Flamingo Dancer does Wisdom - someone else's not mine!

Wisdom doesn't travel well and is hard to keep in preserved form. It is rather like the manna that fed the Israelites in the desert, which had to be consumed fresh and was inedible the following day. Perhaps it can only be transmitted orally, in teachings and sermons and private conversations. Unless absolutely incontrovertible, it tends to ossify into banality when written down...

... Part of the reason that it is hard to learn from wise advice is that wisdom ia not the same as other kinds of knowledge.The basic precepts of wisdom are not hard to grasp: control your passions, fears and desires; be concerned with a reality beyond the narrow bounds of self, which means love, vocation, disinterested aspiration and devotion. But while any intelligent person can understand these principles intellectually by their late teens, this is not enough: for wisdom is not about concepts but about a way of being, which is infinitely harder. Buddhism or Stoicism may each tell us, in their different ways, to become detached from desire and fear, but reducing those passions in ourselves is another matter.

Wisdom is not learned or imparted by precepts but by example and practice. Perhaps it is harder to be wise today than in any earlier age because the traditional cultural structures that exist to assist people in this way - to grow up and to live as sane adults - have been severely compromised. Religion, for example, tends to be fanatical or forgotten. Once it was one of the principal ways that society transmitted its values. Art also played an important role in this regard but has become almost irrelevant, fenced off by as a special form of highbrow entertainment with little more consequences for real life than popluar movies and music. The formation of social values has been left largely to commercial media and advertising, which are fuelled essentially by fear and desire. The preservation of sanity is left to families and to a lesser extent to schools, both of which struggle today against very powerful contrary influences.

excerpt by Christopher Allen , Weekend Australian Review, November 8-9 2008 pp18-19.