The New York Times - Book Review - USA (2022-03-13)

10 S UNDAY, MARCH 13, 2022

ITS TITLE NOTWITHSTANDING,“The Quiet
Before” crackles with noise: Chartist ora-
tors whipping up support for suffrage in
early-Victorian Britain; competing Futur-
ist manifesto-shouters in a Florence the-
ater in 1913, the evening concluding with a
light bulb smashing against the side of Fil-
ippo Marinetti’s face “as he tried to read
out a political statement”; white suprema-
cists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in
Charlottesville in August 2017. But Gal
Beckerman’s elegantly argued and exu-
berantly narrated book also features qui-
eter groups whose conversations, he dem-
onstrates, eat away at the underpinnings
of established authority: micro-common-
wealths of letter-writing scientific observ-
ers 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 minor-
ity will become a majority, have brought
about epochal change is not a new insight.
Studies of the “Republic of Letters,” popu-
lated by enemies of religious and state ab-
solutism 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 bril-
liant work on the sociability of prerevolu-
tionary 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 ve-
hicles of communication themselves: the
letter chains of the 17th century (though,
oddly, not the arguably more decisive cir-
culation of printed texts); mass petitioning
in 19th-century Britain; the manifesto
fetish of the modernist avant-gardes; and,
in a particularly gripping chapter, the un-
derground samizdat The Chronicle of Cur-

rent Events in the late-1960s Soviet Union.

Informed by our obsession with social me-

dia, 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 win-

ningly, naïvely ambitious, as when the nat-

ural 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 offi-

cial lies; or when Wael Ghonim, a market-

ing director for Google, horrified by the

savage police murder of a computer pro-

grammer, 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 govern-

ment of the Muslim Brotherhood that in

turn triggered the same military dictator-

ship from which the demonstrators sought

to liberate Egypt. The great Chartist peti-

tion of 1839 for household suffrage, com-

promised by a violent insurrection in

Wales, saw its leaders convicted of high

treason and either executed or trans-

ported 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 Exhibi-

tion of 1851.

Bathos or tragedy often extinguished

the bright hopes of brother- and sis-

terhood. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto,

urging Italians to rouse themselves from

pasta-induced torpor (his Futurist Cook-

book 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. Gor-

banevskaya’s stirringly brave and cre-

atively elusive defiance of state censorship

ended up with her locked away in a mon-

strous psychiatric hospital. In the 1930s,

when he edited The African Morning Post,

Nnamdi Azikiwe sketched out a Pan-Afri-

can solidarity meant to transcend tribal di-

visions that he believed were cynically

perpetuated by British colonialism. But

the Nigeria to which he returned, as presi-

dent, would collapse into atrocious civil

war when his own people, the Igbo, seced-

ed 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 lis-

tening 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 ac-

cepted 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 divi-

sions between militant activists and prag-

matic strategists, managing to peel away

some of the following.

There have been happy exceptions. The

scientific revolution, grounded in empir-

ical observation liberated from dogma or

any authority derived from purported rev-

elation, would eventually prevail, although

a daily dose of Fox News and the social me-

dia 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 character-

izes 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 prelapsari-

an innocence, catching the networkers in

the bright dawn of their community-mak-

ing. 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 ex-

change called WELL, had that “communi-

cation 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. Hy-

perventilated shrieking and venomous

trolling get noticed as their mad projectors

fully intend. But out of deafened earshot,

there is indeed, as Beckerman’s title im-

plies, a realm of relative quiet, where mil-

lions of connections are daily wired togeth-

er, and which offer to conversationalists

thoughtful rather than thoughtless provo-

cations, solid sources of knowledge rather

than fathomless wells of ignorance, and

even, every so often, shots of pleasurable

illumination. 0

The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

In this intellectual history, it’s always the quiet ones.

By SIMON SCHAMA

THE QUIET BEFORE

On the Unexpected Origins of Radical
Ideas
By Gal Beckerman
335 pp. Crown. $28.99.

An anti-Chartist cartoon from 1843 by George Cruikshank.

IMAGE FROM UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Are radical movements destined

to fail?

SIMON SCHAMAis a professor of art history and
history at Columbia University. His last book
was “Story of the Jews, Vol. 2: Belonging.”