By Chuck Klosterman
New York Times bestselling writer Chuck Klosterman asks questions which are profound of their simplicity: How definite are we approximately our realizing of gravity? How definite are we approximately our realizing of time? what's going to be the defining reminiscence of rock track, years from this present day? How heavily should still we view the content material of our goals? How heavily may still we view the content material of tv? Are all activities destined for extinction? Is it attainable that the best artist of our period is at the moment unknown (or—weirder still—widely identified, yet completely disrespected)? Is it attainable that we “overrate” democracy? and maybe most annoying, is it attainable that we’ve reached the top of knowledge?
Klosterman visualizes the modern global because it will seem to these who'll understand it because the far away past. Kinetically slingshotting via a huge spectrum of goal and subjective difficulties, But What If We’re Wrong? is equipped on interviews with a number of inventive thinkers—George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, Amanda Petrusich, Ryan Adams, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater, between others—interwoven with the kind of high-wire humor and nontraditional research simply Klosterman may dare to aim. It’s a probably most unlikely success: a e-book in regards to the issues we won't recognize, defined as though we did. It’s approximately how we are living now, as soon as “now” has develop into “then.”
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Extra resources for But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Example text
And not “wrong” in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves. A Brief Examination as to Why This Book Is Hopeless (and a Briefer Examination as to Why It Might Not Be) The library in my sixth-grade classroom contained many books that no one ever touched. It did, however, include one book that my entire class touched compulsively: The Book of Lists. Published in 1977, The Book of Lists was exactly what it purported to be—521 pages of lists, presented by The People’s Almanac and compiled by three writers (David Wallechinsky, his sister Amy, and their father Irving).
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. “What ages [poorly], it seems, are ideas that trend to the clever, the new, or the merely personal,” Saunders continues. “What gets dated, somehow, is that which is too ego inflected—that hasn’t been held up against the old wisdom, maybe, or just against some innate sense of truth, and rigorously, with a kind of self-abnegating fervor.
Any anecdotal story about “floating toward a white light” or Shirley MacLaine’s past life on Atlantis or the details in Heaven Is for Real are automatically (and justifiably) dismissed by any secular intellectual. Yet this wholly logical position discounts the overwhelming likelihood that we currently don’t know something critical about the experience of life, much less the ultimate conclusion to that experience. There are so many things we don’t know about energy, or the way energy is transferred, or why energy (which can’t be created or destroyed) exists at all.
