Abstract
One hundred percent. That is the percentage of authors of this volume who believe that the world would be a better place if people more frequently applied wisdom to their interactions with other people and with the world in general. Zero percent. That is the percentage scaled likelihood that people will apply such wisdom, on a regular basis, any time soon. To apply wisdom to contemporary world problems, or even to one’s own problems, requires one to learn how to be wise and to transfer this wisdom to interactions with others. There is little sign that schools are about to teach for wisdom (Sternberg, 2004; Sternberg & Hagen, 2019), and one certainly does not learn to be wise from observing many of today’s leaders (Sternberg, 2018). What are the obstacles to wisdom, and what can be done to alleviate them? In this final chapter, we first discuss obstacles to wisdom in two domains—teaching for wisdom and acting wisely in today’s political climate. Without teaching for wisdom, it is unclear what path will be available to future citizens of the world to improve the world we live in. But we also need to get on that path right now, by acting wisely in our online and offline lives, in private and in public. The purpose of this book was not just to describe our perilous situation, but also to show how wisdom might show us a way out of it. Therefore, after discussing obstacles to wisdom in two domains, we review the suggestions made by the chapter authors for using wisdom to deal with contemporary world problems.
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Glück, J., Sternberg, R.J., Nusbaum, H.C. (2019). Not Today, and Probably Not Tomorrow Either: Obstacles to Wisdom and How We May Overcome Them. In: Sternberg, R., Nusbaum, H., Glück, J. (eds) Applying Wisdom to Contemporary World Problems. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20287-3_16
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