One of my pandemic silver linings has been re-establishing a regular reading habit. I plan on recapping my reading in these short overviews, with quick summary information and quotes for anyone looking for their next book.

Published: 2017

Read: January 2021

Publisher Summary: But What If We’re Wrong? is a book of original, reported, interconnected pieces, which speculate on the likelihood that many universally accepted, deeply ingrained cultural and scientific beliefs will someday seem absurd. Covering a spectrum of objective and subjective topics, the book attempts to visualize present-day society the way it will be viewed in a distant future.

Genre: Culture

Rating: 8/10

Who Should Read This?

• People sure about everything
• People unsure about everything
• Amateur futurists and historians
• Other generally curious folks

Skimmable? No

Notable Quotables:

• When the prehistoric remains of a previously unknown predatory whale were discovered in Peru in 2010, the massive creature was eventually named Livyatan melvillei. A century after his death, Melville gets his own extinct super-whale named after him, in tribute to a book that commercially tanked.
• So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them.
• But in order for someone to argue in favor of any architect except Wright (or even to be in a position to name three other plausible candidates), that person would almost need to be an expert in architecture.  Normal humans don’t possess enough information to nominate alternative possibilities.  And what emerges from that social condition is an insane kind of logic: Frank Lloyd Wright is indisputably the greatest architect of the 20^th century, and only people who potentially disagree with that assertion are those who legitimately understand the question. History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.
• I imagine America as a chapter in a book, centuries after the country has collapsed, encapsulated by the casual language we use when describing foreboding failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588.  And what I imagine is a description like this: The invention of the country as described.  This country was based on a document, and the document was unassailable.  The document could be altered, but alterations were so difficult that it happened only 17 times in 200 years (and one of those changes merely retracted a previous alteration.) The document was less than 5000 words but applied unilaterally, even as the country dramatically increased its size and population and even though urban citizens in rarefied parts of the country had nothing in common with rural citizens living thousands of miles away.  The document’s prime directives were liberty and representation, even when 5 percent of the country’s population legally controlled 65 percent of the wealth.  But everyone loved this document, because it was concise and well composed and presented a possible utopia where everyone was the same.  It was so beloved that the citizens of this country decided they would stick with it no matter what happened or what changed, and the premise of discounting (or even questioning) its greatness became so verboten that any political candidate who did so would have no chance to be elected to any office above city alderman. The populace decided to use this same document forever, inflexibly and without apprehension, even if the country lasted for two thousand years. Viewed retrospectively, it would not seem stunning that this did not work out.
• Do I believe our current assumption about how the present will eventually be viewed is, in all probability, acutely incorrect? Yes.  And yet I imagine this coming wrongness to resemble the way society has always been wrong about itself, since the beginning of time.  It’s almost like I’m showing up at the Kentucky Derby and insisting the two-to-one favorite won’t win, but refusing to make any prediction beyond “The winner will probably be a different horse.”