Posted by
jarhead on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 12:44:19 AM
‘‘In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don’t see in other candidates,’’ Morrison wrote. ‘‘That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.”
Boy, philosophers down through the ages have sought the true meaning of wisdom and here it is. Creativity and brilliance-done, we have wisdom. Of course the great sages were seeking wisdom as defined by the best that man could be in all things; a goodness coupled with altruism seeking out and begetting, fortune willing, great and noble outcomes for one’s fellow human being.
While creative imagination and brilliance have long been associated with success all too often that success has not included altruism or the best interests of one’s fellow human being. Mao was decidedly brilliant and imaginative as was Hitler but I dare say neither would be sought after as the source of wisdom that good and noble folks look for in pursuing that which is best is in all of us and for all of us. I suspect too that Morrison equates glibness and brilliance when, in fact, glibness has no part in brilliance except to perhaps lend itself to the timely expression of brilliance and even then, absent the expression of true wisdom, as was the case in many of Hitler’s greatest speeches, is far removed from wisdom or its expression.
But I may be expecting too much of the liberal mind in so enormous a definition as wisdom. Where a conservative would want each of us as individuals to, as best we can, exhibit our own individual wisdom it is true by observation that liberals seek and desire that someone else be the bearer of wisdom and that the madding crowd can then take part in that wisdom by adulation, acceptance and without need to develop their own hard won wisdom; a wisdom for which we have no one to blame but ourselves but which would appall the staunch liberal who, wanting no part of individual responsibility, seeks ever the wise one and is all too often disappointed at the result.
Forgive me my conservative individualism (and skepticism) but I much prefer the wisdom gained by age and experience to the perceived ‘brilliance’ that short passage of time will quickly punish in the harsh and unforgiving incubator of reality.