Wisdom Project Précis

Why The Wisdom Project?

by Charles Stohmer

Although The Wisdom Project has its feet on the ground in real world foreign relations, it began in the air. Three hours out of London, six miles above the Atlantic and flying uneventfully to Atlanta through a bright that sky that I once heard a pilot call “severe clear,” passengers sat quietly, absorbed in their laptops or novels or drowsily captive to that vespertine atmosphere created on planes when the movies are running. Then all the video screens went blank.

“The movies should be back on in a few minutes,” a voice explained over the intercom. “We apologize for the inconvenience.” A necessary fib, as it turned out. People rose to stretch, some ordered drinks, others queued at the toilets. The Boeing 777 droned on. Twenty minutes passed. Across the aisle from me, a passenger slid open his porthole shade and broke the spell of counterfeit evening. The brilliant evanescence stretched into forever. It hurt your eyes to look for too long.

Suddenly Captain Williams Texas drawl came through the intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention. Your serious attention. There’s been an major incident in the United States and all air traffic has been grounded. We are in no danger. I repeat, we are in no danger. But we have been instructed to land at Halifax, Nova Scotia. We should be there in about two hours. We can’t give you any more information at this time. Please be patient and bear with us. We will have more information for you when we are on the ground. Thank you for your cooperation.”

Delta Airlines Flight 59 became the penultimate of forty-two international flights landed at Halifax International before the airport ran out of parking space for the huge planes. Ten thousand foreigners had arrived without warning, a small town and all the problems that go with it. After many hours of waiting on the tarmac, our flight and several others were deplaned in the middle of the night, rushed through customs, and driven in yellow school buses to Dartmouth Air Force base, where we lived, about 900 of us, until Saturday morning, when the FAA finally released our flight to fly on to Atlanta.

I’m not going to retell that story here. It’s been published elsewhere. But it set the stage. Back home I was simply trying, like everyone else, to understand why the attack had occurred, what was the wisest way to respond, and how a future 9/11 could be prevented. I thought I might write a few articles on it, perhaps give a few talks. Good and sufficient answers, however, were not forthcoming, even from the “experts.” It’s easy to forget that across the world the considerable political wisdom of the world’s capitals stood analytically and prescriptively dumfounded before what Kanan Makiya (Brandeis University) at the time called “this apocalyptic act of fury.”

A wise response to 9/11 was up for grabs. The irony was palpable. What was being called a defining moment lacked clarity.

Perhaps for the first time in history, the world community in toto faced a crisis of its collective political wisdom. Within a few years, trenchant analyses and vigorous foreign policy prescriptions were emerging from every quarter, often contradictorily, but in the months following the attack answers proportionate to it there were not. Even in the United States historians, political leaders, and pundits of every sort (sans most neoconservatives) confided publicly that they were also at a loss. It was refreshing to see such public humility from the elite, but it was astonishing that a wise response to 9/11 was up for grabs. A disturbing irony was palpable. What was being called a defining moment lacked clarity. So America resorted to war and the rest of the world held its breath, if not its nose.

Having recently finished a book project and now with some time on my hands after returning home from England, via Halifax, I began my own research. My area is the historic wisdom tradition of the old world Middle East, and my initial goal following 9/11 was to determine if the literature of that narrative provided ideas, principles, and norms for analyzing what had taken place and for finding ways wiser than war for America’s relations with the Muslim Middle East. If so, and I suspected it would be so, then I would expand the research. So I set out along two tracks: 1) to investigate the international dimension of the historic wisdom tradition more deeply than I had ever done before, and 2) to understand how foreign policy decisions were made between the United States and the Middle East states. The goal being to determine if the former could offer wise ways ahead for the latter.

Over the years much of my writing and teaching has been to help individuals and groups understand how the ideas, principles, and norms of the historic wisdom tradition can help them develop wisdom-based approaches to environs today where human diversity is normative – such as in education, relationships and social life, the business community, environmental responsibility, and especially the arts, communication, and religious engagement.

Waiting restlessly in the wings during those decades of that work, however, was an area of the wisdom literature of the old-world Middle East that I left largely unexplored. This was the highly esteemed role that old-world rulers, foreign ministers, political advisors, policymakers, and other high-level officials gave to the wisdom way in their international relations and foreign policy decisions. I had made notes about this over the years, especially about its two most prominent classes of officials, but never went beyond that initial stage. Curiously, scholarship has generally neglected this international dimension of the literature. So, having seen wisdom-based reasoning successfully practiced in our time in other areas, I wondered after 9/11 how it might also be successfully put to good use in international relations today. Specifically, I wanted to understand how leaders and policymakers in the West and in the Middle East, who were grappling with a future in which building more cooperative relationships was going to be like struggling in quicksand, might benefit from normative ideas of the wisdom tradition.

As Tolkien once said about writing The Lord of Rings, the tale grew in the telling. I wanted to get it right, and by 2003, as The Wisdom Project was becoming more focused, specialists in the field were growing interested and I began traveling to Washington DC. To be brief about it, what struck a chord among theorists, diplomats, and policymakers alike was that the agency of wisdom was able to meet with a diverse lot of stakeholders around the table more even-handedly than ideologically-based talks could do. And what seemed to really fascinate, given the dilemmas posed by the so-called secular/sacred split view of life, which dogs and divides relations between the Muslim Middle East and the West, was the unique potential wisdom has to assist leaders, their foreign policy teams, and the religious actors that work alongside them, to negotiating the rough intersection of the secular and the religious in cooperatively peaceable ways.

My thesis was still pretty cloudy then, truth be told, and I was naive to think that the Project could have something palpable to offer Washington and Mideast capitals in just a couple of years. And I couldn’t explain it like I can today, but I knew that the inherent virtue of the agency of wisdom is found in its unique ability to focus our minds on the basic interests and concerns that are shared by the human family as a whole before any distinctions are made between who is religious and who is not. I believed that would provide international negotiators, mediators, policymakers, and others with an approach that would help them ease around a perennial problem of U.S. – Mideast relations: the parties meet with what in the end typically amounts to contradictory agendas based on competing sectarian checklists of interests due to the different political and religious ideologies being represented in the room. Talks, then, have become a ritual around which each party tries to coerce the other into signing off on its checklist.

But when the parties sit down together with the agency of wisdom, a process is set in motion whereby wisdom for reaching justly cooperative and peaceable agreements can emerge from the parties themselves, over time and with honest effort, as they focus first and foremost on the common ground of human mutuality. It is an alternative, a different, way of reasoning about constructing international relations. As I would share this, specialists in the field could see how the agency of wisdom could give them a reasonable and responsible alternative to the methodology of sectarian checklists. The wisdom way, I argued, could dramatically increase possibilities for more peaceable arrangements in the secular / religious relationships the exists between the West and the Muslim Middle East, and it could provide a non-ideological, non-polemical way for engaging in the kind of constructive debates that were indispensable for creating rapprochement between adversarial states.The inherent virtue of the agency of wisdom is found in its unique ability to focus our minds on the basic interests and concerns that are shared by the human family as a whole before any distinctions are made between who is religious and who is not.

By 2006, I was glad to be able to begin pursuing The Wisdom Project as a visiting fellow of the Center for Public Justice, and it was around that time that I began to see something tangible  enough to be a book on wisdom-based U.S. – Mideast relations. This was being increasingly confirmed as I would share with specialists who were working in the field of U.S. – Mideast relations. Muslims, Jews, Christians, and “secularists” alike, whether they worked on policy issues, or in the fields of mediation and reconciliation, or brainstormed at think tanks, and so on.

I then began work on the book and organizing the larger Project as an open-ended, multi-aspected, and nonpartisan international relations research initiative with two main objectives. One is to offer national leaders and the foreign policy communities of the United States, Britain, and Middle East nations, and the religious leaders who work alongside them, ideas and norms for developing an alternative, wisdom-based way of reasoning for more cooperatively peaceable relations between their diverse peoples. The emphasis is on recovering the agency of wisdom in the decision-making processes. For this, the Project draws from in-depth research into the historic wisdom literature of the old-world Middle East to present principles, ideas, and norms that can be applied to good effect today by leaders and their foreign policy teams in virtually all salient aspects of international relations.

The other objective seeks to inform and educate individuals, groups, and interested others who are not specialists in the field but who would like to understand the complex and historically subtle theater of international relations and foreign policy decision-making, especially between the United States and Middle East states. How it really works, not how we may think it works.

For both objectives the larger Project comprises several aspects. We publish articles and write requested special papers, travel and teach, run talks, engage in forums such as roundtables, build relationships with religious and political actors who work in the field, and participate in a variety of other mediums. And of course, the new book, as yet untitled, not quite finished, and in search of a publisher, tackles both objectives in depth.

If I seem pretty jazzed about all this, I am. But I’m realistic, too. Ultimately my Christian faith gives me the hope of a future in which “human flourishing among peoples who are different” is writ large over the entryway. The agency of wisdom, I argue, calls “whosoever will” to be a faithful presence anticipating that future by working to establish samples of it in international relations in the here and now. Mind you, I detect an idealist streak in the historic wisdom tradition and its literature about this, but the agency of wisdom in this world, as the literature itself bears out, is realistic about what is possible as it empowers us to tap deeply what I call, pinching a line from Abe Lincoln, the better angels of our nature.

Nevertheless, I believe the kind of anticipatory witness I have just described is central to the purpose and function of the wisdom way under God, today. I also believe that if you want to know what has been missing in foreign policy decision-making, that is what has been missing, especially when we consider that contemporary international relations are typically constructed around balance of power arrangements set to the bare minimum of what is required not to go to war.

Still, I am jazzed about what wisdom may make possible, even in our “adversarial” days. Through my research, I have identified five norms of wisdom that have become central to the initiatives of larger Project and to the book. I call these wisdom norms: peaceableness, relations, insight, skill, and mutuality.

I have been fortunate to have received critical help on these norms from foreign policy specialists and officials of all sorts, including Christians, Muslims, Jews, and secularists, and to have have had conversations with some senior advisors, both in the U.S. and Britain. I don’t think is is naive to conclude that that these wisdom norms can address situations faced today by both secular and religious actors in U.S. – Mideast relations, to suggest reasonable and responsible ways ahead for more cooperatively peaceable bilateral and multilateral relations.