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 best-selling treatises on demonology which led to the 15th century craze for witch-hunting.
Michiko Kakutani Photo: Mark Seliger
"The same forces that eventually spurred the Renaissance initially sped up the distribution of superstition," says Michiko Kakutani in her new book, The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider.
It is a neat summary of her thesis that the modern world, especially the post-Covid Trump-dominated America, is being churned by a series of 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 former 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 then President Donald Trump's persistent lying, in The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.
Her focus now is how a confluence of issues has led to the rise to power of outsiders, smashing the old norms. This can be good - marginalised groups like immigrants, women and, in America, African-Americans - are redefining politics and culture. But, equally, Donald Trump, white nationalists and far-right authoritarian regimes have created turmoil and used their outsider status to gain power. Everyone loves an outsider, she said.
Photo: Penguin Random House
"The crisis is embodied in the person of the twice-impeached, four-times-inducted former president Donald Trump, who tried to overturn the 2020 election and incited a violent insurrection against the government."
Kakutani, the critic, uses a lot of art and literature examples to illustrate the clash.
To her, it is like a duel between the subject of Yeats' Second Coming - "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold " - and Joe Biden's favourite poem, Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy - "Once in a life-time/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up/And hope and history rhyme."
More pertinently, she sprinkles her book with the woodcuts of the 19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai whose wood-block series of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji included some blocks illustrating zen-like calm but also The Great Wave woodcut (also known as Under the Wave of Kanagawa), one of the most reproduced images, of a terrifying surging wave destroying all it hits.
"It is an image that embodies the feelings of dread and hope that come with swift, unpredictable change," writes Kakutani.
She charts the hope, but the book is mainly dread.
At the heart of the book is the American fascination with outsiders. In politics, that has given rise to leaders as diverse as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama running as Washington outsiders - "though none as dangerous as norm-busting conmen like Donald Trump", says Kakutani.
Entertainment celebrates outsiders from renegades like Marlon Brando to Tony Soprano, or Omar Little of The Wire. Kakutani argues that the America of The Wire, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad is a country where dreams are running aground, a place of disappointment and struggle for the poor and middle class. "Lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end," Tony Soprano tells his therapist. "The best is over."
That meant fertile ground for Trump. Whereas other outsider politicians still routinely invoked the future of America, he ran on a promise to "Make America Great Again", Kakutani says. A promise to turn back the clock to when men made the rules, and immigrants were at the margins, she says.
The power of the message came from the fact few other countries have been so invested in the outsider stereotype, reaching back to westerns and the frontier myth - and that it keeps emerging during times of social and economic crises. A man of the people arises to oppose entrenched and oppressive political elites.
When The Great Wave was published last month in the US, it immediately attracted some scathing reviews. The critic found herself heavily criticised.
Slate magazine ran a lengthy review under the headline "How did the former New York Times book critic get so bland?", calling the book disheartening, lacking literary flair and bad. The Wall Street Journal went further, calling out its cultural partisanship (progressive activism good, conservative activism bad) as a "sneering, snobbish little exercise" and labeling it a "flat-out dud".
Landing here, this little book doesn't come with the weight of Kakutani's New York literary baggage. It is not as bad as painted, though not as good as one would hope. It is a quick read on important topics. The drawback is it is not as interesting as it thinks it is.
Anyone who has kept up with the latest news will have encountered all the issues Kakutani raises, in spades. There's Trump, Musk, abortion rights, Supreme Court decisions, mis- and disinformation, witter, racism, state rights, Black Lives Matter and so on.
The Great Wave reads like a synthesis of modern maladies, a kind of Coles Notes for the 2020s, rather than an analysis. In fact, there are 85 pages of notes for 190 pages of text. The problem is that while The Great Wave is wide-ranging, there are few new insights to transform these summaries. Chapters, having charted an issue, seem to come to a sudden halt without any fresh perceptions or ideas of what humanity could do to resist the problems.
When in the final pages, Kakutani does offer a few suggestions, these, too, are largely a synthesis of current actions. She approves of moves to combat misinformation like the European Union's moves to force social media platforms to better police comments or Finland's school level teaching on media literacy.
Kakutani argues more changes could be made to US laws to ensure no repeat of the 6 January insurrection, and American political parties should dial down the volume of partisanship, especially in this year's presidential election.
It seems like a forlorn hope.
Michiko Kakutani's The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider is published by Penguin Random House