I submit there is a reason we lack wisdom. We are afraid of legitimate authority. In fact, many in our culture question whether any authority really is legitimate. Therefore, we have no concept that obedience can be a virtue. As a matter of fact, obeying your parents can be the simplest and most straightforward way of gaining wisdom.

Yes, you heard it here, on a conservative, semi-libertarian website: obedience can be a virtue. Obedi-phobia is a cultural and personal disaster. Don’t bother looking it up: I just invented it. Obedi-phobia means a pathological fear of obedience to legitimate authority.

What is legitimate authority? Everyone who knows more than I can be a legitimate authority on that subject. Parents are legitimate authority figures over their children. The Law, in our Anglo-American tradition, exercises authority over us all, because the law is made through the participation of large numbers of people, in a reasonably transparent process. Americans obey the law, not because some Dear Leader says so, but because the Law says so. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, people obey God, not because God is a cosmic bully who will punish us if we don’t. We obey God because we believe He loves us and has our interests in mind.

Here is how obedi-phobia hampers our quest for wisdom.

The ancient Greeks called prudence “practical wisdom.” Prudence did not mean, doing whatever you can get away with, as it now means in political parlance. The Greeks considered prudence the virtue of doing the right thing at the right time in the right amount, even when this can’t be deduced from general principles. Prudence shows us the difference between courage, a good thing, and rashness, a foolish thing. Seen in this light, the Greeks regarded prudence as the queen of the virtues, that held all the others together.

Prudence requires experience with actual people in actual situations.

Experience shows us how to recognize the difference between a sincere complement and groveling flattery. Experience teaches us how to distinguish between joyful spontaneity and idiotic self-indulgence.

But children have no experience. By definition, at the beginning of life, it is impossible to have accumulated the store of experiences that would allow a person to be genuinely prudent.

So, how can the young acquire prudence or practical wisdom? As Dennis put it on his show, the relatively pain-free method is to listen to what other people have to say, or to observe other people’s mistakes. The painful method is to jump off the cliff to see for yourself whether gravity really works for you, or whether gravity is just a cynical plot by old people to suppress the exuberance of youth. In the first two cases, the young person acquires wisdom by learning from the experience of other people.

There is an even simpler alternative: The child could obey his parents. (Gasp!) Continued...