You May Be Old, But Are You Wise?
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“Teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”-Psalms 90:12
Although I happen to belong to a group called Wise Aging, I am not an active wisdom seeker, but I wouldn’t object if some of it fell on me from time to time. But since wisdom is often associated with age, and my years have already surpassed the requisite three score and ten, I do admit to being curious whether my words can be best classified as wisdom or gibberish.
For millennia, the nature of wisdom and its sources have been the domains of philosophy, religion, and spirituality. And perhaps they should remain in those domains. But in an era when science is the ultimate authority on nearly everything, it’s no surprise that science – in this case, psychology – is trying to horn its way into the territory.
To cite one recent, benign example, the Mather Institute, which conducts research about wellness and aging, asked 750 adults aged 55 and up how they described wisdom. “No two respondents described wisdom in exactly the same way,” its research brief reports. Survey participants did agree, however, on a few common characteristics. For 80%, a wise person accepts their own limitations. Two-thirds thought the wise were realists, and a majority thought they were in control of their own lives and had strong relationships. On the other hand, most of the adults did not associate wisdom with success or intelligence.
Age does not equal wisdom, they decided. More than 70% agreed that wisdom increases with age, but only 39% thought age and wisdom were strongly related.
In Walks Science
Psychological wisdom research has only become a popular field for the past three decades, according to Judith Gluck, a professor of psychology at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. One of her recent papers discusses how difficult it has been to get consistent empirical evidence on wisdom when different researchers use different definitions. Fortunately, she writes, researchers have now developed several “integrative models of wisdom.” Cognitive-focused models start with awareness of “uncertainty, unpredictability, and the limitation of one’s knowledge,” and they acknowledge that different perspectives, shaped by different values and life contexts, are legitimate. Personality-based models emphasize curiosity about life, a willingness to question beliefs, and compassion for others. Developmental models try to explain how wisdom develops and why some people grow wiser as they live their lives.
Gluck concludes that “the relationship between wisdom and age is complex because wisdom is a complex construct in itself.” But the author believes wisdom research must continue to understand how wisdom develops and how to encourage its development, “not just to improve individual well-being but also to increase humanity’s chances of survival.”
Look, I don’t want to do anything to harm humanity’s odds for survival, but is slicing and dicing causative factors and indexing personality traits really getting us anywhere? Is the goal to arrive at criteria so we can determine how wise we are on a scale of 1 to 100? Is there value in having standardized tests to identify students with high wisdom potential? Does anyone believe that delineating the causative factors of wisdom will guarantee that future leaders of business, government, and religion will be the wisest of the wise?
I’m all for science (despite never making higher than a C on any college course that ended in -ology), but science has this powerful urge to strap a subject to the table, perform a vivisection, catalog the constituent parts of each internal organ, and draw conclusions about the nature of its reality. Sometimes it produces new understanding. Sometimes it just drains the life out of the subject.
A Vote for Art
I think the latter is the case with the scientific approach to wisdom. The slice-it-and-dice-it approach to knowledge seems to yield less useful understanding than a holistic approach, the way it has always been understood by philosophers, the religious, and the spiritual. Wisdom is practical guidance in the art – not the science – of living.
Who is wise? To the Jewish sage Ben Zoma, it is “the one who learns from every person.” Being curious and open to multiple perspectives counts. A wise person is also humble enough to know what they don’t know. As Socrates put it, “The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.”
As for wisdom’s connection to age, having many life experiences can certainly help develop wisdom, but it’s not automatic. It depends on what you learn from those experiences. You can be wizened and still not be wise.
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