THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE
It is said that knowledge is power, but this is only a partial truth, based on the self-proclaimed authority of our Age of Reason. To know of something is not to know it, and to have ideas about something is not to experience it. While it’s true a person can leverage knowledge about things to effect results, such knowledge does not transform a person. Only experience can change the way we look at things, how we regard ourselves, how we relate to people and the world at large, and thus how we use the knowledge we acquire. In an effort to crown reason and deduction as lord almighty, we have forgotten this and thus diminished our capacity to guide ourselves as individuals and as a culture in a healthy, life-giving and affirming direction. We have, instead, invested too much in ideas that lead nowhere, to misaligned places, or to the mere accumulation of more ideas. We’re drunk on knowledge, but what we desperately need now is wisdom.