The biographies of great individuals teach us many lessons, but I am always seeking the common thread between them. In the case of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), it requires some work to figure out the key lesson.
Montaigne’s essay titled “On the inequality amongst us” is conveying the key lesson from his life, namely, that we should accept without complaints the fact that each person is different, and that all attempts to homogenise people are doomed to fail.
Individuals are unequal in intelligence, agility, beauty, skills and personal interests, just to mention a few aspects. Luckily, Montaigne accepted inequality as a fact early in life and spared himself lots of trouble.
In sixteenth-century France, the monarch deployed massive efforts to homogenize the ideas in the country, but his attempts proved a dismal failure.
In fact, he achieved exactly the contrary. Instead of having all citizens share the same ideals, he destroyed social harmony. Instead of having everybody accept the same beliefs, he only generated discrimination, hatred and war.
Montaigne’s essay “On the inequality amongst us”
Montaigne did not praise enough the wisdom of adopting a realistic stance. Not only is it a fact that individuals are all unequal, but that life rarely delivers perfect justice or fairness.
We all know of people who, in their profession or business, have profited from personal connections. It is certainly unfair, but I wouldn’t waste a minute worrying about those situations.
Montaigne commends self-made individuals like Spartacus (1st century BC) that rise to positions of leadership, and has no good words for incompetent aristocrats like the ancient Roman senator and consul Claudius Pulcher.
While Spartacus led a revolt that defeated Roman armies on two occasions, Claudius Pulcher ordered a foolish attack which exposed the flanks of his ships. As a result, he lost seventy-five per cent of the Roman military fleet.
Montaigne laments the harm that individuals like Claudius Pulcher inflict on society, but fails to bring his argument to its final conclusion.
The crucial lesson from “On the inequality amongst us” is that we shouldn’t waste time lamenting the world’s unfairness. I view today’s world as better than sixteenth-century France in terms of fairness, but we are still far away from perfect justice.
Thus, we should not allow natural or artificial inequalities to discourage us. Instead, let us seize the opportunities that life offers, so that we can improve our situation.
Montaigne’s views on inequality and unfairness
Montaigne points out in his essay that many aristocrats that possess important titles (king, baron, duke) have done nothing to deserve them. We could make the same comment about the heirs to great fortunes, but so what?
Nothing prevent us from working diligently to advance our station in life. We can build our future based on our personal qualities, irrespective of other people’s apparent good luck.
We are in a far better situation than Montaigne in sixteenth-century France because we can relocate to another place more often than not. If our environment offers few opportunities, we can relocate to a better city, country or continent.
Inequality can be perceived as unfair or as advantageous. It takes creativity to do the latter. We should become conscious of the advantage of being different in some aspects.
Our skills, motivation and self-discipline are going to play the determinant role in how our life turns out. It is wasteful to remain focused on other people’s seemingly unfair advantages.
Montaigne and the role of fortune in human affairs
Montaigne tends to overestimate the role of chance because he employs examples taken from ancient Rome. He argues that Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) benefitted from political alliances, which originated in part because of his aristocratic lineage.
I agree with Montaigne’s argument applied to Caesar and to sixteenth-century France, but we shouldn’t extrapolate it to our days, where opportunities are plentiful for those with ambition.
Montaigne is particularly blind when it comes to himself. In his essay, he attributes his position in life mainly to his family origin, but is it really true?
In Montaigne’s century there were thousands of people who equalled or surpassed him in wealth and social position, but he is the only one who devoted years to researching and writing.
I regard Montaigne’s essays as a vast achievement that none of his peers was able to equal. Let’s remember the lesson when we hear people attribute their success or failure to their origins.
Montaigne himself was not exempt from feelings of envy at times. When he was mayor of Bordeaux for two consecutive terms of two years each (1581-1585), he often had to deal with individuals wealthier than he was and with better connections.
A crucial lesson from Montaigne’s art of living
Instead of getting carried away by his negative emotions, he adopted the right philosophical stance. Envy was irrational and unproductive, he reasoned. Instead, he opted for concentrating on his work, practising virtue, and doing the best of each day.
Let us remind ourselves, advises Montaigne, how Epictetus (55-135 AD) rose from slavery to freeman, and then to famous philosopher. Epictetus had learned to live one day at a time. He did the best he could in each situation, and dealt with problems as they came.
Is it fair that Socrates (469-399 BC) was sentenced to death on the basis of unsound accusations? Or that the great Aristotle (384-322 BC) had to flee Athens, leave his school behind, and die in exile because of his Macedonian origin?
I’m afraid that we can find in history endless illustrations of inequality or unfairness, but there are also countless examples of individuals who seized the available opportunities and built themselves a great future against all odds.
“Fortune often lifts the unworthy,” notes Montaigne. That’s a fact of life, but not a dominant trend in our century. Let’s love our unequal skills, motivation and vision because those play a much larger role in our future than fortune will ever play.
If you are interested in putting rational ideas into practice in today’s situations, I recommend you my book “Sequentiality: The amazing power of finding the right sequence of steps.”