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

We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached

The work itself is not above criticism, but no individual criticism has any impact; at this point, attacking Moby-Dick only reflects the contrarianism of the critic.

The national desire to reach the moon first was now a military concern (with a sociocultural subtext over which country was intellectually and morally superior). That accelerated the process dramatically.

What critics in the nineteenth century were profoundly wrong about was not the experience of reading this novel; what they were wrong about was how that experience would be valued by other people. Because that’s what we’re really talking about whenever we analyze the past.

In order to overcome such impossible odds and defeat the unrelenting ravages of time, the book has to offer more. It has to offer a window into a world that can no longer be accessed, insulated by a sense that this particular work is the best way to do so. It must do what Vonnegut requests—reflect reality. And this is done by writing about the thin

The cultural recession of rock is intertwined with its increased cultural absorption, which seems backward. But this is a product of its design.

So what we have is a youth-oriented musical genre that (a) isn’t symbolically important, (b) lacks creative potentiality, and (c) has no specific tie to young people.

The concept of success is personal and arbitrary, so classifying someone as the “most successful” at anything tends to reflect more on the source than the subject.

Before we can argue that something we currently appreciate deserves inclusion in the world of tomorrow, we must build that future world within our mind.