Review: The Wisdom Pyramid

We need help navigating the torrent of ideas.

You have probably felt the increasing tension over everything. It doesn’t take much to create a Twitter storm. Its not just in the buffered world of social media where conflict explodes. We walk on eggshells in our conversations constantly trying to assess what tribe someone belongs to so we know what topics to avoid. Even holiday parties need to be navigated with great care because of the potential for explosive conflict.

I am convinced that one of the reasons that tribalism is rampant in the modern world is because we are flooded with information. We don’t know how to process the torrent of ideas, so we take the shortcut of having our tribe process the ideas for us.

Brett McCracken has given us a tool for our information consumption that borrows from the old tool of the Food Pyramid. Just like binge eating can slowly erode our physical health, we need to be constantly assessing not only what we are consuming with our minds, but in what proportion we are consuming it.

In The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, McCracken outlines a strategy for our information diet that starts with proximity to God. God speaks in his Word and that should be the bulk of our information intake. But we don’t always know the best way to interpret and apply his Word, so we go to the church next — both historically in the creeds and presently in other believers in our local church. Next we gain insights from creation through General Revelation. Then we find value in books (it’s a humble move to put books at a lower priority level than the local church when he is writing a book). Beauty is next — art, movies, novels, culture, rest, etc. And then finally the internet and social media.

You can watch a short video explanation of the concept here.

Parents of teens, this book is especially written for you — your children need help learning how to navigate a world where they receive more information with less wisdom imparted to them. The increase in anxiety amongst Gen Z is partially the result of not knowing how to process the torrent of information.

Note: Crossway provided me a review copy free of charge.