More dread than hope

A Pulitzer Prize-winning critic looks at whether the current surge of the outsider is smashing old norms for the worse.

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The arrival of the Gutenberg printing press in the late Middle Ages may have been good for literacy but it was bad for witches. It hastened the Age of Reason but it was also the ideal vehicle for what we today call misinformation, chiefly in printing bestselling treatises on demonology - which led to the 15th-century craze for witch-hunting.

"The same forces that eventually spurred the Renaissance initially sped up the distribution of superstition," notes Michiko Kakutani in her new book, The Great Wave.

It is a neat summary of her thesis that the modern world, especially post-Covid, Donald Trump-dominating America, is being churned by a series of new ways of thinking and doing, like those wrought by the Gutenberg printing press five centuries ago. But while the ideas may be put to good use by humanity in the future, they are currently wrecking institutions and spreading chaos.

Kakutani, the New York Times' chief book critic until 2017 and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, has tackled a similar subject before. In 2018, she attempted to make some sense of the former president's persistent lying, in The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.

Her focus now is on how a confluence of issues has led to the rise to power of outsiders, smashing the old norms. This can be good - marginalised groups such as immigrants, women and, in the US, African-Americans - are redefining politics and culture. But equally, Trump, white nationalists and far-right authoritarian regimes have created turmoil and used their outsider status to gain power. Everyone loves an outsider, she argues.