Photos: Brittanica (Morrison), Rolling Stone (Miranda), Wikipedia (Bechdel), Brittanica (Erdrich), Massive Science (Le Guin), Harvard Crimson (Adichie), Alan Elkann Interviews (McEwan), Penguin Random House (Ozeki), Wikipedia (Marker)
Some moments in human history are clearly wiser than others. In politics, and in social life more generally, ours seems strikingly unwise.
Far too often, we distrust cognitive and moral nuance and ignore the value, and the power, of cultural difference. We choose to be blind to the lessons of history, to dismiss expert opinion, and to seek in our public lives only confirmation of our views and biases. Where concern for the common good is not eclipsed by a rabid individualism, it regularly devolves into a no less insistent tribalism. We are empathic with others like us but fail miserably with those who are different. And our determination not to know is often only matched by our insistence that we do.
Cultivating wisdom, in ourselves and in others, is patently hard work, made all the more so by technological advances such as generative AI and social media platforms that provide the illusion of knowledge and simulacra of community. But we have no choice but to do so.
Wisdom Matters argues that contemporary cultural narratives—novels most notably, but also films, plays, and graphic memoirs—serve as powerful antidotes to the propagation and persistence of unwisdom today. It draws upon classic conceptions of wisdom in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy; in Buddhist, Taoist, and Christian thought; in Native American spirituality; as well as in the rapidly growing body of work on wisdom in the field of psychology. In so doing, it seeks to break out of the cycle of horrified fascination that drives so much of our public discourse today.
It has often been said that there are as many reading styles as there are readers. For that reason, I have constructed Wisdom Matters to allow for both grazing and a deeper dive. Samplers might want to start with Why Wisdom? Why Now?, A. Ham in the Age of Trump, and What is Wisdom?, then choose posts of particular interest from the table of contents below. Readers wanting to explore how experiments in literary form help to foster readerly wisdom, for example, might read those three posts, then the posts on Ozeki, Marker, Adichie, Morrison, Erdrich, and Bechdel. Readers interested in the challenge of fostering wisdom in our political moment could add Empathy and Cultural Dislocation, The Wisdom to Know the Difference, and Reading for Wisdom in the Age of AI to the three sampler posts. The deepest of divers should simply follow the table of contents from beginning to end. Posts in bold below lay out the theoretical framework for the posts listed under them, much as chapter introductions in a book might do.
- Giving Up on Paranoia
- Reading Literature for a Wiser World
- A. Ham in the Age of Trump [on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton]
- In Praise of Small Sanities [on Adam Gopnick’s A Thusand Small Sanities]
- Rethinking Liberal Education [on Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity]
- The Death of Old Goriot [on Honoré de Balzac’s Old Goriot]
- The Novel as Atonement [on Ian McEwan’s Atonement]
- Holding the Self Lightly [on Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being]
- The Soul of the World [on Paolo Coehlo’s The Alchemist]
- The Smile of Oneness [on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha]
- The Poignancy of Things [on Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil]
Empathy and Cultural Dislocation
- Empathy and Irony [on Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers]
- Slow Reveals [on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees]
- Simply Human [on Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness]
- Something Else Stands Beside It [on Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God]
- A More Novelistic Approach [on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country]
- A Lovely Thing Done Together [on Toni Morrison’s Beloved]
- The Wisdom to Know the Difference [on Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer]
- Pillars of Salt [on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five]
- Let This Book Give You Heart [on Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman]
- In Praise of Hard Work
- Reading for Wisdom in the Age of AI
- The Wisdom of Fun Home in the Age of AI [Alison Bechdel]
- Wisdom in Community [on Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For]
