[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.
Paul Davis Journals Blog 