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Harnessing The Power of Wisdom: From Data To Wisdom: October 2013
Harnessing The Power of Wisdom: From Data To Wisdom: October 2013
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SERIES
Additional books in this series can be found on Nova’s website
under the Series tab.
ANDREW TARGOWSKI
New York
Copyright © 2013 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
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Preface ix
Introduction xiii
Part I. Introduction To Wisdom 1
Chapter 1 From Information Technology to Wisdom 3
Chapter 2 History of Research on Wisdom 9
Chapter 3 Applied Wisdom 19
Chapter 4 Wise People 33
Part II. Wisdom Concept 45
Chapter 5 Philosophical Wisdom 47
Chapter 6 Purposes of Life 55
Chapter 7 Four Minds of Wisdom 59
Chapter 8 History of Civilization Wisdom 81
Chapter 9 Judgment and Choice 91
Chapter 10 Art of Living 101
Chapter 11 What is Wisdom? 111
Part III. Wisdom, People and Civilization 115
Chapter 12 The Wisdom of People and Their Civilization 117
Chapter 13 Wise Civilization 125
viii Contents
Edmund Husserl
The Crisis of the European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology
1
. Infostrada was launched to a pilot project as the “Polish Internet” in 1972-74, whereas the
Internet was made available to civilian users only in 1983.
2
. See: A. Targowski, “Dialog pokolenia pomostu z pokoleniami ojców i kolumbów, czyli
refleksje o Powstaniu Warszawskim,” [Dialogue of the Bridge Generation with the Fathers
and Columbus Generation, Refleksions on the Warsaw Rising] in Tragizm i sens Powstania
Warszawskiego [Tragism and Sense of the Warsaw Rising], ed. J. Kuczyński i J.L.
Krakowiak, 2006, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Akademickie DIALOG, 204-221.
x Andrew Targowski
civilizations, nations and states operate, with the USA and Poland in close-up.
The candid and passionate discourse results from something more than pain
and a lack of consent to the world as it is; it also stems from an engineer's
passion for exploration and treating the world as a fabric that lends itself to
modification and an ever more creative design. As Vice-President (and
founder, 2003+) of the Council of Polish-American Engineers in North
America, he is as far as possible removed from a contemplative perception of
spirituality, which he sees as a Promethean civilizational mission of the
extravert and entrepreneurial personality.
Therefore, the reader, too, will be stimulated to a critical appraisal of the
author’s views, but to one's own judgments, attitudes and choices, as well; no
one can remain indifferent. Targowski favors dialogue and has been a theorist
of communication, so he even expects such reactions – he is in no way into
soliloquies; what he means is actively participate in the co-creation of the
collective wisdom of action. To refer to Husserl again, one can feel wise only
in so much as one belongs to a wise community. This is not a confession made
by a recluse, a frustrated individual, an anarchist, an individualist or a liberal;
rather, it is a voice coming from someone who is in agreement with the idea of
the Greek community of philosophers, universalistically called by Husserl the
“functionaries of humanity,” and whom I would dub the vestals (guards of the
cult) of reason and universal human culture. Thus, too, speaks the President of
the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (2007-
2013), aspiring to the role of the co-founder of Wise Civilization.
Andrew Targowski
Informatician-Civilizationist-Philosopher
Western Michigan University (USA)
PART I. INTRODUCTION TO WISDOM
Chapter 1
Paradigm
WISDOM choice
Universal
Knowledge
Global
Knowledge
judgment
Communication Frame
Theoretical
Knowledge
Basic
Knowledge
Concept direction
Information change
Data measurement
event
Existence
whether someone selling arms is also responsible for their use, whether a
slandered man can be cleared of infamy or what is fetus if it is not life.
If Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China constituted a coherent Eastern
civilizational region, the Greeks and Romans, living in an essentially mild
Mediterranean climate, were a different, Western civilizational region. The
many Greek islands encouraged sailing and perfecting the relevant sills. The
people travelling between the islands appreciated the right judgments and
choices that led to efficient and good lives: ones sometimes made more
pleasant by poetry and sculpture (i.e. noticing not only wisdom but also
beauty). This is why the Greek heroes, as of approximation, the sixth century
BCE, were philosophers rather than saints, artists or wealthy people. Greeks
singled out Seven Sages: Thales of Miletus, Chilion of Sparta, Bias of Priene,
Periander of Corinth, Solon of Athens, Pittacus of Mytilene and Cleobulus of
Lindos. Plato added two more: Anacharsis – a Scythian philosopher, and
Myson of Chenae. Their sayings were even inscribed on the temple of Apollo
in Delphi. The wise man Bias was reported as saying that “wisdom ought to be
appreciated as a means of travelling from youth to old age as it is more
enduring than any other commodity” (Durant, 1966:141)1.
It is highly probable that the wisdom of the East was taken over by the
travelling Greeks, who were willing to develop it further. Thus, they created
philosophy, which in Greek means the “love of wisdom.” What the Greeks
meant was that, in the accomplishment of life, man should attain wisdom. It
was Thales of Miletus (624-547 BCE) who expressed this hope. He sought to
transform mythos into logos (i.e. myth into science), and pursued universal
knowledge founded upon practical qualifications of people doing various jobs.
He argued that “anything made of water, comes from water and consists of
water.” He was the first to pose the questions, in the classical civilization that
were later to become philosophers’, most important tasks, lasting even until
now.
From Thales onwards, the progress of philosophy – the only science at
that time – has been about gradual development of knowledge on human
thinking. Its first millennium in antiquity (6 century BCE to 4 century CE)
consisted in searching for order in the universe. The philosophers pursuing that
included Thales, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The grand triad of
Greek philosophers – Socrates (470-399 BCE), Plato (427-347 BCE) and
Aristotle (384-322 BCE) – still dominate the world’s philosophy. Socrates was
a master in looking for the truth2, and Plato was an outspoken champion for
the power of ideas, whereas Aristotle was a genius who theoretically
integrated morality, aesthetics, logic, politics, science and metaphysics into
12 Andrew Targowski
one system3. It was Aristotle who called wisdom a virtue, but he only
considered god to be wise; he saw people as stupid, for they do not know the
goal of life, and therefore their choices are not good and, hence, unwise. He
thought that wisdom was a prescription for action and an intellectual virtue
alongside others, such as friendship, justice and understanding. Unlike moral
virtues -- courage, temperance and freedom – he associated human wisdom
with the rational part of the soul, with the latter linked to god, who was the
only truly wise one.
However, the much appreciated wisdom climax, highly esteemed until the
present day, consists of the works of Roman neo-Stoics of 1st and 2nd century
CE: Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, while leaving aside the broad
philosophical issues, highlight man’s negligible role in the world permeated by
the divine order and providence. Still, man is akin to a rational deity, and so
obliged to perfection. The evening-time compunction is somewhat related to
the contemporary of ‘self-management’ theorists’ reflection on whether they
have done all that they planned, without a sense of guilt and sin. So, as Polish
Rev. Jan Maria Bocheński (1992) said in his Podręcznik mądrości tego świata
(Manual of Wisdom of this World), the essence of the wisdom of this world is
a rule of self-governance and sensible planned action, applied to the totality of
man’s life, rather than the sheer fear of god. He had it published even though,
as a Christian, he does not recommend the wisdom of this world “since just
because you profess one faith does not imply that you should not know the
others,” which is in no disagreement with Janusz Kuczyński’s universalistic
principle of multi-level identification and my Spirituality 2.0 [see chapter 13].
In the Middle Ages (6th to 14th centuries CE), philosophers applied
themselves to eternal happiness, i.e. the role of religion in the attainment of
this goal. The Greek science of philosophy turned into scholastics. The fall of
Rome (476 CE) ushered in the dark ages and until the Renaissance (1453)
people, living in the poverty and constant looting prevalent in the nascent
lands of Europe, reached out to God. People massively joined Christian orders
so they could survive in the safety provided by the group. As the adage goes
“fear makes you turn to God.” The leading philosophers of the period include
Gilbert, Roger Bacon and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Modern philosophy (15th to 20th centuries) engrossed itself in the methods
of reasoning, and the passage from existence to cognition, and from religion to
science. However, the issue of wisdom was in a way eliminated from
philosophical research in the last 500 years. This topic seems to be too banal to
philosophers, who chose to close themselves behind the doors of their ivory
towers and ceased to take any interest in day-to-day living. The dominant
History of Research on Wisdom 13
theme in their studies is the definition of the so-called world outlook. Notably,
any major philosopher does have their worldview. By no means, whatsoever,
can they ever mention another worldview, as if those were not significant any
longer. This might account for philosophy being so different from sciences
such as physics, biology or chemistry, where discoveries and improvements
are built on the preceding achievements. The contemporary physics does not
deny the achievements of Newton, Bohr or Skłodowska-Curie, even though it
has upgraded or outright changed those. The recent 500 years of philosophy
were marked by the ideas of sages such as Giordano Bruno, Copernicus,
Descartes, Galileo, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx,
Kirkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Russel, Whitehead, Carnap, Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, Sartre, Popper, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Kuhn, Derrida, Habermas
and others.
In 1912, the research on wisdom was being conducted by the German
psychologist William Stern, who investigated the Intelligence Quotient in
children and then in adults, especially military recruits. IQ is seen by many as
wisdom, whereas what it really does is assess an individual’s capability of
doing some more complex tasks. It could then be seen as a wisdom ability
index.
In the end of the 20th century, the American psychologist Vivian Clayton
distinguished between three activities determining wisdom: obtaining
cognitive knowledge, reflective analysis of the knowledge and its filtering
with one’s emotions. When she retired, further psychological research was
undertaken in Germany.
In 1980 the German Max Planck Institute started a project on wisdom
research (which can be understood as “taking wisdom down to the lab”) under
the guidance of the German-American psychologist Paul Baltes (1939-2006).
In this Berlin Project, wisdom was recognized as “expert knowledge having a
pragmatic influence on fullness of life4.” The further part of the definition
regarded wisdom as right judgment, refined advice, analysis of psychological
depth, emotion control and committed understanding. However, to the benefit
of the cause, a group of psychologists from that institute was polemic with
philosophers’ perception of wisdom as utopian. They saw wisdom as
unpopular because, having studied 700 people, they did not find anyone wise
among them. They concluded that the development of wisdom reaches its
climax around age 65, while around age 75 the human mind loses its
intellectual capabilities, with a number of exceptions, obviously. The German-
American psychologist Monica Ardelt is in disagreement with the Max Planck
psychologists’ proposition that wisdom is a unique privilege of experts. She
14 Andrew Targowski
thinks that regular people can be wise, too. She continued V. Clayton’s
research in a 3D model that integrated ‘cognition, reflection and emotions.’
To the detriment of the cause, though, the Berlin Project did not launch
any broader empirical research on wisdom in the world. It was only the
American psychologist Robert J. Stenberg from Yale University who
undertook research on wisdom, proving that the investigation of the human
potential cannot conclude with the IQ; it must also reckon with wisdom5.
Wisdom is understood as a successful application of intelligence for the sake
of attaining common good by means of balanced personal, inter-personal and
supra-personal interest, in both short and long term, taking into account
adaptation to the environment, changing, or even selecting a new environment.
Wisdom, he believes, can thus be equated with prudence. This is a lengthy
definition of wisdom, a very complex, and apparently complete one as well. It
is, however, difficult in application and seemingly applies to vital life
situations only.
One of the most recent researchers of wisdom is the American publicist
Stephen Hall, who made a review of wisdom research for the New York Times6
in 2007. He concluded that young people are more pessimistic than the older
ones in expressing their opinions, the reason for that being that the individuals
more advanced in age have encountered more negative situations than the
young, and so they have developed more emotional composure and tend to
regain a balance in their psyche after a negative experience. Still, the author
proposes no definition of wisdom, which he sees as a mystery; the way
wisdom is developed remains a mystery to him, as well. It is hardly surprising
that the most famous Encyclopedia Britannica offers no definition of wisdom,
either.
It is puzzling that neither philosophers nor psychologists should have
taken any notice of the fact that, since the end of World War II (1939-1945),
economic decision-making theorists have developed research on making
optimal decisions, that is, essentially wise ones. A number of pioneers such as
Koompans (1975), Kantorowicz (1975), Simon (1978), and Kahneman (2002)
were even given Nobel Prizes in Economics precisely for elaborating a method
of making best possible decisions. Robert McNamara (2016-2009) devised a
method of deploying various categories of loads among the ships sailing in
Land Lease supply convoys to the UK and Russia. Since these were attacked
by German U-boats, usually several of them sank. The method was about
ensuring that the mix of goods should reach its destination and about avoiding
the same category of items being shipped on one vessel. Was this method not a
wise solution? This is how a discipline of operational research was initiated in
History of Research on Wisdom 15
industry that e.g. served the purpose of devising such a section of metal sheets
as was necessary to make some parts so that the loss of the raw material would
be minimal. Was this optimal section of sheets not a reflection of the
designer’s wisdom? What about their calculations leading to planning a best
possible timetable of production in order to minimize machine idleness? This,
too, betrays wisdom in decision-making.
As far as calculating optimal decisions in corporate management,
management science has tackled this problem. Methods of linear programming
have been in operation until today for the best possible planning of a
production program so as to manufacture the necessary number of cars of
various models to a maximum company profit or to minimum company
expenditure (but never both at the same time). This is the so-called diet
problem: how many specific kinds of food need to be eaten to secure the
necessary number of proteins and vitamins at the lowest possible cost. Optimal
diet is an expression of wise eating, is it not? Another method of linear
programming, the so-called transportation method, computes the best possible
route of a truck’s journey in shipping goods to shops so that the sum total of
the route will be most cost-effective in terms of labor and fuel, and shortest in
time.
The development of IT in computer architecture is about building ever-
faster computers that would process information as fast as people do.
According to some estimates, such a computer is supposed to be available
around 2025. A question can be asked, though, whether a computer like this
would think wisely, if there is no consensus as to what exactly knowledge is.
Another branch of IT deals with automating decisions by means of artificial
intelligence. AI can automate a well-defined concept of decision, but its
wisdom will never be greater than the wisdom of the designer of such a
computer system. More importantly, it won’t be a wisdom independently
generated by a computer without it being influenced by a human designer.
At the beginning of the 1990s informatics offered data mining from large
databases, which a company such as Walmart collects every day in their
several thousand shops scattered all over the world. This provides a wealth of
information, and even knowledge, about the clients of the company. It appears
that the goods in the highest demand on Monday are nappies and beer because
when, after the weekend, the wife asks her man to replenish the stock of the
disposables that have run out over the weekend, he also makes a point of
buying some beer, which he drank over the same period watching some
sporting events. On the basis of the rules regarding the most popular goods on
Monday, the store manager is ready to make the best decisions – and wise
16 Andrew Targowski
ones at that – concerning these goods. First of all, he must secure their
sufficient stock on Monday; second, he could place those in the same shelves
if he liked to facilitate the job to the customers. However, if he wished to
maximize the company’s turnover, he would place those along aisles far away
from each other to provoke the customers to buy other stuff upon an impulse,
too, on their way from the nappies shelf to the one with beers, or the other way
round. Aren’t the decisions of that manager wise?
At the beginning of the 21st century an IT discipline began to emerge,
called cognitive informatics7. Until then, the science dealt with vocational
applications, such as computerizing engineering jobs, process control systems
(air traffic or production control) and organizations (administration, business,
university, etc.). Cognitive informatics, in turn, investigates the effect of IT on
the cognition of the increasing knowledge (i.e. generally speaking on the
informed behavior) of man. On the basis of his model of Semantic Ladder
(1990), which defines the data-information-concept-knowledge-wisdom
hierarchy, the present author has set out to formulate the interdisciplinary
theory of wisdom (2011), probably the most important virtue of man, resulting
from the ever improving cognition of the world and life situations.
The undersigned has founded his theory of wisdom on the following
assumptions:
1. Any sane person can make wise decisions throughout their lifetime,
from childhood to old age. Surely, the quality of such wisdom
changes over the individual’s life and the historical time of the
civilization, such as what was wise in the 19th century need not be
wise in the 21st century.
2. Wise decisions need not be expert in nature – they are wise in a
specific situation, not necessarily the wisest ever.
3. Wisdom ought to be defined in such terms as to be understood not
only by experts but by an average man. Seen from this standpoint,
wisdom is good judgment and choice in the context of the art of
living. One can imagine someone very knowledgeable but unwise.
The reverse can be true, too. Right judgment alone is insufficient,
then, for the right choice to be made: emotions, intuition, will, the
historical time of the civilization, and many other factors come into
play, that is, the factors that can be universally characterized as the art
of living, which stem not only from well-defined principles but also
from vaguely seen rules or outright new principles, necessary for the
situation and time.
History of Research on Wisdom 17
APPLIED WISDOM
If man is a rational being (rationale animal), it is only insofar as his
whole civilization is a rational civilization,(…),and which now of necessity
consciously directs human becoming.
There appears to be no civilized man who did not encounter religion. Even
unbelievers made a decision in terms of faith after having some deeper insights
into it. Since we broke with pagan religions and, for as long as we have been
20 Andrew Targowski
dealing with monistic religions, we have known that they teach that the path to
good action leads through prudence and telling right from wrong -- morality.
The wisdom of the spiritual man is then about moral judgment and a prudent
choice of comportment.
The administration of justice is a civil set of rules of how to avoid conflict
and crime in society. Every member of society must reckon with the law if
they cherish freedom. In the Western Civilization it was assumed that a wise
law should be administered prudently in order to attain the same effect when
applied in like situations. The law in the USA is guided by nearly Solomon-
like wisdom when it prefers a possible culprit to avoid conviction (due to
doubts surfacing over trials) rather than allowing an innocent one to be
convicted.
In medicine, it was as long ago as at the time of the Greek Hippocrates (5th
century BC) that an oath for physicians was introduced that held “primum non
nocere,” that is, “first, do no harm.” The progress of medicine in the 20th and
21st centuries had doctors facing extremely difficult decisions to be taken in
order to save a patient’s life, such as salvaging the life of a mother at the
expense of the life of the baby, or the application of chemotherapy, which can
destroy cancer but can also damage other organs. Other decisions can be
mentioned, such as those related to a termination of life support, genetic
engineering, transplantations or cloning. These require wisdom guided by
morality – a choice between saving or harming a patient. In other words, a
doctor ought to be moral and prudent, applying some treatment protocols
rather than innovations, particularly those untested. It is also known from
practice that a good doctor (read: a wise one), in order to arouse trust in their
treatment methods, ought to be well-mannered at the patient’s bed or, to put it
more universally, must be polite when examining the patient.
Summing up, one can assume that the wisdom of religion, administration
of justice and medicine (healthcare) consists in morality and prudence. It
follows that a priest, lawyer or physician ought to make moral and prudent
decisions if they want to be wise. At least this is what society expects of them.
It is known from the practice of contemporary life that priests of organized
religion often act neither morally nor prudently. Their excuse tends to be that
they are the same sorts of citizens as others in the society. They thus imply that
the rest of society is immoral and reckless, so they form no exception to the
rule. They tend to forget that their mission and calling to priesthood is
supposed to be precisely about preaching morality and prudence to their
faithful, who earn them a living by contributing to the collection tray.
Applied Wisdom 21
in fact exceptions, and felonious ones at that, such as the notorious German
doctor Mengele, who experimented on the prisoners of the Auschwitz Nazi
death camp, or those who kill terminally sick patients stealthily in hospitals
(known cases in the USA). These include the paramedics of the Lodz
emergency service who, instead of saving the sick, killed them with lethal
injections to increase the turnover of certain undertakers who were paying
them commissions. Sure, these exceptions appear insignificant, when seen
against the background of well or even perfectly treated patients, who are
cured by wise doctors.
Praise is to medics for when immoral and imprudent priest and lawyer
fail, at least one can statistically count on wise doctors. This kind of optimism
may be corroborated by the fact that thanks to the wisdom of medical science
and physicians, the last millennium has seen life expectancy in the Western
Civilization treble whereas in the Islamic Civilization – say, in Afghanistan –
where healthcare is low quality, the average life expectancy is only 38 years,
that is, 50% longer that it used to be 1,000 years ago.
The wisdom of intellectuals, writers and philosophers is of vital
significance to the population at large, as these prominent thinkers lead
societies, nations, states and civilizations. The products of their wisdom
include informing their societies on their state, development of global trends
and concepts, that is, usually the ideas that should emend the existing state of
affairs. They present their ideas in writing in the examples of wise reasoning,
which justifies the solutions being offered.
The role of the intellectuals (including writers and philosophers) is a new
one in the new societies. So far, it was the priests, scribes and even court
jesters who stimulated people’s consciousness. The intellectuals as the social
avant guarde dates back to the French Revolution (1789). This was when the
French philosophers, such as Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1712-1778) educated the
French elite in Parisian salons as to the need to overthrow monarchy and make
the king’s subjects turn independent citizens. Their American friends (Thomas
Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and others) learned the new ideas
in France and set the scene for the American Revolution (1776) or provided its
rationale in the post-revolutionary period. In the next age, that is, in the 19th
century, Karl Marx (1818-1883) laid the intellectual foundations for the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 with his Capital (1867) and the Communist
Manifesto, written together with Frederic Engels.
In the Polish People’s Republic (1945-1989), the regime took excellent
care of intellectuals (poets and writers in particular) in order that they would
glorify the dictatorship of the proletariat. The authorities made perfect use of
24 Andrew Targowski
Third Republic, for which they risk no consequences. At that time the intra-
regime opposition was made up of intellectuals who wanted better living
conditions for Poland. Two books promoted such ideas Gra o jutro (A Game
for Tomorrow) by Stefan and Andrzej Bratkowski and Informatyka klucz do
dobrobytu (Information Technology: the Key to Prosperity) by Andrzej
Targowski. The wisdom of the intellectuals of that time was about smuggling
the ideas of western democracy and technology in undercover, in such ways as
to make it possible for society to suspect something written between the lines
of texts which, if straightforward about things, would never have been allowed
through by censorship. Further actions by intellectuals got complicated once
the regime became successful in breaking them up and limiting their influence
on society in the official media with the manipulation of truth, typical for
totalitarian authorities.
However, the role of intellectuals in society grew by means of launching
the so-called underground circulation of printed media since the regime was
unable to meet the buoyant aspirations of the Poles of the 1970s. The wisdom
of the then intellectuals, such as Leszek Moczulski, Adam Michnik,
Broniosław Geremek and others, was that they knew that intelligentsia alone
could not change the dictatorship of the Polish People’s Republic.
The industrial working class had to be made more activist. The KOR
committee for the defense of workers was a challenge to the dictatorship of the
proletariat in Poland. Workers exploited by the dictatorial power -- allegedly
in their own name and on their behalf -- gained in the intellectuals of the day
effective and wise allies. This resulted in the Revolution of Solidarity (Polish
Revolution) in 1980-1989 and the abolition of the dictatorship of the Polish
People’s Republic. The wisdom of intellectuals and their disciples – workers –
won the day. This was a rare example of applied wisdom in the history of
practicing politics in the 1000+ years of complicated Polish history.
The role of intellectuals on the other side of the Iron Curtain, that is, in the
United States, was about maintaining the status quo – in the defense of
democracy and Capitalism against any form of penetration by Communism.
After the victory of the allied forces and the USSR over Germany, Italy and
Japan in 1945, there were fears that the popular Uncle Joe, i.e. Joseph Stalin
would want to expand his influence outside of the Soviet Union, which did
happen first in relation to Eastern Europe and then China, Korea, Vietnam and
Cuba. The West was most fearful that Communism might take root in the USA
and Western Europe, where there were communist parties.
The response to the Communist threat was the doctrine of containing
Communism, formulated by G. Kennan in 1946. The doctrine was a
26 Andrew Targowski
expectation that college will be “fun, no logic and instructor will be nice.”
Whatever can be said about scientific methods taught in colleges – particularly
business colleges – they do teach balancing various interests because business
and (especially) administrative management is about satisfactory decision-
making at best, and is constrained by a number of conditions and resources.
Be that as it may, the spectacular progress of the Western Civilization
results from the fact that it was developed by wise people. So, people do
practice wisdom, with prominent businessmen, scholars, engineers, physicians,
artists, politicians, generals in particular, but not only. Indeed, these great
individuals are successful people, who succeeded thanks to their wisdom. It is
often claimed that they achieved success thanks to their being sly; this is a
simplification, though. Being clever is not enough to make one a great
engineer or artist – you also need to have some proven concepts of solving
problems. Without those, judgment and choice (i.e. wisdom) cannot be
successfully applied.
The next chapter will set out to analyze some prominent individuals in
terms of their wisdom. At this point it will merely be stated that the wisdom of
each of the categories of prominent people is about a creative concept of
action that leads to good judgment and a choice of behavior. A great
businessman will thus be an individual who spotted a market niche – a demand
for a new product or service. In 2012, the list of top global business people
featured a young woman who introduced the spandex fiber to stockings and
clothes, which make the people who wear those garments, look more
attractive. She started from investing all her savings ($5,000) several years
ago.
The wisdom of the IT mega-tycoon Bill Gates was about knowing that an
easy operating system would be applied in millions of computers. And so it
happened. He preferred to develop his small company – Microsoft – rather
than accept the offer to head the great and prestigious IBM Corporation, which
found itself in crisis in the 1980s.
The examples of applied wisdom – at least in the Western Civilization –
reach the consciousness of those within its bounds in a number of forms.
These include schools, colleges, media, books, discussions, the home, where
youths are brought up, and where various conversations take place. In this
way, examples of applied wisdom reach regular people and make wisdom
practiced in society, perhaps more intuitively than consciously, though. This
process is illustrated by the model of applying wisdom in the Western
Civilization, shown in Figure 3.1.
Applied Wisdom 31
Religion
Justice Morality
Medicine
and
Prudence
Balancing Interests
Methods
Intelectuals Outstanding
and Factors
Writers People
Reasoning Conceptualization
WISE PEOPLE
In the chapter on applied wisdom I concluded that wise people are marked
by their capability of powerful conceptualization and their choice of
appropriate solutions. Allow me to trace their concepts and the impact they
made upon the society. An analysis will follow of some examples of wise
intellectuals, writers, politicians, generals, businessmen, engineers, scientists
and artists.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a philosopher of politics, and
presented his creed in The Social Contract (Du contract social, 1762), where
he defined the subsequent motto of the French Revolution (1789): “Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity.” He claimed that man is born free and only later they
get “shackled” by life. He even thought that the 18th century progress in
science and arts brings man into servitude rather than freedom (A Discourse on
the Arts and Sciences, 1750), which to a degree proves true 250 years after, in
the 21st century. He was the first intellectual to attack the right to own an
estate, which was a criticism of the achievements of the English Revolution of
1688. He undermined the proposition that the majority is always right. His
wisdom was about an in-depth comprehension of the limitations of the
principles that characterized the development of the French society at that
time. He himself was able to promote the idea which led to the Great French
Revolution that made man free rather than a subject of a ruler. He also
authored the bill of the Polish Constitution that was adopted by the Sejm on
May 3, 1791, and which was so progressive for the day that it led to the
partition of Poland by Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795.
Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), a sociologist and political scientist
who – upon the downfall of Communism and the emergence of the New
World Order (NWO) – defined this situation in a way that astonished everyone
34 Andrew Targowski
by holding true years after. The term was introduced by the optimistic
president George Bush, Sr.; however, the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers
questioned this optimistic attitude by the senior of the Presidents Bush. The
world lost a sense of security. The cause of the attack on New York and the
growing global turmoil was not understood. As things were, S. Huntington
published the famous paper The Clash of Civilizations in the prestigious
bimonthly journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, followed by the book of the same
title in 1996. His wisdom is about defining the essence of the New World
Order, where there is no war on terror but, rather, a conflict between the
civilizations of Islam, the West and the East (in the South of Russia). It is a
religious war of sorts, because it involves a clash of different value systems.
Stefan Bratkowski (1934--). Since 1956 he worked on the editorial board
of Po prostu, which provoked the student revolt at the Warsaw University of
Technology in 1956, putting an end to Stalinism in the Polish People’s
republic in the late 1960s. His book Księga wróżb prawdziwych [a Book of
True Fortune Telling] became widely popular as it predicted the future created
by the progress of science and technology. With his brother, Andrzej, he wrote
the book Gra o jutro [a Game Played for Tomorrow], which questioned the
way in which the economy of the Polish People’s Republic functioned,
popularized western experience in management and called for the
reinstatement of money as a measure of efficiency in place of the
implementation of plans. As of May, 1970, he was the editor of the Thursday
supplement to Życie Warszawy – Życie i Nowoczesność – which turned into an
almost symbolic organ of common sense and “opposition through constructive
criticism,” only to be disbanded in 1973. Together with Bogdan Gotowski and
Andrzej Wielowiejski, he subsequently organized a seminar called
“Experience and Future” [Doświadczenie i Przyszłość, DiP]. Upon the ban on
public discussions imposed on it, the caucus – now deprived of leadership,
statute and membership list – carried out surveys, and on this basis prepared
influencial reports. The first report – On the Plight of the Republic and the
ways of its emendation – came out in 1979. The independent publishing house
NOWA undertook to publish the book with massive circulation; it also
published the other reports by DiP, which were subsequently broadcast by the
Polish Section of Radio Free Europe. DiP played an important role in shaping
the public opinion in the period immediately preceding the formation of
“Solidarity,” as well as in establishing the theoretical and political foundation
for the systemic transformations in Poland.
Following the introduction of the martial law in Poland on 13 Dec.,
1981, he actively supported the illegal anti-Communist opposition. In 1987 he
Wise People 35
Nobel Peace Prize for the Marshall Plan, which allowed for the reconstruction
of Western Europe after the war-time destruction. He was such a modest man
that he even declined a million-dollar proposal to write memoirs – an
exorbitant sum for the time. He was a true soldier, entirely devoted to winning
that Great War, so vital for mankind. He won it only to do his best to avoid
glory afterward.
There are few generals like this. Most generals are mediocre and even bad
commanders. Bad generals have a propensity for either risky or no
maneuverings. They have poor personalities, questionable mind formats and
suffer from the lack of erudition. In effect, they lose battles and wars.
Henry Ford (1863-1947) is thought of as the most prominent business
person in the 20th century, who laid the foundations for the American
manufacturing. At the beginning of that century, there were 2700 companies
that were in the business of producing automobiles, each releasing several
dozen vehicles yearly and those were works of art. Such a car cost several
thousand dollars and only a very tiny fraction of the elite could afford one.
Ford resolved to produce autos at $300 or below with a view to selling those to
ordinary customers, including his own workers. He even increased their wages
to make them able to afford to buy a Model T car. In order to produce such
cheap automobiles, he used assembly lines and scientific management that
made creative use of the investigation of time motion, first introduced by
Frederic Taylor. These methods came to be called 'Fordism,' with the
industrial development based on it – Americanism = Fordism + Taylorism.
Low cost was possible thanks to the introduction of extensive standardization
of parts and sub-assemblies. Therefore, a saying by Ford has gained fame
“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is
black.”
Along with the manufacturing success, Ford's cheap cars, smaller
companies started to go bankrupt. Now there are only 3 domestic car
manufacturers: GM, Ford and Chrysler(owned by Fiat). Ford's wisdom was
about excellent conceptualization of the market and its potential for certain
goods, fostered by the employment of gifted managers who developed the
40 Andrew Targowski
it with his mathematical calculations, and hence he was not afraid of criticism,
sure of his mathematical proofs. Also, he was able to draw upon the
achievements of other scholars (Robert Hook, 1653-1703) whom he would
give due credit. He thus broke with the tradition of philosophers who limit
themselves to presenting their own outlook only. This is how he demonstrated
what the progress of science – seen as an additive process – ought to be like.
Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) authored the theory of evolution by
natural and sexual selection. Now the theory is the basic paradigm of biology.
His wisdom sprang from his 5-year observation of Nature and travels around
the world. He investigated various animals, plants, fossils and talked to many
different people. He collected a great number of (examples - data) from natural
solutions, observed slight variations in the same domain of fauna and flora and
reached his generalizations in that manner. He simultaneously arrived at
similar conclusions as Alfred Wallace (1823-1913), but he was smarter than
Wallace as he published the results of his work first.
annihilated. This was the time of the Cuban Crisis, when a nuclear attack on
the USA was being expected from Cuba. The network was first used in the
military as the so-called ARPANET. In 1983, upon the motion of Paul Baran,
the network was divided into the Milinet and the Internet. Baran's engineering
wisdom was about using the advice from a neurosurgeon to structure the
network in the likeness of the human brain. As we know, our brain has no
central point and its parts function autonomously. It occurred to Baran that in
order that for a communication to move around such a network, it must have
an addressed electronic envelope, which would control its movement along the
multiple pathways of the net; something like the Cruise missiles, which thanks
to the GPS guide themselves onto the target on their own. The Internet
communicated the world and set in motion an intensive globalization of
business, media and flow of people. Its significance can be compared to the
invention of print3,4.
The French painter Jean Debuffet (1901-1985) was wondering whether art
can be wise and answered that “it is an unwise idea.” Art is as necessary for
life as bread. Without bread, man dies of hunger; without art, one dies of
boredom.” Stanisław I. Witkiewicz [Witkacy] (1885-1935) said that “art is a
discipline where a lie never produces good effects.” This is corroborated by
the crisis of art in the USSR where socialist realism was being promoted, or a
similar crisis in Germany at the time when a “beautiful German” was being
publicized.
How do artists attain wisdom in their profession? Pablo Picasso made
over 70,000 sketches for his paintings. It implies that he made several hundred
sketches for any one of his final artistic outcomes, meaning that, other than his
great talent, what contributed to his wisdom/success was also hard work.
PHILOSOPHICAL WISDOM
Philosophy evolved from a mission to investigate wisdom but, in the
course of its 2,600-year-long history, it has forgotten about wisdom1.
Philosophers have been propagating their own wisdom by way of declaring
their world-view. Philosophy gave rise to the progress of science, but it has not
become science itself since philosophers do not take into account the output of
others in the field and do not integrate it with their own achievements. The
principle seems to be relating one's own views to the Grand Trio (Socrates,
Plato and Aristotle, i.e. the context of approx. 2,400 years ago). We are
familiar with Aristotle referring back to Plato, Voltaire to Newton, Marx to
Hegel, but these are just the most popular exceptions. The practice of non-
additive development of philosophy is unimaginable in science. Science
develops in a ladder fashion, where every staff missing results in difficulty in
moving up or down a field of science.
Philosophers have become specialists in posing great questions on the
point of our lives. Take the questions asked by the English philosopher B.
Russell2:
These are very wise questions by the English philosopher, ones that have
not been answered yet. It does not even seem that anyone has set about trying
to answer those yet. All Nobel Prize physicists are convicted that the world is
ruled by chaos. A Nobel laureate and a physicist, too, Albert Einstein had an
illusion that he could reconcile science with faith as he was curious about what
laws that man does not know were in Gods basket. However, the English
cosmologist Stephen Hawking claims that he knows God's way of thinking.
He thinks that the black holes in space originate from a divine plan to
manipulate the energy of the universe. Yet, aware of the consecutive
enunciations on the revelations by this scholar, one may suspect that his
discovery of the divine way of thinking is self-publicity rather than the truth.
The discovery of Higgs boson, sometimes called the “God particle” on July 4,
2012, makes physicists a little embarrassed as it seems that the Big Bang was
caused by the energy coming from an invisible Higgs boson that would have
come from a different world, which brings down the theory that the Big Bang
was an independent explosion.
Doubt as to the significance of human life on Earth is foreign only to
monotheistic religions. According to the Christian religion, man exists in order
to praise God. If it were so, it would mean that God is an egomaniac. This is
no noble trait. Worse, according to this religion God is omniscient and
almighty; why, then, does God allow an uncontrollable population expansion,
which can bring civilization to a halt. Does God do that so as to have more
people who praise him? The Christian Church is cautious and does not voice
its views on human discoveries related to the way in which the world operates.
It does not want to make a mistake that was once made when it preached the
geocentric dogma of Aristotle and punished dissenters with stakes. Polish
scientist-priest Nicolaus Copernicus was so afraid of the punishment that he
revealed the fact of having written the tract De Revolutionibus Orbium
Coelestium only when he was sure he was dying. Its point was – contrary to
what the Church was preaching – that it was the Earth that revolved round the
Sun, not conversely.
Since then, the Church has stuck to some subject matter and has tied God
to a specialization of dealing with the values of man's behavior only. Praise is
to the Church for that. In the opinion of this author, were there no religion, it
would have to be invented. Who else would teach virtues and values? Religion
is a component part of a civilized man's culture, and if properly realized, it
Philosophical Wisdom 49
should serve man well. The problem, as usual, lies in details – in the right
implementation of organized religion. In the 21st century, religion is perceived
as one of the best organized corporations with great marketing and the market
being divided into specialized consumer areas.
The Polish Pope John Paul II claimed there was no contradiction between
science and religion, but he must have been overly optimistic. If he did say so,
though, let us benefit and let the Polish-American author, his great enthusiast,
voice his opinion on that issue. If God created this world because he is
almighty, it means that God is not only a master-moralist, but – above all – he
is a supreme cosmologist, astronomer, geologist, biologist, physician,
engineer, scholar, artist, sociologist and another specialist in the construction
of the world, life and all the interrelations involved.
God is an almighty super-creator, then. If so, there is a question if he
could have created this universe alone. Given the volume of the jobs to do, he
should have had experts, devices and organizations. Where are they, then? In
the blazes of fire and smoke and asteroids that hover around in space. If those
questions are an outcome of my sick imagination, then God needs no helpers
or computers to direct the progress of the world and so can he create the world
with one magic word?
In the same context it could be observed that from the standpoint of
science, the Holy Spirit is simply a “telephone” over which God
communicates with us, except that we do not know his communication system.
If it is not so, it would mean for me that God is a conjurer, of the kind of
David Copperfield.
One is for sure: God must be wise. The supreme deity arranged for Project
Man on a planet called Earth, where he gave man autonomy of determining
their own fate on the basis of their own morality, knowledge and wisdom. In
this design, the research task is about whether the homo sapiens species can
function for a long time; probably not forever, as in such a case the choice of
the planet was wrong, but man will come to an end anyway once the Sun
expires in several billion years and the energy that powers human biology has
run out. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why did he not foresee the
temporary quality of Planet Earth?
God is certainly wise, though, as is evident in the foresight of man's
propensity for evil. This is why God made us mortals: evil immortal man
could threaten the very God. And then it is far from uncertain what would
happen to God and the world? For a while I have allowed theological and
philosophical fantasy to run wild; it needs elaboration if man seeks education
and wisdom, or perhaps man wishes to know too much?
50 Andrew Targowski
The main world outlooks have been mentioned above; there may well be
more of those, albeit less popular. Sure enough, no regular person without any
philosophical background has any clue about these, and it is a great loss for
philosophy that it has lost touch with people, and possibly with reality, as well.
So that those philosophical approaches to the wisdom of life could occur,
they need to be sorted out and redacted to form a functional whole. Sorting
will be about grouping the approaches affecting general reasoning methods
and individual reasoning. Also, the approaches will be classified in terms of
their logical (logos) and mythological (mythos) character; philosophy is proud
to be founded upon all approaches rather than one. Sets of so diverse
approaches of the Western Civilization will be divided upon the author's gut
feeling as follows:
These world outlooks teach one that a wise man is one who is pragmatic,
can anticipate situations (apriorism) and knows what wisdom is about (knows
its theory). They should also be idealistic and down-to-earth, realistic, too, and
understand that elitism reflects natural diversity and determines progress; but a
wise man is ethical, as well. All these virtues stem from the progress of
philosophy. However, the pragmatism indicated is New Pragmatism, which
3
[English translation: Praxiology. An introduction to the science of efficient action],
54 Andrew Targowski
PURPOSES OF LIFE
Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was perhaps right in saying that if people do not
know the purpose of their life, they cannot make wise decisions. Indeed, in his
day human life was much less complicated then it is now in the Western
Civilization. 2,400 years ago, the purpose of life was to survive until the
following day, have something to eat, avoid getting killed or being held
captive and thus becoming a slave. The average life expectancy was 25 years
of age.
Aristotle lived longer (he died at 62) and did have a very efficient life. He
was a son of a physician working at the court of the emperor Alexander the
Great (356-323), whom he would teach and advise. Upon his resignation from
this role, he set up a school in Athens and prospered. Upon the death of
Alexander the Great, who lived fast and furious but over an extremely short
lifespan (33 years), the public opinion of Athens turned against the great
leader and Aristotle had to move away to Chalcis, where he devoted his life to
a selfless pursuit of philosophical truth about the world and life.
The literature of management research knows a hierarchy that
characterizes the life of man – Maslow’s Hierarchy (1943) – classifying man's
needs from those of physiology (air, water, food, sleep, procreative sex), safety
(of the body, family, employment, resources), love/belonging (friendship,
family, sexual intimacy), esteem (confidence, achievement, respect), and self-
actualization (morality, creativity, problem solving). Although Abraham
Maslow investigated the needs of such people as FDR or Einstein, self-
actualization does not appear to have been the main goal of their lives.
56 Andrew Targowski
8- Acomplished Life
7- Meaningful Life
s ed
6- Interesting Life
rea
inc
5- Virtuous Life
m
do
wis
4- Healthy Life
nd
ea
3- Peaceful Life
if
of l
2- Surviving
ity
Life
lex
mp
1- Wise
co
Life
Figure 6.1. The Hierarchy of the Purpose of Life in Western Civilization as they are
Perceived in the 21st Century (The Targowski Model)
This life purposes hierarchy has been built upon an assumption that a wise
life is essential for life advancement and meeting ever higher targets. This
model does not contain the proposition by Aristotle that fulfilled man is a
happy individual since human life can be happy if it has a positive balance.
Happiness is so elusive and transient that it cannot be imagined to be attained
for good1. There are few exceptions and therefore any goal of life can be
Purposes of Life 57
4. The present author remembers this war very well, as he himself, as a 7-year-old got out from
under dead bodies of those shot dead during the Warsaw Rising in August 1944 at the
corner of ul. Madalińskiego i Kazimierzowska, with his mother, Halina Targowska nee
Four Minds of Wisdom 61
vengeful sentiments among the people might lead to the success of that party,
but is it wise from the perspective of the national interest? Like in the case of
the Tea Party, we are dealing here with the domination of the Basic Mind,
which can generate this kind of policy. Yet, three other minds are missing.
The Basic Mind had evolved in man by 200,000 years ago, when homo
sapiens had developed an intuitive manner of communicating on the basis of
body language and facial expression. This led to the development of learning
and remembering the language of mimicry and also the expansion of brain:
memory and associative circuits. In the course of time, this was replaced by
the spoken language and symbols; it was possible to remember stories and
myths. As a result, it was made possible to get organized into families, tribes
and society, which led to an even bigger expansion of the brain. Practicing this
info-communication led to the development of external forms of
communication: written language, depictions, papyri and books. In this way,
societies became increasingly organized and evolved moral virtues and values
(within religion) so as to control the desirable comportment of the members of
society. Notions of crime and punishment were powerfully ingrained and
enforced in those societies and this has continued to date. The Basic Mind is
still there and is most commonly applied in the practice of “everyday life.”
The Basic Mind generates knowledge and wisdom of the common-sense
kind. Is it only at the level of junior high school? Knowledge and wisdom is
applied by a vast majority of people around the globe. Examples of this kind
of knowledge include: you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it
drink; there is none so deaf as those who won't hear; wisdom makes wise
people wiser; there is a silence before the storm, and the like. Americans know
Murphy's law, which says that if anything can go wrong it will. Law II says
that a new system generates new problems.
The Understanding (Theoretical) Mind began to develop with high
intensity 500 years ago, when the invention of print made theoretical
knowledge disseminated. Universities may have been around in Europe since
1200: in Paris (1200), Naples (1229), Cambridge (1243), Sorbonne (1257),
Lisbon (1290), Cracow (1364), Vienna (1365), Heidelberg (1386), but it was
the invention of print (1453) which made knowledge spread instantly. First it
was navigation knowledge, which led to great geographic discoveries
(America – 1492), followed by algebra (1494), applied in commercial
Krzyżańska 14 times wouded in this rising and his father Stanislaw hanged in March, 1945,
as a saboteur of V2 missiles manufacturing in the Mittelbau-Dora camp in Nordhousen in
the Harz Mountains, Germany.
62 Andrew Targowski
practice science. Such was the plight of the most prominent scholar of the
16th century – Galileo (1564-1642). He was a great Italian astronomer,
physicist and philosopher, who put to question the new physical and
mathematical concept of Nature, but in order to survive, Galileo recanted on
his ideas and lived in home detention, even though in private he was said to
admit: “and yet it moves.” He meant the Copernican model, which had it that
the Earth revolves round the Sun.
When men sensed the power of the mind, they began developing
numerous world outlooks, which as of then became the subject matter of
philosophy. Renaissance (1453-1600) made man reborn from the darkness of
the Middle Ages and brought back the enjoyment of creating beauty and being
in close intimacy with it. Those who excelled in it included Michelangelo
(1475–1564) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) as well as the many great
Italian architects. English philosophers such as John Locke (1632-1704), who
spoke for the importance of experience in life (empiricism) and David Hume
(1711-1776), who developed the theory of skepticism and uncertainty in
action, and also the French encyclopedists: Denis Diderot (1713–1784),
Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire (1694-1778), the famous opponent of
organized religion, intolerance, fanaticism and superstition, as well as Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), whose essays, replete with social protest
became the yeasts for the Great French Revolution of 1789, and Isaac Newton
(1642-1727) laid the foundations for the Enlightenment (17th-18th cc.), also
called the Age of Reason, which is still on and is taking on ever new tasks.
As the enlightenment of man progressed in the 18th century, the
significance of reason in man's life was most fully realized by then philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He thought that man's reason is capable of
independent judgment of situation, unaffected by “facts.” He also thought that
man's reason is able to anticipate the situation and “facts,” too. Therefore,
reason is capable of conceptualizing the future situations (a priori) and
predicts their consequences before they are empirically known, as argued for
by the skeptic David Hume. Kant's philosophy influenced the German
idealism, represented by Hegel and Schelling.
In philosophy, G.F.W. Hegel (1770-1831) broke with the static
investigation of life, history and civilization in favor of the dynamics
controlled by dialectic; that is, drawing a resolution from thesis and antithesis,
action and counter-action.
On the basis of dialectic, Karl Marx (1818-1883) defined Communism,
whereas the 20th and 21st century progress of democracy is founded upon
control and equilibrium (dialectic) between the three pillars of state power:
64 Andrew Targowski
Russia, France and Greece – and even in China. The development of railways
in that period could be compared to the development of the Internet today
since it was the railway that decided the pace of the Industrial Revolution, just
as today the Internet determines the global civilization. The few Polish
scientists left the country, too, as was the case with Maria Skłodowska-Curie.
Alas, the bourgeois revolution, founded upon the premises of the Great French
Revolution, only reached Poland in 1918; industrial revolution, despite
showing some signs of arrival in the inter-war period with the Central Poland's
Industrial Hub and the port of Gdynia, truly set off only after 1945.
The two revolutions, so vital for the formation of the Understanding
Mind, could not have occurred in Poland for political reasons, but also due to
there being so few people with the Understanding Mind in Poland. The Polish
elites were then very patriotic, but they were too emotional. They did not think
rationally. They had one mind and no patience to develop Poland as an
example for Russia, as Tsar Nicholas would have liked it; they preferred to
fight him in spite of the opposition from the generals in 1830. The Polish
patriots behaved in a completely different way than did the Czech elites, which
used their presence in the Austro-Hungarian Empire very wisely.
Margrave Aleksander Wielopolski, the Polish administrator of the Russian
Partition said that “you can die for Poland but cannot co-operate with the
Poles.” This syndrome of a lack of the Understanding Mind could be painfully
felt in the parliamentary chaos of 1919-1926, the situation which had led to the
German and Soviet invasions of Poland in 1939 and in the decision to start the
rising in Warsaw in 1944, in particular.
The Polish elites of those days did not understand the complexity of the
Polish situation and had wrong judgment of the situation; they made wrong
choices of the solution options, that is, they acted unwisely, causing calamities
for individuals, the people and the state. These unwise decisions will be
discussed in Chapter 14 – Wisdom, Truth, and Responsibility.
In analyzing the development of the Understanding Mind one may realize
why some countries developed faster than others. Those countries that had
evolved understanding minds earlier and better than others, also made faster
and better progress. Take the USA in the 20th and the 21st centuries, where
the percentage of people with higher education is 30 per cent, against Poland's
18 per cent in 20115. There are 1,7 times fewer Poles with this mind than in
America, which is considered one of those best developed in terms of this
mind.
The Understanding Mind makes judgment on the basis of common sense
(Basic Mind) and theoretical knowledge. A nurse with 2-year specialist
66 Andrew Targowski
countries of Latin America. There was even a moment in the history of the two
empires when they divided the globe into two spheres of influence, with the
Western hemisphere belonging to Spain and the East – to Portugal. The Global
Mind, which the Spaniards developed too, did not help them in functioning
wisely, the effects of which can be felt even today, because when they got hold
of a lot of gold and silver in the countries of South America, they brought it
over to their own country and financed their extravagant lives by importing
almost everything from abroad. They even caused inflation in Europe due to
the excessive surplus of legal tender for payments in Europe. To make matters
worse, the Spanish Armada was defeated in the English Channel in 1588. Of
the 130 ships, 50 did not come back to their ports, which could be compared to
the defeat Napoleon suffered at Moscow in 1812. The lack of a well-
developed industrial infrastructure in Spain makes the country one of the most
crisis-stricken economies in Europe, as reflected by the 20 per cent
unemployment, which among the Spanish young people is about 40 per cent
today.
The II Wave of Globalization started under Queen Victoria in 1837 and
lasted until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The English Empire survived
until 1949. The British conquered several dozen countries thanks to their
navigation and the great navy; Canada, Australia, New Zealand, large lands in
Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Pacific, as well as India,
Ceylon, Burma and China.
To be able to rule nearly half of the world, the British developed the
Global Mind and made excellent use of it. After 1949, most countries of the
Commonwealth became independent, only to return, as independent countries,
to a union (club) of countries that recognize the Queen as the head of their
state. The Global Mind of the British developed its knowledge in ship-
building, communications, weapons and industrial goods. Their wisdom was
about selling their products in the colonies and at the same time importing
from them very cheap natural resources. The British needed to be particularly
wise in ruling such great countries as India and China. In the vast India, they
had only 1000 state officials and some military; they ruled this country using
the effectual strategy of “divide and rule” and they proved extremely
successful in keeping the Chinese down by way of feeding them opiates: not
by themselves, of course, but by using the Indian neighbors, who made good
money on that. In any event, the British put their Global Mind to good use
during World War II, when they were not disheartened by the battles lost to
Germans in 1940. Their PM W. Churchill played the war excellently to the
68 Andrew Targowski
advantage of the British even though at the beginning of the war he did not
have enough resources to beat Germany.
The III and IV Waves of Globalization began after the drawing of the Iron
Curtain in 1947. The Political West (including Japan) began to integrate and
globalize itself under the leadership of the USA whereas the Political East was
becoming integrated under coercion from the communist ideology from the
USSR. The sphere of influence of the Political East extended not only over
Eastern Europe but also included Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and to a degree
China, too, but also Cuba and countries in Africa, such as Egypt, which
sympathized with it.
The two waves of globalization competed with each other ideologically to
the degree that they endangered the world with a nuclear war. It never
occurred simply because these waves were managed by wise people on both
sides of the Curtain. The two waves of globalization ended their activities as a
result of the 1989 Polish Revolution and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in
19916. Regarding the development of the American Global Mind during the
Cold War, the following data testify to its extent and complication. In 1970,
the USA maintained a million soldiers in 30 countries, organized 5 regional
pacts, signed treaties of military co-operation with 42 countries, confronted the
USSR in 53 international organizations and provided economic and military
assistance to 100 countries7.
The present V Wave of Globalization has been around since the turn of the
20th and 21st centuries and was caused by the remarkable expansion of the
Internet. It resulted in a concept of distance having died, which made it
possible to transfer 40,000 factories from the USA to China and other
countries with cheap labor.
It proved a major financial success for global corporations and the soaring
of unemployment in the USA and a number of European countries,
particularly West European ones. This gave rise to the financial crisis of 2008
which, rather than a cyclical crisis of capitalism, proved to be a structural one.
In the Asian countries that had been notorious for poverty, living standards
went up and an ambition surfaced to overtake the Western Civilization in
economic development. The Western Global Mind, driven by short-term greed
of amassing great profits is losing to the Asian Global Mind, which is winning
an economic war without a battle. In the confrontation of the two minds, the
Internet is of more service to the Asian rather than Western Global Mind.
Thanks to the Internet, the V Wave of Virtual Globalization is surfacing; it
is founded on community networks, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter,
Linked In and others. In the 2010s the number of virtual “internauts” reached
Four Minds of Wisdom 69
1.2 billion. These people get organized in virtual communities and even a
global virtual society.
They demonstrated their power in 2011 when the so-called Indignant
protested in Wall Street (Occupy Wall Street) at the same time in 1,000 cities
across America and Europe. It is probable that in the November elections of
2016 the American Virtual Society can put forward its candidates for President
and Vice-President and can have its virtual members vote in real polling
stations.
Since Americans are equally disaffected with the Democratic and the
Republican candidate, the voting for a candidate representing the virtual
society will be an expression of mistrust for both the Democrats and the GOP.
If one of those candidates wins, it will be a revolution comparable with the
French and American Revolutions.
The Global Mind is guided by the principle “think globally, act locally.”
In practice, the power of global corporations destroys the local effort, which is
too weak to face the challenges posed by the global capital. To a degree, this
principle works well only in France, where petit bourgeoisie defends its small
businesses against the invasion of global chains, such as Walmart. The Global
Mind operates in cyberspace and reaches all the places which function in the
Internet. The paradox of this mind is its neighborhood bonds diminished in
favor of acquaintances with people who are thousands of miles away. The
Global Mind is still developing and its development constantly fails to reach a
saturation point; it always “expands and becomes ever more in-depth,” thus
becoming ever greater in terms of being informed and regarding its knowledge
and wisdom. People who are not equipped with the Global Mind, and there are
still lots of those, and maybe even the majority in the world, that is, single-
(with the Basic Mind only) or double-minded ones (those who have Basic and
Understanding Minds) cannot compete in information, knowledge and wisdom
with those who have three minds (Basic, Understanding and Global), but one
can imagine people with the basic and global minds but without the
understanding variety. A number of mariners, soldiers and civil servants on
foreign missions, as well as couriers and salesmen (self-starters and self-made
men) seem to have developed this combination.
The Universal Mind develops over an additive process as an evolution of
humanism, driven by morality, with virtues and values in particular (Figure
7.1). The evolution of humanism has been ongoing for 4,000 years, that is,
since the emergence of Judaism, which believed that life was to be in service
of people in the name of God. The guiding principle of the service was the
70 Andrew Targowski
Additve development
1789 FRENCH REVOLUTION
Individualism and liberalism
1776 AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Parliamentarism and pluralism
1688 ENGLISH REVOLUTION
Knowledge, rationalism, freedom of ideas,
XVIII ENLIGHTENMENT tolerance and pluralism
Law
I BCE-V CE ANCIENT ROME
On the basis of their powerful military, the Romans managed to order the
lives of civilians, that is, their citizens, in this “law-based polity.” Since then,
the word “civilization” has been in circulation, with the Roman law studies to
this day providing an example of universal thinking. However, after the
excesses of the Romans in conducting wars, the 1st-century Christianity
Four Minds of Wisdom 71
introduced the values of faith, hope and the love of fellow human beings. The
love for fellow human beings came as a total surprise to the Roman society
and those who were at war with it, and which were guided by ruthlessness in
their deadly struggle. People were surprised by this value, but after about three
centuries of oppression by the supreme authorities of Rome, the emperor
Constantine the Great (272-337) felt he had to recognize the Christian values
as the supreme principles of the Roman Empire (313 CE).
The fall of Rome (476 CE) submerged Europe in darkness for close to 324
years (the name Europe was not yet in use at that time) until the Franks came
to organize their empire (800) with a powerful, positive part played by
Christianity.
The process took Europe 650 years and was and found a climax in the
flourishing of the Renaissance (1453-1600), proclaiming the complete
development of man by ways such as the sponsored beauty of art (the Medicis;
sculpture and painting, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Titian) and
the grand architecture, best exemplified by St. Paul's Cathedral in the Vatican.
The financial excesses connected with the cathedral led to the Reformation,
that is, the split of the Roman Catholic Church into Catholicism and
Protestantism (banning Luter in 1521).
Soon afterward, a series of religious wars and the inquisition plunged
Europe in hatred and religious persecution for two centuries (16th and 17th).
Soon after those ceased, the era of the Enlightenment emerged towards the end
of the 17th century, which stressed tolerance in response to religious wars and
the inquisition. The Enlightenment not only emphasizes the validity of the
values of rational thinking, replacing superstitions and dogmas, but demands
that the freedom of thinking, speech and gatherings be respected, which is still
a challenge for countries with authoritarian systems (e.g. in China, the Middle
East, Cuba and Venezuela, not to mention North Korea). The US Declaration
of Independence of 1776 recognizes equality, freedom and the law, albeit only
for the whites. It was only after 190 years that black citizens were granted
equal rights with the whites. The declaration promises the individual citizen a
right to pursue happiness. The United States were such a vast country, rich in
natural resources, that happiness seemed within close reach for the lucky ones
who had emigrated from the overpopulated Europe, still engulfed in wars and
conflicts. This document is still considered the best definition of modern
liberalism and individualist philosophy. It is these values that the Tea Party
keeps drawing upon in the 21st century.
The Great French Revolution (1789) proclaimed liberty, equality and
fraternity and transformed the subject of the French king into a citizen of
72 Andrew Targowski
People tend to reject received ideas and theories and affirm their own, as if
contrary to science and facts, as Hegel wrote more than 200 years ago. Man
again reaches out for their own logic so they can resist the impact of the media
and prevent themselves being brainwashed by politicians, businessmen,
technologists, who place their own business over the common good.
Alas, Postmodernism is losing to the economic globalization of the 21st
century, which transforms the Western Civilization into Global Civilization,
with business ever more clearly becoming its “religion.” The chief value of the
global business is maximizing profits within a short time span. Whatever
business does is best, you cannot criticize it in the media or parliaments as
politicians and the media then face losing financial support. Universities start
talking about a need for sustainable development, i.e. the vitality of business,
responsibility for the environment and social responsibility. The theory of
economics begins to contrast “shallow economics” (accounting with business
costs only) with „deep economics” where social and environmental costs are
taken into account, including the effects of unemployment and transfer of jobs
to Asia, generated by business.
The paradox of the liberal economy is that as a result of the principle it
embraces, when it attains success, it stops being liberal and democratic as its
everyday activity is de facto controlled by lobbyists. Every 2-4 years voters
elect representatives, who then do as the lobbyists please, that is, they become
subordinated to the will, money and objectives of CEOs and financiers.
Liberal economy resembles a snake that eats its tail and reminds one of the
“Lenin rope,” the purchase of which a banker will borrow money for to make
money, even if they know they will be hanged on this rope.
In the modern social development of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries,
four conflicting value systems competed: the idea of nationalism and
imperialism (Russia, Prussia, Austria), the ideas of communism and
totalitarianism (Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela), the idea of absolutist-
theological monarchies (Middle East) and the ideas of liberal democracy (the
Political West). Social progress is constantly on the move and its result might
boil down to wars over resources, as their fast exhaustion by the overpopulated
earth will probably take place in the mid-21st century. What will happen then
is the de-evolution of humanism as man might return to the cave stage.
The Universal Mind can be found in judges and constitutional lawyers,
doctors, priests, intellectuals and various humanists. This mind has been
making great progress over the last 4,000 years. Over that period, civilization
has developed about 44 values that make us noble creatures as long as we
apply these in lives. Unfortunately, this is not the case and man espouses these
74 Andrew Targowski
UNIVERSAL MIND
complete
GLOBAL MIND
extensive
UNDERSTANDING
MIND
self- depended
THEORETICAL
BASIC
MIND
dependable
Four Minds of Wisdom 75
allied would land and this is why he wanted to deploy it 100-200 km away
from the Channel, more or less in the heart of Normandy so that, once the
place of landing was known, it would be possible to reach any place in the
east, west or center of the coast. Notified of the dispute, Hitler chose a
Solomon-like solution. He divided the division into three parts and placed
those in the west, east and south of the French coast. Obviously, Guderian was
right, but Hitler, with his wisdom at the basic level, could not resolve the issue
wisely.
There were 160,000 Jewish soldiers in the German army9. They were
good soldiers and considered themselves patriotic Germans; their families had
lived in Germany for hundreds of years. But in the cities where they came
from their families were being persecuted. When they visited the families on a
leave, they heard complaints of mistreatment. The soldiers then would put on
their official uniforms, attach the many distinctions and medals, visit the local
offices of the SS and file complaints. There, the non-commissioned soldiers
needed to report to these front-line officers and they made excuses for the
persecutions the families were being subjected to. These situations were
sometimes quite grotesque. To meet the needs of their officers, Admiral Karl
Dȍnitz (commander-in-chief of the Navy) and Marshal Herman Gȍring
(commander-in-chief of the air force) approached Hitler to resolve the problem
in a positive manner. Hitler did not side with the soldiers and ordered that all
those be dismissed from service. No leader with higher education, leading
such a devastating war, would have gotten rid of so many thousands of good
soldiers.
Lacking in the understanding mind, Hitler allowed just 6 months for the
German physicists to make the atom bomb. He thought that physics was a
Jewish science and felt deep reluctance to it. With no higher education and,
consequently, no respect for scientific knowledge, he caused the V1, V2 and
V3 projects to fail. After their production plants near Szczecin were bombed,
the manufacturing of the missiles was moved to dungeons in the Harz
Mountains and for the sake of their production, the Nordhousen Mittelbau-
Dora concentration camp was organized.
Any logically thinking commander-in-chief would have created wonderful
conditions for the manufacturing of these missiles. They were to have been the
Wunderwaffe that would decide the course of the war. One would have
imagined that the commander of the camp ought to have been Werner von
Braun, the constructor of the missiles. However, a Gestapo officer was put on
charge of the camp and he had 50,000 camp prisoners killed, to the obvious
detriment of the camp and the chances for the Germans to win the war.
78 Andrew Targowski
In the summer of 1944, Germany was on the retreat from the Eastern
Front, receiving a heavy beating from the Soviet Army. The high command of
the Polish resistance AK Home Army began to contemplate a rising in
Warsaw. There were a number of opponents, including Count Adam F.
Ronikier (1881-1952), President of the RGO Economic and Welfare Council.
Ronikier lived in Cracow, and it was here where he suggested it to the Gestapo
commander Miller that Germans should consent to a Polish brigade being
brought over from London to Warsaw. The idea was that the London
Government, supported by the Polish military, would officially receive the
Soviets in Warsaw. This would in a way slow down the army's west-bound
drive and make it easier for the Germans to arrange for an effective retreat
from the Eastern Front. Germans would need to have some benefits from the
situation, too. The governor Hans Frank consented to the proposal but wanted
to have Hitler's consent, so he sent a colonel from Cracow to Berlin to sort out
the conception in person. Hitler would not agree, even though the plan was
logical and favorable to the German cause, though, obviously, it was most
advantageous for Poland. With his basic mind only, Hitler could not
understand the benefits of the plan in a situation that was critical for Germany.
As can be seen from the examples given here, Hitler was lacking in the
understanding mind, one of the features of which is objectivity as it is based
on judgment using theoretical criteria that lead to the evaluation of the benefits
and drawbacks of the solutions, measurable factors possibly being applied. In
his judgments, Hitler was guided by an advanced subjectivity, dominated by
racial prejudice against the allegedly lower Jewish and Slavonic races. He
simply failed to fully understand the situation and, as they say, he just would
not see.
In foreign policy, Hitler did have a good global mind, but only in the
beginnings of his diplomacy. His successes include the Munich conference of
1938, where Great Britain, France and Italy consented to the German take-
over of Western Czechoslovakia and accepted the annexation of Austria.
Another success was the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939, which facilitated
the defeat of Poland, but delayed the assault on the USSR by two years. It was
attacking Russia that was his strategic priority and it was clearly set out in his
famous idea of Drang nach Osten.
According to the reputable British geographer Helford Mackinder, Russia
is “the Heartland and whoever dominates it, dominates the world” (1904);
Hitler did want to rule the world. The Generalplan Ost (GPO) resulted from
the earlier Nazi ideas of gaining the living space (Lebensraum), which
Four Minds of Wisdom 79
allegedly the Germanic race of lords deserved, and it was also in line with
Hitler's interpretation of concept of Drang nach Osten.
From the standpoint of long-term policies, the pact with the USSR in 1939
was a short-term success. However, due to this apparent success, he failed to
implement the most major idea of expanding the “living space” for the
“expanding Germanic culture” because he unnecessarily waited for two years,
during which time the USSR consolidated its military and not only did it
defend against the German assault of 22 June, 1941, but also defeated
Germany and destroyed Berlin in 1945.
The pact with Japan and Italy of 27 August, 1940, was a wise move by
Hitler, but declaring war on the USA on 11 Dec., 1941 – four days following
the destruction of the American Navy on the Pacific by Japan (Pearl Harbor) –
meant that Germany had a death warrant issued against it.
At that time Germany was waging a great war against the USSR and
should have focused their attention on that war; the declaration of war on the
winner of World War I only accelerated the US accession to the war in Europe
as early as November, 1942, taking over Africa in 1943, where an assault on
Europe was to come from: first from Sicily (10 July, 1943), and then France
(D-Day in Normandy, 6 June, 1944), concluded with the repeated defeat of
Germany – this time in May, 1945 (previously in 1918).
The above analysis implies that Hitler did not have an operational global
mind (no breadth). An attempt at using it ended up in defeat. Having just one
mind, Hitler had no chance to succeed in his war. He would have stood such a
chance had he first attacked the Soviets. If the West had not helped him, it
would at least have remained neutral as this would mean defeating
Communism. Hitler had a chance to beat Russia and reach India, which he had
planned. He would have thus realized his plan of securing the “living space.”
Similar conclusions can be reached on analyzing the minds of the many
political leaders of the world at that time. Napoleon came to power thanks to
the French Revolution, which he would betray and delay the enforcement of
its ideals for a hundred years. Thus he demonstrated he was lacking in the
truly universal mind. In terms of the global mind, he did have a right sense of
space, but his war with Russia in 1812 was unnecessary and not only ended up
with his political defeat but also spilled the blood of 2 million French men in
all his wars. Napoleon was two-minded and the two missing minds decided his
defeat.
The contemporary leaders of the world are usually four-minded (Obama,
Sarkozy, Hollande, Merkel, Cameron), which is no guarantee of success,
however, as what comes into play is the art of living and the art of governance,
80 Andrew Targowski
too. This will be discussed in another chapter. It is not enough to have the right
ideas and strategies – one also needs to have the skill of putting them into
societal practice. As an aside to these deliberations, the example of the Italian
PM Silvio Berlusconi (1936-) comes in handy. He had no universal mind (a
notorious scandalist) and his terms in office proved to be his personal defeat.
It is the readers who will be left to determine how many minds their
leaders, bosses or priests have, what that implies for their knowledge and
wisdom and what can be expected of them.
Chapter 8
started using symbols and were able to remember a number of situations and
practices, allowing them to live wisely since they remembered good solutions;
this is when man began to organize group life – tribes and society.
It was easier to live in organized groups: hunt for food, rear children,
make arrangements against the hostile forces of Nature and other people. Man
created culture – models of human behavior in groups guided by values and
symbols – as a norm for the tribe or society. When civilization had learned
how to cope with the challenges of Nature, it started to revolve round issues
that determined the success of the society.
The progress of culture was reinforced by the invention of print and books
in the 15th century in Europe as this set off and spread the development of
theoretical knowledge in chemistry, physics, biology and other disciplines.
Man began knowing more and in this way enriched their judgments and
choices. In a number of matters, they started making wiser decisions, e.g.
thanks to the Portuguese navigation techniques man set out discovering new
continents, such as America in 1492, which initiated I Globalization Wave.
Reaching out for new colonies (by the Spanish and the British, but also
Dutchmen and Frenchmen) created a need for the development of sea
transportation, and this resulted in the invention of the steam engine and then
the Diesel engine.
Replacing man's muscle work with engine caused an increase in free time,
which could be used for education. This unleashed the Industrialization Wave
and man was attracted to capital and wealth, which they could get hold of even
if they did not come from aristocracy. This is what happened in the 19th and
20th centuries, characterized by an increase in wisdom in individual decisions
of man, but these centuries also saw a rise in unwise decisions by man, who
came to want ever more and at the expense of others, including whole
societies, at that.
The challenges of Nature and organizing societies in states saw man
victorious thanks to the increments in knowledge and wisdom, but on account
of an increase in their wealth, man caused new social challenges which they
can no longer handle wisely as the degree of complication of the decision-
making situations at all levels of the society has increased manifold as
contrasted with the times when man confronted Nature.
Civilization2 began to transform from one geared at organizing societies to
one founded upon the concept of social justice. This issue is treated differently
by different ideologies, which sometimes has nothing to do with social justice.
Man has shown to have a greedy nature and, led by demagogues in leadership,
reaches out to get hold of ever new areas and resources in the name of
History of Civilizational Wisdom 83
intellectual doctrines, such as the 20th century German and South African
varieties of racism. Man is able to exterminate millions of fellow citizens in
the name of the so-called social justice, as did Communism in Russia, China
and Cambodia in the 20th century, taking the toll of 94 million dead (65
million in China, 20 million in USSR, 2 million in Cambodia, 2 million in
North Korea, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in
Eastern Europe, 1 million in Vietnam, 150,000 in Latin America and about
10,000 as a result of the international activities of Communism in many
different countries3).
Nazism and Communism saw an enemy in the education of the oppressed
as these people might know too much and be wise, and thus possibly
dangerous in the fight against their oppressors. In Poland under the German
occupation, the Germans in the first place arrested teachers and academics,
who were then murdered in concentration camps such as Auschwitz and
Dachau. The Nazis planned that an average Pole should merely be able to
count to 100 because it was the German overlord who would be supposed to
think for them. In Germany, Hitler supported the art that glorified the beautiful
German; he also brought together the avant guarde paintings and had them
sold for a pittance in Switzerland. He supported simple art that would be easily
perceived and required no sophisticated reasoning – wisdom – in order to be
understood. It was Nazi leaders who were supposed to be wise, not their
subjects, even if those happened to be their fellow countrymen.
In the USSR, following the Bolshevik Revolution-2017, the intelligentsia
was the first to be exterminated (in that time it belonged to the world elite).
Great poets were not being granted licenses to do the job of a poet (sic!) if
their artistic work did not support Communism. In the hour of the regime's
weakness, some artists were spared – they were put into a sealed train and
expelled from the country. No wonder that the prominent poet Mayakovski – a
bard of the Bolshevik Revolution – committed a suicide.
In Cambodia of the 1970s, when following the expulsion of the Americans
from Vietnam the Khmer Rouge took over power, close to 2 million people
were murdered, making up 24 per cent of the population3. In the first place
those who were murdered wore glasses (could read) or had smooth hands,
undamaged by manual labor – they first killed the intelligentsia. These were
the potential, wise opponents of the Khmer Rouge policies. The Khmer Rouge
sought to destroy Capitalism and its tool – money – as well as the cities with
its smart entrepreneurs.
These murderers were led by Pol Pot, himself and intellectual and
graduate of the Sorbonne. The Khmer Rouge communists were appalling,
84 Andrew Targowski
blood-thirsty felons: they fed farm crocodiles with hundreds of living people
daily. If the prisoners resisted, they were pushed into the jaws of the reptiles
using high-voltage rods. Particularly ghastly treatment befell children of the
intelligentsia – they were fed to crocodiles in most barbarous ways.
Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge communists traded human organs, cut out
of the political opponents' bodies without any anesthetics; they would later put
the hapless people, thus deprived of organs, onto trucks and fetch them to
crocodiles as food. If we criticize those criminals, what can be said of the
buyers of these organs? They came from the Western Civilization and must
have known the origin of the transplants, which they bought for cash. The 21st
century China is also involved in organ trade; several thousand executions are
carried out there annually and “nothing can be wasted.”
It was not only the Political East that felt ideologically uneasy about their
conquered subjects becoming wise. The Political West made their contribution
in that respect, too. The 19th century British conquerors of China made sure
the Chinese were enslaved by the mass consumption of opiates – having been
drugged, they could hardly demonstrate wisdom. In making the Chinese high,
Indians were used to supply the Chinese with the drug.
At the other end of the Political West, in Latin America, the corrupt
political leaders and landowners kept their citizens/workers down in the state
of constant intoxication by recommending and affording them a possibility of
chewing coca leaves. These people worked the fields extremely hard from
dawn to dusk and, most importantly, they were “satisfied.”
Wars and conflicts were a stimulus for the development of computers for
military purposes in the 1940s, resulting in the Information Wave in the recent
decades; it emphasized the impact that computerized information made on
human cognitive processes and the wisdom that followed. The launch of the
Internet in 1983, in particular, caused the surge of another Wave of
Globalization, which caused the fall of the Western Civilization and the
emergence of the Global Civilization, along with the new challenges it carries
for the wisdom of man.
The Information Wave transformed the civilization that had so far been
based on their design of political concepts such as capitalism, socialism or
communism into one based on technology. The 21st century globalization
challenges make man embarrassed and have them ask a question whether they
are wise enough to prevent the civilization, created for the last six millennia,
from utter destruction. These challenges can be described in the conception of
The Death Triangle of Civilization (Figure 8.1). This triangle is formed as a
History of Civilizational Wisdom 85
2050
Population
Population Decreasing
Bomb Policy
2300
Death
Emigration
Triangle of from the Resources
Civilization Planet Bomb
Ecological
Bomb
Another Planet or
Galactic
Kyoto (1997) or Copenhagen (2009), but these do not have a major bearing on
the state of civilization because countries like the USA and China disregard
the settlements of those summits.
A technology-based civilization should apply technology in such a way as
to facilitate life to man. But the technology that is globalizing the world
increases the role of man in the world, especially in the most developed world
– the Western Civilization. Particularly, the technology that is liaised with
business turns the rank and file into the redundant on account of their being
“too expensive” and their work easily done by an “Asian slave,” robot or an
automated expert process, such as a call center.
Is business wise in replacing people with machines? A short-term profit
from eliminating human labor causes, in the long run, the elimination of the
consumers of this business as the unemployed have no money to buy goods
and services which may be cheap (thanks to Asian slaves and machines), but
those jobless people have no money to do shopping.
The policy of exporting production and the work it involves to Asia has
caused a profound crisis of turbo-capitalism in Europe and the USA, that is, in
the Western-Atlantic Civilization (or Western-West)5 in 2008. Still, this
downturn had been caused by the haphazard financial system, that is, the depth
of this several years' crisis was caused by the outsourcing of industrial work to
Asia; the economy of services is too weak to guarantee full employment,
economic growth and the emergence of the middle class, which determines the
success of the society and the state.
Apparently it does not take rocket science to understand the dilemma of
the present-day Western Civilization, and yet the lack of knowledge and the
lack of good judgment and choices which the two entail is making the crisis of
turbo-capitalism grow deeper rather than became contained in the 2010s.
It looks like man can launch risky business deals and make huge money
on these but is not wise enough to estimate their social and ecological
consequences. The knowledge of the world and technology may be
progressing, but the collective wisdom of man is diminishing. Who knows,
perhaps the knowledge of societal issues in on the downturn, too, because after
the fall of Communism there is no longer a power that would control the
actions of Capitalism along the principle of check and balance, fundamental
for democracy.
5
Alongside the Western-Atlantic (called also Western-West) civilization, there are: Central-
Western (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Baltic Republics, Croatia,
Slovenia), Western-Latin and Western-Jewish civilizations.
88 Andrew Targowski
The social live in the 21st century, particularly in the Western Civilization
indicates the meaningful decline of the societal harmony in it, what is
exemplified by the structural and perhaps permanent financial and economic
crisis. In solving this crisis, wisdom of political leaders is not fully seen.
Chapter 9
media and politics about the potential for alternative energy (solar panels,
wind turbines, long-life batteries), but in 2012 this type of energy supply did
not even cover 15% of the demand. So is the case with the gas-electric hybrid
motors. Their advantages are known and appreciated, but their use is not
growing fast, even though it should. There are a number of reasons behind
that, but people's estimates tend to be too optimistic as compared with the
reality.
The judgments of the situation differ in that the “standpoint is determined
by where you sit.” Low-earners use their earnings to survive. They usually
have no financial reserves to complicate their judgments and choices.
However, the rich, and the very rich in particular, judge the situation as a game
with others like them, say, billionaires.
The owner of the software company Oracle, Larry Ellison, is valued at
approx. $40 bn, which is much less than the estimates for Bill Gates ($55 bn),
and therefore he is much more energetic in his undertakings as he wants to
overtake his famous rival. This kind of person makes their judgments and
choices subservient to this kind of activities, which are sometimes irrational.
At least so it seems to regular people. There are exceptions to this, though.
Warren Buffet, second only to Bill Gates (valued at $44 bn), lives on a
$100,000 annual budget in a house he bought 50 years ago and drives an old
car. He reinvests his annual income of $4 bn and distributes it among charities.
The only luxury he sticks to is the private jet and its permanent crew.
The terms of judging the economic state and trends has good grounds in
econometry – mathematized economics. It is a field excellently developed by
academics, about which thousands of books have been written and thousands
of students educated. Econometric evaluations are used by economists
employed in governmental economic centers and major banks. Alas,
politicians rarely make use of these expert judgments, particularly when those
are pessimistic or when, based on these studies, they would need to make
unpopular decisions. The 2011-2012 crisis of the euro is a handy example in
this respect. They should have allowed Greece to go bankrupt rather than have
it take out more loans to pay back the interest on the loans previously given by
German and French banks (€120+ billion w 2012). Econometric calculations
demonstrate that Greece is unable to pay off either the old or the new loans.
The German and French politicians, though, are making efforts to prevent their
banks from going bankrupt while they are in office. Is this what a new loan
should be meant for – timely repayment of the interest only?
Highly advanced is the judgment on the situation in manufacturing and
transportation; it uses optimization methods of linear programming, known
94 Andrew Targowski
since World War II. These methods can be employed to evaluate a range of
production programs, such as what goods (e.g. cars) and what numbers of
them need to be produced to maximize profits or minimize losses. Companies
make good use of these methods. In the distribution of goods from wholesale
warehouses to retailers, the point is to plan the shortest possible distances
between shops to minimize the length of the transportation route – save time
and fuel. Distribution companies – if managed by educated and wise CEOs –
employ experts in these methods; they can and do apply this kind of judgment
and choices.
PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique), also called CPM
(Critical Path Method), is a popular method of assessment in project
management. There, a computer calculates in which actions there is no spare
time and combines these into the so-called “critical path.” The project manager
has a great judgment of the situation; they know which actions, if delayed, will
also delay the implementation of the whole project. They can then shift
manpower and equipment from those actions where there is spare time to get
the actions at risk done. In the USA, every contract for the supply of weapons
and logistics for the Department of Defense must have the PERT net so that
the customer will have the right judgment of the situation as well as right
premises for decision-making regarding the implementation of the contract.
The PERT method has been known since the 1960s, when it was first used to
manage the design and production of the Polaris submarines.
Decision-making methods include decision-making simulation games,
initiated in 1947-1950 by the ingenious Hungarian mathematician John von
Neumann, who collaborated in their design with the excellent Polish
mathematician Stanisław Ulam (the Monte Carlo method). It merits a mention
that both these scientists collaborated on the design of the atom and hydrogen
bombs in the Manhattan Project, held in Los Alamos. That spectacular
application of mathematics contributed to the defeat of a dangerous
superpower – Japan – in the summer of 1945.
In the 1960s, Jay Forrester (1918-), from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, devised a simulation model called industrial dynamics, which
was later used by the team led by Dennis L. Meadows (1942-) to investigate
exhaustibility of resources, whose findings were then published in The Limits
to Growth3. This book triggered a global environmentalist movement.
In the anticipation of the assessment of future situations, simulation
methods tend to be used that are based on mathematical models and ultra-fast
computers, generating infinite options of situations, which later assess and
estimate the probability and consequences of their occurrence. These are used
Judgement and Choice 95
a repayment of this debt, and the Chinese have come to see that too, but in this
way they have sucked America into their poor country and in so doing made it
dependent on the supply of goods from China. In other words, the Chinese are
wisely winning the economic war with America without a battle. This is just
putting to practice the policy of the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (5th
century BCE) and it is evident to anyone who has an understanding and global
mind.
Another effect of the Walmartization of America is the changes in the way
students are educated in business schools. Management science used to be a
mandatory subject. Now it is optional, which means that you can get an MBA
diploma without a profound familiarity with the hard subject of judgment and
choice by means of these advanced methods. In other words, we are educating
students to be more stupid rather than wiser. Why should students be
instructed in these mathematized methods if learners no longer like
mathematics? Why make them “tired” and disaffected?
The 20th/21st century business replaced its reluctance to advanced
decision-making methods with Key Performance Indicators (“KPI”). Their
idea is about focusing decision-makers' attention on 20 indexes in 4
perspectives: client, finances, innovation (incl. training) and operation. If a
company has 20 good indexes, it is assumed to be in good shape. Jack Welsh,
CEO of General Electric, used to be a master in the 20-indexes management. I
would call the approach a Red Ocean Strategy, which is about a meticulous,
step-by-step improvement of key indexes.
2005 saw the definition of the Blue Ocean Strategy2, which emphasizes
innovative approach. In the first place, it offers customers the new values that
the business contributes. This can be seen in the example of the Barnes &
Noble bookshop in the USA. The customer entering the bookshop need not
buy the book – they can read it, have a get-together with an acquaintance, have
a coffee and cake or meet the author. This way a traditional bookshop has been
transformed into a cafe and reading room, thus contributing two new functions
to the one already existing, which is an added value for the customer. The
customers got to like the new solution. Alas, Barns & Noble is fighting for
survival as the e-bookshop Amazon seeks to eliminate paper books from the
market and replace those with e-book readers, with its brand product Kindle in
particular.
The Blue Ocean Strategy puts a company's customers into three
categories: traditional (established), opponents and those never considered as
potential customers. The Coca Cola Company has some established customers
(the youth), but its opponents are wise mothers who do not want their children
Judgement and Choice 97
to take in too much sugar and caffeine. Therefore, the company has launched
Coke Zero, to meet the requirements of the wise mothers. To face the
opponents of soft drinks, who are among beer or wine lovers, the
manufacturers of alcoholic beverages have released the co-called coolers,
containing some palpable traces of alcohol.
The Green Ocean Strategy is gaining ground; it is about recognizing the
environmental costs in business cost calculations. It means the recycling of
used products – plastics, metal or paper, etc. Some businesses even seek to
make it from Green to Gold3,4.
More broadly, there is ever more talk of the strategy of sustainable
development, the point of which is that the present generation of the users of
Earth should pass the planet on to the next generation in a condition it was
received. The judgments and choices, including the kind of development
should reckon with the solutions warranting the vitality of the
economy/business, responsibility for the environment, climate control and side
effects.
Alongside the need to work out wise judgment, one needs to know how to
make wise choices. Psychology comes in handy with its several techniques,
based on the optimistic, pessimistic and equal-chance techniques. These are
the chief techniques, but they can be further modified by their combinations.
The pessimistic decision-maker determines their choice on a maxi-mini user
approach – the best option out of the worst. A stock-market investor-pessimist
will invest in the fund stocks, having diversified portfolios, and with their
profits smaller but more certain, rather than directly in securities. An investor-
optimist will invest in the stocks of the companies that have so far been the
most profitable. As we know, growth capacity has its limits, and it is far from
certain whether they still have any potential for growth. An equal-chances
investor will invest in both funds and by buying stocks directly, choosing
securities with both high profits and those that have yet to grow.
What follows from this review is that there are a range of judgment and
choice methods for people to make, and these should secure wise thinking and
decision-making. In an individual dimension, that is, individual people, many
of us make use of these methods and think wisely, making wise decisions.
In the collective dimension of the society, state or the globe, the standards
of wisdom in judgment and choices are eroding. This is noticeable in the
decisions by politicians, affecting the quality of life in society. In the 21st
century, state politics, in democracies in particular, is highly polarized. It boils
down to power struggle, no matter how important the arguments of the
opponents are. There is hardly any consensus between rivaling parties.
98 Andrew Targowski
1. Judgment
a. competence in the understanding of the situation
b. conceptualization by means of big picture versus small
picture and vice versa
c. short-term versus long-term in the understanding of the
situation
d. localization versus globalization in the understanding of
the situation, and vice versa
e. sensitivity to economic, environmental, climatic, and
societal effects in a given situation
f. others
2. Choice
a. prudence
b. tolerance
c. practicality
d. universality
e. others
Judgement and Choice 99
The above criteria, applied wisely in the judgment and choice of options
should secure wise thinking and decisions. Sadly, there are a number of other
criteria that affect the quality of wise thinking and decision-making since man
is not a computer and does not always act in a way which would be implied by
the judgment of the situation. These criteria will be called the art of living,
which will be discussed in the next chapter.
Chapter 10
ART OF LIVING
From the very beginning, man has been rational as this determined
survival in the inexorable natural selection. As civilization progressed and the
quality of societies increased, man was losing their instinctive rationality for
the sake of humanism, where irrational behavior matters, too. Still, as
knowledge and education grew, man evolved worldviews and defined all kinds
of ideologies.
In the name of these ideologies, man was ready to die, and in fact died in
their myriads and voluntarily, too, in revolutions: American, French,
Bolshevik, Mexican and others, as well as nationalistic wars, such as in
Germany, where millions died for the sake of expanding the space for the
“exceptional” German culture during World War II. The Soviet soldiers at the
time and same war died in millions, too; they gave their lives “for the
homeland.” Today we know that they went forward after a quart of vodka,
followed by the NKVD troops that killed the hesitant. Even now, in North
Korea, those who vote against the regime are killed. To survive, the rest have
learned to demonstrate mass hysteria following the demise of leaders.
In those cases, ideologies kill millions. In order to survive these irrational
challenges, people must demonstrate the art of living. Especially in the Global
Civilization, this approach is indispensable, too, as the Western-Atlantic
civilization behaves irrationally.
The art of living is a skill of controlling one's emotions; it is a will of
employing morality. It is also intuition and possessing an ability to be guided
by the common wealth rather than one's own benefit, and ability to focus on
important issues: the will to apply selflessness, and also a will to be either
patient and modest or energetic, depending on situation. The art of living is a
skill of functioning in unpredictable situations and reckoning with some less
102 Andrew Targowski
rational factors; it is also a skill of proper conduct when faced with a company
of people coming from a generation different than one's own. The art of living
may reinforce the wisdom of judgment and choice, but it can also weaken,
discredit and neutralize these.
The theoretical foundations indicating that man uses two decision-making
systems – emotional-intuitive and rational – were defined by the psychologist
Daniel Kahneman, the 2002 Nobel Prize laureate in economics, for the theory
of decision-making in the conditions of insecurity. D. Kahneman defined two
systems1; System 1 – fast thinking – acts as if automatically with little mental
effort. It will instantly detect that one object is further away from the other,
determine the source of a sound, supply the result of 2+2=, finish the adage
“There is silence ...” whereas System 2 – slow thinking – requires a bigger
mental effort, sometimes backed up with complicated calculations, such as
filling in the annual income tax form, providing information on the workplace
phone number that includes an extension or checking a logical or
mathematical proof. System 1 requires no major scan in human memory;
System 2 does.
System 1 generates impressions, feelings, inclinations, and – when
supported by System 2 – it can even generate religious beliefs, attitudes and
intentions. This system can even be programmed by System 2. System 2
operates effortlessly under normal circumstances, but when it detects a
difficult situation, it switches, as it were, to higher levels of reasoning, which
slows this reasoning down in order to remain wise.
Certainly, man employs System 1 or 2 automatically for most of their
conscious life. The theory only corroborates the validity and role of human
psychology in man's life. Psychologists even categorized major behaviors
depending on age. The Erikson (1902-1994) Model is particularly appreciated
as it allows one to predict with a high likelihood the behaviors of the person
one is dealing with, in other words, their wisdom:
Table 10.1. The criteria of morality in the main 21st century civilizations.
Hindu, Islamic and African civilizations are the most consistent in the
application of the values they profess. These are strictly controlled by
organized religions and their societies are poor rather than rich. Their hope for
a better life is in the afterlife, which religions secure for them. Although the
Islamic Civilization commands huge income from oil resources in the Middle
East, those who dispose of the money are unwilling to share the wealth with
the societies, as seen in the Arab Spring of 2011.
The remaining 4 civilizations: Western, Eastern, Japanese and Chinese
nurture national rather than religious traditions, with those in business guided
by the morality of business or, rather, the lack of ethics.
The wisdom of these civilizations will be discussed in more detail later.
Control emotions. Luckily for civilization, people are emotional and
emotions control our judgment and the choice of the options of decision-
Art of Living 105
could be; apply yourself to the latter. Einstein used this advice in his research.
When he first came up with his own formula of energy (E=mc2). He did not
get lost in the tangle of research in theoretical physics. He was always able to
get down to the most important work. He spent his last 20 years elaborating on
the “theory of everything,” which neither he nor others have been able to do
successfully. Incidentally, Einstein was not as wise in his private life as he was
in physics. He lacked it in his relationships with women. Yet, it was a wise
decision to leave Germany in 1933 and go to the USA. Did he do a good thing
rejecting the offer to become the first president of the State of Israel in 1948?
He wanted to devote his research to the theory of everything, but he did not
succeed. In 2000 the TIME magazine declared him the man of the 20th
century. A bad example of the skill of focusing on the most important matters
of the office is President Barack Obama in 2009-2012. This was a time of
growing unemployment, which he began to deal with selectively only in the
third year of his term. What he brought to the foreground was the obligatory
health insurance, the constitutionality of which had been questioned (in July,
2012 the Supreme Court pronounced the healthcare reform constitutional,
saying that some fees for services are a form of tax whereas the President
considers those fines for not insuring employees). On account of the problem
of unemployment that was not being solved, the president was ranked low in
the polls.
The Italian PM, the tycoon Silvio Berlusconi behaved likewise in terms of
his inability to focus on issues of state priority: he thought, contrary to facts,
that the Italy of 2011 was faring well, as indicated by the plight of seaside
guesthouses and restaurants when Italy had began to plunge into an ever
growing debt loop to the brink of insolvency. This caused his prompt
resignation.
Be reflective. Remember what is worthwhile, forget what is unworthy of
remembering and be prepared to associate facts, judgments and choices.
Develop a skill of reevaluating the events from the past, the present and those
that can happen in the future. A controlled contemplation of an event should
occur – see the event in new circumstances and time. This is particularly true
of children who made unwise decisions in the past, contrary to the advice from
their parents. Years after, in a controlled state of emotions they might wish
they had obeyed their parents.
Be selfless. The issue of altruism marks noble individuals, who guide their
judgments and choices in keeping with this value. What might seem irrational
for some, for Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela,
Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, John Paul II, Lech Wałęsa, Warren Buffet
Art of Living 107
or Bill Gates seems an obvious and wise solution. It can be expected that
everyone should be selfless, but it is leaders in particular that should be
marked by this attitude. Regular people can apply this towards their closest
environment, such as parents, spouses, children, cousins, neighbors and other
in need in their close proximity.
Be patient. In the English military, there is a principle that important
operations should be decided the next day, after having a good night's sleep, in
order to avoid haste and making an unwise decision which could be painful in
its consequences. The English appreciate the virtue of patience. Often it is not
worth reacting immediately to a critical situation so as not to exacerbate the
crisis and find oneself in a situation with no way out. Making important life
decisions requires some time to make a judgment and a choice towards a
solution. Making haste in getting married in the USA has led to a situation in
which every other couple gets divorced. If you are in conflict with someone,
give them some time to back off, come to senses or, possibly, make another
mistake. I was once playing a game of tennis on the first Legia court in
Warsaw. There were some spectators. I began to show off with spectacular
tricks and fell behind in points. Then, the famous tennis commentator and
tennis expert Bohdan Tomaszewski advised me “let him play,” and because
tennis is a game of errors, my opponent began losing points and I won by
meticulously increasing my score. This is how Agnieszka Radwańska, an
excellent Polish tennis player, beats the best stars in the world. I apply this
tactics in my professional and social life. I give my opponents time to make
mistakes.
Communicate your solution. The wisdom of living is not only about wise
reasoning but also about implementing your wise solutions. This is achieved
by submitting your ideas to the right people and institutions at a right time.
The art of living is about: moral, ethical and intuitive balancing of
emotions, attention directed to important things, and an ability to reflect by
way of remembering significant matters and forgetting those irrelevant,
associating significant factors, with reacting to events characterized by
patience and a dose of selflessness as well as other immeasurable factors,
especially in difficult situations, so that wise judgment and choice be
reinforced. These are illustrated by the model in Figure 10.1.
108 Andrew Targowski
CHOICE
Be reflectional; remember-forget-connect
Be altruistic
Be pacient
Other
JUDGMENT
Figure 10.1. Factors of the Art of Life in the Process of Becoming Wise.
Some authors3 have found it with wise people that they can be grateful,
have organized lives, are able to overcome hardship, are not surprised by
adversity – rather, they treat it as something natural in life, – are curious of
life, knowledge and seek an understanding of difficult things, have an
untypical common sense, exemplify self-sufficiency and assistance to others,
seek a balance in things, and are usually modest as they have a sense of their
value no matter what others think. These traits ought to be included under the
art of living, but they need not occur as some necessary criteria of wise
judgment and choices. Only in investigating the art of living among wise
people may it appear that some fulfill those criteria in full, while other in part.
The art of living is not a science that relies on some well-defined rules. It
is intuitive action, characterized by positive results. If judgments and choices
can sometimes be mathematically well-defined, the same cannot be applied to
Art of Living 109
the art of living. It follows that wisdom results from the combination of logic
with mythology, which is characteristic for philosophy. No wonder philosophy
is the “love of wisdom,” except that, in studying wisdom, philosophy must
leave its Ivory Tower and enter the crowd of regular people to see what
everyday wisdom is all about.
Chapter 11
WHAT IS WISDOM?
Practical life and the discussion so far indicate the great complication of
wisdom and its kind of mythical quality. The discussion in this book indicates
that the Cognitive Model of Wisdom is attainable in steps. Surely, just as in
any model of social or even technical (physics, chemistry, and biology)
sciences is a simplification of reality, but thanks to the modeling of reality we
are able to inquire into its essence better. Take the 1913 Solar Model of Atom
by Nielsen Bohr, thanks to which there occurred a quick and directional
progress of theoretical physics even though the model itself underwent gradual
improvements and alterations to comply with new discoveries of ever more
elementary molecules and their relations with the other elements of the model,
today known as the Cloud Model – these relations are as complex and unclear
as clouds. The Bohr Model was preceded by the Dalton Model on the
indivisibility of molecules (1803), the model of Early Atom, seen as “plum
pudding" (1897), the Saturnian Model (1904), Rutherford Model, with a
positive center surrounded by emptiness (1909). The Cloud Model, which is
now in force, has been developed by a number of authors since the 1950s. It is
to be hoped that the model of wisdom presented here will undergo a similar
evolution.
It follows from the discussion1,2,3,4 so far that wisdom in its rudimentary
sense is a good judgment and a good choice of the solution concept. A number
of (mathematized) calculation and intuitive methods can be applied to judge
and choose the concept, but the scope and quality of the judgments and choice
depends on the number of minds applied. Someone who has just one mind –
basic – will only be able to use the common sense for judgment and the choice
of solution.
112 Andrew Targowski
WHOLE MIND
Civilizational Wisdom
UNIVERSAL
Art of Living
INFORMATION
C H O I C E (-)
Be Reflective-Remember-Forget-Connect
Be Focused on Important Issue
Professional Wisdom
Control Emotions
Be Philosophical
Be Altruistic
Be Patient
KNOWLEDGE
Other
Other Wisdom
MIND
J U D G M E N T (+)
DATA
Family Wisdom
CONCEPTS
BASIC MIND
All the component parts of the model are processes despite their names
indicating an apparently nominal rather than verbal nature. Take
KNOWLEDGE (nominal character of the name), used in the process of
114 Andrew Targowski
Global
Civilization
Chinese
Hindu Buddhist
Global Market
International
Institutions:
United Nations
Western Easatern
WTO
IMF
G7 , G20
Other
African Islamic
Japanese
Arguably, the Western Civilization has already been transformed into the
Global Civilization, as manifested in the decline of the Christian morality for
the sake of the morality of business – no morality. This is evidenced by the
financial and economic crisis of the West, which started in 2008.
Other civilizations are variously affected by the Global Civilization. The
Hindu Civilization accepts the Global Civilization as its society knows English
perfectly and is highly “mobile” globally. The Eastern Civilization (Russia and
Bulgaria), with Russia in particular, accepts capitalism but fends off
Westernization. The Japanese Civilization allows itself to be involved in the
Global Civilization but its culture is very traditional and strong. The Chinese
Civilization allows modernization but does not officially accept
Westernization, as opposed to the leanings of its young generation. The
Buddhist and Islamic civilizations do not accept westernization or
modernization but the elite of Islamic Civilization uses the Global Civilization,
particularly its financial system and its residential areas in case a social crisis
occurs in the home countries.
Table 12.1. Civilization Wisdom Potential Index (CWP) in the 21st century2
CWP CWP
WISDOM ACTIVITY CWP BASIC UNDERSTANDING CWP GLOBAL UNIVERSAL
CiVILIZATION POTENTIAL MIND MIND MIND MIND RANKING
JAPANESE 0.73 4 27 80 477 1
WESTERN-WESTERN 0.21 1 9 65 459 2
CENTRAL-WESTERN 0.12 0.44 3 13 53 3
CHINESE 0.34 0.63 2 4 7 4
JEWISH-WESTERN 0.01 0.06 0.43 2 6 5
EASTERN 0.05 0.09 0.65 1 5 6
LATIN-WESTERN 0.02 0.02 0.30 0.7 2 7
BUDDHIST 0.02 0.05 0.14 0.4 0.4 8
HINDU 0.08 0.13 O.4 0.4 0.4 9
AFRICAN 0.02 0.003 0.002 0.01 0.05 10
ISLAMIC 0.01 0.02 0.02 0.03 0.03 11
120 Andrew Targowski
the so-called common sense. When they use the understanding mind they will
make 6 wise decisions out of the ten made. The high level of wisdom in the
Japanese civilization results from their art of living on a small island without
natural resources. Also, they are able to learn from others, as evidenced by
their fast adaptation of Western technologies and then the betterment of these
to the extent that they have become the main suppliers of cars and electronics
in the global market.
Regarding wise decision-making in the Western-Western Civilization and
the Jewish-Western Civilization, the number of the wise decisions made is
falling, which stems from the fact that the people living in these civilizations
have long been enjoying a high or very high standard of living; when they
lived in poverty, they tried to get out of it, but now that they have got out of it,
they have lost their eagerness to make wise decisions.
In the remaining civilizations, there is a very low number of the educated;
hence the people's decisions based on theoretical knowledge are limited in
number, though the elite of the Chinese and Indians (Hindus) are developing
their individual wisdom fast, particularly in business and technology. None
the less, these huge populations are not well educated and therefore they have
been ranked low on the list. As a result of globalization, the 21st century China
has visibly raised its standard of living in cities (450 million people), but in the
country side there is serious poverty and backwardness (involving 800 million
people). The per capita GDP in China is $5,184 (2011). In India it is worse,
with per capita income at $1,527 (no. 133 globally). In comparison with the
USA, with its per capita GDP at 50,000$, the productivity of these countries is
still very low, indeed. Is it not a measure of the wisdom of the people who live
in those countries, in the end? Surely, this is determined by a number of
factors, including the historical ones. Still, is history not tantamount to the
additive wisdom of the people?
Man has powerfully developed their knowledge as a result of the
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and consequently – wisdom,
which follows from the liberation of reason. The result is the Western
(Atlantic) Civilization's standard of living close to prosperity. However, this
wisdom is eroding along with globalization, with the following challenges
emerging from human wisdom4:
The vast scale of the present-day conflicts may go beyond the human
intellectual capacity for problem solving. Discord between people is growing
as well as chaos in economic, political, technological and social theories.
Can these problems be solved successfully? I think the chances are small.
The only chance is the enhancement of education and making their wisdom the
The Wisdom of People and Their Civilization 123
most vital resource people ought to fall back on, a resource they have forgotten
about.
Chapter 13
WISE CIVILIZATION
THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE CONTEMPORARY
‘UNWISE’ CIVILIZATION
The progression of civilization is in its sixth millennium. By the time of
the Industrial Revolution it had been slow. In the second millennium of the
contemporary era, the world’s population grew twenty two times, income per
capita went up by 855% and the income of the whole world grew 300-fold. It
was only as of the Industrial Revolution that civilization started growing
tremendously fast. Within 800 years, i.e. from 1000 to 1820, income per
capita had grown a mere 53%, while from 1820 to 1998 it grew eight times,
1
with the population growing five times (500%) . The average life expectancy
increased in this millennium from 24 to 78 years in the developed countries1.
One could say that an average man was just a little better off in 1800 than
someone living 6,000 years ago. Owing to the growing population most
average people fared even worse than their forefathers. People in the UK and
the Netherlands were better off but normal people living in the immobile
societies of Japan and China lived close to the level of cavemen. They were
subject to Malthusian selection where births were leveled off by deaths. Any
growth in the number of births diminished the level of per capita income. The
paradox of the then civilization was about wars, epidemics, diseases, chaos
and lack of hygiene boosted living standards as it reduced population.
The Industrial Revolution, which introduced machines in place of the
muscular effort of men, produced a surplus of goods, which was a rationale for
the growth in population, and even forced it, as the industrial business needed
more and more clients – this developed scientific and technical knowledge,
126 Andrew Targowski
American Way of
Life—
Population % of global resources % of resources used
Country (million, 2005) used (2005) (2005)
USA 298 27 27
CHINA 1,300 5 117
INDIA 1,100 2 99
R.O.W. 3,700 66 66
TOTAL 6,465 100 309
Sources: Pocket World in Figures, The Economist, 2008 plus the author’s estimates
The data shown in Table 1 imply that at present it takes three planets like
Earth to secure the American Way lifestyle to China and India, assuming that
Wise Civilization 127
the rest of the world, i.e. 50% of the population live the way they live today, in
poverty. If those remaining poor people want to live like the Americans, then
it takes 6 planets like Earth to secure this lifestyle or 5 billion people need to
be transferred to other planets, which for now seems impossible. In conclusion
of the hopeless situation of the civilization, the following opinion by Lester
3
Brown could be quoted:
The policies of steady economic growth for the sake of securing new
jobs for the growing population, which supports these policies, is
growing in a positive spiral, leading the problem of overpopulation to
self-entanglement and self-destruction of the population.
The policy of improving the organization and efficiency of agriculture
and industry is a fundamental paradigm of contemporary business and
business schools. In consequence, it leads to a vast nonsensical
concentration of businesses, automation, robotization, informatization
and virtualization, which curtail employment where the labor market
is on the rise.
128 Andrew Targowski
revolution, impossible to win, but also an unnecessary and harmful one. The
point is not to fight religion but that it should grow at the global level rather
than in some areas of the world. Spirituality 2.0 would teach complementary
morality, founded upon the most essential values of the particular Religions
1.0. These are listed in Table 2.
Over the last 200 years, civilization utilized three socio-political systems:
Capitalism, Socialism and Communism, as well as their various combinations.
None of these systems can control the Universal-Complementary Civilization.
Capitalism in its present form of turbo-Capitalism is subservient to global
business and its bosses and is controlled by lobbyists, thus losing its
democratic and liberal character. Its main objective is generating exorbitant
profits for a narrow elite (1%). Apple had $100 billion cash in 2012 and
decided to pay a dividend to its shareholders -- $2 per $600 worth of share,
which for small capitalists is a ridiculously negligible capital gain, amounting
to 0.003%. The bosses of the corporation, though, regularly pay themselves
dozens of millions of dollars in bonuses.
The strategy of global business is a pursuit of a steady increase in the
productivity of resources by an ever growing concentration of companies in a
given branch, monopolizing the market and expanding target markets.
134 Andrew Targowski
Eko-edu cation
Spirituality 2.0
Wise
Society Eko-i nfrastructure
Spirituality 2.0
Economic vitality
Environmental accountability
Social responsibility
136 Andrew Targowski
Spirituality 2.0
Social Responsibility
Sustained
Entity or Economic
Environmental
Process Vitality
Accountability
Knowledge-driven process
Sustainability-driven process
Solidarity-driven Civilization
Figure 13.3. The Processive Relationships between Wise Civilization and Wise Society
Figure
and Quality of Life. 13.3. The Processive Relationships Between Wise
Civilization and Wise Society and Quality of Life
CONCLUSIONS
1. The development of civilization so far has been controlled by
religions, which are in a structural, permanent and ever-growing
conflict at the dawn of the 21st century.
2. Lessening of inter-civilizational conflicts (as illustrated by the present
war on terror) is only possible when religions come to consensus,
which is not very likely at present.
3. The only practical solution is the introduction of Spirituality 2.0,
which introduces a shared supra-platform for shared values and
secures tolerance and the application of Religions 1.0.
138 Andrew Targowski
land of Kalisz, Jan Suchorzewski, who threatened to kill his 6-year-old son in
case he survived to see the times of tyranny, that is, the time of the new order.
The guards took the child away from him just in time.
As a result, the Constitution of the 3 May led to the third partition and the
fall of the Polish state in 1795. Is it wise to instruct the citizens in unrealistic
policies now, and take responsibility for any further disadvantageous fate of
the nation, which would inexorably follow such an approach?
The Poles are proud of the heroism of the Warsaw Rising in August, 1944,
whereas the truth is that the rising was the biggest national catastrophe in its
millennial history. It was started at the end of July, but it had never featured in
the strategic plan of the “Operation Storm.” In military terms, it was directed
against Germany, but the Soviet Union was targeted politically – the London
Government wanted to welcome the Soviet troops as host in the liberated
Warsaw, thus making it impossible for the Communist PKWN Committee – a
Polish pro-Soviet government – to take over power.
Alas, the Poles did not know that in August, 1944, Stalin had an
agreement with Roosevelt, upon which he was supposed to send 15,000
mariners to Cold Bay, Alaska, to staff 250 vessels to be taken over from the
Americans, on which they were supposed to fight Japan. In the fall of 1944,
the commander in charge of training was the US Navy Captain George
Maxwell, born in Warsaw, former name Dzwonecki. He owed this nomination
to the fact that he could swear in Russian perfectly, which was not so
insignificant in everyday communication with the Soviet mariners1.
True, the youth were eager to fight battles – victorious rather than suicidal,
though. Therefore, the insurrection itself ought to be distinguished from the
insurgents when analyzing “1944.” The rising turned out a national calamity,
which can only be understood by a Varsovian. The rising is also
synonymous to Polish heroism, German and Soviet barbarity and the Anglo-
Saxon mercenary approach (one could agree here with Norman Davies2) as
well as an unethical and ill-mannered attitude.
The harsh judgment of Poland's “allies” does not make Polish political
leaders any less responsible for the generous disposal of the Polish life,
material and cultural output. May the truth about the rising improve the
process of selection of the leaders for the highest positions in the III Republic
of Poland. This is what the 200,000 dead call for, as well as the 400,000
wounded and 600,000 of those who did not return to Warsaw after the war; the
smoldering ruins call for the same. The great and universal heroism of the
insurgents and residents should make one demand that this be the case.
Otherwise, their „yeast would be wasted.”
142 Andrew Targowski
The capital was wiped out by the Germans, with the total losses greater
than those caused by the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in August, 1945. There is an opinion among historians and politicians that for
as long as insurrectionists are alive, it will be wise not to talk about the defeat
of the Rising. Is this a wise policy on the part of the national leadership?
Would it not be better to teach the next generations from the mistakes of the
past so as not to repeat those mistakes later? Is it not what political
responsibility to the people should be about? Despite the true official version
of the Warsaw Rising missing, Poles have themselves made up their mind on
the insurrection. More importantly, they did not repeat the mistake and the
Polish Revolution of 1989 was conducted with almost no loss of life.
The issue of the 1945 betrayal of Poland by the West in Yalta is another
example calling for the truth to support the collective wisdom and
responsibility of the Poles.
First, the incorporation of Poland into the Soviet sphere of influence took
place as early as Teheran, in November and December, 1943. The meeting in
Yalta took place on 4-11 Feb., 1945, was about the details on how to
implement the settlements from over a year before.
To have a better insight in the motivation of the West in 1943 and 1945,
one needs to live in a pragmatic Anglo-Saxon culture. On arrival here 33 years
ago, I set about trying to understand the causes of the Teheran and Yalta
stance by President FDR. The US President was then guided by American
interests, not Polish. Banal though the statement sounds, Poles still believe that
the American president betrayed them, even though he had never promised
them anything. For the allies, the British and Americans, the objective no. 1
was defeating the Germans at the lowest possible losses. The Americans knew
that the Europeans would never defeat the Germans on their own and that they
would need to intervene in Europe. Therefore, before this happened, they
wanted the Soviets to defeat the Germans in the East first.
The Polish-Soviet relations were at the time hostile, and the allies would
wipe our tears in this conflict while at the same time they would support Stalin
because it was him, rather than us, who had the military might to defeat
Germany. Had the Americans supported the Poles rather than the Soviets,
there would always have been the threat that the indignant Stalin would sign a
peace treaty with Hitler. This possibility was in the air the moment the
Germans besieged Moscow in 1941 and some probing talks were held between
those parties in Sweden.
Suppose the Americans had supported the Poles and would not have
agreed to divide the influence in Teheran in 1943. By the time Germans had
Wisdom, Truth and Responsibility 143
lost the battle of Stalingrad, but they were still entrenched in Ukraine and
Leningrad was still under siege. So, Stalin was not sure of victory yet, and
Western political support absent, he might have sought peace with Hitler. It is
uncertain whether Hitler would have opted for peace, but Roosevelt could not
have known that and he preferred not to take risks. Incidentally, Roosevelt was
impressed by Stalin particularly that his close adviser was a Soviet spy. So, it
could not have been expected that during the war Roosevelt would tell Stalin
“Fight the war with the Germans and, when you have already won it, leave
Poland to us.” In the Teheran Treaty the matter was left to elections, which
Stalin was to rig later. However, this made the West declare the Cold War on
the Soviet Union, so the wartime friendship was indeed replaced by war, the
reason being the Sovietization processes in Poland. A special part in the Cold
War was played by President Harry Truman, who always reminded the Soviet
leaders of having failed to conduct free elections in Poland.
For the Poles it would have been nicer if – rather than declare the Cold
War – the West had invaded the Soviet Union right away in 1945, preferably
under the command of a Polish popular General W. Anders, who was eager to
write the “last chapter” of his memoirs after conquering the Soviet Union. I am
writing this chapter only 67 years after his memoirs, seeing his naiveté.
Although we were to experience the practices of Communism, it was thanks to
Poles in captured Poland (1945-1989) rather than anyone else that the system
was finally disgraced and dumped in the landfill of history.
Admittedly, Roosevelt disregarded the French, too, and did not treat them
as some kind of tip in the balance of the war in Europe. This Franco-American
resentment can be felt even today. Surely, having won the war against
Germany in 1945, the Americans wanted to return home immediately rather
than die for “Danzig” again.
In the event of a Soviet-German peace treaty, either the powers would
have fallen back on the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact or Ukraine would have been
divided and Poland – incorporated into the Reich. Hitler could still have
dictated solutions. Thanks to the peace, Germany would have transferred most
of their forces to the West, and consequently the American invasion of 1944
would have been questionable. If it had materialized, the war could have lasted
up to three more years. In practice, it would have lasted until the summer of
1945, by which time the USA had developed the atom bomb. Still, neither in
Teheran nor in Yalta was FDR unaware of that possibility. It was only the
knowledge of the A bomb that provided the edge to H. Truman's position in
Potsdam in July and August, 1945.
144 Andrew Targowski
BECOMING WISE
Nobody is born wise; wisdom is practiced throughout one's conscious life
and it never reaches a saturation point. Neither can one assume that once one
made a wise decision, one will always behave wisely forever after. In order to
consider one wise, one need not be wise in all decisions – it is enough to have
a positive balance in important decisions.
Wisdom is accumulated throughout a lifetime even though it is dependent
on the time and circumstances in which it occurred. It means that there is
never a wisdom which always works, as what was wise long ago need not be
wise today1,2,3.
Progress in knowledge changes the methods of judgment and choice; it is
particularly true in medicine. Some time ago it was recommended that the
patient lay in bed after operations. Now walking on the next day is advised. I
have given a number of examples illustrating this conviction here in this book.
Men with four minds: basic, understanding, global and universal usually
– that is, if all goes really well – comes to possess those minds in adulthood
(35-65). This is not to say that they cannot perfect their basic mind at school
age (6-12) and adolescence (12-18).
On top of having the four minds, men perfect their art of living all their
lives. The older they get, the better they control their emotions and
concentration on important matters. The same holds true for the virtue of
patience: young people are less patient that adults. They are also less altruistic
since they tend to deal with a number of time-consuming occupations:
learning, sport, pleasures, dating, etc.
It has long been believed that wisdom cannot be learned4,5 – one gains it in
the course of expanding one's life's practice. It is definitely so. How does one
teach wisdom unless one knows what wisdom is? Apparently, wisdom has
146 Andrew Targowski
been defined in detail here. Whether it has been presented clearly – this is up
to the reader to decide.
It cannot be guaranteed that someone who has been taught the theory of
wisdom will by default be wise, just as it cannot be promised to a student of
the theory of finances that they must necessarily become rich.
In order for man to consciously develop their wisdom, they first need to
know what it is about and above all; this must be assisted by parents, school,
universities, work and a wise environment. The following is a brief discussion
of what these institutions need to do.
and thus the essence of wisdom would be deepened. In colleges, all the
elements of the processes of wisdom are lectured, but they are dispersed, as a
result of which the student can be at a loss whether they are in fact dealing
with wisdom. If they do not, they cannot see anything extraordinary, deepen
their knowledge on the subject or develop their skills in making wise
decisions.
The development of the global mind ought to start at college provided that
the student starts using study-abroad programs, such as one-term foreign visits.
They should also take part in foreign trips, which are rather cheap for students.
Learning foreign languages should be mandatory. Also, participation in two
seminars/talks per semester on international issues, which are organized at any
university, ought to be obligatory.
The development of the universal mind at the universities of the Western
Civilization occurs within the general teaching of the humanities. Student
participation in some enlightened causes, such as women's emancipation, the
protection of the environment or saving energy definitely develops this kind of
mind.
In colleges, where student life is rich in a variety of associations and
activities, the art of living begins to manifest itself. The sense of belonging to a
group, caucus, team or some other grouping determined by interests begins to
form. This is when first serious relationships are entered into, which
sometimes end up in marriage. This is also when students learn loyalty to the
ideas they subscribe to, with some feeling isolated as they cannot see any
bonds of ideas with their environment. The forms of student life that go
beyond studying are extremely important as they shape the art of living. It
would be advisable for students to take part in seminars on the art of living,
which universities have gone silent about, treating those as students' private
business.
The 21st century invasion of social networks and tweeting written
communications kills face-to-face communication. It is a very negative
process, which replaces natural life with a form of artificiality. The youth have
fallen in love with this form of communication. Alas, the art of living ought to
limit it so as not to bring human beings down to “chatterboxes” which
communicate more than they say.
Becoming Wise 149
them. Poor tennis players would rather play with even poorer ones as they
want to beat someone at last or are ashamed of losing. They do not care about
high quality play.
In conclusion, the process of the development of a person's wisdom is a
continuing process7,8 and one that is essential, and possibly the most
important, for the success of people and their civilizations. It occurs
consciously or unconsciously. The bigger the role of consciousness and a good
art of living in this development, the greater the chance to become a wise
person, which is yours truly the author wishes those of his patient readers who
have managed to read the book through.
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