The death of wisdom

Whenever people make sweeping claims about how the present differs from the past, I want to grab and shake them: “How do you know? Did you watch a movie about WWII or read “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius? Or is this coming from something you half-remember from your primary school? People spend years trying to figure out things like that, but you can “have a sense for it”?

Here’s an example.

If I were to say that “wisdom” has lost its place in modern society, chances are this is not the first time you have heard that. You probably can’t point out when or where, and you likely agree with that statement, too. You might be thinking – “wisdom – that’s such a loaded term. People mean a lot of things by that, it’s subjective…”. Let me stop you right there. You are right, but none of what I am about to present depends on the word's single, unequivocal meaning. If there’s enough collective consensus on what a term encompasses, that’s already a definition for me.

Of course, use words in the way you want. If you think wisdom is eating breakfast for dinner and going to raves well in your 60s, I cannot stop you from believing that. We can settle eternal questions on definitions later. I only care about the parts of wisdom where everyone would agree. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, well…

And, to be clear, it may seem I get overly worked up about things of this sort, but this is because this stuff matters. If wisdom were, in fact, in decline, that would be a disaster. Wisdom is the compass that drives society forward; without it, we are walking blindfolded in the dark. If that is happening, we should do something right away. Like, in this very moment. You can just drop everything you are doing and act.

So should we?

Wisdom is woven from many strands. The wise aren’t devoid of hope, but they are conscious of the complexities entailed in any project. Properly aware that much can and does go wrong, the wise are alive to moments of calm and beauty, even extremely modest ones. The wise know that all human beings, themselves included, have irrational desires and incompatible aims, are unaware of a lot, are prone to mood swings, and are visited by all kinds of fantasies and delusions.

Yet, they are unsurprised by the ongoing co-existence of deep immaturity and perversity alongside intelligence and morality. They know that we are barely evolved apes. The wise will sit with someone of an opposite political belief and not try to convert them. They will hold their tongue at someone who seems to be announcing a wrong-headed plan for reforming the country, educating their child, or directing their personal life.

The wise have made their peace with the yawning gap between how they would ideally want to be and how they are. They have come to terms with their idiocies, flaws, horrors, limitations, and drawbacks. They are not ashamed of themselves and don’t have to lie or pretend in front of others.

So, how do we make sense of all that?

Geriatric neuropsychologist Vivian Clayton worked on a definition of wisdom in the 1970s that has served as a foundation for research on the subject ever since. After scouring ancient texts for evocations of wisdom, she found that most people described as wise were decision-makers. So she asked a group of law students, law professors, and retired judges to name the characteristics of a wise person. Based on an analysis of their answers, she determined that wisdom consists of three key components: cognition, reflection, and compassion.

I like that. So, I will use it to analyze the state of wisdom today.

First, picture this: society has been on this steady climb up the IQ hill thanks to better schooling, healthcare, you name it. That’s called the “Flynn Effect” – our collective intelligence is seemingly on a non-stop upward trajectory. But then, something curious happens. When we think we've got it all figured out, the story takes a turn.

In places like Norway, Denmark, and even the U.S., IQ scores, once scaling new heights, now show a slight but noticeable dip. This isn't just a blip on the radar. It's a significant shift that's got researchers scratching their heads.

James Flynn himself, the man behind the original Flynn Effect, was clear that this increase in intelligence wasn't just about genetics. It was more about environmental changes – better living conditions, more access to education, that sort of thing.

Røgeberg and Bratsberg, researchers from Norway, dived deep into this. They looked at data from Norwegian military conscripts and confirmed Flynn’s thoughts. It wasn't just about being born smarter but growing up in a world that nurtures intelligence.

Education, for instance, played a considerable role. The more years of schooling people had, the higher their IQ scores tended to be. But here's where the plot thickens. Despite all these advancements, the reverse Flynn Effect suggests that our collective intelligence might be hitting the ceiling. Maybe it's the changing nature of our education systems or our lifestyles – more screen time, less book reading, and a shift in the skills we value today.

Røgeberg points out that while some cognitive abilities, like abstract thinking, are still strong, others, like math and vocabulary, are deteriorating. He speculates that maybe we're adapting to a world where calculators are in our pockets.

So, on a relative basis, are we getting dumber?

The progressive substitution of mechanical power for human physical activity in jobs, household chores, transportation, and leisure undermines the physical fitness needed for cognitive function.
Physical activity in work, transportation, and recreation has been trending down for a century. On a population level, medical interventions have not, and probably cannot, eliminate the physiological consequences of too much food and too little physical activity throughout life.

The economic system and physical infrastructure set the automatic routines of the 21st-century affluent society. They developed from two related centuries-old trends: the progressive increase in per-capita productivity and wealth and the progressive substitution of mechanical energy and work for human labor. These have nearly eliminated the threats to health and survival every day in 1900, increasing life expectancy but leaving as residue the diseases of affluence.

Abundance is making us stupider.

But cognitive speed isn’t everything. One must take time to gain insights and perspectives from one’s cognitive knowledge to be wise (the reflective dimension). Older people have much more information in their brains than younger ones, and the quality of the information in the more aged brain is highly nuanced. While younger people are faster in cognitive performance tests, older people possess greater sensitivity to fine-grained differences.

The more information people have in their brains, the more they can detect familiar patterns. That's reflection. Neuroscientist and author Elkhonon Goldberg says that “cognitive templates” develop in the older brain based on pattern recognition and can form the basis for wise behavior and decisions.

This is far from breaking news. Anyone who has spent enough time living in the world and learning from their mistakes should be able to cobble together a set of rules for life that look much like their grandparents’ advice.

And yet.

We venerate Greta Thunberg and 20-something startup founders. We condescend “boomers” and rally for “Votes at 16” campaigns. University is the petri dish of the culture we consume in the West. The fetishization of youth has given us the false idea that young people are best placed to guide their elders despite their apparent lack of experience.

News flash: they are not.

C. S. Lewis coined the phrase ‘chronological snobbery’ to describe ‘[T]he uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.’ Older people are dismissed as foolish, uninteresting, and (far worse) “problematic.” While in most cultures, older people are regarded as sources of wisdom, they are more likely to be condescended to in the modern West.

I reject the poisonous dichotomy that insists that the past must be good or bad. But many like me are discovering, much to their surprise, that the world is complex. One needs time or good heuristics to navigate any complex system. Elderlies have both.

In “The Closing of the American Mind,” American philosopher Allan Bloom argued that the point of education should be to explore “what is accessible to all men as men through their common and distinctive faculty, reason.” He found, however, that universities were more likely to teach cultural relativism focused on how different cultures approached the truth. And this was, like, in the ‘80s.

According to Bloom, this splintering of truth into culture also manifested individually, as people pursued studies based on their class, gender, or race – not their shared concern for what it meant to be wise. Bloom was certainly not alone in criticizing this replacement of profundity with identity politics. Nor was he alone in implicitly arguing that wisdom is separate from the question of group identity.

With no version of shared truth, how can we expect to understand others and be compassionate?

Psychologist Igor Grossmann noted in his “State of Wisdom Studies” that one key goal is to define wisdom that transcends individual cultures by identifying common threads worldwide. There are continual reflections on the relationship between cultural particularism and universal wisdom in the perceived death of wisdom.

Part of the reason wisdom has been downgraded in education is the very opposition between universal truth and particular experience. We are told to seek wisdom outside of our identities, but everywhere we go, we find ourselves and others entangled in these very identities.

Now, I do not wish to oversimplify the evolution of Western philosophy or ignore the many philosophers who contributed to this process. I am not an academic and do not have the academic standing to pronounce myself in matters of wisdom. But, constructing a complicated framework to assess something as self-evident as the decay of wisdom is more of an exercise of style than anything.

The signs are everywhere.

Erik Torenberg puts it well: “Consider marriage. In 1960, 95% of working-class children were born in two-parent households. In 2005, it had dropped to 30%. Meanwhile, 85% of wealthy children were born in two-parent households.

Now consider the labor force. In the 1960s, everyone worked. By ~2010, 1 in 7 males was now looking for work — and they were nearly all of low class. Meanwhile, the wealthy, of course, have jobs.

When you stop expecting people to have jobs, be religious, and get married — shocker — they stop doing those things.”

Would you say any of that is “wise”?

In countries with a single-digit percentage of global carbon emissions, we tell ourselves we are combating climate change one paper straw at a time. In business, a system of explicitly racist and deliberately discriminating practices is the only path to combatting “systemic racism,” a construct that you can’t disagree with in public, or else you’ll recursively be accused, guess what, of racism. In private bedrooms, the sexual revolution encourages most, and especially women, to quit “living in squares” and start “loving in triangles” because sex is no more than a leisure activity, with no intrinsic specialness, and invested in meaning only if participants choose to, trading collective displacement with individual liberty.

What do all of these beliefs have in common?

As Mike Solana puts it, “Most of these inverted dogmas coursing culture at the moment feel small, unrelated, and almost too silly to mention. However, the proliferation of inverted moralities and truths, rooted in nearly every aspect of our lives, has rapidly accelerated in the age of social media. Today, we live under a culture and popular ethics shaped almost entirely by spectacular, total lies”. The signs of the decay of wisdom are everywhere.

These narratives are all illogical, short-sighted, or partial – they either make sense for a small group of people (rather than the collective good) or in the short term (rather than the long term), or they don’t make sense at all. Their cognitive, reflective, and compassionate attributes are completely absent. As modern society’s guiding tenets, they are far from wise.

But if I had to bet, I’d say you didn’t need a neuropsychologist’s framework to reach the same conclusion.

Sometimes, people can and should make broad, sweeping generalizations. Sometimes, they “have a sense of it, " which is correct. Isn’t that, in and of itself, the very proof that “wisdom” doesn’t need sophisticated definitions? Like the infamous threshold test in “Jacobellis v. Ohio,” wisdom, like obscenity, is something “we know when we see it.” And I think we have seen enough.

The signs are everywhere.