#138： Reviving Practical Wisdom with Barry Schwartz
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we discuss why we need to go back to what aristotle championed as the way to make decisions in our lives: using what he called "phronesis" or roughly translated to practical wisdom.
Transcript
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we're at mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast we've
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probably all seen instances on the news or even in our own lives where we've seen rules and
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regulations enforced that just didn't make any sense for a particular situation what's funny and
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tragic at the same time is the people enforcing these rules and regulations and particular
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situations will tell themselves and even other people like this doesn't make any sense but i have
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to do it because that's what the rules say my hands are tied and you probably see this in your own life
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you see some bureaucracies school systems probably in large corporations you probably work at a job
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where your company has just a weird rule that just doesn't make any sense but you have to abide
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by it because uh that's what the rule is or you'll get fired it was my guest today on the podcast
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co-authored a book where they make the case that we've let rules and regulations swallow our lives
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and this has resulted in us losing the ability to use wisdom his name is barry schwartz he's the
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co-author of the book practical wisdom the right way to do the right thing and he discusses what's
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happened in the past i mean really this past 75 years where rules and regulations have enveloped
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our lives the ill effects of that and then he makes the case that we need to go back to what
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aristotle championed as as the way to make decisions in our in our life and that is using
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what he called phronesis or roughly translated to practical wisdom so today on the podcast we're
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going to discuss what practical wisdom is how we can nurture it in our own lives and the lives of
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our children and why this would be beneficial to us personally and to us as a society as a whole
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really fascinating discussion we get into some great psychology and philosophy so without further
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ado barry schwartz practical wisdom barry schwartz welcome to the show thanks so your book you wrote
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along with kennis sharp a few years ago is called practical wisdom and it's about how to confront
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problems or how to solve problems or make decisions we'll get into exactly what practical wisdom is in a
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bit but before we do that let's talk about how people societies uh particularly modern bureaucratic
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societies how do we go about solving problems and making improvements and why how come sometimes
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these tools that we use don't work well i think we have increasingly uh come to rely on a model
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where decision making is basically done by rules experts of some kind self-appointed or otherwise come up
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with a set of procedures a set of rules that everyone is supposed to follow to make decisions to make
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judgments and then you basically bring people on and their task is to follow the rules uh this is a
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reflection of a lack of confidence in the judgment of the people who who you're giving the rules to
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so i'm an expert i make rules i hand them to you you don't need to be an expert you just follow the
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i created and i think we've come to rely more and more more and more on that partly because if you let
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people use their judgment and they have bad judgment they'll screw up partly i think to protect against
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favoritism and bias if you treat every situation exactly the same way you can't be accused of being
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biased so imagine a school teacher who has to follow a script in teaching her second grade class
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uh the virtue of following a script is that she can't be accused by some parent of uh of liking
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this student more than that student of giving this student extra attention compared to that student so
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she retreats behind the fact that she follows exactly the same procedure with everyone so she can't
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be accused of bias or favoritism so i think that's increasingly the way we do things uh and the
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problem with it is that life is complicated especially life that involves interaction with
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other human beings and there really is no one size fits all set of rules or procedures that works
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so what happens when you follow rules is that you kind of get the mediocre solution to every problem
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never the best solution it's an insurance policy against a disaster in case you use your judgment
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and your judgment judgment is bad but it also pretty much guarantees that you'll never get it exactly
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right uh and i think really think that that's uh that that's a pity um uh you we need to appreciate
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that basically every situation is importantly different from the ones we've had experience with before
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and we need to use our judgment to see whether to bend the rules how to bend the rules whether to
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ignore the rules and stuff like that can you point to specific examples where uh perhaps administrative
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rules or stringent laws uh have gotten in the way of actually created you know mediocre results
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well i mean i think we're now seeing this played out a lot in the press the uh draconian policies we
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have for incarcerating uh non-violent criminals typically drug for drug offenses um was a disaster
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you know everybody uh you you you have a certain amount of weight and you have to go to jail for a
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certain amount of time and if it's your third offense they basically lock you up and they throw away
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the key uh sometimes this is an appropriate penalty sometimes it's ridiculous and uh and i think the
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reason this was imposed is that there was a sense that judges were soft on criminals and they were
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going to make it so that judges couldn't be soft on criminals because they had these guidelines that
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they had to follow um the only reason we're starting now to abandon this is that we've you know like half
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the citizens of the united states are in jail we've got we've got the worst prison population in the
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entire world yeah and it's decimated the african-american community it's decimated the african-american
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community it's decimated state budgets you know it costs three times as much to incarcerate somebody
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as it does to educate somebody it's just it's just uh uh ridiculous so there are these cases uh examples
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for we write about it in the book of drug courts where you come before a judge specifically with drug
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offenses and the drug and the judge's set of possible um decisions have as much to do with
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rehabilitation as with anything else do you have a job have you been seeing your counselor on a regular
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basis and stuff like that so the rule book gets thrown away and the judges it's the judge can use
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his discretion about just how hard to be uh with each uh perpetrator uh and they've had spectacular
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success wherever where they've been tried it started in buffalo this guy just couldn't stand
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especially there were so many veterans coming before him veterans who you know become psychological
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casualties of of the war in iraq uh and he just couldn't bear locking them up so he decided we
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got to do things differently and it transformed um the way in which these kinds of cases are handled
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uh but you know this is the sort of thing it takes courage to introduce in your jurisdiction
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um and and by the way if the judge didn't have good judgment this would not be a good program but he
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does have good judgment yeah a lot of judges have complained that they have that these uh strict
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rules are basically taking the judgment out of judging uh so that's one example yeah and i think
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another example would be uh people often complain about like zero zero tolerance policy it's at schools
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um i guess they've been shown like if a kid draws a gruesome war picture um sometimes get suspended
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yeah yeah and the one you know but here's the thing you know what some of these kids a small number of
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them when they do something like this it's kind of maybe it's a sign that there is some serious
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aggression lurking within them so you need you really need to clamp it down so if you decide to use your
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judgment and you missed some kid and the next thing you know he's pulling out an automatic weapon and
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mowing people down you know that's a catastrophe so what do you decide to do we're never going to let
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that happen again and you impose more rules to make sure you catch every potential um uh you know serial
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killer um and you may catch every potential serial killer but not but 999 out of a thousand
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kids who are doing these horrific drawings are never going to be serial killers yeah and i think
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there's one case that you brought up i thought was sort of funny but also really sad is about the
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dad who gave his kid uh mike's hard lemonade yeah at a ballpark uh do you tell that story well yeah i mean
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i read this in uh actually in the in the new york times um this guy was a professor at the university
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of michigan and he took his i think seven or eight year old boy to a detroit tiger baseball game and
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the kid wanted lemonade so dad went up and got it and the only lemonade they had was mike's hard
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lemonade and his father had no idea that what hard lemonade was so the kid is drinking it out of the
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container and a security guard sees it and immediately calls the police and an ambulance they rush the kid
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to the hospital he's fine uh they're all set to release the kid and to his dad and the police won't
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let them and they put the kid in a foster home and they made the dad come before a magistrate because
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this was an example of child abuse now or child neglect uh the judge when he made this decision said
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i hate to do it but we have to follow procedure the cops when they brought him to the judge said we hate
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to do it but we have to follow procedure finally they let the kid go home but only if the dad leaves
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the house and checks into a hotel for two weeks you know protecting the child from his father we hate to
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do it but we have to follow procedure it was ludicrous uh and everyone knew it was ludicrous even as they
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were doing it i mean eventually you know two weeks of disruption of a family and everything ended up
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okay but the process that got you there was just um was was a preposterous example of the over
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application of rules yeah i mean it sounded like something from like a camu novel i mean it was
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just like just bizarre everyone knew it was bizarre and the weird thing about it is that everyone
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involved knew it was bizarre even as they kept on doing it wow okay they all knew that the rules did
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not apply we're not meant to apply to a case like this but they they followed the rules they had
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to do it you know when i talk about this um when i give talks about this topic i point out to people
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it's easy to snicker but you know in philadelphia where i live once uh every couple of years there's
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a story that appears in the newspaper about this kid who has been unbelievably neglected you know 14 years
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old weighs 75 pounds and somehow the family was was on the radar of the social welfare uh organizations
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and nonetheless these case officers had allowed this abuse to persist and you know so there's a lot of
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hand-wringing and and uh commitment that we can never let this happen again so there are cases where
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people in positions of authority have extremely bad judgment or indifference and because there
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aren't strict rules for them to follow they don't do their jobs and bad things happen but the solution
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to that is not more rules the solution to that is better people as case officers okay so the solution
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to that yeah is developing uh what aristotle called phronesis right but it's translated as practical
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wisdom right in a nutshell what is phronesis or practical wisdom well it's not so easy to say
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what it is in a nutshell what he thought it was is the ability to do the right thing in the right way
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at the right time for the right reason and the important point is that he was contrasting his
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understanding of wisdom with his teacher plato's plato was interested in wisdom also but for plato it was
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abstract so you know wise people had these great thoughts about um uh universal general generalities
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of of the world and human beings and aristotle was much less interested in that than he was
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in how we go about making our practical day-to-day decisions um and whereas plato was looking for
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abstract universals aristotle was interested in the particularities so what some people say is uh he thought
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there was priority to the particular every situation is different every person is different
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people who have had experience dealing with certain kinds of situations learn how to read the situation
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they're perceptive they can empathize with the people they're dealing with and they find the right
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uh step to take the right solution to this particular problem without regard to what the universal
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universal generalization is of which this is an instance so it was really rooted in the practical
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aristotle was a careful observer of the trades people in ancient greece and marveled at their ability to find
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practical solutions to particular problems uh and he thought the same sort of thing you know was needed
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when you when the problems you faced involved human beings rather than um building materials say
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so yeah i love that analogy that aristotle make that uh becoming a good person living a flourishing
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life is you sort of have to become craftsman in a lot of ways but how does uh phronesis tie in with
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his virtue ethics like how does aristotle's conception of ethics or virtue guide how you use practical
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wisdom as a tool well that's a great question and uh ken sharp and i make make a point of suggesting
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that he thought that that practical wisdom was in some ways the master virtue you're right
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aristotle was a virtue theorist which meant that moral people are not people who follow moral rules
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there are people who have virtues courage humility honesty and stuff like that and to be a virtuous
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person is to have to be a moral person is to have these virtues but also famously aristotle thought
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that courage is a virtue but you can have too much courage honesty is a virtue but you can have too
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much honesty so the trick is to have the right amount of courage when somebody have has too much
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courage we call it recklessness when somebody has too little courage we call it cowardice so you need
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to find what aristotle called the mean which is just the right amount of courage what helps you do that
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wisdom is what helps you find the mean in addition sometimes virtues conflict
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um you know kindness is a virtue honesty is a virtue so what do you do when your friend um we actually
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use this this particular example in a class that we teach your friend calls you to come over and and
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take a look at her before she goes to this fancy wedding she's all dressed up and you go and she opens
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the door and she does a little pirouette and says how do i look and you think not so good
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and the question is what do you tell her and when we give this example to students their immediate
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reaction is tell the truth friendship is based on honesty if you can't count on your friends to be
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honest they're not your friends but the more we unpack it the more they come to see that maybe that's not
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the right thing to do that telling the truth is right if you think your friend has a reasonable
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alternative if you think your friend won't be shattered to discover that even though she thinks
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she looks great other people don't she knows she'll never trust her own judgment again so sometimes
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what you need to do is tell the noble lie and knowing when to tell the truth and when to tell a lie
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requires that you know your friend and know your friend extremely well so so so wisdom is what
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enables us to resolve conflicts between virtues uh and find the mean amount of any particular virtue so
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we regard it as the as the master virtue so how do you go about uh developing that wisdom because
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there's a lot going on yep when you're making that decision so you were calculating how your how your
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friend would respond uh you know what is in this situation like how do you figure out or develop that
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ability to know what the right thing to do is the right time for the right reason the right place
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well that's another great question and and you know there's a sense in which this case could take you a day
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to figure out what how to answer your friend you sit down you create a spreadsheet with all the factors
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how much confidence does she have what's her wardrobe look like blah blah blah and she says how do i look
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and you say well give me a day and i'll let you know obviously that that's not going to fly so you're
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going to have to come up with an answer and you're going to have to come up with an answer quickly
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and one of the one of the interesting developments in modern cognitive psychology
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is the sort of model kind of computational models of mind where we build up with experience these networks
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of associations that enable us to come to conclusions extremely quickly and intuitively although we don't
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necessarily know how we reach them so what we suggest in the book is that the way you get to make these
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judgments right is by having is by practice you're crappy at it at the beginning and you keep on having
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these experiences you make a try you get it wrong you learn from your mistake your your um cognitive
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machinery gets smarter and smarter and eventually you're making these rapid decisions that are most
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of the time the right decision there's no substitute we think for experience um you can't you can't give a
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course on how to be wise and expect that at the end of the course people will be wise you learn it by
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doing it often you learn it by watching other experienced people do it and learning from them
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uh but there's no substitute for actually making the decisions getting feedback and refining your
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ability to read situations so i mean are there some big picture cognitive or emotional skills that
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are involved in wisdom like being comfortable with ambiguity or nuance or i mean it's something you can
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something you can do to put yourself in a position where you can develop that ability to
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judge shades of gray it certainly helps to be uh tolerant of ambiguity if not comfortable
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because if you're not tolerant of ambiguity you will think that either you'll either think there's
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a rule for every situation or you'll think i need a rule for every situation because i can't bear the
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uncertainty i you know i don't mind being wrong as long as i'm wrong because i follow the rule that
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somebody else articulated then if i'm wrong it's his fault it's not my fault so there are people who
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can't tolerate ambiguity they want there to be a right answer they want it to be clear and unambiguous
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um and you know for all i can say for those people is kind of get a life that's not the way the world is
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and i think people know this in their everyday interactions i don't i think there are very few
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parents for example who think that the right way to raise their kids is by following a set of rules
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they may start out thinking that you know they read all these books that tell them how to be a good
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parent and they say well we're just going to let our kid cry herself to sleep at night because that's
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what you're supposed to do and so on and so on and so on all these rules and their kids teach them
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basically that rules won't do the job their kids teach them because they apply the rules and the rules
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don't work uh and having figured out how to raise the first kid along comes the second and all of a
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sudden a completely different person so all the things that work with the first kid don't work
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with the second kid so you your kids force you to appreciate that the way you manage child rearing
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is by really knowing your child appreciating that that person's individuality and crafting solutions
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to problems that are appropriate to the situation and to the to the person and i think good teachers
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know this about the kids in their classrooms you treat every kid the same you're going to be a terrible
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teacher kids need different things and your job is to figure out what each kid needs and then find a way
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to provide it insofar as that's possible um so i think experience teaches us the limits of rules
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but at the same time when we're in sort of official situations we want to be able to fall back on rules
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because it takes the pressure off us yeah that the comment about how every kid is different and good
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teachers know this there's been a lot of uh commentary and comments from teachers lately about some of the
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top-down standards that states are putting on teachers and it's sort of hamstringing teachers like they
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want to be a good teacher but they can't because they get ready get their students ready for this test
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no no it's exactly now there are two things going on there one of them is this focus on the test as the
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measure of all things uh and you know there's enough there's been enough inks built on that i don't need
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to belabor the point um but even aside from that um by giving teacher scripts to follow they are de-skilling
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teaching and that's going to have two effects it's i it's going to prevent teachers from developing
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wisdom because the way you get wisdom is by do varying what you do and learning from your mistakes
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if all you're doing is following a script you're not going to be any better teacher after 30 years
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as you were the day you started uh or it's going to drive wise teachers out of teaching
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you know i came into teaching a full of ambition to stimulate and excite young minds and find a way
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into the heart and mind of every single second grader they won't let me do that the hell i'll
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find another occupation so and i think that's what school systems are doing they're driving
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the best teachers out of teaching because the things that attracted them to teaching aren't available
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speaking of children are there things i know a lot of our listeners are parents they're dads
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um are there things that we can do to help our children develop phronesis well the main thing i
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think is to let them there's a there's a wonderful book written by a psychologist named wendy mogul
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called the blessings of a skinned knee and her point and this book was written 15 years ago even before
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the word helicopter parent had come into existence uh her point was that parents are too preoccupied
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with protecting their kids from every little mishap every skinned knee it could be psychological
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skinned knee they don't want their kids to ever be disappointed to ever be unhappy to ever
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hurt themselves so they hover and make sure that mistakes never happen and i think that you know that
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the kids will be um will have fewer moments of unhappiness but they will be completely unprepared
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for living in the world as independent adults and they'll never have the opportunity to develop
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wisdom because they never get to try things and discover that some things don't work so you have
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to be willing to let your kid fail um you know when you're training a medical resident you have to be
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willing to let the resident make decisions and sometimes have those decisions be wrong it's just
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that you know in life and death situations the doctor is hovering so that after the resident has
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made the mistake the doctor corrects it before we have a dead patient so you know skin knees are a
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blessing drowned drowned kids are not a blessing so you want parents to be around to make sure that
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nothing terrible happens but not so around so that he so that nothing even mildly bad happens it's very
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hard to convince parents that it's okay for the kids to experience a little bit of failure and
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unhappiness um it also builds resilience in kids you know failure is inevitable and if you have no
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experience failing at things being disappointed and then picking yourself up and trying again when it
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finally comes say in college you just you just disintegrate and and we see that i think more and
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more in our college population college students are much more fragile nowadays than they were when i
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started teaching and i think part of the reason why is they've been so well protected before they get
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to college that they don't know what it's like to fail all right so let your kids experience failure
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because experience is the the master teacher experiences the master but you know experience
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with control sure you you want the failures to be manageable failures not catastrophic the other
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thing is is by modeling we learn a lot by watching other people so you know if you're a wise person or a wise
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parent that helps you to cultivate a wise child let your kids in on the process let them see you don't do
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it behind a screen don't do your decision making behind the screen um talk to them about the
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process you went through and deciding how to handle the situation and that may help also but it's a bump
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it's a it's a long bumpy road um and uh you just have to be willing to occasionally experience failure
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yourself as a parent i would say yeah for sure don't beat yourself up um are there any i mean you mentioned
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the uh sort of the we're giving judges more discretion now with the drug cases are there any other
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examples where you're seeing practical wisdom making a comeback into institutions we saw examples that
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were kind of outlier examples there's a program for training medical students that's affiliated with
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harvard where instead of doing the usual third and fourth year rotations from one specialty to another
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the third year the third year med students get a panel of patients and they see those patients all
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year whatever the patient whatever problem the patients have they come in and students deal with
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them with experienced physicians looking over their shoulders and so what that does is it it encourages
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doctors in training to appreciate that they're not treating organ systems they're treating people
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because they've seen this person again and again and they know this person doesn't have just the
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problem that they're bringing in today but the problems that they brought in a week or a month ago and they know
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something about the person's family situation and what kind of a recommendation is a feasible
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recommendation for this patient to be able to follow uh the students love it they uh turn out turn into
00:28:17.300
spectacular doctors but this has not spread you know this is a this is a wonderful little anomaly
00:28:24.640
and it may be that it doesn't spread because it's too expensive or it's more expensive to do the educating
00:28:32.080
this way there are there are in law schools the part of law school that most law students like the best is
00:28:38.820
something called the legal clinic which is where you actually you know people from the community come in
00:28:45.400
with their problems problems with a landlord with an employer mundane problems or not so mundane
00:28:51.380
problems and you get training in the law by helping real people solve real problems students love it
00:28:58.880
faculty are sort of contemptuous of it it's not academic enough so the legal clinic is usually taught by
00:29:06.400
somebody who's not a regular member of the law school faculty you know some practicing lawyer who once a week
00:29:12.120
comes in and runs the clinic but what the students learn i think is that legal issues always have
00:29:19.560
context attached and that you can't be a good lawyer just by knowing the law you need to know the context
00:29:26.080
you need to know the principles and the way you do that is by dealing with real cases and not with
00:29:31.740
textbook cases so those are examples uh you know if the legal clinic became a central part of law school
00:29:38.380
instead of a peripheral one that would uh almost certainly create wiser lawyers interesting yeah i
00:29:45.480
went to law school and uh yeah we had a legal clinic and you're right it wasn't taught by a regular
00:29:50.420
faculty member it was just a person who came in once or twice it almost never is and the more prestigious
00:29:55.460
the law school the more likely it is that the legal clinic if they have it at all will be taught by an
00:30:01.020
outsider and there there is sort of a movement in law school and i don't know if it's going to take uh
00:30:06.100
it has any legs but basically your first year of law school you first two years maybe you learn
00:30:11.960
all the basics like torch law contracts all the basics and then after that you sort of take these
00:30:16.780
semester-long classes that are more like seminars yeah um there's a movement saying that okay instead
00:30:22.680
of spending those two years doing these seminar classes just get the kids out there the students
00:30:26.720
out there actually practicing law under the guidance of a teacher but i don't know if it's going to go
00:30:33.000
anywhere well it's interesting because you know the law legal education is really on in crisis right
00:30:38.300
now because their job opportunities for lawyers are so bad and you have all these people getting
00:30:43.720
out of law school with massive debt so there's talk about can we do it in two years rather than three
00:30:48.900
uh so so students are not in as big a hole when they finish and stuff like that and there are many
00:30:55.460
fewer applicants so there are you know second tier law schools are not always able to fill up their
00:31:00.860
classes it's a major problem and one possible approach so this may be an opportunity it may be
00:31:07.300
an opportunity and uh you know produced by economic exigencies to get law schools to rethink how they do
00:31:16.480
their educating and it may turn out as you say that what ends up happening is one grueling year in the
00:31:24.440
classroom and then the next couple of years are basically spent as an intern at the feet of a
00:31:30.660
an experienced practitioner be less expensive to do and more satisfying to the students and my guess is
00:31:38.480
it'll produce much better lawyers well that's funny that's how they used to do legal education
00:31:43.300
like in the 19th century like you read the law like abraham lincoln did and then you wouldn't you
00:31:49.000
found an attorney to be your mentor yeah i think there's a few states like vermont still has that
00:31:55.000
program so you don't actually have to go to law school in vermont uh you can intern at a law firm
00:32:00.280
for three or four years and uh you have a law degree you take the bar exam yeah yeah i think this
00:32:05.920
i don't know this for a fact but it wouldn't surprise me if the for increasing formalization of legal
00:32:12.520
education is uh an attempt to attain higher status you know you go to medical school for four years
00:32:20.300
the idea is you can become a lawyer after one year what does that say about the relative status of
00:32:25.900
training in law versus training in medicine so you beef it up to make it feel like there's this magic
00:32:31.780
secret stuff that people learn when they go to law school and it takes them three grueling years to
00:32:37.640
learn it um most of the law people i know who've gone to law school basically say they the only year
00:32:44.440
that's really essential for their training is the first and after that they just take classes they're
00:32:49.900
interested in and it's fine you know they're happy they enjoy it and blah blah blah but you know
00:32:55.380
after the first year all of it's gravy yeah that was my experience too well uh barry schwartz this
00:33:02.240
has been a fascinating discussion uh thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
00:33:06.360
thank you so much you asked wonderful questions for us thank you bye-bye bye-bye our guest today
00:33:12.520
was barry shorts he's the author of the book practical wisdom and you can find that on amazon.com
00:33:17.080
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:33:24.700
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy
00:33:28.360
the podcast i'd really appreciate it if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher really help get the
00:33:32.680
word out about the show and also give us some feedback on how we can improve it
00:33:35.580
really appreciate it and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly