Chuck Klosterman Asks: What If We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything?

The dress that broke the internet
Remember way back in February of 2015, when families were torn apart and marriages rent asunder over the color of somebody’s mom’s dress? A picture of the dress was posted on Twitter and we all spent weeks arguing whether the garment was black and blue or white and gold. Any two random people, living in the same broader culture and at the same moment in time, might have looked at the same picture and seen two very different things. (The debate came at a particularly difficult time: just a few months prior, a firestorm had erupted over the color of Marty’s poofy vest from Back to the Future. A vest which is, for the record, clearly orange and not red. So stop it.) Project these debates over time: Klosterman discusses Homer’s references to the wine-dark Aegean Sea, as well as the fact that, until Newton and Descartes, color was largely seen as the immutable property of an object rather than a function of reflected light. It rarely occurs to us that we might not be seeing the same thing when we talk about a particular color. Whether the reasons are cultural, linguistic, or physical, there’s every reason to believe that we’ll have a hard time even agreeing on terms with our descendants.
On the telly
More so than much of entertainment media, television seems particularly ephemeral. It’s been around for a while, but not nearly as long as books or music, and not even as long as motion pictures. Even the plain fact of television has changed dramatically over time: a family gathered around the tube in the ’50s, or even the ’90s, would probably be shocked by our on-demand culture, with hundreds of channels and multiple streaming services, screens that have transformed into enormous flat panels that hang on the wall, or might be small enough to fit in our pockets so we can annoy others by watching them on the train. Klosterman argues that it’s not merely the technology that will change, but what we value. As in other arts, it’s very difficult to predict what people looking back will find to treasure about what we’re watching. Tossed-off news broadcasts from our time are probably more likely to be of value to the people of the future than reruns of Arrested Development or Breaking Bad, proud of them as we may be. Who knows? Full House might as regarded as Moby Dick a few centuries hence.

Jurassic world
It would be super-duper cool if people of the future find out that we were wrong about dinosaurs being extinct. But that’s my hope, not Klosterman’s. In science, as in everything else, it’s impossible to know what we don’t know. Fewer than 30 years ago, scientific consensus had dinosaurs pegged as cold-blooded and generally lizard-y; we now know (or at least strongly believe, based on a greater base of knowledge) that the “thunder lizards” of the distant past were a lot more like warm-blooded birds. That’s a relatively minor correction compared to potential future upheavals in knowledge. Klosterman talks to Brian Greene (The Elegant Universe) about the growing acceptance of the possibility that our reality might be shaped by not one universe, but by many (possibly an infinite number) of universes. We’d like to believe that our modern scientific methods are more than up to the challenge of adapting to a completely new understanding of the multiverse, but we’ve thought such things before.
But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, by Chuck Klosterman, is available June 7.