empathy 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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On Wisdom and Migration, 3

September 12, 2019September 12, 2019 Peter Starr

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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On Wisdom and Migration, 2

September 1, 2019September 12, 2019 Peter Starr

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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Giving Up on Paranoia

August 10, 2019September 12, 2019 Peter Starr

Wisdom is a perfect antidote to the paranoid style of American political culture today.

I miss paranoia. Let me explain.

In the mid-2000s, I worked on a multimedia project entitled We the Paranoid. You can view version 1.0 of it here.

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A.Ham in the Age of Trump

August 6, 2019August 10, 2019 Peter Starr1 Comment

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

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

I recently had the pleasure of experiencing first-hand the life story of an “obnoxious arrogant loudmouth” whose “swagger” is “built on a bedrock of total insecurity.” 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. A great political scandal ensues.

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On Wisdom and Migration, 1

August 5, 2019September 12, 2019 Peter Starr

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

This is the first in a series

The quest for wisdom is a physical as well as intellectual undertaking…. [T]he early history of wisdom unfolded on the road.
Stephen S. Hall, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience

We are living through a time of extraordinary nativist backlash, most tellingly emblematized in the U.S. by the candidacy, then presidency, of Donald J. Trump. A 2017 survey by PRRI and The Atlantic found that white working-class voters who said they “often feel like a stranger in their own land” were 3.5 times more likely to have supported Trump than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Those who “favored deporting immigrants living in the country illegally” were 3.3 times more likely to have done so.

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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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