What would Thomas Jefferson think?
January 7th, 2010 at 9:27 pm (History, Society)
Thomas Jefferson has a podcast. That’s right, you can now listen to our third President discuss his views on a wide range of subjects in a weekly show, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, that bills itself as “A Radio Program that Models Civil Discourse, Critical Thinking and Good Citizenship.” You can subscribe on iTunes or just browse and listen to individual mp3s.
Today I listened to Episode 761: The Long Now. President Jefferson begins by describing what he feels are the necessary elements of a good conversation: one in which we take time to really connect, we listen to each other, and everyone contributes. There were the obligatory comments about how today’s communication modes are less and less conducive to that kind of conversation, trending towards short exchanges, abbreviations, and interruptions. To that I would add that much of our communication is also more ego-centric: tweeting, blogging, and posting status updates on Facebook are all about pushing out to the world some information about ourselves, not about mutual exchanges or real conversation, even when comment facilities are provided. But I think that is just different, not necessarily bad; those who thrive on deep prolonged conversation with like minds will seek that out anyway, in whatever form they can find it. That said, a reminder is always welcome of the value of slowing down and getting the chance to connect with others through the exchange of ideas and analysis.
The show then focused on the 10,000 Year Clock being built by The Long Now. The goal of this project is to provide a symbol to inspire all humanity to take the long view. The Clock will provide a reminder to consider the impact of what we do and create, which may reach forward in time hundreds or thousands or more years. Rather than focusing myopically on our narrow lives and their brief extent, we can consider what lies beyond, outside, and long after we are gone. I’m doubly fascinated by this project, because it also served as the inspiration for Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, the best book I read in all of 2009.
But the point of mentioning this project on the TJ Hour was to find out what Thomas Jefferson would have thought of such an endeavor. And we learn that President Jefferson was awfully fond of clocks himself (had 29 in his house, including one too big to fit indoors, so he cut a hole in the floor to let it extend down into the cellar) but that he is skeptical of how a clock, with its fundamental purpose of precisely marking out time, could help us disengage from the ticking moments of the present and think further ahead. He talks at some length about how the very imprecision of clocks in his time went hand in hand with a less frenetic life pace, when days were ruled more by the position of the sun than by an external, ticking, whittling-away sort of device. He also mentions the role clocks played in the Lewis and Clark expedition—an interesting side note that I would have liked to hear more about. I enjoyed his advice about how to slow down time: take an hour’s walk, or grow a garden. Both of these encourage you to let go of your strangle-hold on time, and allow it to stretch out in an organic way. But (in my opinion) while they do also encourage free-wheeling mental activity, which for me often does lead to bigger, weightier thought about my own future, they don’t necessarily prompt me into a centuries- or millennia-long view. I think this clock, for me personally at least, could well provide inspiration more along those lines.
I could not determine from the website how long this show has been running, but given that the most recent episode is #803 and it is a weekly show, I guess it must have been going for something like 15 years! I find that incredible! And it’s a mere 0.15% of 10,000 years! I guess I do need a longer view.
Now if only John Adams would create his own podcast, too.
Terran said,
January 8, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Interesting! I’ll have to look up the podcast. Not that I take a great deal of organic time for podcasts…
Re: the Long Now. Yes — I love the idea of this project. I’m a bit skeptical of humanity’s ability to *truly* think far ahead — 10k years is on the order of evolutionary time scales — but I think trying to think about that scale is good.
We did see one of the prototype long now clocks at the London Science Museum. It is a beautiful piece of engineering, but it wasn’t displayed as well as I would have liked. It’s really hard to understand its mechanism by looking at it… Still, it fit in nicely among the bits of Victoriania. :-)
Have you seen the Long Now’s dictionary, the Rosetta Project? It’s also an amazing piece of work — I would love to own one of their disks, but I can’t even find out if they’re selling them. And I suspect, given the construction, they would be a couple hundred dollars apiece, at least.
Re: deep, back-and-forth conversation. I conjecture that the issue is not that the blogish world doesn’t encourage conversation, but that text itself doesn’t. Blog systems like LJ have pretty good support for dialog. (Well, better than most blogs, anyway.) But even in email or Wave, it’s difficult to hold a real conversation. I guess it’s, again, the pace that we’re used to, but I just can’t sustain real convos by email. I have to go to voice at some point. Text is just so *slow*. (I’m not the world’s fastest typer, but I’m fast enough that I can see that even if I were a blindingly fast typist, I’d still be slower than talking.) It takes forever to express medium-sophistication thoughts in text.
Plus, there’s an enormous amount of body language, intonation, etc. that’s present in voice/in-person conversation that you just can’t capture in text, which makes the bandwidth even lower. Finally, text messages are static — it’s hard to achieve the kind of dynamic back and forth that we’re used to in conversation.
Finally, the sheer degree of connectedness that we can attain in the digital social network world is so much higher than we can sustain in person, day-to-day. We simply don’t have *time* to hold real conversations with so many different people. (Much as I would wish to be able to.)
That said, I often find myself wishing for better communication. I would love to be able to spend more time having more good conversations with interesting people. Especially with those of you who are so far away! :-)