Random Sunday Musings

Thoughts on society, culture, wisdom, Proverbs and emotional reasoning.

Our society and culture are beset with people who believe themselves filled with wisdom, and due to this belief, think themselves destined to rule because they are made from finer clay.

Proverbs 26:12 says:

"Do you see a man wise in his own eyes?
There is more hope for a fool than for him."

I think true wisdom is best defined as cross-functional knowledge.

It’s sort of a liberal arts degree of life.

I think a liberal arts degree should carry more status within the degree hierarchy because a liberal arts curriculum is the traditional course of study in Western education, including the study of history, literature, writing, philosophy, sociology, psychology, creative arts and more. It is designed to educate the whole mind, not just focus on a specialty to the exclusion of all others.

What I mean by wisdom being cross functional is that a truly wise person need not be credentialled at a high level in any specific category, they simply need a functional understanding of how science, religion, economics, ethics, the arts and natural laws intersect and work together to form a unified process of existence.

My grandfather was one of the wisest men I have ever known. He had very little formal schooling, but in the process of raising a family on a Mississippi farm during the Great Depression, being a God fearing man, honest to a fault, a voracious reader, and a rational thinker and an astute observer of nature and natural events, he was able to see the connection in all of those aspects of his life, and that gave him the ability to synthesize true wisdom and to give his children and their children the benefit of that wisdom.

So many people in positions of power today lack wisdom. While they may be highly educated - and even experienced - in some things, they simply lack the ability to make the important connections between their expertise and the other items I mentioned before.

Given the SCOTUS decisions of this term, and some lower court decisions that didn't go the way some would have preferred, there are many smart people saying very stupid things about what is constitutional and what is not. We have a cadre of the media screaming that government must be able to control speech, that compelling speech is necessary to protect LGBTQ "rights" (as if there are special rights for LGBTQ), that being able to discriminate based on race is constitutional and that the Supreme Court is under the control of the Legislative and Executive Branches.

I don't think these people are stupid, I just understand that they are one dimensional. To consider most issues facing a republic such as ours, and matters of constitutional import, it takes multi-dimensional reasoning, also known as wisdom, that these people are just not equipped to do.

Reason born from wisdom also informs that just because a thing can be done, doesn't mean it should be done. Wisdom means that just because one discipline says something can be done, if another says not to do it - we must have the strength not to do it. If a scientific advance results in a moral conflict, the moral aspect must be considered, simply being told to "believe the science" is insufficient.

Abortion falls in this category, as does "gender affirming care". In order to proceed with either requires the denial there is a moral and ethical component that must be addressed in each and the only way to approve of either is to simply ignore those components.

Reason is impossible without wisdom and when reason is absent, emotions rule.

So much of what we hear out of Washington has been emotionally based. Because they really, really want something to be true is is true, even though whatever it is has no basis in natural or constitutional law.

For example, just last week on MSNBC, Karine Jean Pierre, aka the White House's Human Dust Mop, last week declared there is a constitutional right to receive preferential treatment based on one's race even though the language of the 14th Amendment prohibits such nonsense.

Whether Ms. Dust Mop believes it or is just supporting a Biden agenda, I think most reasoning people understand that racial preferences are most certainly NOT supported by the language, spirit, or traditions of the Constitution.

Similarly last week, the New York Times, allegedly a newspaper, came out as pro-censorship and anti-free speech. Of course, they know about the First Amendment but they have a regime to protect and that regime needs to control speech to survive.

Also, specifically against the Constitution.

Proverbs 26:11 says:

"As a dog returns to his own vomit,
So a fool repeats his folly."

Seems there is truly less hope for these people than for fools.