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“Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors …”

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

For Oscar Wilde, a cynic was someone who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Many of us are cynical now. Perhaps, to paraphrase Wilde, we value nothing because we insist on knowing the price of everything.

It’s 70 years since the first edition of the work of a different playwright, Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. As spring takes hold, here as it does in the Welsh village of Llareggub, we have yet another opportunity to re-see the greenness in the grass (“happy as the grass was green”, Fern Hill); and all the colour in the seemingly most drab and prosaic of surroundings.

In Thomas’s paradoxical world, the blind are generally best able to see, like Captain Cat or the grave men near death. There’s a profound point here, largely missed by a zeitgeist that equates knowledge with wisdom. It’s about seeing deeply instead of seeing a lot.

The biggest scientific breakthroughs haven’t required zillions of data points. They’ve been made by individuals who see what everyone else also sees, but more sensitively. Like Newton and his insight that white light comprises all the colours of the rainbow. Einstein didn’t have a much-vaunted-in-the-world-today thirst for knowledge. Of course, he needed some knowledge but that wasn’t really his goal. He had a thirst to understand the things – rendered deceptively banal by repeated experience – already known to him and numerous others, like the feeling of weightlessness when you descend in a lift, or the jiggling of small particles in a liquid. Which doesn’t mean that great insights necessarily follow from sitting in a chair; but scouring the planet for information doesn’t guarantee much insight, or any at all – and even has the potential to be counter-productive.

We don’t need big data. We need to understand our small data better. Like Dickens’ M’Choakumchild, who could have taught infinitely better so much more if only he’d learned a little less, we lose vitality when we take in too much. We don’t need to travel to numerous countries, or be able to list their capital cities or political leaders, in order to understand human affairs; we need to observe ourselves and people around us more thoughtfully. We don’t need lots of stuff, money or experiences; on the contrary, we need to escape from the poverty of our riches.

Acquiring knowledge for the sake of it might be exhilarating of course, which can be justification in its own right. But the wise amongst us are those who can gauge their personal limits, when too much interferes with either their happiness or their ability to think.

Learning when to stop is as under-appreciated today as it was in the world of Hard Times. Maybe we were wiser in some intervening period: certainly ‘moderation in all things’, a mantra of a previous generation, feels today like a forgotten lesson. Yet it’s more important than ever for a burning planet. Who needs to fly thousands of miles to enjoy a holiday who can properly appreciate a different part of Britain, the wood down the road, even a garden? Who needs a new dress or suit when the current one still looks good subject to a suitably carefree attitude to that small mark or hole? Who has to have a thousand friends who can be a good friend to a few?

If only we could fully observe the colour in nature, in people, ourselves, things; and also the energy we consume … when we fill the kettle, or put our finger on the thermostat, our foot on the accelerator pedal, our credit card details into Amazon. If only … then we wouldn’t need to place our blind-as-Captain-Cat faith in technology, we could salvage the planet with a gentler way of living.

We need to value what we already have.

According to Mark Twain, when he was 16 his father knew nothing, but by the time he was 21, it was amazing how much he had learnt.

Twain’s father may have been ultimately fortunate. A gloomier perspective on children’s attitudes to their parents was offered by Oscar Wilde: children start off loving their parents; then they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

George Eliot wrote eloquently – in Silas Marner for example – about the natural suspicion human communities have towards an outsider. Such suspicion may be temporal as well as geographical. Each generation is like a Silas Marner to its successors. They think they know better, are quick to see the earlier one’s mistakes, less quick to see them fairly in context. Maybe that’s part of the reason why it often seems that, in Hegel’s words, the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

A common perspective is that unless you have a specific experience in life, or a specific physical condition, or live in a specific physical situation, then you cannot properly understand someone else who does have that experience, condition or situation. You can’t understand a country unless you’ve been there. Or a man, woman, trans, or other gender unless you are or have been one. Or addiction to drugs unless you’ve tried them yourself. Or the criminal mind (sorry Father Brown) unless you have a record. Or homelessness unless you’ve been homeless.

Or a particular time unless you’ve lived through it.

The popular appeal of this perspective may be attributed in part to the importance we attach to names. Every generation has different names and categories – for flowers, medical conditions, ethnicities, social groupings and even biology. To misuse (the current meanings of) names or categories is to court suspicion or worse. Richard Feynman’s insight that when you learn the name of something in the physical or natural world, you haven’t on that score yet developed any understanding of it, might have been scientifically valuable but is hardly mainstream in human affairs.

Having had an experience adds to a person’s CV a gravitas that is quite likely to be unwarranted. In one of his books, Alain de Botton comments that often you can communicate in vain with a person who’s just returned from travel abroad for evidence of any insight into the land just visited. Nor will a journalist who’s been to the front line in a conflict necessarily have any new wisdom to impart. But we can be confident that the traveller and journalist will be listened to on account of their experience. If Dickens’ M’Choakumchild had learnt a little less, he could have taught infinitely better so much more; apparently a similar message doesn’t apply to foreign travel.

The emphasis on specific experience not only makes it hard to learn from the past. It also militates against simple living – and a sustainable way of life. Simple living is seen as simplistic living with a narrow outlook; a sophisticated individual must have a wealth of experiences in life to warrant the adjective. Samuel Johnson might have commented that most of us stand in greater need of being reminded of what we already know than learning or experiencing new things; but, like Feynman, his observation is more wise than popular, both at the time he made it and in the current zeitgeist.