Even a brief look at the Contents of Montaigne’s Essays tells us that with all the striking variety of subjects, Montaigne was most of all preoccupied with human nature. Here is an alphabetic list of some selected topics:
action,
affection, age, anger, conscience, constancy, cowardice, cruelty,
desire,
experience, falseness, fear, friendship, glory, greatness,
honesty,
honor, idleness,
imagination, inequality, intentions, liars, liberty, moderation,
passions,
pedantism, profit,
reason, sadness, solitude, soul, truth, uncertainty, vanity.
Since antiquity and
up to
the end of the nineteenth century, people perceived history as the
result
of individual behavior, and the individual behavior as the result of
good
or bad human qualities, right or wrong ideas, and true or false
beliefs.
Good results rewarded good qualities and bad results punished for bad
qualities.
This paradigm looks like a vicious circle because a quality is defined
by its results, but as we know, even in physics the most fundamental
concepts
can be defined only in a circular way.
For a long time, an
individual
behavior of historical consequences has been attributed to the most
visible
figures at the top of the ladder of leadership, such as king,
emperor,
general, Pope, bishop, ideological dissenter, chief mutineer, reformer,
and, extrapolating to our times, president and Chairman of Federal
Reserve
Board. From one angle, they were the points of application of
mysterious
forces of history to the heavy solid bodies of faceless masses.
If you push a book on the
table crosswise at the corner, it will turn, but if you push it at
right
angle to the middle of the side, it will slide. From another point of
view,
it was their will, knowledge, skills, and character that moved the
massive
figures on the historical chessboard against an equally determined
opponent.
For centuries,
history was
all about humans, and the authors of antiquity were the first to push
the
frontier deeper into the jagged and tortured landscape of human nature.
The results of exploration,
development, and cultivation of human nature were in public domain. The
categories of right and wrong, good and bad, true and false were
valuable but essentially free tools. Wisdom was planted and harvested
by
philosophers and moralists and stocked up for everyday public use and
for
lean years.
Philosophy sifted through
enormous loads of mental ore in search for nuggets of wisdom about good
and bad, right and wrong, and how to turn one into the other, but every
nugget dissolved in the crucible of critical analysis. Every statement
was linked to its opposite like a pair of boots tied up with their
shoelaces.
The world changed
between
the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Human life had to adapt to
the
life of machines and other human creations. Philosophy had little to
say
about the transparent and understandable in all minute details
machines,
and psychology had even less. Imagination? Passions? Glory? The
machines
of the late twenty-first century may have all that in the future, but
today
they are still quietly building up internal complexity and accumulating
chaos, errors, and attitude problems beyond human control, waiting for
the moment when they could jump out of the Microsoft Windows into the
brotherly
embrace of the schooled but still imperfect humans.
The consequence of
complexity
is such that the life cycle of an imperfect and annoying software is
already
shorter than the time needed for its perfection, and this built-in flaw
is a deeply human feature from which all the philosophy of sorrow grew.
So we are, humans, realizing our flaws only when there is no more time
to correct them.
It seems to me that the gradual change and devaluation of humanism came with the Industrial Revolution, when people could see with their own eyes how the unknown in Biblical times machines worked, how their parts maintained an enviably coordinated movement, and, later, how the invisible in Biblical time living cells managed their spectacular molecular business. The scientific education limited the scope of categories of right and wrong to the area of logic. In the business practice, right was what increased profit and wealth. Wrong was what took it away. In politics, the right actions increased power and the wrong ones could cost life. A smoothly working system maintaining its order and not falling apart, was good, right, and beautiful whether it was alive or inanimate.
Right and wrong, therefore, became mostly pragmatic markers, like left and right, because whether a person was moral or immoral mattered less than the final result of the person's action. In the society of civil order and robust economy humans are evaluated like machines and by machines checking crucial functional points.
I believe that all this is not to lament about but to accept as the acknowledgment that humans are not alone anymore on the reserved park bench of nature: they put their belongings next to themselves to fill up the entire length, and their personal effects cast strangely human little shadows.
What do we, millions of new kings of the universe, need to know in the new world with no Kings and no Prophets? What common language can we find with our Things so that we could listen to their guidance and resist their pushing us off the bench?
In the new world, which is very much old underneath, the categories of
system, chaos, order, energy, temperature, probability, complexity, structure, pattern
are the heirs of
true, false, right,
wrong, good,
bad, beautiful, ugly.
Human nature, with
action,
affection, age, anger, conscience, constancy, cowardice, cruelty,
desire,
experience, falseness, fear, friendship, glory, greatness, honesty,
honor,
idleness,
imagination, inequality, intentions, liars, liberty, moderation,
passions,
pedantism, profit,
reason, sadness, solitude, soul, truth, uncertainty, vanity
joins the nature of Things with
aggregation,
amplification, charge, concentration, diffusion, dispersion,
dissipation,
dissolution, distribution, efficiency, entropy, fluctuation, fluidity,
force, impact, influence,
information, modulation, molecule, performance, radiation, reliability,
replication,
resistance, rotation, stability, synchronization, work.
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