Rare is the politician who will say “I don’t know” about something and mean it, including her own future. That is one reason why I despise the question, “Are you running?” It generally wastes the time of journalists everywhere; candidates rarely say “yes,” even if they secretly intend to launch a campaign later on, with the proper pomp and circumstance.

I resisted asking Abrams that question, but she managed to answer it anyway. “I am thinking about it,” she voluntarily admitted, as she has before. When asked about being Joe Biden’s running mate, however, her answer was new.

“We talked about the presidency and what it means,” Abrams said of her recent lunch with Biden. “We talked about whether I was thinking about running. We talked about whether he was thinking about running. But we did not have that conversation. And everything else is pure speculation, made up by somebody else.”

I can understand why someone who had just endured what Abrams had wouldn’t want to immediately subject herself to a 2020 campaign. For that matter, why would she want to be president?

“The reason I want to be part of the conversation about running for president is that too many people dismiss the idea,” she said. “This is not to cast aspersions on anyone else, but with an identical set of skills and identical set of experiences, to be discounted because I don’t look the way we think you need to look, or I’m not from a space where we think I should be from, and that is the only determinant that differs between whether I am lifted up as a candidate or not. That’s wrong.

“Now, whether I run this time or run in the future,” Abrams continued, “I believe we need leaders who actually want to lead everyone. I believe we have to have leaders who care about foreign policy and domestic policy, but who care about the least of these, who care about poverty, who understand that climate change is real, that my body is mine, that gun safety does not diminish the Second Amendment, and that has to be someone willing to have that conversation in Montana and in Mississippi and in Michigan as well as on Manhattan Beach. You’ve got to be willing to have that conversation everywhere.

“And so I don’t know whether this is the moment for me, and that’s what I’m going to think about. But I think I am more than capable of leading a country that is contained of so many good people who want what’s right. I’m a good leader, I’m a good executive, I’ve been outside the U.S. a few times, and I’ve done a little bit of foreign policy. But most importantly, I’m smart enough to be in charge of this country.”

This increasingly dangerous obfuscation of information and wisdom is what Toni Morrison (b. February 18, 1931) — one of the deepest seers of our time — examines in an almost-aside, the way only towering intellects can.

Morrison writes:

In all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of a progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about. And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you will see… that it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch.

Reflecting on how she too had mistaken information for illumination in her initial approach to her subject — a sort of arrogance she condemns as poison to both wisdom and imagination — she writes:

[I had read] the historical books… I had read the autobiographies of the slaves themselves and therefore had firsthand information from people who were there. You add that to my own intuition, and you can see the shape of my confidence and the trap that it would lead me into, which would be confusing data with information and knowledge with hunches and so on. I thought I knew a great deal about it. And that arrogance was the first obstacle.

What I needed was imagination to shore up the facts, the data, and not be overwhelmed by them. Imagination that personalized information, made it intimate, but didn’t offer itself as a substitute. If imagination could be depended on for that, then there was the possibility of knowledge. Wisdom, of course, I would leave alone, and rely on the readers to produce that.