The idiom you’ve probably heard more times than you can count is that hindsight is 20-20, meaning that it may be pretty easy now to see how and why something happened in the past.

For example, looking back, historians and politicians came up with all sorts of high-falutin’ explanations of why the Soviet Union crumbled and the Berlin Wall fell. But in the middle of everything leading up to it, did anyone really see that it would happen so quickly? Not really. Even people like the late Czech writer and leader Vaclav Havel, who opposed the Russian bear for years, were taken by surprise, writes cultural observer Malcolm Gladwell in last year’s “Revenge of the Tipping Point.”

Another of several hindsight examples in the book is gay marriage – which seemed like a mountain for activists to c

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