Montaigne, War, and CIE

In his essay “Of Cannibals,” Montaigne runs into a roadblock of sorts. When attempting to define barbarianism, he finds that it truly depends on the perspective of the culture. There can be no universal definition with given traits because each culture defines the terms using slightly different traits. Montaigne uses the example of cannibalism to show what he means. He says that in some ways, cannibals are less barbaric then what would be considered “civilized” cultures. The strongest argument Montaigne seems to make addresses the fact of torture. He says that cannibals might even be more civilized because they wait until a person is dead before they dissect and eat them. Meanwhile, some cultures torture people and cause them more pain than death could. This argument makes sense, especially considering some of the modern day practices that countries in our world exhibit. Most American citizens consider their country blameless in war. However, looking at the highly controversial War in Iraq, we caused more distress to the country than it could really handle. Our actions resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians for motives that are not even clear in the minds of most US citizens. This is quite a barbaric act, especially when you consider that the people we were attacking had not technically done anything to provoke such an attack from our country. I believe that this kind of barbaric act is what Montaigne means. Even though people may have some ideas of a different culture does not mean that everyone from that culture has the same set of ideas. This is the same idea we get stuck on in CIE. We try to define terms with examples of specific situations. More general definitions would work better because then we would not run into the problem Montaigne had of different people having irreconcilable ideas of the same term.