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

by Chuck Klosterman

“There is a very, very good chance that our understanding of gravity will not be the same in five hundred years.

“For two hundred years, Isaac Newton had gravity down. There was almost no change in our thinking until 1907. And then from 1907 to 1915, Einstein radically changes our understanding of gravity: No longer is gravity just a force, but a warping of space and time.

A post-gravity world is beyond my comprehension. But the concept of a post-gravity world helps me think about something else: It helps me understand the pre-gravity era.

If mankind could believe something false was objectively true for two thousand years, why do we reflexively assume that our current understanding of gravity—which we’ve embraced for a mere three hundred fifty years—will somehow exist forever?

at the time of Melville’s death, total sales hover below five thousand copies. The failure ruins Melville’s life: He becomes an alcoholic and a poet, and eventually a customs inspector. When he dies destitute in 1891, one has to assume his perspective on Moby-Dick is something along the lines of “Well, I guess that didn’t work. Maybe I should have spent fewer pages explaining how to tie complicated knots.” For the next thirty years, nothing about the reception of this book changes. But then World War I happens, and—somehow, and for reasons that can’t be totally explained2—modernists living in postwar America start to view literature through a different lens. There is a Melville revival.

We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

my personal characterization of naïve realism is wider and more insidious. I think it operates as the manifestation of two ingrained beliefs:

“When considering any question, I must be rational and logical, to the point of dismissing any unverifiable data as preposterous,”

“When considering any question, I’m going to assume that the information we currently have is all the informati...

We have no idea what we don’t know, or what we’ll eventually learn, or what might be true despite our perpetual inability to comprehend what that truth is.

It’s impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.

The problem is with the questions themselves.

Even if we can’t foresee the unforeseeable, it’s possible to project a future reality where the most logical conclusions have no relationship to what actually happens.

With Occam’s Razor is how a serious person considers the past. Unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work for the future.

When you’re gazing into the haze of a distant tomorrow, everything is an assumption.

Klosterman’s Razor: the philosophical belief that the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with.

Language is more durable than content. Words outlive their definitions.

What any singular person thought about Moby-Dick in 1851 is as irrelevant as what any singular person thinks about Moby-Dick today.

If you prioritize cultural multiplicity above all other factors, you can’t make the very peak of the pyramid a reactionary exception, even in the unlikely event that this is what you believe (since such a conclusion would undoubtedly be shaped by social forces you might not recognize).

The reason something becomes retrospectively significant in a far-flung future is detached from the reason it was significant at the time of its creation—and that’s almost always due to a recalibration of social ideologies that future generations will accept as normative.

The hardest part is accepting that we’re building something with parts that don’t yet exist.

People will always look backward in an attempt to re-remember what they want to be true,

The reason shadow histories remained in the shadows lay in the centralization of information: If an idea wasn’t discussed on one of three major networks or on the pages of a major daily newspaper or national magazine, it was almost impossible for that idea to gain traction with anyone who wasn’t consciously searching for alternative perspectives. That era is now over. There is no centralized information, so every idea has the same potential for distribution and acceptance.

Competing modes of discourse no longer “compete.” They coexist.

The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens.

History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “a set of lies agreed upon”). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.