But What If We're Wrong? (23 page)

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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 unclear
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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.” They
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).

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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, almost
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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.

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“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, despite 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)
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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.

This is an old problem, best answered (and maybe even solved) by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” For philosophy students, the essay is about the conflict between objectivity and subjectivity, and Nagel's exploration of a bat's consciousness was simply the example he happened to use. But the specifics of “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” are pertinent to the problem of personification. Nagel asks if it's possible for people to conceive what it's like to be a bat, and his conclusion is that it (probably) is not; we can only conceive what it would be like to be a human who was a bat.
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For example, bats use echolocation sonar to know what's in front of them (they emit a sound and listen for the returning echo). It's not difficult to imagine humans having echolocation sonar and how that would help us walk through a pitch-black room. That experience can be visualized. But what we can't understand is how that experience informs the consciousness of a bat. We can't even assess what level of consciousness a bat possesses, since the only available barometer for “consciousness” is our own. The interior life of a bat (or an octopus, or any nonhuman creature) is beyond our capacity. And as a society, we are comfortable with not knowing these things—although less comfortable than we were in (say) the nineteenth
century and much less comfortable than we were in (say) the fifteenth century. So imagine that this evolution continues. What would happen if we eventually concluded—for whatever collection of reasons—that our human definition of logic is an inferior variety of intelligence? Humans would still be the Earth's dominant life form, but for reasons that would validate our worst fears about humanity.