There is a regular piece in a local magazine called ‘Useless Facts’. To indulge you, here is a taster; ‘The collective noun for a group of Wombats is a wisdom’.

We live in an age of abundant trivia. Our desire for it appears in the game ‘Trivial Pursuit‘, crossword puzzles and game shows on TV. We strain our memories for obscure facts as ageing weight lifters reaching for one more cerebral lift. The sight is rarely inspiring. So why are facts so useless?

I was inspired by T.S. Eliot many years ago when I read the following lines in his poem ‘The Rock’;

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

He was perhaps one of the first thinkers to formulate these distinctions, back in the 1930’s.

Later, an extra level was added which is ‘data’ and is a subdivision of information. He might have written; Where is the data we have lost in information? This idea is sometimes abbreviated to DIKW – just in case you ever get asked what this means a quiz.

I am personally less interested in ‘data’ because it is the same as my definition of information; ‘the smallest subdivision of thought’.

So I shall start considering information. We know that it is fundamental to every thought process. With bad information, we make bad decisions. Science depends on being able to measure and repeat experiments until the information is correct.

With the unimaginable amounts of information being collected now in the Information Age, it is fundamental that it is processed rationally. We need to see the wood for the trees. Processing is the step we take to find knowledge. The process is analogous to the game of ‘joining the dots’ to allow an unseen picture emerge.

The military have always been good at finding ‘intelligence’ (knowledge) in the maelstrom of information. They grade it on a continuum between that which is not likely to be true and that which is. Not only that but the source is graded between ‘reliable’ and ‘unknown’. In this way any picture emerging from the dots can be graded as likely of unlikely to be true.

Police Forces use a similar process in order to target their resources. They need to know what is going on and who is doing it, where and when. The computer has been the answer to a prayer for the police. The information comes streaming in to their computers every second of everyday and is stored there, for a rainy day. The day comes when someone, somewhere wants to know everything about a particular villain. His favourite brand of cigarettes matching a packet found at a murder scene is not significant, but adds another dot in the process of knowing what happened.

Just as information forms a picture, so does knowledge. When you begin to piece together some knowledge of life as you age, you might be regarded as becoming wise. Wise because you are seen to connect different areas of knowledge to form a bigger picture. This picture has a certain ‘universality’ about it. The patterns, the laws, the philosophy, the truths, the traditions, the ‘old wives tales’ – are true for this time and place in a way that almost goes beyond time and place. They are so true that even when the facts change and the knowledge on which they are based changes – even then, wisdom does not decree another course. It is so broad, that it can maintain a course, a straight path, to achieve an aim. And it knows what that aim is – whilst those who process information may have no idea.

Those facts you learnt in school cease to mean anything as you get older, for the world becomes a larger place and wisdom operates in a totally different way. Facts cannot change by definition. If they do they become a new fact. Wisdom has the option to self evolve; to set a new aim and method of achieving it. It can be subtle or radical because it never digs itself into so deep a hole that it is reluctant to dig somewhere else. Wisdom is liquid, like an ocean and operates in the way that tides flow this way and that.

So when you watch a world leader who cannot change their mind or cannot make up their mind, or know their mind – you are watching someone engrossed in facts and knowledge. Even when they glimpse an aim or voice once someone else suggested, they have no idea how to achieve it. They have forgotten, as T.S. Elliot so elegantly puts it, wisdom.