake of which he diverts his thoughts from a good meal and regrets the time spent eating it. You will find that no dish on your table tastes as insipid as that beautiful pabulum of his soul (as often as not it would be better if we fell fast asleep rather than stayed awake for what we do it for) and you will find that his arguments and concepts are not worth your rehashed leftovers. Even if they were the raptures of Archimedes, what does it matter?

Perhaps it all could have turned out differently if Montaigne had only called his essays a form of philosophy:

The learned do arrange their ideas into species and name them in detail. I, who can see no further than practice informs me, have no such rule, presenting my ideas in no categories and feeling my way – as I am doing here now; I pronounce my sentences in disconnected clauses, as something which cannot be said at once all in one piece. Harmony and consistency are not to be found in ordinary base souls such as ours. Wisdom is an edifice solid and entire, each piece of which has its place and bears its hallmark.

We’re ordinary base souls, but we’re also in a constant state of becoming, which is a philosophical school of though that goes back to Heraclitus, was picked up by Nietzsche and is now the dominant thought in postmodern philosophy. As mentioned in yesterday’s essay, even looking back at past photos can lead us to discover ourselves in an unrecognizable state:

Everywhere death intermingles and merges with our life: our decline anticipates its hour and even forces itself upon our very progress. I have portraits of myself aged twenty-five and thirty-five. I compare them with my portrait now: in how many ways is it no longer me! How far, far more different from them is my present likeness than from what I shall be like in death.

So that’s Montaigne’s analysis of philosophy, but now, in closing out his life-affirming project, he’s now in the mood to offer us a final summation of his theory of life. It’s not a system … and neither is it a day-by-day rulebook for living. Rather, it’s a way of focusing ourselves and saying yes to every moment in life. Nietzsche toiled to find the contentment that Montaigne outlines here, but he lacked the lightness and innate joy necessary to pull it off:

When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me. Mother-like, Nature has provided that such actions as she has imposed on us as necessities should also be pleasurable, urging us towards them not only by reason but by desire. To corrupt her laws is wrong.

Note that Montaigne is not rejecting desire — he wants us to find a balance in life between reason and desire and to understand how moderating desire is not a rejection of it, rather it’s a way to make it more meaningful. How do you find this balance? Montaigne suggests that if you pay close attention to your life — recognize what brings lasting pleasure and pain — nature will tell you where the balance lies:

If you have been able to examine and manage your own life you have achieved the greatest task of all. Nature, to display and show her powers, needs no great destiny: she reveals herself equally at any level of life, both behind curtains or without them. Our duty is to bring order to our morals not to the materials for a book: not to win provinces in battle but order and tranquillity for the conduct of our life. Our most great and glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly. Everything else – reigning, building, laying up treasure – are at most tiny props and small accessories.

Throughout my essay about Montaigne’s essays, I’ve set Montaigne and Nietzsche against each other. They’ve been battling it out for my philosophical soul. Nietzsche is a great believer in agon … he glorifies the struggle and the reach for greatness. He wants humanity to evolve and create the overman. In the following paragraph, Montaigne anticipates Nietzsche and defeats him:

You can indeed, using artifice rather than nature, make your journey more easily along the margins, where the edges serve as a limit and a guide, rather than take the wide and unhedged Middle Way; but it is also less noble, less commendable. Greatness of soul consists not so much in striving upwards and forwards as in knowing how to find one’s place and to draw the line. Whatever is adequate it regards as ample; it shows its sublime quality by preferring the moderate to the outstanding.

While Montaigne is defeated Nietzsche in one area, he’s creating space for him in another, lashing out at the ascetic ideal that he supported in many past essays that glorified the stoics:

The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. If anyone desires to set his soul apart so as to free it from contagion, let him have the boldness to do so (if he can) while his body is unwell: otherwise, on the contrary, his soul should assist and applaud the body, not refuse to participate in its natural pleasures but delight in it as if it were its husband, contributing, if it is wise enough, moderation, lest those pleasures become confounded with pain through want of discernment.

Instead of following Socrates’ lead and using philosophy to know ourselves, we venture out in search of an overman or, for today’s techno-Utopians, an technology Singularity that will reshape everything. And it’s all a grand waste of time, according to Montaigne:

It is an accomplishment, absolute and as it were God-like, to know how to enjoy our being as we ought. We seek other attributes because we do not understand the use of our own; and, having no knowledge of what is within, we sally forth outside ourselves. A fine thing to get up on stilts: for even on stilts we must ever walk with our legs! And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.

And that’s where Montaigne’s life leads Montaigne’s ideas, to an acceptance of the limits of his self knowledge and everyone’s self knowledge. But where does his wisdom leave me?

Today not only marks the end of the Montaigne Project, it also would have been my dad’s 74th birthday. He died six-and-one-half years ago of cancer, and a big part of my personal narrative is the incomplete relationship between us.

My parents divorced when I was 11. My older sister, younger brother and my mom moved from New Jersey to Oklahoma soon afterward — my mom remarried the owner of a truck stop in Tulsa. But my dad had no idea that we were moving. In fact, he thought that he and my mother were getting along better, perhaps nearing a reconciliation.

He called our house in New Jersey the day before we were scheduled to fly out to Tulsa to say he’d be coming for a visit in the afternoon. We were taking nothing with us but suitcases, so there was no sign that we were going. My mother told us that we had to keep it quiet. I was distraught. My mom called my soon-to-be stepfather, he asked to talk to me and told me to “be strong for my mother.”

So my father came and, dutifully, I didn’t mention a word. We watched some talk show, Mike Douglas I think, and he had the Toastmaster General on. At some point I asked why the Postmaster General was telling jokes on TV, which made my dad laugh and helped me mask the barely held back tears. We all promised to see him again soon … and the next day we boarded a Braniff flight from Newark. Other than a few days at a time on holidays, I barely saw my dad again until I went to college.

Jump forward now to the last day of my father’s life. He was in a hospice in Henderson, NC. I had been visiting him for about 10 days as had my brother and sister and some of his closest friends. We all knew the end of was near. My dad and I both love baseball and we’re Yankee fans — God forgive us. The Yankees had given us both more than our fair share of good days, but this was not one of them. This was October 20, 2004, game 7 of the American League Championship Series.

My dad looked horrible — and horrified. He had a breathing tube, so he couldn’t talk. But worse, he had a terrified look in his eyes. But maybe the real terror was mine. I sat in a chair about 10 feet from him, watching this horrific baseball game, where our team was on the brink of blowing a 3-0 series lead, the first time anyone in MLB history had done such a thing.

At some point, I should have pulled up a chair and held his hand … said something other than some idle talk about the game. But I lacked the courage. I left his room to drive back to my sister’s house and said something about seeing him again tomorrow. But tomorrow didn’t come for him. He died about an hour later.

My mother’s voice has, for too long, narrated the story of my father’s life. For this reason, my memories of him tend to be sad. I see him as someone who just didn’t seem to make much of his life. And I don’t think I was prepared, in 2004, to say the things that he need to hear on his way out of this life.

But Montaigne is helping me with this one, so I think I’m up for the task. Dad, you lived your life the way you wanted, even if it didn’t always turn out the way you wanted, and I’m proud of you for that. To the end, you remained your own man. And although you never lived to see them, you have three handsome, hopelessly independent grandsons with the Conley name who share your spirit.

I feel bad that you dwelled so much on your failing and faults in life, because I do that too. Let’s hope that the kids don’t inherit that. You were never shy to tell me how much you loved me and how proud you were of me. My greatest regret in our relationship is that I never shared the favor with you, even when you needed it the most. I’m sorry for that. That’s something else that I hope not to pass on to your grandsons.

I have no idea why I felt obliged to write any of these 107 essays, but I dedicate all of them to you, dad. Happy birthday and rest in peace.

Recently, my sister sent me a collection of photographs of me with her oldest kids, taken in the summer of 1993. I was 27 years old at the time and remember those days fondly — I had an interesting job (speechwriter for Governor Wilder), I was in great physical shape and I particularly remember their trip to Richmond pleasantly.

But you wouldn’t guess any of that from the pictures. There’s not a single smile or even hint of a smile on my face in any of the photos. I looked tired and dour. Before seeing those pictures, I might be tempted to think back to those days and consider it one of the happiest times of my life … but my memories tell one story, my face quite another.

There’s quite a bit of revisionism and summing up in this next-to-last Montaigne essay. He makes some of his most powerful anti-war statements here, which stands as a marked contrast from his earliest writing that glorified war frequently. He also tells some memorable anecdotes, including one about allowing an entire platoon to take over his estate briefly just because he didn’t feel it right to turn down anyone once he’d allowed the first soldier to enter. Another anecdote details how he basically talked himself of our kidnapping by arguing strenuously with his captors.

Montaigne’s irony is often carefully disguised, but this paragraph is one of his most effective ironic statements about achieving glory through the ongoing civil war. It stands as a fascinating counterweight to his previous exempla about war heroism:

During the disorders in which we have lived these last thirty years, every man in France sees himself, both individually and collectively and hour by hour, on the point of having his entire fate reversed: all the more reason, then, to keep one’s mind supplied with stronger and more manly provender. Let us be grateful to our fate for having made us live in an age which is neither soft and idle nor lazy: nowadays a man who would never otherwise have become famous may do so because of his misfortunes.

And here, Montaigne makes one of his strongest statements about the brutality and destruction of the religious wars in France:

I doubt whether I can properly admit how little it has cost me in terms of my life’s repose and tranquillity to have passed more than a half of my days during the collapse of my country. Faced with misfortunes which do not concern me directly, I buy my resignation a little too cheaply; as for lamenting on my own behalf, I have regard not so much for what has been taken from me but for what still remains to me, both within and without. There is some consolation in dodging, one after another, the successive evils which have us in their sights, only to strike elsewhere around us.

This serves as Montaigne’s final statement on war and disorder in his native country. Most of the essay, however, deals with two issues he has examined in depth throughout his project — the limits of the intellect and the value of philosophy. In this essay, Montaigne bravely examines everything he’s put on the table — even the essays themselves — and makes his final statement in favor of living a simple life, more like peasants than noblemen.
Montaigne uses Socrates as his entry point for this idea, writing that the power of Socrates was the simplicity of his ideas and language:

Socrates makes his soul move with the natural motion of the common people: thus speaks a peasant; thus speaks a woman. He has nothing on his lips but draymen, joiners, cobblers and masons. His inductions and comparisons are drawn from the most ordinary and best-known of men’s activities; anyone can understand him. Under so common a form we today would never have discerned the nobility and splendor of his astonishing concepts; we who judge any which are not swollen up by erudition to be base and commonplace and who are never aware of riches except when pompously paraded.

What Montaigne is building up to with this argument is an attack on excessive erudition. The Oracle did not advise Socrates to know everything, after all, it advised him to know himself:

Socrates, did not deal with vain notions: his aim was to provide us with matter and precepts which genuinely and intimately serve our lives: to keep the mean; to hold fast to the limit; and to follow nature…. It is not possible to be less pretentious or more lowly. He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much she can do by herself. We are richer than we think, each one of us. Yet we are schooled for borrowing and begging! We are trained to make more use of other men’s goods than of our own.

Then Montaigne makes an interesting psychological assertion — that our desire for excessive knowledge is akin to drives like greed and gluttony. This fits perfectly with Nietzsche’s will to power … our intellect also wills dominance over us and requires an ever expanding library to attain that power:

In nothing does Man know how to halt at the point of his need; be it pleasure, wealth or power, he clasps at more than he can hold: his greed is not susceptible to moderation. It is the same, I find, with his curiosity for knowledge: he hacks out for himself much greater tasks than he needs or can achieve, making the extent of knowledge and the usefulness of knowledge co-equal: In learning as in everything else, we suffer from lack of temperance.

This will to intellect becomes an enemy of self knowledge. We start to imitate the writings of Aristotle or even model our lives on someone like Caesar. Bear in mind that this is a major self-criticism for Montaigne, he peppered his essays with numerous exempla, now he’s making the argument that these exempla are masks that hide what’s most important within us:

It is far easier to talk like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than both to talk like Socrates and live like Socrates. In him is lodged the highest degree of perfection and of difficulty. Art cannot reach it. Moreover our own faculties are not trained that way. We neither assay them nor understand them: we clothe ourselves in those of others and allow our own to lie unused – and some may say that about me, asserting that I have merely gathered here a big bunch of other men’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the string to hold them together.

Looking back, Montaigne sees his project in a different light. What he had previously criticized as vanity, he now sees as the vital truth in his project, while the thoughts of ancient sages are mere filler. If this is true, of course, then my project is even more worthless than Montaigne’s, but I’ll get to that shortly:

I want to display nothing but my own – what is mine by nature. If I had had confidence to do what I really wanted, I would have spoken utterly alone, come what may. Yet despite my projected design and my original concept (but following the whim of the age and the exhortation of others) I burden myself with more and more of them every day. That may not become me well: I think it does not, but never mind: it might be useful to somebody else.

Montaigne lets himself off the hook somewhat by pointing out that he’s merely writing in the style of his age:

A presiding judge boasted in my presence that he had amassed two hundred or so borrowed commonplaces and worked them into one of his presidential rescripts. By declaring that fact to all and sundry he seemed to me to be nullifying the glory he was being given for it. A petty and ridiculous vanity for my taste in such a subject and in such a person …. At least the ink and paper are his. In all conscience that is not writing a book but purchasing one, borrowing one. It shows men – something of which they might have remained in doubt – that you are unable to write one.

All of this is rather esoteric, so Montaigne decides to relate it to an issue that he’d covered in a previous essay — explaining now that his close reading of the ancients gave him the false impression that philosophy was useful in sanctifying death:

Contemplate yourself. You will find within you Nature’s arguments concerning death – true arguments, most fit to serve you in your need: they it is which make a farm-laborer, as well as entire nations, die with as much constancy as a philosopher…. If you do not know how to die, never mind. Nature will tell you how to do it on the spot, plainly and adequately. She will do this job for you most punctiliously: do not worry about it: In vain, O mortals, do you strive to know the uncertain hour of your death and by which road it will come.

Montaigne, who for essay after essay tried to come to peace with Stoic philosophy, now makes his strongest, perhaps ultimate, break from that worldview. He never walks away from Stoicism nor names its failings, but the criticism of philosophy in this quote strikes firmly at the Stoics, both Greek and Roman:

We confuse life with worries about death, and death with worries about life. One torments us: the other terrifies us. We are not preparing ourselves to die: that is too momentary a matter. A quarter of an hour of pain, without after-effects, without annoyance, has no need of precepts of its own. To speak truly, we prepare ourselves against our preparations for death! Philosophy first commands us to have death ever before our eyes, to anticipate it and to consider it beforehand, and then she gives us rules and caveats in order to forestall our being hurt by our reflections and our foresight! Thus do doctors tip us into illnesses in order that they may have the means of employing their drugs and their Art.

So Montaigne reaches a valuable insight about philosophy that Nietzsche later embraces via Zarathustra — that the aim of philosophy has to be life, not death:

If we have not known how to live, it is not right to teach us how to die, making the form of the end incongruous with the whole. If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way. They may bluster as much as they like, saying that the entire life of philosophers is a preparation for death; but my opinion is that death is indeed the ending of life, but not therefore its End: it puts an end to it; it is its ultimate point; but it is not its objective. Life must be its own objective, its own purpose.

While on the subject of death, I was thinking yesterday about Woody Allen’s film “Annie Hall,” and the fact that while nobody dies in the movie, talk about death envelops it. There are jokes about Alvy Singer’s obsession with death and the books he buys for Annie on the subject. There’s also Alvy’s comment about how a relationship is like a shark, that it needs to keep moving or it will die. He then calls their relationship a dead shark.

There’s no death in “Annie Hall,” but the end of Alvy and Annie’s relationship is a kind of mortality. The story of their love affair is a life in itself, one with its own mythology and inevitable demise. The life affirming message at the end of the film is that, bad ending and all, Alvy was better off for having loved Annie.

In this way, I believe we are constantly dealing with death within our lives. Short aspects of our lives flicker and flame out, and in the same way, so too do our mortal selves. My personal view is that philosophy isn’t about how to prepare to die … and it’s not really about how to live either. It’s about being aware and open to reconsideration. It’s about taking an open-minded look at your old photos.

In 2000, the U.S. was running a budget surplus … but after a massive tax cut, three wars and a long recession that sunk tax revenues and increased short-term spending, we now have a large and unsustainable budget deficit. As Paul Krugman noted earlier this week, instead of doing the obvious: raising taxes back to the levels of 11 years ago, cutting back on our military adventures and doing everything we can to put people back to work, the focus is on blaming the victims — cutting programs for those who have suffered the most in the recession.

But don’t worry about these real problems, there are plenty of fake ones to distract us from considering the inanity of our political leadership. Two popular sideshows this year have been the birther and deather movements: those who believe that President Obama was not a naturally-born citizen and those who insist that Osama bin Laden is still alive, even though Al Qaeda itself has admitted his demise.

While there are no major polls measuring the deathers yet, a new Public Policy Polling survey found that even after the release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate, only 48 percent of Republicans believe that he was born in the United States. This marks a 16 point improvement since the White House released the birth certificate — and in fairness, the number of people who say he is not a citizen is down to 34 percent — but I still find it remarkable that anyone would hold enough doubt or animus at this point to bother with a ‘not sure’ remark. Even a devoted doubter like Montaigne would be hard pressed to give that answer.

You might think that this insanity would drive the White House crazy, but actually I can’t imagine a better political circumstance for them. Instead of having to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of job growth and deficit reduction, the birthers and deathers put Republican Presidential candidates into a terrible bind. Disavow this large segment of the GOP primary electorate now and you might have no chance at winning the nomination … but become too cozy with the know-nothings and you’ll have virtually no chance of winning the general election, no matter how bad the economy looks a year from now.

I find it hard to believe that the number of truly idiotic Americans — so easily influenced by supermarket tabloids like The Globe and lunatics like Orly Taitz — can compose nearly a majority of one of this country’s major political parties. Montaigne in this essay, largely about witches, provides a highly plausible theory about how such mass delusions spread:

At first simple folk are convinced by the event itself: it sweeps over them. From them it spreads to the more intelligent folk by the authority of the number and the antiquity of the testimonies. Personally, what I would not believe when one person says it, I would not believe if a hundred times one said it. And I do not judge opinions by their age.

In other words, the birther theories have been around long enough and repeated for so long that they’ve taken on a certain authority, even if the facts surrounding them are non-existent. If this is the case, the deathers should slowly start to build in the coming months and could make up an equally strong portion of the anti-Obama vote by November 2012. False facts, Montaigne wrote, have a way of building up their own ludicrous credibility:

I was recently letting my mind range wildly (as I often do) over our human reason and what a rambling and roving instrument it is. I realize that if you ask people to account for ‘facts’, they usually spend more time finding reasons for them than finding out whether they are true. They ignore the whats and expatiate on the whys. Wiseacres!

Those easily seduced by birther and deather theories will start off with the assumption that Obama is evil and his Presidency illegitimate. From their, deciding why these theories have relevance become a puzzle of determining how Obama could have pulled off the frauds instead of actually determining whether the theory is true:

They skip over the facts but carefully deduce inferences. They normally begin thus: ‘How does this come about?’ But does it do so? That is what they ought to be asking. Our reason has capacity enough to provide the stuff for a hundred other worlds, and then to discover their principles and construction! It needs neither matter nor foundation; let it run free: it can build as well upon the void as upon the plenum, upon space as upon matter: meet to give heaviness even to smoke.

What conspiracy theories amount to — and I have to admit now that I’ve been highly unfair placing them all on the conservative side, liberals have their own idiotic theories including 9/11 denial and various assassination theories — is a false form of skepticism. It’s a “prove that human breathe oxygen” form of skepticism that denies all human knowledge. True skepticism is about expanding human knowledge and understanding:

By following this practice we know the bases and causes of hundreds of things which never were; the world is involved in duels about hundreds of questions where both the for and the against are false: The false and the true are in such close proximity that the wise man should not trust himself to so steep a slope.

Long before the game of ‘telephone’ was invented, Montaigne describes how rumors spread:

By man’s inborn tendency to work hard at feeding rumors we naturally feel embarrassed if what was lent to us we pass on to others without some exorbitant interest of our own. At first the individual error creates the public one: then, in its turn, the public error creates the individual one. And so, as it passes from hand to hand, the whole fabric is padded out and reshaped, so that the most far-off witness is better informed about it than the closest one, and the last to be told more convinced than the first.

And once these rumors start spreading, it becomes nearly impossible to unravel them. Take, for instance, the way the birther rumors morphed into discussions of President Obama’s academic record or draft registration forms. Once you accept the premise that the President is a fraud, debunking one part of the rumor nearly allows it to shape shift into another:

It is wonderful how such celebrated opinions are born of such vain beginnings and trivial causes. It is precisely that which makes it hard to inquire into them: for while we are looking for powerful causes and weighty ends worthy of such great fame we lose the real ones: they are so tiny that they escape our view. And indeed for such investigations we need a very wise, diligent and subtle investigator, who is neither partial nor prejudiced.
Many of this world’s abuses are engendered – or to put it more rashly, all of this world’s abuses are engendered – by our being schooled to fear to admit our ignorance and because we are required to accept anything which we cannot refute. Everything is proclaimed by injunction and assertion. In Rome, the legal style required that even the testimony of an eye-witness or the sentence of a judge based on his most certain knowledge had to be couched in the formula, ‘It seems to me that…’

Montaigne suggests that the best way for cultures to avoid this kind of inanity is to raise children to be inquisitive. Having three young boys myself, I can guarantee you that they are born inquisitive … if anything, we beat the questions out of them because we get tired of answering every why. But Montaigne is correct that we need to give them a framework for a life of questioning:

And if I had had sons to bring up I would have trained their lips to answer with inquiring and undecided expressions such as, ‘What does this mean?’ ‘I do not understand that’, ‘It might be so’, ‘Is that true?’ so that they would have been more likely to retain the manners of an apprentice at sixty than, as boys do, to act like learned doctors at ten.

In my opinion, the most important trait for people to adopt in expressing opinions is admission that ideas are purely their own and based on an individualistic point of view. I have a tendency to state my opinions forcefully — but that doesn’t mean I’m closed to possibility that I might be wrong:

I warrant you no certainty for whatever I say, except that it was indeed my thought at the time… my vacillating and disorderly thought. I will talk about anything by way of conversation, about nothing by way of counsel. Nor, like those other fellows, am I ashamed to admit that I do not know what I do not know.

But even Montaigne recognizes that this can be taken too far and only applies to issues that are matters of opinion … I need to be clear that President Obama was born in the State of Hawaii and Osama bin Laden is still dead, and those are facts, not opinions:

The arrogance of those who attributed to Man’s mind a capacity for everything produced in others (through irritation and emulation) the opinion that it has a capacity for nothing. Some went to the same extreme about ignorance as the others did about knowledge, so that no one may deny that Man is immoderate in all things and that he has no stopping-point save necessity, when too feeble to get any farther.

I’m not one to give advice to Republicans that often, but if I were advising the loyal opposition today, I would suggest that they nominate a ticket that bears no personal animus towards President Obama … doing so would go a long way towards making the 2012 election about issues — real, important issues — rather than matters of lunacy. A Jon Huntsman-Tom Coburn ticket, for example, could give the Obama White House a lot of sleepless nights. Such a contest would be good for the country.

This isn’t a terribly bold conclusion on my part — Sarah Bakewell wrote a book extolling the value of Montaigne’s wisdom for a contemporary audience — but even still, I think the subtlety of Montaigne’s thinking isn’t fully appreciated today and can even help us unravel some of the most thorny issues of contemporary philosophy. In fact, if I would say that there’s a single method to Montaigne’s wisdom it’s this — avoid all thorny situations.

I’ll get to the details of that in a bit, but first I want to bring Nietzsche back into the discussion to examine the thorniest of all of his philosophical concepts: will to power. This is a concept that has been dangerously misunderstood for more than a century in large part because Nietzsche never completed his promised metaphysical system built around “will to power.” Then, after losing his sanity, Nietzsche’s notebooks were absconded by his sister, who proceeded to bastardize them into a virtual handbook for fascists. To this day, many people think of Nazi parades when they hear the phrase “will to power.”

But according to New York University philosophy professor John Richardson in his book “Nietzsche’s System,” Nietzsche had something far more subtle in mind for the phrase:

When we first hear Nietzsche’s claim, and as long as we allow our understanding of it to be guided by his terms’ surface suggestions, we suppose he is speaking of a human willing that aims at power over other persons as its ultimate end…. But although many now see (this definition’s) inadequacy, I think it hasn’t yet been replaced with a full enough positive conception of the will to power.

So if ‘will to power’ isn’t a drive for all human beings to dominate — which would have made it akin to social darwinism — then what is it? First of all, we need to step back from the idea that it’s about people at all:

‘Will to power’ is most basically applied not to people but to ‘drives’ or ‘forces’, simpler units which Nietzsche sometimes even calls ‘points’ and ‘power quanta’. These are the simplest ‘units’ of will to power, or the simplest beings that are such will; we grasp Nietzsche better if we begin with these and only later make the complex extension to persons.

At the most basic, understandable level, think of ‘will to power’ in terms of our drives: hunger, sex drive, competitiveness and consumer desire. All of these drives are determined to win — and they are often in competition with one another to achieve that result:

‘Will to power’ is a potency for something, a directedness toward some end…. Just as scientists speak of a variety of drives or forces, so Nietzsche takes the units of will to power to be deeply diverse in their types, differentiated by their distinctive efforts or tendencies. The sex drive, for example, is one pattern of activity aiming at its own network of ends-perhaps these are centered on seduction or coupling or orgasm-whereas the drive to eat aims at a very different network.

But even though Nietzsche uses the word ‘will,’ we should not assume that he believed we are in complete control of these forces. To the contrary, Nietzsche believed that these forces are extraordinarily powerful and warp our common concept of free will:

Our usual notion of the will is not just too narrow-it’s not even true of us; (Nietzsche will) claim that precisely because we are constituted out of drives or forces, we don’t ‘will’ anything in the way we ordinarily suppose.

That’s the basic framework that Nietzsche spelled out in numerous books. He never ties it all together, however. And we’re still left with some nagging questions about what to do with this insight, if it’s in fact valid. If these drives are as powerful as Nietzsche suggests, should we merely surrender to them — say yes to everything, as Nietzsche himself claims as a New Year’s resolution at one point.

Montaigne, as I have said previously, is a wonderful moderator of Nietzsche’s most extreme thoughts. In particular, I think Montaigne gives us some very good reasons in this essay to say no much more frequently than we say yes. What I find particularly interesting, however, is the reason why Montaigne believes that we should say no — and that is because he basically agrees with Nietzsche that our drives, and the drives of others, are tremendously powerful and once we start down the road of yes-saying, we’ll inevitably become slaves to the will of others.

The argument doesn’t always sound the way I just characterized it — Montaigne is heavily influenced by the stoics, so when he’s talking about powerlessness, it’s often wrapped in the language of a powerful will. But bear in mind that Montaigne also understands, and writes frequently about, the limits of reason, so he’s not suggesting here that reason is sufficient to conquer these drives:

I exercise great care to extend by reason and reflection this privileged lack of emotion, which is by nature well advanced in me. I am wedded to few things and so am passionate about few. My sight is clear but I fix it on only a few objectives; my perception is scrupulous and receptive, but I find things hard to grasp and my concentration is vague. I do not easily get involved.

Montaigne’s distance is not the result of disinterest, however, it’s the result of a conscious effort to keep distance from enthusiasms that could suck away his time and attention:

There are emotions which drag me from myself and tie me up elsewhere: those I oppose with all my might. In my opinion we must lend ourselves to others but give ourselves to ourselves alone. Even if my will did find it easy to pawn and bind itself to others, I could not persevere: by nature and habit I am too fastidious for that: fleeing from obligations and born for untroubled leisure.

That line about lending ourselves — but not giving ourselves — to others is crucial to understanding Montaigne. He never suggests that we become hermits or adopt selfish attitudes. Rather, he’s suggesting that we avoid the mistake he made when becoming mayor of Bordeaux, becoming so involved in an activity that was not a passion of his that it becomes a form of slavery. The reason why such situations should be avoided is that we cannot detach ourselves and our multitude of drives … so we end up becoming passionate, even enraged, in situations that have no real meaning to us other than the personal affront:

Stubborn earnest arguments which ended in victory for my opponent, as well as results which made me ashamed of my hot pursuit, might indeed most cruelly gnaw at me. If I were to then to bite back as others do my soul would never find the strength to support the alarms and commotions which attend those who embrace so much: it would straightway be put out of joint by such internal strife.

A balance must be struck, however, because there is great virtue in serving others. The test is this — surrendering yourself willingly to these duties, not becoming personally engaged in them. Think back to what Montaigne’s viewpoint of religion, because it was similar … it’s better to just accept the tenets of the Church, make the leap of faith and not give it a second thought, because religion has a value beyond ourselves and personalizing it can only bring suffering:

Whoever knows its duties and practices them is truly in the treasure-house of the Muses: he has reached the pinnacle of human happiness and of man’s joy. Such a man, knowing precisely what is due to himself, finds that his role includes frequenting men and the world; to do this he must contribute to society the offices and duties which concern him. He who does not live a little for others hardly lives at all for himself.

The opposite approach to this balance takes two forms — becoming detached from social obligations and trying to guide others towards salvation or surrendering your entire life for the provision of others:

Any man who forgot to live a good and holy life himself, but who thought that he had fulfilled his duties by guiding and training others to do so, would be stupid: in exactly the same way, any man who gives up a sane and happy life in order to provide one for others makes (in my opinion) a bad and unnatural decision.

Montaigne, at the tail end of his life, fully embraces living a passionate life. Think back to his essay on conversation — he doesn’t want us to be engaged in vague pleasantries, he wants us to passionately debate and enjoy competitions. But his belief in balance is always a part of his thinking and here he warns us not to get involved in the kind of competitions that might bring out these agonistic passions to no good end:

Even in vain and trivial pursuits such as chess or tennis matches, the keen and burning involvement of a rash desire at once throws your mind into a lack of discernment and your limbs into confusion: you daze yourself and tangle yourself up. A man who reacts with greater moderation towards winning or losing is always ‘at home’: the less he goads himself on, and the less passionate he is about the game, the more surely and successfully he plays it.

At the end of that quote, Montaigne is drifting back into Stoic rhetoric … and I think he loses his train of argument a bit by doing so. Later on in the essay, I think he expresses the idea a bit more clearly:

I used to like games of chance with cards and dice. I rid myself of them long ago – for one reason only: whenever I lost, no matter what a good face I put on, I still felt a stab of pain. A man of honor, who must take it deeply to heart if he is insulted or given the lie and not be one to accept some nonsense to pay and console him for his loss, should avoid letting controversies grow as well as stubborn quarrels.

Montaigne doesn’t come up with an absolute answer here, he just provides a useful way of considering Nietzsche’s conception of powerful drives. In doing so, he also makes a point that plays back into his essay about conversation. I would suggest that, along with a series of drives that create forms of human competition, there’s also a drive to avoid confrontation. The popularity of highly-polarized news channels such as Fox News and MSNBC is a testament to this fact … people do not watch these channels because they want a vigorous two way debate, they watch them to avoid debate, so they can receive news and information that fits within their comfort zone and doesn’t push them into an aggressive fury.

The great risk of this approach in a democracy is that if you don’t vent the frustration in small batches, it can eventually explode when your team loses a major competition. Montaigne’s call for debate is a way of avoid the kind of madness that he describes here:

I want us to win, but I am not driven mad if we do not. I am firmly attached to the sanest of the parties, but I do not desire to be particularly known as an enemy of the others beyond what is generally reasonable. I absolutely condemn such defective arguments…. When my convictions make me devoted to one faction, it is not with so violent a bond that my understanding becomes infected by it. During the present confusion in this State of ours my own interest has not made me fail to recognize laudable qualities in our adversaries nor reprehensible ones among those whom I follow. People worship everything on their own side: for most of what I see on mine I do not even make excuses.

Montaigne suggests that for some matters, we need to expose ourselves regularly, in small doses, to competition and differences so we do not end up demonizing those who we disagree with. On the other hand, there are some powerful passions within us that can do so much danger to us, we’re better off shutting them off completely:

Socrates never says, ‘Do not surrender to the attraction of beauty; resist it; struggle against it.’ He says, ‘Flee it; run from its sight and from any encounter with it, as from a potent poison which can dart and strike you from afar.’ And that good disciple of his, describing either fictionally or historically (though in my opinion more historically than fictionally) the rare perfections of Cyrus the Great, shows him distrusting his ability to resist the attractions of the heavenly beauty of his captive the illustrious Panthea: it was to a man who was less at liberty than he was that he gave the tasks of visiting her and guarding her.

I think what Montaigne is suggesting is this: we have a certain social role in life that requires our engagement with a wider world. Shutting ourselves off from the world is impossible, so we should engage with it honestly and directly. Debate issues, take up sides, do so honorably and with loyalty — but make every effort to avoid demonizing those who have taken other positions. But when it comes to our personal lives, we are under no obligation to engage our drives as openly as we engage the world. These drives are mysterious and often dangerous … and when it comes to living your life, saying no is the best way to retain your freedom:

How much easier it is never to get in than to get yourself out! We should act contrary to the reed which, when it first appears, throws up a long straight stem but afterwards, as though it were exhausted and had lost its wind, makes several dense nodules, as so many respites which indicate that it no longer has its original vigor and drive. We must rather begin gently and coolly, saving our breath for the encounter and our vigorous thrusts for finishing the job off. In their beginnings it is we who guide affairs and hold them in our power; but once they are set in motion, it is they which guide us and sweep us along and we who have to follow.

People constantly make the mistake of starting off on ventures that hold only middling interest, believing that they can moderate their involvement to achieve some discrete end. But these are the most perilous decisions of our lives — it is these dispassions that create the greatest dangers. Recognize these situations and avoid them, Montaigne is suggesting:

We must keep our eyes open at their beginnings; you cannot find the danger then because it is so small: once it has grown, you cannot find the cure. While chasing ambition I would have had to face, every day, thousands of irritations harder to digest than the difficulty I had in putting a stop to my natural inclination towards it.

This isn’t a terribly bold conclusion on my part — Sarah Bakewell wrote a book extolling the value of Montaigne’s wisdom for a contemporary audience — but even still, I think the subtlety of Montaigne’s thinking isn’t fully appreciated today and can even help us unravel some of the most thorny issues of contemporary philosophy. In fact, if I would say that there’s a single method to Montaigne’s wisdom it’s this — avoid all thorny situations.

I’ll get to the details of that in a bit, but first I want to bring Nietzsche back into the discussion to examine the thorniest of all of his philosophical concepts: will to power. This is a concept that has been dangerously misunderstood for more than a century in large part because Nietzsche never completed his promised metaphysical system built around “will to power.” Then, after losing his sanity, Nietzsche’s notebooks were absconded by his sister, who proceeded to bastardize them into a virtual handbook for fascists. To this day, many people think of Nazi parades when they hear the phrase “will to power.”

But according to New York University philosophy professor John Richardson in his book “Nietzsche’s System,” Nietzsche had something far more subtle in mind for the phrase:

When we first hear Nietzsche’s claim, and as long as we allow our understanding of it to be guided by his terms’ surface suggestions, we suppose he is speaking of a human willing that aims at power over other persons as its ultimate end…. But although many now see (this definition’s) inadequacy, I think it hasn’t yet been replaced with a full enough positive conception of the will to power.

So if ‘will to power’ isn’t a drive for all human beings to dominate — which would have made it akin to social darwinism — then what is it? First of all, we need to step back from the idea that it’s about people at all:

‘Will to power’ is most basically applied not to people but to ‘drives’ or ‘forces’, simpler units which Nietzsche sometimes even calls ‘points’ and ‘power quanta’. These are the simplest ‘units’ of will to power, or the simplest beings that are such will; we grasp Nietzsche better if we begin with these and only later make the complex extension to persons.

At the most basic, understandable level, think of ‘will to power’ in terms of our drives: hunger, sex drive, competitiveness and consumer desire. All of these drives are determined to win — and they are often in competition with one another to achieve that result:

‘Will to power’ is a potency for something, a directedness toward some end…. Just as scientists speak of a variety of drives or forces, so Nietzsche takes the units of will to power to be deeply diverse in their types, differentiated by their distinctive efforts or tendencies. The sex drive, for example, is one pattern of activity aiming at its own network of ends-perhaps these are centered on seduction or coupling or orgasm-whereas the drive to eat aims at a very different network.

But even though Nietzsche uses the word ‘will,’ we should not assume that he believed we are in complete control of these forces. To the contrary, Nietzsche believed that these forces are extraordinarily powerful and warp our common concept of free will:

Our usual notion of the will is not just too narrow-it’s not even true of us; (Nietzsche will) claim that precisely because we are constituted out of drives or forces, we don’t ‘will’ anything in the way we ordinarily suppose.

That’s the basic framework that Nietzsche spelled out in numerous books. He never ties it all together, however. And we’re still left with some nagging questions about what to do with this insight, if it’s in fact valid. If these drives are as powerful as Nietzsche suggests, should we merely surrender to them — say yes to everything, as Nietzsche himself claims as a New Year’s resolution at one point.

Montaigne, as I have said previously, is a wonderful moderator of Nietzsche’s most extreme thoughts. In particular, I think Montaigne gives us some very good reasons in this essay to say no much more frequently than we say yes. What I find particularly interesting, however, is the reason why Montaigne believes that we should say no — and that is because he basically agrees with Nietzsche that our drives, and the drives of others, are tremendously powerful and once we start down the road of yes-saying, we’ll inevitably become slaves to the will of others.

The argument doesn’t always sound the way I just characterized it — Montaigne is heavily influenced by the stoics, so when he’s talking about powerlessness, it’s often wrapped in the language of a powerful will. But bear in mind that Montaigne also understands, and writes frequently about, the limits of reason, so he’s not suggesting here that reason is sufficient to conquer these drives:

I exercise great care to extend by reason and reflection this privileged lack of emotion, which is by nature well advanced in me. I am wedded to few things and so am passionate about few. My sight is clear but I fix it on only a few objectives; my perception is scrupulous and receptive, but I find things hard to grasp and my concentration is vague. I do not easily get involved.

Montaigne’s distance is not the result of disinterest, however, it’s the result of a conscious effort to keep distance from enthusiasms that could suck away his time and attention:

There are emotions which drag me from myself and tie me up elsewhere: those I oppose with all my might. In my opinion we must lend ourselves to others but give ourselves to ourselves alone. Even if my will did find it easy to pawn and bind itself to others, I could not persevere: by nature and habit I am too fastidious for that: fleeing from obligations and born for untroubled leisure.

That line about lending ourselves — but not giving ourselves — to others is crucial to understanding Montaigne. He never suggests that we become hermits or adopt selfish attitudes. Rather, he’s suggesting that we avoid the mistake he made when becoming mayor of Bordeaux, becoming so involved in an activity that was not a passion of his that it becomes a form of slavery. The reason why such situations should be avoided is that we cannot detach ourselves and our multitude of drives … so we end up becoming passionate, even enraged, in situations that have no real meaning to us other than the personal affront:

Stubborn earnest arguments which ended in victory for my opponent, as well as results which made me ashamed of my hot pursuit, might indeed most cruelly gnaw at me. If I were to then to bite back as others do my soul would never find the strength to support the alarms and commotions which attend those who embrace so much: it would straightway be put out of joint by such internal strife.

A balance must be struck, however, because there is great virtue in serving others. The test is this — surrendering yourself willingly to these duties, not becoming personally engaged in them. Think back to what Montaigne’s viewpoint of religion, because it was similar … it’s better to just accept the tenets of the Church, make the leap of faith and not give it a second thought, because religion has a value beyond ourselves and personalizing it can only bring suffering:

Whoever knows its duties and practices them is truly in the treasure-house of the Muses: he has reached the pinnacle of human happiness and of man’s joy. Such a man, knowing precisely what is due to himself, finds that his role includes frequenting men and the world; to do this he must contribute to society the offices and duties which concern him. He who does not live a little for others hardly lives at all for himself.

The opposite approach to this balance takes two forms — becoming detached from social obligations and trying to guide others towards salvation or surrendering your entire life for the provision of others:

Any man who forgot to live a good and holy life himself, but who thought that he had fulfilled his duties by guiding and training others to do so, would be stupid: in exactly the same way, any man who gives up a sane and happy life in order to provide one for others makes (in my opinion) a bad and unnatural decision.

Montaigne, at the tail end of his life, fully embraces living a passionate life. Think back to his essay on conversation — he doesn’t want us to be engaged in vague pleasantries, he wants us to passionately debate and enjoy competitions. But his belief in balance is always a part of his thinking and here he warns us not to get involved in the kind of competitions that might bring out these agonistic passions to no good end:

Even in vain and trivial pursuits such as chess or tennis matches, the keen and burning involvement of a rash desire at once throws your mind into a lack of discernment and your limbs into confusion: you daze yourself and tangle yourself up. A man who reacts with greater moderation towards winning or losing is always ‘at home’: the less he goads himself on, and the less passionate he is about the game, the more surely and successfully he plays it.

At the end of that quote, Montaigne is drifting back into Stoic rhetoric … and I think he loses his train of argument a bit by doing so. Later on in the essay, I think he expresses the idea a bit more clearly:

I used to like games of chance with cards and dice. I rid myself of them long ago – for one reason only: whenever I lost, no matter what a good face I put on, I still felt a stab of pain. A man of honor, who must take it deeply to heart if he is insulted or given the lie and not be one to accept some nonsense to pay and console him for his loss, should avoid letting controversies grow as well as stubborn quarrels.

Montaigne doesn’t come up with an absolute answer here, he just provides a useful way of considering Nietzsche’s conception of powerful drives. In doing so, he also makes a point that plays back into his essay about conversation. I would suggest that, along with a series of drives that create forms of human competition, there’s also a drive to avoid confrontation. The popularity of highly-polarized news channels such as Fox News and MSNBC is a testament to this fact … people do not watch these channels because they want a vigorous two way debate, they watch them to avoid debate, so they can receive news and information that fits within their comfort zone and doesn’t push them into an aggressive fury.

The great risk of this approach in a democracy is that if you don’t vent the frustration in small batches, it can eventually explode when your team loses a major competition. Montaigne’s call for debate is a way of avoid the kind of madness that he describes here:

I want us to win, but I am not driven mad if we do not. I am firmly attached to the sanest of the parties, but I do not desire to be particularly known as an enemy of the others beyond what is generally reasonable. I absolutely condemn such defective arguments…. When my convictions make me devoted to one faction, it is not with so violent a bond that my understanding becomes infected by it. During the present confusion in this State of ours my own interest has not made me fail to recognize laudable qualities in our adversaries nor reprehensible ones among those whom I follow. People worship everything on their own side: for most of what I see on mine I do not even make excuses.

Montaigne suggests that for some matters, we need to expose ourselves regularly, in small doses, to competition and differences so we do not end up demonizing those who we disagree with. On the other hand, there are some powerful passions within us that can do so much danger to us, we’re better off shutting them off completely:

Socrates never says, ‘Do not surrender to the attraction of beauty; resist it; struggle against it.’ He says, ‘Flee it; run from its sight and from any encounter with it, as from a potent poison which can dart and strike you from afar.’ And that good disciple of his, describing either fictionally or historically (though in my opinion more historically than fictionally) the rare perfections of Cyrus the Great, shows him distrusting his ability to resist the attractions of the heavenly beauty of his captive the illustrious Panthea: it was to a man who was less at liberty than he was that he gave the tasks of visiting her and guarding her.

I think what Montaigne is suggesting is this: we have a certain social role in life that requires our engagement with a wider world. Shutting ourselves off from the world is impossible, so we should engage with it honestly and directly. Debate issues, take up sides, do so honorably and with loyalty — but make every effort to avoid demonizing those who have taken other positions. But when it comes to our personal lives, we are under no obligation to engage our drives as openly as we engage the world. These drives are mysterious and often dangerous … and when it comes to living your life, saying no is the best way to retain your freedom:

How much easier it is never to get in than to get yourself out! We should act contrary to the reed which, when it first appears, throws up a long straight stem but afterwards, as though it were exhausted and had lost its wind, makes several dense nodules, as so many respites which indicate that it no longer has its original vigor and drive. We must rather begin gently and coolly, saving our breath for the encounter and our vigorous thrusts for finishing the job off. In their beginnings it is we who guide affairs and hold them in our power; but once they are set in motion, it is they which guide us and sweep us along and we who have to follow.

People constantly make the mistake of starting off on ventures that hold only middling interest, believing that they can moderate their involvement to achieve some discrete end. But these are the most perilous decisions of our lives — it is these dispassions that create the greatest dangers. Recognize these situations and avoid them, Montaigne is suggesting:

We must keep our eyes open at their beginnings; you cannot find the danger then because it is so small: once it has grown, you cannot find the cure. While chasing ambition I would have had to face, every day, thousands of irritations harder to digest than the difficulty I had in putting a stop to my natural inclination towards it.

Montaigne begins, as he often does, disparaging this project and his life’s work:

The Law ought to impose restraints on silly useless writers as it does on vagabonds and loafers. Then my own book and a hundred others would be banished from the hands of our people. I am not joking. Scribbling seems to be one of the symptoms of an age of excess. When did we ever write so much as since the beginning of our Civil Wars? And whenever did the Romans do so as just before their collapse? Apart from the fact that to make minds more refined does not mean that a polity is made more wise, such busy idleness arises from everyone slacking over the duties of his vocation and being enticed away. Each individual one of us contributes to the corrupting of our time: some contribute treachery, other (since they are powerful) injustice, irreligion, tyranny, cupidity, cruelty: the weaker ones like me contribute silliness, vanity and idleness. When harmful things are compelling then, it seems, is the season for vain ones; in an age when so many behave wickedly it is almost praiseworthy merely to be useless.

Jump forward to the information age and I would contend that writing is one of the least vain activities in which you can be engaged. It’s not like Americans spend their time building things or harvesting wheat anymore — for the most part, we spend our time and energies providing goods and services for people wealthier than we are, or helping them build an even greater fortune. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of it — it just seems to me that the line between serious and trivial work disappeared ago, with the exception of those who make a living in the military or as emergency first responders. Despite his protests, I think Montaigne senses the actual work — and the value of that work — even as he’s hesitant to surrender his modesty. He has to give a bawdy counterexample to demonstrate his project’s relative worth:

Anyone can see that I have set out on a road along which I shall travel without toil and without ceasing as long as the world has ink and paper. I cannot give an account of my life by my actions: Fortune has placed them too low for that; so I do so by my thoughts. Thus did a nobleman I once knew reveal his life only by the workings of his bowels: at home he paraded before you a series of seven or eight days‚ in chamber-pots. He thought about them, talked about them: for him any other topic stank. Here (a little more decorously) you have the droppings of an old mind, sometimes hard, sometimes squittery, but always ill-digested.

Montaigne then reveals a new piece of his psyche that somehow escaped all previous essays — he needs this project because he lacks a male heir:

My chief aim in life being to live it lazily and leisurely rather than busily, she has taken from me the need to proliferate in wealth to provide for a proliferation of heirs. For a single heir, if what has been plenty enough for me is not enough for him, that is just too bad. His foolishness would not justify my wishing him more.

And even if his project proved to be worthless — which it clearly did not — just providing him an escape from the world of toil would have been reward enough:

What would I not do to avoid reading through a contract and shaking the dust off piles of papers, a slave to my affairs and, worse still, a slave to other people‚ like so many folk who do it for the money! For me nothing is expensive save toil and worry: all I want is to be indifferent and bovine. I was made, I think, more for living off somebody else, if that could be done without servitude and obligation. And when I look at things closely I am not sure whether, for a man of my temperament and station, what I have to put up with from business and agents and servants does not entail more degradation, bother and bitterness than there would be in following a man born greater than I who would give me a bit of guidance and comfort. Slavery is the obedience of a weak and despondent mind lacking in will.

It may sound harsh to compare the world of office toil to slavery, but I accept that characterization. My own experience is that I willingly follow and serve natural leaders, but have great difficulty accepting the opinion and authority of those who are, at best, my peers. I readily accept, and welcome, fact checking and genuine editing, but loathe heavy-handed rewriting from people who could never succeed at the jobs I’ve held. Montaigne’s position is that people continue to accede to this style of life due to our fear of nonconformism:

We cheat ourselves of what is rightly useful to us in order to conform our appearances to the common opinion. We are not so much concerned with what the actual nature of our being is within us, as with how it is perceived by the public. Even wisdom and the good things of the mind seem fruitless to us if we enjoy them by ourselves, if they are not paraded before the approving eyes of others.

Extrapolate this behavior to a full society and you end up with a cobbled-together mess:

I learn from our example that, whatever the cost, human society remains cobbled and held together. No matter what position you place them in, men will jostle into heaps and arrange themselves in piles, just as odd objects thrust any-old-how into a sack find their own way of fitting together better than art could ever arrange them. King Philip made just such a pile from the most wicked and depraved men he could find. He built them a city which bore their name and sent them there. I reckon that out of their very vices they wove for themselves a political fabric and an advantageous lawful society.

Returning to a previous theme from several essays, Montaigne still holds that custom is what governs a society best. So there’s a contradiction in Montaigne’s thought, that a successful culture requires a level of conformism, but this same conformism is keeping individuals from reaching their true potential and perhaps from attaining happiness:

The best and most excellent polity for each nation is the one under which it has been sustained. Its form and its essential advantages depend upon custom. It is easy for us to be displeased with its present condition; I nevertheless hold that to yearn for an oligarchy in a democracy or for another form of government in a monarchy is wrong and insane.

It’s an important point, but Montaigne doesn’t develop it here, returning instead to the fact that he’s said much of this before:

In these ravings of mine, what I fear is that my treacherous memory should make me inadvertently record the same thing twice. I hate going over my writings and only unwillingly probe a topic again once it has got away. I have no freshly learned doctrines; these are my normal ideas. Having doubtless conceived them a hundred times I am afraid that I may have mentioned them already.

Montaigne apologizes for changing subjects frequently, but also explains the method behind the madness:

I change subject violently and chaotically. My pen and my mind both go a-roaming. If you do not want more dullness you must accept a touch of madness, so say the precepts of our past masters and, even more so, their example. There are hundreds of poets who drag and droop prosaically, but the best of ancient prose, and I scatter prose here no differently from verse sparkles throughout with poetic power and daring…. Since I cannot hold my reader’s attention by my weight, it is no bad thing if I manage to do so by my muddle. Yes, but afterwards he will be sorry he spent time over it. I suppose so: but still he would have done it! And there are humors so made that they despise anything which they can understand and which will rate me more highly when they do not know what I mean. They will infer the depth of my meaning from its obscurity ‚Äì a quality which (to speak seriously now) I hate most strongly; I would avoid it if there were a way of avoiding myself. Aristotle somewhere congratulates himself on affecting it: a depraved affectation!

Montaigne then explains why the third edition essays are so much longer — never realizing that the quality of the product has markedly improved as well:

Because the very frequent division into chapters which I first adopted seemed to me to break the reader‚ attention before it was aroused and to loosen its hold so that it did not bother for so slight a cause to apply itself and to concentrate, I started making longer chapters which require a decision to read them and time set aside for them. In this kind of occupation, whoever is not prepared to give a man one hour is prepared to give him nothing; and you do nothing for a man if you only do it while doing something else. Besides I may perhaps have some personal quality which obliges me to half-state matters and to speak confusedly and incompatibly.

There’s actually very little confusion in the third volume — but there is a great amount of muddle in this very long, highly meandering piece. Montaigne suggests at one point that his entire project might be a massive, unedited mess. Untrue in general, but perhaps in particular:

Reader: just let this tentative essay, this third prolongation of my self-portrait, run its course. I make additions but not corrections: firstly, that is because when a man has mortgaged his book to the world I find it reasonable that he should no longer have any rights over it. Let him put it better elsewhere if he can, not corrupt the work he has already sold. From such folk you should buy nothing until they are dead. Let them do their thinking properly before they publish. Who is making them hurry? My book is ever one: except that, to avoid the purchaser going away quite empty-handed when a new edition is brought out, I allow myself, since it is merely a piece of badly joined marquetry, to tack on some additional ornaments. That is no more than a little extra thrown in, which does not damn the original version but does lend some particular value to each subsequent one through some ambitious bit of precision. From this there can easily arise however some transposition of the chronological order, my tales finding their place not always by age but by opportuneness.

There is one amusing sidebar element to Montaigne’s essay worth mentioning — he starts to imagine how future readers might interpret what he writes. This is interesting, for one, because it’s the first time that Montaigne recognizes that the project might have lasting value.

When all is said and done I have no wish (as I know often happens whenever the dead are recalled to memory) that people should start arguing, claiming ‘This is how he thought; this is how he lived’; ‘If only he had uttered a few last words he would have said this or given away that‚”I knew him better than anyone else.’ Here I make known, as far as propriety allows, my feelings and inclinations. I do so more freely and readily by word of mouth for any who want to know; nevertheless if you look into these memoirs of mine you will find that I have said everything or intimated everything. What I have been unable to express in words I point towards with my finger: Those slight traces are enough for a keen mind and will safely lead you to discover the rest.

Which I believe is quite right — and I find it amazing how badly the essays have been misinterpreted through the centuries, especially in regard to his views of religion. Montaigne may be unclear in parts, but in total his worldview was elucidated with remarkable clarity. Which, interestingly enough, is the point that he returns to the question of personal freedom and culture:

My own manners deviate from current morality by hardly more than an inch, yet even that makes me intractable for this age and unsociable. I do not know whether I am unreasonable in losing my taste for the society I frequent, but I do know that it would be unreasonable if I complained that it had lost its taste for me more than I for it.

Montaigne ends with one of his most rebellious statements — that for all of the support he lends throughout the project for the status quo and for respecting culture, his genuine affections might be on the side of the troublemakers and rabble rousers in life:

I, on the contrary, strive to give worth to vanity itself, to doltishness, if it affords me pleasure, and I follow my natural inclinations without accounting for them thus closely.

The kind of conversation Montaigne has in mind isn’t filled with facile pleasantries and idle gossip. I can only imagine the revulsion he might feel if he were stuck in one of those endless Proust salon chats rating everyone’s standing in the social strata. The genius of Proust is the way he simultaneously displayed both insight and banality. We’re always aware of Marcel’s wisdom amidst the mindless blather. In this sense, Proust is the natural heir to Montaigne, except that his gift was in showing, not telling.

Still, if Proust cultural dissection lacked anything it was the kind of vigorous conversation that Montaigne extols in this essay. If “In Search of Lost Time” has a flaw (and the same could be said for Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,”) it’s the fact that too many insights are shared directly by the narrator, bypassing the kind of character-level debate and examination that would have made them more interesting. While I don’t find Doestoyevsky’s ideas as powerful as either Proust or Tolstoy, I do admire the way his latter novels let the characters debate everything without overt intervention from a narrator. And in fairness to Tolstoy, by the time he wrote “Anna Karenina,” he’d learned to let his ideas — and even some pointed counterpoints to his ideas — be spoken through his characters.

In my estimation, one of the great failings of modernism has been the slow drift away from vigorous debate and towards atomic polemics. That might seem like an odd statement — aren’t we surrounded by competing ideas and opinions? Yes, but we’ve left it to the individual to create and judge the intellectual clash. Even seemingly interactive technologies like blog comment sections have devolved into opportunities for individuals to either agree wholeheartedly or to tell the writer, in effect, to shut up.

Perhaps the clearest example of this can be found in our various definitions of debates. We still hold genuine debates in this country, but only between high school students, many of whom only understand a fraction of the arguments that they are reading off rapidly. (High school debates would be far more interesting and valuable if college philosophy students were forbidden to write briefs for them.) them.) The speed of contemporary debate is designed so that opponents will fail to respond to all arguments in the allotted time — and it’s simply easier to win an argument based on no response than to clash on every point and risk the outcome being decided by a judge, who may not understand anything being argued.

But for all the failing of academic debate, at least it is real debate, unlike the embarrassing joint-press-conference-type event featured in our political campaigns. These so called debates are designed to turn elections into quiz shows and to limit the amount of actual candidate interaction and clash as much as possible. We let American adolescents debate each other without a moderator or any form of adult intervention, but we can’t allow the candidates to rule us to interact with each other absent a news media authority figure, strict time constraints and blinking red lights. It’s lunacy.

Why do we need debate? Montaigne in this essay give us a rich catalog of reasons, starting with the simple truth that we never stop learning in life and one of the best ways to test both our ideas and style of discourse is to keep testing it:

Every day I am warned and counseled by the stupid deportment of someone. What hits you affects you and wakes you up more than what pleases you. We can only improve ourselves in times such as these by walking backwards, by discord not by harmony, by being different not by being like. Having myself learned little from good examples I use the bad ones, the text of which is routine. I strove to be as agreeable as others were seen to be boring; as firm as others were flabby; as gentle as others were sharp. But I was setting myself unattainable standards.

Can’t we continue to grow intellectually by reading? Yes, but it’s not sufficient — only in lively conversation do we get to test the ideas we’ve read and to integrate them our other thoughts. Intellectual competition for Montaigne is akin to sports:

Studying books has a languid feeble motion, whereas conversation provides teaching and exercise all at once. If I am sparring with a strong and solid opponent he will attack me on the flanks, stick his lance in me right and left; his ideas send mine soaring. Rivalry, competitiveness and glory will drive me and raise me above my own level. In conversation the most painful quality is perfect harmony.

Montaigne is clear that he doesn’t enjoy debating just anyone — and debating the stupid can be an exhausting experience. There’s a level of respect we accord to anyone who we agree to debate, which is why heavily favored candidates rarely allow their opponents the honor. Once this kind of agreement is reached, Montaigne would reject the contemporary custom of highly structured rules and would prefer a lively event:

Among gentlemen I like people to express themselves heartily, their words following wherever their thoughts lead. We ought to toughen and fortify our ears against being seduced by the sound of polite words. I like a strong, intimate, manly fellowship, the kind of friendship which rejoices in sharp vigorous exchanges just as love rejoices in bites and scratches which draw blood.

In a previous essay I called Plato the father of debate and Montaigne helps spell out why here — a proper debate is akin to one of Socrates’ dialectics and contestants should see them as both competitions and learning opportunities. If anyone ever creates the Las Vegas of debate that Montaigne suggests here, I will promptly relocate there:

When I am contradicted it arouses my attention not my wrath. I move towards the man who contradicts me: he is instructing me. The cause of truth ought to be common to us both. – What will his answer be? The passion of anger has already wounded his judgement. Turbulence has seized it before reason can. – It would be a useful idea if we had to wager on the deciding of our quarrels, useful if there were a material sign of our defeats so that we could keep tally on them and my manservant say: ‘Last year your ignorance and stubbornness cost you one hundred crowns on twenty occasions.’

Returning to the subject of yesterday’s essay, Montaigne reiterates his dislike for intellectual deference. This raises the point that internal debate is just as important as public contests:

It is a bland and harmful pleasure to have to deal with people who admire us and defer to us. Antisthenes commanded his sons never to give thanks or show gratitude to anyone who praised them. I feel far prouder of the victory I win over myself when I make myself give way beneath my adversary’s powers of reason in the heat of battle than I ever feel gratified by the victory I win over him through his weakness.

Next, Montaigne discusses an important feature of all debate: rules of order. The difference between genuine debate rules of order and the strict constraints of contemporary debates (and frequently interrupting TV hosts) is that the former facilitates genuine clash while the latter squelches it:

I admit and acknowledge any attacks, no matter how feeble, if they are made directly, but I am all too impatient of attacks which are not made in due form. I care little about what we are discussing; all opinions are the same to me and it is all but indifferent to me which proposition emerges victorious. I can go on peacefully arguing all day if the debate is conducted with due order.

Next, Montaigne takes on logicians. With the risk of sounding like one myself, Montaigne’s argument here isn’t entirely clear. He seems to be arguing against Socrates’ style of dialectics, but given everything else he’s written, that’s unlikely. Perhaps his arguments are intended to critique the French legal profession of his day. Regardless of the target, it reads today like an accurate critique of analytic philosophy:

There is the man who cannot see reason but holds you under siege within a hedge of dialectical conclusions and logical formulae. Who can avoid beginning to distrust our professional skills and doubt whether we can extract from them any solid profit of practical use in life when he reflects on the use we put them to? Such erudition as has no power to heal. Has anyone ever acquired intelligence through logic? Where are her beautiful promises? She teaches neither how to live a better life nor how to argue properly. Is there more of a hotchpotch in the cackle of fishwives than in the public disputations of men who profess logic? I would prefer a son of mine to learn to talk in the tavern rather than in our university yap-shops.

The “no power to heal” line is powerful — it’s this disconnect between intellectuals and the polity that’s creating greater distance between experts and democratic citizens at a time when greater understanding is necessary. Montaigne held such intellectuals with a special brand of contempt:

I like and honor erudition as much as those who have it. When used properly it is the most noble and powerful acquisition of Man. But in the kind of men (and their number is infinite) who make it the base and foundation of their worth and achievement, who quit their understanding for their memory, hiding behind other men’s shadows, and can do nothing except by book, I loathe (dare I say it?) little more than I loathe stupidity.

We end up debating — if ever — with tight communities of like minded people. Montaigne senses an element of tyranny in this:

There is always an element of tyrannical bad temper in being unable to tolerate characters different from your own. Secondly, there is in truth no greater silliness, none more enduring, than to be provoked and enraged by the silliness of this world – and there is none more bizarre. For it makes you principally irritated with yourself: that philosopher of old would never have lacked occasion for his tears if he had concentrated on himself.

Returning to intellectual clashes themselves, Montaigne next analyzes the question of authority — how can we judge facts without first validating the truth of the claims? And how can we consider a fact to be true unless we trust and esteem the source of the fact? The important point here — one lost in contemporary journalism — is that all facts and opinions are not equal. People must make judgment calls and need enough information to do so with accuracy:

It is not enough to relate our experiences: we must weigh them and group them; we must also have digested them and distilled them so as to draw out the reasons and conclusions they comport. There never were so many writing history! It is always good and profitable to listen to them, for they furnish us with ample instruction, fine and praiseworthy, from the storehouse of their memory: that is certainly of great value in helping us to live. But we are not looking for that at the moment: we are trying to find out whether the chroniclers and compilers are themselves worthy of praise …. Anyone who could discover the means by which men could be justly judged and reasonably chosen would, at a stroke, establish a perfect form of commonwealth.

One reason why we cannot always make those kinds of rational calls is because luck intervenes — destroying best laid plans and bailing out the foolish:

In this world’s activities we often notice that Fortune rivals Virtue: she shows us what power she has over everything and delights in striking down our presumption by making the incompetent lucky since she cannot make them wise. She loves to interfere, favoring those performances whose course has been entirely her own. That is why we can see, every day, the simplest among us bringing the greatest public and private tasks to successful conclusions …. Our very wisdom and mature reflections are for the most part led by chance. My will and my reasoning are stirred this way and that. And many of their movements govern themselves without me. My reason is daily subject to incitements and agitations which are due to chance.

As mentioned previously, I’m far less concerned than Montaigne about the dangers of rhetorical style. With so many other forms of entertainment competing today, I find it a small miracle that anyone would choose to listen to a speech anymore. But I do agree with Montaigne that we make far too much of what are now called “sound bites:”

In debates and discussions we should not immediately be impressed by what we take to be a man’s own bons mots. Most men are rich with other men’s abilities. It may well be that such-and-such a man makes a fine remark, a good reply or a pithy saying, advancing it without realizing its power. That we do not grasp everything we borrow can doubtless be proved from my own case. We should not always give way, no matter what beauty or truth it may have. We should either seriously attack it or else, under pretense of not understanding it, retreat a little so as to probe it thoroughly and to discover how it is lodged in its author.

In conclusion, Montaigne raises an important point of humility: debate is always about understanding and the primary subject is always yourself — what you know, feel and believe:

A man of straight and elevated mind who judges surely and soundly employs in all circumstances examples taken from himself as well as from others, and frankly cites himself as witness as well as third parties. We should jump over those plebeian rules of etiquette in favor of truth and freedom. I not only dare to talk about myself but to talk of nothing but myself. I am wandering off the point when I write of anything else, cheating my subject of me.

Through the years, I haven’t written much about Mayor Daley, for the most part because Jenny remained in his employ in the 13 1/2 years after I left City Hall employment. Montaigne would understand my silence:

There are few matters on which we can give an unbiased judgement because there are few in which we do not have a private interest some way or other.

My private interest has been to support this Mayor and keep the more colorful stories of government service to myself. And now that he’s leaving office — with far less to gain from doing so — I’m going to remain loyal and silent. Mayor Daley has earned this loyalty.

Yesterday, after the photos were snapped — and all three boys took their place in the Mayor’s seat (let the record show that Finn was most reluctant to leave) — the Mayor remarked “you have a nice family,” to which I responded that, since Jenny and I met working for him, the family is entirely due to him. But I wonder if he doesn’t feel that about most families in his city … because he’s commanded Chicago throughout his tenure.

It’s hard to imagine what Richard M. Daley will do without the power of his office … but Montaigne argues that the ability to walk away is the greatest sign of internal strength:

In general high rank has one obvious advantage: it can lay itself aside whenever it wants to; it is virtually free to choose either condition. All forms of greatness are not brought low uniquely by a fall: some there are which allow you to stoop low without falling. It does seem to me that we set too high a value on it, as we also do on the determination of those whom we have seen or heard refusing it or resigning it at their own volition. In its essence the advantage of it is not so self-evident that it takes a miracle to reject it.

For all of the challenges of the job, Mayor Daley held until the very end that he has the best job in America. One reason why he’s succeeded for so long is that he’s demanded the same level of professional passion from the people around him — he wants everyone in their discrete roles to believe that they too hold the best job in America. After all, heavy wears the crown and many, Montaigne included, are not suited for it:

I have never found myself wishing for imperial or royal rank nor for the prominence of those high destinies where men command. My aims do not tend that way: I love myself too much for that. When I think of growing in constancy or wisdom or health or beauty, or even wealth, it is in a modest way, with a timid constricted growth appropriate to myself; but my imagination is oppressed by great renown or mighty authority.

Serving a leader, whether a mayor or a king, requires a certain mindset — knowledge of your middling rank. Overstepping your authority, or worse circumventing authority, is the greatest sin. Montaigne held positions like this throughout his professional career and seemed perfectly suited by nature to the jobs:

I want neither to be a wretched nobody arguing with doorkeepers nor one who causes crowds to part with awe as I pass through. By lot and also by taste I am accustomed to a middling rank. In the conduct of my life and of anything I have undertaken, I have shown that I have fled rather than sought means of stepping above the degree of fortune in which God has placed me at birth. Anything established by Nature is as just as it is pleasant.

These middling jobs, however, can also be extremely demanding. Mayor Daley wants people who are passionate in these roles … so if your nature is either to reach higher or to get out of the pressure cooker, he’s not going to be sympathetic. Montaigne understood that this is probably the only course a ruler can take, which is why he eventually retired to his estate:
I have a soul so lazy that I do not measure my fortune by its height: I measure it by its pleasantness. But though I do not have all that great a mind, I do have one which is correspondingly open, one which orders me to dare to publish its weaknesses.

The emotional challenge of working within any system is accepting a level of domination. Unless you are on top — and Montaigne has already made clear that he doesn’t like such lofty heights — then you have to accept a role within the bureaucracy, which is something that Montaigne couldn’t accept freely. He even wishes for a certain “bargain” with power, where he’s freed from ruling if the rulers will just leave him alone:

I dislike all domination, by me or over me. Otanes, one of the Seven who had rightful claims to the throne of Persia, took a decision which I could well have taken myself. To his rivals he abandoned his rights to be elected or chosen by lot, on condition that he and his family could live in that empire free from all domination, and from all subordination except to those of the ancient laws, and should enjoy every freedom not prejudicial to those laws, since he found it intolerable both to give or to accept commands.

Words like these lend credence to the argument that Montaigne, not Estienne La Boetie, was the author of the infamous anarchists essay that Montaigne felt obliged to defend. I’m not a Montaigne scholar, so I have no learned opinion on the matter … I would tend to think that Montaigne was merely sympathetic with his dear friend and had enough insider knowledge to be skeptical of all authority.

Despite this skepticism, Montaigne is unusually sympathetic to rulers and the challenges they face. I’m in agreement with him here — despite the cliches about politicians, I find them for the most part to be likable, ethical people doing the best they can in a system they didn’t create:

The harshest and most difficult job in the world, in my judgment, is worthily to act the King. I can excuse more shortcomings in kings than men commonly do, out of consideration for the horrifying weight of their office, which stuns me. It is difficult for such disproportionate power to act with a sense of proportion.

According to Montaigne, one of the worst things about being a ruler is that no one has the courage to speak or act truth to power … and this lack of challenge, while seemingly deferential, is actually disdainful and insulting:

The disadvantage of great rank (which I have taken as the subject of my remarks here since some event called it to my attention) is the following: nothing perhaps in the whole of our dealings with others is more pleasant than those assays which we make of each other as rivals for honor in physical sports and for esteem in those of the mind – and in which a sovereign can take no real part. It has often seemed true to me that the force of respect leads to our actually treating princes disdainfully and insultingly.

A confession: looking back on my days in government, I don’t think that I stood up for my beliefs as strongly as I should have when face to face with Governor Wilder and Mayor Daley. It’s tough to stand your ground in the spotlight, but I now see that it’s the only way to serve them well. Perhaps it’s why politicians should always seek the counsel of older aides and those who have known you long enough to stand up to you personally, if not to the office.

My final thoughts on Mayor Daley are these: there is no question that, on balance, he leaves behind a greater Chicago than the one he inherited. Put aside the controversies and the stands on individual issues, Chicago has not suffered the decline of other American midwestern cities. And for that, we all owe Richard M. Daley our gratitude.

We have anecdotal evidence of some approaches that have worked in the past, but politics is not science and there’s no effective way to implement economic theories in a democratic polity. Every action comes down to a choice between standing by your emotional gut reaction or compromising for the sake of doing something.

Democratic polities prefer doing something over doing nothing, so there is always a strong incentive for both sides to compromise. And the greatest emotional incentive any politician has is to win re-election — and there’s no surer way to win someone’s favor than to do something that directly benefits a voter. And so, in the U.S., we have a system where the government pathologically spends too much and taxes too little. How much of an immediate and long-term problem this is, again, is open to interpretation, none of it based on verifiable fact, but for the most part on gut feelings and emotions.

For these reasons, I thinker like Montaigne is valuable even when analyzing the contemporary political economy. It doesn’t matter that he’s discussing politics in an Age of Kings, because his approach to politics is largely psychological — and what he has to say about rulers in the 16th century remains valid for Presidents, Governors, Congressmen and legislators today.

Start with what Montaigne thinks of Kings who spend lavishly on the public as a way of winning public opinion:

It is a sort of lack of confidence in monarchs, a sign of not being sure of their position, to strive to make themselves respected and glorious through excessive expenditure. It would be pardonable abroad but among his subjects, where he is the sovereign power, the highest degree of honor to which he can attain is derived from the position he holds. Similarly it seems to me that it is superfluous for a gentleman to take a lot of trouble over how he dresses when at home: his house, his servants, his cuisine are enough to vouch for him there.

Kings, of course, could remain in power without majority support of the governed … democratically-elected officials aren’t so lucky. That lack of confidence that Montaigne mention is endemic to their position. Montaigne isn’t actually writing about political spending in this quote, he’s talking more about lavish dress to promote the power of the monarchy. But the same also applies to governments, especially local ones, that choose to spend tax dollars on baseball stadiums and basketball arenas instead of infrastructure improvements that would actually enrich the community:

Such funds would seem to me to be more regal, useful, sensible and durable if spent on ports, harbors, fortifications and walls, on splendid buildings, on churches, hospitals and colleges, and on repairing roads and highways.

The central problem with modern democracy is that it’s become a contest to win the hearts of voters by spending other people’s money … which in turn ends up being the taxpayer’s money … which therefore encourages governments to keep taxes as low as possible without cutting back on the spending. When an economy is growing rapidly, this isn’t a problem … but when the economy slows, government has now lost the ability to “prime the pump” with spending or tax cuts. This leads to austerity at precisely the time that it causes the most harm. Montaigne contends that all of this is done in the name of generosity:

It is all too easy to stamp ideas of generosity on a man who has the means of fulfilling them with other people’s money. And since generosity is measured not against the gift but the means of the giver, in such powerful hands it always proves useless. To be generous, they discover, they have to be prodigal. So it is not highly honored compared to the other kingly virtues: it is, said Dionysius the Tyrant, the only virtue to be fully compatible with tyranny itself. I would rather teach a king this line from one ancient ploughman: that is, ‘If you want a good crop, you must broadcast your seed not pour it from your sack.

My old boss, former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder, calls this the “necessities versus niceties” conflict … all of those unsexy things that are necessary for a government to do to help promote a wealthier society — modern infrastructure, good schools, public health and safety and a reasonable safety net — fall under the axe first. And as Montaigne notes, when you help people in good times, you prevent yourself from providing truly needed help in bad times:

Liberality without moderation is a feeble means of acquiring good-will, since it offends more people than it seduces. The more people you have helped by it, the fewer you can help in the future… Is there a greater folly than doing something you like in such a way that you can do it no longer?

You might think that Montaigne is making a case for a purely minimal government, and for the most part he is, but beyond infrastructure and safety net, he also sees one other useful purpose for public money — creating works of cultural wonder. There’s a need to cultures to make investments in their own grandeur, mostly for the sake of posterity:

If anything can justify such excesses, it is the cases where the amazement was caused not by the expense but by the originality and ingenuity. Even in vanities such as these we can discover how those times abounded in more fertile minds than ours …. How puny and stunted is the knowledge of the most inquisitive men. A hundred times more is lost for us than what comes to our knowledge, not only of individual events (which sometimes are turned by Fortune into weighty exempla) but of the circumstances of great polities and nations. When our artillery and printing were invented we clamored about miracles: yet at the other end of the world in China men had been enjoying them over a thousand years earlier. If what we saw of the world were as great as the amount we now cannot see, it is to be believed that we would perceive an endless multiplication and succession of forms. Where Nature is concerned, nothing is unique or rare: but where our knowledge is concerned much certainly is, which constitutes a most pitiful foundation for our scientific laws, offering us a very false idea of everything.

Montaigne turns the discussion to how cultures interrelate, and uses the opening of the New World as an example of an opportunity lost:

What a renewal that would have been, what a restoration of the fabric of this world, if the first examples of our behavior which were set before that new world had summoned those peoples to be amazed by our virtue and to imitate it, and had created between them and us a brotherly fellowship and understanding. How easy it would have been to have worked profitably with folk whose souls were so unspoiled and so hungry to learn, having for the most part been given such a beautiful start by Nature. We, on the contrary, took advantage of their ignorance and lack of experience to pervert them more easily towards treachery, debauchery and cupidity, toward every kind of cruelty and inhumanity, by the example and model of our own manners. Whoever else has ever rated trade and commerce at such a price? So many cities razed to the ground, so many nations wiped out, so many millions of individuals put to the sword, and the most beautiful and the richest part of the world shattered, on behalf of the pearls-and-pepper business! Tradesmen’s victories! At least ambition and political strife never led men against men to such acts of horrifying enmity and to such pitiable disasters.

That’s a very strong statement against fighting wars of commerce — can there be anything less humane that destroying a civilization just to protect our own “quality of life?” Wouldn’t our genuine quality of life be improved by learning from these civilizations and by emulating their best aspects? Montaigne’s prudence in government spending fits into this as well — if cultures become so attached to their own bourgeois trappings that they demand ever greater largesse, isn’t it inevitable that they will seek out foreign enemies to continue this ill-earned enrichment. Learning to make sacrifices at home is the first step towards creating a more modest, respectful foreign policy. And we must also learn to be more humble about our achievements:

Neither Greece nor Rome nor Egypt can compare any of their constructions, for difficulty or utility or nobility, with the highway to be seen in Peru, built by their kings from the city of Quito to the city of Cuzco – three hundred leagues, that is – dead-straight, level, twenty-five yards wide, paved, furnished on either side with a revetment of high, beautiful walls along which there flow on the inside two streams which never run dry, bordered by those beautiful trees which they call molly. Whenever they came across mountains and cliffs they cut through them and flattened them, filling in whole valleys with chalk and stone. At the end of each day’s march there are beauteous palaces furnished with victuals and clothing and weapons, both for troops and travelers who have to pass that way.