Fossil, etymologically, is “something dug up.” What paleontologists “dig up” are preserved bones and also, but rarely, actual tissues. They also uncover traces of ancient life, footprints and coprolites (really old poop). Fossils enable scientists to reconstruct a world long gone, the life of organisms that lived long before humans.
 
With very detailed investigations and enough fossils, paleontologists can paint a relatively accurate picture of ancient life. I say “relatively accurate” because much of their work on behavior borders on simple surmise and assumed modern analogs in the present. Did some herbivorous dinosaurs herd like bison? Probably. Did some carnivorous dinosaurs hunt in packs like wolves? Probably. After all, even though they are numerous, life strategies seem to be finite in number. There are only so many ways to get food, reproduce, and protect.
 
So, paleontologists rely on the world around them to interpret the world of the past. Not so with those carrying a grudge. They do just the opposite; they interpret the present on the basis of the past. Look, for examples, to those parts of the world where people are enemies because their ancestors were enemies. It’s as though such people practice a form of reverse paleontology. They keep digging up the past, finding the smallest traces of lifestyles and lives long gone to use as a model for contemporary life.
 
There appear to be two ways of using fossils: One uses the present to interpret the past; another uses the past to interpret the present.

​Here’s the image: A kid with a conical hat sitting on a stool in the schoolroom’s corner. He’s a dunce. He just doesn’t prepare, or he just doesn’t get it. His lack of understanding gets him labeled as stupid, and the place for stupid people is the corner.
 
Right. This wouldn’t happen in today’s schools. Most educators know not to label a child who might have difficulty with a particular lesson or subject. But the practice seems to have taken place in the past. And we all know the irony, that the label “dunce” is supposedly (Samuel Johnson’s disagreement notwithstanding) derived from the name of John (Joannes) Duns, A.K.A. Duns Scotus, the medieval Scottish philosopher, theologian, and logician whose painted picture depicts a guy wearing what appears to be a rounded fez, the model for the dunce’s cone hat. It’s really ironic. Duns Scotus was one of the brilliant minds of his time.
 
Scotus, the “Subtle Doctor” as he was called by the Pope, lived at the beginning of a new wave of thinking. His intellectual enemies sought to undermine his followers’ thought with ad hominem attacks and name-calling. Thus, “dunces.”
 
One might think that anyone who takes a position on something today is a dunce. The labeling is free and easy. Disagree with someone? Call him or her a dunce. Yes, it blocks the kind of logical debate for which Duns Scotus was known, but, hey, it makes those who do the labeling feel good about themselves and helps them to “win,” at least in their minds, the argument du jour.
 
It doesn’t matter which side of an issue you support, you’ll always find yourself wearing the dunce cap and sitting in the corner of your intellectual enemies’ schoolroom. You might have flawless logic on your side. You might just have an honest disagreement about how some aspect of society should work. You might, of course, even be wrong, but not maliciously wrong. Somebody is going to give you that conical hat.
 
But don’t wear it. Don’t go into the corner. And don’t try to put it on the person who tries to place it on your head. You have other choices, one of which is to continue making, like the Subtle Doctor, your logical point. Another is to recognize that those who would put you on that stool in the corner can only rarely be convinced that you are correct. It is their emotional attachment to their side that prevents them from seeing your side, and it’s that attachment that grabs the conical fez to stick on your head.
 
Watch almost every human circumstance that involves opposing sides on topics that range from politics to religion. Who puts whom in that corner, in that place for the dunce?

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony develops on four notes. Just four, but possibly the most famous four notes in all of music. Want to sing it? Daht-Daht-Daht Duhhhhhh. The words are easy. The notes are simple, three short Gs followed by a long E-flat. Daht-Daht-Daht Duhhhhhh.
 
The composer runs those four notes throughout the symphony. They occur mixed in various musical phrases, but they keep their basic character.
 
Symphonies are relatively long pieces of music, usually complex, and usually played by big orchestras. If you go to hear a symphony, you also get a visual complex: Bows and fingers playing strings, drumsticks on drums, symbols clashing, woodwinds and brass being picked up and rested, then picked up again. There’s activity on stage, and it all moves to the baton of the conductor in the notes of the composer. All that movement is a sitting ballet, typically in black and white, with all the color in sound.
 
You, too, are a composer. You take a few notes and turn them into a personal harmony that evolves on your basic notes. Here or there you add notes or change the tempo or key, but those basic notes stay the same. They are the notes that others remember. Very rarely do others remember all those complex motifs and developments. When they think of you, they hum the basic notes of your makeup. Only you can play the complex symphony.
 
But that also applies to your humming the life of another. There are the recognizable basic notes, the motif on which the composition of a life is built. Those are easy to remember, so they stay with you. Those notes become an earworm, but the rest of the symphony? Well, usually it’s lost because it’s complex, and you have enough to do trying to play your own symphony, let alone trying to hum someone else’s.
 
So, we simplify the lives of others, reducing them to some basic four notes. They are important notes, we note, but they are no more the whole complex of a life than your basic four notes are the whole complex of yours.

Let me be charitable from the outset: Eleemosynary means “charitable,” so you don’t have to look it up. The word derives from a Latin word for “alms” and a Greek word for “pity.” Pity, in turn, derives from the Latin word pietas, “piety,” which appears to also mean “loyalty” and “duty.” The word pity also comes from the Old French word for “mercy,” “compassion,” “care,” “tenderness” and for the state of those pitied: “wretched condition.” So, there we have it. If you are eleemosynary, you might also be compassionate, merciful, tender, loyal, and dutiful. Did you throw some coins into the Salvation Army bucket? Did you give some support in the form of time or money to a worthy cause? Did you assist someone in a task? Did you help someone in need? What are you, some kind of saint?
 
Heard a sermon on a blisteringly hot summer day in a small church with no air conditioning. It was the best homily I ever heard, and I have some familiarization with sermons, having read, for example, those of the great poet John Donne. As I was saying, there the congregation was, sweltering in the church, and the guy at the altar looks at everyone and says, “If you’re not a saint, you ought to be one.”
 
That’s it. That’s what I call the greatest homily ever spoken. Oh! I know, Buddha supposedly topped it just by holding up a flower without speaking. Okay, Buddha gets the brevity trophy, a very short statue. Nevertheless, “If you’re not a saint, you ought to be one” certainly makes a hard-hitting point. In a world with “oughts” and “shoulds” dictating lives and frustrating people, one “ought” should be a focus. We ought to be eleemosynary.
 
Who loses when everyone is eleemosynary? Who loses when piety turns to care? Who loses in tender compassion? You know the answer: No one. No one loses when everyone is a saint. If you’re not a saint, you ought to be one.