Nothing Is Simple

I have noticed my social media tending to show me “5 simple tricks” for a variety of things these days. For flatter abs, for curing an Achilles injury, for fixing financial problems, for marriage and divorce. Some of this is social media becoming smarter and noticing that I pay more attention to these kinds of clips. But a lot of it is the culture that we swim in, the world of simple absolutes, of liberal and conservative polar opposites, of diet cures and supplements and steroids that move you faster along a path that might otherwise take decades. My brain (along with everyone else’s, I assume) wants to believe that life is simple, that every problem has a simple solution, that the wise gurus out there who tell us that the answer is these three things are right. And they’re not.

One of the people I bump into again and again is the adult who believes that their high school education was adequate—or even true. Worse still are the ones who think that their elementary school education (or dare I say Kindergarten) is in some way still applicable to adult situations, to geopolitics, or to history. When an adult tells me about the first Thanksgiving—and believes it—I want to laugh, but it is also very sad.

What getting a graduate education at an Ivy League school taught me was that the more you know about any topic, the more you realize how little you know about everything else. It’s the Duning-Kroger problem in reverse. As someone who studied Germanic Languages and Literatures, for instance, I am aware that I wrote my dissertation on a tiny slice of a topic, eighteenth-century women’s literature in German. Or rather, one specific writer in that time frame: Sophie von La Roche. That’s it. That’s my one expertise. I know a lot about that time frame. I know some of the other writers in it fairly well. I know a handful of other German writers.

What I also know is that there are dozens of other time periods other people know so much more about than I do. There are people who wrote dissertations about a particular topic through German Literature. They know about that and I don’t. I went to a tiny university library in Germany to read books published centuries ago that probably no one else had checked out in decades if not centuries and may never check out again. I have a lot of opinions about women writers in Germany even if not in that time frame, but I am not an expert in any other writer. Just one obscure writer. And I spent ten years getting that expertise. If I had spent my entire life as an academic, maybe I would have a few other areas of expertise. Or maybe I would have written about my writer’s connection to other women writers after her. But I didn’t.

What I do know is that every other Germanist I know had a different expertise and there will never be a shortage of tiny niches within German Literature. And don’t even get me started on the language. Yes, I studied the rules of what is loosely called “Modern High German,” and I know the international phonetic alphabet, but mostly I know those two enough only to have a vague idea of how ridiculous the idea of one language is, because there is a different dialect spoken in every village of Germany and in every neighborhood of every city and that this dialect changes every second so that it would be impossible to do anything other than get a gloss on what that language is during the very tiny sliver of history you might try to record it in.

And all of this makes me painfully aware of the level of ignorance I have in every other area of human knowledge: physics and mathematics and history and philosophy and linguistics and computer programming and on and on and on.

In my current life, I sometimes have to explain to people that the US tax code is thousands of pages long and no one is an expert on all of the pages. I am not an accountant and I don’t work for the IRS, but I do know Publications 590B and 560A really, really well and might be wiling to argue certain paragraphs of them with another person who has read them. It’s a small area of expertise, but it’s what I get paid to do right now and let me assure you that within my field, there is plenty of disagreement about what the “rules” are and what they are not and no one else cares and that is as it should be.

All this is to say that the only people in the world who think that anything is simple are people who are deeply ignorant. Or people who are trying to sell you something. Mostly the latter, but sometimes the two categories fit together nicely. Sometimes being knowledgeable about something is precisely what prevents me from trying to sell people things. It might make my life a lot easier if I believed that things were simple. If I believed that these five simple tricks would give me a six pack, then I would work harder at getting a six pack, right? Or at least for the six week time frame that I’m promised will give me the desired results.

But as someone who also has a certain expertise in triathlon and Ironman training, I have learned that most things about doing well in a particular sport are about persistence or they are about natural talent. None of them are about five simple tricks to acing your first triathlon. If I could just persist and age didn’t matter, I would still be winning races. But age does matter and at some point, you just can’t fight it anymore and it’s worse for you if you try all the simple tricks in the world.

As for the bigger political picture, I am leaning heavily into the belief that most people have good reasons for believing what they do. There are not simple answers to questions like how to have a fair tax code or how to run the federal government and its bureaucracy or what stance a president should take with regard to a foreign war. I try to gather information from both sides and I am trying very hard right now not to point fingers and say that the other side is getting “fake news” because I know they’re doing the same thing to my side, whatever that side is.

So beware of being sold simplicity. I think one of the things I loved about Mormonism is the promise of simplicity. Just do these five things. Or these twenty-five things and you’ll get to heaven and God will protect you from evil. Maybe you believe in a god like that, but I can’t see any way to square this world with any set of rules that are simple. No, not even gravity, which is possibly the least simple rule of physics that has ever been taught to elementary school students.