But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

  For a time, GQ magazine ran a monthly film column called “Canon Fodder,” where a writer would examine a relatively contemporary movie and assert that it deserves to be considered a classic. Now, this was not exactly a groundbreaking approach to criticism. It’s been attempted forever. But the concept still bothered people, mostly for the way the writer, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, framed her mission in the debut essay about Terminator 2: “It’s an obligation that every generation must take upon itself in order for art to thrive: tear down what’s come before and hail our own accomplishments as good enough . . . Let’s be untethered from history, ignore the tug of the familiar, and resolve that any movie made before, say, 1986 has received its due respect and move on . . . History does not inform the value of a film; you need never see a stylized Godard flick or Cary Grant comedy to understand the enthralling power of Fargo or Independence Day. Movies are a mass art and everyone should have opinions on them regardless of if they’ve seen The Deer Hunter or not.”

  As a premise for a magazine column, this is fine, outside of the suggestion that Independence Day isn’t complete dog shit. It has been pointed out to me (on two separate occasions) that it seems like something a younger version of myself might have written and believed. But the reason it annoyed certain serious (and self-serious) film consumers was the militancy of the tone, which might have been accidental (although I doubt it). It projects a heavy “You’re doing it wrong” vibe. The proposal is not that some modern movies are also as good as those defined by prehistoric criteria, but that there is an “obligation” to reinvent the way cinematic greatness is considered. On the surface, it might seem like deliberately ignoring history and focusing on the merit of newer movies would increase our ability to think about the art form. But it actually does the opposite. It multiplies the avenues for small thoughts while annihilating the possibility for big ones. The easiest, most obvious example is (once again) Citizen Kane. Could it be argued that Citizen Kane has been praised and pondered enough, and that maybe it’s time to move on to other concerns? Totally. But doing so eliminates a bunch of debates that will never stop being necessary. Much of the staid lionization of Citizen Kane revolves around structural techniques that had never been done before 1941. It is, somewhat famously, the first major movie where the ceilings of rooms are visible to the audience. This might seem like an insignificant detail, but—because no one prior to Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland had figured out a reasonable way to get ceilings into the frame—there’s an intangible, organic realism to Citizen Kane that advances it beyond its time period. Those visible ceilings are a meaningful modernization that twenty-first-century audiences barely notice. It’s an advance that raises a whole series of questions: Was it simply a matter of time before this innovation was invented, or did it have to come specifically from Toland (and would it have happened without the specific visual vision of Orson Welles)? And in either case, does the artist who invents something deserve a different level of credit from those who employ that invention later, even if they do so in a more interesting way? Is originality more or less important than we pretend?

  Certainly, movies can be critically considered without worrying about these abstractions, just as they can be critically considered without any consideration over the visibility of ceilings. A writer can design whatever obstructions or limitations she desires. But when you do that, you’re not really writing about canonical ideas (which wouldn’t be a problem, except that this was the premise of the column).

  I don’t want to pop this too hard, because—having written for glossy magazines (including thousands of words for GQ)—I know how this process works. I assume the goal here was to create a film column that immersed itself in movies the mag’s audience had directly experienced, so a high-minded reason was constructed to explain why this was being done (and the explanation for that reason was amplified to create a sense of authority). In a completely honest world, the column would have been titled “Here Are Movies We Arbitrarily Want to Write About.” But I note it because this particular attempt illustrates a specific mode of progressive wisdom: the conscious decision to replace one style of thinking with a new style of thinking, despite the fact that both styles could easily coexist. I realize certain modes of thinking can become outdated. But outdated modes are essential to understanding outdated times, which are the only times that exist.

  [3]My DVR automatically records The McLaughlin Group every weekend. It airs on Sunday morning in New York, but I tend to watch it on Tuesday or Wednesday night, depending on my desire for escapism. I started watching The McLaughlin Group in 1986, as a high school freshman. I’ve never really stopped. This is a syndicated public affairs program hosted by John McLaughlin, a man who’s currently eighty-nine years old and may not be alive by the time this book is published. But I certainly hope he’s still around. I want him in my life. There are few things that give me as much low-stakes pleasure as his weekly TV show. The program bills itself as a political roundtable featuring the “sharpest minds,” the “best sources,” and the “hardest talk.” All three of these statements are patently false, though it’s hard to isolate which detail is the most untrue, particularly since “best sources” is willfully unclear70 and “hardest talk” is wholly ambiguous in any non-pornographic context. The content is ostensibly about Beltway gossip, but it’s much closer to wide-angle political science for semi-informed lunatics. My wife refers to The McLaughlin Group as The Yelling Hour, which is technically incorrect twice—the show is only thirty minutes. But it probably feels like an hour to her.

  I cannot overstate the degree to which I love The McLaughlin Group. It’s not merely older and weirder than the other political shows it inadvertently spawned—it’s culturally (and structurally) ancient, and at least three times more entertaining than every show on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN combined. I love it so much that I convinced Esquire magazine to let me write a reported column about the production of the show in 2008, the only time in my journalistic career I pitched a story solely to meet the personalities involved. In theory, The McLaughlin Group is supposed to be a panel of two conservatives and two liberals, with McLaughlin as the clearheaded moderator. But this doesn’t translate, since (a) clearheaded McLaughlin was a speechwriter for Nixon, (b) one of the alleged liberals is often billionaire media mogul Mort Zuckerman, and (c) Pat Buchanan is on almost every single episode (and it would be impossible to find a public figure who’s as liberal as Buchanan is conservative, unless they suddenly hired Lena Dunham or Jello Biafra). To say The McLaughlin Group sometimes traffics in “outdated modes of thinking” is a little like saying Elon Musk sometimes “expresses interest in the future.” But this roundtable forces me to think about things I normally ignore—and not so much about politics, but about the human relationship to time.

  The McLaughlin Group pre-tapes its episodes on Friday afternoon. But they tape the show that runs during Thanksgiving weekend much further in advance, which means they have to ignore pressing current events (since something critical or catastrophic could transpire in the days between the taping and the broadcast). Holiday episodes focus on conceptual issues that move slow. In 2015, one of the evergreen Thanksgiving topics was the future of space exploration, specifically as it pertains to the discovery of water on Mars and what that means for NASA. Listening to McLaughlin and Buchanan (who was seventy-seven at the time) debate the conditions of outer space made me feel like my TV had transmogrified into a time machine. My living room became a South Boston dive bar from 1952. It wasn’t that they were necessarily wrong about the things they were saying; it was more that even the things they were correct about seemed like points no modern adult would possibly employ in a televised argument. Buchanan kept stressing how all the distant celestial stars are actually alien versions of our own sun, as if this realization was some controversial, game-changing theory. McLaughlin briefly conducted a semantic argument with himself about the correlation between the word “universe” and the word “universal.” T
hey could have just as easily debated the future of centaurs. And what I thought while I watched was this: At some point, if you live long enough, it’s probably impossible to avoid seeming crazy.

  I mean, disregard however you feel about McLaughlin’s and Buchanan’s politics—it’s not like these guys have spent the last sixty years in a cave. McLaughlin has a PhD in philosophy. Buchanan has a master’s degree in journalism and once received 450,000 votes for president. Moreover, they’ve both spent decades mainlining the news and talking about it on TV. They are part of the world, and they are well-paid to be engaged with it. But maybe the world simply changes too much for everyone. I sometimes suspect that—just after the Industrial Revolution—the ongoing evolution of society accelerated beyond the speed human consciousness could evolve alongside it. We superficially accept things that can’t be understood or internalized. My grandmother was born before the Wright Brothers’ virgin 852-foot flight and died after we’d gone to the moon so many times the public had lost interest. Everything in between happened within her lifetime. It might be unreasonable to expect any normal person to experience this level of constant change without feeling—and maybe without literally being—irrefutably nutzo. Consciously trying to keep up with what’s happening might actually make things worse.

  We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we’ve learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it’s that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

  [4]Like many little boys, I was maniacally obsessed with sports statistics, perhaps because I was a maniac. I collected copies of Sports Illustrated, but I cared about The Sporting News way more. I didn’t need pictures. I wanted numbers. I wanted to memorize those numbers and recalculate them, despite my palpable disinterest in actual math class. This, I now realize, was a product of my geography and caste. There was no local pro basketball team for most of my childhood, and we did not have cable television. The first nationally televised NBA game of the year would be the All-Star game, and the handful of games that came after always involved at least one of three teams (the Celtics, Lakers, or 76ers). I was able to see only two and a half pro football games a week: whoever the Vikings played at noon, whoever was nationally broadcast at three p.m. (usually the Cowboys), and the first half of the Monday-night contest (because I went to bed at ten p.m.). My relationship to pro sports was mostly built through reading the newspaper, particularly by staring at statistics and imaging how those numbers must have been complied, often by players I would see only once or twice a year. Throughout childhood, I believed statistics were underappreciated by other people. I was obsessed with athletes who I believed deserved to be more famous, based on their statistical production (James Wilder of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Lafayette “Fat” Lever of the Denver Nuggets, Eddie Murray of the Baltimore Orioles). When you’re a little kid, you feel an almost ethical obligation to root for whoever is best at whatever it is they happen to do; all little kids are bandwagon front-runners. I felt the adult world was wrong about how they gauged athletic greatness, and that many complicated questions regarding the relative value of various superstars could be easily answered by looking at the Tuesday edition of USA Today and comparing one column of digits against another column of digits, even though every announcer on TV seemed to incessantly suggest the opposite. Statistics, my father and Dick Stockton often reminded me, do not tell the real story (and players obsessed with statistics lack integrity).

  It has been bizarre—and a little depressing—to see how the culture has inverted itself on this particular issue. There is now a limitless volunteer army of adults who resemble vitriolic versions of my twelve-year-old self. The explosion of analytics has reinvented the way people are supposed to think about sports, even if they don’t have any desire to think differently about anything at all. It’s way beyond “You’re Doing It Wrong.” It’s more like “How the Fuck Can You Not See That Tobias Harris Is More Efficient Than Carmelo Anthony You Illiterate Fucking Moron Who Is So Obviously Doing It Wrong.” There’s simply no prick like a math prick in a sports bar. But those sophisticated pricks are, of course, almost71 always right, at least about measurable events that (a) have happened in the past or (b) will happen repeatedly ten thousand times in the future. The numeric nature of sports makes it especially well suited for precise, practical analytics. I fully understand why this would be of interest to people who own teams, to coaches looking for an edge, to team executives in charge of balancing a franchise’s payroll, and (particularly) to gamblers. It’s less clear why this is of interest to normal fans, assuming they watch sports for entertainment.

  My adolescent obsession with statistics came from not being able to see enough sports, in the same way so many sci-fi writers began as kids who longed to be astronauts. Statistics were a way to imagine games that weren’t there. But now there is no game that isn’t there. Sometimes there are four televised college football games on a random Thursday evening. I can watch them all, and I watch them to be surprised. Sports are among the increasingly rare moments of totally unscripted television. The human element informs everything, in confounding and inconsistent ways. And since these are only games, and since all games are ultimately exhibitions, the stakes are always low. Any opinion is viable. Any argument can be made. It’s a free, unreal reality. Yet everything about the trajectory of analytics pushes us away from this. The goal of analytics is to quantify the non-negotiable value of every player and to mathematically dictate which strategic decisions present the highest likelihood of success; the ultimate goal, it seems, would be to predict the exact score of every game before it happens and to never be surprised by anything. I don’t see this as an improvement. The problem with sports analytics is not that they are flawed; the problem is that they are accurate, to the benefit of almost no one. It’s being right for the sake of being right, in a context where there was never any downside to being wrong.

  The fact that my twelve-year-old self would have loved this only strengthens my point.

  [5]“But isn’t that the whole point of this exercise?” you might ask yourself, almost as if I have temporarily rented an apartment inside your skull. “If we won’t be alive in a hundred or three hundred or a thousand years, what difference will it make if we’re unknowingly wrong about everything, much less anything? Isn’t being right for the sake of being right pretty much the only possible motive for any attempt at thinking about today from the imagined vantage point of tomorrow? If it turns out that the citizens of 2216 have forgotten the Beatles while remembering the Butthole Surfers, what difference will that make to all the dead people from the twentieth century who never saw it coming? If someone eventually confirms that gravity is only an entropic force, it’s not like concrete blocks from the 1920s would retroactively float. The only reason to speculate about the details of a distant future is for the unprovable pleasure of being potentially correct about it now.”

  Here again, my twelve-year-old self would likely agree. There is, however, more than one way to view this. There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience. But 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.

  Over the past ten years, there’s been a collective reassessment of the octopus (this has been happening in the science community since the 1950s, but it didn’t become something civilians adopted until much more recently). We now realize that octopi can do amazing things, desp
ite a limited three-year life span that doesn’t provide much time for learning. They can open jars and latches. They can consider the practicality of foreign objects and test how such objects could be used to their benefit. At the Seattle Aquarium in 2015, it was reported that an octopus tried to systematically escape from its own aquarium, prompting a (subsequently debunked)72 clickbait story headlined “Shocking Claim: Scientists Think Octopuses Might Be Aliens After Studying Their DNA.” There’s growing evidence that the octopus is far more intelligent than most people ever imagined, partially because most people always assumed they were gross, delicious morons. Yet this new evaluation is still conducted through a myopically human lens. We classify the octopus as intelligent because of its ability to do human things, based on the accepted position that we are the most intelligent species on Earth. What’s harder to comprehend is the intelligence of an octopus in a world where they are more intelligent than we are.