Canter Bridge

If you had told me a year ago that I’d be sitting in the third row of a stadium-like conference venue with 37,000 pilgrims who’ve gathered from the four corners to listen to Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger scrape their chairs up to a table and answer questions for a day, I’d have wondered what you were smoking. Or curious whether you’d glimpsed my impending early retirement.

Yet thanks to a Buffett disciple who’s simultaneously joined the board of the Christian non-profit organization I direct and become a friend-for-life, the invitation to do just that came into my hands. Out of respect for my host, I joined the airport queues of the faithful making hajj in Omaha.

I shall not soon forget what I saw in that city, heretofore known to me chiefly as the source of mail-order steaks.

I beg your patience as I interact with the 2010 shareholders meeting of Berkshire Hathaway as an exercise in biblical theology. It is the only thing I know how to do, so I do it. Useful commentary from other angles is abundant and hardly requires an amateurish contribution from me.

Placing Charlie Munger’s acerbic wit and self-appreciated humor to one side, let me focus on the Warren Thing.

The Sage of Omaha defies all expectation for a man who is routinely listed among the world’s wealthiest human beings. Buffett lives where he has always lived. I’m told you can nose your rental care into his driveway without being accosted by security officers with bulging blue blazers. The man is famous for his loyalty to the two sisters who run Piccolo Pete’s, the kind of unremarkable eating establishment to which Omaha’s famous sage returns time again.

Yet this could be a kind of theater—though I suspect it is not—for a man who can fly off on a whim to any chalet he wishes to make his own.

What truly impresses me is the man’s humility as evidenced in the annual ritual of interacting for a day with unscreened questioners whose approach to the coveted (and spot-lighted) microphone seems more than occasionally to be an exercise in self-promotion.

Buffett is unfailingly patient with such folk. He seems not only to sense empathy but even a kind of sympathy for those who dare to stand and deliver in a stadium that is clearly Warren’s Space.

Memorably, he commented to one self-deprecating, would-be entrepreneur who wondered how to build a business that would one day be acquired by Berkshire Hathaway that ‘You’ll do fine, because you know your limitations.’

Over and over, Bufffett and Munger—capacious intellects though they are—acknowledge how little they actually know and how the discipline that got them this far consisted chiefly of ‘avoiding a subclass of stupidities’.

To these eyes and these ears a kind of secular sainthood lurks here. Not an overly pious kind of saintliness, mind you. To the contrary, the famous duo seems a relatively salty lot.

Yet my Day in Omaha put me repeatedly in mind of the division of humankind that biblical wisdom effects: there are the wise and there are the fools.

The difference? The fool is wise in his own eyes. He ceases to learn because he styles himself to have understood already.

The wise assumes always the posture of the learner. No matter how side his mastery ranges, he knows himself to be a novice. So he listens when the fool speaks. He ponders when the fool discourses. He never stops taking in reality and assuming the posture of its servant.

A tantalizing subtext meanders its way through the course that biblical wisdom sets for itself. The subdominant note delivers this message: never think you know in advance from what agents and from what corners truth, reality, and wisdom will next emerge.

I just got a dose of the same from two guys sitting at a card table in Omaha.

I do not know whether these two men, in their way, praise their Maker. This I know: they have helped me to praise mine. And, perhaps, in the mix, to take a step or two away from a ‘subclass of stupidities’.