Wisdom: Practical? Tactical? Didactical?
Phronesis – a timely observation
“The best of times, the worst of times” sums up the journey toward phronesis that made headlines this week.
As you can read in my latest OnWord.net blog (published also by Fr. Robert Spitzer’s Magis Center blog) and the May 3 “special edition” of this Substack, the leak of a document revealing the US Supreme Court’s intention to overrule the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision reflected the two meanings of “Phronesis in Pieces.”
First, the Court’s reasoning showed how an effort to engage in phronesis often happens step-by-step, over time (about 50 years in this case), and it remains an ongoing process. Each persistent exercise of it is more a milestone than the end of a timeline; it can raise new observations and questions, requiring that phronesis become a way of life, filled with moments of trial as well as satisfaction. As in this instance, one might say its creation of a tectonic judicial shift is the kind of phenomenon that happens “gradually, then all of a sudden.” And then it requires follow-through and follow-up into the future.
Second, the pursuit of phronesis these days can be clouded or discouraged by the fact that many people’s engagement with wisdom has fallen into pieces. In a society whose grounding in basic principles of reason and the common good is partial and passionless, the endeavor recalls the Bible’s Parable of the Sower; the seed dies because it lands on infertile turf or is strangled by competing interests and distractions. Seeds of Machiavellian self-interest , power, pride, and irresponsibility toward the common good can grow alongside, and they can even appear to take over the garden. Regardless of one’s policy preferences regarding the Roe abortion decision, we saw this week a bad outcome of so-called “practical” thinking. Based partly on insufficient respect for institutions and their deep, broad values, the leaking of a confidential document proved destructive to tradition, deliberation, and trust.
Those are three essentials for phronesis! Without them, we lose the “inclusiveness” of tradition; remember that Chesterton urged decision-makers to respect “the democracy of the dead,” incorporating rich lessons learned from the past. We lose the “diversity” of deliberation, where people with different backgrounds and perspectives learn from each other so conversations can yield more than the sum of their parts. And we lose the “equity” of trust—a fair and impartial recognition of every person’s dignified participation in a rigorous search for truth. What a tragedy when the siren call for “DEI” is misused to undermine beneficent reasoning.
“Pandevotional” Prayer/Reflection
Recall that Aristotle called phronesis an intellectual virtue which seeks sound judgment about practical matters. It’s “practical wisdom,” which I take to mean real, purposeful, prudential wisdom; it is practicable; it is put into practice because it is useful to the individual and to those whom it affects—and ideally beneficial to the common good and greater good, assuming it deals with a matter of importance for a community or a society.
Let’s not see ourselves as “practical” people merely in “just do it” or “muddle through” or “do what works” terms, where the end justifies the means. The word “practical” is richer in meaning. In medicine, it refers to the practice of a profession, with all its skills and rigors. Practical wisdom is not merely wisdom defined as something that gets the job done; it is wisdom put into practice.
The term “practical Catholic,” as used in qualification and exemplification language by the Knights of Columbus, means “living in accord with the precepts of the Catholic Church” and being in good standing with the Church. Practical is about action in relationship to something larger.
By the way, wisdom was defined by respected catechist Fr. John Hardon, SJ, as “the perfection of faith, the extension of the state of belief into the state of understanding that belief.” It’s been called the highest gift of the Holy Spirit. So practical wisdom is a noble goal we must press toward throughout our lives.
Chewing on This – a story I heard
The word “taxi” comes from the Medieval Latin word for a tax or a charge: taxa. Therefore, the vehicle gets its name from its distinctive component—the meter that determines how much you will pay.
I learned this from an episode of a defunct but archived radio show every fan of phronesis will enjoy: My Word. The classic BBC program can be found at the Internet Archive, which is an absolutely great resource for phronesis fans, who inherently love history.
Word’s Worth – a word that’s news to me
Cis-information. I believe I have coined this word. Upon first inspection, it does not appear in Google, either with or without its hyphen. If you use it, please credit William Schmitt in Substack.
My (tentative) definition of cis-information or cisinformation is: unchanged or grass-roots information—that is, information with a claim to verifiability, rooted in knowable, close-to-home signs or visible origin experiences. According to my research, the prefixes “cis” and “trans” are antonyms.
Cisgender means “denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex”—the opposite of transgender. An aeronautical term, cislunar, means lying between the earth and the moon’s orbit—the opposite of translunar. These definitions are from the Oxford English Dictionary.
Cisinformation is a new term that may deserve new relevance. In a world where we talk about misinformation and disinformation as species of information, we need a term that distinguishes a different species. I propose “cisinformation.”
That’s the Spirit – an experience of God
God may see us as creatures who swing back and forth between extremes. We are not like other creatures, all (or most?) of whom have a constant or average mode of existence, perspective, and behavior; they are predictable, or at least unpredictable in a predictable way.
Perhaps because of our God-given creativity or our concupiscence (which, by one general definition, is a strong yearning), human beings are uniquely unpredictable and complex creatures.
When encountering something new or dealing with some new struggle for understanding, we tend to swing between extremes in our interpretations and related behaviors.
I wonder if this helps to explain why people, especially our younger generations, are responding to the innate complexity of our sexuality by seizing on a plethora of terms for gender. We have swung to this cultural place of endless definitions after millennia of acceptance of a binary, male-female distinction that helps us settle that basic knowledge so we can move on to other, grander knowledge of ourselves and others.
These new definitions keep producing new words after the plus sign in LGBTQ+. One mistake we can make is to be so obsessed with these gender differences that we create them, adopt them, and advocate for them as a “be-all and end-all” label of our identity and our claim to dignity. Perhaps we are trying to understand ourselves and capture them to ease any self-doubt or confusion or inferiority we feel, caused partly by our sexuality but probably tied to many other factors too.
This is part of our existential struggle to know our place, our meaning in a scarily meaningless universe. The struggle is especially tense if we do not have a God who explains our rich identity and profound meaning as individuals, allowing us to feel worthy and loved and “encompassed” with anchors of truth and directional guides amid the world’s mysteries. One’s struggles are worsened by focusing on oneself and failing to see humble, dynamic relationships with God and other people as the sources of understanding we really need. We never will completely understand ourselves or others, but we will benefit from relearning that that is okay. We don’t need to be our own gods, so we don’t have to be the all-knowing sources of definition for ourselves and others. This would remove a lot of strain and anxiety from life. And it would help to avoid the extremes that can distract and disrupt life in community.
Infokeeper – something from current affairs worth pondering
Dorothy Parker, a famed writer in the first half of the 20th century, offered this prescient remark about confirmation bias and settling for the information bubbles on social media which enrage us more than engage us:
“Don’t put all your eggs in one bastard.”
Just kidding – some witty thing waiting to be used
Wit and humor are essential. In their more complicated forms, they help us pierce through complicated concepts to see the beauty of reality. In their simpler forms, they help drop complicated concepts like hot potatoes to find happiness in the occasional, helpless silliness of reality. Remember Groucho Marx: “Outside of a dog, a man’s best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
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