But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just Think Apocalypse

The trouble with ideals is that they become less than ideal almost as soon as they’re stated. When we articulate them, to ourselves or others, we subject them to reflection and discussion. We immediately learn something that makes us want to change, refine or amend them. But our emerging commitments to these ideals inhibit any change in direction. Who wants to be considered flighty or lacking in serious thought?

It’s not just ideals of course. Our preferences, our expectations, our intellectual conclusions, our concepts, as well as our prejudices are never stable. At least they shouldn’t be because this is what we call learning. But do we really want to learn anything that inhibits our progress toward an objective, no matter how obsolete it might have become?

Learning, then, is problematic. But not because of lack 0f experience or incompetence. The traditional locus of the issue of learning is that of formulating the rules for identifying valid chunks of knowledge. This is the domain of epistemology - how do we know what we know? Epistemology is an area of study that has been given a great deal of attention, both philosophical and practical, without much result. We still don’t know how to tell the difference between news and fake news.

But there is another, rather ignored, aspect of the process of learning that may be much more significant than epistemology. Learning, all learning whether in science, literature, the arts, politics, ethics, or just understanding how a new computer functions, undermines, relativises, and often negates everything previously learned. When physicists latched onto Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, it took decades for many of them to unlearn what they knew about their trade, for example.

There is no word, no concept, no technique (except perhaps psychotherapy) that I know of which addresses the dramatic adverse consequences of learning. Yet it is clear that learning, when it occurs, can indeed be traumatic. And where it doesn’t occur it is often due to the anticipatory fear of this very trauma. Some part of our psyche knows just what we’re in for if we let go of any number of established truths we rely on for mental balance. I suspect, given the overwhelming publicly available evidence to the contrary, that this is what’s going on in the heads of American Republicans. To admit that they’ve made commitments to a self-avowed con man is more than their fragile minds can manage.

In other words, obdurate ignorance can be a very purposeful activity. And not just for Trumpists. To accept the possibility, no the certainty, that literally everything we know, and likely take for granted, will be shown to be bogus at some time in the future - perhaps by ourselves but most certainly by others - is disconcerting at least, and devastating to some. Yet many continue to believe that things like facts, evidence, rationality will convince others to adopt a conclusion or a point of view. Ain’t gonna happen. Far to scary.

In any case, at least one school of philosophy (to which I subscribe) has it that true facts will only emerge in that moment just before the extinction of all thinking creatures, that is to say, the human species or its replacements on the planet. At thst moment everything that can be known will be known. Facts will have verified and truth revealed. Before that climactic moment epistemology is a dead end.

Unfortunately, of course, no one will be able to appreciate the epistemological breakthrough at that apocalyptic moment. And we are utterly unable to predict or anticipate what the final truth(s) might be. This, of course, makes the threat of our current tentativeness in all forms of knowledge even greater. We will never know the truth despite our frantic investment in inquiry. All our inquiry will ultimately fail. Isn’t it safer, certainly more comfortable, to just ignore those loonies who go on about climate change, fascist threats, and lack of public education?

Our fear of learning is humiliating. Of course it is. And every previous generation would have felt the same about what they knew. Yet we know they were wrong in every area of knowledge from physics to what constitutes good fiction to how to parent children. If nothing else history shows that future generations will perceive our level of knowledge, our tastes, and our methods (for literally everything, including learning) as passé at best but more likely downright silly.

Accepting that what we think we know is always wrong is like previous generations accepting that the earth isn’t flat or that is not the centre of the universe and is moving at tremendous speed, not through a hypothetical ether but through a field of space-time which itself is warping as we pass through it. Next year’s science may have us wrapped up in x-dimensional strings.

The futility of learning will not stop us from learning. We are, for better or worse, inquiring animals. Perhaps it is language which provokes us to find just the right language about ourselves and the world. Or perhaps it is desire to get beyond language entirely in the hope of discovering what we casually call reality.

What is certain is that recognising what we know now is wrong, will accelerate learning. It might also make less arrogant, obdurate, and pig-headed. My wife has convinced me that this is the only way to live long ago.

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