“It was always obvious (or should have been)”

In retrospect, this post is intemperate and vague and needed a prudent editor’s eyes; see my follow-up post where I say why and much more.

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There is a style of punditry, as well as scholarship, that always knows, or in retrospect claims always to have known, something to have been true, and likes to castigate others for having failed to recognize what should have been obvious all along.

The result of this style, or rather its mood, is a cocktail of contempt, condescension, and self-aggrandizement. It’s also, in its breezy confidence and seemingly unbroken rightness, a rhetorical performance of casual omniscience. It makes a principle out of avoiding thought and the difficulty of thinking, because the answer, the right judgment about some thorny issue, was always obvious to me and therefore should have been to you. One pities the fool for not having had his eyes opened until now.

Even though this style is proper to pundits and scholars alike, I associate it most with sports commentary, especially when such commentary is concerned with gambling odds. Listen to someone like Bill Simmons before Sunday’s NFL games, and he, like any other sports fan, has hunches and intuitions and informed predictions. Listen to him after the games, however, and the refrain is the same week after week: “I should have known!” “It was clear the whole time.” “It was obvious.” “Anybody could have guessed it.”

That is, whether he was wrong or right, Simmons, like any rational observer, could and should have known in advance what the outcome was going to be. When he’s right, he’s no genius, because he was always going to be right—he could read the signs (not to say entrails) that foretold the eventuality in question. And when he’s wrong, he was an idiot, because fate never fails, and he should have known better. After all, the fated win or loss, the fated bet with or against the odds, was never contingent; it necessarily happened just as it always would and must. He just failed to read the signs aright.

This, for some reason, is the way too many political pundits and academic scholars interpret world events as well as one another’s writings and findings. “Finally, everyone else caught up to my long-since-established views” is the mood. And that mood is silly, superficial, and small. It’s the way teenage boys talk. Any mature adult, not to mention someone committed to the life of the mind, should have left this behind with adolescence. It’s unbefitting intellectuals and writers. Above all it’s unbefitting Christians who claim to be scholars.

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. It’s not going anywhere, unfortunately, but it can also serve as a useful shortcut for filtering out voices worth paying attention to—or not.