Before we can argue that something we currently appreciate deserves inclusion in the world of tomorrow, we must build that future world within our mind. This is not easy (even with drugs). But it's not even the hardest part. The hardest part is accepting that we're building something with parts that don't yet exist.Reading But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past is like being a fly on the wall of Chuck Klosterman's pot-filled dormroom, listening in as he meanderingly muses and ponders the imponderables – Have you ever really looked at your hands, man? – and like our imaginary fly, it's easy to pause and listen; to disengage the critical part of the brain and just let the smoke and ideas wash over you in an indistinguishable fog. Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed this read very much in the moment, but in hindsight, I don't know if it added up to much of anything besides its basic premise: how will those things that are important to today's (mainstream American) society be remembered by the people of the future? Will our scientific beliefs look as quaint (or as downright wrong) as Medieval superstition and Aristotelian geocentricism? Will any of our art survive? As these questions are ultimately unanswerable, the fun of this book is following along as Klosterman decides which questions are worth asking. And there is fun to be had in that.
An early (and favourite of mine) example of how an evolving society reframes even the recent past has to do with the movie The Matrix. In 1999, we were enthralled by its special effects and mindbending sci-fi premise – on its own merits, this movie seemed like an instant classic – but as the current sociopolitical climate of 2016 has allowed the movie's sibling directors to announce their long desired transitions from males to females, the basic concept of The Matrix needs to be reconsidered:
Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds – one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden – takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor.And that's a reframing that took less than fifteen years: no one in 1999 could have imagined our current acceptance of – it might even be more fair to say “celebration” of – transgendered people, so how do you extrapolate that example out into the future? What future social and cultural changes could occur over hundreds or thousands of years that could make our current, supposedly progressive, times look backward or even barbaric? Because these changes are unimaginable – it's too easy to say, “Oh, we probably won't eat animals or wage wars” – the question is unanswerable. This paradox is the crux of the entire book.
When it comes to those truths that we may be “wrong” about, Klosterman divides them into two groups: objective truths (like the force of gravity) and subjective (like what are the great novels of our day). For the former, Klosterman interviewed both Neil deGrasse Tyson (who insists that, although science is continually being advanced, our basic understanding of the universe hasn't changed since Copernicus, and it never will) and Brian Greene (who advocates the Multiverse Theory that would totally upend all of current scientific thought): and ultimately, these two, who are presented to the reader as diametrically opposed, agree that Classical Mechanics, with Einstein's Relativity refinements, describe the universe (or multiverse) too precisely to ever be proven wrong. Of course, Klosterman also descends into a stoner dormroom discussion of simulated reality, and what if we're just all characters in someone else's dream, and what happens to the universe if I'm the dreamer and then I wake up? Yada yada.
As for art, Klosterman makes the case that within very little time, all of rock and roll will be reduced to a footnote. It's interesting to follow along as he tries to decide which one act will eventually stand in as the shorthand for the entire genre (The Beatles? Would the scales tip more towards the side of Elvis' pure showmanship or Dylan's pure poetry? What about Chuck Berry, since even John Lennon once identified him as the quintessence?) Klosterman believes that Roseanne is the television show that accidentally captured the reality of its times (by being neither self-mockingly ridiculous or self-consciously “real”) and will probably endure as emblematic. He makes a long argument that the novelists who will be remembered are the ones we probably haven't even heard of, and because he was echoing my own thoughts in this following quote, and I like it when smart people agree with what I think, I'll share it:
If the meaning of a book can be deduced from a rudimentary description of its palpable plot, the life span of that text is limited to the time of its release. Historically awesome art always means something different from what it superficially appears to suggest – and if future readers can't convince themselves that the ideas they're consuming are less obvious than whatever simple logic indicates, that book will disappear.Yet, I don't know if I agree that in the future we'll think of rock and roll as we currently do about march music (for which the shorthand “Sousa” can represent the whole genre), or that when we look back and identify Kafka and Melville as unappreciated geniuses, that necessarily means that future generations will only care about those authors from our own time who didn't find widespread success. Klosterman is able to make the following (to me, contradictory if a chapter apart) statements about those people who decide what from the past is remembered: It's nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it's the weirdos who care the most and To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don't care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad. But the world is already changed since the day that we (somehow, collectively) decided that Frank Lloyd Wright can stand in for all of 20th century architecture or that William Shakespeare represents the height of the Elizabethan dramatists: with the advent of the internet, and as we head towards the Singularity and however that will work as a human/internet interface, won't we eventually be able to hold all examples of everything within our minds at the same time? And I don't mean this to sound as though I'm being defensive of the cultural touchstones of my own era: If a passing thought about Elizabethan plays will, in the future, bring an instant understanding of all of the works of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson simultaneously, why would the era need to be reduced to just one avatar? It would be impossible to go back and fill in all of the art and thought of the past that might adequately flesh out the various eras, but as for today, if someone in the year 3016 wanted to know what life was like for me, they wouldn't need to say, “Oh, she probably listened to Elvis and watched Roseanne and read Jonathan Frantzen”: for while all those things are true, this imaginary person would have access to an instant understanding of all of the music and television and books of my era, an instant understanding of the works of the official culture critics and their unending stream of print and pixels on pop culture, and for all I know, with instant access to the history of Facebook and Goodreads and all of my other public fora, this person would know exactly what I, myself, consumed and thought about it. But I could be wrong about all that, too.
I liked when Klosterman would draw examples from things I've read (namedropping books like Tenth of December, Super Sad True Love Story, and even Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History); I was pleased to understand the point he was making about how either Infinite Jest or The Road might eventually be considered the quintessential book about 9/11. I can't deny that he went to the experts to search for answers and these interviews were often enlightening. On the other hand, I was less engaged by American-specific what-ifs (Is Malcolm Gladwell correct that the NFL will be gone within 50 years? Is a fanatical adherence to a 200 year old, unchangeable Constitution the roots of America's eventual demise? Was Reagan the worst and Obama the best president in the author's lifetime?), but I do appreciate that I was simply following along as Klosterman explored those ideas that were intriguing to him; and in the end, you don't need to be a pothead in a dormroom to find philosophical questions without answers to be an interesting diversion.
We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).
