“Wisdom”. The very word inspires awe. It suggests pronouncements from the Oracle on Mount Olympus, or the stone tablets that Moses (purportedly) brought down from Mount Sinai, or the Analectsof Confucius, or Plato’s Republic, or the sayings of Mark Twain and Yogi Berra. I prefer to call it a distillation of seasoned experience by some of the battle-hardened veterans of the vicissitudes of life– people with a good heart who have served their time on the battlefield and want to pass on to others what they have learned about the art of living, and of politics.
No, it’s not a joke. Trees have much to teach us, or at least underscore, about living together. They have been doing it for many millions of years, and we are only now beginning to understand their remarkable social life.
In his famous book, The Great Transformation(1944), the political economist/ anthropologist/sociologist Karl Polanyi produced a classic critique of the classic liberal (conservative) ideal of free market capitalism that still resonates today.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” The quote in my title (above) is how Donald Trump was once characterized by his sister – a federal judge. No kidding. Phineas Taylor Barnum was the nineteenth century self-described “showman” (he seems to have invented that job category) who made a fortune promoting celebrated hoaxes with gullible audiences. Barnum himself marveled at how willingly the American public “submits to a clever humbug.”
