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

by Chuck Klosterman

“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. And now we realize quantum mechanics must have an impact on how we describe gravity within very short distances.

And then string theory comes along, trying to understand how gravity behaves on a small scale, and that gives us a description—which we don’t know to be right or wrong—that equates to a quantum theory of gravity. Now, that requires extra dimensions of space.

There isn’t an ongoing cultural debate over the merits of Moby-Dick: It’s not merely an epic novel, but a transformative literary innovation that helps define how novels are supposed to be viewed.

People will always look backward in an attempt to re-remember what they want to be true, just as I currently look ahead in an attempt to anticipate how that reverse engineering will work.

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.

The uncomfortable, omnipresent reality within any conversation about representation is that the most underrepresented subcultures are the ones that don’t even enter into the conversation. They are, by definition, impossible to quantify. They are groups of people whom—right now, in the present tense—it is still acceptable to dislike or discount or ignore.

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.

Classical music, which is an extraordinarily sophisticated thing to compose, requires a listener with a lot of attention to detail and a willingness to really think about what they’re experiencing. 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.”

The Rest Is Noise,

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.

The fact that Dylan does not have a conventionally “good” singing voice becomes retrospective proof that rock audiences prioritized substance over style,