Scripture never tells us to look for intelligence. It mentions reason in a few places but that’s as close as it gets. Instead, Scripture tells us to seek wisdom. It’s all about the wisdom. More valuable than gold and jewels – wisdom is where it’s at.

Modern man instead spends his time proving that a raven in as smart as a seven year old human. Great, the raven can identify objects, count to ten and get itself killed crossing a street.

Man managed to set foot on the moon – mostly to make himself better at building missiles that can carry his other shiny new toy, nuclear weapons. Sharp as a tack, our boy is.

Building weapons with new and creative ways of slaughtering other human beings takes a lot of intelligence – and a wisdom score of zero. How about skipping the whole ‘beat the snot out of each other to solve our problems’ thing in the first place?

Homo Sapiens Sapiens – man, twice wise. That designation was dreamed up in the Nineteenth Century when they should have known better but didn’t. The Twentieth Century proved one thing for sure – modern man is about as wise as a rock.

And I probably owe the rock an apology.

Here’s the short of it: it takes really smart people to do really stupid things. Man’s intelligence isn’t his greatest asset. Wisdom is. Having the sense to live well, to do right, to use that over sized brain for the better – living life to its best – that’s using your head and living wisely.

Wisdom is being able to discern the best way to live one’s life both moment to moment and long term. Cheating others so you have money might seem ‘best’ but it proves to be worst. Eventually, no one trusts you and even if you have enough money saved up, living all alone is just isolation with a prettier cell. Might be ‘smart’, but it’s extremely unwise.

Scripture and other ancient texts have been teaching us this since the first cave man started scrawling on a cave wall. Seeking first after wisdom, not intelligence, benefits ourselves and others. That raven can find seeds but it can’t decide the best time or place to plant them or even which is best to plant.

What does all this have to do with politics? Everything. We have this idiot notion that if we are just smart enough, we can figure it all out and make the world a paradise. We can’t. Even if we were smart enough – and we’re not – all that means is we’re good at plugging in data to formulas. But we totally stink at choosing the right formula because that requires the wisdom we discarded a couple centuries ago.

All that heady, philosophic gobbledy gook about justice, injustice, freedom, oppression, good, evil, – all that stuff is the rails to society’s train. We talk about justice but can’t define it. Freedom, but think it means no limits at all. Good, but think it’s merely an opinion, not a state of being. We have discarded the rails and wonder why the train goes no where.

Life comes only in size complicated. Politics is just the process of groups making decisions and it is one of those complications that we can’t live without. For the last three centuries we’ve been progressively trying to put this train on the rails of science and intelligence only to find that those rails cannot support the weight.

If we are to run our lives and our government, we have to start with ourselves, seeking after wisdom. Becoming wiser and making better decisions, for ourselves and others.

We won’t miraculously become perfect any more than we miraculously became brilliant. There’s nothing wise about tossing the baby with the bathwater – intelligence has its place and there’s no wisdom in deliberate stupidity. The world will still be a muddled mess – there are way too many of us for it to be otherwise*.

But, if we want it to be a better world, maybe a tad less muddled, we have to be wise enough to recognize and work toward whatever better happens to be.

Or we can see if we can find a buyer and move on to a new world – while bringing along all the baggage that muddled up this one. The smart move is to sell; the wise move is to make ourselves and the world better.

*More than three is more than enough people to muddle up any planet.