The Wisdom Paradox Page 8
The rub is that some of the most important twentieth-century world leaders did not seem to have enjoyed successful aging, as far as their brains were concerned. Quite the contrary, from a neurological standpoint the towering personalities who dominated the twentieth century’s political landscape, both heroes and villains, aged appallingly badly.
While the historical anecdotes assembled in this chapter make for entertaining reading, it is important not to miss the main point: Despite their often significant mental infirmities, most of these leaders remained in control. Although undoubtedly shielded by layers and layers of aides and secretaries, most of them, both heroes and villains, continued to be at the helms of their countries as real leaders, and not as mere figureheads. Most of them were on top their respective games almost until the very end. While staggeringly implausible at a first glance, this has been true on numerous occasions throughout history. As we have already seen, a number of great cultural personalities were able to maintain their artistic acumen despite significant cognitive erosion, even dementia.
What allowed these remarkable personalities to prevail despite neurological decline was the rich, previously developed pattern-recognition facility, which enabled them to tackle a wide range of new situations, problems, and challenges, as if they were familiar ones—an advantage that those around them and those opposed to them lacked. The remarkable personalities described in this chapter are cases in point to Herbert Simon’s claim that pattern recognition is the most powerful cognitive tool at our disposal. Their histories show with dramatic clarity that the machinery of pattern recognition can withstand the effects of aging on the brain to a remarkable degree; that the protection offered by this machinery to an aging mind can be nothing short of profound; and that the empowering effect of a well-developed arsenal of essential patterns stored in one’s mind can remain intact at very advanced stages of life. The machinery of pattern recognition can withstand even the effects of age-related dementias to a considerable degree and for a long time.
Not all of the important personalities described in this chapter attained wisdom—far from it—but it can be argued that all of them exhibited expertise and competence within their respective cognitive arenas, some good, some evil. They may have lost some, and often much, of their mental computational power. Their memory and attention may have been significantly affected. But they had accumulated through their previous experience a large number of cognitive templates. This enabled them to tackle a wide range of complex situations as familiar patterns, despite their mental erosion, and to dominate, for better or worse, their more computationally nimble but less “pattern-recognition enabled” colleagues, associates, and most importantly, adversaries. Exactly how the cognitively enabling patterns are formed and what protects them from the erosive effects of mental decline will be the subject of the chapters to follow. But first we will examine wisdom, competence, and expertise as psychological phenomena.
4
WISDOM THROUGHOUT CIVILIZATIONS
Wisdom and Genius
Is wisdom a gift or a well-earned prize?
The phenomenon of wisdom has awed generations of philosophers, psychologists, and the general public alike. Its special status was first recognized early in history, and the admiration for wisdom permeates every culture and every slice of civilization, which is captured in the teachings of Confucius and the aphorisms of Solomon. In recent times, leading scientists and public figures have tackled the subject of wisdom as a psychological and social phenomenon. This has resulted in several books sharing the title Wisdom but approaching the mysterious phenomenon from vastly different vantage points.
Among them is a particularly informative and lucid collection of rigorous scientific essays summarizing the research conducted by a number of leading scientists and edited by a highly respected Yale psychologist, Robert Sternberg. I found this volume especially helpful in researching for my own book, and many of the facts and insights contained in the essays are reviewed here.
A very different perspective is offered in a book bearing the same title by acclaimed Australian radio journalist Peter Thompson, who attempted a glimpse into the mysterious phenomenon of wisdom by interviewing several prominent public figures from various walks of life, presumably endowed with the precious gift.
It has always been accepted that of all the mental powers wisdom is the most coveted: Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom (Proverbs 4:7). But how? And what exactly is it? On a personal level, the sense of attaining wisdom is a source of deep satisfaction and fulfillment. “Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness,” wrote Sophocles in Antigone. Psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Kevin Rathunde concluded that among “concepts relating to the evaluation of human behavior” wisdom has attracted the most enduring interest throughout the millennia of recorded history. They further say that, although highly intuitive, the concept of “wisdom” has been infused with a certain continuity of meaning throughout more than twenty-five centuries. Psychologists James Birren and Laurel Fisher link the first mention of wisdom to even more remote beginnings of history. They quote the Encyclopaedia Britannica as tracing it to ancient Egyptian writings composed almost 3000 BC, noting also the first mention of a man reputed for his wisdom 600 years later, a vizier at the pharaoh’s court by the name of Ptahhotep. In more recent times, the Wisdom Tree, with its seven branches of knowledge capped by wisdom, became one of the most emblematic images of medieval Western art, and the Eastern tradition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was made famous in the English-speaking world by T. E. Lawrence. To this day, we regard order and enlightenment as the celebration of wisdom, and chaos and excesses as the result of a lack of wisdom. Throughout the history, wisdom has been understood as the fusion of the intellectual and moral, spiritual and practical dimensions.
But despite this abiding interest in the phenomenon of wisdom, despite the fact that the nature of wisdom has been debated since antiquity, it remains shrouded in mystery even today. Until recently no serious attempt was made to understand the brain mechanisms of wisdom and little to nothing had been said or written on the subject. “To understand wisdom fully and correctly probably requires more wisdom than any of us have,” says Robert Sternberg. A noted psychologist and a distinguished student of the subject, he should know.
How to approach this seemingly impenetrable subject? An old professor of mine, the distinguished psychologist and a great aficionado of elegant parable, Alexei Leontyev, used to say that in order to make things easier to understand, you first need to complicate them. We will follow this provocative recipe. To this end, as if wisdom were not intractable enough, we will also consider genius.
Wisdom and genius are often invoked in the same breath. In fact, Sternberg puts “wisdom” and “creativity” together in the title of his seminal paper. But the nature of genius (or creativity) is as inexplicably mystifying as the nature of wisdom, if not more so. “From remote antiquity until the dawn of what is taken to be modern philosophy, wisdom, like genius, was explicated in terms of providential gods, muses, astrological forces, a sixth sense, genetic bounty, or accidents of nature,” Robinson writes. Genius is among the most revered, yet unattainable, human traits, and so is wisdom. Both are the assets of the few and most of us do not pretend, or even aspire, to have either.
Genius and wisdom share the paradox inherent in their being extreme manifestations of the human mind. They are likely to exist among us unnoticed. The paradox is that both genius and wisdom may lead to conclusions so out of sync with the concepts and beliefs prevailing in society at the time that they are discarded as madness or even completely ignored, like babble in a foreign tongue.
The corollary of this paradox is that in order to make an impact, both genius and wisdom must be ahead of society, but not so far ahead as to be incomprehensible. They must challenge the prevailing beliefs and connect with them at the same time. Military historian J. F. C. Fuller wrote, “Genius can be baffling.” By definition it is. But not too ba
ffling, lest it be ignored or laughed at as foolishness. This fine balance was captured by William Wordsworth, who wrote: “Never forget that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.”
Being too far ahead of one’s time is probably more the fate of genius than of wisdom. After all, we can define wisdom as the ability to connect the new with the old, to apply prior experience to the solution of a new problem. But we define genius as the ability to reveal and grasp undiluted novelty in its purest form. Genius too far ahead of its time is likely to be ignored by its contemporaries, and so is likely to be lost to the generations that follow, although it is difficult to blame society for this neglect. “The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it,” said psychologist Carl R. Rogers.
Does this mean that the celebrated minds, the cultural icons, the great scientists and philosophers, whose theories and discoveries propelled the forward thrust of civilization and illuminated its course like beacons in the night—Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Einstein—were in fact second-best intellects, what a wine aficionado would call “second growth”? That our history has been punctuated with forgotten “extreme geniuses,” whose names and ideas have been forever lost to a society incapable of grasping them in their own time? This thought has intrigued, amused, and disturbed me for some time, not the least because of its vaguely blasphemous cultural implications of rejecting the truly best and embracing the second best. But to think about it further, the whole proposition is a bit oxymoronic, since if their names had been forgotten centuries ago, how can we know today that these geniuses ever existed?
Yet sometimes a nearly forgotten genius’s memory is salvaged for history by serendipity, a coincidence, a fluke, or through a cultural historian’s hard work. I call this the “Leonardo phenomenon.” Today, Leonardo da Vinci is recognized as a genius of the first order twice over: a genius artist and a genius inventor and engineer. It was his artistic genius that secured his immortality and thus sustained an enduring interest in every other aspect of his legacy, including the engineering designs in his Codices. But let me ask this question: Had there been no Leonardo the genius artist, and only Leonardo the genius engineer had lived, would we know his name today? I think not. His engineering ideas were so far out, so ahead of their time, that the likelihood of their making an impact on his contemporaries was extremely remote. The memory of Leonardo the genius engineer would probably have been irretrievably lost, had it not been salvaged by Leonardo the genius artist! But the image of a sage scorned and laughed at by shortsighted contemporaries is also not unheard-of. The life of “a prophet without honor in his own land” is known to be the fate of sages too, not just of daring geniuses. Call it the “Cassandra phenomenon” if you will. Think of Mohandas Gandhi beaten by police in South Africa, or Andrey Sakharov sent into internal exile in the Soviet Union.
What is the meaning, if only metaphorical, of the phrase “touched by God?” (As an agnostic with atheistic leanings, I nonetheless use it myself whenever I encounter an individual of unusual gifts.) Do these rarefied traits, genius and wisdom, stand completely apart from the makeup of us simple mortals? If so, what are we doing here in trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, trying to define genius and wisdom, although we may lack even the ability to recognize the true geniuses and sages among us? And how can we relate these demigod-like gifts, wisdom and genius, to the lives and realities of intelligent, but let’s face it, ordinary human beings, like most readers of this book, as well as its author?
Are those endowed with wisdom or genius fundamentally and inherently different from us? Are they made from qualitatively different stuff, so to speak, as Michelangelo’s marble statue of David on a pedestal is qualitatively different from the throng of admiring flesh-and-blood tourists gaping at it? Or is there continuity between these coveted but mostly unattainable traits and some more modest attributes that many of us have, or at least can realistically aspire to? In other words, could it be that both wisdom and genius are extreme, supreme forms of some highly desirable, but far more common traits? By uncovering such continuities, we will move a step closer to unraveling the mysteries of genius and wisdom. And by identifying and examining the underlying mental traits we will make these concepts more relevant to the lives of most people, who may be both gifted and intelligent, but are neither geniuses nor sages.
Talent and Expertise
To this end, let’s consider two highly desirable but less Olympian qualities: talent and expertise. Suppose that genius is an extreme form of talent, and that wisdom is an extreme form of expertise or competence. Think of genius as talent elevated to the nth degree. Or to turn it around, talent is genius on a human scale; and competence is wisdom on a human scale. Genius and talent are two points on the same curve of a cognitive trait. Think of wisdom as competence elevated to the nth degree. Wisdom and competence are two points on the same curve of another cognitive trait.
With this approach we undoubtedly take something away from both genius and wisdom. Something of these grand concepts will be lost in the analysis, but a measure of clarity will be introduced, amounting to a worthwhile trade-off. And by demystifying them we make them amenable to an examination, which is at least somewhat scientific and not entirely poetic.
Talent and expertise are also highly valued traits, but they are within the reach of most of us. Does it mean that many among us will attain either genius or wisdom? Not likely. But many of us possess talent and expertise (or competence)—traits approximating those two, if on a more humble scale.
Heeding Sternberg’s cogent admonition, we will not aspire to a full understanding of either genius or wisdom; or of talent and competence, for that matter. We are concerned here primarily with their neurobiology, their cognitive and brain machinery. This is admittedly a limited perspective, leaving out ethical, social, and possibly other factors. But it is a crucial perspective, and one basically untapped.
To proceed further, we need to forge working definitions of talent and competence. Suppose we define talent through novelty and creativity. Talent is a particular ability to create, in one’s own chosen field of endeavor, genuinely novel content that departs radically from the previously created body of work: novel ideas, novel art, novel technology, novel industrial products, novel social structures, and so on.
Suppose we define competence through the ability to relate the new to the old. Competence is a particular ability to recognize the similarities between seemingly new problems and previously solved problems. This, in turn, implies that a competent person has at his or her disposal a vast collection of mental representations, each capturing the essence of a wide range of specific situations and of the most effective actions associated with these situations.
The continuity between competence and wisdom has not escaped the attention of psychologists. According to Sternberg, a wise individual is perceived by others as someone endowed with a “unique ability to look at a problem or situation and solve it.” Note that both the formal definitions of, and the commonsense intuitions about, competence and its supreme manifestation wisdom emphasize not only a deep insight into the nature of things, but also—and even more so—a keen understanding of what action needs to be taken to change them. The popular image is one of the people turning to a sage for guidance rather than for explanations. Both wisdom and competence are most valuable in their prescriptive powers. Keep this in mind for now; we will revisit the subject of prescriptive knowledge later.
Talent and its supreme form genius, and competence and its supreme form wisdom, exist both in unity and in contrast. They are two stages of the same life cycle. Talent is a promise. Competence is a realization. Genius (and talent) are usually associated with youth. Wisdom and competence are the fruit of maturity. Mozart’s impish face is the face of genius. Tolstoy’s gnarled face is the face of wisdom. The trade-off between wisdom and youth has been noted by phil
osophers, psychologists, and poets alike. Wisdom and competence are the rewards of aging.
While exceptions exist in either direction, both assertions are accurate at least in a broad statistical sense. In scientists, the age of groundbreaking discoveries peaks at thirty and then tapers off. Einstein the genius was the twenty-six-year-old who formulated the iconic discovery of the twentieth century, the special theory of relativity. Einstein the sage was the sixty-year-old who advised President Roosevelt on the matters of war, peace, and nuclear energy, the twentieth-century iconic menace.
In the creative journey of a genius blessed with a long life, it is often difficult to tell when genius ends and wisdom begins. The two are seamlessly blended together to propel the creative process of remarkable achievement well into the old age. While Michelangelo’s greatest work, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, was completed when the artist was in his thirties, he directed the rebuilding of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Cathedral and designed its great dome when he was well into his seventies.
Such seamless progression and blending of genius and wisdom is awe-inspiring, and it adds a finished quality, a satisfying culmination to a great life. But it is not always attainable. History is replete with examples of “unfinished genius” that failed to evolve into wisdom. Arguably, the short and violent lives of the great Renaissance painter Caravaggio and the rebellious French poet Arthur Rimbaud showed no discernable progression toward wisdom. Rimbaud’s soul mate and lover, the great Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, managed, despite his scandalous excesses, a somewhat longer life of genius, but also died amid dissipation and debauchery, without the slightest trace of movement in the direction of wisdom. It has been said about the great Athenian general Themistocles that “he was greater in genius than in character.” Likewise, it could be said about Caravaggio, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and probably Mozart that they were greater in genius than in wisdom.