David Brooks Archives

Does Wisdom Lean Left?

September 21, 2019September 21, 2019 Peter Starr

“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 Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities

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

Which raises the question: what is the political valence of wisdom as I’ve come to understand it? Or, more pointedly, does wisdom lean left?

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Reflection Time

September 2, 2019September 12, 2019 Peter Starr

Our challenge, both as faculty and as administrators, is to make space for the wisdom of Eve II in an institution predicated on producing Eve I’s.

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of participating in a deans retreat at American University’s Airlie conference center, hosted by our Provost, Dan Myers.

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Teaching for Wisdom Today

July 29, 2019September 12, 2019 Peter Starr

This piece first appeared in Inside Higher Ed and is 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. Reflecting on how American presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had embroiled the United States 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.”

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