Intergenerational Relations in the West of Ireland and Sociocultural Approaches to Wisdom

Questions About Wisdom

It has been a perennial concern among human beings that people with experience of life and coping with its problems should be able to pass on what they have learned to younger generations. In this article, we explore some evidence about transmitting wisdom in the West of Ireland, asking what exactly goes on during this type of transmission and what it is that is expected to be beneficial to the receivers. Is it what is transmitted that is expected to help them, for instance, or how it is transmitted? Tracking wise interactions can throw light on this question, reconstructing what “wisdom” is taken to mean from a variety of different forms of evidence. This article uses ethnographic material to reassemble approaches to wisdom that may remain partially implicit in everyday discussions, but which may nonetheless be decisive in some intergenerational transactions. It examines cases that otherwise seem puzzling, offering conceptual reconstructions that allow us to interpret the behavior of the people concerned as making sense rather than as opaque. In the cases examined here, this reconstructive approach to ethnography permits interpretations of wisdom with direct relevance to relations between generations.

First, the article discusses what it is we need to know about wisdom and the processes by which it may be communicated; it outlines methods by which we have investigated this question here. It then explores some evidence about the use of proverbs in the semitraditional society whose habits of behavior are still detectable in the West of Ireland. Here, it argues that reconstructing what is “wise” about this common form of speech can help us understand intergenerational interaction today; it casts light on active roles both speaker and hearer play in transmitting insights about attitudes and behavior. Second, the article examines evidence about the lives of two single individuals in the same society, both men considered wise by acquaintances. It suggests that it is possible to build on conjectures about their contributions to others in order to explore what accessing wisdom can offer to younger generations. Last, we discuss other approaches in which intergenerational support is associated with responding to blockages in the lives of younger people. In all these cases, the wisdom involved seems to have significant connections with building up various aspects of social competence, perhaps even as far as resilience.

This article does not insist on the extreme claim that wisdom by itself, as a resource in a community, can ward off catastrophes in individuals’ lives. Rather, it suggests that access to wisdom, particularly that of older generations, may offer to enhance competence in dealing with challenging predicaments. Even the most striking of such competences, resilience, composed of varied capacities for dealing with problematic and potentially harmful experiences, is no longer considered to be a solely individual characteristic (Hawley & DeHaan, 1996): It involves interaction. Nor does the literature now concentrate solely on intra-familial processes; wider contexts and environments are also taken into account. Some forms of supportive intergenerational relationship are widely presumed to contribute to it. Nonetheless, Sameroff (2005) points out that although a capacity such as resilience is assumed to be “a multidimensional construct,” its definition and genesis is far from having been exhaustively determined. A similar point is made by Michael Rutter (1999; see Cutrona, 2006). Rutter (2000) claims that “resilience is not a fixed characteristic but rather represents several somewhat different types of dynamic processes operating over time” (p. 675). Luthar (2005) too stresses that “Resilience is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, nor is it fixed in time” (p. 1). Many authors attempt to distinguish resilience from general capacities for overcoming adversity, though it is hard to do this without circularity, and the distinction is not crucial to this article. Rather, ethnographic reconstructions of wisdom extend this debate by pointing to sociocultural resources used by people of different generations for dealing with problems in their common environments. This may have implications for policies affecting older or younger generations, or both.

In sum, the ethnographic observations we have carried out have helped us to discover more about what actually goes on in wise interactions. They enable us to fill in significant details about what people mean when they say someone is wise, and how wise people manifest wisdom. Focusing on how it is experienced by its recipients, we shall conclude by drawing parallels between wisdom in the West of Ireland and some approaches to therapy today.Exploring How Wisdom Happens

In the West of Ireland as elsewhere, when people are asked to talk about wise people and what they can offer others, they more often describe the effects of wisdom than the minutiae involved in how it takes place. Asked to describe someone he had known whom he would call wise, one man said,

I suppose the most fascinating person was my wife. She died four years ago. She was a very sincere person. She came from a family of nine, and any time there was anything go wrong in the family they came to her. No matter how major the problem, she was able to pull the right chords to have the person go away happy again.

When they’d come to her house, the first thing, she’d plugged in the kettle and she made a really good sandwich. She touched their hand and she pulled out the chair by the range and nothing else mattered in the house while that person was there.

The speaker can tell us what sort of person his wife was and what she did for people, but he does not say how she did it. His wife was generous and sociable, “If it was dinner time and there was just enough in the pot for the family, she’d have done without—she shared.” She enjoyed the company of others and was unfailingly helpful, but without undue sentimentality, and she enjoyed a convivial drink:

If there was a birthday party for one of the children, she’d . . . go round with a black bag and she’d pick up the paper, but only up to a certain point. When she thought she’d done enough she’d sit down on the bench, her three sisters would be next to her. She’d kick off her boots and say, “Now one of you make me a hot toddy!” ¹

This lady undoubtedly made an impression on those around her, who treasured her company; they saw her wisdom as in some way bringing it about that problems could be regarded in a new and more positive light. But if we want to find out what exactly it is that wise people do, what happens in the space between sitting a visitor down at the range and that visitor’s departure, we have further questions to ask. It is often assumed that what goes on here is the transmission of “advice,” but we have other suggestions to make.

This article arises from some 15 years of ethnographic interviews and participant observation ² in the West of Ireland, where the author has lived since 1993. The population relevant for this work dwells in a loose collection of small communities in the stony bogland of South Conamara and the mountainous region of the far North of the region; both these areas are considered extremely marginal for agriculture. Until some 50 years ago, subsistence farming was common: people grew their own food (except for tea and sugar) and spun wool from their sheep, which was brought to the weaver in wicker baskets carried on the back. The work was hard: One neighbor, born near the start of the 20th century, said, “The happiest day of my life was when I threw away my spindle!” Religion was just as much part of everyday life as was cooking or cutting turf for fuel, a sustaining part of the social network. This connection is illustrated in a remark by the same person, discussing life after death. “Why shouldn’t I go to heaven? I never quarrelled with my neighbours!” An interviewee who lived nearer Galway used, as a child, to walk for three quarters of an hour into town with his family for Mass at 6:30 a.m. on Christmas morning. They saw it as a practical, as much as a pious measure to stay for the 7:30 mass as well—“That way, you’d get two blessings.” ³ Religion was part of the way in which people lived, and undoubtedly helped to confer sense and meaning on most of life’s activities, but it was not drawn on explicitly in the forms of transmitting wisdom explored in this article.

Interviews for this work (some 30 in number) were carried out, usually in people’s homes or places of work, and lasting between 1 and 2 hours each. This is a largely Irish-speaking region, and though the interviews were mostly conducted in English, it was important to be familiar enough with Irish to understand interjections and references in that language. Some interviewees were chosen for their willingness to discuss the behavior of wise individuals they had known, but the topic sometimes also arose unexpectedly in other connections. The author was a neighbor but known to be occupied in describing Irish rural life, though this predilection was not apparently regarded with undue interest. ⁴ Occasionally, her students at the nearby university also collected examples concerning wise people in the same social setting. Just as important, however, were side remarks in everyday life, habits, or reactions, collected and pieced together over time. This is because this work focuses on practices that make sense as publicly shared ways of behaving, rather than, primarily, conscious individual attitudes.

As Malinowski (1922/2007) remarked, ethnographers inevitably take a different view of a society from those who live in it, who by and large are not interested in describing how their culture works. An ethnographer has to learn how to live in a society, and for this reason at least does not see it entirely “through the eyes of the inhabitants”—a conception popular at earlier stages of the discipline. He or she is trying to understand and map social interactions that people living in a society are, on the contrary, under an obligation to enact spontaneously. The whole point of apologizing, flirting, expressing affection, is to do them without reflecting on their social mechanics, which would make their performance stilted and manipulative. To discuss these practices ethnographically therefore offers a partial translation of how people in a setting live, for the interest of those in a different setting (Asad, 1986). The approach taken by the present author may be termed reconstructive ethnography. It spells out in abductive ⁵ fashion what conceptions or attitudes we need to posit to make a particular collection of remarks and actions make sense; then it searches for further attitudes and behavior that either elaborate and confirm, or contradict, the original interpretation. More than simply learning “how to go on” in a social setting (Winch, 1958), this is a hermeneutic attempt to make sense of public discourse and behavior. It needs to recognize the changeableness and variability to be found within cultures (Edmondson, 2000) and to test interpretations by conferring with members of those cultures willing to discuss them. ⁶ This approach does not represent cultures as homogenous settings in which everyone behaves uniformly, but it does search for resources that by and large appear to be available within them.

Communication in the West of Ireland shows an “elective affinity” with this approach to interpretation, often itself displaying an oblique character. In this social setting, it is customary to give implicit rather than explicit accounts of one’s own or other people’s actions. It is a setting in which behavior is on the whole accorded more consideration in building up such accounts than are imputations of intention, and in which speculation about the internal lives of others tends to be considered intrusive. Thus, it would be more usual to say of someone what he or she habitually does than presumptuously to pin that person down by attributing to them some motive or trait (“She’s great to visit her neighbors in hospital,” rather than “She’s very fond of her neighbors”). Being able to behave appropriately in this cultural setting involves knowing what is probably being implied, but not said, and being able to make witty implications in return—which makes up part of the skill and playfulness involved in negotiating everyday life.

The concept of wisdom itself has become “interstitial” in contemporary “modern” culture, which discourages mention of it in favor of ideas such as rationality or expertise (Edmondson, 2005; Staudinger, 2001). But in the West of Ireland, wisdom can be a difficult topic to broach for other reasons. Throughout the millennia in which wisdom has been discussed, it has been emphasized that wise people would not call themselves wise. In the West of Ireland, this is certainly the case; self-praise is generally considered laughably pretentious. For all these reasons, interviews in this project which try to address the idea of wisdom concentrate on discussing others whom respondents might feel to have behaved wisely.

Wisdom Transmitted Between Generations

Communication in the rural West of Ireland is still affected by its roots in a society in which orality played an extremely important part. Until very recently, speech retained on the whole more authority in everyday life than written language; people would ask the way rather than read maps, give their words rather than sign contracts. These conventions sometimes persist, especially among older people, and can certainly be traced among generations who are now deceased but were old in the last half of the 20th century. As we shall see, habitual forms of reasoning in this social setting tend to take social form, often using maxims and proverbs. The Irish language is well-known for its fondness for proverbs, and Irish people themselves sometimes poke fun at this characteristic of the language. Often, it is assumed that they are clichés, trite and inert, resources for conversationalists reluctant to think for themselves. If this were the entire or even the central content of exchanges employing proverbs, this feature of the language would certainly be disappointing—not to mention incoherent. But proverbs and maxims have been taken seriously by the greater part of humankind through history, and remain important to speakers of many languages today (e.g., in Arabic and Chinese). Rather than dismissing users of proverbs as foolishly naïve, we have tried to reconstruct how speakers use maxims in practice, claiming that it casts light on attempts at constructive communication down the generations. In fact, much of the direct ethnographic evidence in this article is taken from younger generations, albeit not necessarily speakers who are now young in years, attesting to the effects on their lives of older people than themselves.

To examine what proverbs as sources of wisdom can transmit, we can examine the case of a man born early in the 20th century in Spiddal in the West of Ireland. ⁷ Now deceased and known to us only by reputation, he was a small farmer who worked intermittently as a rate collector and also as a matchmaker. The latter role in particular attests to some recognition of his judgment by other members of the community. (One woman described to the author how her parents were married by a matchmaker; she said of her mother, “She knew that a man chosen by the Dwyers would be all right. And they were very happy.” ⁸ ) But Tim O’Flaherty was not a solemn man; he was exceptionally sociable and an excellent conversationalist. In what way was he said to be wise? “He was famous for his vast store of proverbs and the skill he would use to apply them. There was always a perfect fit between what he said and the predicament you were in.” ⁹ This at once gives some clue as to the meaning of proverbs. They are not in the first place constative or statemental, but relational. We suggest that the skilful use of a proverb involves identifying features of a current predicament that are crucial or key in some way, and relating them to an observation that both embodies and provokes a different way of regarding them. Tim’s son-in-law said,

It was a way of diagnosing a situation and finding just the saying to describe it. The proverb would lay things out for you in a way that made you think about them, think what you would do in the future. ¹⁰

Using proverbs aptly in this way, these comments suggest, demands the coordination of three major, and demanding, capacities. The first is the ability to perceive precisely and humanely what is at issue in a given state of affairs, the second, to see how it could be changed, the third, to know how to activate this knowledge for the person addressed. To say that Tim O’Flaherty’s knowledge of proverbs was amassed during his entire life course is not simply to record that it took time to collect and learn a large number of sayings. Learning them meant learning how they could be used. It meant learning the crucial features of human predicaments that a proverb identified and could be used to change.

Learning how to use a proverb in this way would necessarily rest on long experience of its use in different situations. This is tacit rather than explicit knowledge. Contemporary accounts of wisdom frequently refer to unspoken knowledge as a possible component, though without exploring specific advantages that the tacit may have (see Sternberg, 1998). Here is a clear example. Users of proverbs do not explain to the less experienced just why they choose a particular proverb on a particular occasion, and no doubt it would often be hard to formulate the reason. But it would also be counterproductive to do so, if proverbs aim at guiding listeners only so far as necessary to provoke them to work their situations out for themselves. So it would be through particularly attentive observation and diagnosis that some listeners (listeners with a potential for wisdom, perhaps) would come to realize that certain predicaments are marked by a particular feature of human conduct. They may be brought about by a certain sort of error, or capable of remedy in a particular way. Often, this might not be apparent to many of the people most closely involved. Using proverbs effectively in such situations would rest on a profound capacity to understand human behavior, which not everyone acquires in equal measure. It would not only be diagnostic, isolating the causes and effects of human predicaments. It would also involve understanding what is, and is not, susceptible of remedy: What constructive behavior can be expected in particular circumstances, and how it can be elicited. The point of using a proverb may be to startle or amuse listeners in a way that transforms their involvement with the predicament. Its choice is governed by its potential communicative effect on the person who is being addressed.

The surprise and the humor of proverbs are part of what brings the listener to want to see the situation differently or behave differently in it. Supposing I am exasperated with my nephew for treating his brother with what I see as condescension, and chastise him for his conduct. If my elderly mother delivers a speech—however accurate and insightful—about the usefulness of my sermon as an instrument of change, I merely become defensive. But if she says, Ní hé lá na gaoithe lá na scolb (“A windy day’s no day for thatching”), perhaps I may laugh: At any rate, I may come to regard the situation differently (“re-storying” it, in contemporary parlance). I may see for myself that lecturing at this moment and in this way is not the best way to effect change. The fact that the hearer draws the implications concerned makes them easier to internalize and learn from. The theory of learning implicit in such exchanges is participative: Change is enabled rather than prescribed.

This participative effect is accentuated by the fact that the speaker is not composing specially crafted individual comments, but drawing on knowledge shared in the social environment inhabited with the listener. The stress on personal originality among 20th- and 21st-century academic commentators has encouraged them to look down on maxims for their conventionality, but surely this is part of their point. The user of the proverb can avoid assuming a position of superiority, instead pointing to a resource from which speaker and hearer both draw. The very fact that the hearer has, in a sense, learned nothing new enables him or her to keep face and mitigates the distribution of power between the two. Drawing playfully on common resources allows the more experienced to place considerations before those who are less so without patronizing them. It seems too that proverbs’ shared status can itself give pleasure. One conversation partner registered delight to hear that the author knew a proverb familiar to herself: “Oh, do you have that too?” The fact that maxims are held in common seems to contribute to their effectiveness. A proverb, in sum, may be well known, but its selection and employment can be creative, humorous, and witty in a way that takes hearers aback. Far from trite and dull, its use may surprise them into disengaging from habitual attitudes; it can allow them to take productive approaches to problematic situations in which they may be involved. ¹¹

The wisdom involved seems therefore to be wise in the nature of its transmission and use; its contents are not those of the proverb, but the conclusions drawn by the listener. The contents of maxims themselves are not intended as quasi-scientific generalizations about human conduct. The skill of the user is to discern which, in this situation, is most appropriate and most likely to provoke constructive effects. If maxims were intended primarily to convey information, they would certainly be clichés. No doubt they can be used in this fashion, as conversational ornaments with little significance. But in their living form, this reconstruction suggests, they fulfill interpersonal and social roles, offering a joint means of responding to problems.

If this account is correct, examining contemporary or near-contemporary practices in dealing with maxims, sayings, and proverbs casts light on their perennial importance as a mode of transmission between generations. They are able to transmit not only experience, but ways of dealing with it. This form of transmitted wisdom does a great deal more than issue instructions. It demands a real depth of reflective reasoning, communicated in a form that is witty, playful, and effective. It instructs, through example and practice, in techniques of dealing with the self and others. Recipients of this form of wisdom learn that there are different perspectives from which predicaments can be viewed, and they learn how to switch between approaches as a remedy for becoming trapped within a single conception of what is going on. Maxim-related conversations do not focus specifically on individuals’ subjectivities, but what they teach involves learning to manage one’s internal and interpersonal life. (To this extent, learning the use of proverbs has parallels with the interactive understandings of communication to which psychotherapy belongs. Among suggestions that psychotherapeutic methods have precursors stretching back to the ancient world, see Sorabji, 2002.) Proverbs may also refer to and comment on social or political affairs (Edmondson, 2012), but on an everyday scale they offer training in warding off or coping with a range of difficulties, small and large.

Conversation in aspects of semitraditional Ireland that survive, as in other rural societies, is not oriented in the first instance to crafting utterances whose main virtue is the originality of their substantive claims. It can function as a means of upholding, extending, or amending local communal habits and opinions: When people meet each other on the road it is considered better manners for them to activate their common knowledge of their joint setting than to exhibit personal achievements (Edmondson, 1998). In such a setting, it is a matter of courtesy for a speaker to direct attention to cultural stores of knowledge rather than his or her personal insights, but the communicative advantages this allows have seldom been attended to. It does not rule out critical or ironic stances toward the social context in question; nor does it rule out its own form of individuality. But individuality can be shown through the humour and inventiveness with which a common culture is played with and manipulated. This offers a social setting in which older and younger generations can in principle be equally at home while retaining the potential to respond to it in different styles. Playfully creative forms of transmission in fact have affinities with youth cultures in which individuality takes the form of pastiche, reaccenting, and unexpected perspectives on the everyday (for contemporary examples, see electronic music festivals, such as the Mantua Project in Ireland, www.mantuaproject.com, which includes bands such as “Ham Sandwich” or “Walter Mitty and the Realists”).

The interpretation given here suggests a mode of reading past and current uses of proverbs in a fashion that explains how they are associated with wisdom and need not be banal. It also indicates something of what their use can transmit to hearers. The precise implications of this use undoubtedly differ from context to context, but they apparently include modes of managing the self as well as responding to interpersonal and social predicaments—surely key aspects of social competence, stretching as far as resilience itself.

Transmitted Wisdom, Meaning, and Hope

If some types of wisdom transmitted between generations can offer training in dealing productively with personal or social predicaments, can they also have larger scale effects? Can they influence younger generations’ capacities for responding to life as such? Further ethnographic evidence, also from the West of Ireland, suggests that they might. The following quotations, part of a longer interview with a priest brought up on the island of Inis Oirr, ¹² specifically thematize the effects that knowing wise people may have. At the same time, they go toward solving another puzzle. Popular stereotypes of wisdom stress remoteness and self-containment: the wisdom of Merlin. Given that we cannot attain such heights of self-mastery, how could we expect to learn from such people? The evidence in the previous section already casts doubt on this stereotype. In this section, ethnographic interviews allow further elaboration on the communicative nature that everyday wisdom can have and its potentially far-reaching effects.

Edward, my neighbour, was such a wise guy. It was almost innate in him. His house was here and my house was there . . . And the way he’d sit out at night, reading the stars. He’d name the stars to me . . .

He could call you into the mystery of looking at the sky and the horizon of the round island that was about you.

This older gentleman, therefore, had a sense of wider affairs and wider importances, which was specifically communicative, not centered on his own capacities alone. He could “call you into” what was being said. “He’d start a story that would bring you into it—the golden road that would open up on the sea and bring you along it . . . When you reached the horizon it would open up another one.” At the same time, he was wryly witty: When boastful, travelled neighbors returned to the island, the joke was still on them.

And he had a great mind, even though he had no education. There’d be guys that came back from abroad and they’d be spoofing about the towns they’d seen and he knew the ones they mentioned weren’t even in the countries they’d been in!

But Edward was not someone who mocked others in the sense of looking down on them. He cared about other people and was skilled in making insightful and productive suggestions for them in a way that did not cause them to take offence.

Edward had an interest in the human. He could tell you when you’d done something good.

When I was at school, he’d say, not how are you getting on, but how’s the geography going, what are you writing now? When I was training to be a priest, he’d say about my reading, maybe you should draw breath a bit more. He’d start with a positive, but then he’d come round to what you could do better. He had a wisdom that was wider than the smallness of Inis Oirr. We lived on a very small island.

It seems that for him, interest in others was part of his way of being. He was curious about other people. He’d say, “I wonder what the people in Clare are doing and what they are like.” But at the same time, he was clearly skilled in dealing with himself.

There was a wisdom about him, a calmness about him . . . It’s not even about words. It’s about people. He was a mighty man to sit happy in his place and be reflective on it. He wasn’t dogmatic or arrogant.

The priest who was talking about him was very clear that this older man had definitely affected him. “I often think of Edward when someone rings in the middle of the night. Someone rings, they’re screaming, someone’s having a heart attack. I think of Edward, he’d be part of me at that time . . .”

This is an instance in which wisdom transmitted between generations has had effects that clearly extend beyond the immediate issues involved. A somewhat similar case arises from memories of Sean Murphy, who lived in a remote village in the hills in north Conamara and who died in 1996. ¹³ In his case too, intergenerational effects are strong. All the people who give evidence here—his nephew and daughter and his neighbors—are of younger generations. Their comments underline both the particular and the general benefits of knowing him.

Like Edward’s or Tim’s, Sean’s was a wisdom that eschewed solemnity. He “loved to spend time with other people,” “chatting and joking.” His “fabulous memory” meant that “he knew everyone” in the district, and his house was always welcoming. He “made time for other people without making a scene of it. It looked effortless to him.” Like Edward, he was a gifted storyteller (associations between wisdom and storytelling appear strong, for reasons that go beyond the scope of this article). Even years after his death, people remained struck by Sean’s conviviality and his skill in dealing with others. “People wanted to listen to him . . .” He was a “problem solver,” one who “talked things through.” A “jolly” man, Sean was “persuasive”; he was an “excellent judge of character”; and he was also “straight down the line.” He used his gifts socially, for the benefit of the community. We have noted that proverbs can be used to provoke different ways of seeing a situation; Sean too had an “ability to stand back and see another way of getting around” a problem. These capacities could be used in concert. Sean had worked for more than 20 years on building sites in England, and is remembered as defending fellow-workers laid off in retaliation for an accounting error. Sean composed a witty and charming poem, convincing the employers that this was not the workers’ faults. “Sean had a tremendous ability to disarm any hostile situation, calming any volatile state of affairs”—but with humorous “digs” rather than earnest discourse.

Sean’s abilities may have taken a lifetime to hone, but their exercise was quick and timely. This applied even to his dealings with animals, for which he “had great mercy.” His nephew recounted an incident in which he admired the precocious accomplishments of a young sheepdog, herding a flock down a valley.

[My uncle] turned to me and said, “A good sheep-dog pup will always naturally go round the flock of sheep. In this glen, the only real path out is past this point. By positioning Blackie at the far side, no matter how he moved toward the sheep, they would have come this way. The trick is to make it easy for him.”

It is no coincidence that this approach reminds us of “student-centered” pedagogy, in which the teacher is not dominated by thoughts of the task itself but focuses on the pupil’s capacities. (Note that the work of Freire, 1968/2007, himself was heavily influenced by its author’s contacts with peoples from cultures stressing oral communication.) For Sean, interest in learning was related to his interest in children as people; he always “had a kind word” for the “scholars” he met on the road, returning from school. After being encouraged by Sean to persevere in his own education, the nephew eventually became a professor abroad. He consulted his uncle on his achievements in training dogs to perform astonishing feats, since he himself felt daunted by teaching intelligent human beings. Sean replied that, in both cases,

[Y]ou must give them knowledge in a way that interests them, that they enjoy, that they feel they are able to take in.

If you try to train dogs to do impossible things they are not fit to do, then they are defeated straight away and will never advance at all.

Start small, learn all!

Like Edward’s, Sean’s “mighty nature” seems to have been a source of strength to those around him—both in particular and in general. We have seen that he was able to intervene constructively in single predicaments, but his manner of approaching life seems to have had broader effects too. As in the case of Edward, a friend said,

Sean made an impression on any youngster or person who took the time to talk to him and spend time with him. He could say the right things to people without preaching to them. I would say without doubt, he had an impact on my life.

What younger generations learned from him included perspectives on life as such. His daughter recounted,

One particular day we were walking up the mountain. I kept my eyes focused on my feet trying not to fall. He looked at me for a moment and then told me not to just look down because I couldn’t see anything else. He said, “If you only look at one spot, you will not see everything else that is around you.”

In terms of showing younger generations how to deal with specific challenges and difficulties—the management of the self, drawing on social and cultural resources—there is considerable overlap between all the three men examined here. ¹⁴ But, in addition, the cases of Edward and Sean illustrate something of what is meant by ascribing “meaning” to life. Personal and individual affairs are sustained by the sense of a wider perspective in which hope can be preserved, not least because individual events do not derive their significance only from themselves. (For the importance of hope in contemporary therapy, see, e.g., Flaskas, 2007; Flaskas, McCarthy, & Sheehan, 2007.) They can be experienced as part of a broader state of affairs whose value persists even when individual predicaments are daunting. According to Benard (1991), resilient children believe that life has meaning and that goals are worth pursuing. In this connection, we can see Edward and Sean not only as using but also as offering sociocultural resources with potentially wide positive effects.

Wisdom as a Resource in Intergenerational Relations

We enquired at the beginning of this article whether or not wisdom in the West of Ireland is characteristically connected with what is transmitted or how this is done: It appears that the answer is both. In exploring some ways in which uses of social and cultural resources can enhance well-being in connection with wisdom, we started by reconstructing a variety of ethnographic evidence on interaction between generations. It transpires that wise interaction need not be centrally concerned specifically with conveying advice. It may be based on an interactive and participative form of communication, less preoccupied with individuals’ subjectivities as such than with helping to place the recipient in a position from which he or she can see a predicament differently. Thus, it reinforces the well-being that derives from resolving or coping with problems. This insight into what wisdom can offer may have potential for supporting intergenerational relations elsewhere. There are some resonances here with contemporary literature on intergenerational community activism: “They don’t ‘high-hat’ us and we don’t ‘high-hat’ them . . . We just enjoyed speaking with each other” (Kaplan, 1997, p. 219). Uses of narrative therapy may similarly involve forms of companionship within situations in which both therapist and others are thought of as participating in an effort to see the world differently (see Anderson, 1997, Andersen & Jensen, 2007; Fernández, Cortés, & Tarragona, 2007; cf. Edmondson, 2008).

It seems, therefore, that the historical preoccupation with wisdom in intergenerational contexts has not been without reason, and that sociocultural resources are crucial to at least some of the ways in which wisdom takes effect. Rutter (2000) concedes that it seems “not unreasonable” to assume that “there may be variables whose presence fosters particularly good functioning but whose absence carries no particular risk of psychopathology” (p. 652). But he cautions that this has not yet been demonstrated, remarking on how little we still know about “how people think about their experiences and how they incorporate them into their overall schema of themselves, their environment, and their relationships with other people” (Rutter, 2000, p. 674). Reflecting on how to support younger people to confront difficulty, Waller (2001), Sameroff (2005), and Walsh (2006) among others suggest that factors in the community (such as supportive schools) may be significant. No doubt there is no universal panacea; Rutter points out that particular coping styles tend to work well for one kind of stress but not for all. But the presence of social resources involving wisdom has not been considered in this context. It seems very much worth exploring.

Wolkow and Ferguson (2001), for example, argue that there is enough evidence that “caring adults in the community” help younger people for policy measures supporting interaction between them to be justified. Reconstructing wise intergenerational interactions adds to the possible meanings of “caring” in this context. People who form part of the social environment of younger generations (such as Tim, Edward, or Sean), but who might not necessarily be described as “close,” potentially offer support in developing paths to well-being supported by the versions of wisdom we have investigated. We have taken these largely from rural settings, but this is not to say they are confined to them. (Paul McCartney’s well-known BBC interview with Michael Parkinson in December 1999 exemplifies the view that urban working-class culture is, or was, a significant source of wisdom.) In future work, it may also be possible to make practical connections between traditional and contemporary forms of interaction. In forms of community education where Native Americans are involved, in New Mexico for instance, it may be taken for granted that older people will play active roles, and that their cultural knowledge is important in the development of younger people (Morris, 2008). Such measures seem to be genuinely community resources: It is not only younger generations who are helped by them. In this article, we have a direct example of older generations coping with problems involving younger ones. But there are indications from a variety of cultures that older people themselves benefit from involvement in wise exchanges that support those who are younger (see Manheimer, 1997 or Mehta, 2009).

The fact that the types of wisdom described here do not always focus directly on individuals’ interior lives may have advantages, considered as a resource within communities. It may diminish the danger of intrusiveness and enable a better fit with cultural preferences among younger generations, particularly perhaps among younger men. Many of the examples we have seen here provoke wise responses through the witty and individual manipulation of cultural resources; this interactive style may be appropriate for embedding in social contexts such as sports mentoring or training in crafts. Last, we have examined cases of wisdom that eschew overt orientation to power. The wise interventions examined here do not comprise instructions about what is to be done. They draw on common social and cultural resources to enable recipients to evolve their own reactions. Wise communication, in this sense, is not complete in itself but actively requires the participation of the hearer (Edmondson et al., 2009). Discussing the need to sustain younger people in confronting challenges that may face them, Rutter (2000) concludes,

The policy implication is that it may be important to help young people think positively, accepting the reality of their bad experiences, but not taking blame for things outside their control, and building on whatever good aspects there may be. (p. 675)

If it is possible to support interaction involving approaches to wisdom such as those reconstructed here, cultural resources within communities may be used to good effect.

To “translate” from the linguistic conventions in which the evidence was gathered here, the resources we have reviewed feature wise people as excellent storytellers and conversationalists; rather than remote and elevated, they are unpretentious, approachable, and perennially interested in others. The wisdom they communicate does not come in the form of messages or instructions. Rather, they tend often to initiate processes that can activate shared resources, for example in the form of proverbs chosen on the basis of possible connections between a given proverb and a crisis current in someone else’s life. This can have unique effects on recipients, who can take pleasure both in the creative use of shared knowledge and its liberating effects. Wise interaction here thus depends on interactive processes in which recipients are placed in a position from which they can see problems in a more constructive light. At the same time, the joint interpretation of events in the light of the proverbial saying can be experienced as a communal event that sheds new light both on the situation at hand and on the meaning of the proverb.

Future research could therefore explore the extent to which the forms of wisdom transmission discussed here also operate in different cultures. In this article, we have explored a setting whose features seem specially to support the type of wisdom indigenous to it. Do other cultures that feature the use of proverbs employ them in similar ways? What other shared social resources can be drawn on in wise processes, as well or instead? How generalizable is this model, or some variant of it? Many of these are empirical questions. But we may conclude with a report of an actual therapeutic case that suggests that similar processes to those observed here can be found in other settings too. The therapist in this case was Irish, as was the patient, but neither was from the semitraditional background that we have just explored. However, in this example, the therapist similarly uses wit and surprise to remove the patient into a different place, from which he is freed to feel and act differently. ¹⁵ The instance involves the reactions of a child psychiatrist to a child of “about eight or nine” who had been referred for a gambling problem.

He had got hooked on the slot machines, that was the problem. So Tony listened to it. And then he turned around and praised the parents for having brought up such a generous son, who realised that the arcade owner really needed this lad’s money. The lad’s mother gasped! So then Tony said, I also realise you are making a great sacrifice because you don’t get to play football or do things with your friends. So he suggested that the lad got together the money that he spent in the arcade every week, and put it in an envelope, and sent it to the arcade owner, and that would free up his time to do other things. There was this stunned silence in the room. Tony just sat there and beamed.

They set up another appointment but the parents phoned and said he didn’t need it, he was cured, he was out playing football.

In this case too, the wisdom conveyed in the therapeutic interaction is oblique, implicit, and enabling, shifting the point of view of the person to whom it is addressed; and the boy’s resilience seems certainly to have been enhanced.