Thomas Jefferson and the death of wisdom

In recent weeks I have been trying out a mental exercise. Perhaps you might join me? Cast your mind back to 1999. We were standing on the dawn of a new millennium. True, there was a strange fear that all the computers might crash because of a bug called Y2K. But aside from that there seemed to be a tremendous optimism. One of the biggest causes for this was the nature of information technology: specifically, the internet.

Imagine if someone had said to you then: ‘We are heading into a world where almost anything can be read at the click of a mouse. Almost all the great books will be available free online. Almost any quote or reference can be found at the press of a few buttons. Oh and anyone in the world can speak to anyone else, swap information and solve problems. So if you are a physicist in London and another great physicist lives on the other side of the planet, you can do a thing called “Skype” – just remember to unmute yourself.’ If you had put this to our younger selves, I fancy we’d have said: ‘Well, then there is almost nothing we mightn’t solve in the 21st century. We could cure all diseases, become an interplanetary species, etc etc.’

Fast-forward to 2023 and we struggle to define what a woman is. And the world’s most powerful democracy is fighting over which year, indeed century, the country was founded. In other words, we have become stupider. Instead of solving problems we have created wholly unnecessary new ones.

In part this seems to be because of something that Henry Kissinger pointed out in these pages nine years ago. In an interview with Andrew Roberts, Kissinger highlighted the differences between information, knowledge and wisdom.