The Explorers: A Story of Fearless Outcasts, Blundering Geniuses, and Impossible Success by Martin Dugard

Author:Martin Dugard
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Africa, Explorers, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780385677837
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2014-06-02T12:00:00+00:00

“Courage,” wrote the academic and theologian C. S. Lewis, “is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” Yet as much as we admire acts of courage, there is also an institutionalized embrace of mediocrity in the modern world. Settling for good enough is rampant, and widely encouraged. Curiosity, for instance, that great trait that starts all voyages of discovery (personal and otherwise), is actively suppressed. “Curiosity killed the cat” is such a common phrase that we overlook its crystal clear subtext: “Don’t take risks.” Or, in corporate-speak: “Don’t think outside the box.”

The French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote of a commute on the morning he was about to make his very first flight. The city bus was filled with clerks, bankers, and laborers. “I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, and shabby domestic cares. Their talk painted the walls of the dismal prison in which these men had locked themselves up. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny,” Saint-Exupéry noted.

Then, enraged at lives not being lived to their fullest, he directed his writing to the mediocrity surrounding him. “You rolled yourself into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. Nobody grasped you by the shoulders while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”

The hardening that Saint-Exupéry mentions is born out of mankind’s cultural embrace of mediocrity. This herd mentality is seen in everything from popular hairstyles to clothing to music—emphasis on the word “popular.” Parents want to see their children succeed in life, and know that going along with the crowd seems to be the best way to make that possible.

“All men dream, but not equally,” wrote T. E. Lawrence, the legendary British desert explorer, making a distinction between those who choose mediocrity and those who choose courage. “Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”

Inspiring as those words might be, children are not raised to be those “dreamers of the day.” Daydreaming,[3] in fact, is widely viewed as a lazy waste of time. Throughout their schooling years, it is made clear that children who choose to simply do as they are told, rather than those who challenge conventional wisdom through an unconventional creative thought process, will be amply rewarded for their acquiescence. The educational system, corporate culture, and most every aspect of modern life are comfortable with the status quo, resenting and fearing anything that introduces radical change.

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