Radicals Used to Make Change. Then Social Media Happened
Radicals Used to Make Change. Then Social Media Happened
By Simon Schama
Feb. 12, 2022
Review:
THE QUIET BEFORE
On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas
By Gal Beckerman
Its title notwithstanding, “The Quiet Before” crackles with noise: Chartist orators whipping up support for suffrage in early-Victorian Britain; competing Futurist manifesto-shouters in a Florence theater in 1913, the evening concluding with a light bulb smashing against the side of Filippo Marinetti’s face “as he tried to read out a political statement”; white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville in August 2017. But Gal Beckerman’s elegantly argued and exuberantly narrated book also features quieter groups whose conversations, he demonstrates, eat away at the underpinnings of established authority: micro-commonwealths of letter-writing scientific observers in the 17th century; a West African newspaper in the 1930s constituted almost entirely from readers’ contributions; Deadheads dialing in to an early chat group lodged on a VAX computer in mid-1980s California. Great sea changes in politics and culture, Beckerman claims, would never have happened but for the creation of these kinds of collaborative communities operating under the radar of establishment scrutiny.
The idea that webs of allegiance, bonded by the conviction that one day their minority will become a majority, have brought about epochal change is not a new insight. Studies of the “Republic of Letters,” populated by enemies of religious and state absolutism in the late 17th century, go back at least to Paul Hazard’s “The Crisis of the European Mind,” and Franco Venturi’s 1960 “Roots of Revolution” mapped the perfervid world of 19th-century Russian populists. Robert Darnton, acknowledged by Beckerman, has done a lifetime’s brilliant work on the sociability of prerevolutionary French writers. More recently, the power of “horizontal” networks to disrupt “vertical” hierarchies is the core of Niall Ferguson’s excellent “The Square and the Tower.” What gives Beckerman’s book its appealing freshness is his focus on the vehicles of communication themselves: the letter chains of the 17th century (though, oddly, not the arguably more decisive circulation of printed texts); mass petitioning in 19th-century Britain; the manifesto fetish of the modernist avant-gardes; and, in a particularly gripping chapter, the underground samizdat The Chronicle of Current Events in the late-1960s Soviet Union. Informed by our obsession with social media, Beckerman’s book is a lot more than a trip through the genealogy of Twitter and Facebook.
This is not least because his episodes are humanized by vivid biographical vignettes of the founders, each framed at a critical moment in their outreach to the potentially like-minded. Some of their efforts are winningly, naïvely ambitious, as when the natural philosopher Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc recruits a chain of experimental collaborators, scattered in locations as far apart as Syria and Quebec, to observe, on the same night, the phases of lunar eclipse, thus helping him to establish longitude; or when Natalya Gorbanevskaya, of The Chronicle of Current Events, blows the oxygen of reported truth into the fog of official lies; or when Wael Ghonim, a marketing director for Google, horrified by the savage police murder of a computer programmer, founds the “We Are All Khaled Said” web page, bringing hundreds of thousands of followers into indignant and then insurrectionary connection.
As brilliant as Beckerman often is on the makers and sustainers of these networks, he is less satisfying on (or perhaps just less interested in) the eventual upshot of their efforts, doubtless because so many of them ended in frustration, co-optation or defeat. Tahrir Square begat an elected government of the Muslim Brotherhood that in turn triggered the same military dictatorship from which the demonstrators sought to liberate Egypt. The great Chartist petition of 1839 for household suffrage, compromised by a violent insurrection in Wales, saw its leaders convicted of high treason and either executed or transported to Australia. Feargus O’Connor, the fiery Chartist tribune (beautifully brought to life by Beckerman), remained to fight on, but in 1848, with the ancient Duke of Wellington massing troops in the British capital should London rise in revolt, the great Chartist assembly on Kenington Common fizzled out in anticlimax. While the rest of Europe had revolutions, Britain had the class placebo of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Bathos or tragedy often extinguished the bright hopes of brother- and sisterhood. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, urging Italians to rouse themselves from pasta-induced torpor (his Futurist Cookbook is magnificently preposterous — raw salami bathed in coffee and eau de cologne, anyone?) and commit themselves to the virile rush of war, morphs unsurprisingly into his Fascist Manifesto of 1919. Gorbanevskaya’s stirringly brave and creatively elusive defiance of state censorship ended up with her locked away in a monstrous psychiatric hospital. In the 1930s, when he edited The African Morning Post, Nnamdi Azikiwe sketched out a Pan-African solidarity meant to transcend tribal divisions that he believed were cynically perpetuated by British colonialism. But the Nigeria to which he returned, as president, would collapse into atrocious civil war when his own people, the Igbo, seceded to form the Republic of Biafra.
None of this is surprising, since almost all of the networkers have been trapped in a contradiction integral to their modus operandi. In their formative years they needed a degree of invisibility. They needed, at least, to be inaudible to the listening posts of the establishment. On the other hand, what was the entire point of the exercise if they were to stay that way? Their mission, ultimately, was to bring about an irreversible alteration; to turn a half-hidden counterculture into the accepted norm. Inevitably, then, there came a moment when the networkers held their breath, crossed their fingers, bugle-called the troops and stepped into the glare of the public arena. Which was also the moment when authority pounced or exploited divisions between militant activists and pragmatic strategists, managing to peel away some of the following.
There have been happy exceptions. The scientific revolution, grounded in empirical observation liberated from dogma or any authority derived from purported revelation, would eventually prevail, although a daily dose of Fox News and the social media ravings of conspiracy theorists might give one pause to wonder how secure that victory has been. Reasonably, Beckerman (an editor at The New York Times Book Review until earlier this year) rejects the notion that his subjects should be judged by any immediate and permanent change in state and society; instead he characterizes them as relay runners, handing on the baton to the next cohort. And in any case, his book (white supremacists aside) is full of genuinely moving scenes of prelapsarian innocence, catching the networkers in the bright dawn of their community-making. Of course it’s easy to raise a knowing eyebrow at the faith that John Coate, the hippie hired in 1986 to manage the chat exchange called WELL, had that “communication itself could be redemptive … the key to self-government,” as Beckerman puts it, and marvel at the optimism with which the site moderated its conversations through a “host.” But cynicism can be misplaced. Hyperventilated shrieking and venomous trolling get noticed as their mad projectors fully intend. But out of deafened earshot, there is indeed, as Beckerman’s title implies, a realm of relative quiet, where millions of connections are daily wired together, and which offer to conversationalists thoughtful rather than thoughtless provocations, solid sources of knowledge rather than fathomless wells of ignorance, and even, every so often, shots of pleasurable illumination.