Events

Belief

Creed

Digital

Wisdom

26 September 2024

6 min read

The wisdom of living with the question not googling the quick answer

Are we trading wisdom for apparent certainty?

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A person sits on a window sill with one raise knee.

In much of the work I’ve been involved in, whether writing, coaching, hillwalking, local politics, or international development, I’ve learned to ask questions I don’t have answers to, and sometimes neither do the people I’m with. We sit with the question, decide whether it’s the right one, try to discern what else emerges in our peripheral vision as we focus on it. It takes effort to come to something like an answer, and in doing so, we peel off layers of unknowing. It has taken practice, and it can be slow work. But in searching for good questions, I see they can be an entry point into not just information but wisdom too. And there are many places that are hungry for wisdom.

I longed for better questions and more curiosity when I was a district councillor. Curiosity that made space for residents to share their stories and opinions, curiosity about different political positions and what might happen if we work across divides, about what might be possible if we could get past the way things had always been and imagine what they could become. But the desire to save face, to be seen to be in control, was strong, and I felt it often got in the way of real conversation. To be committed to the process more than the product takes courage, I think. The courage of uncertainty, of saying, “I don’t know”, of putting humility and honesty before status. Sitting with questions can be difficult, perhaps even feeling like a luxury, but they show us ourselves and the world a bit more clearly, offering a pathway to relationship, to collaboration, to humanity, to wisdom.

I have been thinking about the temptation to trade the wisdom of questions for the apparent certainty of instant answers, even wrong answers. It is a temptation that, in our age of one-click everything and the importance of image, is only quickening. It is a temptation that I have been thinking about, wondering if it started with that old temptation in the Garden of Eden. Staring at a painting of Adam and Eve in the Prado gallery a while back, I wondered whether that original temptation set us on a path of instant information but also of depleted wisdom.

As I peered into the painting, a thought sparked: what if God told Adam and Eve they could eat fruit from any tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because he wanted us to stay ignorant or innocent (something that Philip Pullman explores in his Northern Lights books) but because he knew it was too easy for us to eat from that tree. He wanted us to live, and to search for knowing and wisdom ourselves. Eating the fruit would bypass experience, there’d be no need to develop muscles of thinking and discernment. And he wanted us to be wise, to keep creating and tending the world with him. When those first pulled-from-the-earth humans ate the fruit, it was like us still-dependent-on-the-earth humans asking Artificial Intelligence to write us an essay: we might get what we want, but we’ve bypassed the experience of thinking, creating, discerning what’s ours to say.

This analogy creaks when pulled too far, but it lingers all the same. There’s a quote I’ve long appreciated, from the biologist E.O.Wilson:

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesisers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

Picking the fruit, becoming reliant on AI, gives us information but perhaps not the ability to think, and not the wisdom to make good choices. God wants us to be wise. The Bible’s Book of James says we can ask for wisdom. It is not withheld from us; it is not hidden. It’s everywhere, waiting to be called on.

There are no digital shortcuts to the difficult work of community, no AI-shortcut to loving well, just as there was never a shortcut to complete knowledge of good and evil.

It’s so easy to find answers now — Google solves problems and democratises access to information, unless of course you’re in a part of the world that has no digital access. In rural mid Devon and in rural Zambia, both places I’ve worked deeply with communities, you can’t simply access an online meeting or find the answer to a question you might have. Sometimes this feels a life-giving challenge: it increases the need for relationship, for trust, for community conversation. Other times is hinders progress: it means people can’t access jobs, or basic health knowledge, or government decisions that affect them. Google has changed who can access the world, how we interact with it, how we think and learn. Historically, people memorised poetry and scripture and news. The printing press changed that; words were pulled from minds and printed on paper. Our online existence has accelerated that: I don’t need to stretch my memory if I don’t want — I can find and store what I need digitally. We’ve outsourced our memory, and I wonder whether we’re also outsourcing our capacity to think and discern.

In doing so, we risk disconnecting from ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our places. No longer do we need to rely on each other for knowing and wisdom — we can trust faceless digital forces that profit from us doing so. We risk too our unique ability to think creatively, to discern good sources, to think deeply and with nuance about a topic. If AI learns from everything that has been, it can synthesise and perhaps even extrapolate from that and project forward, but it can’t creatively imagine. It can’t reflect and speak wisdom.

There is an ease and convenience to Google, to AI. There was an ease and convenience to picking the fruit to gain knowledge. But we are not called to ease and convenience. I think we are called to love, to care for our neighbours, and these things are necessarily inconvenient. Digital access to information is a tool, a resource, a gift that benefits many of us in many ways. But it could easily blunt our humanity, becoming a temptation that bypasses the work of truly living. There are no digital shortcuts to the difficult work of community, no AI-shortcut to loving well, just as there was never a shortcut to complete knowledge of good and evil. With information available at the tug of a fruit — a click, a download, a request to an artificial intelligence — I am curious how our ability to sit with questions will change, whether we’ll feel beauty or fear in not having all the answers, whether we’ll lose our ability to discern, and to “have faith in what we do not see.”

Sitting with questions, with curiosity, is I think an entry point to faith and to mystery.

Jesus calls us to questions, to relationship, to love, not to answers that might be easily won but little interrogated. He knew that questions, not answers, were often the best response to questions. Questions to sit with, to hold up as a mirror, to walk as a path to wisdom. He asked a lot of them. Who do you say I am? How many loaves do you have? Do you love me? What do you want? Why are you afraid? The Bible records Jesus asking questions, and sometimes offering answers too. But the point often seems to be the question itself, giving endless chances for people to question their assumptions, and their judgements, and to deepen their faith and make it personal. In doing so, Jesus offered a path to deeper and more meaningful knowledge of God, the world, others, and ourselves. And by asking questions he gave dignity to people, listening deeply to them, loving them, calling them into themselves.

Sitting with questions, with curiosity, is I think an entry point to faith and to mystery. And we have companions as we do this: Jesus, early Christian mystics, prayer, the Psalms, each other – these are all places I turn to dig deeper into the knowing that comes through unknowing. To live with questions and within mystery, to listen deeply to each other, to speak the language of soul rather than certainty, might be difficult and countercultural. But in an age where the future is becoming less certain despite the whole world seemingly at our fingertips, I think it is where our hope is. After all, “what good is it for a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?”

Explainer

Creed

Feminism

Royalty

27 September 2023

7 min read

Parliament’s floor tiles that empowered a queen

From Palace of Westminster floor tiles fit for a Queen to feminist theology, Belle Tindall takes a thought journey.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A grand highly dercorated hall in the neo-gothic style, with encaustic tiles in the foreground.

The Royal Gallery in the Houses of Parliament.

Houses of Parliament 360° virtual tour.

Engraved into the floor tiles of Westminster’s Royal Gallery are the words Cor Reginae in Manu Domini, which is the Latin script from the biblical book of Proverbs. However, there is one salient difference, one which has caught both my attention and imagination. In English, the original Proverb reads,

‘in the Lord’s hand is the king’s heart’

But what is written on the floor of the Royal Gallery is,

‘the Queen’s heart is in the hand of the Lord’

Right there, on the floor of the Palace of Westminster, is a little piece of feminist theology.

In a parliament that was the apogee of Victorian values and sentiment, the political and cultural epicentre of an Age that was (ironically) remembered in reference to a woman but was nevertheless pontificated on laws that treated women as chattels, these tiles were theological dynamite (as opposed to literal dynamite – that was a few centuries earlier).

Female empowerment was present below the feet, if not within the hearts and minds, of the men who oversaw an era of undeniable and near-absolute patriarchy.

Feminism: A little context

Feminism is not an easy concept to define. It isn’t black and white, however much we wish that it were. In truth, it more accurately resembles the entirety of the grey scale. It cannot claim to be singular any more than the female experience is singular. In reality, it is brimming with nuance, complexity, and subjectivity. What’s more, I would confidently wage a bet that you have arrived at this article with an already in-tact pre-conception of the term. None of us approach feminism neutrally, be weary of anyone who claims to do so – it is simply impossible. Therefore, we are not only faced with the endless external nuances of feminism, but we’re also tasked with sifting through our differing internal understandings. Like I say, it’s about as definable as the shade of grey.

Nevertheless, for the sake of being on the same page, allow me a moment to try. A moment to (briefly) unpack what I mean by the term feminism. For that, I will borrow the words of award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who influentially declared that feminism is the belief in ‘the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.’

That’s it.

To me, feminism is nothing more, and certainly nothing less than that. Of course, as a self-proclaimed feminist, it’s necessary for me to plunge the dark depths of the subjective nature of such a belief. But it is more important to ensure that I continually come back up to the surface for a deep breath of air, and I consider Chimamanda’s over-arching definition to be that air.

With Chimamanda’s words filling our lungs, let us dive beneath the surface for a moment.

Feminism has, and still does, get worked out in the most tangible of ways: through marches on the streets, protests outside government buildings, petitions, boycotts, legal battles and demands. All of which is advocating for the empowerment of women, the restoring of an equilibrium, and the ensuring of that all-important equality of the sexes.

As well as the macro-examples that adorn the history books and media outlets, we must also acknowledge the micro-battles; the thousands upon thousands of non-news-worthy conversations, changes, and decisions that nudge the individuals and communities involved toward the very same goal of equality. After all, feminism is as personal as it is political. And all of these actions, past and present, whether they be macro or micro in scale, are (often imperfectly) working toward the practical, tangible, measurable flourishing of women and therefore society.

And so, with all of that practical work going on – with the many battles won and the many more that are raging on - why on earth would we need something as abstract, as contemplative, as time-swallowingly-indulgent as feminist theology?

I’m glad you asked.

Feminist theology as an imaginative endeavour

By way of an answer, I’d like to return to those words on the floor of the Palace of Westminster. Victoria was the Queen. She wore the crown, she sat on the throne, she lived in the palace, she presided over the government, she ruled over the country. All the evidence was there; it would have taken a rather large dose of delusion for anyone to have questioned it. And yet, according to the existence of those floor tiles, the tangible evidence wasn’t quite enough.

Queen Victoria’s right to be such was ultimately held by the divine. So much so, that the intangible was made tangible, literally carved into the ground that she (and others) would walk upon. And therein lies the need for feminist theology.

Whether one considers themselves to be Christian or not – or even religious, for that matter – we all have ‘imaginative landscapes’. Not ‘imaginative’ as in fantasy, but rather, ‘imaginative’ as in our landscapes of thought. These are the interior places where we attach meaning to our experiences, and therefore judge the significance of every waking moment. As Francis Spufford so eloquently puts it,

'we are meaning-making creatures. We cannot stop making enchantments.'

This is also the realm in which we wonder about the existence of God, the mysteries of our universe, and the significance of ourselves.

And so, it’s in those places, as well as the practical, that work is being done toward the equality of the sexes. It’s in those places that we must grapple with the inherent value of women. Because, in many ways, those are the truest places. Those are the places where reality is crafted, ordered, and understood. It is in those places where truth is sought, viewpoints are galvanised, and actions are decided upon. Feminist Theologian, Serene Jones, writes it this way,

‘Closely tied to the view of practical transformation is feminist theology's contention that changing society requires both changing laws and practices and challenging the categories and processes we use to think about life and to make sense of our world.’

In short, feminism has work to do in both the seen and the unseen. Feminist theology, therefore, is an imaginative endeavour. Which makes it a profoundly important one.

It is the work of digging into biblical texts with an un-denied bias, a particular mission, a sole question that needs answering. We do so in order to uncover what the maker thinks of the made (the maker being God, the made being women), and from there do all other feminist inclinations flow. We find evidence of the empowerment of women in the divine agenda, so it naturally gets included in ours. We spot profound equality of the sexes present in the original blueprint of a flourishing earth, and so we work in partnership with it. We find validation of female worth, value and power in the pages of the Bible, and then work about writing it into the pages of the history books. And on it goes. We get things straight in our imaginative landscapes, and then we get them straight everywhere else.

Did the fact that Queen Vicotria walked upon those affirming floor tiles eradicate any possibility of sexism or misogyny? I doubt it. But I like to think that it was a profound start-line, a radical piece of feminist theology that we are still running to catch up with.

You may be thinking that this is interesting, albeit utterly irrelevant. Because we now live in a secular society, one where we don’t need any kind of God to legitimate the way we perceive anything – least of all ourselves. This is not the good old Victorian era, after all.

And to such arguments, I may be tempted to direct you toward the work of Nick Spencer or Tom Holland and suggest that we’re not quite as secular in our values as we first appear. Or perhaps I could point you to the discography of Nick Cave, Lauryn Hill, Paul Simon or Stormzy and question whether our craving for something truer than what we can see is a craving we’ve truly progressed beyond? Or even bring to your attention the fact that the Barbie Movie is the highest grossing film of the year (you didn’t really expect me to not mention that film in an article about feminism, did you?), and argue that we’re obsessed with wondering what we’re for, what makes us who we are, what generates our value. It is an itch we cannot stop scratching.

I could point to all those things. But oddly, I don’t feel the need to. Because I think you know, as do I, that our imaginative landscape is there, and it matters. We know it, we engage it, we feel it.

And that’s why feminist theology matters. At least, to me.

Gosh. All those thoughts from a few floor tiles. Maybe I need to get out more.

All insights into the Palace of Westminster are curtesy of Richard Hall; architectural historian and author of The Palace of Westminster: Faith, Art, and Architecture: an illustrated guidebook that uncovers the Christian legacy that underpins the visual culture of the Palace of Westminster.