Greats and commoners

 To think you can persuade people strikes many reasonable people as a quaint idea. Haven’t we all read about how polarized the country is? How no one in a political camp can be persuaded by evidence?

Some people don’t change their minds. The Make America Great Again movement is evidence that about four in 10 American voters are not persuaded by anything.

And yet public opinion does change.

I grew up in places that had separate drinking fountains and segregated schools.

When I was a kid, the level of raw sewage that could be released into the watersheds around New York City was roughly one quart in a bathtub-full.

Things that we once accepted disgust us today.

Human beings do change. Although it takes too long, we eventually see the light of better ways.

Trying to persuade others is slow, tedious and frustrating. But when people change their minds, the change is real in a way that what we call a political victory isn’t. One party wins an election and gets the upper hand on the other. But political parties can’t win elections indefinitely supporting policies that the majority opposes.

The slow, frustrating work of trying to persuade your neighbors can be discouraging. It helps me to take a long view and think of Montaigne, who lived through horrific times. When he started publishing his Essays in 1580, Europeans were exterminating each other in wars of religion.

Montaigne loved his place in the world but could appraise it objectively. He thought of himself as a Gascon rather than a Frenchman, a man of the region rather than a man of the country. He was loyal to the government of his day.

He was interested in the people, the institutions and the customs of the people, although he thought of the people, institutions and customs of his region, rather than of the country. He was not interested in the Great Men and Great Women of his day. As he put it:

 

I feel, by the way, no driving passion about the great of the land, neither love nor hatred. …

 

I find it hard to govern my own feelings about our country’s leaders. But I think Montaigne’s counsel is sound. There’s wisdom in paying attention to the health, education, welfare and prosperity of the ordinary people and their institutions. If you want better representative government, start with the people. The commoners, not the greats.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 893. The quotation is from “On the useful and the honourable,” the opening essay in Book III.