Opinion | Compassion does not necessarily come from spirituality

We all wonder about the nature of wisdom and how it is acquired because it is so essential in producing well-functioning and harmonious individuals and societies. Katherine Kam’s May 9 Health & Science essay, “Experts seek insight into how we acquire wisdom,” attempted to present an innovative scientific approach by Dilip Jeste to uncovering the biological origins of wisdom, but it ended up as an overly pro-religion treatise masquerading as a scientific investigation.

Dr. Jeste’s premise is that understanding wisdom begins with the “ancient spiritual texts — [which] have remained stable over millennia, with some cultural differences,” as the essay put it. They reveal that “the wise have tended to be compassionate, calm, open-minded and decisive people who have learned from their experiences.” This leads him to conclude, Ms. Kam wrote, that one of the components of wisdom is “spirituality or belief in something larger than oneself.” It is true that wise individuals can be characterized as “compassionate and open-minded,” but this is not necessarily a by-product of spirituality or a belief in a higher being. It can be a product of secularism, a belief that human beings are at the center of the universe and that the wise are the ones who engage in introspection and ethical inquiry and who desire to do good deeds to benefit humanity, as opposed to engaging in destructive activities, which extremist versions of religions have practiced over the centuries, including to this very day.

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