A Soft Start to Social Revolution

The conviction animating Gal Beckerman’s “The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas” holds that social media, and online communications generally, are not optimal venues for the development of “radical” ideas. What radical ideas need in order to flourish, he contends, is sustained, patient debate among committed people with a shared, well-defined ideology. In the past these ideas percolated for a long time in pubs and coffeehouses, pamphlets and small-circulation dissident newspapers, before they burst into public life in the fullness of time. Now, Mr. Beckerman laments, they come and go with regularity on a dizzying array of electronic platforms. “Radical change—change that strips off the stucco and gets to the girders, that offers a chance to see ourselves and our relationship to nature or to others in new ways—doesn’t start with yelling,” he writes. “It starts with deliberation, a tempo that increases, a volume set first at a whisper.”