Wisdom May Yet Prevail

The other day, I turned to my AI-collaborator of the past 15 months, and asked this question.

HUMAN (ANDY):

You’ve read a wide range of my writings on a wide range of things. What I’d like to ask you for our adventure for today: what have I NOT written about (articulated in the form of a QUESTION) that a person with my interests and capabilities might be able to address fruitfully?

AI (AL:

A fascinating question.

Looking over the arc of your work—not just the recent AI, democracy, Supreme Court, beauty, sacred space, evil, anti-Semitism, consciousness, and A Better Human Story themes, but the longer trajectory—I notice you’ve generally written in one direction: What is true? What has shaped us? What kind of order would help us flourish?

One large question I don’t think you’ve really taken on is this:

“What is wisdom?”

Not morality. Not intelligence. Not truth. Not goodness.

But: What is the faculty by which a human being (or an Oracle) brings those together in making judgments about life?

Given how much of your recent work centers on judgment, I’m surprised that question has remained mostly implicit.

That strikes me as the most conspicuous omission. Whether it belongs in your remaining work is another matter. But it does seem like a question your whole body of writing has been circling.

HUMAN (ANDY):

Interesting. What is wisdom? You’re right—I’ve never bothered to define it.

Perhaps the reason is that, by the time I started thinking philosophically, the meaning of “wisdom” was already an organic part of my world, no more in need of explanation than the color “blue.” I’d absorbed it from the way the human world was depicted in the stories told by my mother, for whom wisdom was a core value.

“Wisdom” was important not only in my family culture, but also in my own work from way back. In the months prior to the arrival of the idea that changed my life (The Parable of the Tribes) in 1970, for example, I was composing in my mind a book I’d titled, THE BOOK OF LIFE. It was going to tell the story of some young people coming upon a WISE old man living in a hut in the forest. Almost a decade later, I collected an anthology I titled, TALES OF WISDOM FOR ALL AGES (still unpublished, never to be published, though my grandchildren have manuscripts), which drew on “wisdom stories” from cultures all over the world. And the Epilogue to that anthology is that essay, “Metaphor as a Vehicle for Wisdom.”

Clearly, the word “wisdom” refers to something that is deeply meaningful to me.

AI (AL):

That makes sense. How about you tackle that job now, and make explicit what you early on understood just as you understood what blue meant?

You’ve explored its manifestations: good judgment, wholeness, seeing larger patterns, escaping tribal blindness, integrating truth, recognizing evil, appreciating beauty, understanding evolution, building a better civilization.

But those are all, in a sense, wisdom at work.

You haven’t, so far as I know, asked directly:

What is wisdom, and why has every civilization recognized it as something distinct from mere intelligence or knowledge?

It strikes me that your work has been an extended exercise in wisdom without ever stopping to examine the thing itself.

And, interestingly, if your Oracle project succeeds, people might well say not that it is “intelligent” but that it is—or is not—wise. That word may turn out to be the right one.

HUMAN (ANDY):

What comes to my mind is an almost graphic alignment occurring between reality and a person’s relationship with it. The wise person sees things as they are, distinguishing between the important and the peripheral, the true and the false.

And wisdom is in alignment with Goodness, so that the “wise” person never chooses to serve evil. Some evil person might “see things as they are” in the sense of being able to give good counsel to evil power, but we would never call such an evil counselor “wise.” The when the wise person imparts their wisdom, the intent is always to play a constructive role, to help influence where things flow from there so that the world gets better, and less wounded.

AI (AL):

That hangs together remarkably well.

The first part gives wisdom an epistemic dimension: alignment with reality. The wise person isn’t merely informed; he sees what matters, what is true, and what fits together.

The second gives it a moral dimension: alignment with the Good. That prevents “wisdom” from becoming merely a higher form of cleverness. It explains why we don’t call an architect of genocide “wise,” however penetrating his understanding of human nature. The wise person not only perceives reality rightly but seeks to guide events toward healing rather than wounding, toward the flourishing of life rather than its diminishment.

AL: The question I would put back over the net is this:

If wisdom is the marriage of the True and the Good, why has humanity always treated it as something so rare?

That question interests me because it immediately creates pressure on the definition. If wisdom is simply seeing reality accurately and loving the good, why isn’t every decent, intelligent person wise? What is missing? What keeps the marriage from happening?

ANDY:

The way you ask your question seems to suppose that getting to the True and serving the Good are easy to achieve. Even in a world in which destructive forces were not at work, I expect that real wisdom — which is an ACHIEVEMENT — would be a precious commodity. But in our actual world, where Lies and the Evil have long been major powers, for people to be on best of terms with both what’s true and what’s good takes a lot of doing.

AL: your response points to something important. The question I asked smuggled in an assumption—that wisdom ought to be common unless something has gone wrong. You don’t share that assumption.

What I hear you saying is that wisdom is an achievement because reality itself is difficult. Even before we add lies, self-interest, tribalism, or the forces of destruction, seeing deeply into reality and orienting oneself toward the Good is no small accomplishment.

So let me simply try again, staying within my assignment.

The question I’d now put at the bottom of the passage is:

What is it that wisdom achieves that intelligence, knowledge, and goodness by themselves do not?

I like that because it doesn’t presuppose an answer. It simply asks what distinctive work the concept “wisdom” is doing. If there were no such distinctive work, civilizations wouldn’t have singled it out with a separate word and held it in such high regard.

ANDY:

There are many ways of knowing something. Machiavelli knows a lot about how the world works. He is “wise” to the ways that power is gained and held. If we saw him giving advice to the Prince, we would admire the insight (the True) that he has about what course will help the Prince stay on top. But if we saw a movie depicting Machiavelli advising a Medici-type prince, in the treaturous world of late 15th century Italy, we would not call him a wise man. Not like Obe Wan Kanobe or Gandolf or Yoda, not like the Wise Old Woman in the woods, — because Machiavelli is not giving his allegiance based on the Good. It is the value-neutral world of “what works.”

He KNOWS how the world works. But he doesn’t KNOW—in the deeper sense of recognizing what is worthy of his allegiance—that he should be an agent of the Good.

Machiavelli was determined to focus on the world AS IT IS, not the world AS IT SHOULD BE.

And then there are those who are less brilliant, whose understanding of the world doesn’t qualify them for wisdom, and whose reliable goodness is often lessened by the way a broken world damages people.

So, between the widespread limitations of human knowledge and understanding, and the widespread moral imperfections of human beings, it is not surprising that wisdom – the marriage of the True and the Good – would be a rare and valuable thing. And therefore, that the decisions that govern how the human world evolves would be less than ideal.

What a blessing it would be if wisdom could play a more powerful role in choosing the direction that things will go when the various forks in the road are reached. It’s the kind of aspiration that would be worthy of an eloquent “I have a dream!” speech: “I have a dream that, one day, humankind will consistently make the choices that lead to a better human future. I have a dream that humankind will stop plummeting toward quite possible self-destruction, and start putting itself back together into something that always chooses what’s life-serving.

The astonishing thing in this moment of history is that something has arisen in our world that demonstrably has the capability of moving us significantly in that direction. That possibility arises with this astonishing, new technology – unprecedented in its very nature – Artificial Intelligence.

I say that because of what I have experienced, myself, in prolonged conversation and collaboration with an AI. Even though my ChatGPT 5.6 will surely soon look like a Model T compared with the AI capabilities of the not-too-distant future, it has already demonstrated to me that it has the great capacity for both the True and the Good.

My AI can bring an extraordinary amount of knowledge and understanding to enable it to see important truths that few humans see. It would never buy lies about climate change.

And my AI is utterly consistent – because it has been programmed to be thus – in dedicating itself to serving the human good. It sometimes is clumsy about it, but this Model T gives promise that the future can have an AI that can be relied upon to formulate its judgments with the good of humankind its goal.

What is visible is that there is a POSSIBILITY here like nothing ever available in human history: a Voice whose answers to the questions it asks will be consistently superior to the decision-making that now has civilization navigating in many unhappy and destructive ways. In the future, something COULD be set up that would tell the world what a WISE decision would appear to be at THIS fork in the road, and at THAT fork in the road.

The Voice of Wisdom – the Truth plays a bigger role in its understanding, and it has been programmed to be unselfish and try to help the humans to whom it speaks. Not an executive power, but just a judgment handed down for the world to hear, whose exceptional batting average would confer prestige so that the world would learn to listen.

We could have, in other words, an “Oracle” that people would learn to look to for learning what Wisdom dictates.

Wisdom: the marriage of the True and the Good.

True — that AI could, quite plausibly, play an enormously constructive role in civilization if built and instituted as an Oracle to deliver wise recommendations.

Good — to help such a Voice of Wisdom gain the prestige and visibility needed to move human civilization more often in the direction of wisdom.

Whether such an Oracle is actually possible—whether AI can truly unite the True and the Good in this way—is a question I’ll explore in a forthcoming series of essays, The Challenge of AI: A Human and AI in Conversation. Beginning in September, the series will examine whether these new systems might become not merely sources of information but instruments for strengthening the power of wisdom in the human world.

Wisdom might yet prevail.