Only a little less than a century after the Europeans “discovered” new lands, one of the greatest French thinkers Montaigne meets someone who spent some time with the “barbarous and savage cannibals”, as they called the Indigenous people. 

Where did the word ‘barbarous’ come from?

The name barbarous was given by the Greeks to any people that didn’t speak their language. The term simply meant “non-Greek”, or someone who speaks an incomprehensible language which to them sounded like “bar-bar-bar”.

Who was Michel de Montaigne?

Michel de Montaigne, whose full name is Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, was born in 1533 in Dordogne in a family of rich merchants. His father educated him following the humanist principles developed by Erasmus. The young Montaigne was educated without constraints and became one of the world’s greatest open-minded thinkers. He went on to study law and became a magistrate in Bordeaux at the age of 22. He worked at the Parliament until 1570 and then retired to his castle to live like a lord. It was there that he started writing the Essays from 1572 until his death twenty years later. His Essays contain all the humanist ideas on life, emotion, ethics, imagination, freedom, and so on. 

Here are Montaigne’s thoughts on this unreasonable fear of the other:

I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, except, that everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things. They are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas, in truth, we ought rather call those wild whose natures we have changed by our artifice and diverted from the common order. In those, the genuine, most useful, and natural virtues and properties are vigorous and sprightly, which we have helped to degenerate in these, by accommodating them to the pleasure of our own corrupted palate. And yet for all this, our taste confesses a flavor and delicacy excellent even to emulation of the best of ours, in several fruits wherein those countries abound without art or culture.

Neither is it reasonable that art should gain the pre-eminence of our great and powerful mother nature. We have so surcharged her with the additional ornaments and graces we have added to the beauty and riches of her own works by our inventions, that we have almost smothered her; yet in other places, where she shines in her own purity and proper luster, she marvelously baffles and disgraces all our vain and frivolous attempts:

Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius;

Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris;

Et volucres nulls dulcius arte canunt.

[“The ivy grows best spontaneously, the arbutus best in shady caves; and the wild notes of birds are sweeter than art can teach.—“Propertius, i. 2, 10.]

• All things, says Plato,—[Laws, 10.]—are produced either by nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by the one or the other of the former, the least and the most imperfect by the last.

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