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Right In Front Of Our Eyes
How we rarely understand what phenomena are really telling us
There’s an adage that says, “ordinary people understand nothing, clever people can solve difficult known problems, but it takes a genius to see what’s right in front of everyone’s eyes.”
Or, as per the BBC TV Series Sherlock when the eponymous hero tells his amanuensis Dr. Watson: “As ever, you see but you do not observe.”
I’d argue, however, that we don’t have to be geniuses to see what’s right in front of us. We just have to ignore the clamor of voices telling us what we should believe and instead look at the data and really think hard about what it is really telling us. Very often, the popular narrative is woefully wrong.
For as long as our species has been around, we’ve been clambering over rock formations that were practically shouting their history, yet it wasn’t until James Hutton and then Charles Lyell that anyone began to listen.
Ordinary people, doing what ordinary people always do, merely thought what they were told to think, believed what they were told to believe, and repeated whatever they’d been told to repeat. For ordinary people the world was 6,000 years old and had been created by an invisible magical creature that began its recorded existence as a cult god of an obscure tribe of illiterate and innumerate goat-herders…
