My quest for wisdom: eight aphorisms in search of a hat.

I am still a number of years away from being an old man, but as I advance in age I give more and more thought to how I can be a wise and dignified old man when the time comes.

The other day I took the first step toward dignification by purchasing a tweedy "old man's hat." I don't know the official name of this kind of hat (or cap), and I realize that even young men are permitted to wear it. But I've always thought of it as an old man's hat because it was the kind of hat worn by my grandfather, whom I knew only when he was an old man. When I graduated from college in 1960, eleven years after his death, I spent the summer at the University of Edinburgh; and one day I made a sentimental side trip to Paisley, my grandfather's home town, which he last saw about 1910 when he departed for America. As I got off the bus in the center of Paisley, what did I see but a multitude of old men, all of them resembling my grandfather because they were all wearing the "old man's cap." And of course they were all looking very dignified.

So when I appeared in public the other day wearing the old man's hat, it was an epoch in my life. I had become my grandfather.

But dignity isn't everything. Wisdom too is needed. The correct old man will be in possession not only of a proper hat but also of a repertoire of aphorisms that sum up the wisdom he has accumulated in the course of a long and well-spent lifetime. Unfortunately I have but scant recollection of any words of wisdom uttered by my grandfather; otherwise I could simply plagiarize his words as I plagiarized his hat. He was a bricklayer, so he told me something about how to lay bricks properly; but alas, I can't remember what. He also told me that an English shilling was worth twenty-five cents in American money; but shillings no longer exist, and even if they did they would be worth only about a dime, the sun having in the meantime set on the British Empire.

So it looks as if I have no choice but to discover my own wisdom. I've been working at this, asking myself: "What important insights have I gained that can be expressed in twenty-five words or less?"

The only one I've come up with so far is this: "In the course of my adult lifetime, the machinery has got better and the men have got worse." Or to express this in inclusive (though unfortunately nonalternative) language: "There has been a twofold process of technological improvement and human deterioration."

Witness on the other hand: fine automobiles, "smart" bombs, pollution controls, genetic engineering, life-saving surgery and drugs, and, of course, computers, the great symbol of the era.

But witness on the other hand: high rates of crime, violence, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and sexually transmitted diseases, plus declining SAT scores and voter-participation rates.

So obvious has the superiority of technique to humans become that when humans fail nowadays we increasingly abandon attempts to rehabilitate them. In the old days (that is, from the fall of Adam and Eve to the fall of Sigmund Freud, which took place about 1968), we used to try to improve imperfect people. But now we judge it best to allow them to wallow in their imperfection; meanwhile we try to invent some new piece of machinery that will permit inferior human material to function more or less successfully while remaining inferior.

For example:

1. AIDS. We don't deal with the problem of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases by encouraging sexual restraint (or to call it by its old-fashioned name, chastity). No, we search for a vaccine, in the meantime promoting condom use. But what are condoms and vaccines but machinery?

2. Out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Again, forget about sexual restraint. More machinery is the answer, in this case contraception and abortion for teens.

3. Violent crime. Do we focus on the nearly complete collapse of the two-parent family which has taken place in many lower-class urban neighborhoods, a collapse that breeds crime and violence as surely as swamps breed mosquitoes? Heavens, no! That would give offense to Murphy Brown and her Hollywood friends. Instead, we build more prisons and give longer sentences; that is, more machinery.

4. Education. Are American schoolkids unable to read Shakespeare? Unable to tell you what happened in 1066? Unable to remember who Martin Luther was? Why, then, it's perfectly clear: their schools need more machinery, that is, more computers. After all, by computers ye shall be saved.

5. National deficit. Do Congress and the president exhibit a chronic incapacity for balancing the federal budget? Then let's create an interesting piece of machinery called the Balanced Budget Amendment. (An earlier machine, called Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, broke down after being on the road for only a few miles.)

6. Politicians. Have we grown dissatisfied with elected officials? An item of machinery called Term Limitations will take care of that.

7. Children. Have your children been a disappointment to you? Did they fail to make all-state? Were they turned down at Princeton? Too bad. If you could have waited a few decades, the clone-meisters would have supplied you with kids guaranteed to be smart, athletic, good-looking, cooperative, and unfailingly affable (this last the greatest miracle of all).

8. Et cetera. And if you have any other problems that were not covered above, just call in kindly Dr. Jack Kevorkian and his death machine.

I'll be told that this aphoristic wisdom of mine is an exaggeration. Of course it is. But my fear is that it is not all that much of an exaggeration. We live in a technological culture, as the Europeans of the Middle Ages lived in a religious culture. We have faith in technique, as they had faith in prayer. When they ran into difficulties, they were sure there was a way they could pray themselves out of them, if only they prayed long enough and hard enough and in the right spirit. When we run into difficulties we are confident that we can "technologize" our way out of them, as in the proverb: "If we can put a man on the moon, then surely we can solve problems X, Y, and Z."

It was not so long ago that religious thinkers used to fear that humanism's immoderate glorification of man would lead to a loss of belief in man. Today the thing to fear is not atheism but ahumanism. Before we even completed the work of abandoning theism for humanism, we have begun to abandon humanism for technicism.

Now let me see, where did I leave my hat? If only we could invent a machine to remedy absent-mindedness!