The Klosterman Files : But What If We're Wrong? (2016)

Getting old goes a little bit like this: one day you wake up and no one gives a shit about what you love. The musicians, movies and authors who helped you become who you are become immediately and inexplicably uncool. Some of them become forsaken from collective memory. No one remembers who they even were. That is why old people become cranky. Culture doesn’t systematically bulldoze everything, though. Some art outlives entire generations.

In But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present as if it Were the Past, Chuck Klosterman is trying to map out what it is exactly what makes culture immortal.

The premise of this book is pretty straightforward: what are we going to remember from our era and how are we going to remember it? Because what we remember from the past probably isn’t what the past wanted us to remember from it either. Few details survive the test of time. Without looking on Google, do you remember who was the NBA MVP and 1975 and when you do look on Google (because you will), be honest: did you even remember he existed?

Right?

RIIIGHT?

Bob McAdoo was probably very important then. But forty-five years worth of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Dominique Wilking, Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Vince Carter and LeBron James make it seem like everything important happened in the NBA between 1984 and 2020. Whatever happened in 1975 seem prehistoric to us. Because we haven’t lived it and also because it was prior to the NBA becoming a global brand under commissioner David Stern.

That is just an example. In But What If We’re Wrong?, Klosterman examines every cultural aspect of how we live now and attempts to extrapolate if whether or not it’ll be important in 50 or 500 years. He goes over literature, music, television, sports and even science. Is our way of understanding how the world works going to be the same in 200 years? That question itself made for a pretty awkward conversation between Klosterman and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

What will be remembered

Although But What If We’re Wrong? is a very theoretical exercise, there are some takeaways. The main one is that commercial success is not an indicator of legacy. Most of the best-selling music of past eras is completely forgotten today. Chuck Klosterman gives many example, but few resonate like Hootie & the Blowfish Cracked Rearview Mirror selling sixteen times as many copies as the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street.

When your mom told you being popular wasn’t important, she was absolutely right. The most consistent indicator of legacy is countercultural power. Have you changed the way we think about life? No one remembers Hootie & The Blowfish today, but everyone still remembers Nirvana because they changed our relationship to music. They unwittingly created alternative rock, which would be a dominant cultural force for twenty fucking years or so.

Television is a slightly different animal, though. It is barely coming into its own as an art form, so there is very little historical perspective on its merits. The cultural game changer was The Sopranos, so it is going to be one remembered for a while. No series before The Sopranos were trying to basically be the long form equivalent of a well-written movie. It was not the best show, but it was the paradigm shifter and that’s what’s important.

Before The Sopranos, the cultural merit of television was to reflect our way of living. If you think about the fifties, what do you remember? Father Knows Best, right? If you think about the eighties or nineties, it’s probably some sitcom like Who’s the Boss? or Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Back then, cinema showed us heroes and superheroes and television reflected ourselves back to us. That is until The Sopranos came and changed the game.

What won’t be remembered

If there’s one important takeaway from But What If We’re Wrong?, it’s that historical perspective is inevitable and that it won’t anything to do with the perspective we have on ourselves now. Internet and social media have made it extremely difficult not to pass hasty judgement on people and situation. Professional athletes have it worse with Twitter, being buried and unburied with every playoff performance, but it applies to everything.

Our judgement is more ephemeral than it has ever been. That is because everyone is empowered to judge everything at any hour of the day. Twitter is a 24/7 service, so if you feel like making a Paul George sucks joke or shit on Donald Trump at 2 AM, you can do it and it will be recorded for as long as you don’t go and delete it yourself. But these have little to no objective value. The only value they have will be to judge you on if you become famous for something else.

None of our judgements will be remembered. What will transpire from our era will merely be that we started judging everything on social media and that we often turned these against ourselves. What will be remembered from our lifetimes are the events that changed society and although you feel empowered to do so because you have a public voice now, you are what has been changed. Your inspired social tirades are the new normal.

But What If We’re Wrong? is the most unique book Chuck Klosterman’s ever written. It is not as different from his others as I remember (it does drift into nerd pop culture talk a lot), but its epistemological angle make it a little darker than its predecessors: there is very little point in overanalyzing our culture if every take we come up with will be proven wrong by history. It’s a book that seriously argues for the fact that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously.