Nothing more challenging than perseverance in the face of hardship. It’s easy to give up and to say, “I’ve had enough!” To remind us that perseverance often has its rewards, older generations encourage younger ones not to yield to obstacles. There appears in every older generation some sense that perseverance is a not only a virtue, but also the most favorable approach to success.
 
To make their point about perseverance, our elders tell us of extreme instances of survival. One of those tales that serves as a model is the story of the shipwrecks of the Runnymede and the Briton on the Andaman Islands during a tropical cyclone (hurricane) in 1844. The two ships were sailing in the Bay of Bengal when the storm arose and drove them into the mangroves of the Andamans with their hundreds of soldiers and passengers, including women and children.
 
Storms at sea are dangerous phenomena as we all know. Ships, regardless of their size, are akin to bathtub toys as they skim across waters hundreds to thousands of feet deep. And there is always the potential to run into the sides of the tub, in the case of the Runnymede and the Briton, the mangroves. The tale of the two shipwrecks, however, is not without stories of those who chose not to persevere, stories of foolish individuals who thought to challenge violent winds and waves and impatiently give up on a sound course of survival. One soldier, for example, while the captain of the wrecked Briton tried to organize crew and passengers, disobeyed orders and impatiently tried to swim to safety. The people on the ship could only watch him drown as he fought strong currents that prevented his reaching the shore.
 
But the tale is mostly one of survival by perseverance. All storms eventually pass, and the crews of both ships remained largely organized, enabling them to establish a camp on land until their rescue. About two months after the wrecks, rescuers arrived to find about 630 relatively healthy survivors and the loss of only three men, one woman, and two children.
 
Now, the survivors did have some advantages beside their will to survive and their organization for the common good. They had supplies from the ships, which had wrecked about a half mile from each other. They also had soldiers whose weapons prevented the local cannibals from attacking the crew and passengers. But having those supplies, weapons, and organization shouldn’t diminish the lesson of perseverance through hardships. Life in the Andamans was apparently so difficult that a previous attempt to colonize them had been abandoned. The rescuers were surprised to see survivors who had not succumbed to disease or attack. A year after the rescue and at the request of the Runnymede’s owners, Joseph Darvall wrote the story of survival, deriving this lesson:
 
 “We may… learn one important lesson from the perseverance of the crew of the Runnymede. That is, never to abandon any good undertaking on account of difficulties. Some unlooked-for circumstance may arise to crown our endeavours with success. The crew of the Runnymede had lost every thing but hope, when deliverance came to them unexpectedly.”*
We are in many ways consistent from generation to generation, the older generation wishing the younger one success and prescribing a key method: The simple “never give up” instruction that is both hard to learn and difficult to practice.
 
Somehow each generation has those who learn the lesson by enduring natural and human disasters and personal setbacks. Those survivors tell the tales of perseverance, but it seems that the young always have to learn personally the practical value of the virtue of perseverance.
 
*Darvall, Joseph, Esq., The Wreck on the Andamans: Being a Narrative of the Very Remarkable Preservation, and Ultimate Deliverance, of the Soldiers and Seamen, who Formed the Ships’ Companies of the Runnymede and Briton Troop-ships, Both Wrecked on the Morning of the 12th of November, 1844, upon One of the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal. London: Pelham Richardson, 23, Cornhill, 1845. pp. 72, 73.

Isn’t there a story somewhere about a guy who killed his brother and was condemned to be a “fugitive and a wanderer”? Oh! Yes.
 
Being a fugitive and a wanderer is a hard life. In the story of Cain and Abel, one has to ask, “Fugitive from whom?” By my count, there were only Dad (Adam) and Mom (Eve). I’m sure they were angry with their son, and they probably wanted to punish him, but little Earth is a big planet when one considers all that territory outside the Garden of Eden. It’s easy to get lost when there aren’t many searching and pursuing. And maybe Adam and Eve resigned themselves to losing one son to death and the other to crime before making more sons and, presumably, daughters, leaving Cain to his wanderings. He always was a troublemaker, wasn’t he? You know, acting up in the back of the cart and making Adam say, “I’m going to stop this thing if you two don’t get along back there. Stop distracting me when I’m driving.” Eve, tired of all the fuss but not wanting to take her eyes off the cart path, probably without looking swung her hand behind the front cart bench to give a disciplining slap to the closer boy. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with him. He just won’t listen.”  
 
Are we all fugitives and wanderers in the tradition of Cain? I don’t mean we must flee because we committed some horrible crime like fratricide. Instead, I mean that we are fugitives from the kind of thinking that pursues us relentlessly. “Think this way, or else.”
 
We all have a desire to wander, if not from place to place, then from philosophy to philosophy, from one metaphor of life to another. We all decide between conforming to a family of ideas and rejecting some, if not all, of what we are conditioned to accept.
 
Not that we all reject all. There are small wanderings that each of us makes, some divergent path that sets us apart and that sometimes makes us fugitives of thought. We begin by sitting on the cart’s back bench and having the cart directed by someone on the front bench, someone with the ability to put in check our wayward thinking, our “misbehaving thinking.” Maybe Abel wasn’t a troublemaker like his brother, but surely he had some doubt about the destination or impatience with the ride itself.  
 
It isn’t some homicide that separates us into fugitives and wanderers. It’s our getting out of the cart of ideas into which we were born, our taking a step along a path not rutted by cartwheels. Cain, for all his evil, had an advantage of making a new path, but he left no enduring ruts worth following. We know him by an act of anger. But he did have a model of rebellion and nonconformity in him. Mom wasn’t exactly the most faithful adherent of the rules. Remember that apple? Had there been neighbors, they would certainly have gossiped about “that family.” “What could one expect of them? Hadn’t they already been evicted from a pretty nice place? Is it surprising that one brother became a murderer?”
 
Like Eve and Cain, we share some rebelliousness in our intellectual wandering. Like them, also, it derives from the chief “sin.” What is that? Pride. Remember, Eve wanted to be like God, and that entailed pride. “Hey, I don’t care Who that Big Guy thinks He is. Ain’t no one going to tell me I can’t do something.” Cain’s anger, like all “sin,” ultimately derived from the attitude that “ain’t no one going to tell me I can’t do what I want to do.” All intentional rebelliousness and “sin” derive from pride.
 
You’re probably thinking, “I’m not proud because I want to think for myself.” Yes, you are, but that’s the better face of pride’s two-sided coin. The worse face is its side that bears the unchangeable impression of fixed thought. Let me mix metaphors here. Sure, you will at some time in your life misbehave in the back of the cart, and you will get out and begin to wander, thinking that your thinking is independent. Unfortunately, you might at times construct another cart with another back bench and expect the children in the back to behave or “I’m gonna stop this cart and hit someone with a switch.”
 
We don’t want our offspring to fight to the death, but we should not expect them to ride passively, just as we haven’t ridden passively. Independence will inevitably out, or the individual relegates himself or herself to the back seat. In any family—even families of criminals, politicians, apostles, and intellectual disciples—there will be those who misbehave and wander. Some will be treated as fugitives.
 
Pride, the root of all sin, is probably also the root of individualism. Every generation faces the dilemma between thinking in the context of tradition and making a new path of thought where no ruts mark the way. Every generation has to choose between being an intellectual Cain or Abel. History is replete with examples from religion, science, art, and philosophy. Some Cains are fugitives because of the way they destroyed in their pride the unity of a family of thought; others are wanderers seeking a path along an un-rutted landscape. Which one are you? 

Are you subject to fate? Have the three fates laid out your life in an unchangeable manner? Is free will a myth? Certainly, there are studies, such as those of neuroscientist Wolf Singer, that call into question your level of freedom. But should you go to the extreme to say there is, in fact, no such thing as free will and that your brain is an independent controller? Are there biochemical processes that do your thinking for you? Is cooperation among brain cells the key to your next decision? Are you fated?  
 
Mythologized by the Greeks and Romans, Fate was envisioned as three goddesses who had roles of spinning the thread of life (Clotho), measuring it (Lachesis), and cutting it (Atropos). Ever since, the idea of the Fates has circulated through culture. “When it’s your time….” Were the Greeks and Romans just foreshadowing the work of modern neuroscientists who say we are the puppets of our brains?
 
It will be a long time till we resolve the dilemma of determinism versus free will. Once the realm of philosophers and theologians, free will is now the realm of neuroscientists who have discovered that brains play roles unknown to ancient, medieval, and relatively recent modern thinkers. A recent study of brainless frogs suggests that even body structure might be the work of the brain.
 
Tufts University’s Celia Herrera-Rincon and others devised an experiment that revealed the role of brains in African clawed frog embryos.* The bodies of brainless frogs developed abnormally. It seems that the young brain plays a role in organizing muscles and nerve fibers, and it probably plays a role in normal organ development. In other words, the brain, even in its earliest stages of development, exerts an identifiable control over the body. That begs the question: Does the more sophisticated brain in a mature animal exert even more complex control over behavior and in humans over thinking and decision-making?
 
“No. Say it ain’t so, Celia and Wolf,” you say. “Surely, I’m in control. Surely there’s a ‘larger’ more holistic me than a bundle of nerve fibers and neurons knotted up inside my skull.”
 
Think of the implications of the Tufts University experiment. It has the potential to call into question all kinds of belief and faith, and it possibly replaces traditional notions of free will with a new model for human decision-making. Is it a manifestation of chaos theory at work: Initial conditions determine outcomes. Your embryonic brain was that initial condition.
 
“Yes, it was,” you argue, “but it is the current environment of my life that I manage. And I do that through my free will.”
 
Maybe, my little tadpole. Maybe. Was Celia destined to study brainless frogs from the time her own embryonic form looked like a tadpole? 
 
* C. Herrera-Rincon et al. The brain is required for normal muscle and nerve patterning during early Xenopus development. Nature Communications. Published online September 25, 2017. doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-00597-2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00597-2

Give us our own Aristotle, a sage capable of seeing the world from perspectives hidden from the rest of us by our valley views. Give us that person, of any gender or age, who sees the world from some high plateau and who can prepare us to explore and conquer newfound truths.
 
But don’t give us an oracle. Instead, give us a guide who offers not The Truth, but who rather shows us the kinds of paths, including those that lead into cul-de-sacs, blind alleys, and dead-end streets, that we might travel enthusiastically. Give us someone who doesn’t point to the treasure chest, but who encourages us to make a U-turn when we find ourselves facing barriers imposed by our own or others’ ignorance.
 
The great polymath of ancient Greece, Aristotle, became Alexander the Great’s teacher, and it was apparently a U-turn that took him to Macedon. As the tale is told, Philip II of Macedon destroyed Stagira, but then, reversing his decision to leave the city in ruins and its people enslaved, Philip rebuilt the city in exchange for Aristotle’s teaching services. The conqueror saw the value in having a polymath guide his son. With such great preparation comes the possibility for great conquests, not just of places and people, but also of knowledge.  
 
Did you have a polymath prepare you for today? Will you be a polymath to inspire others?

x + 6 = 21
x + 6 - 6 = 21 - 6
x = 21- 6
x = 15
 
Remember those arguments you heard about learning math, particularly algebra and geometry? “It will teach you how to think.” “It will give you mental discipline.”
 
And then the promises of those arguments came up against the real world. When is the last time you applied x or y or quadratic equations to the practical problems of everyday life? Were those teachers just trying to justify their jobs and convincing themselves that what they were doing had actual relevance to living? Maybe. Maybe not.
 
Probably most of what you do is a matter of solving word problems. No, not the kind that you did in school, such as “If Johnny takes a plane that travels 500 mph to City X while Jenny takes a bus that travels 60 mph, which one is more likely to use the onboard bathroom?” No, rather, you face problems that require some emotional input.
 
If my memory serves me correctly, there’s very little emotion in either algebra or geometry, but in life emotion seems to prevail. And some of us do, on occasion, actually solve problems emotionally.
 
I wish algebra and geometry did have an emotional component. As many have joked, they might in the modern classroom. “Johnny, that’s a very good try. Your answer is very close. You should feel good about yourself.” Certainly, the emotional component in life rarely lends itself to stark reasoning and black-and-white answers.
 
So, what’s useful about algebra? That is, what’s useful beyond the figuring of complex math problems, such as those involving the application of complex economic theories, analyses of quantum effects, and algorithms that take the place of human decision-making?
 
Well, there might be an algebra of life, one in which we see how changing a negative sign to a positive one works when we fool around with equations involving people. If I want to find the value of an unknown on one side of the human equation, I might have to cancel out the known on the other side.
 
Wait a minute. I just realized that we do that algebra thing all the time, you know, cancelling out something on one side to learn something about the other side. That’s called negotiating, and it’s always about balancing an equation on the basis of identifiable terms.
 
It seems that we do use algebraic thinking as our teachers said we would. And maybe people who are bad at negotiating never mastered basic algebra.  

We might not be an endangered species, but we are certainly endangered individuals and have always been so. There’s little to argue for an underlying peace and much in human history to argue for “man’s inhumanity to man.” The idea of the “Noble Savage,” once part of a poetic tradition, will never be in danger, however. It will be carried on by naïve segments of every generation, typically by the young until they discover its dubious character. Every generation of unsuspecting youth will seek an ideal world far from the reaches of civilization’s corrupting influences.
 
Sound pessimistic?
 
I’m open for the optimistic view, the one that tells me how “noble” humanity is in general, how very close to the angels we are as a non-ethereal species. And then I run into the little evils, the ones that endanger not life, but rather reputation, or good will, or hope. Contradictory? Am I a pessimist? A Nihilist? Don’t I see the good in humanity?
 
I see good in individuals, and I see in some individuals both overt and insidious evil. It’s a wonder that we’ve survived, but maybe in that survival lies the lesson of optimism: Although evil exists, there has been some balancing good. Although we know of individuals perpetrating evil, we also know of individuals perpetrating good, generation after generation of them. Survival depends on there being at least just enough good to counter evil.
 
Of course, our species has arguably come close to extinction by natural phenomena, such as the great volcanic eruption of Toba about 74,000 years ago. Surviving such events might be a matter of luck and quick adaptability to living under stressful conditions like the rapid onset of a volcanic winter. But once we widened our geographic range, individual catastrophic events, like the more recent eruption of Mount Tambora in the nineteenth century, have been less of a threat to our species. Sheer numbers—now more than 7 billion humans—and geographic distribution have warded off extinction.
 
With lessened threats by nature, we have survived to face intra-species threats. And therein lies an argument for optimism about humanity’s future. Good hasn’t necessarily prevailed, but it has sufficiently warded off a total self-annihilation. “That’s not much to be happy about,” you say.
 
Maybe not “happy,” but at least a bit optimistic. Individuals will still do evil things, some even detrimental to the survival of millions of humans. Yet, those persistent acts of goodness seen in every generation and in the direst circumstances, coupled with a distribution of people over all habitable and even slightly habitable places, ensure that some will survive. Possibly, we can find a reason for some optimism in our persistent 200-millennia survival in spite of natural catastrophes and individual acts of evil.
 
Yes, evil exists, but so does good. Maybe it’s not a wonder that we have survived. 

As a young professor, I listened to one of my older colleague’s complaints about his students’ levels of ability and accomplishment. He was himself a well-traveled bilingual man familiar with both Eastern and Western cultures in the context of a war and its aftermath. In giving his long, rambling lectures that his students had difficulty following, he seemed to rely mainly on his life experiences, rather than on his book-learning. That few college students could relate to his message born of experience seems natural, but of course, the rambling didn’t help. Every generation is similar in having to acquire experience before realizing what the previous generation wants to impart in a seemingly rambling presentation of details. Every generation runs a race the previous generation believes it has already completed, restudied in memory, and examined from the post-race perspective. The details overwhelm the inexperienced who look for a brief overview, a shortcut, a set of easy-to-follow steps to knowledge or success. Look, for example, at the length of this paragraph—troublesome rambling, eh?  
 
Experience requires time and events, both of which are in short supply during youth. Yet, wanting both, many young people take up causes, often enthusiastically. The inexperienced, however, often “apply” before they “know,” and ironically, they do so with confidence. “It’s so evident. Why haven’t the old people done this?”
 
Regardless of the opinions of the pessimistic elderly like my now deceased colleague, the young are often willing to put in an energetic effort for a cause. The young see races to be run, goals to be reached, challenges to make an ideal world. “Why haven’t the old people done this?”
 
But in running toward the goals they believe they can reach, many ignore the contexts of contemporary competitors who are running different races. We ponder in our haste, “Why aren’t they all on the same track we run? And why are those old people just sitting in the stands scratching their heads?”
 
Enthusiasm for a cause is often the point of departure for two generations. Some members of an older generation, having already run with the wind in their faces, see that certain races are rather futile and certain goals not worth the efforts they made in reaching them. Or, having reached the finish line they chose to reach in their youth, they see that others have raced to different ends on tracks they never knew. Someone sprints a 100-meter dash; another runs a Marathon. One can win against competitors in only one race at a time, and time, for humans, is finite. Zeno was wrong in part: We can reach a finite goal, but we don’t all run toward and reach the same goals, and we don’t run with equal pace or enthusiasm. He was right in part: Those ideal goals are unreachable because their finish lines are in the details of their tracks an infinite number of fractions distant from the runner. 
 
In youth, we are optimistic about reaching ideal goals. Experienced runners might attempt to convey the details of difficulty, but we don’t see the logic in their “ramblings.” Is it our impatience derived from inexperience that makes us incapable of following their lessons?
 
Knowing where failure is probably inevitable, the experienced attempt to convey their knowledge. The inexperienced take such warnings as ramblings of the elderly who cannot understand their passion. In the cause of cause, every generation trains hard and runs hard toward a goal as long as the goal seems worthy of the attempt. Advice from the elderly in the form of details seems little more than pessimism from rambling minds filled with irrelevance. No one wants to hear from an apparent Scrooge, “Bah! Humbug,” with regard to a goal. As Ida M. Tarbell once wrote, “The pain and struggle of an enterprise are not what takes the heart out of a soldier; it is telling him his cause is mean, his fight is vain. Show him a reason, and he dies exultant.”* When the young believe they see a finish line, they race toward it, and they don’t want someone telling them in rambling details that their goal is unreachable.
 
So, in our youth we race toward a goal that we simply believe others could not reach because they had not the necessary energy or perseverance. But that lack of experience is often what trips us in the middle of the race, and that same lack applies to those who wish to improve the world by imposing their method of running and their strategies on others. Yes, some will run with us, but others choose to race different distances at different paces on different tracks. In youth, we often fail to understand why others choose to run as they do. Is wisdom a mix of understanding not only that humans have limitations, but also of understanding that ideals, though possibly worth our striving, have endemic unreachable finish lines persistent through generations. If in our youth we could only understand the ramblings of the old, we might focus our energy on races we could win.
 
Not so in our youth. Praise our naïve enthusiasm for challenges. Praise that ability to expend great energy before we get bogged down on a muddy track of details.  
 
In attempting to recruit others to race toward the same finish line, many of us make in our inexperience the same mistake that Ida Tarbell says others make when they want to change the world: “He wins, but he loses, by this method. He makes converts of those of his own kind, those who like him have rare powers for indignation and sacrifice, but little capacity or liking for the exact truth or for self-restraint. He turns from him many who are as zealous as he to change conditions, but who demand that they be painted as they are and that justice be rendered both to those who have fought against them in the past and to those who are in different ways doing so today.”**
 
We will never settle on the importance of a single race, and we will never be able to convey the details of experience to novice runners. They might understand part, but never the whole, of explanation. Too many details. Only running and living can enhance understanding on a par with those who are more experienced.
 
See a life of details in the old. See a life of generalizations in the young. See one group worn down by the details of the races they have run. See the other group expend their energy. See the former having realized that they chose certain races among many they could have run; the latter still in the process of choosing but believing that the race they will choose to run is the only race worth running.
 
*Tarbell, Ida M. The Business of Being a Woman, New York. The MacMillan Company, 1921. Online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16577/16577-h/16577-h.htm
 Last chapter: “On the Ennobling of the Woman’s Business,” 216 ff. Paragraph 7.
 
**Ibid., Paragraph 3.

In his analysis Rousseau and Romanticism, Irving Babbitt says that Rousseau held the same principle as Irish novelist George Moore (1852-1933): Both believed “that the only thing a man should be ashamed of is of being ashamed” (p. 129).* Apparently, that principle derives from a belief in the importance of individualism.
 
That shame derives from cultural contexts seems undeniable. Why would an individual feel shame except in violations of dogma, regulations, rules, precepts, and laws? That is not just a question for eighteenth- and nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century minds to answer. We all encounter the problem of individualism vs. conformity, the latter imposing shame upon those who do not conform.
 
We all sit upon a fence, even those who believe they have made a clear choice between individualism and conformity. And strangely, nonconformity has become a conformity of sorts. Those seeking “identity,” usually the young and impressionable, stumble across “models of individuality” they emulate. So, youth, for example, wishing to strike out on a different path from a more formal or traditional lifestyle might take up dressing in the Goth style or become, like George Moore and the French artists with whom he associated, somewhat “Bohemian.” When individuality is identifiable, it is no longer individual. To be identified in the late 1960s through the late 1970s as a “Hippie” and a member of a counterculture meant being one in a group of self-identifying members that had its own dogma, regulations, rules, precepts, and laws.
 
Unless we are reared by wolves, we are all enculturated, and our “individuality” faces the prospect of “being ashamed.” That means that all of us deal in some way with ideals as they impose shoulds and oughts upon our behavior and sometimes even on our thoughts.
 
You might have acquired through enculturation a political inclination toward the shoulds and oughts of complete unfettered capitalism or complete socialism. Both bodies politic and economic require some conformity to ideals, and that means a relinquishing of individuality to some degree based on a level of shame. This isn’t a new dilemma; it is one version of the dilemma that reaches the very core of the question about how we live as individuals in a societal context. Probably because he inherited the unresolved dilemma the question poses, the Buddha addressed the matter more than two thousand years ago, and philosophers and psychologists have struggled unsuccessfully toward its resolution ever since.
 
You will probably never completely resolve the problem of conformity vs individualism, but examining your vacillating stand on the dilemma is worth your effort. Shame might influence members of a society to act ethically or morally even as it imposes limitations on individuality and complete freedom. Too much of anything, however, never seems to be good. So, too much shame burdens and restricts every individual. Somehow each of us has to find a balance between just being ashamed of being ashamed and not being ashamed because of being unashamed.
 
*Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and Romanticism. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company, Riverside Press Cambridge, 1919.

The origin of the tarantella is a matter of debate. Some say that it is a remnant from Bacchanalian rites; some say it derives from whirling responses to spider bites. Certainly, it seems to have been long associated with parts of Italy as the only cure for some tarantula bites.* The tarantella’s inclusion in wedding reception dances mimics the dancing associated with the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, a celebration that involved women dressed as brides who danced themselves into a trance as though they were under the influence of a black-bellied tarantula’s toxins.
 
The Web hides its own poisonous spiders who inflict hallucinatory trances upon those willing to dance to any innuendo, regardless of its veracity. Because the Web is far-reaching, its sticky threads are difficult to avoid. Anticipating where and how the spiders of inimical ideas and rumored guilt build their traps is the only way to avoid the bite. Want some advice? Before you act under the influence of such spiders, do some further research. That poisonous bites can affect the nervous system is undeniable, but they don’t have to infect the mind. Whirling in a mob is a questionable cure.
 
You don’t need to dance in a trance.
  
*Fabre, Henri J., The Life of the Spider. 1912. Fabre writes (p. 5), “The Italians have bestowed a bad reputation on the Tarantula, who produces convulsions and frenzied dances in the person stung by her.  To cope with ‘tarantism,’ the name given to the disease that follows on the bite of the Italian Spider, you must have recourse to music, the only efficacious remedy, so they tell us.  Special tunes have been noted, those quickest to afford relief.  There is medical choreography, medical music.  And have we not the tarentella, a lively and nimble dance, bequeathed to us perhaps by the healing art of the Calabrian peasant?”