The Wisdom Pyramid - A Review

We don’t hear as much about wisdom these days in modern discourse.

We hear about expertise, eloquence, and clarity.

None of those three things are bad things in and of themselves, but they are a far cry from wisdom.

Any good Bible reader can tell you that wisdom is a good thing. Wisdom is personified by Solomon in the Proverbs. Moreover, James urges his readers, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him.” (1:5) The alternative to wisdom is being a doubter who is “like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.” (1:6)

To be honest, being tossed like a wave seems to be the standard state of most people in our culture. People tend to have a ton of information at their fingertips, especially since most of us carry the internet in our pockets. But having information without knowing what to do with it leads to being wind tossed. Having a framework that allows us to do something with available information is a step along the way to wisdom. True wisdom is having a true framework that can handle all available data.

Brett McCracken’s book, The Wisdom Pyramid, published in 2021, is a helpful, popular level book on the problem of information overload (or wisdom deficit) with some practical solutions. It’s more than a jeremiad and much more than a self-help book.

McCracken identifies the problem of information overload, with statistics that help illustrate the immense increase in volume and range of information we are exposed to. He also notes there is a constant pursuit of novelty in our world—there is always something different coming down the pike. This is complicated by the emphasis on finding meaning within, so that one’s moral compass is guided by one’s current feelings.

This sort of condition helps explain why many of feel ill at ease in the world. There is no solid ground. We have not been taught how to navigate this world. We are often overwhelmed by the battering of the wind, like waves of the sea. Too seldom have we asked God for wisdom.

As part of the solution, McCracken proposes a six-tiered approach to information intake. Much like the food pyramid paradigm that used to guide our nutritional sources, the foundation layer is the most plentiful with the top level being consumed sparingly.

It is little surprise that McCracken, a regular contributor to The Gospel Coalition, begins with Scripture intake. The Bible should make up the largest volume of our information diet. The Word of God is food for the soul and we should feast on it regularly. After that the teaching ministry and community of our local churches should be a plentiful source of content. In a reasonably healthy church with other believers also trying to consume great volumes of Scripture, that fellowship and teaching should echo the foundation of the pyramid.

McCracken recommends that nature form the third tier of the ever-narrowing pyramid. It has certainly not helped our culture’s understanding of truth to believe we have conquered the outside and that we can master nature. The heaven’s declare God’s handiwork, if we’ll only take time to listen. The next level in the wisdom pyramid is books. Old books are good, because they help us see the problems with our own age. New books can be good because good books explore topics with a depth and precision that blogs, newspaper articles, and social media does not.

The penultimate layer of the wisdom pyramid is exposure to beauty. McCracken recognizes the transcendent nature of beauty—that it isn’t merely a human appreciation, but reflects the order of the universe. More significantly, he knows that because has emotive power that comes and goes. It cannot be the main pursuit, though it can point us toward the other transcendentals: truth and goodness. Finally, at the tippy top of the pyramid is the internet and social media. These are the “fats, oils, and sweets” foods of the old food pyramid. Great treats, but terrible for long-term health when taken in large quantities.

The wisdom pyramid is helpful. It may not perfectly reflect the opportunities we have, but it should be something we aspire to replicate. Our problem is that most of us have reversed the pyramid. We live online and dabble in the others. It’s a good thought to try to wean ourselves off our phones and the internet (except my blog, of course), and spend more time at the bottom of the pyramid.

After all, we should be seeking wisdom. And wisdom is best found in the words of the author of the universe. Indeed, where else shall we go, for Christ has the words of eternal life? (John 6:68)

The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World

By McCracken, Brett

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Stop Reading the News - A Review

There are thousands of companies and people that have you on their mind right now.

Maybe not you in particular, but they are thinking about a category of people that you belong to. They want your attention. They want to have you read their article see the advertisements on their pages and get hooked on their product.

Sometimes we act as if manufacturing drama for the news is a recent phenomenon. Jeffrey Bilbro helps debunk that in his book, Reading the Times. He goes back to Henry David Thoreau’s concern that newspapers of that day were exaggerating claims, inflaming situations for the sake of sales, and disrupting people’s ability to see the integrity of the world. The issue, though, goes back before that to pamphleteering after the invention of moveable type for the printing press, which drastically lowered the entry cost for authors and publishers. It’s a long-term problem, but it remains a real one.

Rolf Dobelli recognizes the way most people take in media as a significant problem and recommends that, as the title of his little book suggests, we Stop Reading the News. This book is, as the subtitle claims, “A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life.”

Dobelli is a popular author of airport books, like The Art of Thinking Clearly. His aim is not to draw people into some mysterious appreciation for only high-brow literature and a contemplative way of life. Rather, he is someone who has likely benefited significantly from attention in various forms of media (especially for the sales of his books), but understands that the way we process the news is bad for our minds.

The ironic setup for this volume is significant to its message and humorous. Dobelli opens the book describing his taking the opportunity to speak to a room full of journalists at the Guardian in 2013 about another book. However, he had also just written a blog post about avoiding consuming the news. In the room filled with people whose livelihood depended on people consuming the news, he was asked to further explain his position. He did. The newspaper employees found something worthwhile in his explanation, subsequently publishing some of his comments. This, in turn, led to the book, Stop Reading the News.

Summary

According to Dobelli, he has nearly entirely avoided consuming the news since 2010. One of the most significant exceptions was when he briefly got infatuated with American presidential politics around 2016. However, he quickly realized that it was a trap and returned to his more careful media consumption habits.

Despite what the media publishers may tell you, it is entirely possible to go through life without reading or watching their content. Dobelli estimates that the average person likely encounters about 20,000 items of “news” per year. He encourages a thought experiment: How many of those news articles have led to meaningful decision in your life that you would not have otherwise have made?

Looking back over the past year, I have to argue that Dobelli is largely correct. The news has not changed my mind, caused me to do something radically different, or really improved my life in any significant way. I may have encountered a few books that I otherwise would not have, but there has been little of significance. For Dobelli, the most significant difference the news could have made is when he would have known his flight was cancelled due to the Icelandic volcano eruption had he read the news. That would have saved a few hours of his life.

The news is largely irrelevant. Not just irrelevant to our daily lives, but actually totally insignificant. Dobelli points out the none of the daily newspapers in the world covered the invention of the first internet browser, which is arguably one of the most significant inventions since the plane. There were other stories of human and political interest on that day, but none of those items were really as significant in a historical sense as the web browser.

The news also encourages us to worry beyond our sphere of influence. It is tragic that there is genocide going on in a distant place, but our understanding every detail of the ongoing drama does not benefit me or the victims of unrest. In fact, when all is said and done, it is highly likely that much of the information distributed as “news” will be determined to be incorrect. Additionally, the news lacks the ability to accurately explain why things are happening, which is, in large part, what people who follow the news faithfully are not experts on issues they have not studied through longer articles and books (despite their confidence on social media). The net result of following the news closely is a false confidence in one’s own expertise and a more unsettled mind.

Another significant point that Dobelli makes is that the average person spends about 90 minutes a day reading this news. This means that about 1 month of the year is invested in reading or watching material that really won’t matter. Avoiding the news opens up worlds of possibility for deeper engagement through books, better conversations, and simply being a better observer of the world around. Imagine adding a month back into every year for rest or more productive purposes.

Conclusion

Stop Reading the News is a short book, about 146 pages long in a gift-sized format. It is about the right size to read on a medium length flight. It is filled with arguments for avoiding the news and ways to get by without reading the news. Dobelli’s point is not that we should be oblivious to the world, but that other media are a better way to really understand what is happening. He also notes that most stories of real import will be brought to your attention in daily conversation, even if you avoid the rapid-fire approach to the news.

This is not a must-read book, but Dobelli’s approach is compelling and the book is an easy read. This is the sort of volume that would be useful in a high school or college course on media literacy as a companion to the course. It is the sort of book that might be worth conveniently leaving at the home of a relative who is consumed by the news and has been transformed by the tone of the news. Personal application of the avoidance of news (and likely social media) might be a beneficial practice that would be worth experimenting with for many of us.

Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life

By Dobelli, Rolf

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Reading the Times - A Review

Most local newspapers are dying. The little paper in my city has been reduced to high school sports, complaints about the nearby nuclear plant, classified ads, and the occasional social gossip. More and more newspapers are shifting to a model of reprinting what comes through on some subscription service. This has had the effect of trivializing the news, so that local stories about small-scale, but important deeds like a teen giving her father CPR or a child finding the foundation of an old historical building while exploring the back woods disappear. In their place we get news about a smaller and smaller set of less and less real people who happen to have a large following on social media, their own TV show, and might have moderate talent in some other area of life. We end up knowing more about a rich, beautiful, spoiled person whom we will never meet than we do about our neighbor down the block.

The media by which we take in the news of the day affects the trivialization of the world, though it does not mandate it. Many people get their news from social media, which means that it tends to be ideologically slanted toward opinions shared with one’s friends. Since one of the basic presuppositions of our society is that if you associate with someone you agree with them, a bubble of reality begins to form. And, since the art of disagreeing temperately on social media is difficult to learn, opposing ideas are often avoiding or ignored rather than engaged and questioned. Comments are either strongly affirming or attacking the opinion under consideration, because to say “yes, but” or “maybe this, yet not that” is a needle that few can thread from a keyboard.

But it is our behaviors that trivialize the news. We share articles with misleading headlines, sometimes without having read the body. We look for opinions that excoriate our outgroup. The algorithm feeds our human behavior and continues to provide the material for which we have developed a taste. And we must be clear that our taste has been developed through our own actions, or, at least, through our own failures to resist the tendency of the news medium to trivialize our view of the world.

What can we do about it?

Jeffrey Bilbro’s book, Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, provides both an apt diagnosis of the problem and some particularly helpful steps toward alleviating it. The result is a succinct, clearly-written book that is accessible to the layperson.

Bilbro’s diagnosis is not particularly innovative. He is channeling the energy of Wendell Berry, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, and Thoreau in arguing that the way news is presented is not good for the human condition. In application, Bilbro’s solutions are much more reliant on Berry and Thoreau (whom Bilbro has written about previously) than the other two thinkers. In any case, innovation is not what is needed, but intelligibility and digestibility.

The core of the problem, as Bilbro presents it, is not necessarily the technology or the content of the news, but rather that too much of what we get that passes as news has very little to do with our lives, even though it is designed to rattle our cage. What we get angry or excited about often has little to do with what God is concerned about:

“Perhaps we need to conduct an emotional audit and consider which issues or news items cause us to become angry, outraged, or excited: Are we grieving over what grieves God and rejoicing over what brings him joy? Or have we become emotionally invested in trivia while growing apathetic about matters of real import?”

Bilbro recognizes that a big part of the problem is the way we read the news. As a result, the fix is to change ourselves and what we value. This is a book that is timely and well suited for those looking for an off-ramp from the highway of partisan politics, misanthropy, and emotional turmoil that often goes with the news.

After a brief introduction, in which Bilbro explains that his purpose is to help us understand how to use the news to love our neighbor better, the book is divided into three parts with three chapters each. Part One deals with attention, Part Two with time, and Part Three with community. The pattern of each part is to present the modern problem in the first chapter, put out a somewhat abstract better condition in the second chapter, and then provide some realistic practices that can help transition between the two. This pattern of problem, better vision, and help to get there makes this book a novel contribution.

Bilbro does not abstain from social media, nor does he recommend that for his readers, but he provides a means to put social media use in its place. He doesn’t recommend disconnecting from news media, but being more thoughtful of who we read, when, and how. The book presents a realistic vision of living in a world that demands our participation, but threatens us through our participation at the same time.

Much of Bilbro’s writing has had a localist bent. Like his hero, Wendell Berry, he has invested a great deal of thought in how to live in this place, right now. Modernity tends to flatten the world (a la Friedman) and create a tyranny of the eternal immediate present. Bilbro points to living better with an eternal viewpoint and a local scope, which is just the opposite of the way the news pushes us to have a global scope with an immediate viewpoint. This book won’t solve all of everyone’s problems, but it is another piece in a puzzle of dealing with the malaise of modernity.

In addition to being helpful and well-written, for those engaged in the study of modernity, this book ties a lot of pieces together. The footnotes are a roadmap to a wide range of resources for deeper study and consideration. They are also a trap for an individual’s book budget. I had to read the book again (a pleasure) before writing this review because I got sidetracked for several weeks following the leads that Bilbro laid out in his notes. Several mysterious packages showed up on the porch in the interim, which I had to explain to my wife, which was local news enough around here.

Buy the book because it is good and useful. Beware that it is going to make you stop, think, and probably even change the way you look at a few things.

Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News

By Bilbro, Jeffrey

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NOTE: I received an advanced reader copy from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.