Ethos or How I Learned Some Wisdom
3 February 2012
I seek wisdom because I love to be good
*What is then the source of the many things I will assert so boldly in this essay? Is there something real to ground my claims? To what wisdom did I have access? Who is speaking here? How did I become who I am? From what did my wisdom grow? What reality did I experience and assimilate which makes me believe that I gathered some wisdom?
As the main ingredient of what I write is personal knowledge, action and learning from it, it is fair to present my experience and way of thinking – a brief intellectual biography:
*
I did not learn everything I know from kindergarten. I hated kindergarten. My first teachers of wisdom were my family. Now I am what survives of them.
My Grandfather, peace be upon him, told me magnificent bed-time Enlightenment stories about freedom and of knowledge being power; compelling stories of the kind that gives form to a child's future life. He was amazing with intelligence but stubborn like King Lear. He lived his way from the misery of orphan childhood, up to local renown and well being and back to losing everything because of war and change of political regime; this makes me understand how ephemeral our successes are. He dreamt to be a writer or a biologist but had to become a lawyer for subsistence. He did things, saved people, and convinced irresistibly as the lawyer he was - which irritated many. He had a passion for Aesop, Spinoza and Francis Bacon, among other things. While he pushed forward his chin, exactly as my son does, he kindled me to ask the never-ending flow of questions of a child. Ceaselessly asking questions is a sacrifice way to knowledge. Eternally asking questions to yourself and to all you live, is a certain path to wisdom.
My polymath Father, the taciturn engineer and scientist, answered those childish questions with intimidating and compulsive scholarly precision, always taking in hand some encyclopaedic source, to find the right name, the true quote and the exact explanation. He demonstrated that you do not take surface for granted, you go uninhibited to check everything, sapere aude, not in the trash of third hand sources, not from the trendy speech of authority, but in the great serious reference books of humanity, and they will not bite you. He showed me how to rise intellectually, always higher then a given situation, so that I could have a wider and deeper view. On the other hand, his impeding excess of scrupulous rigour or detail also taught me, unintentionally, that you do not need to know everything; just know where to find it and go to it when you need it. Thank you Father!
Father, in his prison of books.
He also taught me by negative example – he was an ivory-tower scholar and Utopian, an introvert at the limit of autism, conceptual and analytical to paralysis, who never applied the wealth he knew – that knowledge hoarded in silence is childless like Sleeping Beauty forever dreaming. Wisdom must go practical too! He was a bibliomaniac too; he did not drink or smoke or gamble but he bought books with all he earned and studied them with the seeming urge to know everything. Ah, if I could know half he knew! All his salary went up in smoke on the walls forming a fascinating, hypnotic tapestry of volumes, among which I lived my childhood. Books were my friends, my refuge, my shield, my castle of civilization, but in time I learned that having all the books augments your library not your mind, not yet; and certainly not your ability to do things and to finish what you start. They are there, all around, yet not yours: to own them you must read them, understand, select and digest them. You must awaken their sleeping knowledge. You may even need to forget them. I learned from my Father to refrain from buying books instead or reading them where they are available, in the great libraries.
My second Father, Eric, was the opposite temper, the gifted fixer; he taught me to see the world just as it is and also to dare change it. He proved to me by example that while some things are given, many things you can make and do, even some “impossible” ones. A normal attitude for someone who had dedicated his youth to a succeeding Revolution. When something was to do, he showed me how to find those who can and how to bypass those who cannot. He proved to me that when you act and when people believe you, you can. Fortune favours the bold! He convinced me that you can be tough without hate, compromise, dissimulate, survive among wolves, talk with tyrants, and still remain uncontaminated, a honest, good-hearted person, able of humane ideal and generous choice; but, at retirement, he ended up assassinated because of the too many things he knew about too many bad people. Do not mix with wolves, you will pay the difference! Thank you Eric, for teaching me that what happens to me is because of me!
My Mom was the uncompromising, passionate, intuitive critical thinker. Nothing escaped her scrutiny. She was a historian. Luckily, she was an extrovert, unlike my father and I inherit both. Her warm intuitions, wide literary interest, her first impressions, her taste, rarely failed. Curiously, her ulterior educated reasoning was often mistaken rationalization. She proved to me that often, intuition works where ratiocination falsifies. Forced application of reason may be reductive and inadequate. She incited me to ask "what is this?", "what is it not?", “why?” “why not?” and “What is old and what is new in this?”, “Why this and not that?” "Which other things are similar and which are different?". She counterpoised with many such deeply subversive questions the politically correct langue de bois which was mandatory in our country for a surviving intellectual. She taught me to subvert and survive political correctness even in its own terms.
Alas, she also contaminated me with the hopeless compulsion of critique, of challenging the good-enough, of desiring forever more and better, that open ascending spiral never to be satisfied. Such an exponential model of aspirations is a serious hindrance to ever be wisely content and to enjoy life among normal mediocrity. Perfectionism is not wisdom, it is specialisation and pride of excellence. Remember this, to have balance when you educate your children. Teach them some imperfect contentment too. It is called humility. They will live happier.
With amazing naivety, my parents inculcated me to worship the values of truth, beauty and justice, their spiritual alternative to God. As if they were higher than life. Their enlightenment-born spirituality was made of Ethic, Reason and Humanistic Civilisation, Art and Culture. Music, theatre and reading good books was their ritual of elevation. They took for granted the utopia of necessary Progress as being a law of nature and society, leading unstoppable, one-way. towards the better, in all domains. What a poor replacement for religion ! They believed that justice must and does prevail, granted by the necessary progress of Humanity and that truth is the highest, sacred, value, worth sacrifice, as if these dry norms were in themselves the end-values of humanity. But later I found that they are only means towards other more humane values and a better life, not ends.
That proud obsession for uncompromising honesty and righteousness cost me needless enemies, humiliation and trouble before I wised up. Naked honesty must dress in civil cloth and righteousness must learn to use judgment, wait and find the means to prevail.
A most important learning came to me from my parents errors and loss; I witnessed how their earlier youthful idealism was fooled and abused, how they blundered into captivity, how their life was wasted by that quickly disenchanted belief in Marxism – that yet another genially-stupid, dystopian “ultimate solution” opposed to the German final solution and supposed to solve forever the sufferings and injustices of the world.
We got estranged and trapped, we survived in a grey totalitarian regime where the victorious "socialist" life was almost as “poor, nasty, brutish and short” as Hobbes' primitive society, a dictatorship without a social contract, with an extra of Byzantine crippling perfidy. It was the enslavement of the people in the name of the people. Another failed Utopia, another totalitarian Beast which devoured several generations... for nothing. In retrospect, I understand that I lived my youth in the garbage can of History.
Venerating humanism, beauty, culture, sincerity and freedom in a world of malevolence and hypocrisy offered rich occasion for learning and practising wisdom. Life-saving wisdom of dissimulation. Nothing teaches prudence and subtlety of mind like coping for years with tyranny and newspeak. I imagine that Medieval intellectuals lived the same under Inquisition. Oppression and censoring force you into scholastic trifrenia: you think one thing, must speak another and do another thing yet, each discordant with the other two. You must learn to live with permanent inconsistency and mental dissonance: a strange curriculum teaching me how to cope and survive within complexity and contradiction. Socially, you wear a mask of dissimulation stuck to your face. You move your hands and feet and tongue with political correctness, restrained by invisible strings of prudence. Your thoughts, reserved to the inner circle of family and to dangerously close friends, are in sharp contradiction with what you can and often must say and do publicly; nothing you say or write will represent truly your ideas. A deciphering key is necessary to understand what you say. Quoting you later is lying about you. In fact, what you say and do under constraint does not represent you at all. Call it acting under duress.
Unexpectedly, I found in later years an advantage born from this maddening experience of functioning in chaos and falseness. If you managed to host consciously such contradiction in your mind without becoming insane or corrupt, your thinking will become resilient to complexity and open to meet the irreducible plurality and contradictions of the world as it is.
Some thirty years of life apprenticeship as an intellectual under tyranny provided me with subversive survival wisdom amazingly useful to understand and consult later in big multinational corporations of the West. I learned to see human reality behind corporate pretence, words as re-definable tools, things communicated without saying them. I felt prepared to count with inevitable "negatives" ; honest prejudice, mechanical thinking, ignorance, stupidity and absurdity, and to think under permanent uncertainty and flow, undisturbed by ever present contradiction and ceaseless surprise. I learned to persuade, not by assertion but by making things simple and obvious, to cause people to understand, by creating metaphors and compelling questions instead of answers. I used the strategy of doing by not doing, of leaving room and leaving things to happen, with an imperceptible nudge towards the desirable. I understood that if you wait, the right moment comes for everything.
*
I did not learn much wisdom from school either. There, I was fed basic skills, reasonable information, “data” now obsolete and some valuable evergreen knowledge of general culture. School was teaching us to read, pencil and count, but certainly not to learn, to understand or to think critically, nor to write or communicate with people. School so to say, was teaching the manuals, not the children... It was mainly used to weed divergent thinking and to cultivate conformity. If you want to educate your child, do it yourself, at home. Collect the useful school grades additionally, without illusions.
Besides the curriculum of many critical situations of daily life, I found rich examples of wisdom in literature; not in reading the whole Western Canon but in a modest treasury sufficient to make me rich, from the profusion spread by my parents over the four walls of our apartment. At the middle of the last century, people were still able to read books all the time. I devoured numberless works I do not remember, because for a long while I ignored the covers with authors and titles, just rushed and absorbed the content, the action, the situations, the mind-growing treasury of words, the grammar, the turns of mind the nuances and particularly the ideas. This barbarian invasion among so many books, the myriad disorderly, disparate bits of general culture and notions absorbed, taught me something priceless; that many words give you freedom and power. I also learned for life how ignorant and fallible I was, and I will be, forever. I learned to accept that I will never know enough, nobody can. I made peace quite early with the idea that I will live - like everybody else - in a world here what I will never know is immense, while what I know is a small familiar treasure-cave in that infinity. I claim that renouncing the arrogant, neurotic need and pretence of knowing the enough the "right" and necessary (or worse, everything needed for a complete system of knowledge) is a key to wisdom. Once familiar with this truth, you stop being defensive, you can advance un-paralysed and open to assimilate ever new discoveries, facts become friendly. You are at ease to say: "I don't know." You are free to correct yourself all the time and to be corrected. With this attitude, you can still appreciate when you know much more (or less) than other people.
These are questions confronting all of us when we meet our ignorance: “What do you chose ? Despair in front of the unknown? Giving up? Rebellion and pride to be ignorant? Urge to deny or to reduce infinity to what you know ? Seeking enlightenment from a prophet or from a great authority ? Hiding humbly inside a large community of anonymous ego-less scientists and begging the future with faith in progress that "Science" shall know it all ? Or do you accept with modest friendliness to do your best in your life-space and biography, to think with confidence in your human mind, based on the incomplete knowledge you have now, and to try what you reasonably can, to use and correct wisely what you know and just learned, while coexisting peacefully with the Great Unknown, and the learning forever?
Among so many forgotten, my literary affinities became, Defoe, Swift, Scott, Stevenson and De Coster, Andersen and the brothers Grimm, countless folk stories, Dumas, Dickens, Verne, Toparceanu, Cervantes, Karinthy, Hašek and Kafka, the precursors of science-fiction, Asimov, Lem, Wells, Bradbury, Saint-Exupéry, La Fontaine, Twain, the Sufi fables of Nasreddin Hodja, Graciàn, Maupassant, Gary, Chekov, Gogol, Poe, France, Hugo, Zola and Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky, Ilf and Petrov, Greene, London, Kipling, Rolland, France, Feuchtwanger, Zweig, Boccaccio, Orwell, Melville, Hemingway, Conrad, Werfel, Golding, Lampedusa, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Hesse, Graves... These were my first dead teachers. Much later I discovered Homer, the 1001 Nights, Kahlil Gibran, Carroll, Lao-Tzu, Chuang-Tzu, Sun-Tzu, the KJV Bible, Montaigne, Erasmus, Bulgakov, Borges and Marquez, Rushdie, Gilgamesh, Goethe, TH White, Waltari, the Mahâbhârata, Dostoevsky, Douglas Adams, Herodotus, Gibbon, Durant, Huxley, Plato, Watts, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Shaw, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Æsopic fables and the Greek myths, to mention some readings that I am made from. But wisdom, if any, is of course what remained after I forgot most of what I read.
All those books, while they offered me evasion and refuge, prepared and caused me to dream and think, furnished and freed my mind with multitudes of situations, words, values, criteria, feelings and patterns, turns of mind and shades of differentiation; they became my own treasury chest of comparisons and of choices. Those pages were so full of amazement, of interesting things, that they filled my mind and taught me what is interesting and how to observe that something is interesting. As a result, I am never bored; I found that if you look and care, everything around you becomes interesting. Only empty heads need to be amused and entertained all the time.
The school of life went on. I studied and re-studied psychology, communication and education science. I used to dream that psychology were the historically accumulated worldly wisdom about how people know consciously, believe, give meaning, feel, judge, decide and act, an endeavour to understand, influence and help persons and communities. Nevertheless, in the sixties of the twentieth century psychology was enslaved to "method", turning away from the comprehension of man, into a mechanistic under-dog physical science about "subjects" (not of kings but of research) reflexes, mazes, tests, behaviours, pathologies, and statistical correlations. Positivist dogma was worse than religious. That study was not about wisdom and not serving people. Psychology was working at splitting and turning Man into machine. I did my doctorate in "communication psychology" and shut up; useless to waste my life against the windmills of behaviourism and positivism.
I decided not to quit my profession but to practice my own brand of old-time wisdom about the human person, the one with a name, life-history, identity and self-hood, able to say "I" and to start new things. My rescue was that in fact psychology is applicable wherever people are and whatever they do. You can always call it something else; I practised psychology in this fashion, all my life.
For ten years, I played with applying psychology to communicating to wide audiences, trough Television in its early years. I became a TV person. It was thrill! We were clever but foolish. We, young TV people, at the debuts of TV in my country, were dreaming then that Television - the nec plus ultra of that epoch without WWW - was to be a miraculous window towards the whole world and the highest culture, to freedom, open wide for everyone. I believed that with television, democracy becomes - in time - inevitable. It was certainly not meant to be just a funnel used to homogenise and to dumb crowds down with the despair of bad news and the inflation of envy, normalising violence vulgarity and greed. In spite of propaganda and censorship, we amused viewers, opened eyes, informed and tried to instruct people. Behind the silver screen I tasted the vanity of renown. It tastes good, bitter-sweet. Television commands important means and influence. You can do things with words, sounds and images. I tasted the power of having access to almost whoever I wanted, of doing things out of reach for other people. I found out that what is impossible for one is feasible for another or with different means, with different understanding or in different places. Having to do things on time, at the inexorable rhythm of news and broadcasts, I learned to avoid the ones who cannot and to find the ones who can as Eric taught me. This recipe helped me all my life.
I had to became proficient– because of omnipresent censorship – to communicate things compellingly without saying them directly. Rich vocabulary helped a lot. Examples and symbols and meaningful sequences of image - as I learned - speak silently but are in fact louder than words. And yes, you can launch ideas seemingly tame and "correct", but which will become causes of change and keep working in the receiving minds, until they fruit radical conclusions. Making distant ends meet, ceaselessly absorbing new, interesting things and teaching them to masses through image and example was fun and excitement. I often achieved to make complicated subjects understandable and acceptable. (In time, I made permanent and compulsive learning and understandable teaching - what I like to call the power to make things simple - my vocation). At my leisure hours, by academic remorse and ambition, I continued my doctoral studies and advised many "clients" as a counselling psychologist. I founded the first “normal psychology” practice for students in my country; for a few years I consulted in my spare hours, face to face, by mail, by phone, by a newspaper column, along with many other occupations; I learned thus that advice can change people’s life. Through those experiences, I became convinced that what persuades and helps people is not fact and reality but what they understand and feel from it. I also learned the wisdom that you can take the horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink.
Visibly I had much energy. At that time I was also a successful interpreter and prolific translator of film, skilful in subtitling (at that epoch the film translation was often done with no written reference text, by listening to the original, then the sub titles were hand calligraphed on scrolls and hand synchronized live). Funny thing, the more and the faster the dialogues went in a film, the shorter and fewer the subtitles had to be. As an interpreter I understood that bad translation is literal and good translation is situational, provided you are responsible to keep it truthful. More than translating from a language, you must render into the language fit to the listener.
Ten years of such translation practice made me understand something important: that you can say a lot with a few short words, that context and usage determines meaning radically, that you can say the same things with very different words and even say very different things with the same words. That words carry thinking. More, you can say things with no words or by causing expected words to be absent.
Being a professional translator is like riding a bike; once learned it, the habit stays with you for life. I can say that - starting with my two mother tongues - I was and will be a translator and a *cross boundary incumbent" all my life; from one language to another, from one point of view (or even world-view) to another, one context, frame of reference and set of references, level of abstraction and occasion to another, from one image to another, one paradigm to another, from one culture to another, from one understanding and sensibility to another, and sometimes even from one truth to another. I believe that understanding this and doing this responsibly contains some wisdom. Being an interpreter is certainly a trade which contributes to make one able to transfer some wisdom.
*
Maybe the deepest force I discovered during my fast-paced television years was the unnaturally convincing and mind-building might of a mass communication menu as a whole, conveying ostensibly an artefact reference life-world of moving image and sound, with its distinctive visual, dreamlike logic in movement. That flow was not mere illustration of words, not arrow-like "messages" nor mere copy of perceived reality, it was mass transmissible intuitive "shared common sense" building, a way of ostensive visual thinking, entirely artificial, recorded, edited and broadcast as if alive; something like reasoning (or dreaming) on behalf of other people... A dangerous tool of mass influence. Whoever masters the Noosphere, rules the background of public mind. Unfortunately the "united dictators and populist tyrants of the world" understood much of this, Tragically, the western democracies imbued with freedom of thought and expression, cannot find how to prevent the abuse of their own freedoms when it is used to poison and manipulate public opinions and future generations.
Broadcasting is communicating pre-fabricated, dreamlike logic and memes fated to be assimilated by viewers mostly unawares. Add to this the "content" - the mediated perception of a larger, "distal" (distant) world, never experienced directly but vivid enough to become part of the personal maps of reality, images of the world and worldviews of the audiences.
I understood that - for most of it - the distant world we never meet and even much of the proximal environment, are for us mere received representations and interpretation in words, mainly or only "verified" on the trust we have in communication, in the witnessing what we see and trusting the credible people or the unquestioned language in which we think. Most of the world, we "know", we never encounter, never touch, only have it pictured, mediated, testified, attested, named, categorised, affirmed, shown, explained and interpreted on our behalf. But we take life decisions and follow ways based on this virtual reality's examples. A whole culture can go astray on such a path.
This is the everyday reality of our "justified belief". That mediated map is most of the world we live in. We base our image of the world and in consequence our reasonable judgement and many of our crucial decisions on things we never met directly, based on received common sense and on words and ways in which other people understood them or want us to understand them.
What is then all this dogmatically correct talk about modern man knowing the world through empirical direct experience, measurement and experiment? Did you, the reader, form your personal knowledge in this "empirical" way? What percentage of the world population knows scientifically? Moreover, is Science still credible enough to correct the errors and deceptions?
Science and even rationality is received by us mortals on trust, by hearsay and authority discourse. Going to school is not so different from going to church.
My conclusion for a theory of mass persuasion was that subtle, sinister, manipulation schemes and conspiracy theories are mere child play compared with the brute force influence of flat assimilation and building up of a daily diet of shaped and censored agenda and artefact representations we consume. Television (and today, forty years later, ten times amplified, Internet, mobile communication, social networks and the like) rule the global public representation of the World. Changing the image of the world is changing the world. All this is done irresistibly, in full daylight, no tricks, no hands needed. Crime does pay. Nobody accountable for the whole. It is an irresistible "technological" progress. How to protect humanity's good sense and critical thinking against this huge amplifier and "validator"? How to protect people against the levelling by AI and the viral spread of ideas of prey?
As I was a young proud fool, I set out explaining those dangerous thoughts and means in my doctoral thesis; I was very, very lucky that the government's grand inquisitors did not notice what I wrote. They could have forced me to apply that Orwellian knowledge. Explaining powerful influencing means to those propaganda people was the wrong thing to do, a very foolish, mindless thing. Luckily, I became mindful of the danger and stopped writing about this subject.
*
As my life went on, in my superficial pursuit of vanity and of immediate freedom from constraint, I attended the evening classes of another great teacher of wisdom, my own errors: I did innumerable foolish mistakes, mainly imprudent and useless talk, opinions and conflicts with people for the sake of doing things well, in the name of the thing well done. I got sanction for them so that I had to learn that in a large part what happens to me is brought about by me and by not learning promptly enough from my errors. I understood quite slowly that to succeed, you must keep alive and healthy.
For long years, in my fascination with freedom, busy with not doing what I did not want to do, I drifted, side-stepped, out-manoeuvred, navigated amid Scylla and Charybdis, responded and seized opportunities instead of building patiently my own destiny. I made some very good and some bad choices, so that I understand now the importance of life choices. I realize only now that I never had a life plan to set who I wanted to be and where I wanted to go in the long term. I was mainly keen to do well what I did rather than what I wanted to be or achieve in time. This error demoted me, without warning, to the light cavalry. No surprise that life carried me on its tides: "when you do not know where you want to go, every road will get you there" as Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat warns.
Numberless critical situations, benign or dangerous, taught me most I know and part of what I don’t know (but I cannot describe all of that, the map would grow larger than the territory).
Armed with my psychologist's eye I learned that in most critical situations there is a somewhat "objective" substantial, given part - call it "blood, steel and money" but also a human side which can worsen and destroy everything uselessly or, on the contrary, limit loss and improve things notably. Therefore, there is much room for learning wisdom as competence with people and situations.
I practised my own choice of the capital sins as we all do; pride, sloth, greed, anger and much worse, egotism, perfectionism, inattention to others, impatience, superficiality, dissipation and weakness of will. What a waste! I met good people and bad people and indifferent, callous beastly or machine-like people, who are probably the worst of all; at times, and this still paradoxes me, some good people did harm to me and some bad people helped.
I can say now that I learned much more wisdom from my defeats, mistakes or vices and certainly from my encounters with mindlessness, weakness, absurdity, hate, greed, cowardice, wickedness and stupidity than from the wisest sages. As Cato the Censor said in Plutarch's "Lives..", wise men learn more from the fools than fools from the wise." Sadly, fools also learn mostly from the fools rather than from the wise, but not the same thing. The most useful of the insights was, I guess, to understand the omnipresence and the substantial importance of what I call "negatives" in human reality. Uncertainty, fear, absence, ignorance, transience, loss, imperfection, error, prejudice, false belief, wishful thinking, imprecision, appeared to me as ever present, active factors one must include - as states of fact - in good judgement in all matters; neglecting them makes good reason disconnected and stupid.
The hard thing was to cope and learn from so much dysfunction, falsity and evil but not to let it corrupt and embitter me. It was hard to dissimulate and to lie daily but keep cherishing sincerity and trust. In time you become what you do. As I learned to hit my enemies, the danger was to start liking it for the sake of power. It was hard to stop engaging in futile shows and conflicts, as it was to refrain from dying for other people’s misfortunes, but still to stand up for things that count for me whenever I can and to have true compassion for people so imperfect. To this date I believe that I managed this by remaining a seventeen years old dreamer.
I formed a habit of changing fast to adapt and to stop loss. Few people understand and appreciate this flexibility. I found that the hardest thing is to make the good choices for the long-term while you do promptly the best immediate ones; to chose within a conflict of values - between good against good or the least bad from two evils, between values incommensurable (as Isaiah Berlin explains them), to balance the many conflicting good things you desire now, with a most important thing you believe to be desirable for your life, in the distant perspective. That is a mark of the wise, I believe.
When based on what I learned, I did better, I also fared better. I learned that being good feels good and makes you good. You can be good because you chose to be good, in spite of your private anxieties and nightmares. Each point of wisdom understood, helped me help other people. With each wise finding embodied, I helped myself greatly. Unfortunately, many of my own weaknesses of temper and character never improved. It is hard to change your temper, it is a kind of destiny. Moreover, knowing some wisdom is insufficient to become wise.
*
After ten years of sparkling showmanship and opportunism among wolves and sheep, for the sake of my cherished freedom and dignity, I tore myself out of television “celebrity,” changed forever country, language, culture and occupation. Contrary to Maxime Leforestier's exhortation, my country was not one to leave and regain freely: " Etre né quelque part/c'est partir quand on veut,/Revenir quand on part" (To have a place of birth, /Means that you have a right/To leave when you would and to come back too). I gave up "forever", everything I possessed, except my family, my freedom and my mind.
Starting from scratch as an immigrant stranger was for me an urgent occasion for practical wisdom; wise choice too, as it seems. One penalty, which I understand now as a life sentence, was - after having been a gifted wordsmith in my mother tongue - to live and work and write all the rest of my life in foreign languages, exclusively.
Since people are not really equal, since labels as "refugee" or "migrant" are not real, mere stupid, ugly, evil urge to turn living people into categories, objects and statistics, I did suffer much less than I expected. Armed with some inherited intellectual baggage, I did not suffer segregation, xenophobia or hopeless poverty as many immigrants do. There was place for me too on the boat of Switzerland. I respected the country generous to accept me at the time of need and the country respected me. We, Swiss, must keep aware how lucky we are to live in such an exceptional place and protect this island of democracy and of well being.
I worked some five comfortable and boring years for a Swiss university, compared and found that the “science” of psychology kept utterly astray from seeking helpful human wisdom, obsessed, as it was to become precise, logical, behavioural, experimental and objective, free from human bias, ideally mathematical and programmable. For my generation psychology research was dead, I thought. It is only now, in the new millennium, too late for me, that I start finding plenty of exciting books and research proving that the old generation grew weary of being scientifically correct and that a new generation rises competent and unafraid of mechanistic dogma.
Disappointed, I “moved into business” and used my theoretical and practical experience to design advanced courses of applied psychological awareness and practice, for consultants and managers in multinational organisations; privileged events, individually crafted, competing with the abundant, cheap, introductory simplifications offered on the market. In the 1980’s those professional and business people who were my students were still considered valuable assets and still needed to become better at understanding people and dealing with persons. People and groups still counted in the business models, not only costs and profit margins. In the beginning, I did not realize that I was paid for practising the luxury to teach wisdom, but this is what it was. My students were presented with "comprehend-what" "live it" "make it yours" and with "know-how-to" distilled from social sciences and humanities, made understandable in rational but “simple”, metaphoric or experiential form. The learners appeared pleasantly charmed and often made superlative appreciations. Some pretended – making me quite suspicious – that this or that instant when they said “Aha!” was unique for them, that they “never learned like this in their life”. Was I becoming some sort of guru or a ham actor cast-off from Television? I suspected this was empty flattery or that maybe I did something cheaply manipulative. After a while, it dawned on me that it was in fact what I call now the power of making things simple, the blend of common sense and paradox, of common-place simplicity and complication, of metaphors, emancipatory challenging and dramatized experiencing of critical situations – that produced such sense of personal transformation. (Unfortunately, some sects and charismatic tyrants also use such methods). Yes, it is true: a moment of discovery, a paradox that reveals you your limits, an unforgettable word or tale that makes one understand, a sudden feeling, can awaken a person and change a life story. They learned what they were ready to learn; I learned about learning and unlearning.
Collaterally, during those busy years of teaching educated audiences in various countries across the globe, from North America to South Africa to Israel, France, Switzerland, Italy, Hong Kong, Australia, Norway or Japan, I concluded that all people are very much the same in their differences; the deeper you go, more similar they are. They share the same common-sense judgement because they share the same biology, the same mental processes and the same human nature. Accordingly, we can understand other minds and feelings, if we care. Montaigne was so right in studying himself in order to understand other people! I found in my turn that a limited number of important situations of life and work are typical, universal and timeless - “critical situations” forever repeated in human lives, generation after generation - part of the human condition - so that we are justified to describe their pattern and improve them wisely to form treasuries of practical wisdom. All people, in all cultures, long for such a treasure of understandable interpretation of their world and for recipes that apply to their life; many can improve, based on other people's experience, provided they can make sense of its presentation. I found that the most important teaching I can offer is to cause people to understand experience and to learn how to learn from what they live, how to give meaning to what they learned; they will do the rest. Knowing how to learn is an efficient way to wisdom; being able to learn and to unlearn is a part of being wise.
To build up my little treasures of ideas that work in practice, while revisiting my childhood and youth experience, I went to read, discover, and plunder the eastern wisdom of Taoist philosophers and writers, the koans and haikus of Zen masters, the teaching stories of the Sufi. I listened - with regard - to the wisdom gathered by the great religions. I went mainly East and came back West; eastern cultures - and scriptures in general - favour wisdom because they encourage analogy and metaphor and cope with imprecision. I sieved the deep thoughts of the Qohelet, the myths, sayings, stories and fables of the world, the turns of Socratic tactics, the 36 Stratagems, the Art of War, the paradoxes of the philosophers and other sources of the like. I skimmed the psychology tomes and translated whatever looked useful from academic jargon into understandable images, examples, stories, simulations and role-plays.
Surprisingly for me – an agnostic – I found that deep human wisdom about what could be a worthy satisfying life and about the ways of the world is respectfully treasured in the scriptures of the religions but appears to be ignored or discarded in the writings of secular materialistic tradition in which I was educated. I found little wisdom in modern scientific literature. Why did Enlightenment and science have to throw out the baby with the tub water of bigoted obscurantism? Why is it so difficult to draw wisdom into science and from science? Why does science - with its incontestable value of truth and reliability - deny spiritual life, breed coldness, mechanical thought and amoral cynicism ?
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By teaching so many managers and business people how to counsel, I became inevitably a consultant myself, called to intervene with “real things” in “real situations”. This exciting work grew for a number of years and it became my last profession. Soon, my speciality appeared to be the change of culture, intervening in critical organisational change.
Because of the unconventional courses they liked, people expected me to be a wizard, which I did my best to be: I was presented “impossible situations”, blocked relationships, miscommunication, moments of personal or organisational pathology and panic, and interpersonal warfare among individuals, groups and in mergers of organisations. A fascinating world! Because people trusted me - but only when they were ripe to listen - I succeeded quite a number of times to help, except when I was requested to proceed by prejudices mechanistic plan and by the book, in order and discipline, as it was done before.
Finally the money-people got me: My last company proceeded to turn me into a salesman and a no questions asked yes person. I felt that, again, an establishment wanted me to become a mercenary, This time I was to be a specialist in job-destruction in the name of value chain optimisation and ruthless profit seeking: "Look what they've done to my song, Ma!" That was the end of my regular employment life and the hefty wages with the capitalists.
Before being exposed by the order-and-discipline-value-chain and and-profit-margin crowd, my successes were mainly connected with candid unfettered simplicity combined with unexpected complication (the detail of what I mean remains my strategic secret). Mostly, I would see complicated situations in simplest human terms, I would evaluate how "impossible" something is by considering it in a higher, wider or deeper context. I baptised that approach N±1. Socrates would help me constantly to help people discover what they did not know and Eastern thought spiced with paradoxes enabled me to help them see and taste what they did not see or feel. My boldness helped them to attempt what they "could not do". You can read elsewhere my accounts of N±1 approach and my musings about the practical value of emptiness, silence and wu-wei action by non-action.
I observed that often, as the sages teach us, the sorrows called “problems” grew from bad definition of a situation and of words, and from the inability to see beyond one’s own horizon. I also observed that all people need some form of spirituality.
My teaching-travel of the world made me learn many things:
If you really want to learn something, teach it. If you want to really know people and things, try to change them. If you want to change them, start from where they are (from where their mind is). If you want to understand where they are, know thyself .
You can educate and change people (a bit) in silence, by listening, asking them to tell you what they know, inciting them to teach each other. I learned that you could teach life’s savoir-faire and choices by telling stories, by metaphor, asking questions (and listening to the answers), by pointing your finger, by showing what and how. As much as by telling your truth in full honesty or crossing wits with your students. The strongest is to make people experience, feel, see, taste discover, understand and imagine. Like Pygmalion, you can even better people by simply believing in them; but keep a prudent distance too.
You can teach by didactic confusing and luring folks into meaningful errors, by refraining from doing whatever , by being absent at the critical moment in order to leave space and time to learn from own experience. You can teach by making feel that this or that became obsolete or inadequate and by helping people to forget moves that worked before bu now fetter them.
I found out that deep wise thoughts must dwell in simple words but do not be excessively clear. Things should remain ambiguous enough for people to understand them, which is only possible by projecting some meaning and approximation from themselves so that they grow to own them.
I learned that some things you build, hammer, carve march and push, but other things you pull and some you seed, water and wait to grow. I learned that to make something grow you water it, but to kill it you flood it. Moreover, some things you do not touch but leave alone. I still try to do this, to this day; I only gave up expecting recognition and thanks for such mastery.
I also grew convinced that there is a time for everything.
Gradually, as I reflected and wrote the present study, it also dawned on me that all the topics I ever taught or wrote about in my life were an instinctive quest for a wise attitude, wise choices, a wise, lighter, less heavy-handed style of doing things. All this develops instrumental wisdom, smartness, the means and know-how to do properly what we want to do and to keep away from what we do not want.
Communication with impact, effective criticism, tooling the freedom of thought, the art of giving advice, the Tao of pull instead of push, telling meaningful stories and fables, competent listening, asking productive questions, using void, paradox and surprise, being strategic - are all tools of practical wisdom for good judgement and wise conduct. I spent my life serving in the light cavalry of wisdom. Now, I see the need for heavier cavalry too.
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As a father, I tried to apply what I knew to educate my little prince. This experience taught me that we educate our children not by what we say but by what we are. My son is as wise as I was at his age. At best.
As for myself, I am still very far from being able to apply without wavering the simplest wisdom I learned and I taught, not to speak about actually being wise. I know some of it, understand it, believe it, invent some of it, explain it usefully, use some of it, but I do not manage to live my life by it. Depressing! All I achieved is to be a wise fool. I still get irritated like the untrained fighting rooster in a Chinese story while knowing perfectly well that keeping silent and opaque would frighten the adversary. I still fall to the weakness of inattention, forgetfulness, pride, selfishness, sloth, miserliness fatigue or negligence. I still waste these late days that will never come back instead of delighting in each moment of this late autumn. I still do not give and live centred meaning or an ultimate goal to my life. I still struggle with the priority and the conflict of values. I still wonder what is really desirable. I still dread old age, illness and death so near. I still need to influence what will happen after I am gone. In this disorder, it is lucky that, unlike some well educated philosophers, I love wisdom and still delight in it as if it were a high good!
There is an exasperating gap between what I understood, the way I think to advise other people, and what I do for myself. In addition, there is so much I am certain that I do not even guess about! Nevertheless, as the story goes, I do deserve recognition for what I know: for, if I were to be rewarded for what I do not know, all the treasuries of the world would be insufficient.
This is my schooling and research of wisdom; of course, I also consulted a few scholarly books and the pile keeps growing.
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Now when I look at what I wrote I see the omission; it is all intellectual; does wisdom come mainly from the experience and knowledge I described? No! It comes from what you do with all that experience and learning, from the way you relate to it and the manner you use it. As John Dewey said, we do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting to experience [1]. I would say that you learn only what you learn from your experience of learning and from what you do about your deeds.
I figure that our awareness and the network, the configuration of our understandings, grow, assimilate and change inside us like a baby in its mother, not like a heap or a brick-house of knowledge. It was well said that the lion is made from digested sheep [2].
A large part from what I understood I learned from myself. Call it mindful, reflective learning. Let me say that I learned much from asking myself many questions, working out things in my mind and observing my process of learning; from the way the learning happened, from its taste, the triumphs and the disasters, from what worked and what not; I also drew life conclusions and preferences from what I could not learn – that which I was - and am - unable to understand, which puzzled me or beat my mind, taught me that there are limits and what they are and how to live with them.
I believe now that some well-balanced people are born with a higher chance to behave wisely; I also believe that some people less talented or intelligent can grow wiser than the gifted ones who lack the proper temper to control themselves, the energy and courage to do the right thing, or are flawed in character so that their wisdom grows corrupt.
We learn from what we feel, from intuition and from the way we learn. Not only from facts, explanations and knowledge given to us. What we learn, must depend - cast upon our perceptions - on some born abilities like a style of perception and intelligence and features like our character and temper. Not to speak about the horse-power of raw intelligence. The specific internal working of our brain and mind may be decisive. A tendency to perceive Gestalt - forms connecting together with meaning - or the preference for seing all details separately, may make radical differences of intellect.
I learned my wisdom in the way I did – among other possibly better ways - because I was born with an ease to see connections and particularly forms, with an impatience to jump and see the global behind the local; my way of wisdom is intuitive because I am born a fast-thinker of representations not a slow, careful thinker of words.
My choices of wisdom were determined by such preferences, I am aware that very different choices of wisdom exist; as a child I felt instinctive empathy and thus compassion for everything living which was not a threat; I would pay ransom to rescue lizards from my mates to save them from torture, I would sympathize with a dog, a cat a bird and try to make peace between them. I love to feed the young foxes roaming in town. Killing is horror for me. I sympathize with the weaker against the oppressor. When I can, I chose compassion, peace and diversity, tolerance and agreement to disagree, above sterner moral judgement. But I know that there are situations when only an eye for an eye applies. No doubt this shapes my views of what wisdom is. I believe that the meaning of life is to keep alive, multiply and spread and the measure of all things is - for man - himself. Life is sacred and so is civilisation, our spiritual life. I chose that the highest value for humanity is the pursuit of better, happier life, on Earth and not the service of servant, instrumental values like truth, justice, equality or faith which are valuable means but not ends. Above all, I am aware that all these things are axioms, things which I take for self-evident, to be considered with measure and critical sense.
*
Does my meagre familiarity with a relatively quiet life give me the right to project my own ideal and to write about wisdom?
I think it does. I feel entitled to make explicit my personal experience with practical wisdom. I know, there are several sorts of it, because there is more than one ideal of life worth living. There are also incongruously different times people are given to live. Inevitably, my lines will express what I conceive, the way I reason, the values I cherish. My introspective bias may be a limitation but it is also strength. Impersonal, theoretical high level theories of wisdom are utopia by definition, similar with science without conscience. They lack soul. Wisdom, as I conceive it - different from knowledge about wisdom - can only be personal, situated, relative to context and engaged in vivo. I believe that even the discourse about it, its understanding and its description need to be personal. There is no Artificial Wisdom as there is no Artificial Intelligence.
I am not a wise one but I did meet and practice wisdom - and its opposite, foolishness and stupidity– enough to have relevant familiarity with them. This was sufficient to feel the difference, to develop a taste for sapience and to steal some good learning. It gave me an intuition of what it is. I think I grasped some words of wisdom and turns of mind worth learning. I witnessed some wise conduct worth emulating. I read about some worthy goals of life. I feel qualified to pass on my understanding even if my stronger claims should be read with a question mark after each phrase.
So much for the research method: “…like as much of this play as please you!”
Last but not least: Unfortunately for style, I write and re-write these pages while I think and clarify my mind. I cannot stop learning and changing mind as I advance. This means that my text cannot use my favourite recipe of wise power, the power to make things simple, but on the contrary, shows how complicated things are for me. As for the examples of wisdom I will offer – limited by my own ability to evaluate my evaluation – I wish at least that you will say, with a condescending feeling of déjà vu: “Yes, I knew this all the time!” or “Interesting! I didn’t see it this way.” Is it not a talent of wisdom to make new things familiar and familiar things new?
Heavens, this chapter looks like a last will.
The "State of the Art" - an Impression
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[1] “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience” (Dewey, J., How We Think, heath, Boston, 1933, p. 78)
[2] "Rien de plus original, rien de plus soi que de se nourrir des autres. Mais il faut les digérer. Le lion est fait de mouton assimilé." Paul Valéry, Choses tues, Tel Quel Pléiade page 478