A Riddle
What do these descriptions have in common?
- Struck with pace inside the intersection of post and bar
- Contains no salt
- Deploys coherent packages of software functionality as loosely coupled, coarse-grained services
Answer?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
They all describe good.
- A good penalty kick
- A good glass of drinking water
- A good enterprise architecture ( It delivers dramatically improved application flexibility, allowing enterprises to continuously adapt constellations of services to keep IT capabilities aligned with business goals!)
Meaning
Most of the time, we demand that our words have meaning. In fact, if something doesn’t have meaning, we tend to say, “That’s not a real word.” It’s nonsense. It’s babble, and we don’t use it (because it’s utterly useless).
So what on earth are we doing messing about with a word like, ‘good’? It can mean “right inside the post”. It can mean “salt free”. It can mean “salted” (Yay popcorn!). It can mean “loosely coupled”.
It seems it can mean anything. How could the same word possibly mean either salt-free or salted? It’s so flexible as to be self-contradictory. It’s meaningless! This has to be the worst word in the English language! (Serious question to readers – can you think of a more flexible word?)
But…
No-one seems to have any problems using it. It’s one of the most basic words we have in English. I don’t recall ever having to look it up in a dictionary. (Go ahead. Try. Then come back and tell me how on earth the same word can mean both “not depreciated” and “amusing”. Ahahahaha! Your lack of inflation is killing me!)
It has simple, direct translations to many languages. Bon. Goed. Gut. Boen. Bueno. It’s not just easy in English.
Do we even need to explain it to little kids? I think they just pick it up from context. Even our dogs understand this word. It’s one of the most commonly used, least misunderstood words we have.
And yet we can’t come up with a decent definition for it. No one has ever told me what this word means.
It means *everything*. And yet we can still understand it and use it.
This is the greatest word in the English language.
The irony is, we don’t spend any time talking about it, because, well, it’s that great! We don’t talk about it, we just go ahead and use it. Well, I want to talk about it!
Definitions and Synonyms
My previous post on wisdom is laboured. It rambles on forever – it’s brutal! (Same as this one).
But I think I have a better handle on wisdom now, because wisdom is a synonym for good. “Wisdom” means “good” in the same way that “salted” means good.
“Salted” means good popcorn. Wisdom means good decision making. Good choosing.
There is one enormous difference between wisdom and salt, however. Salt has a meaning beyond its context specific, popcorn limited, alternate interpretation of, “good”. Most of the time, it just means “salt.”
Wisdom, however, has little meaning beyond it’s core association with the good. Words we find flung around when defining “wisdom” and “wise” are “discern”, “sound judgement”, “good sense”, and of course, “knowledge”.
Some nice questions to ask here, like, “Discernment of what?” Could it be discernment of anything except other than the good from the bad? And isn’t “sound judgement” a nice synonym for “good judgment?” (Go ahead, look it up. And then come back and we can ask why the listed definitions of ‘sound’ are simply a subset of the listed definitions of ‘good’. Even ‘legally valid’ shows up both places 
)
The only independent meaning of wisdom apart from good seems to have to do with ‘knowledge’. Let’s go on and dig a little deeper into knowledge. Does any kind of knowledge bring wisdom?
Actually, the very first definition for wisdom in Merriam Webster seems to answer this for us, all nicely authoritatively and decisively:
1 a: accumulated philosophic or scientific learning
Case closed. Philosophy and science are wise, all others need not apply. Let’s go home? Nope, hold on.
Digging under the definition for ‘wise’, we find this gem:
3 (archaic) : skilled in magic or divination
Now, don’t that just beat all? If I’m reading this right, it means that over time, the knowledge thought to be wise changed. Color me suspicious, but I just might be talked into suspecting that Merriam-Webster are allowing their definitions to be swayed by our current Western fascination with Science as the answer to all our problems.
My only point, of course, is that the knowledge which pertains to wisdom is not any knowledge but only good knowledge. At some point people thought that was Magic, now they think it’s Science. But all the while, wisdom meant stocking up on the good knowledge. At no point were people well versed on pig farming considered especially wise.
Two facts are evident:
- Wisdom serves exclusively as a synonym for good in the context of knowledge and decision making
- History as presented by a snap analysis of Merriam Webster indicates that people have no clue as to what “good” actually is. It’s just not pig farming.
Conclusion
By realizing that ‘wisdom’ is really just a synonym for ‘good’ in the context of decisions, choices and their underlying knowledge, we can discover a couple really shocking things. The first is that wisdom, as a word, inherits all the problems (and the greatness) of goodness. Is it wise to deploy coherent packages of software functionality?
Well… It depends if you’re building an enterprise architecture or not! Once we think in terms of knowing the good (magic? science?), and choosing the good (salt? salt free?) things click and the question of, “What is good?” begins to loom large on our radar.
That’s the second point – If we want to know what is wise, to have any sense of how to live our lives, we have to tackle that most confusing, most contradictory of all words. We have to ask,
“What is good?”
6 Responses to "Wisdom II – Wisdom is Good"
At no point were people well versed on pig farming considered especially wise.
And why not? A foolish pig farmer soon finds himself out of business.
A wise pig farmer gives good care to his pigs, sees to their proper feeding, and health needs, is there when they farrow to make sure that no piglet gets stuck enroute, that the mother doesn’t savage her young, that the milk let-down reflex has kicked in properly.
The foolish farmer goes off for a night to the pub and ends up with dead livestock.
Any Alberta pig farmer still on his feet financially these days is exceptionally wise.
Or perhaps, the wisest are those who got out of raising pigs last year.
I knew people would call that out….
I’m not saying that the phrase, “a wise pig farmer” is non-sensical or an oxymoron. But when we say, “a wise pig farmer”, we are describing someone with good knowledge *in the context of pig farming*. That is, they are equipped to make good pig-farming decisions, which extend from livestock care all the way to business sense and moderation in drinking.
I’m just saying, when the aliens come down and say, “Take me to your sage”, in yesteryear it would have been Aristotle, today it’s Hawking. The only cut of the representation that pig farmers get is the cold shoulder.
Notice that the use of the word, ‘sage’ in my example above is completely void of context. This is important. If they had said, “Take me to your pig farming sage” we would supply a different person entirely
. But by denying us context they force us to make a decision about what is good. If they had said, “pig farming sage” we would have had to make a decision about what is good *in the area of pig farming*. But if they just say, ‘sage’, we are forced to ask, “What is good knowledge?” in the most general, open sense.
So I’m not denying that there is “good knowledge” related to pig farming, just that people haven’t historically looked to pig farming as *a general source* of “good knowledge”. Two easy reasons for this:
1)Most people aren’t pig farmers
2)Pig manure isn’t particularly glamorous.
Of course, I’m sure someone like Leo Tolstoy would have said that a simple pig farmer’s life was the source of far more good knowledge than that of a sophisticated or glamorous philosopher.
I’ll have that quote for you momentarily.
And you didn’t even touch on the materialism implicit in something like, “have you got the goods?”
Or the magical feel about the good spell (is that really just about the selfishness of the prosperity gospel–with a little extra spin to make it supernatural??)
You’re right – there’s a (not so?) sneaky assumption there that physical wares are ‘good’ but since I don’t have a real definition for the word, it’s hard to say whether or not that assumption is correct.
And I must say, a good spell is beter than a bad spel.
“Serious question to readers – can you think of a more flexible word?”
I’ll go with Bill:
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
Maybe not more flexible, but definitely harder to define.