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
Best thing I’ve read this year.
The premise is pretty simple. Basically, Klosterman spends most of a book…not PROVING that we’re wrong about just about everything, but asking questions that make us think, “If I step outside myself for a second, I COULD be wrong.”
You’d be amazed the places he goes with this. He starts with fucking gravity! STARTS with. Not proving that gravity is nonexistent as we experience it, but that it may be an emergent force, which is a force that results from other things and therefore isn’t its own force. Does that make any goddamn sense? He’s better at this than I am. That’s why I give his book 5 stars and mine 3. Plus, his covers look better. Plus, everything else besides his covers and clarity is also better.
I have some favorite parts, but I’m going to limit myself to one because I could be here all damn day.
I have to do this one because this is a point of personal passion for me, and I think Klosterman expresses something really important about the first amendment:
“There is no amendment more beloved, and it’s the single most American sentiment that can be expressed. Yet its function is highly specific. It stops the government from limiting a person or an organization’s freedom of expression (and that’s critical, particularly if you want to launch an especially self-righteous alt weekly or an exceptionally lucrative church or the rap group N.W.A.). But in a capitalist society, it doesn’t have much application within any scenario where the government doesn’t have a vested interest in what’s being expressed. If someone publishes an essay or tells a joke or performs a play that forwards a problematic idea, the US government generally wouldn’t try to stop that person from doing so, even if they could. If the expression doesn’t involve national security, the government generally doesn’t give a shit. But if enough vocal consumers are personally offended, they can silence that artist just as effectively. They can petition advertisers and marginalize the artist’s reception and economically remove that individual from whatever platform he or she happens to utilize, simply because there are no expression-based platforms that don’t have an economic underpinning. It’s one of those situations where the practical manifestation is the opposite of the technical intention: As Americans, we tend to look down on European countries that impose legal limitations on speech, yet as long as speakers in those countries stay within the specified boundaries, discourse is allowed relatively unfettered (even when it’s unpopular). In the US, there are absolutely no speech boundaries imposed by the government, so the citizenry creates its own limitations, based on the arbitrary values of whichever activist group is most successful at inflicting its worldview upon an economically fragile public sphere. As a consequence, the United States is a safe place for those who want to criticize the government but a dangerous place for those who want to advance unpopular thoughts about any other subject that could be deemed insulting or otherwise. Some would argue that this trade-off is worth it. Time may prove otherwise.”
Yes. Thank you.
There’s this thing that people say. “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequence.”
I really hate that saying. Because if there are consequences for speech, then what part of it is free, exactly? Are you just reaffirming that you don’t have the ability to physically stop a person from saying something? You’re telling me that you’re not Beetlejuice?
God, I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to use this GIF. I need to use a Beetlejuice GIF in everything. And also, I need to not say his name again in this review, lest I call him forth.
But anyway, are we saying that once unappreciated words leave a person’s mouth, as long as we act within the law, it’s game on to bring down whatever consequences we can? Because that’s not freedom of expression at all. That’s freedom of thought. Once the thought is expressed, it’s subject to some pretty heavy restrictions.
I can write a blog about how I think my boss is stupid (I don’t), and I can be fired for that. And if I DID get fired for that, people would blame me, not for thinking my boss is stupid (because my guess is 90% of people have expressed this), but for saying it. Off work time, not using work tools, I’m still an idiot for saying how I feel in the medium of my choosing.
I agree with Klosterman, it may be worse to have non-delineated consequences for non-specific types of speech than to have what appear to be restrictive laws. If the law makes some specifications, I can knowingly violate those and accept the consequences, or I can choose to operate within them and stay safe.
In the US, you don’t have that option. If you say something that makes an individual or group upset, they may not be able to put you in jail, but they could certainly attack your personal life, your livelihood, just about anything they wanted to. This has happened many, many times, and I encourage you to check out Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed to find out more about just how devastating this type of consequence can be and how uneven and disproportionate its application is.
Frankly, I think what’s fair and just is for everyone to know the rules. It’s fair to pull me over for speeding when the limit is posted.
And the other thing, who the fuck died and made you the decider of what consequences a person deserves for pissing you off? And why did they have to die to make you in charge? Where were you at the time of the murder/coup? Seems like you had something to gain from the untimely demise of this unnamed individual who was formerly in charge. I have a lot of questions for you, buddy, and I think you should probably answer some of them before you get all high and mighty.
In all seriousness, I really dislike that we tout our freedom of speech when, in reality, the freedom is in your freedom to express things within parameters. You’re free to say whatever you want as long as you’re polite, considerate, on the right side of current events, and as long as you don’t say something about someone who can fire you. Or you can be independently wealthy and above any significant consequence in terms of your ability to get and keep a gig. Of course, as with most rules, freedom of expression applies most to rich people. Go figure.
I feel, and I feel very strongly, that the right path is not to limit speech, whether we do that by participating in retweeting or blasting people with fire hoses, but to create more speech in opposition to the things we don’t like. Not to ask for removal of or apologies for expression, creating what we assume to be a vacuum that we assume will SURELY be occupied by something good and wonderful and acceptable, but to instead skip straight to creating the good and wonderful thing that would occupy the space directly adjacent to what we find distasteful. When it comes to books and art and movies and tweets, space is something we’ve got in spades. Trust me, I took a grad level class on information storage and retrieval, a field that, in the digital realm, is all about the ability to classify and locate things within an infinite space. There is no limit to the quantity of space we have for art and for expression anymore. The only limit is the one we put on, the limit of what we see as quality, but is more accurately boiled down to what we do and don’t “like.”
Klosterman said it better, of course:
“…there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder. It’s good to view reality as beyond our understanding, because it is. And it’s exciting to imagine the prospect of a reality that cannot be imagined, because that’s as close to pansophical omniscience as we will ever come. If you aspire to be truly open-minded, you can’t just try to see the other side of an argument. That’s not enough. You have to go all the way.”
I could be wrong. After reading this book, I could definitely be wrong.
And I could be wrong in thinking that limiting speech is not ultimately a good thing. I’ve been wrong about things before. I listened to ska music. A lot.
My perspective on it is just that we’ve tried it this way. We’ve tried to let faceless citizens decide what is and isn’t acceptable speech. And it’s worked, sort of, and it’s not worked, sort of. And so, if we try it another way, the likely result is that it will ALSO sort of work and sort of not work.
But if we have a larger variety to choose from, a 31 flavors, if you will, as opposed to the single pint of ice cream in the fridge, I can make a choice. I can consume the flavors I like, or I can try out a new flavor, or I can be crazy, say fuck off to that pink tester spoon and get a whole scoop of something that turns out to be Mint Chocolate Chip, by which I mean a flavor lots of people love and I’m not crazy about.
And yes, there’s a risk. Some disaffected youth working at 31 Flavors might cross-contaminate a flavor I love with some bullshit flavor, and once in a while I’ll get a taste of something I don’t care for. Perhaps I’ll become sick because I ate a bit of something I’m allergic to.
But ultimately, my dislike of a flavor doesn’t remove that flavor’s right to exist, and doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not someone else might enjoy that flavor.
I say, with full knowledge I could be totally wrong, that if you don’t like any of the 31 flavors, your answer is not to ask that the store remove a flavor in hopes they’ll replace it with something you love. It’s to ask them to get 32 flavors.
Please note that this analogy does not apply in any way to that pink ice cream with the bubble gum bits in it. That’s vile. That’s like dipping your Bubble Tape into a glass of milk before chewing.