Montaigne’s sense of the absurd

While reading Montaigne’s essays, I was really impressed by his sense of humor and the way he picks up the absurdness of human behavior. The most obvious example is his take on relativism in the essay “Of Cannibals”. As he describes the savage customs of a native South American tribe, which include killing and eating their war prisoners, Montaigne is quick to point out that while many of their behaviors strike as barbaric, they are not any more barbaric that the customs of his own nation. Appalled by the religious wars in France, where mass murder and particularly cruel torture methods and executions were employed, he rightly points out that the Europeans consider themselves more civilized only because humans tend to perceive their familiar local norms as the correct ones and not because they are truly superior. In his essay “Of the inconsistency of our actions”, the writer describes the frequent hypocrisy and inconsistency of humans who change their mind or interpret other people’s behavior as the situation suits  them at the particular moment without perceiving the contradictions. The anecdote of a promiscuous young woman who attempted suicide because of being pursued by an unwanted admirer in an apparent show of virtue is one of the many examples of this. In other essays Montaigne observes how people sometimes arbitrarily consider things good or bad, simply from custom or convenience, as, for example, saying “bless you” at a sneeze but frowning on the other two “sorts of wind”. He simply mocks his own culture and people at every angle, exposing the innate ridiculousness of humans.