De/Construction

I listened to two podcasts recently, both of which remarked on the present tendency to tear down ideas, rather than create new ones. I've seen these tendencies. A line of thought sees "cancel culture" as a force carving great swathes through intellectual society. Psychological changes are made en-masse via technologies made possible by the smartphone. Is the zeitgeist a destructive force? Will marketplaces of ideas become battlegrounds of the mind?

Enlightenment

💡 Here I consider mostly Europe, but perhaps there are non-European centric stories that may shed light.

The printing press created the capability to produce books in greater volume and variety than ever before. Indirectly, this enabled the greatest social, technological, and epistemological changes that humans had undergone in a millennia. As the variety of books in circulation increased, people encountered an ever larger set of ideas concerning religion, history, science, poetry, art, etc.

The ideological powerspace (that had for a thousand years remained relatively stable) wobbled. Many peoples who had lived in relative stability were suddenly, depending on your perspective, radicalised or enlightened. The primacy of religion at the time should not be understated, and ideological conflict often centred around God, Jesus, and Church. Who had the authority to make claims about the divine?

Institutions asserted their power in an attempt to stabilise social structures. The Catholic Church provided a list of prohibited books (the Index Librorum Prohibitorum). As the protestant reformation took hold in Europe, both sides fought for the hearts and minds (and souls) of their flocks. The printing press proved perhaps more powerful than the musket. Ultimately there were centuries of unrest that followed the invention of the printing press, and perhaps even with hindsight, such chaos was unavoidable. The social and epistemic structures that existed prior were incapable of constraining people with access to such variety and volume of ideas.

Modernity

We live today in a world just recently exposed to a new printing press, known synonymously as "the internet", "the web", "social media", "facebook" etc. It's direct consequences bear similarity to those of the printing press: democratisation of content production, and an increase in the volume and variety of content. It remains to be seen whether the differences between the press and the internet are fundamental, or just of scale. The scale of the internet is orders of magnitude greater than the press. While millions of people would eventually be published in books, and hundreds of millions became readers, in 2023 Facebook has 2 billion daily active users. Books had originally only text (like Tweets), while apps are multimedia experiences that blend into the real world via shopping sites, dating apps, VR and more. All this in only ~5 decades of internet. We have only just begun to observe the longer term consequences.

The much unloved term "cancel culture" captures something of the modern conflict. Universities serve as hosts of frontier wars. Today, as in 16th century Europe, it is easier to destroy your rivals than to build something new. Today, we can barely agree on basic facts. Organisations build reports on cancel culture, while others claim it doesn't even exist. Regardless of your position, it's emblematic of a conflict that cuts to the root of our belief systems. If we live in the age of "post-truth", it is because we have killed it.

The unanswered question is whether we are entering a new age of ideological conflict, as inevitable as what followed the invention of the printing press.