🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

  - Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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Greetings!

As promised earlier, here is another installment from my interview with acclaimed cultural critic, novelist, gentleman farmer, essayist, and recent convert to Orthodox Christianity, Paul Kingsnorth:

YANAM: What is "wisdom"?

PK: Wisdom is one of those things that you know when you see it, but it's very difficult to put into words. I'm not sure you could ever define it. It's a bit like trying to define love or something. You kind of know it when you experience it. But I think that wisdom, spiritual wisdom and cultural wisdom is maybe something to do with knowing limits. It's about having a connection to God and having an understanding of your place in the world, knowing the limits of that, and knowing that you're not at the center of things. That's the big thing. I think if you're genuinely wise, people never think they're very important. I've noticed that there's nobody who likes the sound of his own voice who's really probably wise.

This is certainly the heart of the Christian tradition, isn't it? And many other spiritual traditions too. It's about putting your ego away and removing yourself from the picture, putting the world first, and putting other people first. I think that's probably what wisdom is. And actually living that rather than just talking about it, which is easy. But living it is very different. So yeah, I would say that's, if you can define it, that's probably what it is.

You want to be careful not to romanticize old cultures and all of that. That's easy to do. But at the same time, I think there's zero wisdom in the modern world. I can't see in my culture at the moment such as it is. I can't see a single wise person. I don't see a wise leader. I mean, maybe there are a few wise religious leaders or poets around, but I can't see many of them either. But we're not a culture that values wisdom at all. We value power, wealth, technology, and material stuff. And we're very good at that. That's what the West is great at. We're good at building things and making things and providing material wealth. And you know, you don't want to sniff too much about that because it matters that you're warm in the winter, you know? Yet at the same time, if you don't have any wisdom in your culture, then it's not going to last five minutes because you don't really know what the meaning of reality is.

Many cultures, not all of them in the past, the traditional cultures that are still alive today value wisdom in a way that we don't, which doesn't mean everybody in those cultures was wise or that everything they did was good or wise, but you can see it. Certainly, every indigenous tradition I've come across values the notion of the wise elder. You don't get to be an elder unless you're wise. And that's true in the Orthodox Christian tradition as well. A real elder is somebody who can impart wisdom, not just somebody who's old. There's a sense of being someone that you go to for guidance. Every traditional culture I've heard of and every traditional story I've read features a culture in which this kind of wisdom of the elders is important. It really matters. The wise elders might only be one or two, but they're the people you go to for advice on everything from warfare to whether you should get married to how you should worship because it's a thing that matters, and you recognize it when you can see it.

And actually, I think that our culture's complete devaluing of the notion of wisdom — probably laughing when we hear the word now — is what's going to doom us ultimately if we don't turn that around because we have not got any wisdom left and we don't value it. If that means we're not going to do wise things, that's going to take us where you'd expect.

OK…that’s it for today! I hope you enjoyed this installment from my interview with Paul Kingsnorth. Next up, we're going to be taking a look at the life and thought of the great cultural critic Ivan Illich, so please stay tuned!

All the best...and I'll be in touch again soon!

Herman

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PPS: If you'd like to learn more about Paul Kingsnorth, please check out his Substack!