Events
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Digital
Wisdom
6 min read

The wisdom of living with the question not googling the quick answer

Are we trading wisdom for apparent certainty?

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A person sits on a window sill with one raise knee.

In much of the work I’ve been involved in, whether writing, coaching, hillwalking, local politics, or international development, I’ve learned to ask questions I don’t have answers to, and sometimes neither do the people I’m with. We sit with the question, decide whether it’s the right one, try to discern what else emerges in our peripheral vision as we focus on it. It takes effort to come to something like an answer, and in doing so, we peel off layers of unknowing. It has taken practice, and it can be slow work. But in searching for good questions, I see they can be an entry point into not just information but wisdom too. And there are many places that are hungry for wisdom.  

I longed for better questions and more curiosity when I was a district councillor. Curiosity that made space for residents to share their stories and opinions, curiosity about different political positions and what might happen if we work across divides, about what might be possible if we could get past the way things had always been and imagine what they could become.  But the desire to save face, to be seen to be in control, was strong, and I felt it often got in the way of real conversation. To be committed to the process more than the product takes courage, I think. The courage of uncertainty, of saying, “I don’t know”, of putting humility and honesty before status. Sitting with questions can be difficult, perhaps even feeling like a luxury, but they show us ourselves and the world a bit more clearly, offering a pathway to relationship, to collaboration, to humanity, to wisdom.  

I have been thinking about the temptation to trade the wisdom of questions for the apparent certainty of instant answers, even wrong answers. It is a temptation that, in our age of one-click everything and the importance of image, is only quickening. It is a temptation that I have been thinking about, wondering if it started with that old temptation in the Garden of Eden. Staring at a painting of Adam and Eve in the Prado gallery a while back, I wondered whether that original temptation set us on a path of instant information but also of depleted wisdom.  

As I peered into the painting, a thought sparked: what if God told Adam and Eve they could eat fruit from any tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because he wanted us to stay ignorant or innocent (something that Philip Pullman explores in his Northern Lights books) but because he knew it was too easy for us to eat from that tree. He wanted us to live, and to search for knowing and wisdom ourselves. Eating the fruit would bypass experience, there’d be no need to develop muscles of thinking and discernment. And he wanted us to be wise, to keep creating and tending the world with him. When those first pulled-from-the-earth humans ate the fruit, it was like us still-dependent-on-the-earth humans asking Artificial Intelligence to write us an essay: we might get what we want, but we’ve bypassed the experience of thinking, creating, discerning what’s ours to say.  

This analogy creaks when pulled too far, but it lingers all the same. There’s a quote I’ve long appreciated, from the biologist E.O.Wilson:  

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesisers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”  

Picking the fruit, becoming reliant on AI, gives us information but perhaps not the ability to think, and not the wisdom to make good choices. God wants us to be wise. The Bible’s Book of James says we can ask for wisdom. It is not withheld from us; it is not hidden. It’s everywhere, waiting to be called on.  

There are no digital shortcuts to the difficult work of community, no AI-shortcut to loving well, just as there was never a shortcut to complete knowledge of good and evil. 

It’s so easy to find answers now — Google solves problems and democratises access to information, unless of course you’re in a part of the world that has no digital access. In rural mid Devon and in rural Zambia, both places I’ve worked deeply with communities, you can’t simply access an online meeting or find the answer to a question you might have. Sometimes this feels a life-giving challenge: it increases the need for relationship, for trust, for community conversation. Other times is hinders progress: it means people can’t access jobs, or basic health knowledge, or government decisions that affect them. Google has changed who can access the world, how we interact with it, how we think and learn. Historically, people memorised poetry and scripture and news. The printing press changed that; words were pulled from minds and printed on paper. Our online existence has accelerated that: I don’t need to stretch my memory if I don’t want — I can find and store what I need digitally. We’ve outsourced our memory, and I wonder whether we’re also outsourcing our capacity to think and discern. 

In doing so, we risk disconnecting from ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our places. No longer do we need to rely on each other for knowing and wisdom — we can trust faceless digital forces that profit from us doing so. We risk too our unique ability to think creatively, to discern good sources, to think deeply and with nuance about a topic. If AI learns from everything that has been, it can synthesise and perhaps even extrapolate from that and project forward, but it can’t creatively imagine. It can’t reflect and speak wisdom.  

There is an ease and convenience to Google, to AI. There was an ease and convenience to picking the fruit to gain knowledge. But we are not called to ease and convenience. I think we are called to love, to care for our neighbours, and these things are necessarily inconvenient. Digital access to information is a tool, a resource, a gift that benefits many of us in many ways. But it could easily blunt our humanity, becoming a temptation that bypasses the work of truly living.  There are no digital shortcuts to the difficult work of community, no AI-shortcut to loving well, just as there was never a shortcut to complete knowledge of good and evil. With information available at the tug of a fruit — a click, a download, a request to an artificial intelligence — I am curious how our ability to sit with questions will change, whether we’ll feel beauty or fear in not having all the answers, whether we’ll lose our ability to discern, and to “have faith in what we do not see.”  

Sitting with questions, with curiosity, is I think an entry point to faith and to mystery. 

Jesus calls us to questions, to relationship, to love, not to answers that might be easily won but little interrogated. He knew that questions, not answers, were often the best response to questions. Questions to sit with, to hold up as a mirror, to walk as a path to wisdom. He asked a lot of them. Who do you say I am? How many loaves do you have? Do you love me? What do you want? Why are you afraid?  The Bible records Jesus asking questions, and sometimes offering answers too. But the point often seems to be the question itself, giving endless chances for people to question their assumptions, and their judgements, and to deepen their faith and make it personal. In doing so, Jesus offered a path to deeper and more meaningful knowledge of God, the world, others, and ourselves. And by asking questions he gave dignity to people, listening deeply to them, loving them, calling them into themselves. 

Sitting with questions, with curiosity, is I think an entry point to faith and to mystery. And we have companions as we do this: Jesus, early Christian mystics, prayer, the Psalms, each other – these are all places I turn to dig deeper into the knowing that comes through unknowing. To live with questions and within mystery, to listen deeply to each other, to speak the language of soul rather than certainty, might be difficult and countercultural. But in an age where the future is becoming less certain despite the whole world seemingly at our fingertips, I think it is where our hope is. After all, “what good is it for a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?”

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Justice
7 min read

Just where does the arc of history bend towards today?

What happens when the optimism bubble bursts.

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London. 

The feet and legs of someone walking on a white rug, beside the words Justice and Government woven in to it,
Obama's Oval Office rug.
The White House, via Wikimedia Commons.

"Yes we can! 

Yes we can! 

Yes we can!"

There was something magical about hearing Barak Obama speak to a crowd. The rhythm of his sentences, the rhyme of his words and the melodic cadence of his baritone delivery had the ability to hold you spellbound. It felt so positive, so uplifting, so inspiring.  

The call and response with the audience only underlined the positivity of the impression: ‘Yes we can!’  

It was listening to Obama that I first heard the quote: 

 ‘The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.’ 

I loved it. Obama used it a lot, and so did I.  

It seemed to epitomise the hopefulness his presidency embodied. Implicitly, it advocated the qualities of patience and persistence that are so important in working for a better world. It doesn’t happen overnight. It also acknowledged his rootedness in what had gone before, ‘As Dr King used to remind us …’. Obama was borrowing the line from one of his own heroes. 

In fact, the quote was with him all the time in the Oval Office of the White House, to the right of his desk. Along with four other quotes it was woven into the perimeter of a 23 by 30-foot oval rug that almost filled the room. 

The one-liner still delivers a punch, just as it did for Martin Luther King. However, I am increasingly convinced that it doesn’t stand scrutiny. As much as I want it to be true, and long for it to be true, I do not believe that it is. 

The sentiment was of its time. Not the 1950s and 60s of Dr King, but the 1850s of the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker from Massachusetts. The germ of an idea originated with him in a sermon entitled, ‘Of Justice and the Conscience’. At this point it was a complicated paragraph rather than a pithy one-liner. 

‘You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.’ 

Parker was also responsible for ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ that Abraham Lincoln would go on to cut and paste into his famous Gettysburg Address during the Civil War. It also appeared on Obama’s rug. 

The intellectual circles of the 1850s were alive with many new ideas like progress, equality and the abolition of slavery, and ‘transmutation’ (or evolution as it would become known). In science, industry and social life things were moving forward and getting ever better. 

As the century moved on this conviction continued to grow and become more widespread. By the early years of the twentieth century Parker’s thought itself had been distilled down into the single line we’re familiar with and included in popularly published collections of aphorisms. 

Prosperity and progress informed the narrative of Western culture and ideas of evolution were imported into other disciplines. In anthropology, for example, this gave rise to ‘social evolutionism’ and the categorisation of societies into a developmental sequence ranging from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised’.  

Of course, it doesn’t take much imagination to recognise that there was a darker side to such notions. Here was also an underpinning for a colonial worldview and an intellectual justification for racial hierarchy. Western culture was more ‘evolved’.  

These views were epitomised in psychology where, for example, in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) he speaks of indigenous people as ‘the most backward and miserable of savages’, comparing the way they live with features of a neurosis and mental disorder. 

The carnage of the First World War effectively popped the bubble of an overly optimistic ‘progressivism’. I do wonder whether we are now at another ‘bubble popping’ moment in the West. 

Is your ‘bubble of optimism’ in danger of popping, or has it even popped already, like mine? 

In the decades since the Second World War we have succumbed to our own narrative of progress. We have witnessed amazing technological advances and stunning scientific discoveries. The forward movement is obvious, and the promise of an even better future is clear. 

Then, supported and monetised by the market economy, our lives are tempted, enhanced and festooned by the latest products and services that our money can buy. From smart doorbells to wearable tech and TikTok to ChatGPT our world is constantly changing and upgrading and the movement forward is undeniable. 

The narrative runs in our wider life too. We celebrate the triumph of the suffragettes, the defeat of fascism and the collapse of old-school communism. Francis Fukuyama may have been premature declaring the end of the Cold War as the ‘end of history’ in 1989, but it did seem like Western-style liberal democracy was what the world was striving for. 

Then there are the advances in our shared life together in Britain. If Acts of Parliament in some measure illustrate the pulse of the nation, the direction is clear. Take, for example: 

  • the Sexual Offences Act 1967 
  • the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 
  • the Race Relations Act 1976 
  • the Childrens’ Acts of 1986 and 2004 
  • the Disability Discrimination Act 1995  
  • the Human Rights Act 1998 
  • the statutory instruments protecting against discrimination in employment on grounds of religion or belief (2003), sexual orientation (2003) and age (2006) 
  • the Gender Recognition Act 2004 
  • the Equality Act 2010 
  • the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 

This list isn’t exhaustive and there are campaigners who are very keen to add to it. But we live inside this narrative, and we know the plot. It is familiar to us. And it would be so easy to be seduced into a new myth of inevitable progress, ‘The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice’. 

‘Social evolutionism’ was so deeply embedded in late Victorian culture that its ‘self-evident’ truth went largely unchallenged. The vast majority believed their own hyperbole and complacently embraced the fruits of burgeoning industry and an expanding empire. They lacked the self-critical capacity to comprehend the flaws in their worldview and to understand what their world was capable of in the infernal, apocalyptic catastrophe that was unleashed in 1914. 

Maybe, embracing a more contemporary myth of progress has a similar effect on us. We presume that our way of life will inevitably continue moving forward unchallenged. That we have a right to experience a tomorrow that will always be better than yesterday. And that those who do not subscribe to our notion of ‘progress’ are clearly inferior, ill-informed or backward in some way. But such a mindset also lacks a culturally self-aware and critical edge and is oblivious to how easily things could fall apart. 

At this moment in time the world seems far less secure than at any point in my lifetime. Our community hosts refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong, a friend has only recently returned from working with a voluntary agency in Israel and I am about to meet up with another friend who has just flown in from the United States.  

Populist, anti-democratic and disruptive forces are more blatantly at work around the world than for many a long year. Developments in AI, cyber-terrorism and digital warfare create a disembodied sense of ‘existential threat’. And then there is the climate crisis. Fires in California, floods in Europe and the unprecedented sequence of six tropical cyclones in the Philippines in late 2024 seem to have had little impact in accelerating the response to global warming. 

Is your ‘bubble of optimism’ in danger of popping, or has it even popped already, like mine? 

Of late I have found helpful insight in observations made by Jesus. Rather than fixating about what might happen in the future, he encouraged those who had attached themselves to him to live in the moment, 

'Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.'  

For those who were concerned about what might be happening and felt the world was falling in around them, he offered reassurance. He counselled that such events did not signal the end of the world. Rather, this was simply the kind of thing that happened.  

'You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen … these are the beginning of birth pains.'

Rather, the early Christian ethic was rooted in God’s loving, supporting and strengthening presence during unstable times.  

Writing to the Christian community that had formed itself in Rome, the apostle Paul was convinced that whatever befell them – trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, or weaponised violence – that nothing would be able to ‘separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’  

And right at the base of this ethic that Jesus advocated was an unswerving commitment to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ 

Which takes us back to Obama’s rug and the West Wing office. 

On the left-hand side of his desk was a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt: 

'The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.'

And that really is it. History may not bend towards justice, and hard-won progress we’ve achieved can likewise be lost, but our future will always hang on the ‘welfare of all of us.’  

Well said Mr. President! 

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