'The Revolt of the Public' is April’s Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award winner

Our media revolution has only been able to tear things down. We need to learn how to build.

We’re starting April strong with another Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award winner! In case you missed last month’s book review, it was about Abigail Shrier’s fantastic “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.” I can’t recommend it enough.

This month, we’re singing the praises of Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium” (first published in 2014, but here I'll be discussing the expanded 2018 edition). It was recommended to me by the great Kmele Foster, and it has had a profound effect on my thinking about the state of the world since I read it.

The book explains that the shifts in media technologies we believe accelerated American political polarization and wreaked havoc on young people’s mental health were actually part of a much larger global transformation that Gurri calls “The Fifth Wave.” Essentially, the empowerment of vast multitudes of people to communicate directly with the world and with each other has genuinely transformed society. Here’s some deeper insight into the concept from Gurri himself, via email to me:

The Fifth Wave refers to how information flows evolve: Not smoothly or evenly through history but in great pulses or waves, each of which helped determine a specific type of society. The invention of writing required rule by a Mandarin class; the alphabet made the classical republics possible; the printing press (surely the most disruptive of all) was necessary to the vast political and scientific revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; mass media helped educate, top down, the tens of millions who entered history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The digital dispensation is the fifth such pulse or wave. Despite all the claims I make for it in the book, we are still in the earliest stages of this transformation, which means that events can evolve in any number of different directions.

Unfortunately, in its current state, this media revolution has only been able to tear things down: institutions, ideas, and yes, even people (a.k.a. Cancel Culture). This idea is what Gurri calls “negation.” Here’s Gurri explaining further:

“Negation” comes from Hegel’s dialectical logic (which is mostly crap) but is better known through Marx and Engels who adapted that logic to the class struggle; thus the proletariat is the negation of the bourgeoisie, who had in turn been the negation of the feudal class.  In Marxist terms, it’s the complete overthrow of one class by another, by means of revolution. In my terms, it’s the complete repudiation of the system by the public, usually expressed through some aborted form of protest.  

I liken it to Justice Louis D. Brandeis’ old dictum that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Brandeis meant that transparency is a great way to root out falsity and corruption. However, if you were to focus all of the light of the sun on a single object, it would instantly be incinerated. That’s what I think is happening overall. Ideas, institutions, and people who are tested by maybe 50 rigorous minds and fact checkers will likely come out of the process with a sharper understanding of themselves and their work. But when the same ideas, institutions, or people are put under the (often merciless) scrutiny of millions, they’re likely doomed.

Gurri shows how this phenomenon manifested itself in the 2011 Arab Spring, and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. Gurri also argues that these movements generally were rich with targets — people, institutions, and ideas that needed to be torn down — but often very hesitant or unable to offer constructive solutions or realistic reforms. 

According to Gurri, this hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism in which nothing is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down:

If you push the negation of the system far enough without any interest in providing an alternative, you arrive at the proposition that destruction by itself is a form of progress. That’s how the term was used by Turgenev, who coined it in “Fathers and Sons.”

You can see this nihilism in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to Cancel Culture on both the right and the left — and to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by QAnon and other conspiracy theories.

One thing must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation: Very often, what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was based on some pretty thin evidence, bad assumptions, and sometimes not much more than the pieties of some elites. Understanding the crisis of authority as only being wrongfully destructive of expertise is to miss the fact that, frankly, we are often asking far too much of expertise and experts — and oversight itself has not been all that rigorous. 

Negation is indeed tearing things down that really needed to be torn down. The problem is that it seems to be taking everything else with it.

I have my issues with the book — I think Gurri is way too easy on Trump, for instance — but overall I think the big ideas Gurri is grappling with here are both profound and prophetic. One fertile area for thought begins with the fact that both Gurri and I believe in Nassim Taleb’s idea of “via negativa,” or knowledge by subtraction — which means, essentially, that our best methods for knowing things can only tell us what isn’t true and provide only a shifting outline of what is true.

This concept has interesting implications for negation, however. Couldn’t it be that this massive engine of negation we created could help us find better ideas, better institutions, and more reliable experts? Yes. But it will have to evolve quite a bit first, as the kind of argumentation considered legitimate both on social media and on campus needs to become more disciplined than it currently is.

Right now, discourse on social media platforms like X focuses way too much on personal characteristics and beliefs to decide what ideas are true. That is a classic fallacious ad hominem argument which has been re-legitimized on campus in a variety of forms and is now virtually taken for granted. In order for the massive engine of negation to be useful for the pursuit of knowledge, some ground rules, including “address the idea, not the person,” have to be re-established. My co-author Rikki Schlott and I outline this and many other proposed solutions in “The Canceling of the American Mind” precisely because this is such an important endeavor to undertake.

I am hopeful for this outcome in the long run — but it may be the very long run.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Here’s another clip from my conversation with the mighty John Cleese (my hero — who I first met while naked, by the way) about why we should make fun of dogmatism.

And stay tuned for the full video, premiering April 11 on FIRE’s YouTube!