Playing the Wisdom Game --- Part 1

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Subtitled "Some thoughts about the nature and development of wisdom," this article was first published in the 2006 book LIVING A LIFE OF VALUE.
What is wisdom? Like stupidity, we know it when we see it. But because wisdom manifests in so many different ways, it can't be adequately defined in a few words.
Short dictionary definitions highlight some of wisdom's characteristics such as "keen discernment," "a capacity for sound judgment," and "the ability to discern inner qualities and relationships," but they don't get to the heart of the matter. Joseph W.
Meeker's eloquent yet concise statement about wisdom is much more illuminating: "Wisdom is a state of the human mind characterized by profound understanding and deep insight. It is often, but not necessarily, accompanied by extensive formal knowledge.
Unschooled people can acquire wisdom, and wise people can be found among carpenters, fishermen, or housewives. Wherever it exists, wisdom shows itself as a perception of the relativity and relationships among things.
It is an awareness of wholeness that does not lose sight of particularity or concreteness, or of the intricacies of interrelationships. It is where left and right brain come together in a union of logic and poetry and sensation, and where self-awareness is no longer at odds with awareness of the otherness of the world.
Wisdom cannot be confined to a specialized field, nor is it an academic discipline; it is the consciousness of wholeness and integrity that transcends both. Wisdom is complexity understood and relationships accepted."[1] Wisdom is internal, embodied by persons.
Words of wisdom arise from it. Wise behavior arises from it.
But wisdom itself is not its products. Wisdom is a mode of cognition —  one rooted in perspectives, interpretations, and values.
Wisdom is not about facts per se, it is about the context-linked meaning of facts. It is about the significance of facts and their implications.
Wisdom is a kind of meta-knowledge that helps us make better sense of the rest of our knowledge. Wisdom does this by relating our ordinary everyday knowledge to a variety of contexts, and by viewing it from a variety of illuminating perspectives.
Among those perspectives are: THE SELF-KNOWLEDGE PERSPECTIVE Wise people have a greater than ordinary understanding of themselves. They are aware of their strengths and weaknesses and have developed "workarounds" to stay out of trouble.
Because they have paid attention to how their own minds work, they are better able to understand the mind processes of others. LAWS-OF-NATURE PERSPECTIVE We contemplate doing things in the physical world and ask ourselves: Will this work? What will be the consequences of doing this? In such circumstances an understanding of basic scientific laws can at times lead to better, wiser, decisions.
LAWS-OF-LIFE PERSPECTIVES If we are observant, we eventually sense some general rules that apply in our relations with other people: Sexual infidelity almost always causes pain for someone. Angry words shut down communication.
We rarely adopt other people's lists of dos and don'ts, but if we see these generally applicable truths for ourselves they can help guide our actions. THE SYSTEM PERSPECTIVE The system perspective on reality is a powerful tool for understanding the world around us.
Complexity in the natural world emerges as a hierarchy of natural systems or holons which have the property of being a whole at their own systemic level and a part or component in a system at the next level up the hierarchy. The physical hierarchy of systems moves from subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to crystals and cells, to living organisms, then to ecosystems, the biosphere, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe.
In another branch of this hierarchy, human beings start communicating with each other and give birth to those systems we call societies, economies, and nations. THE EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE What is the universe up to? Where does humanity fit in? Have we become agents of the evolutionary process? Some wise people have developed an understanding of our cosmic and evolutionary contexts and found it helpful to look at the human situation from this "big picture" vantage point.
THE COMPLEXITY-OF-CAUSATION PERSPECTIVE There is a human tendency to simplify causation. We pick out some domi­nant element in a situation and call it "The Cause," when in fact there are myriad necessary elements —  an entire causal matrix —  with roots that go back to the origin of the universe.
BROADENED-IDENTITY AND "ONENESS" PERSPECTIVES As a person develops psychologically and spiritually, their sense of identity tends to broaden. Their circle of concern and identity widens from me, to us —  and for a few, to the entire universe and its underlying ground.
THE FINITENESS-OF-LIFE PERSPECTIVE Time is the raw material of our life, and a conscious awareness of our eventual death helps us to keep our life on a meaningful track and avoid meaningless, life-wasting detours. A HOST OF "HIGH-VALUES" PERSPECTIVES The deeply-held values of wise people are vantage points from which to view life situations and the world: Is this just? Is this truthful? Is this caring and compassionate? Etc.
THE ROLE OF VALUES IN WISDOM Nicholas Maxwell has called wisdom "the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others."[2] The embracing of "high" or "superior" values is a hallmark of wisdom. High values have two roles in the lives of wise people.
First, they provide those illuminating slants on the data of life. Second, they guide the decision-making process toward wiser decisions.
Human decision-making is a largely unconscious process in which a constantly shifting hierarchy of internalized values interacts with a constantly shifting set of perceived circumstances and retrieved memories. Some values, such as survival and reproduction, are hard­wired.
Other values, and their position in the value hierarchy, are the products of life experience and the influences to which we have been exposed. At any given moment our decisions are made by the combined action of: 1.  The brain-mind process currently in charge 2.  The hierarchy of value priorities that exists at that moment 3.  The perceived nature of the situation calling for a decision 4.  Memories of similar or related situations Regarding item one, above, there are three distinct brain-mind processes, each having its own hierarchy of values: •  The instinctive/reactive process located in the earliest parts of our brain to evolve —  the structures of the brain stem and limbic system and their change-resistant programming •  The intellectual process: Typically centered in the left hemi­sphere of the neocortex •  The intuitive process: Less clearly understood, but generally as­sociated with the right, nonverbal hemisphere These processes and their values work together to make our de­cisions and control our behavior in the same way a computer's hardware and software work together to make the computer's deci­sions and control its outputs.
We can look at the three brain-mind processes as the hardware of our behavioral control system. And the internalized values that each process utilizes constitute the heart of the software.
If you ask a person to list their personal values in order of relative importance, you are likely to get a list with some pretty impressive stuff on it. Yet if we look dispassionately at that person's behavior, it might soon become appar­ent that their deep-down, internalized, operational values are not the same as their professed values —  or at least do not have the stated priority.
People always do what seems best, and that "best" is determined by how their hierar­chy of internalized values interacts with the brain/mind's assessment of past, present, and anticipated future circumstances. As Nobelist Roger Sperry put it, "Human values...can...be viewed objectively as universal determinants in all human decision making.
All decisions boil down to a choice among alter­natives of what is most valued, for whatever reasons, and are de­termined by the particular value system that prevails."[3] Superior values, "the values of the wise," produce superior decisions and superior behavior. The self-actualizing and ego-transcending people that psychologist Abraham Maslow studied were wise people, and Maslow's reports on their behavior and mindsets tell us much about the nature of wisdom and the values that underlie it.
Maslow's self-actualizers focused on concerns outside of themselves; they liked solitude and privacy more than the average person, and they tended to be more detached than ordinary from the dictates and expectations of their culture. They were inner-directed people.
They were creative, too, and appreciated the world around them with a sense of awe and wonder. In love relationships they respected the other's individuality and felt joy at the other's successes.
They gave more love than most people, and needed less. Central to their lives was a set of values that Maslow called the Being-Values, or B-Values: wholeness, perfection, completion, justice, aliveness, richness, simplicity, beauty, goodness, uniqueness, effortlessness, playfulness, truth, honesty, reality, self-sufficiency.
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