"There are no transcendent insights that rise above human difference. Yet wisdom exists if we look in the right places"

"You have spent your life cultivating the wisdom necessary to deal with loss and give advice and consolation, but your friend needs neither of these."

"They are sure that their father has passed into a better place and are simply thankful that he has gone home to be with God. At least that’s what they say, but you can tell that underneath the veneer they are profoundly grief stricken."

"You are angry that your friend refuses to accept that there is neither heaven nor hell, and you cannot believe that someone you love so much is so taken in by what you consider lies and fantasy."

"At the same time, you know the importance of the Church for your friend, and do not want to come off condescending or patronising. You don’t know what to do, and begin to ask yourself what good your pursuit of wisdom has been for all these years."

"Surprising as it may seem, classic wisdom texts like the ones you’ve been reading have, in fact, much to help you understand this situation. You just haven’t been taught to see them that way."

"Indeed, most contemporary accounts teach you that issues of identity destroy the pursuit of wisdom."

"the American philosopher Allan Bloom argued that the point of an education should be to explore ‘what is accessible to all men as men through their common and distinctive faculty, reason.’"

"He found, however, that universities were more likely to teach a cultural relativism focused on how different cultures approached the truth."

"According to Bloom, this splintering of truth into culture also manifested on an individual level, as people pursued studies based on their class, gender or race – not their common concern for what it meant to be wise."

"But what he found most meaningful was not this particular identity but, via Socrates, ‘a sort of identity that felt true to my deepest self … the life of the mind – a way of living that held out the possibility of absorbing the disparate parts of who I was into some kind of integrated whole.’"

"As the psychologist Igor Grossmann noted in 2020 in his helpful summary for Aeon of the state of wisdom studies, one of the key goals is to find a definition of wisdom that transcends individual cultures by identifying common threads around the world."

"The two key features of the current definition are: moral groundedness and metacognition. Grossmann writes that the first implies ‘ideas such as the sense of shared humanity, pursuit of truth, recognition of the need to balance personal interests with other people’s interests, and a general willingness to cooperate and have compassion for others.’"

"To be wise does not only mean learning about what we share as humans. It also means being able to work through our differences reasonably without abandoning our moral insights."

"Perhaps surprisingly, this challenge to unite shared humanity and cultural identity is not unique to the modern world."

"While the quest for a common humanity is certainly present in ancient texts, there is also an idea in wisdom traditions that, to truly be wise, we have to learn to live with different ideas of the truth."

"Pace Bloom and Montás, I would argue that part of the reason that wisdom has been downgraded in education is because of the very opposition between universal truth and particular experience."

"We are told to seek a wisdom outside of our identities but, everywhere we go, we find ourselves and others enmeshed in these very identities."

"Plato suggests that much of what Solon gave to Athens was sparked by his visiting the city of Sais in Egypt."

"This learning how to design society through the study of nature is what he calls wisdom:"

"In other words, the wisdom of Egypt is knowing how to survive the destruction of nature through the organisation of society."

"Solon, who helped reduce inequality in Athens, knew that political and material equality can help bind people together, even as they pursue different paths in life."

"Wisdom isn’t something available to us just from thinking or reading texts in one’s own ‘tradition’. As Plato shows us, wisdom requires travel, because truths that are not known in one place may be known in another."

"It is simply a claim that no particular group of humans has had the time and foresight to sort out everything, and thus we all can learn from others about issues that some cultures have missed or forgotten."

"In the pursuit of wisdom, one has to be able to listen for such stories."

"It is that they both have bits of wisdom that the other might use."

"If we don’t read the story as hubris offending God but rather as a simple process of human life, we may extract more meaning from it for contemporary purposes. Simply think of any human collective activity, like building a nation or even just a new technology. Those who build nations wind up split among factions. New technologies like planes can bring people together, but they also send them farther apart. Social media is perhaps the most glaring example of this. We do things thinking that we will find unity, but what we in fact achieve is separation."

"Difference does not lead us into a meaningless relativism, but into a quest to share knowledge"

"There is always a cost to these inventions: they create differences between the inventors and the others."

"This is what Babel teaches us. Those who live in cities or use particular technologies or speak particular languages or play particular kinds of music come to feel alienated from others."

"Because each new use of human potential depends on the creation of difference, it is also, ironically, what keeps humans from coming together to realise the invention’s fullest potential through cooperation."

"Buddhist meditation, Christian devotional practice, Yurok philosophy of the land or Stoic daily lessons could develop only because groups of peoples decided to focus their attention on these aspects of human life."

"In so doing, they likely sought to develop principles that might be useful to others. But because the development of these philosophies requires such intensity, it changed people in the process. By the time an offer could be made, others had gone their own way. Pluralists can combine some of the practices, but not all of them."

"It is sometimes assumed that because of Babel there is no hope of universal connection. But the opposite is true. It is because of Babel that we can truly understand what it means to have a universal connection: it is necessary but imperfect."

"If we understand the wisdom of Babel, then we can understand that difference does not lead us into a meaningless relativism, but rather into a perpetual quest to develop and share knowledge."

"If we forget the wisdom of Babel, then we think that the knowledge we have found matters more than what others have found in their own quests."

"The key is to combine it with the kind of humble metacognition that we can learn from Plato and Babel."

"First, we need to understand wisdom differently: not only as one’s personal philosophical quest, but also as an immersion in understanding how different humans and cultures develop their philosophies of life."

"Second, we recognise that this is a good thing, and that wisdom diversity is just like biodiversity: different cultures and individuals preserve insights that may later be useful for the wellbeing of others."

"Third, we appreciate that difference is not the end of the story, and that protection from destruction and danger requires a social organisation that embodies equality and cooperative behaviour."

"We are wise only if we learn to speak across our differences"

"At the same time, they could see that these differences are not what tears them apart, but what makes them share a fundamental human quest to make sense of the world and develop beliefs and institutions that can guide us to survive and thrive together."

"These traditions teach us that being wise means using our understanding of the natural and social worlds to develop the human institutions that can lift us up through the turbulence of life."

"But it does give us the tools to be prepared to respond, and to remind us that, if we are going to be wise, we can neither neglect the different life positions of those around us, nor fail to remember our shared human conditions."