During one of my recent walks, I was having a mental discussion about the differences between intelligence and wisdom. I don't know why the topic was on my mind but I needed something to think about so I went with it. I often have these mental sessions when I'm out. It's really just a way to pass the time. Sometimes they take more the form of a debate, where I weigh the pros and cons of an issue. This time, I'd characterize it as a discussion or pondering. I wasn't trying to judge one better than the other, just understand the qualities of each.
Intelligence and wisdom are such very different things and yet I think they are sometimes confused. It's easy to identify and find the intelligent among us, just go to any top university and check out its research department. Our society values smart people and places them in prominent roles. We even have an IQ test to help sort our smartness. Finding the wise can be a trickier task. To be sure, there are many highly intelligent people who are also very wise, but the two aren't necessarily linked. I believe we are each born with our own level of intelligence, or ability to grasp, understand and apply new concepts. For some, it may be directed to a particular field (e.g. "He's good at math", etc.). For others, anything they choose to study may come easily. A child's intelligence is evident from a very early age. As parents, we are watching for clues, certain our baby is the next Einstein (just like his dad). When our kids get to school we get the first glimpses as to where they rank with their peers. Very quickly, the "smart kids" are identified and labeled.
But what about wisdom? For that matter, what does it mean to be wise? I started my mental discussion thinking that people were born with a certain level of intelligence but that wisdom was solely learned through experience. By the end of my walk, I'd decided that the answer was more complicated than that. If wisdom is purely the result of being exposed to certain experiences then it would reason that two people, exposed to the same experience, would be equally wise. I don't buy that. I think that, just as intelligence might be thought of as one's ability to understand and apply concepts, there must be some equivalent ability pertaining to wisdom. I'm not sure what it is. To me, wisdom seems associated with "bigger picture" things. Maybe it's an ability to grasp consequences rather than concepts. Maybe that ability coupled with the right experiences makes a wise person. I'm still not sure, but I don't think we do a great job of identifying it early. Instead, people "grow to be wise" and emerge later in life. Maybe that's the way it should be, it keeps so many of them out amongst the rest of us, instead of tucked away inside some research facility.
It was a good mental discussion, even if I didn't reach any definitive conclusions.
No comments:
Post a Comment