We face a fundamental dilemma. Seeking a world more attuned to our ideals seems like relying on little more than hope. Going all in at the table.
We could instead hold the fort. Maintain our successes, such as they are, and resist the Siren Song of change. We can always follow wise counsel and reject a path where the odds are against us.
Or with William James we can take that path—to hold through struggle and pain, through loss and sacrifice, through dark nights of the spirit, an unending negotiation with each other toward what the world could be, without any guarantees of a final success and certainly no clear victory within any lifetime.
He offers an epigram from a Greek anthology to support his choice:
‘A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale.”
We humans are an interesting life form. To date we have survived against the odds. We have very recently developed a technological culture harnessing the forces of nature to offset our limitations, but at the risk of annihilation and the despoiling of the planet.
Shall we take the lessons of our many “shipwrecks” as guides to the present? Or
recall the less frequent times when we “weathered the gale?”
I think survivorship bias throws a lot of us off. It's fine to look at what has worked, but let's make sure we learn lessons from the shipwrecks, too.