Convivial humanism

LISTEN. How to live? More suggestions today in Happiness...

9. Be convivial: live with others. 10. Wake from the sleep of habit. 11. Live temperately. 12. Guard your humanity.

Introducing children to the art of conversation, Montaigne thought, brings them out of their private worlds and engenders indispensable social graces. The graceless and rude incivility of so much of our recent public discourse would seem to vindicate that view. He was a humanist in the fashion of Kurt Vonnegut, "trying to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishment" in a post-human paradise or hell. "We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it." 

Or as Kurt put it, addressing our newest humans: "There's only one rule... God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Only follow nature to be happy, Montaigne's fan Denis Diderot has a Tahitian instruct Europeans. Many of Diderot's readers would have construed that in libertine fashion, more as license than liberty . Others might hear echoes of the Stoics. I hear William James's "savages and children of nature" in his essay On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, "to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead..."

But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys.

The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist.

Over-educated pessimists do abound, in the environment of my workaday world. They're lop-sided. They need to get out more.

Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows...

Guarding our humanity means that for Montaigne, as it did for James: it means staying in touch with the life and health of the body, and resisting the call of those forms of transcendence that would have us "rise above the human"... for Montaigne, recall, even on the loftiest throne we're still seated on our asses. Mustn't get beyond our raisin', as we say in the south. That's when the seductions of authoritarianism most threaten our humanity, as Richard Rorty said in his last, recently posthumously published Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism.

So... convivial pragmatism is a humanism. Montaigne was that kind of humanist too.