Perspective In The 16th Century

While studying history, and even while living life in the present, considering and understanding perspective is of the utmost importance. Every individual carries with them biases, biases that affect and are affected by the experiences they have. Groups of individuals’ biases collectively join and form ethnocentrism, a seemingly inescapable phenomenon existing in the 16th century as well as the 21st. Perspective has the ability to warp one’s take on the smallest of issues; however, instead of rejecting a culture that through one’s perspective seems foreign, odd, wrong, one can utilise it to find some greater truth about their own culture.

Michel de Montaigne, armed with his philosophy of skepticism, obtained a level of

objectivity that most

do not possess. He rejected the idea that there was one absolute truth to life and wrote of cannibals in South America with an open mind. While most Europeans of the time saw cannibalism as purely barbaric, Montaigne compared it with the perhaps more barbaric European practice of torturing and feeding live people to pigs and dogs. This is not to say that Montaigne condoned cannibalism, rather that he was disapproving of the fact that peoples can be so critical of alien cultures while failing to acknowledge let alone attempt to fix the flaws of their own. Montaigne directs this criticism towards the religious wars as well, speaking of the barbarity he has “seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion.” The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, occurring in Montaigne’s home country, France, exemplifies the very prideful hypocrisy that Montaigne attacks. When faced with the rise of Calvinists, who had a set of religious beliefs that were new and threatening, the Catholics responded by committing mass murder, an act that goes against the Catholic belief system. Today, groups of people in Western nations fight against allowing Muslim immigrant and refugees to enter their countries out of fear of radical Islam. These same nations have at times neglected the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people in order to protect the beliefs of those that practice a more extreme form of Christianity. With truth being warped by individual and collective perspectives, it is difficult to discern what is exactly moral or immoral.
Ethnocentrism can be harmful: it can be found at the root of religious, national, and racial wars. Nevertheless, it is a mindset that will always exist among people in some form. What Adam Etinson of the New York Times as well as Montaigne urge people to do is to take their intense scrutiny of other peoples and to apply it in self-reflection. If seeing others’ flaws could help people be less blind to their own, then this elevated form of ethnocentrism could be very valuable to groups of people across the world, as well as the relationships between these groups. If this mindset was utilised during the religious wars, perhaps, instead of continuous violence resulting in the death of millions of Christians, there may have been the religiously tolerant society advocated by the Christian humanists Thomas More and Dedalus Erasmus. If this belief system was adopted today, the political climate of major nations could be less tense and polarising. Pride is a positive quality until it makes one believe they are superior to others.
People are inherently flawed, but what allows them overcome these flaws is self-reflection. It is unfair and implausible to expect that complete objectivity can be achieved, yet without it, no life-style can be declared superior to another, no religion or race can be chosen as the best. Thus, when encountering other groups of people, one should not work to fight them or change them but to see how this encounter can help one work to change themselves for the better.