I recently read an interesting article about wisdom. Some of its contents were interesting, anyway. The writer’s conclusion that wisdom is a mysterious, undefinable entity left me distinctly un-fascinated. This seems to me to be another manifestation of our short-sighted, youth driven “pop” culture, in which history and memory are eschewed in favor of current fashion.

     Here’s what I think wisdom is. You take what a person has absorbed over the course of her/his life, however long or short that might be. You cross-connect all that data. Now if this person is wise, he or she will be able to make correlations between their experiences, giving them a useful perspective on a situation.

     For instance: Joy Smith (fictional character) has lived through a number of Minnesota winters. She’s seen how a particular caterpillar acts in late fall. She’s noted that this caterpillar seemed to come down out of the apple trees earlier in September when there was going to be a snowy winter. Hence, she can postulate the amount of snow that she’ll see in the coming cold season.

     So, you add your experiences to the clarity of your perception, and your ability to see relationships between those facts and experiences; voila! You have wisdom. It’s not necessarily a function of age, since young people can make connections between their experiences, and older folks haven’t necessarily learned a great deal in their lives, and may not have the “horse sense” to put their experiences together. But the greater your body of experience, the more possible connections and correlations there are. This is simple math.

     In our modern society, where youth is prized over everything except wealth, wisdom is badly out of fashion. We see the manifestations of this everywhere; we’re racing around like maniacs, doing little more than ruining our environment and killing each other by accident and on purpose (always due to ignorance unless you want to believe that everyone is intentionally evil), we’re leaping before we look, we’re rushing to judgments that contradict generations of good experience. We’re building giant, complicated machines to do things that we figured out how to do most efficiently centuries ago! What are we thinking?

     Answer; we’re not. We’ve tossed aside our collective memories, our wisdom, our lore, in favor of instant gratification. Like impatient children, we refuse to see how all the yesterdays add up to make tomorrow. All the information is there, waiting to be stirred around into smart soup. One does not have to be ancient to see how crippled we are as a species when we won’t hear the voice of experience.