The Wisdom of Doing What You’re Told

Ever since the Enlightenment, Western civilization has lived with unmatched confidence in autonomous human reason. We believe that certainty is possible and that our own thoughts are generally reliable. “Knowledge is power,” we like to say. We take great pride in being able to think for ourselves. Do the research. Don’t be sheep. Anyone with a functioning brain and access to Google ought to be able to recognize the facts. When we encounter people who don’t see what we see, we conclude they must be idiots.

Of course, the fruit of this confidence is the fractious world we now occupy. Everyone claims to have the truth, but those claims often conflict. We can’t pursue the truth without bumping into questions related to whose truth. Everyone is still very certain they’re right even as they stare across at equally certain people with contrary truth claims. Yet, for some reason, our disputed truth claims haven’t led us to question the Enlightenment’s confidence in human reason. Despite the cultural confusion, we double down.

I’m going to refrain from turning this essay into a refutation of Enlightenment confidence. Instead, I want to make two controversial and interrelated points. First, you don’t need to understand everything to act. Second, receiving knowledge from trusted authorities is good and wise.

Imagine a scenario with me. A young man in a local church begins attending a discipleship group with older men. As time goes on, one of the older men gets to know the young man and cares enough to inform him that he exudes pride and arrogance in his interactions with the other men in the group. He talks down to them and often interrupts when they’re making a point. He doesn’t seem teachable.

The young man hears the criticism but doesn’t receive it well. He just doesn’t see it. In fact, he disagrees completely. He replies with a monologue about how his father always taught him to respect his elders. No one else has ever told him he has a pride issue. He really can’t correct the supposed prideful behavior until he sees it for himself. He commits to pray about it, but he can’t promise action until God reveals the sin to him. He must understand it for himself.

Here’s where post-Enlightenment self-confidence battles against biblical wisdom. The young man’s insistence on knowing for himself is really a mask for the very problem he denies. A humble heart would submit to the wiser man and receive the gentle rebuke on borrowed authority. It’s good and wise to say in such a scenario, “I don’t personally see it, but I trust you. If you say I’m prideful, I’ll take your word for it and commit to working on it.”

In her book, On Reading Well, Karen Swallow Prior uses Anne Elliot from Jane Austen’s Persuasion to illustrate this kind of virtue. At nineteen, Anne had fallen in love and been engaged to marry Frederick Wentworth. However, after receiving counsel from an older family friend, Anne had called off the engagement under the rationale that she could do better. Now, at twenty-seven, Anne is still unmarried, and Wentworth has returned to Anne’s town after greatly improving his station through a successful career.

From our vantage point, Anne should have never listened to the advice of her older friend. She should have trusted her gut. She was in love, and listening to bad advice had ruined her opportunity—the only one she’s had thus far—for marriage.

However, Anne doesn’t see it that way. She tells Wentworth, “I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it, that I was perfectly right in being guided by the friend. . . To me, she was in place of a parent. Do not mistake me, however. I am not saying that she did not err in her advice. It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides; and for myself, I certainly never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity, give such advice. But I mean that I was right in submitting to her, and that if I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have suffered in my conscience.”

Proverbs—the biblical book most synonymous with wisdom—comes to us as advice to a son from his parents. To receive wisdom from these trusted authorities is equated with fearing the LORD (2:1-5). Biblically, there’s a surer source of knowledge than the independent mind. Human reason is not the most reliable authority. Wise living seeks out trusted authorities to which to submit. “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice” (12:15).