Things seem to come easy for some people.
That's more a trick of the light than anything else. Most people who are really good at something are really good at it because they put in the time. They studied it, they read the instructions, they asked questions, they had things explained to them over and over. Maybe they even took lessons.
They didn't just know. They didn't just follow their gut.
I'm not one of those people for whom things seem to come easily, who is dead sure about a lot of things. I got that "imposter syndrome" thing happening--I've been writing this column for this newspaper for 25 years and every time someone asks me to come see them in their office I'm convinced it's being taken away from me. I get sweaty thinking they finally pulled my permanent record.
So maybe there are people who are just naturally competent, who can watch a couple of YouTube videos and feel they've mastered constitutional law or the Stack & Tilt golf swing. There are certainly plenty of people who'd like us to think that of them--social media is rife with people happy to go on about all they know. (It is a symptom of our age to acknowledge that, years ago, I used to write the occasional column headlined "what I know." I discontinued it because it was disheartening to have to explain the joke to so many people, that the column was a satire aimed at would-be intellectual mascots who pretend to certainty on all matters. It makes me sad to think of it. So save your cards and letters.)
Most people understand there are only a few things we can really be said to know. You don't have to get into sophomore philosophy to realize the subjectivity of your perspective; what you know is usually only what you believe. I'm color blind, but I think I know grass is green (though "green" means something a bit different to everyone who sees it). "Green" is a convention, an agreed-upon fact. We know grass is green because that's what we were taught.
A different culture might see grass differently; people with standard color vision see millions of distinct colors. English has names for 11 of these colors that are used by virtually everyone--black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray--and some people have a much larger working vocabulary (they can identify taupe, mustard, etc.). But in the Amazon, there's a tribe that recognizes only three colors--white, black and red. Other cultures have five basic names for colors.
This isn't necessarily because they don't see the same range of color as Americans--unlike the tiny Pingelap Island, where isolation and genetics have resulted in fully 10 percent of the population with complete achromatopsia (total color blindness)--most of these populations see just fine. It's just they haven't the same need to give every color they see a name as people who live in industrialized nations. They have more important things to do than to sit around thinking up ways to describe grass.
On the other hand, most of us wouldn't last a weekend in the Amazon jungle with stone-age tools. So they obviously have knowledge that most of us lack. (To us it might seem that living in the jungle comes pretty easy to them, that it's natural.)
So my assumption is that everybody who does something well has worked at it. Things are more complicated than we tend to present them. And if it seems easy, you're probably doing it wrong.
It's interesting to see these basic ideas--what might be called "truths" in another situation--under attack, but that's the kind of world we live in. Most of the population doesn't have to seek out the news; the news has to campaign for an audience. As recently as 30 years ago, if you wanted to seem like--much less be--a well-informed person, you had to work at it. You had to subscribe to newspapers and magazines like Time and Newsweek and maybe the National Review and/or The New Republic. You had to tune into the TV news when it aired. You had to make an appointment with it.
I remember how jammed up my mailbox would get in the mid-1980s--to do my job (essentially the same job I have now) meant I had to subscribe to at least a dozen magazines. I used to get the Village Voice and The Sporting News weekly, Rolling Stone biweekly, and copies of the New York Times and Washington Post after the lord high editors had looked at them. Back in the day, you had to make an effort to keep up.
And of course a lot of people either couldn't or wouldn't, because people had to work and raise families and go to ball games.
These days the news hunts you down. It comes at you through email, through social media feeds, through the ceaseless blather of the 24-hour news cycle. These days you can't get away from it; it's always pulling at your jacket.
And most of it is designed to flatter and assure you. You press the button to get more of what you like. You are supplied with arguments against what you don't like. You don't have to work for anything. You can sign up and get the talking points delivered to your in box.
On social media, a lot of you presume to lecture people of substantial expertise on their fields. Because you've got "common sense" and a set of tribal-approved assumptions.
But you haven't done the work. You're just posing. And while we live in an age where it's never been easier to bluff your way through a discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr, if you haven't at least read The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, maybe you ought to log off for as long as it takes you to read 220 pages or so.
Because the world is rich in fascinating complexity and contradiction, and it's possible to live outside the pre-fab orthodoxies of left and right. It's just not going to be easy.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 04/17/2018