Timothy Ferris teaches journalism, English, and astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written numerous books and articles on the history and philosophy of science, and on astronomy, neuroscience, and physics. His newest book, The Whole Shebang, will be published in May.
 

  Why are you drawn to Thomas Jefferson? What is it about him?
I'm not sure. I was drawn to him for inchoate reasons at first. I think now I'm attracted to him because he was a great writer. He was a great first draft writer which fifth draft writers like me always admire. And because he was a man of the present. Jefferson was a man of the 20th century, 21st century because he was forward-looking man, because he got things right. He was concerned with education. He was concerned with science. Jefferson saw that science and education and liberty form a whole and you need all three of those. And I fear that those lessons are starting to be forgotten and I've even found myself returning to Jefferson to learn them or relearn them.

  What do you do with the contradiction that this is the man who wrote the words "all men are created equal" but owned more than 200 human beings and never saw fit to set them free?
With regard to slavery, the first thing to keep in mind about Jefferson was that he was passionately opposed to slavery all his life and he meant it. He was an honest man. The second thing is to ask yourself with what basis are you going to approach history. It's very easy to approach everything in history from a moral standpoint because that makes you superior to or equal to the person you're attempting to judge. But is judging the way to actually learn? I don't think so, you know? With many teachers today who like to set themselves up in a position of judging the people that they are teaching about...but if you do that, you blind yourself to them.

  So you'd liberate Thomas Jefferson from that?
Yes, not for his sake but for ours. About a year ago, a young lady, a brilliant young lady who had just graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Berkeley with major in history came up to my country place. I was reading a book of Jefferson and I asked her what she knew about Jefferson and she said, "Oh, he was a slaveholder, wasn't he?" And that's all she knew about him. That's not an education in history for an American or anyone else who cares about liberty to have.

  How would you answer? Who is Thomas Jefferson?
I don't know who Thomas Jefferson is. He's one of those figures that will forever recede before you like the receding galaxies in the expanding universe. They leave the light but you'll never touch the galaxy. He's like Newton in that regard. He was a singular man. It isn't just that we were lucky to have a smart guy among the Founding Fathers, we had a complete individual, a man who is unlike anyone, any other figure I know of in history. He'll always be a mass of contradictions because he'll always be himself and there's, in a sense, no one to compare him to.

Einstein used to say "What do I care about my foolish opinions of yesterday?" And I think Jefferson would have agreed with that. He reminds me of Whitman saying, "I contain multitudes." And a student of Jefferson who wants to understand him I think has to start by accepting the validity of that, that Jefferson had too many thoughts to be concerned about whether they were entirely consistent. To understand a man of his dimension I think you need to have a cosmological scope and not be concerned about consistency. As Emerson said, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Jefferson wasn't consistent but he was the author of the greatest democracy in the history of the world.

  What do you feel about the words ,"We hold these truths to be self-evident"?
Jefferson's writing is, to me, inspirational. The way I discovered that I cared about Jefferson was that I found myself, every time I was in Washington, going to the Jefferson Memorial. One day I had to leave to catch a plane—I was late—and I still went to the Memorial. At that point I began to realize that there was some spiritual dimension to my connection with Jefferson and then I started to try to understand why that was.

  Why is that? Why are we as a people drawn to Thomas Jefferson? What is he speaking to us? What kind of music is he making?
America is, I hope, a progressive society and Jefferson was a genuine progressive. Broadly speaking, there are two casts of human thought. There are those who believe that the earth is a closed system and that everything that we need to know is in some great book and we're not meant to know anything beyond that. And there are those who feel that the universe is open, that we don't yet know most of the things that we could or ought to know and that we can progress toward better understanding. Jefferson was of the second type. Jefferson was a progressive thinker who really did see ahead into the future of this country into government and many other areas. Jefferson understood the importance of education sustaining democracy. He realized that government is the work of everyone and that learning is, ongoing learning is the work of the whole society. All those things, I think, speak to us today and it's vitally important that we don't forget them.

  He was a scientist too.
He was. Jefferson was an amateur scientist and a great enthusiast of science. Jefferson's fascination with science was almost obsessive. On the day on which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he registered, as was his custom, the temperature at four equally spaced times during the day. The next day he went out and bought a barometer. This was someone who had a sense of proportion... He knew that, although he was starting a great nation... that it all, that that nation was part of a wider universe and the wider universe interested him more in a way than did any particular nation, even the one that he helped to found.

  Can you talk about frontiers? One of the contradictions is that he lived on the edge of the frontier and never went into it.
Jefferson reminds me of an astronomer... Jefferson lived perched on the edge of the frontier the way today see ourselves perched on the edge of the enormous universe. He once said in a letter that, you know, we don't know what is out there and so we're not in a position to say what can't be there. Which really is the sense that we have of the universe today. Living as he did on the edge of this unknown universe of the American west, Jefferson did not find it necessary himself to go into it any more than an astronomer needs to fly off toward the Andromeda galaxy.

  Can you talk about the press?
We journalists have a lot in common with Jefferson. I think we all have a love-hate relationship with our own profession. We all feel, as Jefferson did, that a free press is, if anything, more important than having an established government. At the same time, we're all embarrassed and offended by the excesses and stupidities of the press which went on just as much in Jefferson's time as they do today. One big difference is that a politician today can't get away with ignoring the challenges and probings of the press which Jefferson did routinely. Consequently, we couldn't elect Jefferson today. And the press should ask itself just how much of a role it has in having excluded Jefferson from our national political scene.

  Can you talk about his enormous curiosity?
Science is not an encyclopedia or a body of knowledge, it's a process of learning. By the time you've learned something, it's sort of passed through the scientific process and gone onto the wider society. It was the process that fascinated Jefferson. He was wrong about many things scientifically. He didn't believe in evolution—there are lots of places where we could say "Oh, Jefferson was wrong about this or that." But Jefferson understood the spirit of science, which is that your life is an adventure of learning—that you are constantly moving ahead and learning new things and exercising the muscles that enable you to learn and that's what makes you vital and alive. In that, he was in a small minority. The United States in Jefferson's time had no scientific establishment whatsoever. There was not an astronomical observatory in public or university hands anywhere in the United States until about 1830. The few scientists who could be found wrote plaintively back to Europe saying, "I have no one here with whom to communicate except the President of the United States. He likes science but the Congress won't let him do anything about it unless he writes the checks himself."

You know, Jefferson thought that all the species that had ever lived still lived. That was the prevailing wisdom of the day. And so when the woolly mammoth was discovered, its remains were discovered, Jefferson assumed reasonably enough that woolly mammoth were living out in the great unknown west. And he was always asking travelers to look for the mammoth and other fantastic creatures out there in the wilderness. He sent a letter once by Daniel Boone to encourage an explorer to dig for fossils and bring back geological strata.

All the scientific endeavors, Jefferson believed, would lead to practical consequences. He wasn't interested in metaphysical speculation, which was largely the realm of the Church in those days, but he believed that the human condition could be improved. He lived in a time in which the levels of literacy and well-being were far below what almost any American has experienced today. Even poor Americans have little experience with the kind of raw living that was common in those days and yet he could see a path to improve it all. That path was taken by this country and the greatest improvement in the material condition of the greatest number of people in history took place as a result. That's real prophecy. And it came out of empirical rational curiosity of a scientifically inclined statesman.

  This is a great mind, a unique mind..
I think Jefferson is unique. I've never been able to find anyone like him. It's hard to compare him to anyone. You know, Jefferson planned an astronomical observatory at Monticello and it's a tower built in stairstep fashion quite tall and imposing—all the more imposing when you realize that in the whole country around him, there was not a single other astronomical observatory nor any other scientific establishment of any note except the Philosophical Society of which he was president. Jefferson, like the towered observatory that he'd planned, was a beacon for scientific thought in a dark land in which almost no one had any interest in these subjects. Jefferson was routinely ridiculed by his political enemies for his scientific endeavors. They made fun of him for comparing the weights of mice in the Old and New World and specifically they attacked him for having the audacity to claim that the Native Americans and the black Africans had the same physical and intellectual endowment as did white Europeans. For that, they could not forgive him.

  Why does he appeal to both liberals and conservatives?
What Jefferson stood for—liberty, equality, justice, education—really are universal values. And they're recognized as such throughout most of the world today. Anywhere that education has carried them, people have realized that this is in the best interest of all people. Jefferson was one of those figures, along with Locke and Hume and others, who made it clear to people around the world that is was possible to have a better life and that the basis of that better life was to give up the idea that someone else, on the basis of birth or privilege, had the right to order them around.

Statute of Religious Freedom

  Also he separated the Church from the State. Can you talk about the significance of that?
From Isaac Newton on, it was clear that the planets did not need to be pushed around by angels, that nature runs itself and God, therefore, tended to withdraw from immediate everyday events and became the Creator of the universe. From that, it was a short step to say that one could learn about God by studying nature, natural law. And, as Locke maintained, that among the natural laws were natural rights that accrued to human beings. So you have Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence and by starting with the laws of nature and nature's God, he means that there's a scientific basis for concepts like human liberty and equality.

But Jefferson had a hostility toward most organized religion that would bar him from office today. He was a deist. He was widely accused of being an atheist. What Jefferson believed, was that God had made the universe and that science was therefore a proper form of worship for a thinking person. You were given your rational facilities by God and an ability to investigate and learn from nature and through that you would learn more about God and you would also learn about humans and their proper relationship to the state. That, to me, is a profoundly religious position to take. But then, as now, most people didn't think so.

  What is he saying in the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom?
If you're a progressive as Jefferson was, you have to find a form of government that is flexible and progressive also. That's the genius of the American system. It permits a legal revolution every two, four, six years. What you cannot have is a government that is allied to a rigid system of older values—and that's what religions are. It doesn't mean they're wrong. It just means that they're less able to change than is a scientific system. Jefferson, in separating Church and State, among other things, made it possible for the State to move forward in the direction of new ideas without trying to uproot the older and better established spiritual values of the Church.

  Why did he leave slavery alone? He obviously knew it was going to come to a head.
I don't want to pretend to judge Thomas Jefferson. And actually I refuse to judge Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson was the, Jefferson was the owner and the caretaker of a family estate in the South. It could not be run without slaves. His choice was to sell it and move to an apartment in New York—which many people today would say he ought to have done—or to carry on and argue against the very institution of slavery on which his own plantation was based. He took that second courageous position for which, it seems to me, we ought to give him his due credit. It does not make him out to be a hypocrite. He was always opposed to slavery even though he benefited.

It is always possible to take a morally superior position to someone who lived two centuries before you did. If Jefferson had lived in the North, one could say, "Sure, he opposed slavery, but he wasn't part of that system of the South that was so integrated into slavery." As he lived in the South, you can say, "Sure, he opposed slavery by word but not deed, therefore he was a hypocrite." This is all hogwash. He was the best man he possibly could have been under the circumstances short of making some dramatic showboat gesture such as ending the family fortune and freeing his slaves, which I think Jefferson would have put in the category with miracles.

Jefferson disapproved of miracles. When Jefferson read his Bible, he took a razor blade and cut out every reference to the supernatural. Which, by the way, is what Biblical scholars pretty much do today. When they rank what's authentic and what's not, the first thing that goes out are all the references to the performance of miracles. Tom Paine said of miracles that he thought it demeaned God to imagine that God would perform tricks so as to entertain the crowds and make them stand in awe of God. God doesn't need crowds to look at him with awe. And Jefferson didn't need to make some dramatic demonstration of his own right-mindedness in order to make his fellow citizens think the better of him.

Declaration of Independence, Earliest Known Draft

  Do you think he knew that slavery would disappear in a generation or two?
I think Jefferson felt that slavery was doomed. I don't want to make him out to be a prophet who can see everything in a crystal ball, but he certainly understood that slavery and the moral health of the United States were incompatible. And he argued that from the Declaration of Independence on forward and backward in history. He again and again argued against slavery. One question to ask about Jefferson if one's going to judge him is how many thinkers of his era can you point to who maintained that slavery was an unjust institution, that all races were equally well endowed mentally and physically, that equality really meant equality for everyone. It's a fairly short list and Jefferson's on that list.

  What is the pursuit of happiness?
What a great question. It seems to me that the purpose of education is to answer the question of what the pursuit of happiness is for you. The reason we go to school ought to be not to learn some skills to get a job to make a better salary, but to find out enough of who I am so that I know how to pursue my own happiness. And that happiness is necessarily involved with that of the wider society for reasons that Jefferson saw so clearly. If you just pursue your own happiness—"I want a Porche and a hot tub and a condo, all on credit"—and you don't care about anyone else, it doesn't work. You find out that your happiness is bound up with everyone else's happiness. It's a common endeavor. Science is very much like that, you know. You can't just go out and do science by yourself. There has to be a scientific community that supports it. So many of Jefferson's ideas converge on the realization that, if it doesn't work out for everyone, it's not going to work out for the individual.

  If you could be the fly on the wall and be in a moment in Jefferson's life, which moment would you choose?
If I could witness any moment in Jefferson's life, I suppose it would be one of his conversations with Franklin. Jefferson had a sense of humor that wasn't often brought out, but Franklin could really bring it out. And you would then have two of the greatest conversationalists of the century in the room, so that would have been a good time to be there.

  If there was a moment in the history of our republic, what would it be?
I'd like to have been there when they were rewriting the Declaration of Independence because, as a writer, I know what this is like and it's not inspirational. It's not a lot of fun. It was hot, dirty work. And yet, they got out of it one of the greatest pieces of writing in all political literature.

  This is a man who is steeped in the finest impressions. What is Jefferson feeding there?
Jefferson was a civilized man. He believed in all the accouterments of civilization, which he believed were a part of a liberally furnished and progressive mind and life, and not just to be left to wealthy people who might have inherited them. He believed in making a complete life for oneself, and making things just as good as you can for yourself and for others. And the secret to that is that you have to do for others as well as for yourself.

Jefferson worked at everything and he believed that if you keep working hard and contributing, then you have a right also to enjoy some rewards. As a result of his devotion to others, his life was constantly tearing him away from what he most wanted to do. Jefferson said the supreme luxury of his life was the pursuit of mathematics and of science. And he was constantly retiring to pursue these studies and then public life would draw him out again into the vice-presidency and then into the presidency, an office of which he presciently said that no man will ever leave with the reputation that carried him into it.

  And in fact he was not the greatest of presidents, right?
No, that's right.

  What do you think finally is the legacy of Thomas Jefferson? What is his gift to us?
The greatest gift that we can give to Jefferson as well as take from him is to exercise the freedoms that his work, and that of the other Founding Fathers, bequeathed to us. I'm concerned that Americans have become much too quick to throw away their liberties for too little cause. We're consistently asked nowadays, for instance, to abridge our freedom of speech and freedom of the press because someone says that someone else might be offended by what we had to say. If you're offended by what I have to say or write, tell me so, let's talk about it. But don't tell me I can't write it because someone else might be offended. Jefferson all his life wrote things that offended all kinds of people because he understood that your liberties require that you exercise them. The best thing that we can do to warrant Jefferson's gift to us is to exercise our rights and our responsibilities, take government and our community into our own hand and make a better life for our children and their children because that's what he did for us.

  He seems almost unknowable to us. How can we know him, how can we approach him?
I don't know if there is a real Thomas Jefferson. I don't know if there is a real me or a real Ken Burns. And I'm not sure that there's an essential center to a person. It may be, you know, as the brain scientists are now starting to tell us that each person is a constellation of different intelligences and that these intelligences spin like a galaxy and present different glittering facets from moment to moment. Somewhere in that force field, you know, is the totality of Jefferson. We'll never know it, but as Christopher Wren's tombstone says in St. Paul's Cathedral, if you seek his monument, look around you.