B8 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022
brogue and ginger muttonchops,” while
Futurist ringleader Filippo Marinetti, with
his handlebar mustache and bowler hat,
resembled “a silent movie villain about to tie
a woman to the railroad tracks.” But the
author always returns to the mechanisms for
transmitting ideas. For O’Connor, the value
of garnering support for a petition was less
about achieving its specific demands than
about the work of gathering signatories, “the
need to go door-to-door, to convince others,
to mark in ink one’s allegiance to a cause.”
And the Futurist manifestos, as outlandish
as they could be (one was immodestly
dubbed “The Futurist Reconstruction of the
Universe”), offered adherents “a place to
articulate their fantasies” and to experience
that “swaggering feeling that the world
could be dragged, kicking and bloody, into
the future.”
The most compelling of Beckerman’s case
studies did drag the world to a new place.
He lingers on the early years of Nnamdi
Azikiwe — who decades later would become
the first president of an independent Nigeria
— when he was the daring young editor of
Accra’s African Morning Post, a stridently
anti-colonial newspaper powered by the
written contributions of its readers. British
colonial authorities arrested Azikiwe in 193 5
and tried him for sedition, and his
exoneration affirmed local newspapers’
“right to their public space, the small
freedom to debate among themselves,”
Beckerman writes. In the paper’s pages,
readers and writers questioned their
colonial status and their tribal divisions,
igniting what Beckerman calls “those first
flickers of a national identity, born of
opinions rubbing against each other in ways
they never had before.”
Similarly, Beckerman revisits the story of
dissident poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the
force behind the Chronicle, an underground
journal detailing Soviet abuses against
artists and writers. Pieced together in
hiding, by word of mouth, the publication
described conditions in prison camps and
psychiatric institutions — of the kind in
which Gorbanevskaya would be confined for
periods on bogus mental-health diagnoses —
and detailed the arbitrariness of Soviet
courts. In their attempt at radical
transparency about Soviet life, the poet and
her collaborators were forerunners of the
glasnost that would upend the Soviet system
years later. “They were interested,”
Beckerman explains, “in shattering the
distinctly Soviet feeling of having two selves
— one that whispered truths in private and
another that was regularly called on to denyWashington Post
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alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) Bestsellers at washingtonpost.com/booksBook WorldGal Beckerman has written a
book about process as if
process were an end in itself.
Because it usually is.
“The Quiet Before” is a
quirky, delightful mix of a
book that explores the
intellectual impulses behind a
series of cultural shifts and
political revolts occurring across continents
and centuries. Beckerman scours scientific
correspondence from Europe’s Republic of
Letters, parses Twitter debates by Black
Lives Matter Twitter activists, tracks Soviet-
era samizdat writings and revels in 1990s
Riot Grrrl zines, to name just a few of the
movements and moments he considers,
delving into the principles and grievances
behind them all. However, his focus is on
how these movements communicated — the
ways that writers and intellectuals shared,
argued and refined ideas before inflicting
them on the world. “If we rewind to the
instant when a solid block of shared reality
is first cracked,” Beckerman writes, “it’s
usually a group of people talking.” Talking
does not just reflect thinking, but shapes it,
too, or — to use a favorite Beckerman word
— incubates it. He is like a guy who pokes
his head out of the car window not to feel
the breeze through his hair, but to look
down and examine the traffic lines.
Beckerman prefers “slow thinking” — the
steady accumulation and dissemination of
knowledge that begins with “the friction of
two people trading ideas” — and worries
that modern social causes, driven by
hyperactive social-media channels, move too
fast to last. Activists using Facebook
propelled the Arab Spring protests that
toppled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak,
for instance, but the medium “proved
useless when it came to organizing
themselves into a true opposition.” The
notion is not novel — Zeynep Tufekci’s
outstanding 2017 book, “Twitter and Te ar
Gas,” which Beckerman cites, developed
similar arguments — but Beckerman’s
historically expansive case studies and
engaging storytelling make “The Quiet
Before” distinct and worthwhile. Of course,
the quiet isn’t always so hushed, the before
and after life of an idea are not always
clearly marked, and the thinking rarely
seems leisurely to those engaged in it.
Beckerman, a senior editor at the Atlantic,
identifies slow thinking in the missives of
17th-century French astronomer Nicolas-
Claude Fabri de Peirsec, whose library of
100,0 00 letters attests to his side hustle as “a
connector of Europe’s greatest minds.” He
communicated with inventors, clergy and
thinkers across the continent, collaborating
on scientific projects (including a logistically
insane initiative to calculate the length and
width of the Mediterranean Sea by viewing
an eclipse from multiple locations), instilling
a sensibility of scientific inquiry and rigor
among the correspondents. Letters did not
simply constitute one-on-one exchanges,
Beckerman emphasizes. They were “oil in
the gears of idea production” or “messages
carried along a stream with many
tributaries.” Yes, Beckerman has a weakness
for metaphors, but he shows how Peirsec’s
writings circulated well beyond their
original audiences, multiplying the power of
his ideas.
Such letters are not that different, then,
from the email chains ricocheting among
infectious disease specialists, emergency
doctors and public health officials in the
early days of the coronavirus pandemic in
- Beckerman explores one chain in
particular, dubbed “Red Dawn” by its
creators, that offered sanctuary for experts
overwhelmed by their battles with illness,
misinformation and uncertainty. It was “a
closed network with people they trusted,”
Beckerman writes, and it allowed the
participants to develop recommendations
that gained favor with local officials,
especially once the national guidance proved
confusing. “Four hundred years after Peirsec
had deployed his letters to nurture the
development of the scientific method,”
Beckerman observes, “there was still a need
for a private space where this work could
happen, where the pursuit of observable
truth could proceed safely away from the
centrifugal force of politicization.”
In the political space, communication has
tended to be far more public and volatile.
The massive petitions for expanded male
suffrage by the Chartist movement in mid-
19th-century Britain led to violent uprisings,
while the manifestos authored by Futurist
activists in pre-Fascist Italy relished the
notion of a war so brutal that “it would
purify the country and allow them to start
from zero.” (They soon got their wish when
the Great War began in 1914, and the
Futurists became advocates for
intervention.) Beckerman’s descriptions of
the major players are memorable — Chartist
leader Feargus O’Connor was “all Irish
Carlos
Lozada
What’s the
right process
for changing
the world?
THE QUIET
BEFORE:
O n the
Unexpected
Origins of
Radical Ideas
By Gal
Beckerman
Crown.
331 pp. $28.99reality out loud.”
Beckerman is not the only one obsessed
with process; his characters are, too. Tobi
Vail was thinking about it when she used
scissors and a glue stick to create Jigsaw, an
early version of the zines that exploded into
the Riot Grrrl scene of the early 1990 s, in
which young women explored punk and
power and anger over sex and body image
and assault. “JIGSAW IS NOT A CONSUMER
PRODUCT,” Vail wrote. “It is not a product at
all. It is more of a process. A method. I’m
starting to see that process is the key.”
Pandemic-era health experts stressed to
Beckerman that upholding the scientific
method was a priority in their private email
exchanges. Even the white nationalists
organizing the 2017 Unite the Right rally in
Charlottesville were pleased with their
process, meeting on the online gaming
platform Discord to debate the optics of
displaying swastikas and the safety features
of different torches. “I think it’s a fantastic
sign that we can have these disagreements
now, and still stand together when it
counts,” one participant wrote.
This title, “The Quiet Before,” may refer to
the reflection preceding the movements
Beckerman explores, or it may suggest that
radicalism was incubated more deliberately
before the cacophony of the Internet and
social media. Unsurprisingly, Beckerman is
pessimistic about the impact of modern
technology on social activism. He argues
that reliance on platforms like Twitter have
left movements such as Black Lives Matter
too dependent on sudden bursts of sadness
and rage to sustain interest in policing
reform. “The performance, the race for
followers, even the reflex to always make
their actions public” can backfire when
engaging in the arduous task of advancing
specific policy positions, he writes. This is an
issue with many of the movements this book
chronicles. Their immediate impact is not
always clear, or their true sway materializes
only decades later.
Beckerman occasionally seems frustrated
by that, and sometimes resigned to it. Hey,
it’s a process, and it’s driven not just by the
tools in hand but by the sensibility in mind.
“Radical change... doesn’t start with
yelling,” Beckerman concludes. “It starts
with deliberation, a tempo that increases, a
volume set first at a whisper. How else can
you begin to picture what doesn’t yet exist?”
Twitter: @CarlosLozadaWPCarlos Lozada is The Post’s nonfiction book critic
and the author of “What Were We Thinking: A Brief
Intellectual History of the Trump Era.”LINDSAY BRICE/GETTY IMAGESVolunteers offer
reproductive
health
information and
Riot Grrrl zines
at the
Hollywood
Palladium
during the Rock
for Choice
concert on Jan.
23, 1993, in Los
Angeles.This week’s literary calendar is on B6