Scan barcode
A review by vegantrav
But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman
5.0
In But What If We're Wrong?, Chuck Klosterman asks a lot of questions. Fascinating questions. Curious questions. Obscure questions. Rarely asked questions. Questions that will really make you think.
But Klosterman doesn't give any answers--primarily because the questions he asks are, for the most part, unanswerable. And these aren't questions where we can say that the answers don't really matter and that just asking the questions is important. It is true that posing these questions and trying to answer them is important, but the answers matter a lot, too. It's just that we have no way of knowing the answers to those questions.
So, what are some of the questions he asks? That question, I can answer. Klosterman asks us to imagine distant future generations looking back on our generation. How will they remember us and our culture? Which books being written now will make the canon of the future? Will they be writers we already acknowledge as great, or is there some contemporary Kafka toiling away in anonymity that we will never know but whom future generations will look back upon as the greatest writer of our time? Or, even more interesting, what if the writer who will be hailed by future generations is someone whom we currently view as middling or even bad? Klosterman asks similar questions about music and television. Not content to delve only into the subjective realm of the arts, Klosterman ventures into science: will future generations look back on our beliefs about the universe in dismay and shock at just how wrong we are about so many things? Is our current state of scientific knowledge going to be viewed just as we now view the Aristotelian scientific world-view that reigned prior to Newton? In equally entertaining chapters, Klosterman asks questions about the simulation hypothesis, conspiracy theories, and politics.
But What If We're Wrong? is a great book not because of the answers that it provides because, again, it doesn't provide answers. It's a great book because it makes you think. You'll put this book down and find yourself thinking about these questions as you go about your day: is the current it book that I'm reading one that will endure, or will it slide into the waters of Lethe? Will any of the music and movies that I enjoy today be at all remembered a few centuries from now? It's a very humbling book. It asks us to look back into the past and consider how little of the past we actually remember and then put ourselves into the perspective of someone a few hundred years in the future looking back at us: we and what we value will be as of little interest and import to future generations as the lives and values of people living in, say, 1516 are to us. We are not special. We don't have all the answers. But trying to answer these questions--even though we are, as Klosterman continually asserts, almost certain to be wrong--is still both enjoyable and educational.
But Klosterman doesn't give any answers--primarily because the questions he asks are, for the most part, unanswerable. And these aren't questions where we can say that the answers don't really matter and that just asking the questions is important. It is true that posing these questions and trying to answer them is important, but the answers matter a lot, too. It's just that we have no way of knowing the answers to those questions.
So, what are some of the questions he asks? That question, I can answer. Klosterman asks us to imagine distant future generations looking back on our generation. How will they remember us and our culture? Which books being written now will make the canon of the future? Will they be writers we already acknowledge as great, or is there some contemporary Kafka toiling away in anonymity that we will never know but whom future generations will look back upon as the greatest writer of our time? Or, even more interesting, what if the writer who will be hailed by future generations is someone whom we currently view as middling or even bad? Klosterman asks similar questions about music and television. Not content to delve only into the subjective realm of the arts, Klosterman ventures into science: will future generations look back on our beliefs about the universe in dismay and shock at just how wrong we are about so many things? Is our current state of scientific knowledge going to be viewed just as we now view the Aristotelian scientific world-view that reigned prior to Newton? In equally entertaining chapters, Klosterman asks questions about the simulation hypothesis, conspiracy theories, and politics.
But What If We're Wrong? is a great book not because of the answers that it provides because, again, it doesn't provide answers. It's a great book because it makes you think. You'll put this book down and find yourself thinking about these questions as you go about your day: is the current it book that I'm reading one that will endure, or will it slide into the waters of Lethe? Will any of the music and movies that I enjoy today be at all remembered a few centuries from now? It's a very humbling book. It asks us to look back into the past and consider how little of the past we actually remember and then put ourselves into the perspective of someone a few hundred years in the future looking back at us: we and what we value will be as of little interest and import to future generations as the lives and values of people living in, say, 1516 are to us. We are not special. We don't have all the answers. But trying to answer these questions--even though we are, as Klosterman continually asserts, almost certain to be wrong--is still both enjoyable and educational.