By Rudy Barnes, Jr.,April 12, 2025
Wisdom is closely related to intelligence, but it’s more than that. Wisdom combines intelligence learned through an academic education together with our values and common sense learned from a lifetime of experience; and it includes normative standards that shape a person’s ability to survive and succeed in a competitive world.
Higher standards of education do not necessarily provide more wisdom. Wise people, like Jesus and Abraham Lincoln, had great wisdom but little formal education; but most people need a formal education and altruistic values to have enough wisdom to be productive citizens. A.I., or artificial intelligence, can’t provide all the ingredients for wisdom.
Donald Trump calls himself a smart man. That’s debatable; but few wise people would consider Trump a wise man; and he has clearly demonstrated a lack of wisdom to be President. David Brooks considers Trump’s performance so far to be “something so stupid it’s the achievement of a lifetime.”
Remember, though, that Trump was elected to be our President--not once but twice. All who voted for him are culpable for whatever he’s done, and that Trump’s “stupid” policies were predictable. Trump is an unprincipled, nasty and narcissistic man intent on gaining political power, and he made his intent so obvious that all who voted for him share his guilt.
David Brooks correctly condemns the failure to maintain educational standards, but remember that all voters have to be 18 years old. The church and families bear responsibility for the values of adult voters who claim to be Christians, and they got what they voted for; and the rest of us have to live with their immoral political judgment.
Our flawed cultural values of greed, hedonism, and materialism have corrupted our democracy, and it will take years, if ever, to reverse those values with the universal and altruistic moral values taught by Jesus. But we live in a democracy, so we deserve what a majority of our people have supported, and I don’t see a dramatic change in values in the near future.
With wisdom, values are more important than intelligence. Trump’s narcissistic values are despicable and show little sign of changing for the better. Trump is giving democracy and Christianity a bad name in America with his tariffs spreading the misery of his despotic reign around the world. Trump’s real stupidity is not being able to see himself as others see him.
Trump has already undermined Christianity with stupid assertions about how great his oppressive policies are. If Trump’s MAGA were a universal virtue, Trump would be worshipped as the god his supporters think he is; but Satan does a convincing imitation of God in politics and the church, and often wins elections in democracies like America, Russia and even Israel.
Notes:
David Brooks said his biggest worry is that behavioral change is leading to cultural change; but cultural change and the erosion of wisdom are already upon us. “We’re abandoning a value that used to be pretty central to our culture — the idea that you should work hard to improve your capacity for wisdom and judgment all the days of your life. That education, including lifelong out-of-school learning, is really valuable.
Americans had less schooling in decades past, but out of this urge for intellectual self-improvement, they bought encyclopedias for their homes, subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and sat, with much longer attention spans, through long lectures or three-hour Lincoln-Douglas debates. Once you start using your mind, you find that learning isn’t merely calisthenics for your ability to render judgment; it’s intrinsically fun.
But today one gets the sense that a lot of people are disengaging from the whole idea of mental effort and mental training. Absenteeism rates soared during the pandemic and have remained high since. If American parents truly valued education would 26 percent of students have been chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year?
Last year The Atlantic published an essay by Rose Horowitch titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” One professor recalled the lively classroom discussions of books like “Crime and Punishment.” Now the students say they can’t handle that kind of reading load.
The philosophy professor Troy Jollimore wrote in The Walrus: “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It’s not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by A.I. — papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course.”
Older people have always complained about “kids these days,” but this time we have empirical data to show that the observations are true.
What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.
Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence. Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.” On Trump Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/opinion/education-smart-thinking-reading-tariffs.html.
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