What is wisdom ?

It was the poet who said that data is not information, information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. But then what really is wisdom?

Scientists studying wisdom try and break it down into its smallest components to identify and test each component. They then attempt to figure out how each works, how to obtain it, and what it is. There are, according to these researchers, eight attributes of wisdom: Emotional Regulation, Knowing What's Important, Moral Reasoning, Compassion, Humility, Altruism, Patience, and Dealing with Uncertainty. Tests are designed, studies are lined up, and college undergrads short of cash or in need of class credit are then recruited as lab rats in the pursuit of study of wisdom.

The problem is that wisdom is elusive, and the act of reducing it down to a binary code seems ridiculous. Take a common test for moral reasoning: A trolley is out of control and will kill five people unless you pull the lever for the trolley to switch tracks, resulting in the death of one person. What do you do? Researchers later switched it up to find people's moral threshold: How far would you go to save those five people? How much would you participate in that one person's death? Would you kill him or her with your own hands? The problem with the test is that it has only two answer choices: yes and no. Life is messier than that. As is morality. There is no room on the survey to talk about survivor's guilt, or whether the value of life is equal for each individual, or finding alternatives to pushing someone to their death, like, say, yelling at the people on the track to get out of the goddamn way.

There is a danger in seeing this as a map of isolated points rather than a three-dimensional, pulsing, dynamic network of neural coordination, one that is constantly changing, and changeable, one that is weighted with different inputs depending on our previous experiences, our learning, our mood that day, the general uncertainty or anxiety we may be feeling, our life circumstances at any time, our age and stage of life — a network that is, in a word, idiosyncratic.

The problem with many behaviorists — and in particular this new splashy trend of the economist explaining society to us — is their simplistic reduction of our desires, motivation, and reasoning. And so while the neuro-imaging might teach us that our brains are much more complex than the standard self-reporting tests reveal, the experiments break down when they try to encompass all we bring to every decision, or when they figure out why knowing the wise or moral thing to do does not lead one to actually do that thing.

Some of the studies, however, have a wonderful sense of whimsy in their efforts to expose human nature. Take, for instance, a 2007 study at Pennsylvania State University's Smeal College of Business, conducted by two economists. They wanted to know if there was a correlation between narcissism in CEOs and volatility in that company's performance. As they were unable to kidnap the various CEOs and put them through extensive personality testing, they examined "the size of the leader's photograph in company documents, the length of entries in Who's Who, the frequency with which the CEO was mentioned in corporate press releases, and the number of times the CEO used the first-person singular (I, me, mine, my, myself) in interviews." What they found was that the more narcissistic the CEO appeared to be, the more detrimental they were to the company!!

It is true that we all crave wisdom — worship it in others, wish it upon our children, and seek it ourselves. But there's a difference between admiring wisdom and emulating it. That's perhaps the best illustration of the difference between knowledge and wisdom: We know the value of wisdom. We know that we should be caring for the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, but we don't want to pay higher taxes to do so, nor do we really want to donate much of our time or money. But perhaps the most crushing of all the studies was one that showed that a person will naturally act altruistically — until they see those around them behaving selfishly. Instead of pulling up the behavior of the others, the altruistic give up and become as greedy as everyone else.

Finally, to be wise is not to know particular facts but to know without excessive confidence or excessive cautiousness. Wisdom is thus not a belief, a value, a set of facts, a corpus of knowledge or information in some specialized area, or a set of special abilities or skills. Wisdom is an attitude taken by persons toward the beliefs, values, knowledge, information, abilities, and skills that are held, a tendency to doubt that these are necessarily true or valid and to doubt that they are an exhaustive set of those things that could be known.

Going on a diet

Going on a diet

We often go on a diet when we have over indulged and feel that our body is responding only sluggishly to any stimulus. We do not like the look of our silhouette or feel that we will not be attractive to the opposite sex unless we shape up. So we begin a regime of controlling our intake of food and drink and look away when too many sweets are put in front of us tempting us to once again indulge and fall into old patterns. Unfortunately we never quite think of our minds the same way. Are we over indulging if we spend all our time reading newspapers and magazines? Do we become hermits if all we can do is to quote the latest books from our favorite authors? Are our minds so filled with non-essential trivia that we can barely carry on a meaningful conversation? This malady of the mind has been made much worse with the internet. Now you have all the time “fast food of news” on the cable channels always available. You can gorge yourself on the latest news and essays. In short, you can avoid thinking by always wanting to read more and discover ever more esoteric facts.

As Alain Bottom point out "One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible."

The obsession with current events is relentless. We do not need to wait for the weekly magazines to distill the essence of the daily happenings. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows or the world. Every little occurrence anywhere in the world seems to have a cataclysmic quality about it. The cable news chattering pundits boost even minor events into world shattering dangers which we must pay attention to or we could miss out. That of course is their job, they are paid to keep our eyes glue on the TV so that advertisers can tempt us with new fangled goods. But what about us? Why do we fall into this trap? It is worth thinking about that perhaps ten years ago, we read our daily newspaper and perhaps a magazine and saw the news on the TV for perhaps half an hour a day. But today, the TV is on all day lest we miss anything.

We are continuously searching for new works of arts and culture. New artists come an go with an alarming frequency. Authors need to keep on producing books and then going on book tours to promote them. And, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution, like so much of what once impressed us in the past.

Is it not time that the need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting. And just as in diets, we need to look for specialists who will tell which foods are good for us in the long term. Should we only gorge ourselves on the products of chefs like Paul Krugman, Eugene Robinson, EJ Dionne? Or should we mix them up with fare from the right chefs like George Will, David Brooks and Katherine Parker? Would it not be wise to sprinkle in a bit of Tom Friedman—just a sprinkle will do- to really give your mind a heady dish?

Think about it – it is time to go on a diet!