Time & Perspective Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Holmes is throwing a quiet punch at the professional temptation to disappear into cleverness. As a jurist who lived through the Civil War, the industrial boom, and the rise of modern bureaucratic expertise, he watched American institutions acquire an ever more elaborate vocabulary for avoiding plain responsibility. “Investigation of the obscure” isn’t anti-intellectualism; it’s a jab at the prestige economy of ideas, where complexity can become a moral alibi. If you can frame the problem as technically intricate, you can postpone action, dodge accountability, or dress up partiality as method.

The phrase “education in the obvious” is doing more work than it first admits. Holmes is pointing at the basics that elites routinely refuse to learn: power distorts outcomes, incentives matter, words can be weaponized, and legal rules don’t float above society like commandments. Coming from the architect of legal realism, it reads as a warning against treating law as a sealed system of logic. Courts and policymakers love “the obscure” because it feels like mastery; it signals expertise without forcing you to confront what everyone can already see.

There’s also a democratic subtext. “Obvious” knowledge is shareable knowledge. It’s the kind that keeps public life legible to citizens rather than turning governance into a priesthood of specialists. Holmes isn’t asking us to stop thinking hard; he’s asking us to stop using hard thinking as camouflage when the plain facts have been on the table the whole time.