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

by Chuck Klosterman

We now know (“know”) that Newton’s concept was correct. Humankind had been collectively, objectively wrong for roughly twenty centuries.

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, 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.

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

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.

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.

“I remember reading in John Carey’s book23 that Shakespeare and Rembrandt both went through periods of being considered not important,” Byrne concludes. “Carey’s point was that there is no such thing as absolute, timeless, eternal artistic values that will inevitably rise and endure. It just doesn’t happen.

But that’s also the way all culture has progressed. It seems like people have just become more bored with being human.”

There is, certainly, something likable about this process: 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.

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

The juice of life is derived from arguments that don’t seem obvious.

To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.

But the objective world is different. Here, we traffic in literal facts—but the permanence of those facts matters less than the means by which they are generated.

In terms of speculating on the likelihood of our collective wrongness, Tyson’s distinction is huge. If you remove the deepest question—the question of why—the risk of major error falls through the floor.

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.

“False memories, received memories, how we fill in the blanks of conjecture, the way the brain fills in those spaces with something that is technically incorrect—all of these errors allow us to make sense of the world, and are somehow accepted enough to be admissible in a court of law. They are accepted enough to put someone in prison.”

So while it’s absurd to think that all of history never really happened, it’s almost as absurd to think that everything we know about history is real. All of which demands a predictable question: What significant historical event is most likely wrong? And not because of things we know that contradict it, but because of the way wrongness works.

What Carlin is describing, really, is a dispute over the way true stories should be told. And this is important, because there really isn’t a second option. Storytelling’s relationship to history is a little like interviewing’s relationship to journalism: a flawed process without a better alternative.

When we elect the wrong president (or if we remember that president inappropriately), certain things happen. But nothing that can’t be undone. If Buchanan truly was the worst president, his failure has had about as much impact on contemporary society as the cancellation of Two and a Half Men. Big potatoes don’t dwell on personalities.

This logic leads to a strange question: If and when the United States does ultimately collapse, will that breakdown be a consequence of the Constitution itself? If it can be reasonably argued that it’s impossible to create a document that can withstand the evolution of any society for five hundred or a thousand or five thousand years, doesn’t that mean present-day America’s pathological adherence to the document we happened to inherit will eventually wreck everything? It’s a question people will answer unequivocally only if their answer is no.

Even in a pure meritocracy, they would experience differing levels of happiness. “It is not the case that we are born equal and that the conditions of life make our lives unequal,” writes Karl Ove Knausgaard in his nonfiction novel My Struggle: Book 2. “It is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make us more equal.” The apparent unfairness of reality can’t be blamed on our inability to embody this “self-evident” principle. The world would be just as unfair if we did.

Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.

It’s like thinking that our exploration of the Earth is still open-ended, and that we might still find the lost city of Atlantis or dinosaurs living in the center of the planet. The more we discover, the less there is to discover later. Now, to a lot of people, that sounds like a naïve way to think about science. There was a time when it once seemed naïve to me. But it’s really just a consequence of the success of science itself. Our era is in no way comparable to Aristotle’s era.”

“By the time I finally finished writing The End of Science, I’d concluded that people don’t give a shit about science,” Horgan says. “They don’t give a shit about quantum mechanics or the Big Bang. As a mass society, our interest in those subjects is trivial. People are much more interested in making money, finding love, and attaining status and prestige. So I’m not really sure if a post-science world would be any different than the world of today.”

And in either case, does the artist who invents something deserve a different level of credit from those who employ that invention later, even if they do so in a more interesting way? Is originality more or less important than we pretend?