It takes time to go deep. Sounds obvious, I know, but it’s easy to forget.
The internet has given us unprecedented access to information. We have libraries at our fingertips, with tools to search and summarize them. When any question can be answered with a few clicks, it’s easy to fool ourselves into believing we understand the complex topics that make up whatever the current thing is.
From this false sense of understanding comes an entitlement to have an opinion, and, of course, to post it online. But there is a wide chasm between the thumbnail sketch one gets from a couple of internet searches and actually understanding a topic.
I was reminded that deep understanding takes time when reading Karl Popper’s intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest. Popper built his arguments by first understanding other people’s theories to the point where he could elevate them to their strongest version. Only from that vantage point, he went on to criticize them, and, at times, demolish them.
The Open Society and Its Enemies is an example of Popper’s method directed towards Platonism and Marxism. His work was so thorough that Marx’s biographer Isaiah Berlin described it as “the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer.”
One cannot reach such depth overnight. It requires years of reading and thinking.
Seventeen-year-old Popper encountered communism and Marxism in 1919. As he recounts in Unended Quest, he was initially suspicious but was eventually won over by the propaganda. His infatuation didn’t last long, though. When “a shooting broke out during a demonstration by unarmed young socialists who, instigated by the communists, tried to help some communists to escape who were under arrest in the central police station in Vienna” resulting in the death of several people involved, Popper was horrified. But it wasn’t just the brutality of the police that struck him. As a communist, he felt complicit because of the implications of Marxism, with its demand that class struggle intensify and become ever more violent.
From there began a long process of reflection:
It took me some years of study before I felt with any confidence that I had grasped the heart of the Marxian argument. […] But it was not till sixteen years later, in 1935, that I began to write about Marxism with the intention of publishing what I wrote. As a consequence, two books emerged between 1935 and 1943—The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies.
When we hold a book, or engage with any other work of creativity, we interact with a finished product. We can access the work in its entirety and without delay. It’s easy to gloss over the fact that it didn’t materialize all of a sudden.
We are used to getting everything we need instantly, be it a ride home with Uber or an item with Amazon, a movie with Netflix or a meal with DoorDash. This craving for instant gratification is also visible in entertainment apps like Instagram and TikTok, with their short videos that get swiped away unless they hook viewers within a few seconds.
But there is no same-day-delivery system for understanding.
Knowledge comes from within. It’s a lattice we weave one connection at a time, sequence after sequence of conjecture and criticism.
Complex ideas take time to digest. They cannot be summarized in 30-second soundbites.
Popper spent years grappling with the Marxist doctrine, and even longer thinking and discussing with friends, before sitting down to write its obituary.
To push back against reductionist narratives and bring nuance back into our discourse, we need to remember that depth takes time.