Wisdom's folly

Wisdom is the comfort of the ignorant. Most of us have to live with the fact that there are many others brighter and more knowledgeable than ourselves. These people have read, digested and memorised vast amounts of information, and may have powers of deduction that work many times faster than our own. But, we ask ourselves, are they wise?

Wisdom is not mental agility or information retention, but a special kind of insight that enables us to judge what really matters. And in this respect, everyone appears wise to herself.

To be wise is to have a certain knack or skill, one born from experience. And so it is easy to think of it as something like riding a bicycle, which once acquired is never lost. Wisdom lingers, as Tennyson said.

But this is foolishly complacent. Wisdom is frail, and nothing shatters it more violently than the belief that it has been permanently acquired. This, more than anything else, has been the raison d'etre of Wisdom's Folly. We gather insights, but over time we stop thinking about them and they degenerate into empty cliches. We take them for granted, oversimplify them or miss their key point and their insight is lost, replaced by foolish misunderstandings.

To be wise is not to achieve a state of maturity from which one never regresses, but to keep one's understanding sharp by persisting in a habit of constant questioning. This is not the serenity of the mythical sage but the gruelling vigilance of the mind that rejects received certainties.

Anything of value in this series will not linger of its own accord, but will only endure in the minds of those who continue to question as it has done, and better.

• Alfred Tennyson

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