Differences

What is the difference between fear and caution?

What is the difference between faith and belief?

What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom?

Our language reflects our understanding of the world. I've often seen the words above used in the wrong context and making an issue of this may seem pedantic but how we understand words can often affect the way in which we understand and relate to the world around us.

Let’s look at each of these questions in detail:

Fear and Caution:

We use terms like shy, timid and fearful to describe creatures that generally run away when they encounter humans. These are terms that really apply to humans with emotional disorders.

Wild animals tend to regard us as predators – probably because we’re… well, predators. This is not an emotional disorder; this is survival instinct.

Deer do not live their lives in fear of predation. They breed, feed and conduct their lives with the confidence that comes when one is well adapted to one’s environment. Part of being well adapted to a deer’s environment is the understanding that they are on the menu of most large predators. Unlike humans, they are not afraid of each other, not even in the rutting season when bucks can pose a serious threat to other bucks. They rarely, if ever, fight to the death as such but the serious injuries that are often inflicted on the loser often condemns the victim to death through an impaired ability to escape predation, infected wounds and so on. This is no play fight yet bucks do not shrink from this inevitable challenge.

The fact that they tend not to pick fights with large predators is not due to a lack of courage but an enhanced sense of caution, without which, there would be no deer today. Caution is to take flight from a known threat and to treat the unknown as a potential threat. Fear is to feel threatened by everything. The cautious leave the threat behind when they flee; the fearful never escape the object of their fear.

Lions are generally regarded as courageous. It’s easy to be courageous when you’re the biggest predator around; when nothing preys on you and virtually any creature you encounter is on the menu. Ever seen a lion pick a fight with a fully-grown bull elephant? Me neither. Does this make the lion a scaredy-cat? Nope. It makes it cautious.

Faith and belief:

When people ask me what my faith is, I usually answer: “That everything will ultimately be OK”. This isn’t, of course, what they mean. What they mean is “what is your belief system?” I don’t have one. Isn’t that appalling!!? That isn’t to say that I have no faith. I have faith in my path to take me in the direction I need to go, regardless of whether or not I know the destination.

I don’t know whether or not my destiny is pre-decided by a higher being and there is no way for me to know one way or the other in that respect. I can believe it is or I can believe it isn’t. That’s just an idea and it really doesn’t amount to a hill of beans whether I’m right or wrong in that respect.

The problem with a belief system is that it then has to be defended. Having faith that you are on the right path leaves you room to evaluate if it should appear that maybe your faith has been misguided. Faith is not the same as knowing but it enables you to tread the unknown with confidence.

Belief also is not the same as knowing but it is cunningly disguised as knowing. Like faith, it enables you to tread the unknown with confidence but it is a misguided confidence. It is a confidence that you are right so it leaves no room for evaluation when circumstances indicate that you are actually wrong. Belief dictates the path, which cannot then be changed regardless of where it leads.

Knowledge and wisdom:

I read somewhere that knowledge is to know that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is to not put it into a fruit salad. That pretty much puts it in a nutshell. The old adage that knowledge is power is only half true or, rather, it is true largely in a martial sense. Knowing the enemy equips one to foil the enemy’s advances and disrupt the enemy’s plans. That is the power of knowledge.

Understanding the enemy equips one to put an end to enmity. That is the power of wisdom.

It is possible to be wise and know nothing. In fact, it is often said that to know that you know nothing is itself an indication of wisdom. By the same token, it is possible to have accumulated vast knowledge and yet be utterly devoid of wisdom. Our capacity for technological Armageddon stands testimony to that.