You Can’t See the Water

Two young fish are swimming along when an older fish passes and asks, "How's the water?" The young fish swim on for a while. Then one turns to the other and asks, "What is water?"

David Foster Wallace told that story to the Kenyon College class of 2005. His point was simple. The realities closest to us are the hardest ones to see.

A fish does not think about water. It eats in it. It breathes in it. It lives its whole life in it. Water is not something the fish has. Water is where the fish is.

You and I have water too. We call it culture.

The water has a name

Andy Crouch gives the best short definition I know. Culture is "what we make of the world." He means that two ways. It is the things we make: roads, phones, schedules, paychecks. And it is the sense we make: what counts as a good life, a good job, a good church.

Here is the part we miss. None of us started from scratch. Crouch reminds us that we all arrived thousands of years into the story. The water was already in the tank. Long before we shaped culture, culture was shaping us.

And we rarely notice. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall spent his career studying this. He wrote in 1959 that what culture hides, it "hides most effectively from its own participants." The outsider sees it in a minute. The insider can live in it for sixty years and never name it.

Gestalt psychologists have a picture for this. They call it figure and ground. The figure is what you pay attention to. The ground is everything behind it. Your job, your kids, your calendar are the figure. Culture is the ground. It never asks for your attention. It just sets the terms.

Not the enemy. Not innocent.

So is culture good or bad?

Neither answer works. Culture is not the enemy. God put a man in a garden and told him to work it and take care of it (Genesis 2:15). Making something of the world is what image bearers do.

But culture is not innocent either. It teaches. Every culture tells you what is normal, what is possible, and what you should want. Water has a current. If you are not swimming, you are still moving.

What I found in the water

I spent years of doctoral research on one question. What has the culture of capitalism done to the way Christians think about their work?

Here is what I found. Nearly seven in ten of the Christians I surveyed said faith is relevant to success in business. They talked about purpose. They talked about calling. But fewer than one in four named the Bible as a top influence on how they actually work. Experience and mentors ranked far higher.

They talked like disciples. They measured like capitalists.

Nobody chose that. Nobody sat down and decided to blend the gospel with the market. They just lived in the water. I call it the Great Accommodation. It was never a rebellion. It was a drift.

Start with one question

Paul wrote, "Do not conform to the pattern of this world" (Romans 12:2, NIV). You cannot resist a pattern you cannot see.

So before you try to change the culture, do something smaller. Notice it.

Crouch suggests asking what a piece of culture assumes about the way the world should be. Ask that of your calendar. Ask it of your budget. Ask it of your definition of a good year.

Then ask one more. Who taught me that?

You may find it was not Jesus.

How's the water?

Sources

David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water," Kenyon College commencement address, 2005. Kenyon College archive
Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (InterVarsity Press, 2008). Review in the Denver Journal
Andy Crouch with Darrell Bock and Andy Seidel, "Defining Culture and Culture Making," The Table podcast, Dallas Theological Seminary. Episode
Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (Doubleday, 1959). SIETAR USA review
Frederick Perls, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951).
Troy Murphy, Blended Ideologies: The Impact of Capitalism on Christian Theology of Work for Christians in the Workplace (Bakke Graduate University, 2025). Read the dissertation

The water has a name

Not the enemy. Not innocent.

What I found in the water

Start with one question

Sources

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