When I was a kid in Boonville, N.C., I’d occasionally hear a grownup say, “He ain’t got a lick of sense,” meaning someone had just done something really stupid. I’d also hear, “That old boy’s too smart for his own good,” meaning someone with an overabundance of brains unchecked by common sense can bring himself a heap of trouble.
As an adult, I discovered that these two types – the fool and the learned fool – were often one and the same. For instance, I knew a man who purchased a rambling old house in a Smoky Mountain town with the aim of turning it into an inn. An investment counselor, he was supposedly wise with money, yet he spent tens of thousands of dollars on a guest swimming pool in a place where the summers were cool and short. To the little-used pool, he added a pricey restaurant with expensive wines in a location where the clientele was middle-class.
The inn closed after four or five years. Rumor had it that the owner was involved in some financial bruhaha after ducking out on his partners.
We see the same mismanagement and foolhardiness in our federal government, even though many politicians and bureaucrats have prestigious university degrees and backgrounds. Our ever-escalating national debt, the billions wasted on projects like climate change, where officials and advocates claimed to possess godlike abilities to change the earth’s temperature, the hundreds of billions wasted on projects that were more boondoggle than benefit: the list of waste, failure, and foolishness is long and dreary.
Fortunately, two sure-fire remedies are available to the rest of us for fending off foolishness.
First, there’s common sense, which flies under the banner of prudence, or wisdom, one of the four classical virtues. It’s practical wisdom, reason, and good judgment applied to all sorts of situations. Unfortunately, common sense is always in high demand, but all too often in short supply.
If we turn again to the federal government, we see the results of this scarcity. Common sense should tell us that closing schools for months on end during a pandemic will have negative effects on students’ learning and social development. Common sense should tell us that permitting millions of unvetted immigrants into the country will lead to higher crime rates. Common sense should make clear that something is amiss when men and women enter Congress with modest savings and become multimillionaires shortly thereafter.
This practical wisdom is a necessary and wonderful tool for building a good life. The student who works her way through college, avoiding borrowed money as much as possible, has the vision to see beyond school when she won’t have to pay a huge chunk of her income to pay down debt. The guy who keeps his car in good repair, regularly having the oil changed and keeping the tires properly inflated, is applying old-fashioned common sense to a simple problem.
Then there’s humility. Often described as the mother or root of the cardinal virtues, humility encompasses the ability and honesty to recognize and acknowledge both our strengths and weaknesses, what we know and don’t know, what we can do and what we can’t. It precludes bragging or thinking ourselves superior to others without evidence. Humility properly understood and practiced keeps us and the world around us in perspective.
Diminish or remove humility, and we make orphans of the virtues. We see the results of this matricide in totalitarian countries, where creed and ideology kill first humility and then undercut the classical virtues. We see this absence of humility throughout our own culture: the hubristic academics, for instance, who formulate and push gender and race theories as if they were realities, the egotistical celebrities who offer their opinions as if from Olympus, the arrogant reporters and editors who slant or ignore facts when these don’t fit their agenda, the online influencers who mask opinion as truth. These and many other people, from politicians to our next-door neighbors, lack those three key words – “I don’t know” – that separate truth seekers from dogmatists.
Historical figures like George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and Albert Einstein, to name only a few, knew themselves well enough to know what they did not know. They understood, as Washington confessed in his Farewell Address, that they were capable of mistakes. Countless others, from the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to the most ordinary guy in the world, have either apprehended or at least vaguely sensed the value of humility. As Daryl Von Tongeren wrote in “Humble: Free Yourself from the Traps of a Narcissistic World, “humility is a boon for healthy relationships, a necessary component for the workplace, and an important part of any society that seeks to grow and change.”
Are we too smart for our own good? When we lack common sense and humility, the answer will most likely be yes.
Look at the evidence around you and see if you agree.
—
This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image credit: Unsplash
