The Enduring Worth of Wisdom
Pursuing wisdom is our responsibility, but we must be guided by those who profess
It felt good to get THIS off my chest. It felt good to get it out, but it’s now time to tack hard to the positive. But before I do that, I have a few potential misconceptions I’d like to clear up.
Wisdom
One of my closest friends worried that I gave too much to my detractors in the post about grifters, and he worried that people might think that I have soured on the pursuit of wisdom and that it was somehow not worth it. He’s really smart, a really observant reader, and has encouraged me in my various writing and podcasting endeavors. So rather than be dismissive, I will take the potential for misleading my readers seriously.
To be clear:
There is no endeavor more worthy than the pursuit of wisdom and the personal submission to its demands.
In fact, I’d argue we neglect the demands of wisdom at our own peril, individually and collectively. There is no real person without wisdom in the long run. You can game it, suppress it, box it…but in the end, reality has a way of re-asserting itself and all those deferred costs of wisdom-neglect accumulate and have their revenge. As Jordan Peterson quips, “in the end no one gets away with anything.” We have a responsibility to be real in a very literal way. And without wisdom you are not real.
And not only is there no real person without wisdom, but there is no real community either. As Socrates noted, the unexamined life is not a life worth living. In some sense, wisdom IS worth; wisdom IS value.
My friend told me that he believes in my worth, and that he thinks that I am being too modest about my own gifts, and about the value of what I teach. As those of you who know me in what I jokingly called “meatspace” (as opposed to “cyberspace”) I am quite confident in what I do. Any hint to the contrary can be ignored.
My concerns about grifters and grifting stem from a philosophical and observational phenomenon. And fear. But as we know, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” I am wary of grifters, but I have no doubt that boldy speaking the truth is the only antidote to their evil and duplicitous work.
I look forward to exploring the idea of the con-man, the snake-oil salesman, or the grifter in more detail in future posts. Times of civilizational uncertainty and shifting ground always give rise to the man willing to lie like the truth and capitalize on the gullibility of people of good faith.
We see this phenomenon of the trickster in the works of Chaucer’s. We see these scoundrels in Shakespeare. We see them in Melville. We see them in Twain, Faulkner, O’Connor, Fitzgerald, and many others. Economic shifts and disruptions afford opportunities for grifter and entrepreneur alike. They fascinate us because they challenge our notions of who and what are real. The rise of the internet and the massive digital disruptions have opened an untold number of options for the confidence man. And you can find numerous gurus willing to talk you out of your hard-earned dough.
Teaching and Professing
I love being a teacher. Being in the front of a classroom and sage-ing on the stage is among the few activities in life that make me feel right, that make me feel that great Browning line:
“God's in his heaven—
All's right with the world!"
To put it another way, I feel deep resonance in my teaching, to steal a Hartmut Rosa term, and every fiber of my being hums with meaning when I’m “on.” And I know in my bones that this is a great gift. In a word, teaching makes me feel real.
So much of this felt resonance stems from my own submission to wisdom and my ability to translate it to the next generation. I know back in my student days I needed it—wisdom—and my students need it now. And we all need it.
We teachers can often undermine ourselves by acting as if what we do is somehow unworthy of monetization, an act of mean and crude behavior. In our post-aristocratic, commercial age we must remember that it is not vulgar to expect to be paid for what we do. Isn’t it strange that people recognize that as givers of wisdom and keepers of the wisdom traditions, clerics and scholars play an indispensable role in society, yet compensation remains decidedly confused and depressed.
What is a great teacher worth? To this day I remember Dr. Glenn Arbery’s class on book 18 of Homer’s Iliad in the cool October day in ‘93. His seminar on the scream of Achilles grabbed me by my soul, showed me a reality far beyond that which I had heretofore imagined, and set me on my path of teaching. I knew then, as I levitated out of class, that there was much more to life than the mere getting and spending that we all too often lay waste our powers.
However, I’m fortunate to teach at a place that allows me to be fully who I am in the classroom, and working with other men and women who’ve made a similar sacrifice to the calling is equally inspiring. I teach old books to new kids. How privileged is that? For me, it comes down to being a professor, an adult who bears witness and professes to a higher vision, who sees through the material veil, into the underneath.
Wisdom.
So value is intimately intertwined with wisdom. And we can get it. We should and must value wisdom and I am confident that this endeavor of scaling out what I already do in the classroom into the liminal spaces of YouTube and Substack will re-create this value for you.
We know the bar for entry is relatively cheap. Grab a cheap paperback. How hard can it be? But we all need a guide to hold our hand, not because we are incompetent, but we need a guide to connect us to our latent competencies. We are all Dante’s, midway through life’s journey, scared and lost in the dark wood, waiting for direction.
I’m eager to be your Virgil.
I see now that my comment on your previous post was perhaps not needed, and that makes me happy :)
I, for one, am looking forward to this. As you know, you’ve influenced my reading quite a bit through your Twitter presence. My old hardback of Dante stands at the ready.