Wisdom

What Does It Mean To Be Wise?

Remember, we are all in this together

Museum, Arrecife, depicting the colonisation of Lanzarote. Photo: author’s own.

If you don’t know that there’s a war going on in Europe, let me enlighten you. Interestingly, the war started after the Covid pandemic had calmed down a bit. Maybe we in the Global North can only cope with one emergency at a time.

Of course, there are other wars. The war in Sudan is particularly brutal.

That kind of cruelty is hard to fathom. You think systematically gassing people was bad? Then you will also recognize that isolating young babies away from the physical contact of others, often after their parents have died as a result of diseases associated with lack of access to resources, and then allowing them to go through the unimaginable agony of organ failure, alone, often while hooked up to excruciatingly painful machines that are supposed to be keeping them alive, while the dust, bombs and screams rend the air, sets our species apart.

Some say we are now once again staring the possibility of nuclear war in the face. Even if we weren’t, our collective reaction to emergencies of the kind described above, and the more global emergencies of biodiversity loss, pollution, climate change and social, political and financial polarisation…