The Complete Essays (28 page)

[A] Here they live on human flesh;
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there, it is a pious duty to kill one’s father at a particular age; elsewhere the fathers decide, when the children are still in the womb, which will be kept and brought up and which will be killed and abandoned; elsewhere aged husbands lend their wives to younger men to enjoy; elsewhere again there is no sin in having wives in common – indeed in one country the women, as a mark of honour, hem their skirts with a fringe of tassels to show how many men they have lain with.

And did not habit found a state composed only of women? Did it not place weapons in their hands, make them raise armies and fight battles?
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And does not habit teach the roughest of the rough something which the whole of philosophy fails to implant in the heads of the wisest of men? For we know of whole nations [C] where death is not merely despised but rejoiced in; [A] where seven-year-old boys
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let themselves be flogged to death without changing their expression;
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where riches are held in such contempt that the most wretched of their citizens would not deign to stoop and pick up a purse full of crowns. And we know of regions where every kind of food grows in abundance but where both the usual and the most savoury dish is bread and mustard-cress with water.
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[B] And did not custom produce a miracle in Chios where, for seven hundred years, no one ever recalled a woman or girl who lost her honour?

[A] To sum up then, the impression I have is that there is nothing that custom may not do and cannot do; and Pindar rightly calls her (so I have been told) the Queen and Empress of the World.
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[C] The man found beating his father replied that such was traditional in his family; that his father had beaten his grandfather; his grandfather, his great-grandfather: ‘And this boy will beat me once he has reached my age.’ Yet the father whom the son was pulling about and dragging along the road commanded him to stop at a certain doorway, for he had not dragged his own father beyond that point, that being the boundary for the hereditary bashing of fathers customary among the sons of their line.
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It is by custom, says Aristotle, as often as from illness that women tear out their hair, gnaw their nails, eat earth and charcoal: just as it is as much by custom as by Nature that males lie with males.

The laws of conscience which we say are born of Nature are born of custom; since man inwardly venerates the opinions and the manners approved and received about him, he cannot without remorse free himself from them nor apply himself to them without self-approbation.

[B] In the past, when the Cretans wished to curse someone, they prayed the gods to make him catch a bad habit.

[A] But the principal activity of custom is so to seize us and to grip us in her claws that it is hardly in our power to struggle free and to come back into ourselves, where we can reason and argue about her ordinances. Since we suck them in with our mothers’ milk and since the face of the world is presented thus to our infant gaze, it seems to us that we were really born with the property of continuing to act that way. And as for those ideas which we find to be held in common and in high esteem about us, the seeds of which were planted in our souls by our forefathers, they appear to belong to our genus, to be natural. [C] That is why we think that it is reason which is unhinged whenever custom is – and God knows how often we unreasonably do that! If (as those of us have been led to do who make a study of ourselves) each man, on hearing a wise maxim, immediately looked to see how it properly applied to him, he would find that it was not so much a pithy saying as a whiplash applied to the habitual stupidity of his faculty of judgement. But the counsels of Truth and her precepts are taken to apply to the generality of men, never to oneself: we store them up in our memory not in our manners, which is most stupid and unprofitable.

But let us get back to custom’s imperial sway.

Peoples nurtured on freedom and self-government judge any other form of polity to be deformed and unnatural. Those who are used to monarchy do the same: as soon as they have rid themselves of the exactions of one master, no matter what opportunities for change Fortune may give them they rush to implant an equally difficult one in his place, incapable as they are of resolving to hate the over-mastery as such.
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[A] Darius asked some Greeks what it would take to persuade them to adopt the Indian custom of eating their dead fathers (for that was the ritual
among Indians who reckoned that the most auspicious burial they could give their fathers was within themselves): they replied that nothing on earth would make them do it. Then he made an assay at persuading those Indians to abandon their way and adopt that of the Greeks (which was to cremate their fathers’ corpses): he horrified them even more.
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We all do likewise: usage hides the true aspect of things from us:

Nil adeo magnum, nec tam mirabile quicquam
Principio, quod non minuant mirarier omnes
Paulatim
.

[There is nothing which at first seems so great or so wondrous which we do not all gradually wonder at less and less.]
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I once had the duty of justifying one of our practices which, far and wide around us, is accepted as having established authority; I did not wish to maintain it (as is usually done) exclusively by force of law and
exempla
so I traced it back to its origins: I found its basis to be so weak
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that I all but loathed it – I who was supposed to encourage it in others.

[C] This was the remedy that Plato prescribed to banish the unnatural loves of his age – he considered it a basic, sovereign remedy: public opinion should condemn them; poets and everyone else should give dreadful accounts of them. By this remedy even the fairest daughters would not attract the lust of their fathers, nor would outstandingly handsome brothers that of their sisters, since the myths of Thyestes, of Oedipus and of Macareus would have planted moral beliefs in the tender minds of children by the charm of the poetry.
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Indeed, chastity is a fair virtue; its usefulness is well recognized: yet it is as hard to treat it and to justify it from Nature as it is easy to do so from tradition, law and precept. Basic universal precepts of reason are difficult to investigate thoroughly: dons skim through them quickly or do not even dare to handle them, throwing themselves straightway into the sanctuary of tradition, where they can preen themselves on easy victories.

Those who refuse to be drawn away from the beginnings and sources fail even worse and find themselves bound to savage opinions – as Chrysippus was, who often strewed throughout his writings the little account he took of incestuous unions of any kind.
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[A] A man who wished to loose himself
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from the violent foregone conclusions of custom will find many things accepted as being indubitably settled which have nothing to support them but the hoary whiskers and wrinkles of attendant usage; let him tear off that mask, bring matters back to truth and reason, and he will feel his judgement turned upside-down, yet restored by this to a much surer state.

I will ask him, for example, what could be stranger than seeing a people obliged to obey laws which they have never understood;
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in all their household concerns, marriages, gifts, wills, buying and selling, they are bound by laws which they cannot know, being neither written nor published in their own language: they needs must pay to have them interpreted and applied [C] – not following in this the ingenious notion of Isocrates
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(who advised his king to make all trade and business free, unfettered and profitable but all quarrels and disputes onerous, loading them with heavy taxes); they prefer the monstrous notion of making a trade of reason itself and treating laws like merchandise. [A] I am pleased that it was (as our historians state) a Gascon gentleman from my part of the country whom Fortune led to be the first to object when Charlemagne wished to impose Imperial Roman Law on us.
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What is more uncouth than a nation
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where, by legal custom, the office of judge is openly venal and where verdicts are simply bought for cash? where, quite legally, justice is denied to anyone who cannot pay for it, yet where this trade is held in such high esteem that there is formed a fourth estate in the commonwealth, composed of men who deal in lawsuits, thus joining the three ancient estates, the Church, the Nobility and the People? where this fourth estate, having charge of the laws and sovereign authority over lives and chattels, should be quite distinct from the nobility, with the result that there are two sets of laws, the law of honour and the law of justice which are strongly opposed in many matters (the first condemns an unavenged accusation of lying: the other condemns the revenge; a gentleman who puts up with an insult is, by the laws of arms, stripped of his rank
and nobility: one who avenges it incurs capital punishment; if he goes to law to redress an offence against his honour, he is dishonoured; if he acts independently he is chastised and punished by the Law); where these two estates, so different from each other, both derive from a single Head, yet one is responsible for peace, the other for war; the first acquires profit, the second, honour; the first, learning, the second, virtue; the first, words, the second, deeds; the first, justice, the second valour; the first reason, the second, fortitude; the first the long gown, the second, the short?

Take things indifferent, such as clothing: if anyone cared to refer clothing back to its true purpose (which is its usefulness and convenience for the body – its original grace and comeliness depends on that), I would concede to him that the most monstrous clothes imaginable include, to my taste, our doctoral bonnets, that long tail of pleated velvet hanging down from the heads of our womenfolk with its motley fringes, and that silly codpiece uselessly modelling a member which we cannot even decently call by its name yet which we make a parade of, showing it off in public.

Nevertheless such considerations do not deter a man of intelligence from following the common fashion;
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it seems to me on the contrary that all idiosyncratic and outlandish modes derive less from reason than from madness and ambitious affectation; it is his soul that a wise man should withdraw from the crowd, maintaining its power and freedom freely to make judgements, whilst externally accepting all received forms and fashions.

The government of a community has no right to our thoughts, but everything else such as our actions, efforts, wealth and life itself should be lent to it for its service or even given up when the community’s opinions so require, [A1] just as that great and good man Socrates refused to save his life by disobeying [B] the magistrate, [A1] a most unjust and iniquitous magistrate. For the Rule of rules, the general Law of laws, is that each should observe those of the place wherein he lives.
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[It is right to obey one’s country’s laws.]

And here is one drawn from a different barrel: it is greatly to be doubted whether any obvious good can come from changing any traditional law, whatever it may be, compared with the evil of changing it; for a polity is like a building made of diverse pieces interlocked together, joined in such a way that it is impossible to move one without the whole structure feeling it. He who gave the Thurians their laws
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ordained that if any man wished to abolish an ancient one or establish a new one he should appear before the people with a rope round his neck, so that he could be hanged at once if anyone failed to approve of his novelty. And the lawgiver to the Spartans spent his life in persuading the citizens to make a solemn promise not to break any of his ordinances. The Spartan Magistrate
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who roughly cut the two extra strings which Phrynis added to his lyre was not worried about whether the music was improved or whether the chords were more ample: it sufficed him to condemn them because it was a departure from the traditional style. (That was the meaning of that rusty sword of justice hanging in Massilia.)
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[B] I abhor novelty, no matter what visage it presents, and am right to do so, for I have seen some of its disastrous effects. That novelty which has [C] for so many years [B] beset us is not solely responsible,
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but one can say with every likelihood that it has incidentally caused and given birth to them all. Even for the evils and destruction which have subsequently happened without it and despite it it must accept responsibility.