Tag: complexity

Wisdom Matters: Reading Literature for a Wiser World

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Erdrich
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Le Guin
Ozeki
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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)

The arc of human history cycles between eras of relative wisdom and others where wisdom is in short supply. In politics, as in our social life more generally, ours is an era of striking unwisdom.

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Simply Human

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Photo: Nasty Women Writers

It is only by seeing ourselves as fundamentally other—the contingent product of a culture that has no particular monopoly on truth—that we can come into our wisest possible, most “utterly human” selves.

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Slow Reveals

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Photo: Michael Karnavas

At a time when white masculinity has driven what Barbara Tuchman called “the persistence of unwisdom in government” to new depths, narratives like Mbue’s and Nguyen’s could not be more important, nor more welcome.

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Empathy and Irony

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Photo: prhinternationalsales.com

But then along comes “Behold the Dreamers,” a debut novel by a young woman from Cameroon that illuminates the immigrant experience in America with the tenderhearted wisdom so lacking in our political discourse. 

Ron Charles, The Washington Post
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Empathy and Cultural Dislocation

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Photo: A Mile in My Shoes, Empathy Museum, U.K.

When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to the position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels.  It has to do with empathy. 

Barack Obama, in Conversation with Marilynne Robinson

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Rethinking Liberal Education

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Photo: Raphael, The School of Athens (detail), antigonejournal.com

Narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction. Habits of empathy and conjecture conduce to a certain type of citizenship and a certain form of community: one that cultivates a sympathetic responsiveness to another’s needs, and understands the way circumstances shape those needs, while respecting separateness and privacy.

Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity

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In Praise of Small Sanities

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Photo: CBC Radio

No wise liberal has ever thought that liberalism is all of wisdom…. Liberalism isn’t a political theory applied to life.  It’s what we know about life applied to a political theory.

Adam Gopnick, In Praise of Small Sanities

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Does Wisdom Lean Left?

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Photo: CBS News

Wisdom does not “lean left” so much as “lean liberal.”  If wisdom has a party, it is the party of philosophical liberalism and its historic fellow traveler, liberal education.  

Readers of my posts thus far will certainly have noticed my tendency to juxtapose the relative wisdom of Barack Obama to the stunning unwisdom of Donald Trump. 

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A.Ham in the Age of Trump

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Make Hamilton Great Again cap, in the style of Make America Great Again
Photo: funnyshirts.org

Hamilton continues to resonate because it speaks, consistently and profoundly, to a deep hunger for wisdom in American society today.

This project began with my experiencing first-hand the life story of an “obnoxious arrogant loudmouth” whose “swagger” is “built on a bedrock of total insecurity” (70, 76).  Inordinately proud of his “top-notch brain” but prone to serious acts of misjudgment, this “model New Yorker” commits adultery, then pays hush money to cover his tracks (38).  A great political scandal ensues.

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Reading Literature for a Wiser World

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Photo: Sri Lanka Guardian

Wise judgment is attuned to cognitive complexities in the world and to the ways in which historical and cultural contexts inform diverse systems of value.  Whatever their domain of action, wise practitioners evince high degrees of intellectual humility and empathy, together with a thoroughgoing commitment to fostering the well-being of both one’s self and one’s community.  

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