The subject of wisdom has occupied of my mind tremendously as of late. Much of my thoughts expressed in this forum flow out of this thought process, and what ends up on this page is often a tangent to this train of thought spurred on by some recent event in the news. I will step back a bit in this offering to frame in more general terms where I think wisdom has been lost in the modern era.1
In case it is not obvious, I am only a hopeful student of wisdom, not one who has attained wisdom myself. But this does not seem to disqualify me from at least glimpsing where wisdom may come from and reasons why society in the modern era has shut it out.
Our “course of ideas”
I imagine that everyone can identify with having some kind of “course of ideas” that has gone on in their mind as a more or less continuous strain of internal thought for as long as they can remember. At any given moment, they have a “current” set of ideas about what is ultimately true. Their current ideas of truth are periodically ruminated on, improved, and updated, but over the history of their lifetime that changing set of ideas exists as a linear chain of thought that has been with them since their earliest memory.
As we grow we gradually add to and refine our basic ideas and beliefs in a process that seems to begin the moment we gained the mental capacity to comprehend the existence of a reality outside of ourselves. Not that I can remember what my ideas were when I was a child, but the “chain of ideas” I have held through the present appears to extend as far into the past as I have been able to think, and it appears set to continue as far into the future as I will continue to have that ability.
When we recognize that our ideas about truth have been changing our entire lives, we must also recognize that our ideas about truth will probably continue changing for the rest of our lives as well. A month ago, a year ago, or ten years ago, I was as confident about what I believed to be true then as I am about what I believe to be true today. I am in no better position to judge the completeness of my knowledge today than I was then. My only advantage today is the simple addition of some volume of new experience. But nothing about those few months or years of additional experience is qualitatively different from all of my experience leading up to them. I am not suddenly immune to holding incorrect or incomplete ideas because of the the most recent time I once again subtly updated them.
Imperfection and humility
It is this realization that our “course of ideas” will continue to change that shakes our confidence in what we think we know. If we have not figured everything out by now, what will we learn tomorrow to turn what we think today upside down? All the time, mental energy, and self-study expended on pushing that “course of ideas” on a trajectory toward an ever clearer understanding of truth suddenly seems to have been fruitless; you set out to make yourself correct, now you realize you will never be fully correct, or if you ever are, you would never know it.
This point in a person’s life is what we might call the first step toward wisdom. It is of course an arbitrary point to assign for this, as all of a person’s prior steps attempting to perfect his ideas about truth were prefatory to his realization of this never-fully-realized nature of knowledge, and particularly that kind of knowledge that pertains to what is ultimately true.
Thus, the attitude that must be had before wisdom can be attained, or even attempted, is humility.
Why this is seems almost impossible to state clearly, but it begins with the proposition that rendering judgments involves making decisions that depend on facts that cannot be known or can never be certain. If the ultimate good of wisdom is the ability to make sound judgments, then the essence of wisdom must be to have a sense about how to navigate those uncertain facts which are indispensable to truth but forever hidden to the human mind. Whatever the actual skill is that makes one wise in this task, he will never begin to seek it if he is not first humbled about the limits of his own knowledge.
Wisdom in the modern era
But this mechanism for attaining wisdom seems to have ground to a halt in modern times. It is difficult to say such a thing for certain, as this mechanism is not something ever written in stone or taught to schoolchildren like the alphabet or multiplication tables. Wisdom has always been something earned, and it has always seemed to have been a matter men considered best learned by example rather than rote lessons. As the foregoing disjointed and incomplete description evidences, this mechanism is hardly even capable of being written down; it will never be the same for any two people and depends not on teaching a man certain truths, but in finding him once he has realized the limits of his human understanding. There is no one road all men walk down to find wisdom, it begins at some point along each of their own roads.
Past generations seemed to have accepted that this point in a man’s life will come when it comes. Some basic instruction and words of advice are gently given to men in their youth, not with any real expectation that those words will change them then and there, but that they will ruminate in the young men’s minds until the day they are able make this realization for themselves and finally grasp their real meaning. The wiser men of those ages seemed to accept that their young would be brash and unwilling to heed the wisdom of their elders, foolishly believing their elders had not once stood in their very same shoes. Their young were allowed the naïve freedom to endure a period of difficult learning, running up against stone walls and learning the lessons of reality by incurring bruises, both real and metaphorical, and painful in either case.
We can be certain there was plenty of fatherly advice in times now lost to history and attempts to make their children prematurely wise, but what we do know of those times is that many of the means of shielding one’s young from their own stupidity that exist today did not exist then. We can’t help but imagine that, after a brief period in a youth’s life of thinking himself unquestionable, he quickly learned the severity of his overestimation of things by running unprotected square into reality. He either learned or perished. Today we could not imagine anything of the sort. Our young are told they are the inheritors of the future, that their mere youthfulness is somehow the answer to all ills, and that the old ways are meant to be questioned by their new and therefore better perspectives. The prospect of their potential failure is never to be considered.
Worse, they are shielded from the consequences of those doomed beliefs. Even where they are allowed to feel the results of their failures, they are told these are not their own fault. Their overindulgence in student loans is the fault of capitalism and greedy bankers, their inability to adjust to adult life is the fault of racism or homophobia, their mental illness and addictions are the fault of the underfunded medical system, the crime they suffer in their trendy urban neighborhoods is the fault of housing policy. The lessons of life that would have broken the brashness of the youths of the past are thus withheld from the youth of today.
The “course of ideas” for them is therefore a plateau. As far as they are told by their parents and instructors, they have attained the new knowledge, it is inconceivable that any previous generation could every have understood things so clearly as they do, and if the old ways seem to be proven true at every turn, it is the world that must change, not their youthful ideas.
The world without wisdom
The world of today is the product of this halting of the mechanism of wisdom. More factors than the above are at work, but the general feeling of society in the modern era is the opposite of the humility required for wisdom.
The great and terrible projects of the 20th Century were built on the hubris of knowledge. With scientific knowledge advancing and seeming to make anything possible given enough time and funding, every discontent became viewed as a problem to be solved and the shortest route to solving it became viewed as the answer. If there is a complaint X, and if A eliminates X, then by the laws of science A is the “answer.” The humility to consider whether A might come with its own unforeseen ills is not within the scope of 20th Century science.
It is the subject of now-forgotten wisdom. The modern era saw the birth of “restorative justice,” in which the guilty are not to be punished but are to be rehabilitated and their violations viewed not as sins but as the failures of society to orientate them correctly. Ignored is the proverb that has withstood the test of thousands of years: “It is not good to be partial to the wicked and so deprive the innocent of justice.”2
The simpleness of true wisdom is here distilled into a single line with an innately understood meaning. No attempt is made to prove the goodness of that principle, because wisdom knows that in the end no absolute proof could ever be given for it. It is for this very reason that scientists and sociologists are able to tender restorative justice as a solution to one of society’s ills, the unhappy lives of criminals: no proof acceptable for the purposes of science can prove the proposition of the proverb true, so the partial truth of the sociologists is treated as if it were absolute truth. Whether a failure to punish the wicked could have ill effects of its own is not strictly known, and thus is no reason to forgo the benefits of such a policy that are known. Yet no sensible person can actually doubt the truth of the proverb, and the results of decades of restorative justice as a policy serves only to confirm it.
Uncountable examples of the same lack of humility leading to the lack of wisdom exist today.
News and opinion are channeled to us with lightning speed, before facts have been learned or minds have had an opportunity to process what is known. Meanwhile, “To answer before listening—that is folly and shame.”3
Our leaders, in their clamor for power and persuasiveness, are willing to say anything they think will buy them a moment of credibility. Yet, “Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment”4
Self-appointed saviors of the poor preach revolution of economic order, assured of their belief that elimination of the rich will free the poor from oppression as if the existence of rich and poor were not an inevitable condition of the world. But they do not realize that this condition is a permanent feature of humanity, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.”5
It seems inevitable that wisdom will eventually reassert itself. Foolishness is the crashing of human pride into the jaws of reality. It just seems as if the foolish of this age will take the rest of us with them into those jaws. It may be the collapse of the present society that the proverbs of future societies will be written on.
Although I am aware there are historical, artistic, or sociological definitions of “Modern,” I use the phrase “modern era” loosely to mean today and the century or so leading up to it.
Proverbs 18:5.
Proverbs 18:13.
Proverbs 12:19.
Proverbs 22:7.