Cultivating Character: Knowledge and Wisdom
Bring into being, explore and examine, and illuminate
We’re nearing the end of the Cultivating Character series, an adventure that first brought us to the fire that brings us to life: courage. Invigorated, we trudged ahead and took hold of weaving strands of love and kindness that bound together intimate relationships: humanity. These same threads branched out into a canopy that stretched to envelope entire civilizations, underneath which senses of fairness and comradery were kindled: justice. And most recently, we found ourselves at the foot of a mountain whose heights offer refuge from isolating and immiserating excesses: temperance. Faced with this challenge, we climbed.
But wait a second, why do we climb in the first place? And where are we going? Well, we climb because we care, and we move towards what we care about. Love, in its most general sense, provides purpose and direction. Genuine threads of love gently reach out to us like fishing lines that we reel ourselves towards, not entirely sure of where they will take us but with faith that they lead somewhere greater.
What keeps us going despite difficulty? Effort. Courage. Our flames are nourished by reservoirs of love, and their intensity grows with increasing breadth and depth of those reservoirs. We’re able to endure because the fire in our hearts dances to the music of love; we work for what we care about.
One question remains: How do we climb? How do we ensure that our efforts are best channeled towards what we care about?
This is where intelligence comes in. There are fruitful and wasteful ways of climbing, and acting intelligently gravitates us towards the fruitful. An intelligent process is one that efficiently organizes limited resources of effort towards resources found valuable. Put more simply, intelligence organizes our efforts toward what we love. We are organisms, after all.
Today we’ll be covering a virtue that involves the use of intelligence. However, intelligence is not in itself a virtue. It’s simply the how, a benign and directionless mechanism that produces useful tools. What gives the how (intelligence) direction is its why (love), which means we must be careful of what we care about.
Intelligence that serves hubris becomes the Greeks’ amathia (intelligent stupidity). We saw in our last discussion that hubris, a sort of confined love, constrains what we are able to learn and thus produces the ignorant behavior from which all “evil” sprouts. Sure, we can come up with clever ways to climb; but we can just as easily come up with clever ways to tear down others and dig ourselves deeper into isolating holes of self/group-interest. Like navigating a ship without a compass, the intelligently stupid float on beds of knowledge with reasonably well-built ships yet have no sense of direction.
When intelligence, the how, and expansive love, the where and why, collide, wisdom is produced. Love leads us into the unknown where we gain new knowledge; more knowledge reveals a larger network of loving threads. Wisdom flourishes when love flourishes, and vice-versa.
Today’s discussion delves into wisdom and its associated character strengths. Beginning with creativity, we’ll explore our innate capacity to adapt and mold the world around us with ingenuity. Next, we’ll delve into curiosity, tracing the modest threads that beckon us toward greater understanding. Finally, we’ll examine open-mindedness, appreciating its unique ability to illuminate new knowledge with an unbiased glow. We’ll also consider why this strength, unlike others in this series, may be the only strength that does not receive unanimous traditional endorsement.
Hold on…I think I see a thread. Come, follow me.
Creativity
Bring into Being
The ‘floor of Nature’ expands, housing ever more room after room that we jointly co-create faster than we all come into existence. And that is how complexity emerges.
Stuart Kauffman, A World Beyond Physics (2019)
Since the beginning of life, biological evolution has unfurled a relentless and expansive creative process, where the gusts and swirls of creativity emerge from the turbulence of a competitive process. Thriving requires being a step ahead of competitors, and to be a step ahead means taking risks: building beyond what is known and venturing into the new. Ascending life’s ladder demands creativity.
Although many bold spirits meet dead-ends weaving through life’s labyrinth, those of us alive today are still the benefactors of a gradual, continuous process of building beyond established norms. Our evolutionary history includes great leaps: from ocean-dwelling to land-dwelling, four-leggedness to two-leggedness, and kin-only cooperation to international collaborations. We are creatures, a word itself derived from the Latin creare which means to bring into being. Bringing into being and building beyond are the essence of what it means to be alive.
Genetic creativity, however, tends to creep relatively slowly and steadily, needing many generations for small adaptive variations to compound into noticeable features. Confined to the physical, genetic creativity is tempered by reproductive rates, mutation rates, and the legacy of genetic instructions that evolution builds upon. For instance, our spines first evolved to withstand back-to-belly loads that our four-legged ancestors experienced, not heat-to-toe loads, hence our struggle with back pain. Genetic evolution builds upon an endowed physical structure and can’t turn back time to rewrite genetic history. Genetic creativity can also be extremely costly: one ambitious genetic leap could lead to premature death.
But sometime along our painstakingly slow genetic evolution, our bodies developed a creativity hack: the plump neo-cortex that sits atop and interfaces with our fine-tuned mammalian and reptilian nervous systems. This adaptation allowed humans to break free from the physical into the metaphysical.
And once we leap into the metaphysical, creativity flourishes. Risks can be taken at virtually no cost. Instead of life-or-death battles between organisms, we construct life-or-death battles between ideas, and killing off bad ideas is much less costly than losing a limb or dying outright. And when physical constraints can be transcended, creativity is granted more freedom to thrive.
Consider the typical organism. They gobble up energy and material. Their cells, themselves made by the material and powered by the energy, then get to work with the material and creatively shape it into biological tools like bark or thorns or claws or teeth or fur or scales. In this typical case, productions of creative technologies are limited within the confines of the body.
Cognitive creativity allows us to escape these confines. We still gobble up energy and material, but instead of pouring every ounce of energy into cells that sculpt material into muscles or bones or hair or nails, our cells pour some of that energy into the brain, which conjures ideas that then flow through our hands and into material that lies beyond our bodies. For example, when our ancestors innovated the use of rocks for nut cracking and the control of fire for cooking, our bulky and expensive jaws became less useful, shrank, and metabolic savings could be directed toward the brain. Much of our progress as a species comes from funneling energy savings from technological innovation into cognitive growth which fuels more technological innovation which fuels more cognitive growth and so on.
Our technological inventions should thus be considered extensions of us, just as our hair and nails are extensions of us; it’s just that the physical distance between us and what we create provides an illusion that we are separate from them. But we are in relationship with what we create; a metaphysical bridge crosses the physical rift separating us and our creations.
The modern world is a testament to the high value of creativity. The upper rungs of the free market are occupied by technological innovators. Creative artists are celebrated for their ability to piece together creative patterns that evoke good feelings and attract attention. Creative militaries are feared for their ability to piece together creative patterns that evoke bad feelings and demand attention. Be it a large company and their dedicated consumers, a celebrity and their dedicated fans, or a military and their dedicated soldiers, each represent creative offshoots of large groups of collaborating humans—the evolved limbs of superorganisms.
In times of peace, stability, and resource abundance, artistic creativity feeds on abundance and flourishes. Bathed in gentle sunlight and showered by nourishing rain, flowers bloom in spring. Magnificent displays of attractive artistic products evidence richness, stability, and health, which attracts collaborators that further the growth of whomever is showing off. Bees are drawn to the flowers with the most attractive pedals as they signal a rich supply of energy (nectar), and plants are in turn rewarded reproductively when bees fly off and spread their pollen. Artistic creativity tends to lean heavily into the reproductive side of life’s striving to both survive and reproduce.
What modernity considers technological creativity, on the other hand, leans towards the survival side (interestingly, the Greek word techno itself means art; the Greeks considered the making of things and art inseparable). Technological adaptation becomes especially important in times of conflict: you can’t reproduce if you’re dead. When stakes are raised, colorful creative resources are poured into less colorful technological innovations that, crucially, keep us alive. And when an organization (of cells or people) is not completely engulfed in conflict but has just enough of an uncomfortable flame lit beneath its behind, creativity is brought to a boil. We have war to thank for nuclear energy, air transportation, and computers, among others.
The takeaway from all this creativity talk is that since we are creatures, the valuable strength of creativity lies dormant within all of us. But creativity can only be awakened by a struggle. Whether its competing for attention with other artists, competing for market-share with other corporations, or competing with ourselves to become better people, we will only create when there’s pressure to do so.
To come alive, we thus need to be challenged. Find for yourself what’s worth fighting for, be brave, and take the leap. Dive into the turbulence and find creative ways to ride the updrafts to new heights.
Create and come to life.
Curiosity
Examine and Explore
Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
As we climb, threads of love provide direction. Like fishing lines, our attention becomes drawn to the lines that tug at us. In the case of curiosity, these lines represent paths—metaphysical bridges—towards new raw material that our creative minds can get to work with and sculpt into new ideas.
The same fish can’t be caught twice, nor can the same fact be learned twice. Newfound knowledge fuels rather than quells our curiosity, since its discovery reveals more potential branches of knowledge to follow, and thus more to be curious about.
And as we learn, we gain the competence and confidence to explore more of what’s ahead. Exploration reveals more unknowns and uncertainty until our anxiety halts us. Calming this anxiety requires learning what is unknown, reducing the uncertainty, and to do so requires examination. Sufficient examination calms our anxiety so we can get back to exploring. Growth demands both exploration and examination.
Too much of either, however, becomes problematic. Excessive exploration leads to chaos and disorder—entropy—which is exactly what life and its intelligent organizations are working against to sustain themselves. No matter how much area we cover while exploring, if we never dig, knowledge has nowhere to pool. A broad but shallow understanding of the world leaves us lost, confused, and overwhelmed.
Excessive examination, on the other hand, leads us into caves. There’s plenty to learn in the caves, and sometimes crucial nuggets of knowledge are found within. But as we dig deeper, we often lose sight of the bigger picture. It’s in these caves where amathia is born. Cave expert; mountain idiot. A symptom of amathia is failing to appreciate what we don’t know and becoming overconfident and dogmatic. These states provide an allure of certainty, and curiosity is all about pursuing uncertainty. The overconfident mind loses sight of new threads, curiosity is stifled, and progress is halted.
The beginner’s mind greets new threads as if they were new friends, revealing new avenues of growth. The good life and pursuit of truth require a balance between explorative and investigative curiosity coupled with the courage to face uncertainty. When these conditions are satisfied, our courage drives the reciprocating pump of exploration and examination that expands our understanding.
Why else is curiosity adaptive? Curiosity is a necessary precursor to adaptation; to better fit ourselves to our changing surroundings, we first need to gather the information that informs the fitting. Those who make themselves available to the changes in the patterns flowing around them—the gentle tugs in their fishing lines—proactively reap more benefits.
Curiosity leads the founder of a company, a successful artist, or a wise clergyman to read into the patterns of the world that envelop them. The founder follows consumer trends and keeps an eye out for untapped market niches, the artist follows resonating creative patterns that build upon existing artistic foundations, and the clergyman follows recurring historical patterns that capture the essence of human nature. Note the frequency of the word “follow” here. Curiosity calls upon us.
Callings are fun and scary and exciting. The whole magic behind intrinsically motivated interests—these soul-piercing threads that we pull ourselves towards—is that they are unpredictable. We don’t know which lines will tug at us next; if we did, we’d already be there. Intimate and meaningful, callings create a tangible connection between us and where we’re heading.
Our thirst for knowledge, however, can also be exploited. Humble fishing lines aren’t the only threads that attract interest.
As we climb, we inevitably encounter threads laid by those pursuing perverse incentives. Their threads look similar to the meaningful fishing lines, but when we look closely, they’re more like spider silk. These are not threads of love, but threads of pleasure. Strong and sticky, this pleasurable silk lures us into webs that restrict our progression.
We all get caught in these webs. Unfortunately, the unpredictability inherent in intimate and meaningful pursuits is a nightmare for the spiders; it’s easier to catch us when our behavior is predictable. So, when spiders catch us, they degrade meaning and intimacy, making us more boring and predictable so that we’re easier to exploit. Add to that the fact that being restricted can feel good, especially in the moment, because it offers a break from the arduous climb.
Boring, predictable, and sluggish, we’re kept bound within their webs. And so, people find themselves glued to ultra processed foods, social media apps, or pharmaceuticals that offer fleeting escape from the discomfort of climbing. Meanwhile, our endless buffet of subscriptions literally drain life and meaning out of our lives, since climbing is what it means to live, and our sense of meaning is surrendered to the escapes we come to depend on. The silks of pleasure steadily lure us towards meaninglessness; if we were to find meaning elsewhere the spiders wouldn’t get to feed.
If we remain aware and present, we can feel the difference between the fulfilling and draining threads. Climbing mindfully, we can notice the smooth threads despite their timid and humble tugs and follow them to fulfilling ends. Climbing mindlessly, we will stumble into an enticing, brazen, and sticky silk and find ourselves encased in meaninglessness. Take a deep breath and take in the world around you. Feel for the smooth lines so you don’t get stuck.
Pay attention and break free.
Open-mindedness
Shine Above
Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.
Buddha, The Kalama Sutta
Open-mindedness is a strength tightly linked to the explorative side of curiosity, acting like the moon’s soft light to gently illuminate our way forward. The strength of open-mindedness relates to maintaining an awareness of this valuable gentle glow that coats paths indiscriminately and allows for them to be fairly weighed based on their merits. Since the glow is gentle, we do still need a flashlight (some investigative narrow-mindedness) to uncover finer details. However, the greater reach of open-mindedness is necessary to escape valleys of developmental stagnation.
Open-mindedness receives considerable philosophical attention. As we discovered in our last discussion, humility dissolves the walls of self or group-interest that leave us blindly ignorant. A kind of intellectual humility, open-mindedness relaxes the tunnel-vision that otherwise obstructs alternative paths towards greater understanding.
The dissolution of these walls also reveals to us how much there is that we don’t know. Confucius once said, “I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there.” Socrates claimed, “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” And in the Hindu epic Ramayana, the Creator of the Universe (Brahma) at one point admits to the frustrated Lord of Gods (Indra), “What can I do? I can never lie, and I do not know every answer.”
Now, opening our minds doesn’t necessarily mean we have to accept every path, but it at least opens the door to a fair consideration of their potential (or lack thereof). The alternative is to stay rigid in thought. The story of the south Indian monkey trap provides a nice analogy of what can happen when we stubbornly cling to unquestioned values.
A small slit is cut into a coconut, large enough for a hand to slip through but too thin for a fist. The coconut is then filled with rice and secured to a pole. Later, a wandering monkey sees the coconut filled with rice. Score! He slips his hand in, grabs a handful of rice, but…wait a minute…he can’t pull his hand out! Villagers close in and surround the monkey as he desperately tries to escape, but he just can’t seem to let go of the rice.
When we rigidly cling to thoughts or values that hinder our development or ability to connect with others, we behave like the poor monkey and the walls of our mind close in like the impending swarm of villagers. Reasons for clinging are many. Here are a few.
Paths we climb tend to be similar to those we’ve taken before and those taken by others in our groups. They’re familiar and comfortable. We develop an affinity to these paths and seek them out as we climb while ignoring alternative paths. In these cases, we fall prey to the seeking of immediate comfort and familiarity over truth. We care only that the next few steps are easy and predictable. We don’t really care where these paths lead, they could head back downhill or to a dead-end for all we care. This phenomenon is known as selective exposure.
Every journey begins with an initial commitment to a particular path. It takes a lot of work to climb a path, so that when a dead-end is reached it becomes difficult to challenge the precious set of beliefs that afforded us past progress. We find ourselves pounding a vertical rock face rather than turning back and searching for a path around it. Reconsidering the beliefs and values that made us can be challenging, but when our values are so rigid that we’re unable to rediscover ourselves as we climb, we can't really learn anything new. We get stuck. This phenomenon is known as path dependence with a helping of sunk cost fallacy.
When faced with evidence that some paths we hold dear may not be the best, a common response is to search for reasons why our paths rule and other paths drool. We point to the rocks and roots on the paths of others with vivid detail, while ignoring the boulders and logs sprawled across ours. While criticizing others allows momentary distraction from personal shortfalls, we’re inevitably forced to confront the logs and boulders laying in our path, which stokes bitterness and frustration. This phenomenon is known as motivated reasoning.
Dark clouds of selective exposure, path dependence, and motivated reasoning obscure the glow of open-mindedness, extinguishing our drive to explore. These rigidity traps provoke excessive narrow-minded examination or provide the illusion that our path is good enough so that we can stop exploring and examining altogether.
One caveat about narrow-mindedness is that it can be adaptive. As struggles for survival intensify, our attention naturally narrows. Stressed and with nowhere to run, our open minds literally close in on themselves as more automatic faculties come online as our backs press against the closing walls of our minds. There’s simply less time to consider all possibilities, weigh every option, account for every stakeholder. Our self-preservation instincts kick in and, as a social species, this self-preservation also involves group-preservation: fervent support of the groups that keep us alive and an unnegotiable intolerance towards the groups with which our groups compete. Despite leaving conflict and suffering in its wake, close-mindedness keeps us alive.
Open-mindedness is therefore the only character strength in this series that does not receive unanimous traditional support. Think of what happens to the tradition that encourages unbiased consideration of ideas beyond their traditional boundaries. Constituents may become less motivated to emphasize and defend the boundaries, physical or symbolic, that crucially define the group. Fuzzy boundaries are a nightmare for the group (or individual) that wishes to maintain its sovereignty. Ambiguity stokes anxiety and confusion and instability, which makes the tradition vulnerable to the conquest or absorption by more motivated narrow-minded traditions.
Since narrow-minded intelligence (amathia) can be adaptive, especially in the short-term, it will always exist to some degree. Narrowness simplifies, reducing the amount of information to be considered and thus the cognitive demand required in making sense of our world. False certainty provided by simplicity provides is intoxicating and so hard to let go of, especially in times of crisis. But despite being adaptive, it’s clear that this intoxication leaves us ignorant of what lies beyond our narrow scopes.
To reduce our ignorance and climb towards the truth, we need to dim our flashlights every once in a while so that our eyes can adjust to the less intense but wider reaching lunar glow. And for those of us who have the liberty to do so, remember that open-mindedness is a burden bearable only in times of peace and abundance when our minds have the time and space to breathe. It is naïve to expect those immersed in conflict to suddenly drop their weapons and thoughtfully consider each other’s perspective.
And who knows, maybe the fire from the friction between competitors is necessary to shine some light on the truth. But closer to the truth seems to be the one who doesn’t point fingers, but points to each side and recognizes that they are suffering and worthy of love.
Creativity built us tools that helped us climb. Curiosity drew us upwards with a progressive harmony of investigation and exploration. And the soft white glow of open-mindedness illuminated alternative paths that may be worth taking. Leveraging these strengths allows us to climb higher. And the higher the climb—the more accumulated knowledge and experience that is channeled towards well-being—the more wisdom and perspective gained.
Greater perspective brings us to the final consilient virtue in the series: transcendence. We now have all the tools needed to transcend, and with our new vantage point we’re better positioned to harness the strengths of this virtue. Join me next time as we fly above the strengths of gratitude, awe and wonder, hope, humor, and faith.