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?
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?
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