In search of wisdom

My mother was my first best guide. One of her great gifts as a parent was to impart her wisdom simply by talking to me about everything, reading the traditional stories and providing me with carefully chosen books. Apart from a children’s Encyclopedia which I explored for years, I particularly remember Oscar Wilde's beautiful children's stories The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant. These are much more than delightful moral fables. Their language, when read aloud by a parent in the spirit of love, evokes a profound sense of wonder and awe - confirming the essential goodness of life, while sensitising us to what can destroy it. And the illustrations - particularly Walter Crane’s marvelous woodcut in the original publication of The Selfish Giant – demonstrate the power of art to convey what words cannot.

Our inherited culture is the great repository of wisdom. It is overflowing with the most important books, works of art and (importantly for me) music, produced by the best minds of each generation and preserved as the most worthy of passing on to the next. But what is inherited, and the wisdom it contains, is only kept alive by our passionate creative and critical engagement with it. Only then have we standards by which to judge the value of our present culture, including our popular culture, as recognised by sociologist John Carroll.

The critical function of culture, according to Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, involves:

…getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, {and} turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.

I will always be grateful to my English teachers at Sydney University in the mid 1960s for introducing me to Matthew Arnold and 'the great tradition' of English literature under the influence of FR Leavis.  They passionately advocated 'the common pursuit of true judgment' in all our intellectual endeavours, with the primary function of culture and criticism being to help us to live better, more fulfilling lives and to contribute to building a better society.

In so many ways, our future depends on drawing wisdom from our culture. Therefore, the goal of all serious endeavours should be to learn all we can from the best examples available to us, to add our own unique contribution and then share it with others.

3.      Think it possible you may be mistaken in whatever you think or do

One of my intellectual heroes is Jacob Bronowski whose BBC production The Ascent of Man is surely one of the greatest cultural achievements of the 20^th Century. It is a treasury of wisdom from a genius communicator who understood deeply the unity and value of both scientific and artistic endeavour.

Even more than this, however, his greatest contribution, I believe, was to remind us of the human limits of even our best understandings and to warn us against the dangers of hubris and arrogance.

There is no absolute knowledge and those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition…

All knowledge, all information between human beings can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics... 

Every judgment …stands on the edge of error, and is personal...

Knowledge is not a loose-leaf ragbag of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures.

4.      Judge all things conscientiously but try never to judge anyone personally

Since science teaches us that we can have no certain knowledge, we should apply this principle equally to those ethical and moral judgments we are required to make and be more 'tolerant' (in Bronowski's sense of the word) and less dogmatic.