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

Today's nonfiction post is on But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman. It is 262 pages long and is published by Blue Rider Press. The cover is white with the title in black. The intended reader is someone who is interested in modern philosophy. There is some mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there’s nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure—until, of course, they don’t.
But What If We’re Wrong? visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who'll perceive it as the distant past. Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (or—weirder still—widely known, but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible that we “overrate” democracy? And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we’ve reached the end of knowledge?
Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, But What If We’re Wrong? is built on interviews with a variety of creative 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, among others—interwoven with the type of high-wire humor and nontraditional analysis only Klosterman would dare to attempt. It’s a seemingly impossible achievement: a book about the things we cannot know, explained as if we did. It’s about how we live now, once “now” has become “then.”

Review- This is an interesting book grabbling with modern history and how our modern world will be seen in the future. Klosterman is a pop culture essayist and he can get access to some of the greatest thinkers of our time and they will answer his questions. Klosterman questions television, sports, scientific theories, and philosophy. Of course he knows that all these questions are useless because whatever we imagine the future to be, it will be totally different. But that is also the point of the book, exploring that what we think we know is nothing like what we know in 50 or 100 or 5000 years. The writing is good, Klosterman is a master of the craft and makes the impossible question about how we think about anything in the far future. This book was an interesting exercise in thought and if you like modern philosophy, you should read this. 

I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.