BET ON EMERGENCE.

Greg Lukianoff's "When you add billions of eyes to the problems of the world, the result is not just noise but incredible breakthroughs" has Friday short take potential, but for the instructive elaboration that follows.

Mr Lukianoff is a First Amendment fundamentalist, and he recently received an award from the Russell Kirk Center.  In the course of accepting the award, he offered a history lesson.

But if I’m being honest, there is one world leader who I can’t entirely blame for being frustrated with a press that ceaselessly hammered his personal life, his marriages, his affairs, his sometimes-reckless decision-making, his outsized libido, and even his weight.

I am, of course, talking about Henry VIII. And the “press” I’m referring to is, of course, the printing press.

Despite what is now a fairly well-known antagonism, Henry VIII actually started out as a huge fan of the printing press. In fact, the Catholic Church dubbed him the “Defender of the Faith” for his writing. (This, by the way, was a title he kept using after he turned on the Catholic Church. Honestly, kind of a baller move.)

But eventually, Henry turned against the widespread use of the printing press. Why? Because it was disruptive. It was destabilizing. It was dangerous.

I’m not kidding about that either. The printing press was dangerous, in many ways.

What Mr Lukianoff is about to do is connect the dots by which the Critique of Pure Tolerance goes from treating the ownership of a printing press (or social media platform) from being a hidden restraint on freedom, i.e. a manifestation of repressive tolerance, to a means for propagating false consciousness, i.e. something that must be suppressed in order for tolerance to be liberated.  Plus, he's going to have opportunities for musical interludes, coming below the jump.

A printing press, like any other tool, can be used for constructive or destructive purposes.

One of the first bestsellers ever printed was 1487’s Malleus Maleficarum, a witch-hunting manual. This book helped accelerate the European witch trials on a horrifying scale — one that would not have been possible otherwise. It also forwarded ideas that literally got people killed. For example, one way the book said you could tell someone was a witch was if they were eloquent and argued against received wisdom. I imagine a time-traveling Nadine Strossen would have quite a bit to say about this.

The printing press also plunged Europe into two centuries of bloody religious wars. How do we know? Firstly, because you’ve probably never heard of Jan Hus, the unlucky Czech theologian and reformer who in 1415 was burned at the stake in Prague for questioning the church. And secondly, because you’ve almost certainly heard of Martin Luther, the German theologian and religious reformer who kicked off the Protestant Reformation 100 years later.

Martin Luther succeeded where Jan Hus failed because Luther had the power of the printing press. This allowed his ideas to spread farther and faster than was ever possible or even imaginable before. Without the printing press Hus was toast; with it, Luther changed the world.

Time for our first musical interlude.  Portland's Youth Philharmonic perform Antonín Dvorák's Hussite Overture, opus 67.  The falling sequence with which it opens, as well as the Morse-like iterated U (dit-dit-dah) are from a Hussite hymn that well might have, like Orwell's fictive "Beasts of England" or perhaps the very real "Come, Come, Ye Saints" been sung secretly by the faithful, or perhaps more openly when the peasants were feeling particularly irritated.

Those thematic elements function almost like Leitmotiven in Bedrich Smetana's Ma Vlast, with several movements of that composition ending with the falling sequence.  Czech it out.

And yes, Henry VIII was not happy about anybody being able to circulate unpleasant facts, or, as Our Intellectual Betters have it these days, disinformation and misinformation.  Nor was Pope Linus happy about any priest being able to read Scripture in German rather than having it filterered from the Latin by the local Cardinal Archbishop.  Printed books were expensive, and it took a few more centuries for mass-market Bibles to be made available to congregants.  The opening chapters of Tom Sawyer depict the early days of that development.

So, yes, it’s easy to understand why a monarch like Henry VIII wanted to crack down on the printing press and the ideas it allowed people to freely disseminate. It undermined his supremacy (and showed precious little respect for the privacy of his romantic life).

But all the printing press really did was bring more people into the global conversation — not hundreds of millions, mind you, just millions — and dramatically increased the velocity of that conversation. It was the first time that free expression was possible on a mass scale. And almost as soon it hit the scene, people started making a radical argument: An argument for freedom of speech.

The eternally radical idea.

And once millions of extra eyes and minds started scrutinizing the authorities of the day, they realized a lot of what people thought was true didn’t hold up to that scrutiny. Its leaders suddenly didn’t look so great anymore (especially with a giant turkey leg in their hands, which is how we always see Henry VIII in the movies). Europe suddenly realized that their universe of shared certainty, which up until then had seemed so solid, was really about as substantial as a puff of incense.

Allowing people to be free to think as they will, and to say what they think, is a radical idea. And it is opposed in every generation because it turns out that when given the chance, people end up having a lot of questions for authority. Authority doesn’t like that.

On the other hand, authority has new ways to express itself.  We might know of Martin Luther in part because he had Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, and, more recently Christian Sprenger, to set his chorale to music.

So it always is with intellectual schools of thought.  How better to strengthen your claim on Settled Wisdom than to pronounce anathema more vigorously on the doubters?

But it’s not just the dread of tyrants within kingdoms or churches. It’s also the dread of tyrants over supposed knowledge — the ones who think all important truths are known and, as it happens, they are the first in history to know them! What luck!

Sometimes reality comes aggressively for your error.  Ask the monks of Lindisfarne how that works.

Sometimes -- this is the point of Mr Lukianoff's speech -- the anomalies accumulate from a variety of sources.

It’s no coincidence that at the same time as [cancel culture] was brewing on campus beginning in 2014, people across the political spectrum were beginning to lose faith in our experts, our institutions, and even the idea of shared truth itself.

What caused this? Just as in the time of Henry VIII, the culprit was a new, disruptive technology.

This time, it was social media — a tool that brought billions of people into the global conversation, at nearly the velocity of human thought itself. And just as in the time of Henry VIII, the speed and scale of the resulting disruption led people to question everything: Were our authorities trustworthy? Were our moral certainties really certain? Or were these too merely a puff of incense?

I don't know, maybe postmodern skepticism had something to do with that loss of faith.  Maybe a concatenation of expert failures had something to do with it.  Maybe the mediating institutions repurposing themselves whilst continuing to claim the status that "Defender of the Faith" once conferred had something to do with it.  Thus, at the moment, the disruptive voices might be coming from outside the establishment.

And yet, finding confirmation that your doubts, whether valid or not, occurred to other people as well, makes the skeptic less likely to submit to the alleged consensus.   "What we are facing today in America is to a large degree a problem of institutional decay, and the fact that many members of those institutions — particularly higher education — are trying to blame anyone else or come to any other conclusion."  Reality is in Team Emergence's batting order.

When you add millions — or billions — of eyes and minds to the problems of the world, the result is not just noise, but incredible breakthroughs.

What’s happening now is why the free and open exchange of ideas will always be radical. Yes, what the future is going to look like seems a lot less clear. Yes, we’re living through a crisis of authority. Yes, we’re questioning the legitimacy and necessity of our institutions. But those institutions and authorities don't deserve our blind loyalty. And they showed their cards when they went after the eternally radical idea — when they answered “the problem” of free speech with new speech codes, byzantine taboos, and cancellation campaigns.

The institutions and individuals that stand the test of this era will be those who show integrity and principle, those who tell the truth even when it’s inconvenient or unpopular. That’s what happened in the Enlightenment with figures like Voltaire and Diderot, Smith and Hume, Franklin and Madison. It’s also what we’re seeing now on platforms like Substack, where individuals and institutions with integrity and courage are finding new ways to lead.

That might be, but who this era's Voltaire and Smith are will not be determined in the immediate future.