� Roger M Tagg 2011
Stephen Hall is a New York based journalist on Science and Society, born in the early 1950s. He seems to have been partly motivated in writing this book by his assessment of a growing epidemic of 'unwisdom' in both public and private affairs. This was highlighted - at the time of his writing this book - by the 2008 financial crisis triggered by the sub-prime mortgage business in the USA, which hit the New York financial industry (Wall Street etc) especially hard. At the same time, some academics - from various disciplines - have started research efforts to try and characterize what distinguishes 'wisdom' (i.e. thinking right followed by doing the right thing) from just 'knowledge' and 'intelligence'. He clearly has a lot of good contacts in American university research groups, and a few in Europe.
Hall certainly writes well, and attempts to make the ideas come to life through historical anecdotes and reminiscences of live meetings with the researchers. Although he has a few slightly annoying journalistic cliches - like "joining the dots" - it is encouraging stuff to read.
From a personal point of view, I like his en passant analysis of 'Bullshit' in parts of the last two chapters; he describes it as a tactic to "short-circuit reason and appeal to subconscious biases".
You may find it helpful to refer to my table of 'names' that Hall mentions or quotes - see HallWhosWho.
For those with a serious mind, who think that the answer is for us all to become a bit smarter about what goes on in life, I'd recommend reading this book.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| 1 - What is Wisdom? | 6 | "We crave wisdom - worship it in others, wish it upon our children, and seek it ourselves - precisely because it will help us lead a meaningful life as we count our days, because we hope it will guide our actions as we step cautiously into that always uncertain future." |
| 10 | "... to separate wisdom from action is a form of malpractice in the conduct of one's life." | |
| 11 | "Wisdom is based upon knowledge, but part of the physics of wisdom is shaped by uncertainty." | |
| 13 | "... in many cultures, the wise man is also a marked man." | |
| 15 | (Quoting someone else) "Decision theory works very well in controlled situations, but works very bad in the real world, and humans operate very well in the real world." Hall: "We would all be wise to mind that gap." | |
| 17 | "The problem with reductionism [RT: dividing an issue up into simpler, separate parts] is that, at the end of the day, you need and want to put all the parts back together." | |
| 18 | "It (wisdom) requires mediating, refereeing, between the frequently conflicting inputs of emotion and reason, of narrow self-interest and broader social interest, of instant rewards or future gains." | |
| 2 - | 22 | Socrates: "... I am wiser than he (an opponent) is to this extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know." |
| Philosoph- | 25 | Montaigne: "... Socrates alone had seriously digested the precept of his god - to know himself ..." |
| ical Roots | 26 | A fundamental mutation (in human culture, starting around 900 BC?) was to start telling stories about humans without dependence on magic and divine interference. [RT - there were a lot of gods interfering in Homer's Iliad.] |
| 34 | (Of Socrates, Confucius and Buddha) "East or West, they all embrace social justice and insist on a code of public morality. They embrace an altruism that benefits the many." "... each in his own way, asserted the central primacy of sharing their accumulated body of life knowledge." | |
| 35 | "The Augustinian notion of wisdom [RT: i.e., separate from science and bestowed by God] poses a fundamental challenge to us even today." "... the culture of religion can easily be seen as a force in cultivating the social dimension of wisdom. On the other hand, the relative inflexibility of religious doctrine is by its nature anathema to the contextual suppleness of wisdom." | |
| 37 | Kant thought human wisdom is limited to the 'phenomenal' and can't access the 'noumenal'. Revel thought philosophy abandoned wisdom after 1700 to concentrate on knowledge. | |
| 37-8 | Nozick's definition: "Wisdom is an understanding of what is important, where this understanding informs a (wise) person's thought or action." | |
| 38 | Erikson suggested that wisdom might be correlated with old age. | |
| 3 - | 44 | Alter questioned the interpretation of the biblical story of the Fall. 'Original sin' or 'original wisdom'? 'Loss of innocence' or 'beginning of wisdom'? |
| Heart and Mind | 46 | Clayton's adverse result: middle-aged law professors showed more wisdom than older attorneys "who came across as inflexible, with a greater need for deference." |
| 47 | "Clayton put the 'should' back into wisdom." | |
| 49 | The 'Berlin Wisdom Paradigm' definition of wisdom: "An expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life." | |
| 50 | (Wisdom is) "a quality not only of individuals but of groups, institutions and societies at large, and not just as judgment or action, but also the process that produced the judgment." | |
| 51-2 | People start to crave wisdom more when "instead of thinking of their lives as distance from birth, they begin to think in terms of distance to death." | |
| 52 | "... its (wisdom's) very complexity and definitional fuzziness exiles it to the fringe of academic respectability. Smith: 'Probably only somebody who has tenure has the luxury of looking at this.' ". | |
| "... they (the Berlin lot) left emotion out of it." | ||
| 53 | Ardelt's 'Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale' - cognitive, reflective and emotional. | |
| 4 - Emotional | 63 | Stanford researchers: Older people "rely on a complex and nuanced emotional thermostat that allows them to rebound quickly from adverse moments." |
| Regulation | 64 | Job - 'superstar' of the biblical Old Testament |
| 65 | Job: "Surely vexation kills the fool." | |
| 66 | Gross: Reappraisal - "cognitive intervention" to dampen emotion in the brain. Not unhealthy rumination, but healthy reflection. | |
| 67 | Isolation of old people isn't necessarily bad; in tests, the less-engaged inmates of nursing homes often had better cognitive functions. | |
| 69 | Young people "are
interested in careers and the acquisition of information (and ... seem to
hold on to negative emotion more tightly)." "... older people are the real masters of carpe diem." | |
| 70 | Carstensen: When you are young, "you collect people, you collect experiences, you collect information, and you bank it ..." (because it may become relevant - you are in a preparatory state). | |
| 70-1 | (For older people) "the future is now here. What you need for the future is what you have." | |
| 71 | (In experiments) "young people flash neurological 'concern' in the amygdala at the prospect of monetary loss, while older people show little or no activation in anticipation of loss." | |
| 74 | "In people who are unable to regulate their emotions, amygdala activity is higher and daily secretion of the stress hormone Cortisol betrays a pattern associated with poor health." | |
| "Young people tend to cling longer, neurologically speaking, to bad news." | ||
| 75 | "People expect to live longer, be healthier, have greater success in the job market, and avoid the likelihood of divorce, than the actual data would suggest." - This is the 'optimism bias'. | |
| 76 | "A 'moderate optimism illusion' about future events ... could serve as a healthy motivation ... towards the attainment of future goals." | |
| 77 | Mild pessimism may not be too bad either. | |
| 78 | The 'grandparent hypothesis' - they pass their cognitive skills to their grandchildren - an evolutionary advantage? "Two studies of monkeys have shown that the presence of a 'grandmother' increases the reproductive success of the younger kin." | |
| "Emotion regulation may be the most powerful lens in human psychology ..." | ||
| 5 - | 82-3 | Student subjects bizarrely chose $20 now over $40 in 2 months. |
| Knowing | 83 | In decision making, there's a preliminary 'valuation' stage. |
| What's | 84 | Dopamine - a reward mechanism, confirmation if we get a decision right. |
| Important | 85 | But the Dopamine effect tails off with repetition. |
| 86 | Dopamine neurons are concentrated in "the basal ganglia, the ventral striatum, and the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC)", which are "evolutionary older, inner" parts of the brain. | |
| 86-7 | Subjects' decisions become predictable (hence free will is not so free). | |
| 87 | Value is determined in the PFC, but there are multiple subsystems that provide input (at least 4 in monkeys not counting language and symbols). | |
| 89 | Impatience (triggered by need) may be hardwired into the brain. | |
| 90 | Peoples' bizarre "preferences can be repaired by education". | |
| 91 | The brain races ahead of consciousness in arriving at a choice. | |
| "Consciousness is good when the decision should be made on a few aspects ..." but intuition may be better when things get more complicated, even big decisions. | ||
| Dijksterhuis recommended 'deliberation without attention' - a non-contemplative, laid back approach. | ||
| 92 | Dijksterhuis's advice is in contrast to William James who advocated "voluntary bringing back a wandering attention". | |
| The danger of 'attentional blink' - the mind wandering and missing something important when one is consciously trying to concentrate. | ||
| Meditation, using 'disengaged attention' may help. | ||
| 94 | If there are too many choices, their values get "reduced to the level of neural noise", leading to 'decision paralysis'. | |
| 94-5 | "Most classical economists assume personal preference is unchanging and correct." This is unlikely! But do we need re-evaluation, or just editing? | |
| 96 | Is consistency a virtue? What about 'consistent and impatient' versus 'inconsistent and patient'? | |
| 97 | "Homo economicus is happy yet also by definition selfish." And his values are only the 'perceived' ones anyhow. | |
| 6 - Moral Reasoning | 98-9 | 'The Fall' is dodgy psychologically - shame is probably not genetic, while a sense of right and wrong is [RT: but very variable between people!]. Eating of the apple may be more a benefit as the start of human wisdom, than a sin. More probably, the myth was hijacked by religious authorities wanting a hold over people. |
| 100 | Hauser: 'Moral grammar' is hardwired in our brains, using particular sections. | |
| 101 | This is a bit like Darwin's emotional disgust (when near bad smelling food or other stuff). | |
| 102 | Haidt: moral judgment is more ethical intuition than reasoning. Experiments showed that adding extraneous sources of disgust affected subjects' moral judgments. | |
| 104 | Kass: "Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder." | |
| Pinker: the 'shudder test' is not necessarily a good guide, though. | ||
| Hume: "Morals excite passions and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason." | ||
| 106-7 | Josh Green's experiments with the 'trolley' case study: 1 life versus 5 lives, but what if the one life is near you? | |
| 109 | "Emotion can both inform and deform moral judgment." | |
| Utilitarians (Bentham, Mill, Peter Singer) versus Deontologists (e.g. Kant). | ||
| 110 | Emotional decisions gave early humans an evolutionary advantage, but the rational part of our brain has to address the utilitarian questions. | |
| 111 | Greene: even taking Kant's line, people are showing "emotional responses that are subsequently rationalized". | |
| People with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex are much more utilitarian in their moral judgments, without emotion. | ||
| 112 | Working out moral equity/inequity is a first stage, then another part of the brain makes the most effective choice - 'Diffusion of morality'. | |
| 113 | Haidt: Emotion is like an unmanageable elephant - we are just passengers (but Greene sees more balance). | |
| 114 | Maybe wisdom's role in moral judgment is as an 'elephant whisperer' [RT: from my experience, horses are enough here!] | |
| 7 - | 116 | Montaigne: "I should be likely to surrender more naturally to compassion than to esteem" (reflecting on the Weinsberg incident). |
| Compassion | Pfaff: "We are hardwired to follow the Golden Rule." | |
| 118 | Weisskopf: "Knowledge without compassion is inhuman, compassion without knowledge is ineffective." | |
| 120 | Practised meditators can purposely cause changes in experimental observations of brain waves. | |
| 122 | Ricard (Buddhist subject) "selfish happiness is completely at odds with reality" because "happiness and suffering are completely interconnected." | |
| 123 | Davidson wondered if minds could be trained to increase wellbeing. | |
| Dalai Lama: (The Tibetan word for compassion) "does not necessarily imply that compassion is directed only outward towards others, but that it can also be directed inwards, towards the self, so that is consistent with the search for happiness." | ||
| 124-5 | Subcomponents of compassion. | |
| 127 | Gallese's monkey incident (their brain cells fired even when the researcher reached for an ice cream) suggests 'mirror neurons' - action areas that fire in sympathy with what someone else is doing, feeling. | |
| 128 | We 'feel' with someone else - this is 'empathy'. | |
| 129 | Resonance - we feel the disgust when we see others disgusted - this probably ties in with learning by mimicry. | |
| 130 | Development of empathy/resonance brings us evolutionary advantage - it's not wimpish weakness [RT: as Nietzsche might say?]. | |
| 8 - Humility | 136 | Humility - "the moral agent's proper perspective on himself as a dependent and corrupt but capable and dignified rational agent" (attributed to Kant). |
| 137 | "Many people who believe they are not wise are correct in their self-assessment." | |
| Theological humility is different - it is more about submission. But Jesus and Gandhi weren't like that. | ||
| 138 | Gandhi: "... to cultivate humility is tantamount to cultivating hypocrisy." | |
| 139 | Rochefoucauld: "Few people are wise enough to prefer useful criticism (of themselves) to treacherous praise." | |
| 139-40 | 'CEO narcissism' - drama queens of business - bring extreme results - either very good or very bad. | |
| 144 | Meacham: "The essence of wisdom is to hold the attitude that knowledge is fallible and to strive for a balance between knowing and doubting." | |
| 9 - Altruism | 150 | Fehr: "... innate discernment of what is fair, and how to enforce social justice within a group ... must have evolved very early in the prehistory of the human race." |
| "Social punishment is an intrinsic feature of altruism." | ||
| 151 | Fehr: "... the evolution of cooperation is the fundamental thing, because you can have cooperation before you have language." | |
| 'Family selection' - i.e. not self-oriented - can help evolution for a species or group [RT: what about interdependent species?]. | ||
| 152 | 'Gen' - the mother word of the Confucian Way - is goodness + benevolence + human-heartedness + love + humanity + altruism - a "formula for social reciprocity". | |
| 153-4 | Even Adam Smith recognized natural 'heart'; mainstream economics ignored it, also that of 'fairness' which Keynes did recognize. | |
| 155 | "People, on average, initially tend to cooperate - at least until they are betrayed by their opponent." Then they back off to 'strong reciprocity', "rewarding helpers and punishing cheaters". | |
| 156 | "Altruism seems to require the flesh-and-blood presence of another person to trigger the reward centers." | |
| 157 | "In order for altruism to work, it requires an element of constraint (if not outright punishment) of cheaters and free riders." | |
| 157-8 | 'Ultimatum game' when a sharing proposal is felt to be so unfair that a party will cut its own gains to spite a greedy party's gains. | |
| 164 | "Greed and free riding essentially ruined one society" (in an experiment with 2 societies, one with sanctions and one without "(sounds familiar?) until collective wisdom kicked in." [RT: It was the one without sanctions that got ruined.] | |
| 165 | "Fehr has shown theoretically that a small number of selfish individuals can sabotage a population of predominantly 'strong reciprocators'." | |
| "... we derive as much satisfaction from punishing cheaters as we do from selfless cooperating." | ||
| 10 - | 170 | "Nearing a short-term reward creates ... an 'unexpected warp' in the way we perceive the value of things." |
| Patience | 173 | Ainslie: "Self-control is really the art of making the future bigger." |
| "... how people knowingly choose things they'll regret." | ||
| 175-6 | The 'hyperbolic discount curve': effective value = estimated size of benefit or reward / expected delay time. Ainslie: It's a graph representing the person's internal struggle. | |
| 176 | "... human behavior consistently - and tragically - obeys this pattern [RT: rather than discounted net present value?] | |
| 177 | "... we are neurologically doomed by this hyperbolic warp in our perception." Ainslie: it's like "standing so close to a shorter building that you don't realize that the building behind is much taller." [RT: like AMP in Sydney (Australia), or Gol Gumbaz in Bijapur (India)] | |
| [RT: There's also the risk that future rewards won't materialize.] | ||
| 181 | Laibson: It's a case where "the social scientists are catching up to the lay public." | |
| 184 | Immediate gratification and delayed gratification belong to different parts of the brain (probably - some researchers disagree). | |
| "Younger people are steeper discounters", as are extroverts and addicts (of drugs, alcohol, tobacco). | ||
| 185 | It's not so much of "Hume-like cerebral brawl between emotion and reason" - that's way too simple. | |
| 186 | 'Deep brain stimulation' (a treatment for Parkinsons disease) "interferes with a natural tendency to slow down when a person is confronted by a decisional conflict" - so they jump to conclusions. | |
| 187 | "Bonobos and chimps demonstrate a degree of patience not seen in other animals." Over food, humans are less patient than chimps, but are more patient on things like money. | |
| 11 - | 191 | We do many things without conscious effort, assuming patterns will continue. |
| Uncertainty | 194 | Matson: "Certainty has more to do with people and their belief systems than with any given set of facts. ... We need the comfort (and often, illusion) of certainty to move on to the next question (or dilemma, or crisis) in our lives, even though we are buffeted by uncertainty and flux." |
| 195 | Marcus Aurelius: "Only a fool ... would be upset by change." | |
| Medawar: Scientific method (as 'meta wisdom') "can be resolved into a dialogue between fact and fancy, the actual and the possible, between what could be true and what is in fact the case." | ||
| 199 | Cohen: "The old, limbic, emotional brain is the lumpy, amalgamated ball of neural tissue bunched around and above the brain stem; the neocortex is spread thinly over the margins, nestling over the old brain almost like a shower cap." | |
| Conflicts can arise "because the world has changed dramatically, socially and environmentally, over recent evolutionary time, while the emotional brain has not." Hence the many irrational behaviours. | ||
| 200 | "The cognitive part of the brain as a rider" - who needs better stirrups and a sharper whip. | |
| "Institutional and social wisdom ... creates systems and even vast governmental bureaucracies to outwit the quicker, self-defeating impulses of the emotional brain." | ||
| 201 | "... clever advertising and marketing schemes ... specifically target the impulsive part of the consumer brain." | |
| 202 | "Once a behavior becomes ingrained as a neurological habit, it is extremely resistant neurologically to change, even when circumstances shift." | |
| 203 | We need to balance 'exploitation' and 'exploration'. | |
| 204 | "Emotion always assumes the amount of knowledge in hand is adequate to govern our decision, even when it may not be. ... We need to recognize moments when emotion is giving us a bum steer." | |
| 207 | Adam Smith: The wise and virtuous are a select few, but "the great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers" (usually of wealth and greatness). | |
| 12 - | 215 | "... connection between wisdom and adversity" (following the Mario Capecchi story). |
| Youth, Adversity | 216 | The research (Baltes, Staudinger) "has suggested that the major period of acquisition of wisdom-related knowledge and judgment before early adulthood is the age range from about 15 to 25 years." |
| and | 216 | "Old age does not automatically confer wisdom, and being young does not automatically preclude it." |
| Resilience | "Wisdom often grew out of an exposure to adversity early in life." e.g. children in wartime. | |
| Having life easy may not be good for emotional intelligence. | ||
| 217 | Ardelt: "Adversity early in life is an apprenticeship for old age." | |
| 219-20 | 'Stress-inoculated' monkeys were braver and more resilient than a control group ... and they were better at controlling their impulsive response | |
| 221 | But early stress can also cause worse results later. | |
| 221-2 | Babies with "greater left-sided prefrontal activity" coped best with separation, but such balances vary widely over time in the same child. | |
| 223 | "... it seems plausible that resilience, coping, or indeed any form of emotional regulation might ultimately be learned." | |
| 13 - Older and | 229 | "Older adults are able to behave in a more emotionally even-handed manner than are young people ... we grow more emotionally supple ... we are able to adjust to a changing situation on the basis of our emotional intelligence and prior experience." |
| Wiser | "Wisdom is a cognitive version of 'Beat the Clock'; a pitched contest between life experience and mental decay." | |
| 231 | "Cognitive performance begins 'a more broadly based decline' around age 75." ... But "a sizeable portion of aged people in their (a Harvard team's) sample bucked this trend." | |
| 232 | Older adults need to do 'neurobics' to maintain 'cognitive tone'. | |
| 233 | Longitudinal studies (expensive) include Harvard's 'Grant' study and UK TV's '7-Up'. | |
| 235 | Relation to Freudian 'defense mechanisms'; Anna Freud said "denial, distortion and projection" are bad, while "sublimation, altruism, humour and suppression" are good. | |
| 236 | Vaillant: also good are "patience, goal-directed thinking, other-centered behavior, humility". | |
| The subjects with the good defense mechanisms did better in the 'Grant' study. | ||
| 237 | Vaillant: "Isolated traumatic events rarely mold individual lives. ... It is effective adaptation to stress that permits us to live." | |
| "... no correlation between religious practice and mental well-being." (presumably in the Grant study) | ||
| More mature defense mechanisms correlate with more charitable behaviour. | ||
| 238 | 'Letting it be' may be "a fortuitous side effect of mental decline during old age." | |
| 239 | There is a massive experimental bias in using college students as subjects. | |
| 240 | Joan Erikson: "When it comes to understanding life, experiential learning is the only worthwhile kind; everything else is hearsay" | |
| These days, we are short of 'generativity', i.e. effectively passing on wisdom to future generations. | ||
| 14 - | 242 | Franklin "walked both sides of the street that separates pragmatism from virtue." |
| Everyday | 245-6 | Wisdom is very different from IQ; test results are "orthogonal to wisdom". |
| Wisdom | 246 | Sternberg: "We have constructed an education system to produce people with skills to lead us in exactly the direction we don't want to go." (Lay and Fastow of Enron were graduates of Tufts Uni where Sternberg teaches.) |
| 248 | There's little interest among educators in putting wisdom into education. | |
| 250 | Stengel: "The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided." | |
| 251 | Confucius: "A gentleman takes as much trouble to discover what is right as lesser men take to discover what will pay." | |
| Companies committed to charitable giving seem also to be successful businesses. | ||
| 252-3 | Happy labs do better than those with "internal competitions and jealousies, secretiveness and acrimony." | |
| 254 | Lawn care - a ritual by which one can flush one's mind of daily concerns. | |
| 255 | "A domestic relationship often seems like a game that is won by losers. ... People who insist that they are always right, who insist on winning every argument, who insist that they are never to blame ... end up playing solitaire." | |
| 256 | "Being a child is often akin to working for a meddling, demanding and never-satisfied boss." | |
| 257 | Brooks: "Voters do not make cold, rational decisions about who to vote for. Rather, voters make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness." | |
| "In ancient Greece, wise men spoke on public affairs, but fools decided them." | ||
| 258 | "Serial disillusionment with fascism, Marxism, socialism and perhaps capitalism" - but also "spiritual disillusionment on a personal level". | |
| Tuchman: "Men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves." ... "Government excites the lust for power that is so subject to emotional drives, to narcissism, fantasies of omniscience and other sources of folly." ... "It's probably worthless to address political unwisdom by trying to educate the governing class; better to concentrate on educating the public." | ||
| 259 | Tuchman: "Fitness of character is what government chiefly requires. How that can be discovered, encouraged, and brought into office, I have no idea." | |
| "Neuroscience consultants essentially told their clients (presidential candidates) how to short-circuit reason and appeal to subconscious biases." An example of such a consultancy company is the 'EmSense Corporation'. | ||
| 260 | "Code words, inflections and implicit associations" (a bit like hypnosis) "are designed to detonate unconscious emotional reactions, especially fear and disgust." [RT: sounds like a definition of Bullshit.] | |
| 261 | Was US emotional attachment to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s enhanced by a concern for his health? (He appeared to be in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.) | |
| 262 | Tuchman: "The ultimate failure of the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions can be laid to 'too much class hatred and bloodshed', too much political emotionalism, in short, which precluded 'fair results or permanent constitutions'." | |
| "The enormous economy of politics is bankrolling refinements in appeals to the oldest, most fearful, and most impatient parts of our brains." | ||
| 263 | When mass emotionalism reigns, wise people may be best lying low. | |
| 15 - Dare to | 264 | "Our frenetic, postmodern, quasi-apocalyptic, multitasking, dual-income, picking-up, dropping-off, stopping-by, hyphenated, bifurcated, emotionally hectic, intellectually overwhelming, economically challenging and spiritually benumbed lives ..." |
| be Wise | 265 | "... a consumer economy that virtuously embraces bits of wisdom, as long as they are short and compact enough to fit on a coffee cup or a T-shirt ..." |
| "... no such thing as collective wisdom before Gutenberg and Gates?" | ||
| "... our hunger for sages ... bug-eyed with biblical length of beard or adorned with the prophetic jangle of crystals and me-babble ... reflects a human desire to suborn ourselves to forceful, decisive, seemingly knowing charismatic figures, a desire to be rid of the hard work of deliberation and choice (not to mention personal responsibility), to resign ourselves (with secret relief) to the more easeful role of followers and beholders." | ||
| 266 | Being a wise person in today's crowd mentality is pretty dangerous. | |
| 267 | "We figuratively hunger for wisdom to forestall spiritual and existential death." | |
| 268 | "All the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down to ... teach us not to be afraid to die." | |
| 269 | "So many of our modern technologies produce 'personal' devices that collapse time and manufacture urgency" (e.g. computers, mobile phones, social networks, Twitter) ... "yet somehow deprive us of that apprenticed learning that leads to wisdom; this 'digital haze' obscures our view of the future ..." | |
| 270 | "... ever more insistence on speed as a virtue in and of itself." | |
| "Death ... sharpens our eye for details about the well-lived life ..." | ||
| Oscar Wilde: "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at." | ||
| 272 | Clayton: "the metaphorical significance of not being able to find the queen" in a beehive | |
| Maybe it's best to leave some mystery as 'timeless knowledge'. |
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This version updated on 14th February 2011