What Follows Is the Syndicated Transcript of an on Being Interview Between Krista Tippett and Gal Beckerman. You Can Listen to the Audio Recording of the Full Interview here. 

Krista Tippett, host:As Any Student of Histor

media. I look at one group called The Dream Defenders, in Miami, who actually did this. They did something called a blackout, where they just completely got off and then started talking to people in their communities. And one of the things that mattered to them as a group was defunding the police. And what they discovered when they started talking to people, going door to door, having conversations, is that the majority of people did not want to defund the police. [laughs]

Tippett:It’s more complicated than that.

Beckerman:Yeah, that it was more complicated, that they were worried what that would mean, they didn’t really understand what the concept was, that the concept was about not blindly funding police departments in this country to the tune that they’re usually funded, but actually moving some of that money away to, or funneling some of that money into other social services and maybe having a social worker respond to a situation on the street, as opposed to a police officer — that there are actually very nuanced and interesting proposals that were bubbling, but people didn’t understand them.

And the idea of getting off social media was like, this keeps us from just relying on this slogan —

Tippett:It is hard to do nuance on social media, right? That’s what it doesn’t do well.

Beckerman:Exactly. Exactly. And actually, through these conversations and through actually — much like the petitioners in the 1830s, going around and actually trying to convince people of a position or understanding where they’re coming from, those are those acts of conversation that I think made those groups a lot more sophisticated.

And at the height of that sort of earlier phase of Black Lives Matter, 2013 to ’16, the people who — in newspapers and magazines were literally making lists of the most influential activists in the movement based on their follower accounts on Twitter.

Tippett:Right, and that was so controversial inside.

Beckerman:And when you do that — let’s say you’re an organizer just sort of on the ground, trying to have influence in a local city council race because you know that this person could tip the balance and actually enact local laws that will affect communities of color that you care about, that you’re trying to advocate on the part of, and then you see that the people who are getting attention are the ones who knew how to make Twitter work for them and have the kind of voice that Twitter wants and the — it can be a very demoralizing thing and make you think that that’s where you need to shift your attention to.

Tippett:So I think one of the themes in your writing and one thing that’s so great about reading this is that our imaginations are very, are kind of paralyzed [laughs] by the world of social media, by how we see things happen now — even by a phrase like “going viral,” or failing to go viral, being followed or being liked, or not. Whereas in previous eras, in some places, things were done [in] private, because that’s all you had, we now have a world where everybody is handed the megaphone, essentially.

Beckerman:Yeah, and one of the things — I don’t want people to read this and think the internet is fundamentally horrible and we need to just all go use typewriters. It’s actually just a plea for some self-awareness about the way that we use the various tools that are available to us online. And somehow, when it comes to movements or when it comes to trying to put a new idea into the world and convince other people of that idea, we still are attached to this idea of virality as the thing that matters most. We still believe that —

Tippett:Scaling quickly.

Beckerman:Yeah, if we — exactly; scaling quickly, if we just put up a good Facebook post, if we get a lot of people into our group online, if our tweet goes viral, like, we’re starting something, something real. And that’s sort of what I’m pushing against, is to — and that’s what the Black Lives Matter activists who I got to know really, really understood, is that this has its function. It’s one thing. It’s one tool in the toolbox.

I keep returning to this notion of tools, but I think that is the way we need to think about the media that we use and that we need to be careful about when we actually pick it up, and understand that there are other tools in that toolbox. And some of them might feel counterintuitive, because it’s not what’s particularly popular at the moment, but they are very effective in this process of development and incubation.

Tippett:And I would just kind of paraphrase it that way — let the context of how we use the tools be what we can know about how the world actually works, how change actually happens, that is generative and sustainable. And that’s kind of the offering you’re making.

I loved reading — I think this is an article you wrote — about reading parties [laughs] in 2020, and 2020 silent reading parties, which you both wrote about and also took part in — quarantine book club, borderless book club. You wrote about this Hannah Arendt reading circle, reading about — reading The Human Condition, which is just such a phenomenal, eternally insightful book. And you work with this image that somebody gave you who’s leading one of the reading circles. And he said, “When you have a group of people sitting around a table talking, the table is what makes them a group.”

Beckerman:Yeah, I love that.

Tippett:“And if you take the table away, they’re just individuals, they’re not connected.”

But I think you ask, is Zoom our table?

Beckerman:Well, in that moment, [laughs] it certainly felt like it. Arendt’s image of the table and the people sitting around the table, and then the table disappearing, and who are they, is really a moving one to me, and it’s one that inspires sort of my search in this book, in a way, because I wanted to understand sort of what those tables are, for us, as people. I’m looking at the specific context of how change begins, but it seems to me that the table has an important role — the physical table, the space that’s bringing people together into conversation. And her point was, once the table is gone, who are we? And I think she’s pointing to a medium there, in a way. You need an avenue through which you come together. And I feel like when I started to look at letters, when I started to look at petitions and all these examples that we talked about, I sort of found those tables.

Tippett:The tables were always in the story, right.

Beckerman:Yeah, there’s always something that is bringing people together in that way. And can we find those tables online today? Are people doing that? For sure. I think my objective, if there’s — [laughs] if there’s any advocacy in this book, it’s to search for them and understand their importance to human development and progress.

Tippett:Well, but I also feel like you’re pointing us back to the actual tables, right?

Beckerman:Yeah, that too. [laughs]

Tippett:You’re saying, let’s not — let’s do both, but let’s not forget that we still have tables to sit around …

Beckerman:We still have actual tables.

Tippett:… and that somehow, that is an absolutely essential thing that happens when things take off in a long-term way.

Beckerman:For sure.

[music: “Funk and Flash” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, I’m with the journalist of ideas and history Gal Beckerman.

[music: “Funk and Flash” by Blue Dot Sessions]

So I know we’re speaking as this book, The Quiet Before, is just entering the world, but I understand that you met over Zoom with an eighth-grade social studies class in New York City.

Beckerman:[laughs] I did.

Tippett:And they had read, I guess, the introduction. And I’m so curious to hear — these are young humans who’ve grown up with media as we know it now; I’m just so curious about what their questions and observations were and how they perhaps were different from yours, and what you learned from that exchange.

Beckerman:They were wonderful, first of all. They were so willing and eager to sort of understand. They were studying social movements, so I was sort of coming in to talk to them from a place of this expertise gained from the book. And they — the first thing that was funny was that they — it’s very hard for them to imagine doing something in an analog world.

Tippett:[laughs] Right, right.

Beckerman:[laughs] They are so — it’s so part of the fabric of their reality that how could a meme not be involved when you’re talking about social movements? Isn’t that what a social movement is? [laughs]

But I have to say, their questions were kind of more searching than anything else. They wanted to understand sort of how you recreate the thing that I’m talking about. Like, how do you step away? They were looking for prescriptions, I think, which I found to be hopeful, because they — even if it was difficult for them to sort of imagine what change could mean without this particular tool they’ve become very familiar with that they do everything on, they still were — they said, well, how do you do it? Like, how do you find the quiet? What’s that process like? [laughs] And each kind of asking it in different ways, but it did make me sort of think that they had the capacity, [laughs] if they were asking the question.

Tippett:If you look around our world now, where do you — I mean, obviously there’s an inherent contradiction in this question, because part of what you’re doing is talking about things that can only be seen decades later, right? [laughs] And that’s kind of the point of it. But what are you observing now that might be something that someone 30 years from now looks at and says, Oh, there’s a beginning; there’s a quiet beginning?

Beckerman:I mean, it’s not even so quiet, but I have to say one of the things lately that I’ve been aware of, that I think we’ve all been aware of to some extent, is the activism around climate change, and particularly young people. And I find it — I find it very hopeful. You know, some of the conversations that I’ve heard recently are a real rejection of the performativeness of [laughs] not just politicians’ actions, but of anybody who is on social media kind of making a big deal about something they’re doing. They’re interested in getting back to basics and figuring out alternatives. And there is a sense that the way to do that is on a much smaller scale. And to me, that’s hopeful. I see similar conversations happening around police reform, particularly among the activists that I spoke to.

Those are kind of two areas that are demanding a lot of imagination. If you want to rethink how we’re going to approach this crisis of climate change, it seems to me the way that we’ve been doing things or the way we’ve imagined we can change things is not working. So [laughs] the avenues for picturing what could work — we have to establish those. We have to create the spaces where that can occur. And I feel like there is — that young people are in some ways more conscious of — at least the ones that I’ve heard talk about these issues, they’re conscious of the way that something like social media sort of distorts what they do. And they have the awareness to push it away or, at least, keep it at arm’s length.

Tippett:And use it as a tool, but see its limitations.

So I want to ask you a question just in light of all these things we’ve been discussing. What — just kind of right now, this week, today, what makes you despair, and where are you finding hope?

Beckerman:Give me one second. [laughs]

Tippett:That’s allowed. [laughs]

Beckerman:I think despair is easier for me [laughs] to answer right away. I have a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old, and I worry about the role that technology has in their lives and the way that they’re losing a capacity to focus and sustain attention in a way that I think is important, not just to do things like read books, which matter to me a lot, [laughs] but to do really anything that that demands hard work, which I know that they’re going to want to do. So I find myself despairing a lot about what it means that their brains have sort of contorted to these devices that they find themselves on too much. And COVID has obviously exacerbated this to an extraordinary degree.

I find hope, though, in the knowledge that the things that bring us joy haven’t changed that much. [laughs] It’s still — and in some ways, we’ve been reminded of them in this moment. I miss my friends. I miss having social contact in a way that’s been very hard to find over the last two years, even as COVID has waxed and waned; I’ve felt pretty isolated.

Tippett:Not enough tables in your life.

Beckerman:Not enough tables in my life. I just said this morning to a friend, I said, I haven’t been in a bar in a long time. And I don’t know that I really need a — like, I wouldn’t think that I would need a bar, but there is a particular kind of space that opens up when you’re sitting and you’re having a beer, and then maybe a second beer, and you’re — it is that table that’s bringing you together. And so what brings me hope, I guess — I mean, that could be a despairing thought: I need the bar. But I’m hopeful in that I haven’t lost — and I don’t think humanity, [laughs] if I can speak that broadly, has lost that really deep need, in spite of the fact that we’ve been deprived in all these ways. And I find that hopeful, because it means that there are these essential qualities of life that we need, and one of them is being with people, and that in some ways we’ve been given this gift — I mean, at a horrible price, but we’ve been given this gift of being reminded of that.

[music: “Lamplist” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett:Gal Beckerman is the senior editor for books at The Atlantic. His new book is The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas. He’s also the author of When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.

[music: “Lamplist” by Blue Dot Sessions]

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