1. Why Are Mental Skills Important?
The key mental skills form the foundation for everything we will ever do in life and they go a long way in determining how successful we will be. NOTHING is more important than our ability to think effectively and make good decisions.
You might think being born rich is more important than having good mental skills but without these skills how will you avoid losing your money and how will you know how to use it in ways that will be most effective in achieving your goals?
You might think good health is more important than having good mental skills but without these skills how will you know how to preserve your health, or make the best of a bad situation if you should lose it?
You might think that relationships with other people are more important than mental skills but without these skills how will you know which relationships are helpful to you, and how those relationships can best be nurtured, and, on the other hand, how will you know which relationships are harming you, and how those can best be broken off?
Clearly mental skills guide us in everything we do and lead us in every decision we make. If these skills are well developed we can expect them to guide us well and lead us to success, and if they are not well developed we can expect them to let us down and lead us to failure.
2. What are the most important mental skills?
The most important mental skills are knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom.
Knowledge is simply the awareness of facts. The more facts you pack into your brain the more knowledge you have. Knowledge is a vital foundation for developing intelligence and wisdom but it is also valuable in its own right by helping us solve simple problems and make simple decisions.
If you know there is a restaurant across town that serves good food at a reasonable price that knowledge will be extremely useful to you when you are hungry.
If you have a headache and you know that aspirin relieves headache pain and you know there is a bottle of aspirin on the little table beside your bed, that knowledge will also be very useful and could make the difference between enjoying a pleasant day and enduring a miserable one.
At a more advanced intellectual level, if you hear someone argue that all of the Founding Fathers of the United States agreed that the Federal government was not permitted to do anything unless it was explicitly authorized by the Constitution BUT you know that George Washington supported a national bank AND you know that he was a Founding Father AND you know that there is no explicit authorization in the Constitution for a national bank then this knowledge will help you to refute the argument being made.
To gain the benefits that mental skills can give us we need more than knowledge, we also need to develop intelligence.
Intelligence is the ability to construct and analyze logical arguments. The better you are at following premises through to conclusions and the better you are at spotting conclusions that are NOT derived from the premises offered to support them - the more intelligent you are.
For example, if someone says it will be better for the US economy to cut taxes for the rich and someone else says, "Oh that is an ultra-right-wing activist speaking. We should not even consider any policy proposals made by that person because they will obviously be wrong," then we should notice that this statement contains a fallacy. Whether a statement is true or false depends on the available factual and logical support offered on its behalf. The truth or falsity of a statement does not depend in any way on the political beliefs of the person making the statement.
If we are able to recognize this type of fallacy, which is a form of the ad hominem fallacy, then we are more intelligent than people who cannot recognize it.
For another example, suppose the minimum wage is raised and then the economy begins to grow faster than it was growing before, and we hear someone argue that since the economic growth started AFTER the minimum wage was increased then the growth must have been CAUSED by the increase.
If we are intelligent we will notice that this argument is also a fallacy. There is no necessary relationship between timing and causation. Even if we see the sun rise ten mornings in a row shortly after the rooster crows that does not prove that the rooster's crow CAUSED the sun to rise.
Certainly events are caused by other events but just because one thing happens after another does not prove that the second thing was caused by the first.
Even knowledge and intelligence together are not enough to achieve a well-lived life. To get through all the complex issues that face us every day we also need wisdom. To me wisdom is the ability to make good decisions – to figure out the right thing to do – in the face of all the complexities and uncertainties of life and without ever being 100% sure that we HAVE, in fact, made the right decision.
The simplest issues we face can be solved directly by our knowledge of facts. If we are hungry and know there is food in the refrigerator then our problem is solved.
More complicated issues can be solved by using our intelligence, our ability to think logically. Is the Affordable Care Act Constitutional? A question like that can be answered through a logical analysis of the Act and the Constitution.
For the most complex problems though, and for the most complex decisions we face, we will often find that all of our knowledge and all of our intelligence are not enough to tell us the answer. In these cases we have to sort through the elements of the problem to understand it deeply, we have to sort through the available facts and arguments to determine which are most important, we have to decide which of our goals are most important and how our decisions will affect those goals, we have to consider human nature and human feelings and human values, and then we have to make the best call we can.
After the Civil War was it better policy to punish the South or to show mercy? Will it be better for the United States to expel all undocumented immigrants or find a pathway to citizenship for most of them? Questions like these can only be answered well with wisdom – the ability to make good real-life decision in complex situations where we cannot follow a simple formula and where we cannot ever be absolutely sure that we are right.
3. How do we develop mental skills?
Given the vital importance of these skills: Knowledge, Intelligence, and Wisdom, what is the best way to get them?
Some people might think there is no way to develop these skills, we just have to accept whatever we are born with and be happy with that. This is clearly wrong. Every day through observation and conversation and reading we can pack more facts into our brains which means we are increasing our knowledge. Also, it is certainly possible to learn more about the forms of argument and the logical syllogisms, which are the tools of intelligence and, by doing this, we can sharpen our own intelligent. Finally, by watching people make difficult life decisions in complex situations we can learn from examples of wisdom and, little-by-little, deepen our own wisdom.
Clearly it is possible to increase our knowledge and intelligence and wisdom. One of the best ways to do that is by reading good books. The task will not be easy, it is something we will have to work at day by day, year by year, over the course of an entire lifetime, but I believe the results will be more than worth the effort...
Like all big and complicated goals this one is more likely to be achieved with careful planning. We should make a yearly reading plan, listing books that will improve our minds and then working our way through them one-by-one.
I have heard people argue it is better to learn from experience than from reading books - and there may be some truth to this where experience is possible - but consider all the experiences that are IMPOSSIBLE, all the experiences you will NEVER have if you don't read books: living through the Great Depression, witnessing the trial and death of Socrates, suffering through the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, listening to Einstein talk about the theory of relativity, sitting in the White House as Abraham Lincoln decides what to do about secession, watching that first split second of time when the entire universe exploded into existence, or participating in the daily lives of Native American families a thousand years before the white man arrived, all these amazing experiences are things you will never know at all unless you learn about them through books.
If we really want to gain more knowledge and sharpen our intelligence and deepen our wisdom shouldn't we plan to spend as much time as possible with the most knowledgeable and the most intelligent and the wisest people who have ever lived? Unless you have the power to travel magically through space and time the only way you can spend time with these people is by reading the great books they wrote or the great books that have been written about them.
Some books contain lots of information, lots of facts about interesting and useful topics. Reading these books will help us to increase our knowledge.
Some books are either directly about logical thinking skills or show us examples of thinking skills in action as brilliant people make discoveries or solve problems. A book about argumentation might teach us thinking skills directly. A book about how a particular scientific discovery was made might teach us thinking skills indirectly, by showing us examples of those skills in use.
Some books are about the great issues of life: right and wrong, happiness and pain, success and failure, the need to make vital personal decisions without any way of knowing for sure if we are really choosing right. Other books show us examples of people working their way through life and let us watch them trying to deal with these issues and decisions we all have to face along our way. These are the books that can teach us something about how to be wise.
In truth, every book we read can increase our knowledge, our intelligence, AND our wisdom but some books are better suited to developing one or the other of these mental skills. In the list below I have divided the books into three groups of four, one group best suited to increase knowledge, one group best suited to sharpen intelligence, and one group best suited to deepen wisdom.
So here they are, the twelve books on my 2017-2018 Knowledge – Intelligence – Wisdom reading plan.
4. Reading Plan: Year 1
Knowledge
1. The Story of Philosophy
Will Durant
I will read this book primarily for knowledge. Philosophers think hard about deep issues of life like how can we tell the difference between the true and the false, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. If I want to think clearly about these important issues I will need my brain well-stocked with facts about what others have thought about them.
2. The Passion of the Western Mind
Richard Tarnas
I will read this book primarily for knowledge. This great book traces all of Western intellectual history from the ancient Greeks to the 20th century. It covers ideas from philosophy, religion, science, and the arts. If I want to think clearly about the ideas that have seemed important in Western Civilization, like the central importance of logic and rationality, I need my brain well-stocked with facts about what people from all fields of knowledge have said about these ideas over the last 25 centuries.
3. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, Seventh ed.
Robert L. Heilbroner
I will read this book for knowledge. Economics is one of the most important subjects in the world because it tells us so much about how the world works, how human needs are satisfied or fail to get satisfied, how we can organize society in such a way that all of us can have better lives. Economics is also a vital subject because so many of us know virtually nothing about it which makes it easy for the greedy, the politicians, and the cranks to fool us and get us to support policies that will benefit them rather than ourselves.
4. The World's Religions
Huston Smith
I will read this book for knowledge. For much of human history religious beliefs have been big motivators of human behavior. The more we know about the religions of the world the better we will be able to understand what many people, groups, or even whole countries, are doing and why they are doing it.
Intelligence
5. 76 Fallacies
Dr. Michael Cooper LaBossiere
I will read this book to sharpen my intelligence. Like a chess master studies positions from great games a thinker studies fallacies. These are the unsound arguments you have to spot when other people use them and avoid using yourself. The more you know about fallacies the smarter you will be. This book should help.
6. How to Think Clearly
Doug Erlandson
I will study this book to sharpen my intelligence. The more we learn about the principles of clear thinking, and the more we put those principles into practice every day on every issue we face, the smarter we will be.
7. The Double Helix
James D. Watson
I will read this book to sharpen my intelligence. This very great book tells the inside story of one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century, the structure of DNA. As we watch very human scientists struggling to solve a tough problem we can pick up some tips that might help us with problems we have to solve.
8. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos
Dennis Overbye
I will read this book primarily to sharpen my intelligence. This is one of the best popular science books ever written. It describes how scientists have tried to figure out the size and origins and fate of the universe. As we read about how scientists think about these hard questions we can learn how to think better ourselves and thus become more intelligent.
Wisdom
9. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Studying the lives of great people is a good way to seek wisdom. We can try to learn from exceptional people what kinds of choices we have to make in life, what kinds of options we have in making those choices, and what kinds of consequences we might expect from those options. Don't forget to learn from bad choices so you won't have to make them yourself! This kind of learning will start us on the road to attaining wisdom.
10. Walden
Henry David Thoreau
I will read this book mainly for wisdom. Thoreau spent a little over two years living in a cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He took walks and read books and grew beans... and thought about life, and then wrote his thoughts down to help us think about life. Thinking about how we should live, trying to figure out what is the best way to live, those are certainly aspects of what we call wisdom.
11. The Life of Samuel Johnson
James Boswell
I will read this book mainly in the quest for wisdom. Boswell's brilliant biography mainly shows us Johnson talking. He thought about everything and then he talked about everything. And talked and talked and talked. Johnson was a brilliant man who studied history and literature and philosophy and wrote plays and poems and biographies and the first dictionary of the English language. Reading and thinking about Johnson's ideas about life will help us sort through and evaluate our own ideas about life, rejecting the bad ones while keeping the good ones and letting them guide us... and that is wisdom.
12. Plutarch's Lives
Plutarch
I will read this book primarily for wisdom. Plutarch wrote biographies in pairs comparing ancient Greek and Roman generals, statesmen, orators. By studying their lives I can learn what was important to them and how they lived and that will help me think about what is important to me and how I should live. I can learn about the various life choices these people made and think about whether I agree or disagree with them, and why, and that will help me to make better life choices for myself... and that is wisdom!
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So this is my 2017-2018 Knowledge, Intelligence, Wisdom Reading Plan. I am looking forward to becoming more knowledgeable by learning more facts, becoming smarter by learning more about thinking skills, becoming wiser by watching great people make important life decisions and by watching how those decisions turned out.
Next year there will be a fresh set of books to enjoy and learn from, but for this year, let's read these!
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Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway
