Portions of this post first appeared in Inside Higher Ed and are reprinted here with permission
“I am wiser than he is to this small extent that I do not think that I know what I do not know.”
Socrates, in Plato, The Apology of Socrates
In October of 1979, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman delivered a lecture at West Point in which she decried the “persistence of unwisdom” among politicians across the ages (2). Reflecting on how Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had embroiled the U.S. more deeply in the Vietnam war, Tuchman bemoaned a perennial “wooden-headedness”—a tendency for politicians to act wishfully, while not allowing themselves to be “confused by facts” (3). She spoke of geo-political reason as overwhelmed by “ambition, greed, fear, face-saving, the instinct to dominate, the needs of the ego, the whole bundle of personal vanities and anxieties” (5). Evoking an explicitly male obsession with potency, she concluded that, in government, “men seek power over others—only to lose it over themselves” (8).
I dare say that even Tuchman could not have foreseen the depths of unwisdom displayed daily by our 45th and 47th President, Donald J. Trump
Nothing would be easier than to survey the various manifestations of Trump’s “unwisdom”, to show that his style of government represents an uncanny apotheosis of the trends that Tuchman decried in the waning years of the Carter administration. The post-2016 proliferation of blank gift books with titles like The Wisdom of Donald Trump: Words for All Americans and The Wit and Wisdom of Donald Trump suggests that, at the beginning of Trump’s first term, many Americans concurred with the comment of New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton, speaking of Trump’s 2018 Twitter battle with the NFL: “I think we need a little more wisdom in that office” (Wilson). Trump’s actions in his second term have done little to dispel that concern.
Yet focusing on one particular brand of unwisdom—especially one as colorful as Trump’s—tends to let us all off the hook. Tuchman recognized the collective’s role in sustaining unwisdom when she remarked in her concluding sentence: “Perhaps, rather than educating officials, we should concentrate on educating the electorate—that is, ourselves—to look for, to recognize, and to reward character in our representatives, and to reject the ersatz” (9).
There are many reasons to feel that Tuchman’s injunction to grow in wisdom is a particularly heavy lift in America today—in politics certainly, but also far beyond.
We live in a time when new technologies and a rampant ideology of self patently conspire against wisdom’s acquisition. Far too often, we distrust science and expert opinion, preferring simple, rigorist explanations of complex phenomena over nuanced analysis and compromise solutions. Our public sphere is marked by a tendency to demonize the other and the increasing replacement of text-based analysis with more emotionally-resonant memes. We clamor for attention (likes, reposts) in the overwhelming din of social media. By glossing over the ways in which we are all bundles of strengths and weaknesses, our increasingly curated online lives not only make us anxious about not measuring up, they tend to erase the life struggles, both ours and others’, that are essential to the acquisition of wisdom. Those who give us the news are too often addicted to the staging of partisan conflict and a frenetic accounting of momentary winners and losers. We are radically presentist, and so miss out on the insight that deep knowledge of history can bring.
Compounding these developments is our tendency as contemporary Americans to double down on what David Brooks has dubbed the “moral ecology” of “the Big Me”—an ideology of individual achievement and “gospel of self-trust” that fails to recognize that we are fundamentally imperfect beings who only fully realize our aspirations in society (Road 261, 7). We have become deeply distrustful of our major institutions—not recognizing that, for all their evident flaws, these institutions represent the accumulated wisdom of those who have preceded us. Our ideologies of individualist competition and acquisition have turned our social spaces into zero-sum games, blinding us to the ways in which many projects and achievements advance the common good.
In short, much of contemporary life effectively undermines development of the nuanced, historically-informed, empathic, community-focused, and intellectually humble reflection on which wisdom depends. Stephen Hall is right to suggest that our political sphere has become disturbingly adept at speaking to the emotional brain, so as to “short-circuit (neurologically!) political thoughtfulness” (260). Witness a 2018 study in Science reporting that fake news spread through Twitter (now X) “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly” than truth (Langin). And as go our politics, so go our ways of being together across the wide range of social, cultural, and economic domains. Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe, for example, have cogently argued that bureaucratization and the quest for accountability in American corporate culture have led to “an increasing reliance on rules and incentives to control behavior,” thus hindering the exercise of judgment constitutive of practical wisdom (Practical Wisdom 110).
