How do we define wisdom – and why does that matter?

Who’s smarter; would make a good ally; hold a group together? The ability to tell has shaped our world. How is this changing in the digital era? Take a look.

* Too much of anything…

(HT Imaging)

* Don’t count your chickens…

* A stitch in time…

* The grass is always greener…

* Money doesn’t make the world go round.

The wisdom of the ages is so dinned into us, we now think of it as cliched. Yet these hard-won lessons have shaped people and societies, helping us navigate a shifting world and our changing roles within it.

What is wisdom? Literally, it is a state of knowing (from the Proto-Germanic wis, meaning “to see” or “to know”, and the suffix -dom, denoting a state or condition). As Socrates put it, in the 5th century BCE, it is also crucially the state of knowing what one doesn’t know.

As for what makes a person wise, this is where it gets interesting.

A large-scale study conducted across 2,600 people from 12 countries (including the US, Peru, Japan, India, Morocco, Slovakia and South Korea) indicates that perceptions of wisdom are more or less universal, no matter who you ask.

“This is something we weren’t expecting,” says Igor Grossmann, a professor of psychology and computational social sciences and director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who helped lead the study and co-authored the paper on it (published in Nature Communications in August).

The people surveyed included college students in Japan, villagers in South Africa, city-dwellers in the US and tribes such as the Meitei of India. The study offered them a set of 19 characteristics typically associated with wisdom in different cultures. The traits most commonly associated with wisdom included…

* logical thinking

* control over one’s emotions

* ability to cooperate

* ability to accept and assess multiple perspectives

* ability to apply one’s knowledge and past experience

* humility

* attention paid to nature and divinity

* awareness of bodily expressions

The findings made waves in academic circles because, in most cultures, the traits clustered around the same two dimensions of wisdom perception: reflective orientation (which include logical thinking and control over one’s emotions) and socio-emotional competencies (which include humility, the ability to cooperate, to accept and assess multiple perspectives, and to recognise the limits of one’s knowledge).

The number of such subsets could have been three, four, even five, given the 19 traits on offer. Instead, it was the same two dimensions of wisdom perception, across most cultures. This was certainly a surprise, says Grossmann.

The researchers had expected far greater cultural differences. Instead, “people perceive a wise person as essentially a mix of the Star Trek character Spock and Star Wars character Yoda,” Grossmann says. And no matter where in the world one is, this appears to hold true.

Know reservations

Why does any of this matter?

In an age of modern education, modern medicine and the internet, it can be hard to appreciate how much wisdom once mattered. But even in a hospital or war room it is the people with wisdom who actually save lives, avert tragedy, shape timely responses to a disaster, or prevent a war.

It is perhaps for this reason that we have been writing about wisdom for about as long as we have been writing. Going back to Ancient Sumeria (c. 4500 BCE) and Babylon (c. 1890 BCE), texts have laid down proverbs and musings.

Some of it took the still-familiar shape of advice from a father to his son. (One of the oldest such works, The Instructions of Shuruppak was composed c. 2600 BCE by the Sumerian king Shuruppak, to help his son Ziusudra live well and avoid misfortune.)

Some of it took the shape of texts we still refer to today. Among the most elegant of these are the Vedas. Traceable to at least 1500 BCE India, they represent ancient accumulated wisdom on everything from ideal foods to ways in which one may acknowledge one’s true self and perform one’s duty.

Fast-forward about 1,000 years and, in Ancient Greece, the idea of philosophy as a structured academic discipline was evolving. Lost to the centuries is the little detail that the word itself comes from the Greek philos (for love) and sophia (for wisdom).

Wise to the occasion

Our ideas of wisdom have continued to evolve.

By the 16th century, amid the Renaissance, and then the Age of Enlightenment, philosophers such as Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne and Immanuel Kant saw self-reflection and practical reasoning as crucial to wisdom. But also crucial, they added, were scepticism and a critical inquiry of existing bodies of knowledge.

Amid industrialisation and the world wars (which were accompanied by pandemics, famines, colonialism and slavery), philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Michel Foucault redefined the idea further.

Wisdom now involved also acknowledging the absurdity and inherent lack of purpose of the human condition.

Group effort

All of which may seem esoteric; the kind of thing people with a lot of time on their hands might spend the hours debating. But the truth is that defining, understanding and seeking out wisdom have helped us survive.

Who is smarter? Who would make a good ally? Who would hold the group together? “Be it in hunter-gatherer societies or agricultural systems, humans have survived by forming alliances. And to do that successfully, we have historically tracked competencies — such as wisdom — and learnt to figure out whom one can get along with and whom to lean on, to get ahead,” says Grossmann.

What happens to these ideas in a world of free information, misinformation, and a social-media reality that prizes popularity over all else?

The digital world is radically different from the smaller, more-close-knit groups in which human beings evolved to track knowledge, reliability and competence, Grossmann says.

“Online, the usual social mechanisms that reward honest behaviour and penalise misinformation — essentially, the systems that hold people accountable for the purported wisdom they share with the group — break down. The goal is attention rather than social impacts of positive consequence.”

The democratisation of knowledge was always bound to affect how we perceive wisdom, adds author and tech industry analyst Kashyap Kompella.

Perhaps, as algorithms bury true wisdom in favour of the more snackable byte, and as levels of distrust rise, the wheel will turn again and the quest for reflective, authentic knowledge will be more strongly felt, Kompella adds. “With such a vast and constantly updating pool of information, the need to reach out to someone who is not only wise but with whom you share a sense of trust may deepen.”

The truly wise will have to up their game, in the meanwhile. Not just to compete with — or shape — a virtual reality, complete with artificial intelligence, that seeks to step in to fill the gap. But to deal with a world that is radically shifting all over again.

“Wisdom now requires the ability to chart a path through dramatically unknown unknowns,” as Grossmann puts it, “whether these be polarisation, intergroup conflicts or the climate crisis.”