Day 15: Council Of The Elders

So, for this prompt, I’m creating a list of “great” men from history to learn from. Who would they be, and what would you hope to learn from them?

This is a tough one. I’m not too big on holding up figures from the past in such high regard that I would want to sit down with them and take notes. I’m more of the mind that I would have liked someone to point me in the direction I’ve already taken in my life, but at an earlier age. The other hurdle to this sort of exercise is, I cherry pick certain ideas from different thinkers to create my own (hopefully) coherent worldview.

Having said that, who would I like to hear from?
I just finished Aurelius’ Meditations, and think it’s a pretty interesting take on leadership at that level, and the stoic attitude lines up partially with my attitude. He’d be a good start.

I think I’d like to meet my great grandfather. He was an educated man, and was a pioneer in several significant ways. He owned a sawmill that employed many men, and was an early employee of Standard Oil, owning a small fleet of trucks. He was in the generation that first saw the transition from a fully man/horse powered world to one of the internal combustion engine. I wonder what his perspective on our modern world would be.

After those two, the waters get a little murky. There’s no historical epoch I’d rather live in than the one I inhabit now, except maybe the future. The pre-penicillin world doesn’t hold much allure to me.

I just don’t think I’d learn as much from a historical personage as much as just seeing times past. I’d love to see ancient Rome or Greece. I’d like to see what a mediaeval village looked like, and how it was to live then (with the use of modern sanitation and inoculation, of course. I suppose I’d bring along some hand sanitizer).

It’s not that I don’t think I couldn’t learn anything from anyone, it’s just the burden of knowing what they didn’t. Everything they were ignorant of; germ theory, cosmology, human origins. They could learn so much more from us than they could teach modern people.