But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

The cultural recession of rock is intertwined with its increased cultural absorption, which seems backward. But this is a product of its design. The symbolic value of rock is conflict-based. It emerged as a by-product of the post–World War II invention of the teenager.20 This was a twenty-five-year period when the gap between generations was utterly real and uncommonly vast.

It’s also shackled by its own formal limitations: Most rock songs are made with six strings and electricity, four thicker strings and electricity, and drums.

So what we have is a youth-oriented musical genre that (a) isn’t symbolically important, (b) lacks creative potentiality, and (c) has no specific tie to young people.

The fantasies of Fast Times at Ridgemont High are not the fantasies of now: We’ve run out of teenagers with the desire (and the potential) to become Eddie Van Halen. As far as the mass culture is concerned, that time is over.

The concept of success is personal and arbitrary, so classifying someone as the “most successful” at anything tends to reflect

more on the source than the subject. So keep that in mind when I make the following statement:

The central tropes of rock—crunching guitars, 4/4 time signatures, soaring vocals, long hair and leather pants, sex and drugs and unspecific rebellion—seem like a musical caricature that’s identifiable to the level of interchangeability.

the only major art form where the opinion of a random fourteen-year-old is considered more relevant than the analysis of a sixty-four-year-old scholar.

It’s hard to explain how Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was unable to climb higher than number six on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, despite being viewed (almost from its media inception) as the defining song of its era.

“When you’re talking about individual artists from any period of time, all those various people exist within a washing machine of chaos,” argues musician Ryan Adams,

That’s culturally different from something like the Sex Pistols, where you’re looking at music that stimulates us because it shocks people or awakens people or scares people or electrifies people in a much more immediate way. But that’s also the way all culture has progressed. It seems like people have just become more bored with being human.”

Ross was also a top-shelf rock writer (his 2001 article on Radiohead remains the best thing ever written about the group). “If you have Monteverdi

Western culture, pretty much everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person—the “journey” of one particular “hero”—as a prism for understanding everything else.

If Elvis (minus Dylan) is the definition of rock, then rock is remembered as showbiz. Like Frank Sinatra, Elvis did not write songs; he interpreted songs that were written by other people (and like Sinatra, he did this brilliantly).

Gioia’s assertion was that twenty-first-century music writing has devolved into a form of lifestyle journalism that willfully ignores the technical details of the music itself. Many critics took this attack personally and accused Gioia of devaluing

Take architecture: Here we have a creative process of immense functional consequence. It’s the backbone of the urban world we inhabit, and it’s an art form most people vaguely understand—an architect is a person who designs a structure on paper, and that design emerges as the structure itself. Architects fuse aesthetics with physics and sociology. And there is a deep consensus over who did this best, at least among non-architects:

History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.

The first time I ever heard Frank Lloyd Wright’s name, I was being told he was brilliant, which means the first time I looked at a building he designed, I thought either, “That is what brilliance looks like,” or “This is what everyone else recognizes as brilliance.” I knew he was considered “prolific” long before I ever wondered how many buildings an architect needed to design in order to be considered average, much less productive.

don’t believe all art is the same. I wouldn’t be a critic if I did. Subjective distinctions can be made, and those distinctions are worth quibbling about. The juice of life is derived from arguments that don’t seem obvious.

In other words, everyone concedes we have the potential to be subjectively wrong about anything, as long as we don’t explicitly name whatever that something is. Our sense of subjective reality is simultaneously based on an acceptance of abstract fallibility (“Who is to say what constitutes good art?”) and a casual certitude that we’re right about exclusive assertions that feel like facts (“The Wire represents the apex of television”).

understanding of the universe incrementally increases. New questions are getting answered. But are these the right questions? Is it possible that we are mechanically improving our comprehension of principles that are all components of a much larger

According to Tyson, we have not reinvented our understanding of scientific reality since the seventeenth century. Our beliefs have been relatively secure for roughly four hundred years. That’s a long time—except in the context of science. In science, four hundred years is a grain in the hourglass.

Generally, we work from the assumption that there is one universe, and that our galaxy is a component of this one singular universe that emerged from the Big Bang. But the multiverse notion suggests there are infinite (or at least numerous) universes beyond our own, existing as alternative realities. Imagine an endless roll of bubble wrap; our universe (and everything in it) would be one tiny bubble, and all the other bubbles would be other universes that are equally vast. In his book The Hidden Reality, Greene maps out nine types of parallel universes within this hypothetical system.

But I’m not willing to say the multiverse idea is wrong, because there is no basis for that statement. I understand the discomfort with the idea, but I nevertheless allow it as a real possibility. Because it is a real possibility.”

In the ancient world, science was fundamentally connected to philosophy. Since the age of Newton, it’s become fundamentally connected to math.

“On Colors,” Aristotle came up with an explanation for why the sky is blue: He argued that all air is very slightly blue, but that this blueness isn’t perceptible to the human eye unless there are many, many layers of air placed on top of each other (similar, according to his logic, to the way a teaspoon of water looks clear but a deep well of water looks black).

same answer. “It will not happen,” says Tyson. “That number

[13.79 billion years, plus or minus 0.2] is actually quite stable,” reiterates Greene. Even on points of conflict, they generally force themselves into alignment: When I told Tyson that Greene was open to the possibility that our understanding of gravity might drastically change, Tyson implied that I may have phrased the question incorrectly.

It’s easy to recognize why The Structure of Scientific Revolutions annoys a lot of people who earn a living trying to figure out why and how the world works. There’s something a little insulting about the term “normal science,” in the same way it’s insulting to describe a woman’s outfit as “basic.” There’s also a high degree of intellectual hopelessness ingrained within this philosophy—it makes it seem like whatever science is happening at any given time is just a placeholder, and that the main purpose of any minor scientific advance is to wait for its inevitable obsolescence.

Tyson strongly criticized the book, noting that its main arguments are (again) stuck in the seventeenth century. “[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] was hugely influential,” Tyson tells me, “especially on the liberal arts, giving them ammunition to suggest that science was no better way of knowing

the truth than any other way of investigating. It made a huge case of scientists gathering around one truth, and then there’s a tipping point and everyone moves away from that truth to gather around another truth. Hence the title of the book. And this left people with the sense that science is just whatever is in fashion. Kuhn used, as his best example of this, Copernicus. That’s half his book . . . almost half of that book describes the Copernican Revolution as an...

“Well, of course you think that. You have to. You’re a scientist.” A philosopher can simultaneously forward an argument’s impregnable logic and its potential negation within the same sentence; a scientist can’t do that. There is no practical purpose to fungible physics.

“Hey, man. We all know you’re probably correct about this. We concede that you’re a wizard, and what you’re saying makes sense. But you gotta let us explain this stuff to the rest of the world very, very slowly. We can’t suddenly tell every pasta-gorged plebeian in rural Italy that we live in a heliocentric universe. It will blow their minds and fuck up our game. Just be cool for a while.” Galileo famously refused to chill and published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems as soon as he possibly could, mocking all those who believed (or claimed

Imagine two men in a bar, having (in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s parlance) a “beer conversation.” One man believes in God and the other does not, and they are debating the nature of morality. The man who believes in God argues that without

depicts the final seven years of the five-decade search for the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle at the core of everything we believe about deep physics and the origin of existence.

The term “conspiracy theory” has an irrevocable public relations problem. Technically,

“The belief in conspiracy theories is, I hope to show, harmful in itself. It distorts our view of history and therefore of the present, and—if widespread enough—leads to disastrous decisions.”

It’s referred to as the Phantom Time Hypothesis, and the premise is as straightforward as it is insane: It suggests that the past (or at least the past as we know it) never happened at all.

Niemitz. The German version of Phantom Time proposes that the years AD 614 to 911 were falsified, ostensibly by the Catholic Church, so that rulers from the period could begin their reign in the year 1000 (which would thereby allow their lineage to rule for the next millennium, based on the superstition that whoever was in power in the year 1000 would remain in that position for the next ten centuries). The second version is the “major theory,” hailing from Russia, developed by Marxist revolutionary Nikolai Morozov and outlined in detail by mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. In this so-called New Chronology, everything that supposedly happened prior to the eleventh century is a historical forgery; the historical record we currently accept was constructed in the fifteenth century by French religious scholars.

If you believe that all of history is a fabrication, every piece of evidence disputing that claim is also a fabrication. For example, Halley’s Comet was spotted in AD 837 (in multiple countries), which is exactly when it should have been seen, which indicates that the year 837 must have happened the way we generally assume . . . unless, of course, you believe that the Dark Ages are classified as “dark” because they didn’t happen at all, and all the ancillary details they encompass were manufactured by sinister people who made sure the math worked out. There is no way to irrefutably disprove either strain of the Phantom Time Hypothesis, as both are fundamentally grounded in the belief that all the information we possess about the distant past is unreal.

Arguing with a Phantom Time advocate is a little like arguing with someone who insists that your life is not really happening, and that you’re actually asleep right now, and that everything you assume to be reality is just a dream that will disappear when you awake. How does one dispute such an accusation? It can’t be done (unless you consider “scoffing” to be a valid forensic technique). You can disagree with the claim that any specific world condition is illusionary, but you can’t refute that the world itself is an illusion; there’s no other world to compare it against.

The zenith of dream seriousness occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, defined by the work of Sigmund Freud (who thought dreams were everything) and his adversarial protégé Carl Jung (who thought dreams were more than everything—they were glimpses into a collective unconscious, shared by everyone who’s ever lived).

The ability to map the brain’s electrical activity started in 1924—and from that point forward, dreams increasingly mattered less. The last wide-scale attempt at cataloging a database of human dreams dissipated in the sixties. In 1976, two Harvard psychiatrists46 proposed the possibility that dreams were just the by-product of the brain stem firing chaotically during sleep.

‘What the fuck? How could that be?’ scenario, where there’s this possibility of endless alternative realities across space, totally based on conjecture—yet our dreams are supposed to mean nothing? The fact that we’re in a parallel world every night is just supposed to be meaningless? I mean, the same scientists that are trying to explain away our dreams are also telling us things about the universe that are so mind-boggling that we almost can’t describe them.”

She dreamed I had been beaten by drug dealers as a result of her failure to pick up our son from day care. There were a few details from her actual life that clearly fed into this dream—she’d come home late from work the day before, I’d just experienced an unusually gruesome dental appointment, and we both watched an episode of Bloodline (a TV show about drug dealers) before going to bed. But these connections could go either way.

(this could never happen, but—at the risk of sounding like some kind of conspiracy Yoda—lots of things could never happen, until they do).

Conflicting conceptions of “reality” have no impact on reality. And this does not apply exclusively to conspiracy theorists. It applies to everyone, all the time.

There was a momentary sense that this stupid dress had accidentally collided with some previously unknown optic frequency that lay exactly between the two ways in which color can be perceived, and that—maybe, possibly, somehow—the human race did not see “blue” and “gold” (and perhaps every color) in the same, unified way. Which would mean that color is not a real

What significant historical

event is most likely wrong? And not because of things we know that contradict it, but because of the