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By BILL THOMPSON
I saw a phrase recently that is certainly a contradictory term. The phrase is “conventional wisdom.” I asked a friend what he thought that meant and he said it meant wisdom is what people happen to think is the actual status of a particular thing at that particular time.
I always thought wisdom was timeless. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe if enough people say something is true that makes it true as long as those people say it’s true. That seems to be the way of things nowadays.
After all, I found that phrase in a popular news magazine that has millions of readers. The magazine apparently surveyed those people “in the know” and came up with a consensus of fact. Doesn’t that give “conventional wisdom” some credibility? Does the fact that the term originated in Washington, the seat of so much wisdom, give the term any credibility?
To have wisdom means someone is wise. I seldom hear that word applied to anybody any more. As best I can tell, there have only been three wise men in history and they lived more than 2,000 years ago and disappeared with no forwarding address.
Nobody is wise on their own. There are smart people, intelligent people, sagacious people, people with a lot of savvy and people with a lot of insight but I never hear anybody referred to as “wise.”
Is it an old-fashioned word? Is it not “the in thing” to say somebody is wise? Even our slang expressions that include “wise” have changed. A “wise guy” used to mean a smart aleck, somebody who was impudent or sarcastic. Now a “wise guy” is a mobster.
Every once in a while I’ll hear somebody say, “A wise man once said...” just before they use a quote from someone they can’t remember. Which makes me wonder why we remember the quote and not the man.
Could it be that the reason we don’t use the word wisdom anymore is because we get it confused with “knowledge?” There is a difference, you know. Knowledge is what we learn. Wisdom is what we learn from the knowledge.
I’m reminded of something an old man told me many years ago as we were discussing the intelligence of one of his friends. I commented on how intelligent his friend was and how much he knew about so many things. The old man said, “Yeah, Jessie, he knows a lot. But a lot of what he knows ain’t so.”
The reason I got to thinking about all this was reading that magazine I mentioned after getting home from a trip during which I had been listening to one of those radio talk shows. I had been listening to so many people talk on and on about things they knew very little about.
Certainly they had the right to their opinions and to express those opinions and the talk show was probably the right format for that, or a letter to the editor. But it struck me as presumptuous for the magazine to collect similar varied opinions and somehow determine that they represented wisdom.
Wisdom is not collective opinion designated as truth. Wisdom is knowing how little we know but never ceasing to learn. Conventional wisdom is to wisdom what junk food is to food.