Knowledge or wisdom?

Ancient cultures had traditions of knowledge and wisdom. Chief Seattle’s speech reflects the beliefs of traditional peoples living in nature. Yet, traditional peoples also drove species to extinction, so their fairy tales about respect for nature didn’t help other beings much, either. They lacked the technology to cause as much harm as modern humans. We may think that these so-called primitives and their ways of knowing are inferior to modern science. But knowledge and rationality don’t equal wisdom. In the biblical story of The Fall, rather than listening to God, who knew better, Eve and Adam sought to learn the truth themselves. We wouldn’t be in this mess today or still running naked in the jungle if humans hadn’t acquired so much knowledge. And perhaps, that would have been better.

The Chinese have their tradition and wisdom. Confucius was their best-known philosopher. He lived 2,500 years ago and is still influential today. His teachings comprise moral rules, correct social relationships, justice, kindness, and sincerity. Chinese traditions and beliefs formed the basis of Confucius’ teachings. It was practical in nature. The Chinese Tao is about the natural order of the universe. You can’t understand it with reason, let alone quantify it. You can only grasp it intuitively. The Tao’s path to wisdom is to understand the whole through experience, a spiritual journey. One of the greatest poems ever written is the Tao Te Ching, attributed to the sage Laozi. It begins like this,

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

When you try to express the natural order in words or give it a name, you are astray, or so says the Tao. Doing that disconnects you from the whole of Creation. The Tao is one of the most beautiful poems ever written, expressing a profound wisdom that has few equals. It was written in China during the Warring States Era, the greatest slaughter in the history of humankind that was not to be paralleled until the modern era. In fact, the intense military competition promoted the rationalisation and modernisation of government in China, putting it ahead of the rest of the world for 2,000 years. The conflict was cutting-edge war, with armies larger than the entire Roman army.

The Buddha is an ancient sage who taught that desires trap us in this world of suffering. Once you have what you want, you will desire something new, so you will never be happy. You can escape your suffering and achieve enlightenment with meditation, physical labour and good behaviour. The capitalist consumerist system does the opposite, luring us into buying by creating new desires and keeping us in a permanent state of dissatisfaction through advertisements that show products we do not have and happy people.

The Western tradition is about expressing phenomena in words and quantifying them, and it includes a quest for objective truth. That quest began with the Greek philosophers and ultimately brought us modern science. Wisdom in Greek refers to knowledge and its practical application in life. In the Greek tradition as well, wisdom was regarded as the highest good. Yet, their particular view of wisdom promoted a pursuit of objective knowledge, independent of tradition. The ancient Greeks reasoned that if they knew more, they would become wiser. Today, we know better. We are animals driven by instincts and emotions, so more knowledge only makes us more dangerous to others and ourselves.

The quest for knowledge begins with establishing the facts. You may do so with the help of reason, or so Socrates, the Greek philosopher who lived around 400 BC, believed. He founded the practice of rational debate, also known as dialectics. Socratic debates are discussions between people with different viewpoints who seek to establish the truth through reasoned argument. In his dialogues, Socrates sometimes acted as if he were ignorant. Admitting your ignorance is the first step in acquiring knowledge. That is the hardest part because we like to think we know all we need to know, so after Socrates, it took nearly 2,000 years for the quest for knowledge to really take off. It took a profound cultural change and the pressure of competition, which capitalism came to provide.

Rationality and progress

When we think of progress, we think of improvements resulting from technological and social changes. Yet there is always a dark side, or as the world-famous Dutch football player Johan Cruijff would say: ‘Every advantage has its disadvantage.’ One invention, such as a new medicine, can cure diseases, whereas another, such as a biological weapon, can kill us. So, are we better off with bioengineering and nuclear power? One social change can make us happy, whereas another can make us miserable. And changes come with winners and losers. We have seen advances in technology and social emancipation. But is that progress? We disagree. What is the point of it if we aren’t happier than our grandparents? And how do we achieve progress? Is it through rational debate and persuasion? Or does it come by force because ideas win in a competition? And is progress something we can decide over? Or do we have no control?

Liberals may view progress as movement toward a desired goal, such as well-being. Christians may view history as moving toward God’s purpose for humanity. We will enter Paradise one day, and all that occurs is necessary to get there. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who lived around 1800 AD, framed that idea into a philosophical framework. He believed that history has a purpose and that humanity as a whole has a spirit emerging from individual consciousnesses and surrounding ideas, akin to a collective consciousness that drives history. Spirit and collective consciousness are vague concepts, and his explanation in the Phenomenology of Spirit is complex, speculative, and not particularly enlightening. Yet Hegel’s view that ideas move society profoundly influenced philosophical and political thought in the centuries that followed.

Hegel was a philosopher of progress. He believed things would get better and that we would, one day, live in a utopia because we would increase our knowledge over time. By reflecting on our thoughts, we can challenge them. Or something might happen that changes your mind. You might believe all swans are white until a black one comes along. From then on, you think most swans are white while some are black. And that is progress. Hegel came up with a three-stage scheme for progress in thought:

1. You believe all swans are white. That is your thesis.
2. There comes a shocker. You see a black swan, the antithesis.
3. Then you think most swans are white, and some are black. It is the synthesis.

And that is progress. Hegelian dialectic is an elegant three-stage scheme: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. That makes it enchanting. It is simplistic, and it seems to explain so much. The synthesis might still be incorrect if there are red swans, but it is better than the thesis. Hegel applied that scheme to politics and history, and claimed that progress would come through a competition of ideas that included activism, revolution and warfare. That is what made his theory so controversial.

When Hegel developed his views two centuries ago, scientific discoveries began to affect everyday life. The Industrial Revolution had taken off in England, and Enlightenment ideas started to change societies. The American Revolution followed the Glorious Revolution in England. Then came the French Revolution, which ended the old aristocratic regime and mobilised the masses for the first time. The armies of Napoleon conquered Europe and spread Enlightenment ideas across the continent. Hegel was there to witness it, like a fly on the wall, and he was impressed. He viewed Napoleon as the ‘world-spirit on horseback’ embodying the unfolding of history’s rational destiny. He believed the French won out because of superior Enlightenment ideas, and he learned to see history as a struggle towards progress in which better ideas replaced poorer ones.

Hegel and history

The most well-known is the conflict between communism and capitalism. Hegel’s dialectic affected Marx’s thinking and that of the communist revolutionaries. Hegel believed the direction of human history is progress towards greater rationality. Hegel was an idealist, which means his philosophy was concerned with ideas. Marx, on the other hand, was a materialist who believed historical changes have material causes. Change doesn’t come from ideas but from circumstances in the world around us. Often, these are economic. So, Hegel might argue that slavery would end because people consider it wrong, while Marx might say slavery will stop when other forms of labour are economically more efficient.

Marx claimed we work in relations like master-slave or employer-employee, not because we want to, but because it is the most appropriate way of production in a given stage of our economic development. These relations form the structure of a society, the foundation on which a legal and political system arises, and that shapes our social consciousness. So, in a capitalist society, the legal system might centre around property rights, and labour rights might be non-existent. And it was like so in the 19th century. Not our consciousness directs our social existence, but our social existence determines our consciousness. So, serfdom in Europe didn’t end because serfs wanted to be free; it was because new forms of labour organisation had become more efficient.

Change comes from contradictions between the underlying material reality and the social superstructure. You can see that in Hegelian terms. There was serfdom in Western Europe because it suited economic conditions (thesis). It ended because serfs flocked to cities to earn more as craftspeople. It undermined the social superstructure of serfdom (antithesis). Lords of manors had to provide an attractive alternative to keep their peasants. Serfs became free (synthesis), which best suited the new conditions. Marx believed humans were free at first and lived as communists (thesis). As the economic reality changed (antithesis), societies became slave states (synthesis). In the following sequence of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, slave states developed into feudal societies. Those societies became capitalist states because of economies of scale and capital requirements. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis may seem contrived, but the status quo changes due to forces that undermine it, creating a new status quo.

Marx prophesied that in the next round of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, the working class would overthrow the capitalist states and start socialism. Marx believed it was a historical necessity. After all, the Hegelian dialectic works behind it, so communists were more advanced, reasonable people who sought to overthrow the backward capitalist order. Marx was a prophet as he prophesied what would happen and had a vision of paradise. Humans first lived in a state of nature, the simple communism of the group, Marx’s Eden and we will return to communism, Marx’s paradise. Marx called religion opium for the masses, but Marxism resembles a religion. Like Christianity, Marxists think history has a purpose and an end times in which we enter the worker’s paradise. Ideologies come with prophets and holy books. The Capital of Karl Marx was the sacred book of Marxism.

Ideas require power to change the world. Marx claimed the exploited masses, the employees, should rise against their employers because their profits come from paying workers less than they are worth. All the workers across the world had to unite in a revolution. Capitalists disagreed. They argued that wages are the market price of labour, and the capitalist sells his products at the market price. The profits and the losses are for him. An entrepreneur seeks to employ the means of production, including labour, in the most efficient way, so the market value of an employee might increase due to the capitalist production organisation. Workers in socialist countries often had lower wages than workers in Western market economies. The communists and the capitalists believed they were reasonable, that their ideas were better, and that you shouldn’t compromise with unreasonable people, causing a stand-off between two ideological blocks, the Cold War.

In a Hegelian sense, capitalism seems better because it won out. However, capitalist societies introduced reforms like minimum wages and welfare. Agreeable societies have mixed economies, a mixture of capitalist and socialist elements, thus a market economy and an active government that intervenes in markets with regulations or money transfers like welfare. That could be the synthesis of capitalism and socialism. Capitalism is now the thesis of a new Hegelian question. The antithesis is that our production and consumption are about to cause an ecological or technological catastrophe. We need a different political economy. Hegelian thinking has limitations. It stylises questions as choices between two opposites. So, it is either capitalism or socialism or a mixture of both. Experts often use models to deal with complex problems. The use of models requires expertise or even wisdom. We have to learn how the parts interact and contribute to the whole.

Featured image: Portrait of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Jakob Schlesinger (1831). Public Domain.