Member-only story
The Wisdom History Teaches Us
A dialogue on what liberals should learn from the global rise of authoritarianism
The following is a dialogue between myself and Benjamin Cain, sparked in part by a recent essay I published here on Grim Tidings on the subject of history, in which I suggested that studying the past is essential if we are not merely to get more technically capable as time passes, but also wiser.
Ben
If instrumental reasoning is the ability to get what you want, wisdom is the ability to know what you should want. Wisdom is thus philosophical in requiring meta-reflection, the evaluation of ends rather than just means. Thus, we tend to find wisdom not in the crowds, but in elite countercultures.
If we assume a liberal humanist orientation, we’d be inclined to think that wisdom is the accumulation of knowledge that enables us to socially progress and sustain those advances. We learn from history how to avoid misery and arbitrary, grotesque discrimination, as in sexism and racism. From that perspective, the return of authoritarian barbarism, such as you find in Trumpism, seems unwise because it’s regressive.
Now, I share this liberal humanism that typifies the “modern” project of replacing religious mythic inspirations with secular ones. Yet this humanist…
