WHY IS WISDOM VALUABLE?

Knowledge, understanding, expertise and experience are all certainly very valuable. They enable us to comprehend important truths about the reality in which we live, and to improve it.

Commonly this knowledge, understanding, and expertise is grouped and structured within particular disciplines. Each discipline has a set of methods, empirical structures, and mental models which give it a unique viewpoint - a particular way of looking at the world.

It is these methods, structures and models that enable their practitioners to determine what is relevant in particular sets of information and available actions.

Within their specialist spheres this is often perfectly adequate. Doctors can save lives. Lawyers can win cases. Engineers can build bridges. Programmers can produce algorithmic programs. All extremely useful and valuable.

Very often though, reality does not compartmentalise nicely into particular fields of expertise and bodies of knowledge. Oftentimes, particularly for politicians, it seems there are a dozen different viewpoints concerning a topic. A fifteen year old girl has sexted a topless photo of herself to her boyfriend, who shared it with … and suddenly underage minors are being arrested for the production and distribution of child pornography. The lives of vulnerable minors are being ruined by the application of laws which were never designed for the digital age. And who’s supposed to fix the problem - the politicians, the lawmakers.

The field of expertise of politicians is getting elected. It’s a hard enough challenge in itself without expecting them to be experts in the law and everything they make laws about. So they get advice. In this case they get advice from the police, the social workers working with young people, teachers, psychologists, lawyers, judges, parents, children, and from digital technologists dealing in instagrams and web sites and encryption programs. They get information about the effects upon the ‘minds’ of adolescents. They receive advice from telephone companies providing the communication channels, the cloud providers like Amazon who store these images, and social media players. They probably get some advice from ethicists, and the clergy, concerning the morality and otherwise of child pornography, individual privacy, parental responsibilities, and constitutional rights. Feminists will be making some valid points concerning who the victims are, and who needs protection from whom. Meantime their political advisers are trying to ascertain and advise them on ‘community values’, and where the votes lie.

And every single expert is looking at the picture from their own area of expertise, and the unique viewpoint of their discipline and profession. Much, possibly even most, of their advice conflicts.

It’s a similar situation with drugs (legal and illegal), prostitution, PTSD of returning veterans, responses to war refugees, Artificial Intelligence, self-drive vehicles, and hundreds of other topics.

Knowledge, understanding and expertise based on a particular viewpoint, empirical discipline, and set of models and methods is not enough for these topics. You need wisdom. You need a generalist with ENOUGH understanding of EVERY viewpoint. The generalist needs to be wise enough to see the situation from ALL angles, and to thus be able to determine what is truly relevant and MOST important.

And in this ever more complex world, where new knowledge is being discovered and created every day, there are fewer and fewer people who have that breadth of wisdom. We are flooded with information, facts, lies, half-truths, generalisations, irrelevancies, knowledge, understanding, and ever more (but still not enough) experts.

What’s very much lacking in our world today is wisdom.

The wisdom to see the big picture.

The wisdom to reconcile the conflicting viewpoints of both the uninformed and the experts, and discern the greater truth.

The wisdom to understand science and religion, and perceive the truths both offer in the larger context.

Without this wisdom, the ship of Humanity’s first global civilisation is most definitely headed for the rocks.

Of course, wisdom is of little avail if no one is listening.