The Forgotten Virtue You Can’t Do Without

I recently attempted to restore an old cell phone. I read blogs, downloaded software, swapped SIM cards, and tried the old turn-it-off-and-on-again trick. The phone is now completely broken.

Good intentions don’t always equal good results. This is true whether we’re setting out to fix a phone, a community, or a planet. Without the requisite knowledge and skill, well-meaning people can do more harm than good.

This conundrum—that good intentions don’t necessitate good results—is particularly relevant for Christians today. The gospel’s centrifugal force, plus the pull of societal needs, finds Christians tackling challenging issues from poverty to injustice to environmentalism. Sometimes, however, helping hurts. With the call to “do justice and love mercy” ringing loudly, many of us feel pressure to act and to act quickly. But here, as in many areas, Christians must relearn a long-forgotten virtue: prudence.

Ancient Roots

In the ancient world, prudence wasn’t merely one virtue among many. For thinkers from Aristotle to Augustine, it was “the spring of all others,” the cornerstone of the four “cardinal virtues”: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

Today, though, we misunderstand prudence as healthy cautiousness or self-serving conscientiousness—“less a prerequisite to goodness than an evasion of it.” This is not the classical—or biblical—vision. Properly understood, prudence is the ability to be finely aware and tactfully engaged with the issues around us. To properly solve a problem, you must properly understand it; and to properly fix a problem, you must have the requisite skills to engage it. Prudence is to doing justice what insight and steady hands are to doing surgery: the knowledge and skill necessary for the task at hand. It governs the other virtues.

Prudence is to doing justice what insight and steady hands are to doing surgery.

A digital culture, however, prizes quick responses and soundbite solutions. Our consumption of information is more like channel surfing than critical thinking. Combine this with the social pressure to engage the right issues in the right timing, and we’re in a context ill-suited for prudence. But if Augustine is right that prudence is “love that chooses with sagacity,” and we’re those called to love, then it behooves us to remaster prudence.

Here are three truths—rooted in Scripture—to foster prudence in an unthinking age.

1. Prudence Is Not Reactionary

A refrain in Proverbs warns against haste in speech and action: “Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him. . . . Whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way” (Prov. 29:20; 19:2; cf. 18:13). This is not to excuse dragging one’s feet before injustice. Rather, it’s a call for self-possession, an inner stillness capable of deliberation and discernment.

Before you retweet, comment, or advocate, pause and ask yourself two types of questions:

(1) Do I truly understand this event or issue? Is the source I’m using reliable? If “lips that speak knowledge” were a “rare jewel” in Solomon’s day (Prov. 20:15, NIV), how much more in ours?

(2) Along with probing the issues around us, prudence questions the motives within us. Are my motives for engaging (or disengaging) this issue honorable? If we’re acting chiefly to prove others wrong or ourselves right, we can expect our vision to be blurred. Prudence is denied to the man who looks to himself.

2. Prudence Resists Oversimplification

In the 1970s, two Berkeley professors distinguished between “wicked” and “tame” problems. Wicked problems were large-scale societal issues like poverty that, for myriad reasons, were almost impossible to define (let alone fix). Sadly, public discourse has little patience for the careful parsing and detailed analysis that such complex issues require. Sensation and simplicity sell. But reality isn’t simple, and neither are the people intertwined in the societal issues we face.

In his new book, Talking About Race (20 quotes | TGC’s review), Isaac Adams astutely notes how conversations about that combustible topic require careful delineation. Race is the “Velcro issue,” he explains, “because so many aspects of life stick to it: politics, housing, economics, education.” “Given the vastness of the topic of race,” Adams goes on, “our conversations about it are hard because we don’t know where to begin, and we certainly don’t have the competency to speak to every topic.”

Prudence recognizes that rebooting a 10-year-old phone may be more complicated than swapping SIM cards—different experts may be needed to address different parts. Prudence resists oversimplification; rather, it diligently dissects the issue at hand.

3. Prudence Thinks with the Like-Hearted

We wrongly suppose we can think for ourselves. But understanding depends in large measure on the wisdom, research, and insights of others. “Thinking,” explains Alan Jacobs, “is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said.”

The prudent person, therefore, pays attention to the social web influencing her views. Who’s shaping how you think?

The prudent person pays attention to the social web influencing his or her views. Who’s shaping how you think?

Jacobs cautions against only seeking out like-minded people for counsel. Rather, assemble a like-hearted group of godly friends who are “temperamentally disposed to openness and have habits of listening.” The prudent person listens to godly men and women who may hold different views on fiscal or social matters because he seeks to avoid intellectual cul-de-sacs such as groupthink and confirmation bias.

In his primer on the four cardinal virtues, Josef Pieper explains that prudence is a far cry from merely knowing what to do in a given situation. The open-mindedness required for real understanding, and the self-awareness requisite for detecting error in one’s own opinions, is why the ancients called prudence more than a technique or ability—they called it virtue. We would do well to cultivate it afresh.