In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says “The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers.” This rubbed me the wrong way—but I couldn’t entirely dismiss it. I understand the basic point that Csikszentmihalyi is making, and it is pretty inoffensive: measure success by what you can control, not what you can’t. Still, something seemed off to me. It seems to pit tradition against the individual, and claim the latter is more important than the former. Yes, while we have a God-given purpose, how we live it out varies from person to person. Clearly some who ostensibly live to serve the greater good are miserable. But merely “looking within” is no good either. Both in themselves lead to misery, but each seems antithetical to the other.
To unravel this, let’s start with two naive (though common) approaches to defining success. The first assumes that the way to be successful is to adhere to tradition. We can call this the traditionalist approach. The second assumes that success is something only found within yourself, not anywhere else. We can call this the radical approach. Both of these can become pathological. The pathological traditionalist is stodgy, closed to change, holier-than-thou, and quick to judge. The pathological radical is accepting and open to the point of self-destruction.
Clearly there are problems with each side, and neither one seems to paint the full picture. What clicked for me was Owen Barfield’s distinction in Poetic Diction between knowledge and wisdom, and the idea of metaphor and of truth needing to be continually reawakened, continually rediscovered.
Knowledge is the felt change in consciousness one experiences upon learning something new about the world. Wisdom is what remains after knowledge is gone. The wisdom stays, but you cannot get the same knowledge from something that you once did. The same poem will not give you the same feeling as when you first read it. The wisdom it left is still there, but the knowledge is gone. Though a poem or novel may change your mental landscape forever, you can never experience it for the first time again.
Everything is like this. Everything old was new at some point. As Emerson said, language itself is but fossilized poetry. We owe such commonplace words as eyeball, lonely, and assassination to Shakespeare. There is nothing special about them to us now, but when he first said them, they were novel and unexpected.
Sometimes we can get a distorted view by looking at the fossilized forms of metaphors. There may be some aspect of a metaphor at the time of its coining that was accidental, yet which we’ve now latched on to, losing the original meaning. “Survival of the fittest” originally meant “most fitted or suited to an environment,” rather than the now ubiquitous sense of “strongest.” To love God with all your heart (Deut. 6:5) means to love Him with the inner seat of deliberation, memory, and will (leb). Now we associate “heart” with sentiment, and scoff at being commanded to conjure up warm fuzzies.
This is why I believe tradition can sometimes seem to get things wrong while also being quite powerful. The truth of the matter—the spirit of wisdom—is what is important. Merely drifting along in a stream of knowledge without ever building upon wisdom is not the way to go. You’re just going to reinvent old heresies, both theological and scientific. One must build upon the wisdom of the past by seeking new knowledge.
The solution is to be a radical traditionalist. Both sides have truth to them. The traditionalist is right that what is passed down to us has genuine wisdom that we can learn from, wisdom we can understand and incorporate into our being. And the radical is right that that wisdom is often stale and that we have to find something we can call our own.
There is truth to tradition, but to actually use it, one must make it one’s own. So often we hear golden nuggets of wisdom and barely process them. They have been desiccated into platitudes. But it just takes a slight shift in perspective to reveal how meaningful they truly are. Just add water.
This idea itself is nothing new. The idea that old wisdom needs new knowledge is itself such old wisdom in need of new knowledge. I think this is what set me off with Csikszentmihalyi’s quote. The most important hinge in it is “substitute.” The solution is not to substitute societal rewards for ones that are under our own powers, but rather to understand and bring the societal rewards under our own powers.
I often think of the Flannery O’Connor line about educating children: “His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.” So are all we children in the school of the world. We have much yet to learn, and we are still being formed into who we are meant to be. This is not passive learning, or it would not be learning at all. There is much more richness that can be mined from the wisdom of the ages than the mere surface of them. It goes deeper. It goes down to the Truth, with a capital T. We ought to be radical—to get to the root of things. But that presumes there is a root to get to.
