Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
Photo: Nasty Women Writers
Continue reading “Simply Human”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.
Continue reading “Slow Reveals”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.
Continue reading “Empathy and Cultural Dislocation”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
Photo: Raphael, The School of Athens (detail), antigonejournal.com
Continue reading “Rethinking Liberal Education”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
Continue reading “In Praise of Small Sanities”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
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.
Continue reading “Does Wisdom Lean Left?”
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.
Continue reading “A.Ham in the Age of Trump”
Wisdom is a perfect antidote to the paranoid style of American political culture today.
The genesis of this blog dates back to the spring of 2018 when, after 11 years as a dean at two universities, I was granted a semester-long sabbatical from my position as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at American University. Prior to taking on that deanship, I had worked on a multimedia project entitled We the Paranoid. You can view version 1.0 of it here. In many ways, the decision to use my sabbatical to work on wisdom grew out of the perception that, between the late 2000s and 2018, the paranoid style in contemporary American culture had become too ubiquitous, too self-evident, and far too toxic, and that the cultivation of wisdom was in fact its most powerful antidote. The passage of time has only intensified that feeling.
Continue reading “Giving Up on Paranoia”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
Continue reading “Why Wisdom? Why Now?”