Djelloul Marbrook

I don’t think we live long enough to become wise. Most of us wouldn’t use a longer life to do that anyway. Ignorance is such fun. With wisdom comes responsibility, a burdensome sense of the interconnectedness of things, and so our freedom to be feckless exhibitionists would be dampened. Besides, the facts are so noisome.

Perhaps that’s why we prefer a market-driven tastemaking apparatus; it relieves us of the task of appraising a development or a product for ourselves. We let the marketers do their research, and, voila, that’s how we feel! They say they’ve taken our pulse and they’re giving us what we want. I’ve never personally experienced a marketer asking me anything, but then again I’m a bit reclusive.

It makes matters like education and war simple. They respond to whatever the market will bear. After all, hasn’t education become a cost-prohibitive matter of doing as little as we we can for a fancy little piece of paper and then make money? And as for war, well, the big brains have yet to imagine an economy without the military-industrial complex.

But suppose we had a population that didn’t give a damn about the best-seller lists, didn’t care about who’s running ahead or who’s running neck-and-neck, and was perfectly capable of making up its own mind about quality, decency, honesty and capability? That is, of course, what we say we have now, but if we really did it would be a disaster for our tastemakers to the booboisie.

I’ve lived just long enough and gotten just smart enough to be appalled by my sterling record as a boob. For the sheer number of questions I haven’t asked there is, alas, nothing to be applied directly to the forehead. My tables are stacked with books I haven’t read. There are nations full of faces I haven’t seen, ideas that have never darkened my threshold. The things I haven’t done are like a sky full of stars, unreachable and exquisite, and yet there’s no one to whom I’m not connected, nothing that doesn’t affect me. That’s a smidgen of wisdom, isn’t it?

(Note: Fukurokuju (inset) is Chinese god of wisdom, wealth and longevity).

—DM