Wisdom – Week 4
Where I ponder on the wisdom of the fox, the weirdness of the world, and the wonders of excess.
Sometimes we’re blind about our own situation. I’d been working under the assumption that I was doing hardly anything, because I’m engaged mainly in emerging projects that have uncertain pathways to income, or even completion. I’d been feeling tired, and wondering why. I thought of myself as idle and piled up more, but my body knew better. Wisdom was no more than finding a trick for my brain to catch up with the body, and reduce dissonance. Saturday morning, from a favourite café, I wrote down all the writing and thinking projects I’ve got going on. Seeing them spread out on the page, I realised how much there is. Not only that, but I felt a sense of joy at their richness and breadth. Then there was calm.
From this state of better alignment, I was able to prioritise my work. I’d been feeling increasing anxiety, that there was too much on, that it would never stop. Pausing with the spread in front of me, it was instantly clear that most of that anxiety stemmed from two difficult chapters in a book on facilitation I’m co-writing with a friend in Switzerland. They require a solid four days of undivided attention. I can’t commit to anything else serious until that’s done. Yet I haven’t given them the time, and I’m stuck. I took a dose of my own medicine, and decided to give them full priority, trusting that whatever else is urgent will impose itself anyway. Spoiler: by Wednesday the next week, I was over that hump.
The reason I fall into this kind of dissonance is because I’m spread out. But it‘s by design. ‘It’s like you’re building a cathedral’, my partner said, when I mentioned a series of calls and their associated projects one evening. I reflected on his words, remembering the Strasbourg cathedral that towered over the entrance to my high school. One building to hold the world. I recognise this aspiration to totality in myself, as a way to resist ambient fragmentation. Meanwhile, I found myself listening to podcasts on AI in China. One of them had a guest speaker I distantly know. We’d exchanged a few emails back when, they’re a recognised expert now, and know their stuff. Except I soon realised they had only three points to make, and repeated them. I thought back on the old parlour game, are you Fox or Hedgehog? There’s two different types of thinkers, those who know one thing, and those who know many. I’ve been leaning for a while now into my trickster nature, and many-facedness. Listening to this hedgehog speaker, with their three sticky key points, I saw the benefits of self-limiting your scope. Do one part of the cognitive labour well, and trust others will do theirs. Ah, but one must know one’s gifts and calling, and mine lie in the connective tissue, the capillary system, the blood, the gel, the spaces in between. So, in a world ruled by sharp hedgehog wisdom, I have to seek the diffuse wisdom of the fox, and live with its dissonance.
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I’ve taken a big-5 psychological profile test a few times. I consistently ranked in the top percentile on open-mindedness. I survived a chaotic childhood in a family that did not give me coherent frameworks by integrating the Socratic mantra ‘I know that I know nothing.’ Facing parents with diverging agendas, I developed scepticism towards figures of authority. I know the lies people will deploy to protect themselves from ethical pain, get what they want, or process their trauma. This chaotic environment also protected me from rebelliousness. There were no prison bars to break, but swampy mud lands to not drown in. I found inherited frameworks useful for that – philosophy, novels, and lists of virtues or sins to build from. Creativity benefits from constraints, as does character building. Not out of any duty to obey, but a willingness to relate: what we’ve received is the base in relation to which we can build ourselves, open-mindedly, yet not from a void.
I know that I know nothing, then, but I have some frameworks to build knowledge from. There is a recurring line of interrogation in the Weird Studies podcast. It applies to ghosts, UFOs, and bigfoot. When consistent reports of certain phenomena clash with our model of the world, what do we believe? What should count as fact when observation defies common understanding? This is one of the major intellectual dilemmas. A Buddhist friend recommended Dr Greyson’s book After, a psychiatrist’s account of near-death experiences. This is how the book begins. Early in his career, Greyson faced a phenomenon that made no sense in relation to his mental models. A young woman under anaesthesia noticed a red stain on his shirt. She was asleep, and could not have seen it. His original impulse was to push it away, but he returns to it, first describing his own experience, then collecting similar stories, testing and classifying them. Sure, this approach does not meet the criteria for randomised experiment, but if we can learn from it, and assist patients, shouldn’t we? As Greyson keeps repeating, in the absence of a control group, there is no scientific proof that parachutes protect us from death when jumping from an airplane. Yet we keep using them.
It's a recurring theme of ethical traditions that we should follow nature. But nature is weird. Any biologist will tell you that, and other scientists. No need to pull up quantum physics. ‘To have babies, I must mate with another hermaphrodite in the 69 position’, says Isabella Rossellini, dressed as an Earth Worm, in an episode of Green Porno. The bonobos, our closest animal cousin, maintain social harmony by exchanging sexual favours. When pine trees come under attack from caterpillars, they release pheromones that attract wasp. Besides, we are a technological species. New developments are shifting the dial of what is or isn’t in our control – soil health, DNA, body modifications. Is wisdom, then, refusing any of those new possibilities in the name of stern caution? Or to face prejudice and look for facts in the dark? We should follow nature, I agree. Not an idol we made in its image.
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On our trip to Sydney, my friend and I were speaking about this project on virtues. Over brunch at Quick Brown Fox in Pyrmont, we share our morbid fascination with the Trump government. I’m hooked to the drama. Nothing is fully decided yet. The judges might prevail, or Congress switch in two years, or Republicans dissent and oppose the president. There is hope yet in the separation of powers. Yet I’ve seen the weakness of institutions. They’re made of people, gathered in teams, held by shared stories and culture. DOGE has blasted through them with brutal shock therapy. Lawsuits explode all over the place, and rightly so, but even then, some damage is done. Much circulates on proper miscarriages of justice. I like to think of the finer human tissue, the trust and connections eroded, when Mary from finance lost her pay check and moved interstate, Simon from HR postponed elective surgery, or Mindy from IT sold her house. Even if all executive orders were to be reversed, the situation has degraded. We may go through a cycle of death and rebirth – Easter is approaching, reminding us humans do that – but for now, the web is weaker. I tremble to realise how naïve I’d been to believe in the separation of power. It’s a guardrail, maybe, but still: who controls the guns, etc.
So we need strength. I find myself listening to Stoic podcasts on the topic: reframing virtue as strength building. I’ve always been drawn to that aspect of conservative thought, and others too. I cringe at the word innovation, I’m attached to logic, and hold a pessimistic view that, sadly, we’re often more likely to cause harm than good. Yet listening to those podcasts, I note aesthetic divergence with conservatives. To learn the resistance of the real, I prefer cooking to team sports. To reflect on commitment, I prefer friendship to marriage. I’m not averse to tech, I don’t have a garden of my own, and if I firmly believe in personal responsibility, I believe it involves designing and advocating for better collective structures, in proportion to the privilege we have.
I also believe that the pursuit of virtue requires compromise. We must trade innocence against wisdom and strength. All my medical tests have come back good, a recent CT scan showed excellent results. My arteries are in good shape. Cleared of cardiac risk, I attend Pigfest on Saturday with friends of my partner’s. It’s a Grande Bouffe style food and wine event, centred on pork, with all you can drink wine. Charcuterie, sausages, and suckling pig. The chef shares a story. He placed the piglets in a primary school to be looked after by the kids. He came back after a few weeks, picked up the sucklings, and taught the kids about slaughter. ‘When you take your first bite of the golden crispy skin, look for the mild aftertaste of bitter saltiness from young children’s tears’. All this clashes with vegetarian aspirations, and my sense of justice extended to other species. Why am I here, cultivating collective callousness, eating too much, and making myself sick. This type of night is everything wrong with western civilisation. Yet there is a pagan logic I sense, aligned with my family roots in cattle breeding and bullfighting traditions. Violence needs a place. We need rituals to let loose our inner predator. Safer to do that as a group, sublimating our impulse, than repress it and hope it doesn’t come back warped and scarred in a serial killer mask. So I indulge. And the body does its usual thing. I sneak out with terrible hiccups after dessert, and crash in bed by ten, stomach heavy with crispy pig’s ears, fennel sausage and pancetta. Yet I wake up refreshed the next day, as I did on New Year’s Eve. Excess shifted something in my system.