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

by Chuck Klosterman

Melville publishes Moby-Dick in 1851, basing his narrative on the real-life 1839 account of a murderous sperm whale nicknamed “Mocha Dick.” The initial British edition is around nine hundred pages. 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 (“it repels the reader” is the key takeaway from one of the very first reviews in the London Spectator). It sells poorly—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. The concept of what a novel is supposed to accomplish shifts in his direction and amplifies with each passing generation, eventually prompting people (like the 2005 director of Columbia University’s American studies program) ...

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.

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 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.

You read a ‘good’ story from the 1930s and find that somehow the world has passed it by. Its inner workings and emphases are somehow misshapen. It’s answering questions in its tone and form that we are no longer asking. And yet the Gaussian curve4 argues that this is true—that 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.

In January of 2013, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story with the earnest headline “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year.” That book, Tenth of December, was a slim, darkly humorous collection of short stories, most of which deal with the quintessence of kindness and the application of empathy.

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. In fact, it often seems like our collective ability to recognize electrifying genius as it occurs paradoxically limits the likelihood of future populations certifying that genius as timeless.

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.

a single line in Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country: “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”

We must concede that important writing finds a way to accurately represent life, and that the writing that does so will consciously intermingle with the meaningful culture of the time (impermanent though it may be). What that constitutes in our present culture is debatable, but here’s a partial, plausible list . . . The psychological impact of the Internet on day-to-day living. The prevailing acceptance of nontraditional sexual identities. The (seemingly regular) deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers. An unclear definition of privacy. An impotent, unspecified hatred of the wealthiest “one percent.” The artistic elevation of television. The cultural recession of rock and the cultural ascension of hip-hop. The prolonging of adolescence and the avoidance of adulthood. A distrust of objective storytelling. The intermittent rebooting of normalcy in the years following 9/11. I’m not saying an important book must include one of these ideas, or even an idea that would comfortably fit on this list. But it needs to include something that taps into what matters about the world now. There has to be something at stake that involves modernity.

In order to overcome such impossible odds and defeat the unrelenting ravages of time, the book has to offer more. It has to offer a window into a world that can no longer be accessed, insulated by a sense that this particular work is the best way to do so. It must do what Vonnegut requests—reflect reality. And this is done by writing about the things that matter today, even if they won’t necessarily matter tomorrow. Yet herein lies the paradox: If an author does this too directly, it won’t work at all.

The only detail we can all be certain of is that a novel’s (eventual) interpretation will (eventually) be different from its surface meaning—and if that doesn’t happen, the book won’t seem significant enough to retroactively canonize. So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them.

“The most amazing writer of this generation is someone you’ve never heard of, representing a subculture we don’t even recognize, expressing ideas that don’t signify what they appear to mean.”

this, it seems, is how mainstream musical memory works. As the timeline moves forward, tangential artists in any genre fade from the collective radar, until only one person remains; the significance of that individual is then exaggerated, until the genre and the person become interchangeable.

I keep imagining a college classroom in five hundred years, where a hipster instructor is leading a tutorial filled with students. These students relate to rock music with the same level of fluency as the music of Mesopotamia: It’s a style of music they’ve learned to recognize, but just barely (and only because they’ve taken this specific class). Nobody in the room can name more than two rock songs, except the professor. He explains the sonic structure of rock, and its origins, and the way it served as cultural currency, and how it shaped and defined three generations of a global superpower. He attempts to personify the concept of rock through the life of a rock person. He shows the class a photo—or maybe a hologram—of this chosen individual. This is the guy. This is the image of what rock was, and what rock is.

If we walked down the street of any American city and asked people to name the greatest architect of the twentieth century, most would say Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, if someone provided a different answer, we’d have to assume we’ve stumbled across an actual working architect, an architectural historian, or a personal friend of Frank Gehry. Of course, most individuals in those subsets would cite Wright, too. But in order for someone to argue in favor of any architect except Wright (or even to be in a position to name three other plausible candidates), that person would almost need to be an expert in architecture. Normal humans don’t possess enough information to nominate alternative possibilities. And what emerges from that social condition is an insane kind of logic: Frank Lloyd Wright is indisputably the greatest architect of the twentieth century, and the only people who’d potentially disagree with that assertion are those who legitimately understand the question.

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

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

What Bostrom is asserting is that there are three possibilities about the future, one of which must be true. The first possibility is that the human race becomes extinct before reaching the stage where such a high-level simulation could be built. The second possibility is that humans do reach that stage, but for whatever reason—legality, ethics, or simple disinterest—no one ever tries to simulate the complete experience of civilization. The third possibility is that we are living in a simulation right now. Why? Because if it’s possible to create this level of computer simulation (and if it’s legally and socially acceptable to do so), there won’t just be one simulation. There will be an almost limitless number of competing simulations, all of which would be disconnected from each other. A computer program could be created that does nothing except generate new simulations, all day long, for a thousand consecutive years. And once those various simulated societies reach technological maturity, they would (assumedly) start creating simulations of their own—simulations inside of simulations. Eventually, we would be left with the one original “real” reality, along with billions and billions of simulated realities. Simple mathematical odds tell us that it’s far more likely our current reality would fall somewhere in the latter category. The chance that we are living through the immature stages of the original version is certainly possible, but ultra-remote.

We want a pain-free world where everyone is the same, even if they are not. That can’t happen if we’re still keeping score.

The men and women who forged this nation were straight-up maniacs about freedom. It was just about the only thing they cared about, so they jammed it into everything.

But it’s bizarre how angry voters get at non-voters. “It’s your civic responsibility,” they will say. Although the purpose of voting is to uphold a free society, so one might respond that a free society would not demand people to participate in an optional civic activity. “But your vote matters,” they argue. Well, it is counted, usually. That’s true (usually). But believing your one vote makes a meaningful difference reflects unfathomable egotism.

“But what if everybody thought that way,” they inevitably counter. This is the stupidest of arguments—if the nation’s political behavior were based on the actions of one random person, of course that person would vote, in the same way that random person would never jaywalk if his or her personal actions dictated the behavior of society as a whole. But that is not how the world works. “Okay, fine. But if you don’t vote, you can’t complain.”

For any lone individual, voting is a symbolic act that retains its illusionary power from everyone else agreeing that it’s indispensable. This is why voters want other people to vote, even if those other people are uninformed and lazy and completely unengaged with politics.

I imagine America as a chapter in a book, centuries after the country has collapsed, encapsulated by the casual language we use when describing the foreboding failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588. And what I imagine is a description like this: The invention of a country is described. This country was based on a document, and the document was unassailable. The document could be altered, but alterations were so difficult that it happened only seventeen times in two hundred years (and one of those changes merely retracted a previous alteration). The document was less than five thousand words but applied unilaterally, even as the country dramatically increased its size and population and even though urban citizens in rarefied parts of the country had nothing in common with rural citizens living thousands of miles away. The document’s prime directives were liberty and representation, even when 5 percent of the country’s population legally controlled 65 percent of the wealth. But everyone loved this document, because it was concise and well composed and presented a possible utopia where everyone was the same. It was so beloved that the citizens of this country decided they would stick with it no matter what happened or what changed, and the premise of discounting (or even questioning) its greatness became so verboten that any political candidate who did so would have no chance to be elected to any office above city alderman. The populace decided to use this same document foreve...

According to multiple researchers, the likelihood of a significant Pacific Northwest earthquake happening in the next fifty years is one in three. The likelihood that it will be “the really big one” is one in ten. FEMA projects that such an event would kill thirteen thousand people. The story’s most memorable quote came from the region’s FEMA director, Kenneth Murphy: “Our operating assumption is that everything west of I-5 will be toast.”

If the target wasn’t Israel or France, the target would be the United States. Based on common sense and recent history, the two cities most likely to be attacked would be New York and Washington, D.C. So if I believe that a nuclear weapon will be detonated in my lifetime (which seems probable), and I believe it will happen on US soil (which seems possible), and I live in New York (which I do), I’m consciously raising my family in one of the few cities where I suspect a nuclear weapon is likely to be utilized. Based on this rationale, it would make way more sense for me to move to Portland,

I once gave a speech at a Midwestern college, and I asked the person who picked me up at the airport what other authors the university had invited to speak in the past. The driver mentioned George Saunders. When I asked what he was like, the driver claimed that Saunders had pre-Googled the name of almost every person involved with his visit—including the driver himself—so that the brief conversations he would inevitably have with those around him would not be one-sided. He wanted to be able to ask them questions about their lives. Part of me finds this story implausible, but maybe that just proves I’m not very thoughtful.