The wisdom literature is often rather neglected in our churches. Its sapiential character does not fit well within the narrow constraints of our information and doctrine-focused teaching. Its more open-ended and less definitive forms of knowledge unsettle the security of our dogmatisms. Its empirical and pragmatic focus discomforts our ideological abstractions and our personal detachment. Its positing of a common and knowable world shared by all human beings resists our desire to assert a Christian monopoly on truth and insight.

In observing Christian responses to the coronavirus, perhaps nothing has stood out to me so much as the way that it reveals fundamental habits of mind, either characteristic of wisdom or of folly.

The wisdom literature is often rather neglected in our churches. Its sapiential character does not fit well within the narrow constraints of our information and doctrine-focused teaching. Its more open-ended and less definitive forms of knowledge unsettle the security of our dogmatisms. Its empirical and pragmatic focus discomforts our ideological abstractions and our personal detachment. Its positing of a common and knowable world shared by all human beings resists our desire to assert a Christian monopoly on truth and insight.

Even in some Christian circles that make confident appeal to ‘wisdom’, the true character of wisdom can easily become distorted, often out of a desire to subdue wisdom to ideology and its modes of belief. ‘Wisdom’ can be presented to people as if it were a complete pre-packaged system of what to think, rather than as a lifelong formation in disciplined and responsible thought and the art of living well. A certain ideological position can be identified with ‘wisdom’, while actually functioning to do people’s thinking for them. We can be trained in a complete system that is to be brought to reality, without obliging us to assume the responsibility of the sapiential task of relating deep and principled reflection with empirical attention to the world. For many, wisdom, it seems, is also largely the possession of one party—the party to which they so happen to belong—absolving them from the task of listening and engaging receptively and humbly with people of a great many different backgrounds, beliefs, and vantage points.

All of these grave deficiencies in people’s training in, understanding and practice of wisdom have become amply and painfully evident in many Christians’ responses to the coronavirus.

Much of the wisdom literature is addressed to the simpleton, giving the person who lacks wisdom and expertise a nose for wisdom and the character to receive it. It is about gaining an instinct for the shape of wisdom, even before you have developed knowledge or been formed in wisdom yourself. It is how the non-expert conforms himself to wisdom despite his lack of expertise. It is often less about the specifics of what one believes than it is about how you come to and continue to believe it.

But the wisdom literature is also the literature for kings. There might seem to be something of a paradox here, but on closer examination it should make sense. In many ways, the king is called to be the consummate non-expert simpleton. Likewise, wisdom is largely built upon the virtues of the righteous simpleton and never leaves those virtues behind, actually resting more and more weight upon them as wisdom grows.

The wise king is not the universal expert. Rather, he is to be someone with mastery of the task of judgment. And he exercises such judgment well through his gifts in the discerning, taking, and weighing of expert counsel. Ruling with expert counsellors is a rather different thing from rule by experts. Domain-specific expertise and knowledge factors into the wise king’s judgment, but in exercising such judgment he considers and weighs a great many voices of expertise and wisdom before determining upon a specific course of action.

As the wise king is not the universal expert, he must arrive at his wise judgment by some other means, which is a tricky business. And the means by which he does so are largely the same means as those by which the simpleton arrives at any sort of wisdom in the first place, yet developed to a high degree. Because of the vast scope of his responsibilities, the king’s exposure to his non-expertise rapidly grows along with the extent of the obligations for which his wise judgment equips him.

As Scott Alexander observes, the people who were the best at anticipating and preparing for the coronavirus were largely not domain experts, but were people who were attentive to domain experts, while being gifted in the synthesizing of insight from diverse experts and the exercise of prudent judgment in uncertain situations with great risks. This is an important species of wisdom.

In what follows, I would like briefly to outline a number of fundamental principles of a Christian account of wisdom that should guide us in how we respond to coronavirus and other such crises.

1. The Wise Find Security in a Multitude of Counsellors

The wise surround themselves with a multitude of counsellors. By contrast, fools merely appeal to whatever ‘expert’ will confirm them in their ways, dismiss the experts as agents of a conspiracy or blind servants of an ideological agenda, or absolve themselves from the task of discernment by appeal to the fact that ‘experts disagree’. Fools generally appeal to experts to validate them in their positions, rather than genuinely familiarizing themselves with the scope and shape of the conversation between experts of varying perspectives and insights.

The solitary counsellor is a dangerous thing, as is the clique of unanimous counsellors—whether ‘orthodox’ or contrarian (those who are temperamentally contrarian can often mistake their criticisms of mainstream opinions for genuine stress-testing, while not being alert to the ways that their own positions are open to serious criticisms). True wisdom is to be found in attention to a multitude of counsellors, where the viewpoints of many informed and wise persons are constantly cross-examined, stress-tested, revised, honed, and proven through searching conversation with each other, a conversation often directed by the judicious ruler.

One of the typical hallmarks of cranks is that they simply dismiss peers in the mainstream guild as agents of a conspiracy, as malicious, or as stupid, rather than engaging in sharpening good faith dialogue with them or allowing their work to be cross-examined by them. They will speak of the stupidity of the mainstream experts, without ever closely engaging with them face to face, or truly understanding their viewpoints or arguments. Most actual experts tend to treat other experts who disagree with them with rather more respect.

2. The Wise Closely Examine Matters

Fools will readily believe a case without closely seeking out and attending to the criticisms of it (Proverbs 18:17). They routinely judge before hearing. They also attend to and spread rumours, inaccurate reports, and unreliable tales, while failing diligently to pursue the truth of a matter. The wise, by contrast, examine things carefully before moving to judgment or passing on a report.

In following responses to the coronavirus, I have been struck by how often people spread information that they clearly have not read or understood, simply because—at a superficial glance—it seems to validate their beliefs. They do not follow up closely on viewpoints that they have advanced, seeking criticism and cross-examination to ascertain their truth or falsity. And when anything is proven wrong, they do not return to correct it.

3. The Wise Know the Limitations of Knowledge

Fools are credulous, jumping to belief or disbelief. They are also opinionated, loving the proud confidence of a false certainty. They lack the capacity to weigh up many different and contrasting witnesses and viewpoints to arrive at a clearer sense of a matter, neither trusting any party wholly and unquestioningly nor lightly dismissing them when tensions appear. The wise, by contrast, know the limitations and uncertainties of their knowledge and have grown in the humility that accompanies such awareness. The wise resist the urge prematurely to jump to the security of firm yet false conviction, but faithfully endure the struggle of limited knowledge or lack of knowledge in order to search out matters diligently and thoroughly.

The coronavirus is a challenge attended by a multitude of ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’. Responding to such extreme uncertainties requires both decisive and swift precautionary efforts to minimize some of the extreme risks to which we might be opening ourselves up and intense open-ended enquiry into the exact shape of the threat that we are facing. Uncertainty doesn’t feature much in the thinking of the fool (save when he appeals to the supposed indeterminacy of opinion among experts as an excuse for confidently insisting upon whatever he wants). The fool tends to gamble overconfidently on his expectations and gives little thought to the many contingencies that are at play.

The fool scoffed at the supposed panic and fear of people who, while not necessarily expecting coronavirus to hit back in January, nevertheless took precautionary measures to ensure that they were prepared for such an eventuality. He scoffs in the same way now at people who are taking precautionary measures against other real but lower-risk scenarios. He is not really invested in the urgent task of breaking the risks we are assuming down to size through the pursuit of knowledge, because he has never not already had his mind made up on the matter.

4. The Wise Are on Guard Against the Flatterer

The wise recognize that the danger of the flatterer is encountered not merely in the form of such things as obsequiousness directed towards us personally. Flattery also expresses itself in the study or the expert that confirms us in the complacency or pride of our own way, bolstering our sense of intellectual and moral superiority, while undermining our opponents. The fool is chronically susceptible to the flatterer, because the flatterer tickles the fool’s characteristic pride and resistance to correction and growth.

The fool will pounce upon studies or experts that confirm him in his preferred beliefs and practices, while resisting attentive and receptive engagement with views that challenge him (or even closely examining those he presumes support him, as such examination might unsettle his convictions). The fool’s lack of humility and desire for flattery make him highly resistant or even impervious to rebuke, correction, or challenge. You have to flatter a fool to gain any sort of a hearing with him.

Ideology is the friend of the fool. Ideology can assure people that, if only they buy into the belief system, they have all of the answers in advance and will not have to accept correction from any of their opponents, significantly to revise their beliefs in light of experience and reality, or acknowledge the limitations of their knowledge.

By contrast, the wise know that the wounds of a friend are faithful and seek correction. They surround themselves with wise and correctable people who are prepared to correct them. They are wary of ideology.

5. The Wise Love Reproof and the Wisdom that Arises From It

The fool will not carefully consider opposing positions to discover what element of wisdom might lie within them, but will leap at whatever excuse he can find—the tone, the political alignment, or the personality of the speaker, etc., etc.—to dismiss and ignore them. Ultimately, whether he realizes it or not, he hates wisdom, as the task of wisdom is discomforting for him and he will avoid it at all costs. By contrast, the wise will endure considerable discomfort to seek wisdom wherever it is to be found. He will willingly expose himself to scathing rebuke, to embarrassing correction, to social alienation, or to the loss of pride entailed in learning from his sharpest critics or opponents or climbing down from former stances, if only he can grow in wisdom.

The wise constantly tries to increase his sensitivity to truth through the practice of close attention, whereas much of the intellectual effort of fools is expended in explaining away unwelcome truth or rationalizing error (for instance, the wise reader of Scripture tries to read the text on its own terms, whereas the foolish reader tries to avoid the force of the text either by introducing ambiguity wherever he can, or imposing his own sense upon it). The wise diligently and desirously seek out wisdom, whereas wisdom has to be force-fed to the fool.

6. Fools Take Refuge in Scorn and Scoffing

When a fool is faced with an unwelcome viewpoint, his characteristic response is scoffing, ridicule, or dismissal, rather than careful and thoughtful engagement. Levity and scorn are a refuge against correction and Scripture frequently highlights the way that fools’ first recourse when challenged is to such a response. The fool will also slander the wise as an excuse not to listen to them.

Fools are typically threatened by the proximity of opposing viewpoints and require defence mechanisms against them. This is the case even among fools who hold genuine truths. For too many Christians ridicule of others functions primarily to address the fool’s psychological need to inure himself against all other viewpoints, of ensuring that he does not feel any pull of truth in other positions that might dent his unearned self-confidence. Indeed, even evangelism itself can be perverted from a loving sharing of truth with others to a self-defensive assertion of truth against others in order to resist genuine encounter with different viewpoints.

Those with a genuine confidence in their knowledge and a real commitment to truth are much less likely instinctively to employ ridicule. The wise can use ridicule, but it is one of the less employed tools in their toolbox and isn’t deployed without care.

7. Truth is Marked by Consistent Witness

The wise are concerned to demonstrate consistency in their viewpoints, as agreement between witnesses and viewpoints are evidence of the truth of a matter or case. However, the beliefs of a fool are generally marked by great inconsistency. They lack the hallmarks of truth because they are adopted for their usefulness in confirming the fool in his ways, rather than for their truth. The fool will jump between inconsistent positions as a matter of convenience. The consistency of the positions and beliefs of fools are found, not in the agreement of their substance, but in the fact that they all, in some way or another, further entrench the fools in their prior ways and beliefs. Also, the intellectual laziness of fools means that they will not diligently seek to grow in a true consistency (although some might develop a consistency in falsehoods designed merely to inure them against challenge, rather than as a pursuit of truth itself).

8. The Fool is All Mouth

The fool has a love for expressing his opinion, but much less pleasure in the hard work of earning the right to one. The fool would know everything even if he studied nothing. The fool broadcasts his folly and will not hold his peace in the presence of those wiser than himself. To submit to the wise in holding his tongue is too much of an affront to the pride of the fool, who hates correction and the indignity of having to honour the greater wisdom of others. The fool’s incessant speech is a defence against listening and a way to avoid admitting the limitations of his knowledge, all while constantly exposing their limited knowledge.

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