But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman

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The first thing you need to know about this book is that the text on the cover is upside down.[1] This is meant to be a clever way to reinforce the book’s premise (and presumably to stand out on bookshelves), but it gets steadily more annoying each time you pick it up, like a friend who makes a joke on Friday and proceeds to pound it into the ground for the rest of the weekend. I hope whoever designed it is proud of their work.

The book is the perfect Chuck Klosterman concept: what do we take for granted today that people 500 years from now will think is silly? What will people 500 years from now think is absolutely essential about our era that we think is mundane? Could we possibly guess these things in advance? I enjoyed it, but it couldn’t quite live up to the expectations I built up for it while reading the first chapter.

Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a cameo in the book and challenges the idea that any of our scientific ideas will be overturned, which strikes me as both implausible and pessimistic. One of the funniest parts of the book was Klosterman making it clear how annoying he found Tyson without stating it plainly.

There is a lot of multiverse and simulation discussion, which made me think about how much more comfortable people are with the idea of living in a simulation than living in a world where God is real, despite the fact that I’m not sure how to differentiate between the two.

The sharpest observation of the book is on how and why aesthetic recalibration happens. Klosterman gives the example of Moby Dick, which (apparently) bombed at the time of publishing only to be reevaluated and elevated in the aftermath of the First World War. Klosterman makes the argument that for a work to be elevated in this way it has to be flawed or overlooked, otherwise there is no incentive for a critic to revisit them – this awesome thing is awesome and isn't really an interesting story.[2] This gives the critic an opportunity to recognize / highlight / infuse the artwork with themes that resonate with the living generation.[3]

Just for fun, I’ll play Klosterman’s game and put forward three pieces of conventional wisdom we could be wrong about today.[4] Please add your own as a comment below so future generations can marvel at our prescience.

  1. Earth has the only life in the solar system.[5]
  2. Future generations looking back at our era will think that Avatar was an incredibly important culture work, while we know it was visually stunning but forgettable
  3. Not just social media, but TV, Netflix, and video games are as damaging to our social lives as smoking cigarettes are to our physical health

  1. Hilariously, Amazon corrects this so that the text is right side up. ↩︎

  2. How universal is this? I’m not sure. I feel like Michelangelo’s David was immediately resonate and remains so today; but perhaps it is the exception that proves the rule ↩︎

  3. I think you can see a similar dynamic in the historical recalibration of Alexander Hamilton or Ulysses S Grant by Ron Chernow — their tarnished reputations allowed Chernow to tell a deeper story, raising their status for a new generation. Benjamin Franklin or George Washington don’t offer the same opportunities for elevation. ↩︎

  4. This allows for a lot of squishiness and I’ll try not to abuse it, but you be the judge ↩︎

  5. Note that UFOs visiting earth would count if they are manned; despite my best efforts, I couldn’t figure out how to phrase this in a way where unmanned UFOs would count ↩︎