The beginning of Wisdom

An insignificant dispute with my lady wife (can there ever be an insignificant dispute with one’s lady wife?) but no matter, a minor disagreement over washing jars for re-cycling drives me to ponder how hard it is to Un-deceive ourselves about many things.

The jars, for example. How much detergent and hot water is it necessary to waste in order that the wretched things may be tossed pristine and sparkling clean into the mucky green bin which the council’s men may or may not trouble themselves to collect and empty from time to time in the cause of recycling? I had the idea that the deal was, you toss your glass into the bin and we’ll cart it off, melt it all down, scrape off the unwanted goo and make new bottles or glass bricks out of the product. There does seem to be some sense in the idea. But just how much energy and detergent am I to employ in making this recycling process possible? Must I put the jars and bottles into a dishwasher before they will be fit to become waste glass? Something fishy there.

When years ago in England the ‘authorities’ asked for garden and park railings to be cut down and carted off with everyone’s spare saucepans to be melted down for the war effort, I am not at all clear whether any of that scrap went to build tanks or planes; or was it merely tipped, collected only as a propaganda idea to make the people feel they were ‘doing their bit’ to win the war. I do not mean we are into conspiracy theories. No. Something a little different. A muddle of competing motives, interests and possibilities in this complicated world which we are not very good at deciphering.

Consider. Time was, the only way to communicate with one another was to write, send a messenger, or to go and see someone in person and talk. It did not work too badly as a system for communication. Indeed, it sometimes worked surprisingly quickly. Researching parish records a few years ago, I came across correspondence between a parson in a Nottinghamshire village, and one in Derbyshire. To cut a long story short, it indicated that before the age of telephones, one could write to the other, receive a reply, and send back a new response all in the same day! Try that now. Of course we can communicate quicker and more often. But are the relevance and quality of our exchanges any better? I am not persuaded. The Internet allows us to search for information on a scale and with a speed never known before. But how do we know the information is reliable, and do we actually understand the information we amass? I had the impression that knowledge, and the wisdom which it might engender, have to do with much more than the simple acquisition of data.

Enough. It just makes me wonder how far our contemporary technologically-rich Western societies are actually any better for human beings, for all the toys?