November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

Wisdom for Dummies

(Page 3 of 3)

January/February 2000
By Ptolemy Tompkins, Lapis (www.opencenter.org/lapis3/) 
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A new battery of wisdom voices have replaced Watts, Castaneda, and their kin, and the hard, transformative words of the genuine wisdom traditions have given way to a soft, consoling purr--the lullabies of wisdom-as-product. This process is not without interesting side effects. As wisdom manuals turn into salves designed to soothe the delicate skin of our selfhood rather than irritants designed to drive us out of it, the urge toward deep, consequential change is showing up elsewhere, in unexpected places and sometimes unpleasant ways. If young people now devour blunt-edged books that say everything is okay, they are also hard on the lookout for messages with a sharper edge. When they're not lining up to see Scream and Nightmare on Elm Street, they are at the other end of the mall having their flesh pierced in an incoherent imitation of those initiatory destructions that accompanied getting wisdom in times past.

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Those dark, hooded, knife-wielding characters who fill the movies young people love stand for the figure of the lost initiator--the adult from the fringes of the mundane world who arrives with the news that grown-up life isn't complete after all, and that life's other, hidden side might ask more of us than we had ever bargained for.

This message is one of uncompromising singularity and seriousness. The more we tailor it to suit our tastes, or multiply and manipulate it to suit our desperate need for novelty, the more we risk getting lost among the countless versions of genuine wisdom we've collected--and missing its promise altogether.

Ptolemy Tompkins is the author of This Tree Grows Out of Hell, a study of meso-American myth and ritual, and a memoir, Paradise Fever: Growing Up in the Shadow of the New Age. His new book The Book of Answers: Field Notes on Getting Wise in a Wisdom-Crazy World (Avon), will be published in 2000. From Lapis (#9). Subscriptions: $15/yr. (3 issues) from 83 Spring St., New York, NY 10012.

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