The Loss of Wisdom

For a lot of reasons, our culture no longer believes in wisdom. Wisdom is practical knowledge about how to live well in the world: right priorities–and right actions based on those priorities. Wisdom understands the relative importance (and unimportance) of things and builds a life accordingly. Most foolishness is not understanding what is important or not acting in accordance with what is important.

Applying this to an area in which I have spent much of my own life, I think the decline in literature (and the arts generally) as a cultural mainstay is, in part, its abandonment of the claim that literature (and art generally) offers us wisdom for living. The predominate academic view (shared by many writers and artists) is that poems, stories, paintings and the like change nothing. Not only do they not offer us wisdom, they are often seen as testimonies (overt or covert) to moral failure on the part of the author, understood in the categories to which we are currently most attuned: racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, and the like.

The much-vilified Victorians (in an era that saw a great expansion of access to literature and the arts) actually believed that their writers and artists had something important to say to them about how to live. If few people believe that now, it is no wonder that so many prefer turning on the television to picking up a book. The Roman poet Horace said that poetry should BOTH delight and instruct. We are finding that when we lop off the “instruct” part, our “delight” also diminishes.

Our contemporary attitude toward wisdom fits nicely with some of the largely uninspected assumptions of our culture: truth is something one finds (manufactures) only within oneself; the present is morally (as well as technologically) superior to the past (C.S. Lewis called this ‘chronological snobbery’); authority (of all kinds) is based on the abuse of power; diversity of views (pluralism) is proof that no one view is true (relativism); and so on.

I do believe that there is an inescapably subjective element in all our understandings of truth (and everything else). But our culture has exaggerated the implications of that fact (I do think it qualifies as a ‘fact’). As a result, we are suspicious of wisdom—including the things the past has to teach us. We deny the possibility of the very thing we need most.