Wisdom is a perfect antidote to the paranoid style of American political culture today.
The genesis of this blog dates back to the spring of 2018 when, after 11 years as a dean at two universities, I was granted a semester-long sabbatical from my position as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at American University. Prior to taking on that deanship, I had worked on a multimedia project entitled We the Paranoid. You can view version 1.0 of it here. In many ways, the decision to use my sabbatical to work on wisdom grew out of the perception that, between the late 2000s and 2018, the paranoid style in contemporary American culture had become too ubiquitous, too self-evident, and far too toxic, and that the cultivation of wisdom was in fact its most powerful antidote. The passage of time has only intensified that feeling.
Continue reading “Giving Up on Paranoia”