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Friday, April 22, 2005
Oaks And Toadstools: A Reflection On Wisdom
The following essay was stimulated by your Curmudgeon's ongoing conversations with his much-valued friend Pascal.
As so many of us do, your Curmudgeon occasionally looks for comparisons between people he knows -- including himself -- and historically significant figures. In this view, Pascal is Jeremiah; your Curmudgeon is more of a G. K. Chesterton. Jeremiah declaimed passionately, from the assumption that his listeners already understood his fundamentals; Chesterton recurred to the fundamentals frequently and with great care, because he was never quite sure that his audience understood what he meant by them.
Your Curmudgeon is morally certain that Chesterton would find this to be the case with wisdom.
The learning processes that function best in humans are mimicry and mistakes. Mimicry is easy to understand; one imitates the successful behavior of others, in hope of reaping the rewards that flow from the reproduction thereof. Mistakes are somewhat more problematic, specifically because they require one to be wrong at the outset. Nevertheless, the mechanism works. It's worthwhile to ponder why.
A veering approach of the sort your Curmudgeon favors begins with the recognition that mimicry doesn't always work. The mimic who fails must then confront the scientist's question: why?
Medieval seekers after knowledge and power often recurred to supernatural explanations. This is particularly in evidence in the centuries-long attempts to get magic to work. Magic's premise is that certain rituals can invoke the assistance of potent non-human persons in securing what one desires. When a self-described magician actually succeeded in getting what he wanted, it inspired others to mimic him -- and frustration among the mimics when their results failed to match his.
We see here the first critical epistemological disjunction: the gap between information and knowledge. Facts disconnected from their surrounding context and unlinked by any causal theory are mere information. They're near to valueless until re-embedded in their proper context so that a causal theory -- a stab at the creation of knowledge -- can be woven around them.
The development of information into knowledge requires dogged repetition:
- The formulation of a causal theory about some observed pattern;
- The design of an experiment whose results could disprove the theory;
- The rejection of the theory if the experiment's results contradict the theory's predictions;
- The design of further experiments of greater sensitivity if the experiment's results are in accord with the theory's predictions.
This pattern has no terminal point. It must be repeated endlessly, for one cannot prove a causal theory correct. One can only disprove it utterly, or increase one's confidence in it by ever more stringent and ingenious experimentation.
A theory that survives a long chain of attempts at disproof by successfully predicting the results of repeatable experiments contributes knowledge to the world. Knowledge is always about causation; its sole test is the ability to predict what will result from adequately specified preconditions.
But at the cornerstone of all sound inquiry is the recognition that one cannot perform every experiment relevant to a given theory. There isn't time enough, there aren't resources enough, and not every relevant context is within the reach of Man. Though a theory that survives long and arduous testing might be honored with the term "law," the honest thinker must always concede that the laws of Nature, as Man "understands" them, will forever have frontiers we cannot probe. Those frontiers might involve the very large or the very small, or the highly energetic or the not energetic at all, or some other extreme context our powers of manipulation cannot reproduce. Our finiteness guarantees that, no matter how puissant we become, there will always be a realm beyond our reach.
Up to here, your Curmudgeon has been speaking of objective knowledge and its annunciation from mere information. But those subjects are the "bottom layer" of human epistemic activity. They're where we begin, not where we end. The reason is bound up with a fundamental human weakness that limits all our endeavors, most particularly our ability to employ our knowledge for our betterment: how poorly we deal with the clash between knowledge and desire.
Most reliable knowledge -- reliable in the scientific sense of being confirmable or disprovable by objective, reproducible experiment -- is disconnected from human motives and human actions. That is, the quest for knowledge is not driven by any human desire apart from the desire to know, nor is its acquisition determined by any action other than the rigorous method described above. Emotions, opinions, and yearnings for this or that are irrelevant.
But most human action is powered by those things.
Humans are wanting creatures. Yes, we think, and we manipulate the world around us with fair facility, but we do almost all of it in service to our desires, fears, and beliefs, not to our epistemological drive. When Robert A. Heinlein wrote "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal," he was not disparaging the power of reason but rather the overwhelmingly most frequent use to which it's put.
That's why the dictates of reason and experience are so readily shoved aside. When Smith wants something, the desire itself, if strong enough, can eclipse any evidentiary or logical contraindications. We call it "wishful thinking," but in point of fact it's not thinking at all. It's the demotion of ratiocination to a position below the desire it appears to block.
Given that by far the greater part of human action is powered by desires other than the epistemic, and given that desire so frequently nullifies our use of what we know or could reason out, there's an obvious need for some mechanism that will buttress "stage one" knowledge, so easily ruled out of play at the behest of desire, with additional guides and guards upon human folly.
"We're all fools, most of our lives; it's unavoidable," wrote Victor Hugo. Truer words might never have been spoken. A fool is one who knows better and does worse. How frequently and widely we can observe this pattern in ourselves!
Colloquially, we call a man "wise" if his accumulated knowledge and perspective upon human life have granted him a broad insight into that which is good and that which is not good. Ironically, these are precisely the subjects whose recognition Plato asserted to be innate. If the good and its opposite were that readily apprehended, we should all be wise from our earliest years. Yet it is plainly not so.
Traditionally, we are reluctant to deem a young man "wise." There's a general sense that wisdom requires great experience; that a wise man's perspective cannot be acquired in a handful of years. This assumption is mirrored reliably in the perennial depictions of wizards -- the wise men of fantasy, whose knowledge so greatly exceeds that of ordinary man that it has gifted them with extraordinary power -- as old men with long beards, given to profundities that require deep, sustained reflection from the rest of us if we are to grasp even their shadowed outlines. Experience suggests that without an extensive life education, filled with both triumph and tragedy, great learning and humble acknowledgment of how little any one man can know, one cannot aspire to the gravity of wisdom.
But your Curmudgeon has been speaking as if it were utterly obvious what wisdom is. We are compelled to confront the matter more directly than that.
Wisdom reveals itself most reliably in other virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, and humility. The first four of these are the cardinal virtues, which have been urged upon us from the beginning of recorded history. The fifth is the binding element whose presence unites those virtues into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Humility is the only virtue that makes it possible to absorb lessons from the knowledge and virtues of others. The imprudent man will not learn prudence until he recognizes his own folly and the losses he could avoid by recourse to prudence. The unjust man will not learn justice until he suffers under the lash of his own cruelty and recognizes the reflexive, recursive nature of the Confucian Rule. And so forth. But any such transformation of the mind must be preceded by an opening of the heart. The man who would learn from others must first accept that they and their histories have something to teach him -- that he is not capable of deducing all truths from his personal grain of sand.
This is a hard lesson. The greater one's native intelligence, the harder it is to accept.
To a cruel degree, humility requires that we concede that it's not merely our methods for achieving our goals but the goals themselves that are faulty. We want many things we "ought not" to want. To obtain them would be horribly bad for us. But "stage one" knowledge, mated to adequate capacity to act upon the world, can bring some of us tragically close to achieving them. To recognize so fundamental an error as a bad goal requires more than "stage one" knowledge; it requires humility, the binding energy of wisdom.
A brief digression before we conclude.
Whatever you, Gentle Reader, think of your Curmudgeon from his writings here, please know this: he is not a wise man. If you knew the hundredth part of his follies, you'd surely agree that he has no claim to that estate. All he has to share with you is a glimpse of a high place from the low one where he resides. He could be wrong; he often is. But his only hope of learning more than he knows lies in sharing his conjectures, here and elsewhere, with other interested persons, and hoping that the exchange will ignite some new and illuminating spark.
End of digression.
Pascal's conception of antiwisdom -- let's drop the hyphen and make it a true coinage -- and its proponents is worth citing here:
How much wisdom have you been conditioned to avoid seeking or heeding? How many people who have learned from their own mistakes have you been dissuaded from learning from? How many of these humbled souls have you heard called “hypocrite” as they attempted to warn you of specific things that snared them? Is it not likely that those who are most quick to tarnish the reputations and diminish the intentions of those who wish to warn others, are those who want you to proceed to their own agenda? Those who are most quick to inaccurately label the reformed errant as hypocrites are the same as they who wish to use the same successful snares over again -- on you? When through appeals to vanity (or fear of ridicule or peer pressure or whatever) you have been convinced to choose to remain uninformed is it not easier for you to become their next victim? How often have you yourself called snidely, maybe with a smirk, such a potential mentor “hypocrite” as you were schooled to do?How often have you seen MSM put up an extremist opponent against an ironclad proponent for what you know works, and given the two equal time as if they were equally valid? Is this not outright fostering of unwise actions for those who have yet to learn? Are you not threatened by the promotion of anti-wisdom in those around you? Even if you do not feel a moral obligation to warn the foolhardy, don’t you feel a selfish interest to do so?
How much wisdom have you been avoiding either from seeking for yourself or passing on to a friend, Dear Reader?
Just as wisdom results from humbly opening oneself to history's lessons about the importance of the cardinal virtues, antiwisdom consists of willfully rejecting human history's aggregate of lessons about the importance of humility, and exhorting others to do the same.
There is a great irony here, for the wise man is more often regarded as a source of illumination than as its beneficiary. But just as Buddha was called The Enlightened One, a wise man is one who has submitted to a light from another source. He has demoted his intellect, valuable though it is, to a position from which it cannot exalt itself over the knowledge of what is good and what is not good that Man has accrued over his history. Those who have not yet submitted in this fashion can only grasp fragments of what he has absorbed.
After a rainstorm, one will often see a fresh crop of toadstools festooning the spots in a yard where the moisture remains longest: typically, in the basket formed by the roots of a great oak tree, which are designed to catch water and channel it downward toward the taproot. Fungi are opportunistic about moisture, and their spores are everywhere. But they don't endure. At some point the dampness dries up, or the toadstools have consumed it all, after which they wither, sporulate, and are no more. So it is with many of the opportunities and pleasures of life.
In the Katha Upanishad, an exchange between Yama, the God of Death, and Nachiketa, who has won a boon from the gods and seeks the truth about death, runs as follows:
Yama said: Choose sons, and grandsons who shall live a hundred years; choose elephants, horses, herds of cattle, and gold. Choose a vast domain on earth., live here as many years as you desire. If you deem any other boon equal to that, choose it; choose wealth and a long life. Be the king, O Nachiketa, of the wide earth. I will make you the enjoyer of all desires.Whatever desires are difficult to satisfy in this world of mortals, choose them as you wish: these fair maidens, with their chariots and musical instruments men cannot obtain them. I give them to you and they shall wait upon you. But do not ask me about death.
But Nachiketa said: O Death, these endure only until tomorrow. Furthermore, they exhaust the vigor of all the sense organs. Even the longest life is short indeed. Keep your horses, dances, and songs for yourself.
The Hindu mythmakers were strongly focused upon death. Even Brahma, the supreme God of their pantheon, had a finite lifetime assigned to him. Given the belief in reincarnation for the human atman (soul) that lies at the core of Hinduism, this must have been a stroke aimed at leveling, to some extent, the gods with mortal man, for God will not know a second life. In his divine manifestation as Yama the Deathgod, Brahma knows this more intimately than any other being -- and he's desperate not to acknowledge it. But Nachiketa reproves him for his aversion: "Even the longest life is short indeed."
And so it is. We simply don't live long enough, or range widely enough, as individuals to be wise about cutting ourselves off from the lessons of our past. The most important of all such lessons is that of our own fallibility: how often, when we insist upon being left to our own devices, we go horribly wrong, and must unlearn our mistakes through the tutelages of suffering and sorrow.
A human life is a toadstool: quick, vigorous, and capable; but also fragile and evanescent: easily diverted, trapped, and destroyed. Wisdom is an oak. It grows slowly but relentlessly. Its taproot reaches deep into the Earth. No wind nor rain can break it. Like its Source, God the Creator, it endures forever.
Comments
As exhausting for you to compose as it was for me to read, this post worthies its effort. Proving antiwisdom’s prevalence in this world is that you needed to write so much preface. I bow to your ability to evoke in clearer words the rantings that boil over from within me. Thanks once again.
P.S.
All those who’d like to get trackback working seemlessly here, know that I am with you.Posted by Pascal Fervor on 04/22/2005 at 07:02 PMIn trying to model experiments to increase one’s knowledge, two points stick out.
(1) more is always learned from failure than success
(2) the really critical analysis is WHY the experiment failed. There are always more ways to fail than succeed.On the subject of the MSM and skewed debates: probably the single biggest failing in news is the artificial injection of drama into every subject, aka ‘human interest’. I attribute this to what appears to be every reporter’s desire to write a book. This may be why so much ‘reporting’ reads like bad fiction.
Posted by on 04/23/2005 at 12:00 AMI’d like to ask a tangential question.
“Medieval seekers after knowledge and power often recurred to supernatural explanations. This is particularly in evidence in the centuries-long attempts to get magic to work. Magic’s premise is that certain rituals can invoke the assistance of potent non-human persons in securing what one desires. When a self-described magician actually succeeded in getting what he wanted, it inspired others to mimic him—and frustration among the mimics when their results failed to match his.”
How, then, does magic differ from prayer, and is there a difference in the origin or nature of the faith required to successfully do magic and to successfully pray?
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 04/24/2005 at 07:42 AM
