But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

As a fan of Chuck's book on the nineties and his writing style on pop culture and the arts, I wanted to read his other books. This one was super interesting, basically questioning why is it that we think the way that we do: meaning that our current way of thinking is correct and that we may/may not change in the future... questioning what if we think about the present as if it were the past. Already familiar with Chuck's writing, you could probably guess he'll provide specific details in history and pop culture along with some details of his own life and tie them together. I really enjoyed this one and even though I got a little lost sometimes when he gets too into the weeds on things, it really makes you think about why we think the way that we do and think about the past, present, and future a bit differently.

This is a wonderfully refreshing idea for a book: how will the present look from the future? What will we think about the way we looked at sports and democracy and rock music? It's, of course, almost impossible to really imagine how things will look as we gaze back at the past from the future. It's intriguing to contemplate. Klosterman consults lots of his favorite armchair philosophers about these questions and the result is this little book.

Why, then, the average rating, you ask? I wish the book had considered more subjects than the few the author took on, for one thing. Also, what started out to be a fresh idea grew a bit tedious after a few chapters; honestly, what can we really know about the future? Of course, it is always possible that it was just me, and you may love this book to pieces. I hope you do.

I like the premise. It's a thought experiment that asks the question: How will the distant future remember the present. An early example is John Phillip Sousa. You might recognize the name as a renowned composer of marching music, heard at countless high school football games. Chances are you couldn't name a second marching music composer despite it being a prevalent musical form in the late 19th century. He's the single placeholder for an entire genre.

200 years from now who will be the name that represents rock? Arguments could be made for Elvis vs Dylan vs Chuck Berry. What do these choices say about how the future will understand rock? How about the seminal book of the millennium? The TV show that will be of interest to future anthropological study? Is it inevitable that football will cease to exist?

Like I said interesting questions, but ultimately as Chuck admits, everyone who reads the book will be long dead before finding out how horribly wrong or uncannily right he ends up being. Would have been a super interesting long form magazine piece. Bit of a stretch for a book.

I typically describe Klosterman as the authorial equivalent of “fridge logic” - really interesting stuff in the moment that starts to logarithmically decay the moment you close the book until it settles in around 50 percent of where it started from. But, given that Klosterman often succeeds in nimbly managing previously less-explored areas of your mind, this is not at all a bad thing.

BWWW is a series of thought experiments that attempts to examine modern life through the same lens we view the distant past: What is likely to survive, what artist or author will emerge to represent his or her medium as Platonic ideal (for example, were we in Ancient Greece Klosterman might be telling you that this Plato guy that no one's heard of [at the time] might make it big because he's not as popular now).

As thought experiments, they're mostly interesting but even more so than traditional futurology, it suffers by virtue of being unprovable and contrarian. I don't even think most of them are wrong - all at the very least have inner threads of logic that seem more or less resilient when you tug at them. But my mind can only be so elastic, and building up one brain-stretcher upon another leaves me weary, and accepting of arguments if only to prevent defeat by them - not out of any real consideration or judgment.

Then again, I'm not sure the specific arguments were the point, anyway. The main takeaway seems to center around the idea of being open to new ideas - not in the traditional sense of “maybe I should do something different” but “maybe ideas or formulations I possess that are central to my understanding of reality might be completely wrong.” The point is not to run screaming in the streets, tearing out your hair and warning everyone you meet of their inevitable doom. It's to leave space in the your mind (and in the world) for possibility, to not let things go unexamined simply because they're familiar or widely accepted. Interrogate reality, so that you might make sure there's no unreality simply cloaking itself in the veil of normality.

But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong, too.

Interesting premise, but despite spreading himself thin, ranging from science to rock music, politics to television, he doesn't have much more to say beyond what's encapsulated in the title: we might be wrong in our current thinking.