Hard won wisdom engenders humility. The wise aren’t naïve about what they’ve gained, but some of what they’ve gained will be a healthy sense of the limits of their own wisdom. This is similar to the way that those who truly understand a topic are much more aware of the limits of their knowledge, but with the ability to chose good from bad.

How do you tell what’s good and what’s bad? How do you tell the difference between wisdom and folly? It’s not like it’s just intrinsic to all of us, or we would make fewer bad decisions.

I think it’s tempting to suggest that our difficulty here is because our minds are blinded by sin. There’s something to that, but we have to remember that Adam and Eve were told to not eat of the tree of wisdom—presumably they didn’t find it naturally easy either—because they still needed to grow up.

To learn to be wise is work. It requires training. The writer to the Hebrews reminds us:

But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
Hebrews 5.14

The mature are those who have powers of discernment, trained. The wisdom to tell the difference between true and false, right and wrong, wise and foolish, requires training.

What kind of training? Training through constant practice. We aren’t talking about going on a course to be wise, we’re talking about wisdom developing over time by using it. It takes time.

We live in a moment where we’re surrounded by ‘disinformation,’ (some of it coming from those who are so keen to tell us about disinformation) it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell if something you see on the internet is true. It’s likely that this trend will only accelerate; the ability of generative AI to produce images and video that look real at a casual glance is already advanced and it’s only getting better and quicker. Realistically, our shared public understanding of what constitutes truth is withering on the vine; if it’s not already dead. You might think this makes it uniquely important that we learn to determine truth from error; while it’s an unfortunate headwind, it’s not our biggest problem.

Wisdom is not about telling if the video was true or not, wisdom has been vital to successful human life since the Garden. The biggest opponent to the work of wisdom in our culture is not the sudden plethora of tools that make it easier for the average Joe to lie as convincingly as nations already can, though these tools are of concern for our public discourse. Rather the biggest opponent to the work of wisdom in our culture is its speed. Wisdom is work, it doesn’t come overnight, and it rarely comes to the young.

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