When Everything Is Not Obvious by KEVIN DEYOUNG for The Gospel Coalition
Duncan Watts’s 2011 book is aptly named. If you can read words upside down.
The book is entitled Everything Is Obvious, with an * after Obvious. If you turn the book upside down you can read the asterisk: “Once You Know the Answer.” The clever title gets at the book’s big idea. We tend to think there are simple answers to life’s most complex questions. We assume that solving major problems—whether in predicting human behavior, or in economics, or in government policy—is a matter of common sense. We believe everything is obvious. But, as Watts persuasively argues, most solutions to complex problems are anything but obvious. And if they are obvious, it’s only because we have the advantage of hindsight to see what worked.
Most likely, we are still at the front end of the coronavirus crisis. If the disease disappeared over the summer, never to return again, we would still be dealing with COVID’s emotional and economic fallout. Doctors and economists and journalists and historians and epidemiologists will be writing about the virus for decades. At some point, it may become “obvious” that closing schools saved lives or that it was pointless. At some point, it may become obvious which countries and which leaders made the best decisions. At some point, it may be obvious all the ways we made a massive problem less deadly or made a serious crisis worse. But at the moment—in the fog of a pathogenic war—it only takes fives minutes on Twitter to realize that the best way forward is not patently obvious.
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That doesn’t mean some ideas aren’t better than others. I have my own opinions (informed, I hope) about which explanations and which policies are obviously correct. But as a pastor without an expertise in medicine, epidemiology, or mathematical modeling, I want to be careful about issuing any assured conclusions about what we should or shouldn’t do.
I don’t agree with everything in Watts’s book, but it a helpful reminder about the many ways intuition can fail us. We think people will act in their situations the same way we would act, but they don’t. We think that every problem has a simple solution, but many problems are horribly complex and beyond our ability to manage or control. We think we can understand most issues with a little effort, but many issues take years of expertise to grasp (and even then, the experts don’t agree on what is obvious!).
