Knowledge versus Wisdom, and Faith in the Crosshairs

[In this long and “heavy” journal entry, my father starts by discussing the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, but then moves into an assessment of religion as a particular — and at-risk — form of wisdom. His attribution of the 1940s information explosion to the availability of high-speed printing and cheap paper seems incredibly quaint when viewed from our Internet-powered age of instant access to almost any “fact,” scholarly paper or book. If anything, however, the adage he cites “that the modern age has more knowledge and less wisdom than all others which have preceded it,” seems more on target today than ever.

Later in the entry, my father explores the collision between intellectual speculation and inquiry and the institutionalized wisdom, or faith, of religion. This analysis is just one of the internal debates my father depicted in many of his early journal entries, as he sought to define and adopt a “personal faith” of his own.]

March 20, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

I think I remember it being said by someone who should know that the modern age has more knowledge and less wisdom than all others which have preceded it. There is a certain charm in the facility of this statement, and perhaps a certain amount of truth in it. At any rate, it needs considerable dissection into its roots before it can have much meaning.

The profession of scholarly research, with its offspring of popularized writing, has reached a proportion in our day sufficient to keep the book and magazine markets flooded with discussions, analyses, expositions, and criticisms of the details of life and thought in every culture which has preceded our own. Probably this phenomenon is due to the development of high-speed printing, combined with the mass production of cheap paper, but the cause doesn’t interest me as much as the effect.

This research ranges all the way through the mechanic trades and arts to the religious beliefs and practices of former civilizations, and while one individual will usually be interested only in a small segment of the whole span, these studies are easily available to almost anyone with the interest and the time to consult them, and this availability is common knowledge. People today live in a house in which the back door is perpetually wide open on all that has gone before, and there is no selectivity in displaying this vista of the past. People no longer look back through the carefully-oriented lens of myth and tradition, but through the clear, indiscriminate glass of historical fact. Though the many histories written from a nationalist bias must modify this analogy, it is not particularly such works which I have in mind here, but rather the objective studies of scholars in the myriad fields now open to research.

Apparently, then, there has been a vast and accelerating increase to common knowledge in our era. The popular quiz programs on the radio attest to a mania for the acquisition of diverse and often unrelated items of information. But whether wisdom has decreased in proportion to this increase in knowledge is another question, if we mean by wisdom the ability of a human mind to correlate the facts of experience and of history into meaningful patterns which may serve as a reasonably dependable guide to future action. When a certain pattern of wisdom comes to dominate a whole community, it may be called a religion, or, at least, an ethical system, if the ceremonial and supernatural accoutrements usually associated with a religion are lacking. We see that most communities in the past have, each in itself, been dominated by one special religion or ethical system, accepted without question by the majority of its members, and, furthermore, denying the right of all rival religions or ethics. Catholicism, for instance, held a practically exclusive grip on the peoples of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. It acted as a mold, determining the directional flow, within narrow bounds, of even the brilliant minds of the period. To all men it was both a discipline and a bond. It undoubtedly quickened the communal spirit, but it also bound society to the status quo by putting penalties on the speculative mind. The powerful predisposition to faith all but annihilated the habit of inquiry which had gained great strength in the classical civilizations. So if faith is equivalent to wisdom, the former faith-cultures have been wise far beyond our own, for faith and inquiry tend to exclude one another and ours is predominantly an inquiring culture, at least in those realms where faith has formerly held the upper hand; namely, in religion and ethics.

Even the Catholic church, which still adheres to the medieval insistence on the unity of faith, has many members who are beset with doubts. As for members of the Protestant sects, they have so long enjoyed the privilege of the individual interpretation of their faith that the discipline of communal faith has disintegrated in their churches to the vanishing point. There has probably never before in any civilization been so universal a disrespect for the exclusive claims to right which one faith makes over another. And no searching into religious faith, no reexamining of religious faith can hope to restore its former force in society, for the critical analysis of a faith is tantamount to an admission of its inadequacy under conditions of the present. If it filled the human need for faith, there would be no need to question or examine it. A living faith quite subconsciously determines the lines of intellectual development and material operation in the society of which it is the organic foundation; when a given faith must be submitted to objective study, it’s either dead or dying.

That there is a definite human need for faith is illustrated by the preoccupation of many of the best minds of our day with the formulation of a personal faith. First comes the feeling of estrangement from the traditional faiths of the past which are still artificially imposed on the majority of children at the same time that their secular schooling inculcates in them the rudimentary habits of inquiry and scientific skepticism, which, whatever their ultimate value, are consistent with the conditions of twentieth-century life. The average child, perhaps, comes to see the discrepancy between his imposed religious faith and his naturally-acquired habit of inquiry, but he pushes his discovery no further than the mediocre compromise which results in a dormant intellect and a sentimentalized faith. Those who are compelled to push on farther will almost inevitably run into a period of cynicism in which all values are questioned. Finally, the man whose creative impulses are thwarted by the sterility of cynicism, brings himself to the point of making a definite choice between scientific skepticism and traditional religious faith. It is now an exceptional case when the latter is not discarded in favor of the former. We are indeed a civilization between faiths, but not a civilization without faith, nor yet a civilization without wisdom. Widespread industrialization has long demanded a new faith, which has meant the spreading discredit and slow crumbling of the old faith, with all its giant reverberations in institutional life. Therein lies the high drama, both tragedy and comedy, of our times.

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Church versus Religion and Faith

[The following excerpt was part of the (long!) July 30, 1942 journal entry, which began with the journaling & WWII commentary that I published in the previous post. In this continuation of that day’s entry, my father shifts to a consideration of religion’s institutional failings. Like many of us, my father struggled throughout his life to reconcile his intellectual life with his faith (or lack thereof). If his commentary is to be believed, his disillusionment about the Christian church was shared by many of his contemporaries. As with many of my father’s observations, this early commentary could fit quite comfortably in our current world, where the interaction between religion and state affairs is pervasive and — more often than not — unfortunate.]

July 30, 1942 (Middlebury College), con’t.

… In spite of its claimed divinity, it would not be fair to criticize the church in the light of its own ideals, for it is administered by men, like any other institution. Yet the Christian church today seems to be like an old bitch with its teats gone dry and its suckling brood of denominations shriveling and dying at its belly. It lives on in its material forms, apparently as strong as ever; as a spiritual force it is in its death chokes. It has too long and too obviously followed its constituents, not led them, and all who have recognized its failure to lead have spurned it. This includes millions of young men and women in the world today, and if the power of the church is dead in them, it is dead as a power in the world.

No church can hand out religion to its members. It can inspire them to construct religion in themselves, by giving them a larger and truer picture of the world they live in than they can gain for themselves. It must win their confidence, that the picture it gives them is trustworthy and in accordance with the experience of other men. Then there is the basis for that social dynamism we call a common faith. The church is indeed the spiritual leader of its society, and is capable of bringing out the best that is in its members, for this best that is in them will everywhere win recognition and approval, and this is their religion. The church acts as the unifier of the religion in its individual members, by furnishing common standards and forms. As long as the men who administer this church have the intelligence and the will to keep the church abreast of the times, and the leader of the times, the people will not desert the church.

It is the church that deserts the people. Forms harden; standards become outmoded. However slow the process, there is a continual change going on in the world which the church must successfully represent to its members. The change is inevitable, and is inherent in the creative powers that exist in the mind of man: Hence the church must be alert to change, not balk change. It must willingly gather the change into itself, and interpret it to its members in its true light. This the Christian church, and probably every other organized church, has failed to do. Hence it is inaccurate to say that Christians are deserting the church. The church long ago deserted Christians.

Dogma is in the denial of change, and when dogma permeates the church, the church is doomed as a social and spiritual power, except it purge itself. A church must have a ritual, and when this ritual is rooted in the daily experience of its members, it is a beautiful means of common worship. But then daily experience changes, and ritual becomes rooted in dogma, its performance becomes hollow and without meaning. And when the church attempts to enforce its dogma as the rule of life, with actual life no longer admitting of such a rule, the church must be overthrown. The Reformation was the first such major explosion within the Christian church, and from this explosion and those that followed, it has never recovered. If the opportunity for recovery ever was in its grasp, it has now vanished and will not be met again.

There is no need here for criticism of the Christian Scriptures and myths. The very fact that they are widely criticized and ridiculed by millions now living in a supposedly Christian culture is criticism enough. The position of the various Christian denominations in this present war is but another chapter in their damnation. It is not pertinent to point out that the church has among its teachings the love of enemies, the abhorrence of war. During its long history, the church has led the way into war after war, justified them as it saw fit, and survived them with its spiritual power unimpaired. Witness the Crusades, which were the last of the successful holy wars, and which, of course, did contain some seeds of the church’s coming disruption. The important fact to note today is that the church is dragged to the support of this war. It is little more than a pawn of state.

This is my view of the church, and should explain why it wins no reverence and support from me. I am not without a religion. Religion lives in men independently of churches. In this individual manifestation it has the advantage that there is no obstacle but personal ignorance and prejudice to its being shaped continually anew to answer the needs which the impinging world imposes upon it, but it has this tremendous disadvantage, that it cannot any longer be a source of social and spiritual union among men. Its place today is taken today by such forces as nationalism, in which the moral level is typically lowered and warped.

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