Nearly 2,300 years ago a guy in an audience threw some dirt on the toga of a Roman ambassador to Tarentum. That small act precipitated a war in which thousands died and Tarentum changed.

Things didn’t start with the guy in the audience, however. Tarentum was a Greek city lying within the heel of Italy’s “boot.” It was a city of educated people that went to plays and thought of themselves as being better than Roman “barbarians.” During an incident in Tarentum’s harbor, the Tarentines seized some Roman ships and killed the Roman sailors. In response, the Romans sent Lucius Posthumius to demand both an apology and compensation. Lucius was a dignified, calm person. As was the custom of his city, Lucius wore a toga, an unfashionable garb in Tarentum.

When he arrived in Tarentum, Lucius met a rowdy crowd that mocked his outfit and his Greek pronunciation. Nevertheless, Lucius remained calm. At the conclusion of his speech, a Tarentine, mocking him, threw dirt on the toga. Then the otherwise calm Lucius showed the soiled toga to the audience and told them that his clothes would be washed clean by their blood.

Returning to Rome, Lucius told his story, inciting the Senate to declare war on Tarentum. Back in Tarentum, the Tarentines realized they had no effective military leader, so they called upon Pyrrhus of Epirus in Greece to help them defend their city. When he arrived in Tarentum, Pyrrhus took control of the city, shut down the theater and other entertainment, and made the citizens train to be soldiers. Gone were the heady days of elitism in Tarentum. Gone were the fun and games. War was upon them with a virtual dictator in control of their fate.

The Pyrrhic Wars continued for about five years with the eventual defeat of Pyrrhus and the capture of Tarentum by the Romans. Now, I could draw all the usual lessons from this story: How elitism usually leads to some embarrassment or downfall; How the devil you know is often better than the one you don’t; or How insulting someone else can lead to one’s own injury. But I won’t. I won’t mention any of that.

Of course, there are two sides to every story. So, there’s another lesson: When in Tarentum, don’t wear a toga.

How fast? This is not a physics question. Focus on people. How fast will you approach, encounter, and leave people today? You could time the process, but that would be rude behavior during an encounter. Let’s just estimate.

For a very short part of the day, you will be in close proximity to someone else. During that short time, you will make choices that can alter both your and another person’s day in some way.

If you watch a film, you see still pictures at 24 frames per second, enough to give you the sense of motion. Picture the next encounter as part of a film. How many frames will run during that encounter, that is, how many frozen moments will pass? Each, you realize, captures a relationship that plays out as the film runs. Your sense, of course, is that the encounter is smooth, so let’s not get into the old argument of Zeno and Parmenides. For you, the passage is smooth. But, assuming for a moment that you could break up your encounter into “frames,” what subtle differences would you detect from frame to frame?

That is, and this is the big “that is,” what change in either or both of you occurs because of the encounter? On a sequential examination of each frame, you might see no change. But isn’t it curious that during the only time this one encounter will occur in Earth’s history nothing much changed? You and the other person get a brief chance to alter each other in some manner in several frames of an encounter. You have control over half that encounter.

Stop the movie! Freeze frame! Pause! Surely, something is noticeable. You are the producer, editor, director, and co-star of the film. Will you get an award for any of those roles?    

What if there were a perfect philosophy? What would it be? The immediate answer, of course, is “yours.” Yes, you have the perfect philosophy. You are the Aristotle of our times. Or are you?

Conflict. That’s our problem. In fact, conflict arises because I might think you have the perfect philosophy, but someone else will believe otherwise. Maybe we can prove that your philosophy is best. What would that take? What conditions make a philosophy perfect?

First, for your philosophy to be perfect it has to be complete. Perfect derives from the Latin facere (“to make”) and per (“through”). The Latin perfectus and its Romance languages’ derivatives all give “completed” as the synonym and definition of perfect. Second, it has to be universal, that is, it can’t be cultural and limited by a set of historical beliefs. Third, it has to be self-inclusive, that is, it has to incorporate not only meaning but also the origin of meaning. Fourth, it has to be sufficiently understandable (coherent) to be applicable. And fifth, it has to be purposeful, for a philosophy that lacks purpose is a contradiction.

How does your personal philosophy meet those conditions?

Now, your argument: “I don’t agree with your conditions,” you say. “Taking my cue from Kurt Gödel, I don’t think that any philosophy can meet your third condition. And looking at your second condition, I don’t think any philosophy can circumvent a cultural heritage. I have yet another objection,” you continue. “Applicability is a matter of psychology, not philosophy.”

“Okay,” I respond,  “What are the conditions that make your philosophy worth defending? I’m willing to listen.” 

In the underworld or afterlife of Greek and Roman mythology, those who wanted to reach Elysium or return to the world above drank from the River of Forgetfulness, called Lethe. In our living world, we don’t have such a river. When bad things happen, we remember. Even in suppression, those bad things hide in the brain, waiting for some trigger to reconnect the neurons of memory. 

Remembering the bad things is something we’re born to do. The memories serve as protection, of course, warning not to encounter something similar. So, in a sense, trying to drink from the River Lethe might not be a good thing. Popular psychology tells us repression is itself a bad thing. At the same time, that same psychology tells us that we shouldn’t dwell on the bad things in life.

What a dilemma! We don’t know whether to remember or forget. And if we concentrate on the dilemma, we stir the memories, putting distance between Elysium and us. Seems that bridging synapses is easier than bridging the Lethe.

So, we remember the bad things, and their memory keeps us from entering Elysium or returning to a time before the bad things happened. Apparently, we can never drink from the Lethe. The river is a myth. We are stuck in the reality of our personal histories.

The next time you enter an apparent underworld where forgetfulness is unattainable, recognize that in order to see the bad things that happened, you have to look back. Memory does not portray the present.

Good old Boethius. In his 523 (AD, BCE) The Consolation of Philosophy he makes a number of memorable statements that have become platitudes, not because they are worthless thoughts, but because they are just plain true. In one of those statements, he notes that wealth engenders dependence.

I know. We are taught that achieving wealth means achieving independence and a higher level of freedom. We can travel. Build expense homes. Get second homes. Join exclusive clubs. Buy stuff. Buy more stuff. Buy even more stuff. Ah! Wealth.

But then who takes care of the wealth when we get to a certain level of riches? Accountants? Bankers? Investors? Security guards? You know you just can’t keep hiding it under the mattress. I guess Boethius has a point. The very result we hope to get from acquisition places us in its antithesis. Unless we want to stand guard 24/7 over that mattress, we have to rely on others to protect what we thought would make us truly independent.

So, should we go live a hermit’s life, dwell in a lean-to, gather berries, roots, and grubs, do a little hunting, and forego toilet paper to achieve “true” independence? No. You can if you want to, but even in the woods you will be dependent on something like the growth and abundance of food and water. Only a few individuals will be able to sustain themselves in such an environment. If everyone ran to the woods to live, the woods would diminish in extent and quality, the environment would undergo stress, and the multitude of “hermits” would bump into one another in their competition for berries. Conflict or cooperation would ensue, and both are forms of dependence.

You’re stuck in your dependence on others. But that doesn’t lessen who you are. Remember that someone else in some manner depends on you. Maybe your true wealth lies in how many people depend on you not simply for a purchase of goods or services, but for encouragement, emotional support, defense of character, knowledge, skill, cooperation, or advice.  

Where is your cravat? Don’t have one? What about a polyester leisure suit? A toga? Patterns in clothing define “normality” and abnormality in the world of fashion. Every once so often an anachronistic fashion becomes a phoenix of popularity. So, if you still have a leisure suit, keep it. And if James Bond could wear a cravat in A View to a Kill, the 17th-century neckpiece seems capable of rebirth.

What if, however, cravats and leisure suits have long gone out of style like togas, only to be worn in parodies? A wearer would be “abnormal.” Now think inner city. What’s your image? Pants halfway down a butt? Picture Wall Street. What’s your image? Suit, crisply pressed shirt, tie? Imagine Texas. What’s your image? India? Brazilian rainforest?

Having stereotyped images is part of our makeup. None of us can picture all the diverse forms in our world, so we often take the easy path, finding a well-known pattern to identify. Of course, the stereotype is a mechanism of bias, but it saves us time, and it can keep us safe. The good side of the axiom of pattern is that traffic flows together, students sit at their desks, and lines form at the rear. The anomalies, like wrong way drivers, unruly students, and line-jumpers, are generally rare.

Unfortunately, there’s a bad side. From the axiom of pattern we deduce, and from deductions we judge and value. Every time we judge and value, each of us potentially shuts a door on understanding diversity. At the same time we shut a door on others, on other ways of thinking, on other possible solutions to problems, and on other cultures, we proudly accept the stereotype of our own patterns and judge them as valuable.

We can never totally get by our dependence on the axiom of pattern. We can, however, try to understand how we have derived our deductions and values from the fashionable patterns of our culture or subculture.

Here’s how I picture you. You look confident as you stand on the crest of a hill with a sweeping vista. The sun is rising in the distance, filling all beneath you with golden light. Your eyes mirror the sun. You are in command. You have my respect, my admiration. You climbed against obstacles. From some unknown source uplifting music like Thomas Bergersen’s “Starchild” envelopes you.

How do you picture yourself? If your image is less majestic than mine, feel free to borrow what I just wrote. You deserve a day of uplift.  

You have jumped out of your car at the gas station to fill your almost empty tank. As you wait for the tank to fill, you look at the entomological collection you have been displaying on the glass you call your windshield. Time to wash off the bugs.

Job done and tank filled, you get back in the car to drive off, but as you look through the now bug-free windshield, you notice the film of dirt on the inside of your window. It’s been building there since the last time you washed your car. With an outside surface covered in bug splatters, the inside dirt seemed insignificant, even unnoticeable. Now, it’s there, and you especially notice it later as twilight fades and oncoming cars shine headlights through the film.

As you drive, you take a napkin left over from the fast food restaurant and wipe a circle of clean before your eyes, a tunnel of temporary smeared clarity that leaves the rest of the view more translucent than transparent.

Do I need to say more about this? Do I need to draw the relationship between what I just described and almost everyone's view of the world? 

Forget the moss. Think edges. Stones that roll lose sharp edges. Edges break off, and in the process, rocks become rounded, the geologist's term for smoothness. “Rounded” rocks don’t have to be spherical; they just have to be smooth like those pebbles, shingle, and cobbles used in heated stone massages in spas.

Through a number of processes, pieces of “parent” rock break to become units of varying sizes and shapes. The largest of the pieces, called boulders, eventually wear down to become sand, silt, and even clay, all terms geologists use to designate particle, or clast, sizes. As rocks wear away to smaller sizes, they lose their angularity, or roughness. Call it the “life of a rock”: boulder, cobble, pebble, coarse sand, medium sand, fine sand, silt, clay, colloid, elemental composition, nothing.

Since you broke off the parent rock, you, too, have lost some angularity and acquired some smoothness. Interestingly, you have also undergone other breaks that interrupt the smoothness with new edges. Where are you in the process? What is the state of your roundness?

Have you just left the parent rock? Do you still exhibit rough edges from the original break? Have you been tumbling through falls and bumping into other rocks that initially wore down the original edges and subsequently created new ones over many years and through many experiences and relationships?

Here’s “the thing”: Both the process of smoothing and the process of making new angular edges require some banging around. You got smoothness because you underwent collisions; you got new edges because you underwent further collisions.

That’s life, a series of collisions. That sounds like a pessimistic assessment, doesn’t it? Yet, every collision on the way to a particle of no dimension, has the potential to knock off a rough edge and make a new smoothness, easy to handle, comforting to feel, and, at least temporarily, just right for the easy life in the spa.

The phylum Porifera is, from a human point of view, rather primitive. The members of the group, called sponges, don’t have a head, a tail, any internal organs, and, in some, any hard parts. Those that do have hard parts are critters that make needle-like structures of calcium carbonate or silica that interlock like the pieces in a game of jacks. These sponges seem to be nothing but a collection of cells that work together to make single animals that filter water for food.

The sponges without needlelike spicules have a support system made of spongin. It’s the spongin sponge you can use to wash your car without scratching it. Of course, today most people use artificial sponges, and many people have probably never seen a poriferan either alive or dead. Alive in the water, they can be very colorful, but, once removed from their liquid residence, they lose their color rather fast.

Sponges have been around for a very long time, more than half a billion years. In that time they have diversified, but they still retain that “primitive” character they’ve always had. You might say, “You’d think these critters would get a brain after all those years of evolution.” Somehow, without a brain, the cells of a sponge work together as a unified organism, even “falling asleep” at times. Unified action like that implies communication.

Yet, in spite of the primitive nature of sponges, the individuals survive and even thrive. A half billion years is, well, a really long time. As primitive as they are, sponges have been doing something right. It doesn’t look as though humans, who have been around for only 200,000 years, have the wherewithal to last a half billion years. Before and during our emergence, there were other creatures with brains, species much like us. In comparison with the history of sponges, not one of those species lasted very long; otherwise, your neighbor might be Australopithecus afarensis, Little Lucy. What did our ilk do wrong? What are we, with our advanced nervous systems topped by a brain, doing wrong?

It couldn’t be all this violence, could it? It couldn’t be self-destructive behavior, could it?

Now, don’t misunderstand. I don’t want the life of a sessile sponge. I like having a brain and being motile. I just know that when I dive in the ocean and see colorful sponges, I don’t see them chasing after one another in a mindless attempt to injure or kill. They have enough to do defending themselves against the vicissitudes of their environment, filtering some water, and, somehow without a brain, internally communicating for the good of the individual organism. That seems smart.

Does having a brain mean being stupid?