Or, for that matter, the Wise Women? No doubt there are a few of each around. Once in a while you'll hear a Wise Person on the radio - not so much on the television - but whatever it is they have to say is immediately 'balanced' by commentary by an Unwise Person.
I was a History major in college a long time ago, and took a few Anthropology courses along the way, thinking that the two were very much related. It appeared to me that every culture, every civilization, produced and honored Wise People. The Elders, if not the decision-makers themselves, were always consulted when important decisions were made.
Wisdom was a valued commodity.
There was a piece on NPR's Weekend Edition last evening about Chicago Tribune's Rex Huppke's column on the death of Facts.
Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012
In memoriam: After years of health problems, Facts has finally died.
To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.
"It's very depressing," said Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author A History of the Modern Fact . "I think the thing Americans ought to miss most about facts is the lack of agreement that there are facts. This means we will never reach consensus about anything. Tax policies, presidential candidates. We'll never agree on anything."
"American society has lost confidence that there's a single alternative," she said. "Anybody can express an opinion on a blog or any other outlet and there's no system of verification or double-checking, you just say whatever you want to and it gets magnified. It's just kind of a bizarre world in which one person's opinion counts as much as anybody else's."
Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion
Rex Huppke column
And that got me to thinking. What is wisdom and how does one acquire it? Making no claim to wisdom myself, I'm sure that this subject has been dealt with by those who are wise. That said, here is the path to wisdom, as I see it.
observation leads to facts which leads to information which leads to understanding which leads to knowledge which, combined with experience, leads to wisdom.
Education's role is in the process of converting information into understanding.
Now, if you eliminate facts, the whole structure tumbles down.
The Republican Party as a whole, not just Allen West, has a problem with facts. This morning (again on NPR) there was an interview with Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, co-authors of It's Even Worse than it Looks a book which basically excoriates the Republican Party as havin become "ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime."
This description, one could argue, is the direct result of the decision to ignore facts. Without facts as the base, there can be no wisdom.
Which is why the idea of a Wise Republican has become an oxymoron.