Virtue: Wisdom

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WISDOM

I think wisdom is a virtue that nobody really feels like they have. Ideally, wisdom is what allows people to assimilate information and apply it correctly to real life; wisdom is what helps us make the right decisions, which is particularly important in the realm of ethics, since we can't be expected to behave ethically if we can't organize our priorities, judge the costs and benefits of different responses, and choose the best course.

But real life is so infinitely complex that it seems like no matter how much we learn and how hard we try to make sense of real-world situations, it's never really possible to anticipate every outcome of all our own actions, let alone how other people will behave, both in response and independently, and what other apparently unrelated forces will also have an impact. The scientific idea called "chaos theory" is often misunderstood to mean that things are unpredictable because they happen randomly; in fact, it means that in a system of extreme complexity, variables that are so minor as to be essentially unobservable can have a major effect on the system. Scientists often use the example of two leaves set side by side at the head of a rapid white-water river. The leaves will not travel down the river side by side; their courses will diverge early and become extremely different, not because of the physical properties of the system are acting on each leaf differently, but because even that minor variation in the leaves' positions matters very much in determining what will happen to the leaves. Since the variation is so small and the effect so sizeable, it is for all intents and purposes impossible for us to predict where any given leaf will go, even though the river behaves exactly as physics tells us it will behave. Since the universe is a system of so much more complexity than a river, it stands to reason that our wisdom, our powers of prediction based on what can be learned by the human mind, will be that much more functionally ineffective at predicting the future. No matter how wise we are, we are never wise enough to know what we're doing.

As nihilistic as that sounds, the very fact that I just used a scientific illustration of a philosophical idea says a lot about my ideas about wisdom. The Romans described the Gaulish Druids as natural philosophers, and Hippolytus wrote that the Celts believed their Druids could predict events "by Pythagorean science and mathematics." Cicero wrote of a Druid named Divitiacus who was a personal acquaintance of his that "he claimed a knowledge of the natural world which the Greeks call physiologia, making predictions of the future, sometimes by augury, sometimes by conjecture." While it's too massive a leap to suggest that the Celts of the fourth century had a concept of the scientific method, it seems that they believed that gaining knowledge of the physical, observable world could grant insight into the "complex systems" of destiny and the spirit world. Divitiacus's "predictions...by conjecture" is simply wisdom, the ability to understand how things work and what makes things happen.

Nobody has perfect wisdom; nobody knows as much as they would like to know, or applies their knowledge as effectively in practical terms as they would like to. Still, one of the reasons I am drawn to the Druid tradition above all others is the deep respect for learning and knowledge. I believe, as I think the Druids did, that everything we learn empowers us, that the deeper we travel into the true nature of things, the more illuminated we are by the weight and scope and harmony and simultaneous simplicity and complexity of the universe. I believe that biology, physics, history, psychology, and every other discipline and tool for inquiry into "the size of the earth and cosmos" is the revelation of Truth, and that the love of Truth and the humble and genuine and tireless pursuit of it is the virtue that makes all other virtues possible.