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When you ask smart people if they believe there are major ideas currently accepted by the culture at large that will eventually be proven false, they will say, “Well, of course. There must be.
Yet offer those same people a laundry list of contemporary ideas that might fit that description, and they’ll be tempted to reject them all.
“There is a very, very good chance that our understanding of gravity will not be the same in five hundred years.
But the concept of a post-gravity world helps me think about something else: It helps me understand the pre-gravity era.
Aristotle believed that a dropped rock fell to the earth because rocks belonged on earth and wanted to be there.
if we’re going to acknowledge even the slightest possibility of being wrong about gravity, we’re pretty much giving up on the possibility of being right about anything at all.
Publicly attacking Moby-Dick is shorthand for arguing that what we’re socialized to believe about art is fundamentally questionable.
We all start from the supposition that Moby-Dick is accepted as self-evidently awesome, including (and perhaps especially) those who disagree with that assertion.
Melville, a moderately successful author at the time of the novel’s release, assumes this book will immediately be seen as a masterwork. This is his premeditated intention throughout the writing process. But the reviews are mixed, and some are contemptuous
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.
modernists living in postwar America start to view literature through a different lens. There is a Melville revival. The concept of what a novel is supposed to accomplish shifts in his direction and amplifies with each passing generation,
The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional.
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,
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.
The straightforward definition of naïve realism doesn’t seem that outlandish: It’s a theory that suggests the world is exactly as it appears.
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,” and “When considering any question, I’m going to assume that the information we currently have is all the information that will ever be available.”
So while it seems unrealistic to seriously consider the prospect of life after death, it seems equally naïve to assume that our contemporary understanding of this phenomenon is remotely complete.
We constantly pretend our perception of the present day will not seem ludicrous in retrospect, simply because there doesn’t appear to be any other option. Yet there is another option, and the option is this: We must start from the premise that—in all likelihood—we are already wrong.
The Book of Predictions describes itself: It’s several hundred pages of futurists and scientists (and—somewhat distractingly—psychics) making unsystematic predictions about life on Earth in the coming fifty years.
It’s the bad calculations that must have seemed totally justifiable—perhaps even conservative—at the time of publication. And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the status quo is temporary.
In 1994, the idea of a sixty-minute phone call from Michigan to Texas costing less than mailing a physical letter the same distance was still unimaginable. Which is why no one imagined it in 1980, either.
the reason Science Digest was so wrong was not technological; it was motivational. In 1948, traveling to the moon was a scientific aspiration; the desire for a lunar landing was analogous to the desire to climb a previously unscaled mountain.
But when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the meaning of the enterprise changed.
The national desire to reach the moon first was now a military concern
So it’s not that the 1948 editors of Science Digest were illogical; it’s that logic doesn’t work particularly well when applied to the future.
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.
How much of this novel’s transcendent social imprint is related to what it mechanically examines? The short answer seems to be that the specific substance of a novel matters very little.
The larger key is the tone, and particularly the ability of that tone to detach itself from the social moment of its creation.
most of us are so habituated to the current moment that what we do will fade and lose its power and just be an historical relic, if that.
The future we are now living in would have been utterly unimaginable to the vast majority of even the most intelligent thinkers and writers of that time.”
It doesn’t seem plausible that someone could do exceptional work, be recognized as exceptional, and then simply remain in that cultural space for the rest of time. Art history almost never works that way.
it does reflect something telling about the modern criteria for quantifying art: Symmetrical representation sits at the center of the process.
Díaz’s view, which once felt like an alternative perspective, is becoming the entrenched perspective. And when that happens, certain critical conclusions will no longer be possible.
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
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.
This is how the present must be considered whenever we try to think about it as the past: It must be analyzed through the values of a future that’s unwritten.
The hardest part is accepting that we’re building something with parts that don’t yet exist.
‘Literary posterity may often surprise us in its selections, but it almost exclusively selects7 from among those known in their day, not the unknown.’
the only reason we need a canon is so that other people can disagree with it. The work of the writers who get included becomes almost secondary, since they now exist only for the purposes of contradiction.
I certainly understand the mentality behind forwarding the possibility that nothing from this era will be remembered, simply due to volume. There are also those who contend we no longer need to “remember” anything at all, since the Internet has unlimited storage and ebooks never go out of print
But they both overlook something else: human nature. Society enjoys this process, even if the job is superfluous and the field is too large to manage. Practicality is not part of the strategy.
It’s flat-out impossible to speculate on the future without (a) consciously focusing on the most obvious aspects of what we already know, and (b) unconsciously excluding all the things we don’t have the intellectual potential to grasp.
I can’t reasonably argue that the most important writer of this era is (for example) a yet-to-be-identified Irish-Asian skoliosexual from Juárez, Mexico, who writes brilliantly about migrant cannibalism from an anti-union perspective.
For an assortment of reasons, I suspect that whoever gets arbitrarily selected to represent turn-of-the-twenty-first-century literary greatness is—at the moment—either totally unknown or widely disrespected.
Kafka did not have any semblance of a normal literary career, unless you assume “a normal literary career” constitutes dying poor and hating everything about yourself. He represents the Platonic ideal of the tortured genius who dies virtually unknown: He was paralyzed by both a hatred of his own writing and a buried arrogance over his intellectual superiority.
I think it’s quite possible that no writer from this era will be remembered at all—yet if someone is embraced by the currently unborn, it will likely be a Kafka-like character.
The conventional Internet is the ideal vessel for the acquisition of temporary fame; unpublished writers who actively amass substantial social media followings are inevitably trying to leverage those followings into a book or TV deal, on the basis of the premise that they are already relatively famous.
Internet writing is, by definition, public writing. Which means our Contemporary Kafka must be doing something slightly different. Contemporary Kafka must be working in a medium that is either (a) extremely traditional, and therefore unpopular, or (b) extremely new, and therefore unseen by almost everyone else.
I don’t know anyone whose personal experience with the Deep Web extends beyond journalistic curiosity. But it presents a zone where a certain kind of faceless artist could flourish, completely detached from a mainstream society that might not accept or appreciate the work.
