Tupi men were allowed to take more than one wife, and were said to be devoted to them all. ‘Their entire system of ethics contains only the same two articles: resoluteness in battle and love of their wives,’ reported Montaigne. And the wives were apparently happy with the arrangement, showing no jealousy (sexual relations were relaxed, the only prohibition being that one should never sleep with close relatives). Montaigne, with his wife downstairs in the castle, relished the detaiclass="underline"
One beautiful characteristic of their marriages is worth noting: just as our wives are zealous in thwarting our love and tenderness for other women, theirs are equally zealous in obtaining them for them. Being more concerned for their husband’s reputation than for anything else, they take care and trouble to have as many fellow-wives as possible, since that is a testimony to their husband’s valour.
It was all undeniably peculiar. Montaigne did not find any of it abnormal.
He was in a minority. Soon after Columbus’s discovery, Spanish and Portuguese colonists arrived from Europe to exploit the new lands and decided that the natives were little better than animals. The Catholic knight Villegagnon spoke of them as ‘beasts with a human face’ (‘ce sont des bêtes portant figure humaine’); the Calvinist minister Richer argued they had no moral sense (‘l’hébétude crasse de leur esprit ne distingue pas le bien du mal’); and the doctor Laurent Joubert, after examining five Brazilian women, asserted that they had no periods and therefore categorically did not belong to the human race.
Having stripped them of their humanity, the Spanish began to slaughter them like animals. By 1534, forty-two years after Columbus’s arrival, the Aztec and Inca empires had been destroyed, and their peoples enslaved or murdered. Montaigne read of the barbarism in Bartolomeo Las Casas’s Brevissima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (printed in Seville in 1552, translated into French in 1580 by Jacques de Miggrode as Tyrannies et cruautés des Espagnols perpétrées es Indes occidentales qu’on dit le Nouveau Monde). The Indians were undermined by their own hospitality and by the weakness of their arms. They opened their villages and cities to the Spanish, to find their guests turning on them when they were least prepared. Their primitive weapons were no match for Spanish cannons and swords, and the conquistadores showed no mercy towards their victims. They killed children, slit open the bellies of pregnant women, gouged out eyes, roasted whole families alive and set fire to villages in the night.
(Ill. 17.4)
They trained dogs to go into the jungles where the Indians had fled and to tear them to pieces.
Men were sent to work in gold- and silver-mines, chained together by iron collars. When a man died, his body was cut from the chain, while his companions on either side continued working. Most Indians did not last more than three weeks in the mines. Women were raped and disfigured in front of their husbands.
(Ill. 17.5)
The favoured form of mutilation was to slice chins and noses. Las Casas told how one woman, seeing the Spanish armies advancing with their dogs, hanged herself with her child. A soldier arrived, cut the child in two with his sword, gave one half to his dogs, then asked a friar to administer last rites so that the infant would be assured a place in Christ’s heaven.
With men and women separated from each other, desolate and anxious, the Indians committed suicide in large numbers. Between Montaigne’s birth in 1533 and the publication of the third book of his Essays in 1588, the native population of the New World is estimated to have dropped from 80 to 10 million inhabitants.
The Spanish had butchered the Indians with a clean conscience because they were confident that they knew what a normal human being was. Their reason told them it was someone who wore breeches, had one wife, didn’t eat spiders and slept in a bed:
We could understand nothing of their language; their manners and even their features and clothing were far different from ours. Which of us did not take them for brutes and savages? Which of us did not attribute their silence to dullness and brutish ignorance?
After all, they … were unaware of our hand-kissings and our low and complex bows.
They might have seemed like human beings: ‘Ah! But they wear no breeches …’
Behind the butchery lay messy reasoning. Separating the normal from the abnormal typically proceeds through a form of inductive logic, whereby we infer a general law from particular instances (as logicians would put it, from observing that A1 is ø, A2 is ø and A3 is ø, we come to the view that ‘All As are ø’). Seeking to judge whether someone is intelligent, we look for features common to everyone intelligent we have met hitherto. If we met an intelligent person who looked like 1, another who looked like 2, and a third like 3, we are likely to decide that intelligent people read a lot, dress in black and look rather solemn. There is a danger we will dismiss as stupid, and perhaps later kill, someone who looks like 4.
(Ill. 17.6)
(Ill. 17.7)
(Ill. 17.8)
(Ill. 17.9)
French travellers who reacted in horror to German stoves in their bedrooms would have known a number of good fireplaces in their country before arriving in Germany. One would perhaps have looked like 1, another like 2, a third like 3, and from this they would have concluded that the essence of a good heating system was an open hearth.
1.
(Ill. 17.10)
2.
3.
(Ill. 17.11)
Montaigne bemoaned the intellectual arrogance at play. There were savages in South America; they were not the ones eating spiders:
Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!
He was not attempting to do away with the distinction between barbarous and civilized; there were differences in value between the customs of countries (cultural relativism being as crude as nationalism). He was correcting the way we made the distinction. Our country might have many virtues, but these did not depend on it being our country. A foreign land might have many faults, but these could not be identified through the mere fact that its customs were unusual. Nationality and familiarity were absurd criteria by which to decide on the good.
French custom had decreed that if one had an impediment in the nasal passage, one should blow it into a handkerchief. But Montaigne had a friend who, having reflected on the matter, had come to the view that it might be better to blow one’s nose straight into one’s fingers: