I believe think it wise to crank it up, especially for those with a paid holiday! Some reading and The Black Crowes for you pleasure.

What Psychological and Social Factors Contribute to the Development of Wisdom?

When thinking about how wisdom develops, some people believe that wisdom comes with age. This idea may be due to examples that come readily to mind either from personal experience or from popular culture. But before considering how wisdom develops, it is probably helpful to spell out what we mean by the term wisdom. The press sometimes confuses wisdom with intelligence, as if they are synonyms. But not all smart decisions are necessarily wise ones. Of course, many decisions that are smart are neither wise nor unwise. Such smart decisions are well informed, made in the context of deliberate and thoughtful consideration but they are typically the result of an intelligent process rather than wisdom. We might define wisdom most simply as prudent judgment, or as is often attributed to Aristotle, wisdom can be defined as practical decisions that lead to human flourishing. One way of understanding wisdom is to look to specific examples of wisdom, and perhaps this is one reason that people think that aging leads to wisdom.

We have few celebrated examples of young wise folks, whereas the image of the aged sage seems to be almost universal across cultures. The belief is that to be thought wise, one needs to reach a certain advanced age. Of course this does not mean that everyone who is older is wise, but rather to be wise, one needs to be older. This reflected in popular icons such as Yoda from Star Wars or Biblical figures like King Solomon or historical figures such as Confucius, but they are just well-known examples of the pervasiveness of this belief. A recent article in the New York Times on aging and wisdom demonstrates that this entrenched belief is very much alive. In fact this view about wisdom and aging served as the impetus for some of the foundational scientific research on wisdom by Vivian Clayton and Paul Baltes. The idea that wisdom comes with age is a model for a kind of successful aging, especially considering that much scientific research on the psychological effects of aging delivers bad news about declining abilities in systems such as working memory. The idea of becoming wiser holds out a certain kind of hope for our personal futures. For example, Laura Carstensen’s research on aging supports some aspects of the relationship between aging and wisdom. Her work shows that older people make practical choices about how they spend their time that increase positive mood and sense of well-being. This seems like Aristotle’s notion that practical wisdom should increase human flourishing.

Practical Wisdom: The Master Virtue

In 2008, Christopher Ratte and his seven-year-old son were attending a Detroit Tigers game together. When Ratte went to the concession stand, he grabbed a beer for himself and a Mike’s Hard Lemonade for his son, unaware that the drink contained 5% alcohol. When a security guard saw Ratte’s son nursing the bottle of the spiked beverage, he immediately took it from him and then rushed the boy to the stadium’s medical clinic. The medical clinic called an ambulance, and the boy was sent to an emergency room. The doctors at the ER found no trace of alcohol in his system and were ready to release the boy to his father.

But the police had other plans. According to procedure, the police were required to turn the child over to the county’s child protective services. Many of the officers hated the fact they had to do it, but rules are rules. County officials put the boy into a foster home for three days even though the case agents didn’t feel it was the right thing to do, but they had to follow procedure. A judge then ruled that the boy could be released from foster care and into his mother’s custody so long as Ratte moved out of the house. Again, the judge was just following the procedure in his ruling. After two long weeks, dad and son were finally reunited.

The police, county workers, and even the judge all agreed that what this family went through because of a dad’s honest mistake wasn’t an execution of justice. But their hands were tied.

When people hear stories like this one, they’re often outraged. It seems like something is wrong with society when these kinds of things happen–and there is. The cause can be traced to the disappearance of what the ancients called the “master virtue”–practical wisdom–a quality that is vitally necessary for the health of both our culture and the lives of individual men.

What Is Practical Wisdom?

The ancient Greek philosophers spent a lot of time walking around in their togas discussing the nature of things, especially the nature of virtue. ..

The Dalai Lama on Altruism

In order to generate such a strong altruistic attitude in which one promises to seek buddhahood for the sake of others, it is necessary beforehand to generate an unusual resolve in which one takes on the burden of others’ welfare. In order to induce this unusual resolve, it is necessary to have compassion in which one cannot bear to see either the manifest suffering of others or their oppression by unwanted internal conditions that result in suffering. Thus, from the depths of the heart one wishes that they be freed from such a condition. For, unless one is stirred from the depths by compassion, the high resolve in which one takes on the burden of freeing beings from suffering cannot be induced.

It is clear from our own experience that it is easier to generate compassion for other persons who are attractive to oneself or to whom one feels a sense of pleasantness—with whom one feels a sense of rapport. Thus prior to generating great compassion one needs a technique to cause all sentient beings to appear appealing and attractive to oneself. This technique involves viewing all sentient beings the way we already view those beings to whom you usually are the closest, whether these be our mother and father, relatives, or others.

In order to view beings this way, it is necessary first to see them in an even-minded way, and helpful here to use the imagination. Imagine in front of yourself a friend, an enemy, and someone to whom you are completely indifferent—a “neutral” person. Examine your feelings to see whom you hold dear and whom you consider in a distant manner. Naturally, you feel close to your friend; you feel not only distant but sometimes also angry or irritated toward your enemy; you just feel nothing for the neutral person. You have to investigate why this is so...

Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism was a war on both church and state

Tolstoy’s War and Peace is well over a thousand pages. And the BBC has been criticised for whittling it down into a mere six episodes. So it’s obviously ridiculous to try and summarise such a whopping doorstopper in three short sentences. But seeing as Tolstoy believed there was quite a lot to be said for foolishness, here goes: all Christians are fools. Politicians can’t allow themselves to look or behave like fools. Therefore, politicians cannot be Christian.

No wonder the Russian Orthodox church excommunicated him in 1901. He was a thorn in the side of organised religion and, even more so, a vigorous opponent of the state. For Tolstoy, the state was one great big protection racket, a monopoly of organised violence demanding money for a false promise of security. For by the raising of armies its citizens organise for war and yet also make themselves a target for attack. Thus the Christian state is a contradiction in terms. Not that you’d know it from the BBC’s bodice-ripping adaptation, but War and Peace is an extended argument for that most foolish of moral wisdom: pacifism.

Tolstoy’s Christianity was unusual. He didn’t care for the creeds or doctrines of the church, nor for its supernaturalism, nor for what he saw as the hypocrisy of its self-satisfied practitioners. Nonetheless, as “a theory of life” he believed the Sermon on the Mount could not be bettered. Not only are Christians called to love their enemies, but even more challengingly, to “resist not the evil person”.

The Failure of Pacifism and the Success of Nonviolence

Abstract
Although pacifism and nonviolence bear a close relationship to one another historically, pacifism is the ideological assertion that war and violence should be rejected in political and personal life, whereas nonviolence refers to a distinct set of political practices. Unlike other modern ideologies such as liberalism and socialism, pacifism has never gained widespread acceptance among a significant portion of humanity and seems to remain a minority position among most of the peoples of the world. Even among those who use nonviolent techniques, the conventional wisdom that physical violence is necessary under certain circumstances often prevails. However, a growing body of empirical evidence shows that the methods of nonviolence are more likely to succeed than methods of violence across a wide variety of circumstances and that more people are using nonviolence around the world. At the same time, both the effectiveness of military and material superiority in achieving political ends and the incidence of warfare and violence appear to be waning. In a remarkable example of convergence between empirical social science and political theory, explanations for the effectiveness of nonviolence relative to violence point to a people-centered understanding of power. This research can provide a basis for a reinvigorated and pragmatic brand of pacifism that refocuses the attention of political scientists on the organization, actions, and loyalties of people as opposed to technologies of domination and destruction.

Have a rockin' weekend!