Worldly Wisdom

The scriptures referred to are James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a.

A few weeks ago we talked about God's wisdom. But in today's passage from James we hear him speak of another type of wisdom, one that “does not come from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish.” But how can such a way of looking at things ever be called wise? Maybe you'll see it if we call it “street smarts.” Or cynical thinking. And it can steer people around certain problems in dealing with other folks.

This is the kind of devilishly clever thinking we find entertaining in a heist film or a story about a conman. The protagonist analyzes the people he is trying to con, picks out a particular desire or fear they have and works out a way to exploit it. Sherlock Holmes uses this tactic in the story of A Scandal in Bohemia. (Spoiler alert for a 130 year old short story!) Irene Adler has an incriminating photo of Holmes' client, the king of Bohemia. The detective adopts the disguise of a clergyman, defends her against a mob he's paid to threaten her, appears to be knocked out and she has her servants bring him into her house. Then Watson throws a smoke bomb in through her window and, thinking the mob has set her house on fire, Adler goes to the place she has hidden the photo. Holmes played upon her sympathy for a wounded clergyman trying to protect her and her desire to save what was most precious to her. It is a very clever plan based on Holmes' cynical evaluation of women. However, Irene Adler has the last laugh and thereafter Holmes refers to the opponent who bested him as simply “The Woman.”

You can get far in worldly affairs by playing on people's desires and fears and gullibility. Multilevel marketing schemes do it all the time. They offer people a way to get rich and be their own bosses through a plan in which they simply have to sell some products and recruit a certain number of people to do the same. You get a cut of your recruits' proceeds and pay a portion of yours to the person who recruited you. The first problem is you have to pay a large amount to get your starter kit. And you have to recruit something like 10 people each month. They also have to buy starter kits and recruit 10 people a month. The real problem is that in order for that to work you and your “downline,” all the people under you, would have to, by the end of one year, recruit many times the number of people who exist in the world. The math doesn't work out. If it weren't for the selling of the products, it would be labeled a pyramid scheme. 99% of people involved in MLMs, as they call them, rarely make any profits and in fact often lose tons of money, sometimes going into bankruptcy. The 1% at the very top, however, can become very rich. So you might deem the folks who create these schemes worldly wise. But that is not the wisdom from above.

Oscar Wilde said that a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Wisdom is about appreciating and preserving value. But worldly wisdom values the wrong things.

James rightly connects this earthly wisdom to selfish ambition and coveting and envy. People want to aggrandize themselves and they use worldly stratagems to achieve fame and power. They want to have what others have—wealth and control over people—and they use folks' fears and desires to manipulate them. They envy what others are and they try to achieve the impossible: become someone other than who they were created to be.

And these things can work...in the short term. Bernie Madoff made quite a good living running the largest Ponzi scheme ever. Until the fraud was inevitably exposed. He died in prison and one of his sons hung himself. Look up Madoff in Wikipedia and under his name it says simply “American fraudster.” Jeffrey Epstein also did well until ending up in jail, dead. Al Capone's reign as the fabled crime boss of Chicago only lasted 7 years. He was just 33 when he went to federal prison. He was released 7 years later because his brain was deteriorating due to late stage syphilis. He died at age 48, his mentality reduced to that of a 12 year old child. The fruits of worldly wisdom turn out to be rotten.

Again these things can work...superficially. You can get a following through tricks and manipulation, but eventually you will be found out and your popularity will dry up. The mayflies of social media have their brief turn on You Tube or Instagram and, unable to maintain their facade, reveal their naked narcissism and their fame turns to infamy. Just recently an influencer abruptly closed down her You Tube channel and other accounts when a video she posted of her forcing her crying child to pose for her went viral. You can only fake being a good and empathetic person for so long...and then it's “So long!”

It's interesting that the NRSV translation uses the word “cravings.” The underlying Greek word is the one from which we get the English word “hedonism.” It means “strong desires, or passions.” So “cravings” is appropriate. Especially since we now know so much about addictions. In the Great Courses series on The Addictive Brain, Dr. Thad Polk explains that the neurotransmitter dopamine is not so much about pleasure as wanting or craving. Its role is good when it motivates us to, say, eat. Mice engineered not to produce dopamine will starve rather than just walk to their food. But it can be bad when a substance or activity makes the brain's dopamine system more sensitive and easier to activate. That increases the amount of dopamine released and creates an anticipation of a reward. That craving highly motivates the person to pay increased attention to and learn how to trigger the reward again and again. And that leads to addiction.

James also talks about “your cravings that are at war within you.” These cravings don't have to rise to the level of addiction to throw our lives out of balance. They needn't take over one's life completely; they can just take up an inordinate amount of one's time or energy or throw off one's direction in life. James speaks of disorder. If your priorities are in the wrong order, it will deform your life.

Jesus not only summarized the moral law into 2 commandments, he did so in the right order. The greatest commandment, the one that comes first is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:30-31) So our priorities are to God first, to other people second and to ourselves third. But what is the order of priorities in worldly wisdom?

“Believe in yourself.” “Follow your dreams and don't let anyone turn you away from them.” “Do what makes you happy.” In other words, your number one priority is looking out for number one, yourself. We even feed this disordered way of looking at life to our children in Disney movies and TV shows. It's when the hero finally believes in himself that he is able to defeat the bad guy. But doesn't the bad guy believe in himself too? In fact, isn't the villain's motivation following his dreams? “Follow your dreams” is also an accurate way of stating the credo of a serial killer. One of the most chilling moments of the British series Torchwood comes when the heroes capture the leader of a family of cannibals and ask him why he would do such a thing. “It makes me happy,” he says.

The pursuit of one's own happiness is not adequate to serve as the top priority in life. Selfish people are not really happy anyway or they wouldn't continue to pursue it. Instead they try again and again and harder and harder to capture it. But lasting happiness eludes them. And companies know this, building their business models on not satisfying but stoking their customers' cravings. Thus we have fast foods that do not fill us up but make us eat more and more. We have video games and TV shows and social media posts that make us want to play and watch them more and more. They want to turn us into addicts of what they sell. “More, Ever More” is their motto. It's also the motto of cancer.

What about pursing the happiness of others as a top priority? Well, that's not good if we follow the route of trying to satisfy their cravings. That's simply off-loading the problem from oneself onto another. Satisfying their needs is a better aim. The problem is doing that runs you right up against selfishness, your own and others'.

First off, it's hard to be altruistic all the time. I think that's why we often find that someone who seems to devote their lives to others has a dark side. They say to themselves, “I've been so good I deserve a little something for myself.” And so heads of charities often live like kings. As do so-called public servants. Sometimes, people who do much good publicly, like certain religious figures, do evil in private. They still aren't free from their cravings.

The other problem is that if you try to satisfy the needs of others, beyond, say, your family, you run into the fact that other people aren't really interested in helping you. As we've said, a consumer culture doesn't want to satisfy people. Yes, people need a regular supply of basic healthy foods but not more and more. People don't overindulge in fruits and vegetables like they do soda and chips and candy and ice cream.

Yes, people need housing but, if they are poor, they aren't going to buy a bigger and more expensive one in a few years, let alone a second vacation home.

Today a cellphone is necessary to do many things, even to do your job, but how is a phone company to survive if everyone is content with a basic phone and doesn't want to trade it in every few years for the latest model with all the new bells and whistles?

People need healthcare but the companies who have made big money in health don't just handle basic diseases but peddle cures for ED and sell opioids that really aren't designed for long-term pain but for long-term addiction. One reason bacteria are winning the war on infection is that antibiotics aren't a big money maker. People take one or two rounds of antibiotics when they get an infection and that's it. In a decade the bacteria have built up a resistance to that antibiotic. So many companies don't waste money on researching new antibiotics.

That's good worldly wisdom at work. The big money isn't to be made in meeting needs, but rather in creating demands for more new stuff that people really don't need. Come up with something along those lines and companies will throw money at you. Want to help feed, house and care for people who aren't big consumers and you have to search for what few grants are out there. And I think that is a reason why so many people in helping professions—nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers, even clergy—are getting discouraged and dropping out of their professions and sometimes ending their lives.

If worldly wisdom has any use for God, it is in last place, to try to make people feel good about the above, the endless and futile pursuit of happiness. The worldly use God to gloss over the flaws of the system of living for oneself. There are thousands of gurus on the internet telling people what they want to hear. Really popular slogans are: “You can create your own reality.” “You can heal yourself with your mind alone, by getting rid of negative thoughts.” “God wants you to be rich and powerful and happy.” And, inevitably, “You are God.” It's BS but people eat it up. They click “Follow.” As opposed to following a God who requires you to flip your priorities and love him above all and then others and then yourself. A God who asks you to be content with what you have and generous to others. Contentment is a terrible business model.

James says, “But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality and hypocrisy.” Sounds a bit like Paul's description of the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23) It also overlaps with his description of Christian love: “Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious. Love does not brag, it is not puffed up. It is not rude, it is not self-serving, it is not easily angered or resentful. It is not glad about injustice, but rejoices in the truth.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-6) And those common qualities shouldn't surprise us because God's wisdom is all about love. Jesus is the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24, 30) and God is love (1 John 4:8). Jesus Christ is God Incarnate or the divine love made physical. (John 1:14) He demonstrated in his life the two commandments to love God and love others as oneself in that order. The wisdom from above is not how to get ahead in the world but how to love God and others as Jesus does.

Worldly wisdom leads to conflicts, as James points out. Peace comes from accepting and following the wisdom from above, Jesus. And in Jesus, our cravings end because in him there is enough. In Jesus there is more than enough; there is abundance. An abundance of what we really need. There is wisdom, there is meaning, there is purpose. There is forgiveness, there is healing, there is joy. There is peace, there is contentment, there is love for all.