The audio can be found here.
Aaron Lee: Brett, we’re here to talk about your new book, The Wisdom Pyramid. Why don’t you give me the story behind this book?
Brett McCracken: A couple years ago, I was invited to speak at a Canvas conference, which is a Humble Beast conference up in Portland. The topic that they gave me to speak on was how to find “True Joy in a Fake News World.”
As I was preparing my talk for that conference, I was thinking about what I wanted to say. Really what it boiled down to is that true joy, true wisdom in a fake news, post-true world largely involves where we’re looking and where we’re listening. What are the sources that are feeding us so that we have a healthy diet of information? Then the flip side is if you have unhealthy diets of information, then you are on the fast track to foolishness and the opposite of wisdom and the opposite of joy.
So I thought I could create this visual aid that borrows from the food pyramid, but for wisdom. So in the same way that the food pyramid was a guide for how to be physically healthy based on the kind of food that you take in and in the right proportions, I thought I could do something similar for our wisdom: What are the sources of knowledge or the sources of truth that would be conducive to wisdom? What proportion? What would be the foundational layer and what would be like the least important layer?
I sketched out my version of the wisdom pyramid, sent it to a graphic designer friend, and asked him to create a nice-looking wisdom pyramid that sort of looked like the food pyramid. So I used that image as I gave this conference talk, and in the image itself was the highlight of the talk. People were like taking pictures of it on their cell phones and it kind of went viral online that week. That image took on a life of its own.
A couple of years later, as I was thinking about writing another book and what topic I would want to write about, I just kept coming back to this idea of the wisdom pyramid and how it’s become even more urgent in recent years. It’s this idea that the media and this crazy internet age that we live in is forming us with, whether we like it or not, by virtue of what we take in from it. It can form us in very negative ways or positive ways, depending on where we’re looking and depending on those sources. So I decided to just run with the wisdom pyramid and create a whole book about it with chapters on each category in the pyramid.
Aaron Lee: Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how your background played into your book?
Brett McCracken: I am a journalist, I’m a writer, I’m a pastor, and I’m a film critic. I tend to write about film and the arts a lot. The intersection of faith and culture is my sweet spot as a writer at The Gospel Coalition, which is my day job and I’m a senior editor there. That’s the area that I focus on: How the gospel and how faith intersects with movies, TV, music, technology, and all aspects of culture.
So this book is really born out of my multifaceted interests. The Bible is a layer of the pyramid, the church is a layer of the pyramid. I’m a pastor who cares about the church. But then there’s a category of the wisdom pyramid on beauty, which is kind of my chapter where I can lay out my case for why Christians should care about the arts and beauty.
All of this is just stemming from how in my own life, through my upbringing as a Christian, I was fortunate enough to be raised in a solid, churchgoing Christian home. I went to a really great Christian liberal arts university, Wheaton College in Illinois, I worked at Biola, which is a Christian liberal arts university, and in all of these contexts, a big emphasis was the idea that, like faith should be integrated with all aspects of life — everything from the arts and music to science and the study of nature. So there’s a chapter in the wisdom pyramid on nature as a source of truth. All of those things in my background fed into me writing this book.
Aaron Lee: You mentioned in your book’s introduction that we live in a world of alternative facts, and us having our own truth or my truth, as some people would say. So how is wisdom defined? Does wisdom change over time? Is this book particular for this moment or does it apply to the past and future?
Brett McCracken: That’s a good question. I would tend to say that no, wisdom is not something that just changes with the times. The whole point of what makes wisdom wisdom is that it transcends the fast-paced ephemeral nature of things where everything is squishy and fluid and you don’t know what to trust because it’s so fleeting.
Wisdom is eternal. We believe as Christians that wisdom really is God. God is wisdom incarnate. Everything that is wisdom comes from him, and he is an eternal kind of fount of wisdom.
So I wouldn’t say wisdom is subject to the ever changing mood of the Zeitgeist. But that’s exactly why we need it so much now: everything else in life is in flux, and just subject to our whims and our fancies; my truth and your truth; and my preferred facts and your alternative facts. What’s making us crazy in this world is that everything is up for grabs, and we don’t know who is right. We don’t know what is true.
A couple years ago, the Oxford Dictionary, came up with post-truth as the word of the year, a couple years ago, because it really does define increasingly our culture, or Post truth because no one, you know, knows whose claim on truth is correct. So in a world like this, it’s more and more vital that we are looking for wisdom, which transcends all this. All these unstable categories of information and knowledge and claims of truth.
Aaron Lee: Moving to the actual pyramid, the Bible is at the bottom level; that’s the fundamental building block of the pyramid. You said that you made a point to mention the infallibility of God’s word. I thought that it was great that you actually put that in the book. What made you feel like you needed to put this out there?
Brett McCracken: Because without that, there would be no justification for having the Bible as the foundational layer of wisdom. If the Bible wasn’t infallible, if it’s just a book that fallible humans put together subjectively for some agenda, then why would we give it any credence as the most important source of truth?
So everything hinges on the fact that we believe the Bible is God’s infallible word to us. It’s not subject to any dispute. It’s God’s direct, infallible speech to us, and he is an infallible God. His words to us are therefore infallible, and so that’s why it’s at the bottom.
Everything else in the wisdom pyramid to a greater or lesser degree is fallible and subject to misinterpretation or using it in the wrong way. And of course, Scripture can be misinterpreted and can be used in the wrong way. But I don’t think that makes scripture infallible. It just makes it something that fallible humans can abuse, and we see that happening in our world. I talk about that a little bit in the Bible chapter where I go through five principles for rightly handling scripture and making sure that we are actually getting the truth that is there from it, rather than using it for our own purposes.
Aaron Lee: The next layer is the church. Why is community and fellowship, so important for today, especially during our times of COVID?
Brett McCracken: There’s a lot about the church that’s essential. It’s God’s chosen kind of mechanism for his mission to advance in the world. It’s God’s presence among his people. It’s the body of Christ — that’s the metaphor Paul uses. So it’s vital for the Christian life.
I don’t think there’s much stock in people who say, “I can have Jesus, but not the church.” Biblically, that idea just doesn’t work. But beyond that, for wisdom sake, you can’t be wise as a lone wolf, just finding your own way through life. As much as that’s a popular idea in our Western individualistic culture — just look within yourself for truth, follow your heart, trust in yourself, live your truth — that actually is a recipe for disaster. There’s a cap on your wisdom when it’s just up to you.
But in community, you have people who can point out blind spots to you, who you can be accountable to, who can show you aspects of truth that you wouldn’t have seen yourself because of your lens. In theory, the more people you have, the closer you can collectively get to the truth because everyone is able to see something a little bit different, and you can work it out and community together.
That’s why that’s why the church is so essential as like an interpretive community of scripture. I don’t think scripture is meant to be this isolated thing that every individual Christian just takes and makes of it what they want to make of it. The church exists, in part, to be this community of interpretation, where [rp[;r can better get at what God wants us to glean from scripture in community.
Aaron Lee: I love how throughout the book, you tend to go back to the Bible and point us back to God’s word.
Brett McCracken: I like to use this image that not only is the Bible the foundation of the wisdom pyramid, but it’s also a vertical scaffolding. It keeps the upper layers of the pyramid stable just like scaffolding does, because without that scaffolding, beauty can sometimes take you off the rails and it can become a sort of squishy source of truth. But if it’s firmly tethered to Scripture in that grid of scriptural truth, then it can be a wonderful source of truth.
Aaron Lee: Next up on the pyramid is nature. Now, I was surprised by this because after nature comes books. I’m a book lover. I love books. I would have thought that books would come before nature. Can you walk me through your thinking and the rationale?
Brett McCracken: One of the fun things about this book is that I hope it will spark conversations among people about how you would have ordered [the layers] differently because I think those are fruitful discussions.
So here’s my rationale for putting nature where I did: One of the big principles of the book is that wisdom is about proximity to God. If we believe that God is the source of wisdom, then it makes sense that things that are closer in proximity to God would be generally more trustworthy sources of wisdom. That’s why the Bible is the most important because it’s the most direct; it’s the most proximate to God. Then it’s the church, which I think is kind of the second closest we can get to God by virtue of his people; it’s his presence among his people.
I put nature as number three because it’s God’s creation. It’s proximate to God by virtue of being what he made; it’s his handiwork. It’s like how you can know things about an artist by virtue of looking at their artwork. I can start to pick up some things about Vincent van Gogh by looking at “Starry Night” and his paintings, and the same is true of God’s creation.
There’s this idea in theology of general revelation, which is the idea that God reveals Himself to us through the Bible in a specific, special way. But he also revealed Himself to us through general revelation by what he made in nature and creation, including us. We’re a part of nature, and we’re part of his creation in a special sense because we’re made in the image of God, Scripture says, so we bear his specific image.
When we’re in nature — when we’re really attuned to it and paying attention to it — we have eyes to see, ears to hear, fingers to touch. A wonderful thing about nature is that it’s multi-sensory so we can learn things about nature in all of our senses, whereas with a book, you can really only learn cerebrally.
I think there’s something to wisdom that is beyond just the cerebral; wisdom is different than knowledge in that sense. Wisdom is this holistic, kind of embodied thing that we can pick up through non-cerebral ways.
Sometimes just being in nature, as part of God’s creation, we’re kind of in our proper place. Like when I, as a creature that God created, am walking in a national park, looking at the Grand Canyon, and sitting by a river, I’m in my proper place. I’m part of God’s creation, and I’m in harmony with it. There’s something really orienting and stabilizing about that, especially in this frenetic digital age that we live in, which can disconnect us from the physical creation in really unhelpful ways.
Aaron Lee: After books on the pyramid are the arts, and you are the TGC arts and culture specialist. So I want to get really practical here. How can we have a balanced diet in terms of the arts and culture that we consume? Especially when, like you and me, we love these things?
Brett McCracken: It’s increasingly difficult because there’s so much. We live in an abundance of riches when it comes to access to the arts. On Spotify or any music streaming site, you literally have access to everything that’s ever been recorded musically. It’s the same with paintings as you can Google it. No longer do you have to travel to a museum to see a painting. All these video streaming sites have just mind-boggling amounts of movies and series.
There really is a risk with art these days to turn it something almost like desensitizing. I consume so much of it, and I go from one thing to the next so fast that it turns into junk food. It’s just not giving me any nutrition.
The key with the arts and with beauty is in order for them to function as a source of truth, they should slow us down. That’s one of the great things that art does is in a busy age when we’re kind of so distracted: it has the potential to focus us and to attune our senses to something for a deeper, longer amount of time. But we have to be willing to let it do that.
I struggle with that because part of my job is keeping up with as many of the art forms as possible. My “to-watch” list is always so long, and I admittedly I sometimes do move through the arts way too fast. But that just turns us into consumers, and that’s not going to be healthy for our wisdom.
So in the book, I talked about how the arts and beauty have a really close relationship to the concept of Sabbath and the idea that God created this world in six days, but then he took a day to rest and enjoy it. He said it was good, but then that Sabbath day is to experience that it was good, in the words of Psalm 34, to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”
That’s what art and beauty can do: give us space to pause, to slow down, to be thankful to rest, and to just take in the beauty of the world God made and the humans that he made with the capacity to make beautiful things.
Aaron Lee: At the top of the pyramid, is the internet and social media. Why do you think we tend to invert the pyramid where that’s the basis of our wisdom? I know I fall into that trap a lot.
Brett McCracken: Often the response I get from people when they look at the wisdom pyramid graphic is, “Oh, man, I have kind of inverted it. The social media and the Internet are really the foundation.” For most of us, that’s the case.
There are few reasons why. On one hand, just, it’s our human nature — we are busybody, fidgety creatures going back to the Garden of Eden. We’re not easily contented. That’s why consumerism is such a temptation; We’re always wanting to consume the next thing and the next thing. The internet, which is this constant, steady buffet of consumable items, feeds into our tendencies. Social media is such a metaphor for our desire for novelty — our constant desire for something new. You can just scroll all day, every day, and you’ll be constantly finding something new.
The other thing that we need to be able to talk about and be aware of is how the industries of social media — the business side of social media, the tech companies, Silicon Valley — benefit from keeping us constantly on, constantly scrolling, and constantly hooked to whatever the next thing is.
The algorithms are really perfected so that they keep us on their platforms before you even finish the credits. Sometimes before the end credits start on a movie, what does it say? “Watch this next” — it has a suggestion for you. It’s the same thing on YouTube, and that’s what the Twitter feeds are all about — you see something and click on it. But then you see something else, and you click on it. One thing leads to another and suddenly you’re like spending hours wandering around, and you’re not gaining much wisdom. You’re just a pawn in this game that’s benefiting these companies.
That aspect of the industry — the digital capitalism landscape that we live in right now — is something that we need to think about. The movie, The Social Dilemma, on Netflix, is a good entry point for understanding.
Aaron Lee: I am the Social Media Manager for the SOLA Network. You work at TGC, which is also an online ministry. I’m also the social media officer for my church. How can churches and online ministries serve their people, keeping what you said in mind? And how can I as a person that’s consuming this also try to stay balanced?
Brett McCracken: Some people might like, “Well, you’re being so hard on the internet and social media; you have it in the like fats, oils, and sweets category of the wisdom pyramid. But you work for a website, right? You’re on social media yourself!”
My response is, “Yeah, I have the internet and social media on the wisdom pyramid. It has a place. I could have left it off completely and suggested that it can never be a source of wisdom or it can never be healthy for our diet. I don’t think that’s the case. I think there are genuinely helpful things online. There are great things you can discover through social media, and there are amazing benefits that social media has brought to the world. So for all of its faults, and for a lot of the stuff I talked about in the first half of the book, there are some benefits to it.
Like for The Gospel Coalition, we exist to attempt to bring what is often lacking on the internet, which is we try to bring truth, we try to bring illumination, and we try to bring clarity to the confusion of the online world. We try to bring healthy Christian formation to the internet, which is so often full of unhealthy formation in various directions, whether conspiracy theory or partisan politics.
So much of what happens online is really shaping people in negative ways. But if Christians abandon it, if we say, the internet is just a lost cause so we’re just going to all retreat, that’s not helpful because that just leaves the internet to become this utterly depraved wasteland. Throughout history, whenever there’s a danger zone like the plague or the Ebola virus in West Africa, Christians are the ones who, when everyone else is leaving, go in and try to bring health. They try to bring healing to those spaces.
Does it come with a risk? Of course, it does. I’m very aware of the risks of working a full-time job where I have to be on social media all the time, where I have to be engaging in what’s happening online. I see the risks; I see it affecting my soul. But it’s still worth being there because I’m so committed to trying to be a source of truth and healing, light, and hope.
That would be my advice for how Christians use social media and how we are present online is: Let’s try to be a light in the darkness. Let’s try to bring healing to the sickness. Let’s try to bring illumination and clarity to this post-truth, chaotic confusion that exists there.
Will it come with risks? Absolutely. I use this metaphor of going to the internet with our hazmat suit on. We have to be on guard, and we have to be aware that we could just as easily be compromised if we’re online. And sadly, I see it happen all the time, where Christians who spend a bit too much time online start to be shaped in really negative ways. So I think it has to do with moderation, making sure our [online] diet is limited to its proper place and is not the staple of our diet.
Aaron Lee: In your other roles as a husband and a father, and even as a friend to others, how can you encourage them to live wisely, taking your pyramid into account?
Brett McCracken: I think we’re created to be local and focused on the people right in front of us. So the principles that I outlined in this book should apply first and foremost to your family — your spouse, your kids, your own household, and your friend group. If you’re a pastor, then the people in your church.
I really encourage people to read this book in community: read it with your kids, read it with your small group, read it with your friends, and challenge each other. That’s something that we can do is just — ask each other, “What does your diet look like with regard to the internet and social media? How can we help each other put it in its proper place? What creative ideas can we come up with to live these other categories and to prioritize these other categories?”
In my own family, as I’ve written this book, I’ve been mindful that I want to practice what I’m preaching. So Kira, my wife, is always telling me, “Wisdom pyramid!” when I’m trying to pick up my phone. So I try to prioritize Bible reading first thing in the morning before I do anything on my device — I want to model that for my two sons. I try to get us outside as often as we can. We like to go on walks in our neighborhood. Once a week, we take a family walk in a park or at the beach. Church, of course, is something that we really prioritize in our weekly rhythms. So we do try to live now those categories of the wisdom pyramid. And, of course, beauty is a big part of our lives just by virtue of what I do for a living. So we’re trying to get Chet and Ira, our two sons, to really love music and and beauty in the arts.
Aaron Lee: What are your hopes and dreams for this book and for the kingdom?
Brett McCracken: I am so humbled and grateful that the timing is what it is like. I couldn’t have imagined better timing in our culture. I wrote this book in 2019 so I actually finished writing the first draft before the chaos of 2020 happened. And everything that happened in 2020 only underscored why we need something like this. The internet was just a dumpster fire in 2020; it was just a nightmare. It was hard to find truth and to know who to trust and what sources were trustworthy.
There was a new report that came out last month called the Edelman Trust Barometer.It showed that public trust is tanking. It’s at an all-time low in terms of people don’t trust anything, and they don’t trust anyone. So I really do think that this book is well-timed. I pray and I hope that people read it and that Christians especially read it, put it into practice, and start being much more discerning about where they’re lending their ears and their eyes and what they’re paying attention to — knowing that we’re being shaped and really negative ways by having unhealthy diets of information.
It doesn’t have to be that way. And more than ever, we need wise people in our society. Christians have the best chance to be those wise people because we have the foundation. We believe that objective truth exists, so we have the ability to construct the scaffolding of real wisdom by virtue of this solid base of God’s Word. Other people don’t have that, so wisdom is going to be hard for them. They’re going to be this kind of aimless wanderer, a ship at sea in the fog, not knowing what direction is north.
But Christians have true north; we have that orientation. So if we’re not the ones carrying the torch of wisdom, who is? It sounds arrogant to say, but I think Christians are the hope of the world in that sense. Jesus is the hope of the world, but as the carriers of that gospel, as the people who live out that gospel and proclaim it, it’s so important that we’re not falling into the same traps and becoming foolish, just like everyone else in our world. Sadly, a lot of Christians are, and it’s really sad to see.
Aaron Lee: Well, Brett, thank you so much for your work and for your words and for offering a book that can bring the hope of Jesus Christ to this world. Thank you so much.