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.