Who Are Wise, Who Not?
Insight often comes not from an Ivy League degree but by way of animal cunning, instinct, and hard work.
By Victor Davis Hanson — November 22, 2016
“Cleverness is not wisdom.”
— Euripides, the Bacchae
At the height of the sophistic age in classical Athens, the playwright Euripides asked an eternal question in his masterpiece, the Bacchae: “What is wisdom?”
Was wisdom defined as clever wordplay, or as the urban sophistication of the robed philosophers in the agora and rhetoricians in the assembly?
Or instead was true wisdom a deeper and more modest appreciation of unchanging human nature throughout the ages, which reminds us to avoid hubris, tread carefully, always expect the unlikely, and distrust the self-acclaimed wise who eventually prove clever fools? At the end of the play, a savage, merciless nemesis is unleashed on the hubristic wise of the establishment.
Euripides would have appreciated the ironies of the 2016 election.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/442385/print
