Proposed Sources of Practical Wisdom

Abstract

TODAY the world is harassed by political conflicts. Chronic strife and fighting in many places and sporadic violence almost everywhere weaken the foundations of orderly life and threaten to spread into disastrous war. Even in peaceful areas there are harsh oppositions between groups in regard to moral and political issues. It is not surprising that in such conditions there should be, as indeed there is, general recognition of the need for moral and political wisdom, that is, a body or knowledge, or a method, or perhaps a discipline by which disputes might be resolved in a way which would appear fair or reasonable or just to everyone willing to consider the issues with an open mind. In answer to this need there have been a large number and a bewildering variety of prescriptions as to how moral wisdom might be achieved. Humanists have suggested that increased study of the humanities might help, that men might be tamed, humanized, or civilized through acquaintance with literature and the arts, that practice in the valuations involved in the appreciation of literature and the arts would make men sensitive to values and able to judge them critically. Social scientists, perhaps skeptical of the efficacy of esthetic sensitivity in political affairs, have recommended extension of study and research in the social sciences. Some natural scientists have suspected that further development of the scientific attitude, with its disinterestedness, its subordination of individual prejudice and parochial loyalties to an impersonal and therefore cosmopolitan point of view, and its willingness to sacrifice all lesser interests for the sake of truth, would contribute more to a new and reasonable way of handling social problems than does either the social pseudoscientist's dabbling in the social lore and barbarous ways of prescientific man or the humanist's practice in the niceties of visual, auditory, and verbal stimulation. Many religious people, of course, insist that these academic specialties would be helpful, if at all, only if subordinate to and guided by religious doctrine. Whatever their ultimate merits, the present effect of these various prescriptions seems merely the setting-up of claims and counterclaims, oppositions which are not so violent or dangerous or widespread as the political oppositions but which nevertheless have the same character of being conflicts of interest or of ideologies. These academic disputes illustrate indeed what happens generally to attempts to present a reasonable basis for settling practical issues. Each doctrine which seems to its proponents a reasoned and cogent presentation seems to other people a rationalization, a dogma, or just another ideology. This seems truly the frustration of reason, the bankruptcy of human intelligence, that the urgent need for a reasonable basis for social policy and individual action should generate only ideologies, an assortment of personal and group dogmas. Most of us think some of the time, and some of us all the time, that the failure to reach a common basis for moral discussion is caused by the ignorance, intellectual blindness, or original sin of our opponents. We demand that men open their eyes or change their hearts. We admit that the present generation is hopeless but demand more and better education for the next generation. It is in order, however, before placing all the blame on ignorance, blindness,