“Truly here are real savages by our standards; for either they must be thoroughly so, or we must be; there is an amazing distance between their character and ours” (158). Michel de Montaigne, takes a stand in The Cannibal, and says that the Brazilian’s didn’t follow the European views, and were barbaric. He definitely took how they were living, and analyzed it. Montaigne believed that people should not fight each other and tear them apart. The thought of fighting, and killing someone to the death sickened him,
I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried
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I think he would’ve rejected it immediately, but he knows that while some things are looked down upon, the things that they were doing during his time were just as bad. This man was known for taking everything in, and although he was a skeptic he never passed judgment on others. He knew that although he was firm in his beliefs that others thought, and acted differently. So, if presented with the Mayan games he would understand how that fit into their culture, and overall life style. He says it perfectly himself when he says,
I do not share that common error of judging another by myself. I easily believe that another man may have qualities different from mine. Because I feel myself tied down to one form, I do not oblige everybody else to espouse it, as all others do. I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life (façons de vie); and in contrast with the common run of men, I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us. I am as ready as you please to acquit another man from sharing my conditions and principles. I consider him simply in himself, without relation to others; I mold him to his own model. (F