Towards Wise Societies

In the preparations for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), UNESCO called for an emphasis to be placed not on the Information Society, but on the Knowledge Society. That was the genesis of its report titled Toward Knowledge Societies.

UNESCO staff felt that WSIS was too likely to be a conference about connectivity. More important issues than the availability of information involve the quality of that information, whether it is internalized, what is learned, and how that learning is put to use. The focus on Knowledge Societies was an improvement.

I have been thinking about UNESCO a great deal, and it occurs to me that the founders of that organization were thinking "towards wise societies". The world had just emerged from World War II, and people everywhere understood that society had to be wise enough to avoid another world war, one that would be fought with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. The more farsighted among the leaders recognized that the inequities in the world distribution of power, wealth, income, and knowledge were unwise.

UNESCO was created with a unique mission and structure. It was to focus on the minds of men. Education was and remains a central focus of the organization. So too were the sciences. For Americans, it is not always clear what UNESCO means by the sciences, for they include not only the natural sciences and the social sciences, but the human sciences. That latter term reflects French thinking, and includes in the mission of UNESCO what Americans tend to think of as the humanities. Thus history and philosophy were and are key areas of concern for UNESCO. UNESCO's mission also included culture, again a field misunderstood by many Americans who think of "high culture" involving art, music, drama, literature, and dance. UNESCO does include these fields, and they clearly are critically important in determining our understanding of life and how to act. However, UNESCO also deals more holistically with culture, using a definition such as that employed by social scientists to include the entire body of knowledge and institutions that define a people or a society. Finally, UNESCO includes communication and information in its mandate, perhaps reflecting the early influence of William Benton, the advertising genius and State Department official who later became a U.S. Senator. UNESCO recognizes the need for libraries and a strong global information infrastructure, for book publishing and an intellectual property rights regime which encourages expression, as well as militating for freedom of expression everywhere.

If you think about this mandate, it is a mandate to work to make nations and peoples act more wisely!

In a recent posting I noted a suggestion that wisdom has a private face in our individual lives, and a public face in the behavior of peoples and nations. I reflected on recent research which has suggested wisdom is composed of:

• knowledge and understanding;
• analysis and reflection;
• emotional maturity and control.

Obviously, not all knowledge contributes equally to wisdom. We all know people who know a lot but who are not wise. Wisdom would seem to depend most on knowledge about human behavior, motivations and values. It depends on understanding gained from experience as well as from books. In many cases it is conveyed tacitly through the arts, as well as studied in the social sciences. Importantly, knowledge and understanding critical to wisdom is embodied and organized in the humanities.

I sometimes think modern society behaves something like an idiot savant. It has committed a large number of facts to memory, but can not bring knowledge to bear effectively on day to day life, much less on major decisions. UNESCO seeks to find ways that ethics and social science can inform public policy. It seeks to assure freedom of information, freedom of debate, and freedom of the press as institutional protections to assure knowledge is brought to bear on important issues.

Analysis and Reflection are institutionalized processes as well as individual activities when one focuses on the public face of wisdom. How does a nation, a society, or a people reflect on experience, and analyze information to make decisions. The 9/11 Commission comes to mind as an example in which the United States Government reflected on experience, and the Baker-Hamilton Commission as an example of analysis toward decision making.

One should think more broadly, however, of the roles of media, academia, and the literary arts in ruminating about our experience as a people and on the decisions before us as a society.

I have not thought much about emotions as they affect the public face of wisdom, but even the briefest consideration suggests that it is hard for the nation to act wisely when its people are in the grip of strong emotions. The United States created concentration camps for Japanese Americans in the wake of Pearly Harbor, and invaded Iraq in the wake of 9/11. Wiser heads advocate caution in such circumstances, but we depend on the media to make their voices heard, and on our leaders to have the wisdom not only to not be swayed by mass emotions, but to avoid the temptation to take advantage of those mass emotions to move the country in ways history will show to be unwise.