The Thomas Jefferson Hour; Greed and Human Nature

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. The Thomas Jefferson Hour is produced by High Plains Public Radio and new Enlightenment Radio Network. Today's program was recorded in June of 2004 and covers two primary topics, the topic of greed and human nature and the reputation of Benedict Arnold. Please join us as our host Bill Crystal speaks with Thomas Jefferson portrayed by Humanity Scholar Clay Jenkinson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president. Good day to you, Mr. Jefferson. Good day to you, citizen. You're looking fair. I trust you've been getting plenty of exercise. I have been gardening it is the, of course, the height of the gardening season at Monticello. And I said late in my life to Charles Wilson Peel, but though an old man, I remain a young gardener. And you, you of course, put your feeding cold water every day to help ward off colds and flu. That is correct. When I wake up in the morning, I wash my feet for 15 or 20 minutes in a basin of

cold water, sometimes iced water. And this I felt was a way of driving away agues or fevers. By the way, I didn't have a cold more than once every 8.5 years. I challenge you to meet that that standard of health. How often did you have migraine headaches, sir? Well, I had them until I retired from presidency. I had them periodically. And when they came, they would incapacitate me. In fact, and I would often have to go into a darkened room from to entail dusk. It was unable to concentrate even enough to write letters or to read. The pain was excruciating. And I required what you would call in your time total sensory deprivation in order to survive them at all. There were no adequate medicines. There was no real understanding of migraines in my time. But I suffered from them. And I knew this much that they were in some regards stress related. But I had them until 189 when I retired from the presidency voluntarily. And I never had one thereafter. So I felt relieved in my retirement to be without this terrible burden.

Indeed, sir. Well, it's good that you're feeling especially fit today. We have listener questions that are going to drive this program. The first comes from Paul Morningstar, who called the Empire for Liberty program that over arches the Thomas Jefferson hour. And he asked a question about, well, this, this may be gibberish to you. But he asked a question whether greed was a social disease or a personal imbalance greed. This is not a Jeffersonian topic. Is it not, sir? Well, it may be a Jeffersonian topic, but the, the way you have put the question certainly seems odd to my 18th century sensibilities. But perhaps we should start by talking about greed. I don't regard greed as an inherent part of human nature. In other words, I believe that man is born good or at least neutral. And that if we train our young people correctly in ethics and the moral sense, good sense, skepticism, benevolence, that there

really is the opportunity of indefinite perfectibility in the nature of man. I do not believe that man is a self-interested, greedy, lustful, repacious, sinning sort of creature. I think that's an imputation that has been created by pessimists, frankly. And that was essentially the worldview that you inherited when you were a young man, though. Was it not? That had been the worldview of theologians from, from Paul to Augustine to Martin Luther to my goodness, John Calvin. I pretty much up to your own day. There was a deep pessimism in the history of Western tradition. And I suppose it goes back to Paul, ultimately, because Luther and Calvin and Augustine were all Paulines. They, they're the basis of their theology was the Pauline epistles, as I

understand it. And particularly Romans, I think all the great theologians from Augustine through, through Calvin were reinvigorated by the, the epistle to the Romans by St. Paul. I don't regard Paul as authoritative. I certainly don't regard him as as an authoritative exponent of Jesus ethics. But I will grant that that a very profound and fundamental pessimism as at the center of Western civilization up until the Renaissance. But with the age of science, the Renaissance, and the period in my lifetime known as the Enlightenment, a more benevolent view of life was beginning to persuade. And it was competing with the inherited pessimism of the Middle Ages. And frankly, I felt that the evidence that the science was on the side of those who had a benevolent view of man rather than those who had a dark view of man. So what you're really saying is

that greed is not an inherently human condition. It's something that occurs from time to time, but that none of us certainly are born greedy, nor do we need to wage war on greed within us for the better part of our lives. No, I don't think so. I know there were distinguished political theorists in my time who believe otherwise. And I know that our own John Adams would find this sort of talk to be erroneous and even fatuous. I'm sure Hamilton would merely scoff at the notion of the general benevolence of mankind. And there are social philosophers in Europe, particularly Bernard Mandavill, who had written the fable of the bees. And in that very important document, Mandavill had said that private greed produces public happiness that an intense private self-interest, each man out for himself, has the net effect of creating public happiness and that

the social good is fueled by this private lust for distinction and success and wealth and access to members of the opposite sex and so on and so forth. I just never believed that. I believe that the reason that we have inherited this pessimism is because that in earlier times we were a overly influenced by the Judeo-Christian theology, be living in a world of scarce resources where there really was a struggle to exist and therefore people had to be self-interested and see we were living in ignorance and that ignorance made us believe that what appeared to be the case was also the norm. And the biggest mistake you can make is looking around and saying well the world is such and such that must be the norm. The world is artificial and we create it and the Declaration of Independence of 1776 said we can tear up our charters and start fresh and if we do remarkable things will happen and history has borne that out. The United

States is the the great optimistic, wealthy, prosperous, and happy nation that it is because we had the good sense to tear up our charters and stop looking to the past and create something new. And yet many would look at the constitutional convention and the bargains or the packs that were made presumably with the devil as being decisions which really reflected the inability to to take a greed off the table. Yes, I can see that. There was sectional interests. The South had its interests, agriculture, slavery, states rights, the North had its interests, commercial traffic, navigation, the fisheries off of the New England coast, stronger central government, a more federalist constitution. I see that but part of this is environmental. New England is Calvinist. Nobody doubts that the pilgrims and the Puritans had a profound influence on the thinking of New Englanders. Virginia is a cavalier

state. It comes from a more latitude and area and tradition in Britain, more aristocratic tradition, less consumed by the Puritan movements, less consumed by Calvin and his teachings. So there are environmental factors here and we must also keep in mind that I'm not ruling out that there are impulses of darkness in us. Greed, lust, repatiousness. The seven deadly sins of the medieval time. I wouldn't call them sins, but I take your point. I don't rule out that these impulses are in us. But the point is that if we emphasize the benevolence of man and train man for benevolence and produce institutions for him that honor, cherish and promote benevolence, man I think will rise to that standard. And if he doesn't rise all the way, he will certainly get a lot closer than he will if you bring in, say Paul Augustin or Thomas Hobbes to tell you what life could be on earth. Well you mentioned John Adams. John Adams considered it an absolute necessity in his own life to strive for virtue, which meant to not

only educate himself to the highest degree possible, but also to look at the darkness within and to perpetually wage war on it. That for him it couldn't be ignored. It was it was too profound a part of who he was. I see his point and I do believe we have to be we have to struggle against our base or impulses. I think we have to struggle every day to be polite in the face of rudeness to be generous in the face of our selfishness to tolerate differences rather than go to war against them, to treat those who are dependent upon us with justice even though we may be enraged at them, to negotiate differences rather than let them spin out of control to be monogamous in the face of the animal passions of humanity. I'm not a fool. I do understand that

that it's not a utopian picture and when Madison said if men were angels no government would be necessary, I hear him. So I don't want to be seen as some naive bubble-headed man who can't see straight. I see it. I see it in myself to a certain degree although I had enormous self-discipline in most regards. I see it in others. I have seen the lust for money. I also believe that Jesus was speaking some truth when he said that the love of money is the root of all difficulty in the world. So I understand this but I think that that has been emphasized unnecessarily by pessimists and I think that their answer is the wrong one and their answer is that if this is man, this sinner, this creature of base passions, we must erect a Leviathanic government to control those passions that we need hyper-government to protect ourselves from these impulses.

I don't see that. I see education as the the leaveening principle. That's the yeast that can turn us from whatever is wrong in us to what is good or to use another gardening metaphor. It's like a peach tree. When you grow a peach tree, if you just let it proliferate in the garden, it's going to produce weak fruit because it will have too many branches and some of them will be sapping the sugars out of the tree. But if you go in and prune it properly, you can have three or four or five branches that produce absolutely outstanding fruit and every orchard owner, every gardener, understands the need for pruning. So I see a child as a vine or a peach tree that is growing up only in nature and nature is profuse but undisciplined. That's the nature of our wilderness, profuse but undisciplined. And when humans come in and begin to garden, which is after all what God set Adam and Eve to do in the Garden of Eden,

when humans come into garden and to train nature modestly, that's when fruits begin to blossom for it. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president, Mr. Jefferson's answering a listener question. He has agreed a social disease or personal imbalance. Mr. Jefferson, I hear you saying it's neither it's not especially pervasive in humankind. Indeed, if one gets the right sort of education, then one probably will exhibit few few of those calculations at all. And if one listens to the moral sense, you have a moral sense embedded in your heart or your head that tells you on every situation, what the right thing to do is. So where do we look for a good example of a person devoid of greed? Where do you look? Where do you look? We don't look at you. You're as flawed as any of us. I won't necessarily grant that but I will take myself off the table because I

don't like to speak about myself in this way. Well, you said John Adams was a poor calculator when it came to the motives of men. It would seem to me John Adams with his understanding of us despite our rhetoric descending into the muck of our origins as being far more on the mark perhaps than you which are magnificent rhetoric but with modern revelations which suggest that you like the rest of us were weak when you needed to be strong. First of all, I don't think that if I were you that I would hold up Adams as the exemplar of anything but I'll freely admit that I was an imperfect human being just because I don't want us to get lost on ad hominem when we're trying to talk about the nature of humankind. So I will simply take myself off the table and put perhaps Mr. Madison there. I would prefer to have General Washington put on the table as the good example. I'll accept that. The disinterested human being, the man who could have profited enormously from his role in the revolution and yet profited little the man who

manumitted all of his slaves and provided money in his will in order to see that they were taking care of even even past his death. The man who who was a part of a Cavalier class but who clearly understood that that he didn't have to remain silent on the issue of slavery that he could speak beyond his own life and and do something about it which which in the case of Mr. Madison seems not to have been the case either. Well I'm happy to grant Washington as the nation's leader and I do think he'll be remembered and revered as long as liberty has voters in the world. I think that he is America's principal freedom fighter and the fact that he renounced power when he could have seized power I think you rightly point to that as the single greatest source of his magnificence as a human being but let me return to the subject of the moral sense let's say that you and I are on an island and there is one coconut that's it and you are busy writing a message in a bottle and I find that coconut and I am hungry I want that

coconut I feel a greed an appetite to have it for myself and my and I may think briefly of hiding this knowledge from you eating the coconut privately then pretending to you that I had had no food whatsoever I can understand why one might feel that but my moral sense would be calling loudly to me during this moment of contemplation and it would be saying I wouldn't want him to do that to me that's the golden rule and I think that's probably the most important of all rules in life if I do this he may starve and I will lose my companion and our chances of surviving diminish so they're self-interest but it has the same effect or I may think that in some much more vague way this is simply unfair to do to this to somebody that I claim to

admire and that if even if he survived and but if he came to understand what I had done the tension between us would drive us apart in some way and that our in our friendship would be hurt by this so there are any number of of calculations that come out of the head in the heart which would prevent me from eating that coconut alone mr. Jefferson it's a wonderful story you tell great stories it is didactic I learned learn a great deal from it I admire you enormously and yet as you speak about coconuts I think of you making a wonderful living enjoying every luxury well someone is providing for your wants as a slave where does the golden rule apply when it comes to something like that my point is is that you yourself with with such a strong and well articulated moral sense were as as admired in the institution of slavery as as anyone who never gave it another thought maybe maybe John Adams is right maybe you know we crave virtue we long for it we study it we seek it

like general Washington we practice self-control because our temper is so you know is so likely to flash we do all of these things and yet somehow despite our best efforts we remain creatures who are at some level victims of ourselves and the world we inherit well as a gentleman I certainly don't want a quarrel with you if it's your view that that my view of human nature can't possibly have validity because I was a slaveholder and therefore was a creature of greed and appetite myself there's not very much we can do by way of furthering this this argument but let me speak in a in a sort of broader and more general way I think that Adams was too pessimistic I think that he looked around and saw evil motives everywhere I think that I was perhaps too optimistic Adams has the virtue of certainly not looking hypocritical because his pessimism was was not based in

it wasn't it was not at odds with with other factors in his life there's no question that my ownership of slaves particularly in your time though less so in mine calls everything that comes out of my mouth into a certain kind of question there's a shadow that is cast over everything that I might possibly say and I simply have to accept that but we were able to function in our discussions about society quite successfully with this evil in our world in other words we could still talk about the nature of man we didn't feel embarrassed and incapacitated from talking about the good society merely because we had flaws as long as slavery was never laid on the table and never mentioned it was possible to discuss all sorts of wonderful things that is the irony from the standpoint of the 21st century that it was the elephant in the living room that was never discussed mr. Jefferson will be right back in just a moment welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour your weekly conversation with the third president

mr. Jefferson I need to apologize I'm letting my own 21st century perspective enter into our discussion and I'm afraid I'm being unfair to you I know that at the time the constitution was developed in Philadelphia the issue of slavery perplexed the various people not only in the north but also in the south as well and that it was it was deemed necessary to put it as far on the periphery as possible and not to speak of it simply because union would not be possible as long as it became a central issue I think that was proven by the by the election of Lincoln as president in 1860 in the subsequent American Civil War but but let me take let's take slavery out I'm not attempting to call you a hypocrite let me just close this discussion by saying that I'm absolutely aware of the the problem that you're pointing to and you know if you think about American history the fact that slavery is a part of our national story is just so sad because

we are the world's hope there's no question that we meant what we said when we talked about the ideals of humankind and the rights of man and dignity and equality and justice and the rule of law and the machine of the law in this country we were going to operate by rational principles for the first time in human history there's no question that we were sincere we weren't we weren't all thinking this is just rhetoric by which we're grabbing power from Great Britain and and bringing a home-grown elite to bear on our our system of government we were we were deeply intoxicated by the ideals of the enlightenment and by the ideals of natural right and we wanted desperately to produce the world's first really remarkable culture and we did and there's no question that we did and even with all of our failures and there were many what we produced in 1776 and 1787 and in the election of 1800 was something that the world can't live without that in your time

every nation that wishes to be self-determining has no choice but to look to that model because there is no other model there are their imitations and there are foreshadowings of it and other cultures but there really is only one founding model of what life can be on earth under proper constitutional principles and we designed it and I was a part of it and many of us who were the designers were flawed men some of us were flawed because we were greedy like Robert Morris the financier of the revolution and some of us were flawed because we were vain glorious and prickly like by Colonel Hamilton and some of us were flawed because we didn't quite believe in the thing you know we wanted to believe it but we do we couldn't quite make our character come on board I think that's John Adams to my mind I was flawed in the way that some others were just seems more glaring with me because I'm the author of all those glittering statements but I was flawed in

that my basic economy was based upon slave labor and I accept that and I believe my flaw is a deeper one than Adams flaw I believe that my flaw is a deeper one than Hamilton's flaw because his flaw was self-destructive and his family paid a price but it wasn't destructive of as I put it in another context about Negroes people who had never done him any disservice you know people who were basically innocent who were forced into slavery I accept all of that and I believe that it's a blot upon my character and it's a blot upon the republic and I feel so unhappy to think that this world experiment of such importance and magnitude has this crack in it because we can't allow that to divert us from the urgent need to produce these constitutional republics all over the world in other words if if we become cynical and say well the founding

fathers were slaveholders therefore all that they said was corrupted I think that's just patently nonsense what we said was not corrupted we may have been corrupt beings who said true things but I believe strongly the world cannot live without the ideals that we articulated and that if we are if we are judged harshly for not having lived up to them ourselves then that's just something we have to bear historically but I think in the context of the question that Paul asks you know his greed of social disease or personal imbalance the point is well taken that some you know some form of imbalance exists in the best of us and I think for John Adams that was part of why he thought a government needed to be to be full of checks and balances to protect to protect the the docile individuals from those who would gain power who would exploit the the tendencies that we have in those directions and use the government as the vehicle for achieving it

I think that he understood that at our best we're still not perfect and and it seems to me your rhetoric has a has a difficult time acknowledging that we are incapable of of perfection well I think we're capable of much more perfection than we think I think we have never tried in human history to live according to rational principles I mean I'll just say frankly I cannot accept original sin I would rather accept the notion of greed than the notion of original sin because the notion of greed is a resource notion that there is a forest and I see it and you see it and we each try to grab as much of it as we can for our own good our own gain that at least makes a kind of sense to me but if you start by saying God created us as miserable sinners and everything that comes out of our activity is therefore corrupted that I can't accept because it seems so dark and I think that that the checks and balances that I would suggest are written in the human heart more than in

government I I do agree with John Adams that we need checks and balances and I like our tripartite system I particularly like the Federalist balance between national and state authority and I think that any system where power is is is lodged in one person or one entity is a flawed one deeply flawed one so I accept that and but I believe that man is more innocent when he doesn't have power than when he does I think man in the state of nature is is more benevolent than he is when he is the governor or the senator or the lieutenant so I think these are important differences but nevertheless I think that that the checks and balances are really written in the human heart if I covet your wife that means that I at some point during that that lust I must reflect that I would not be happy if you were coveting my wife and that we probably couldn't have a social structure if everybody was coveting everybody else with impunity this may be a poor choice of

examples sir I'm accepting your challenge to look into the mirror of human nature and I if I I understand that the good of society requires us to show some discipline I don't steal your cow because if I do you steal my hog then I retaliate and suddenly one of us has a pitch fork or a rifle and there's a shooting so I try to respect your property not because I don't want some of it but because I understand consequences and because I understand basic principles of fairness and I understand that our society could not function very well if we all behaved out of a kind of disregard for other people's lives and and their vows and their principles that doesn't mean we don't commit errors in the course of our lives but when we do my point is we always know we're doing wrong it's interesting that the idea of greed has been articulated by many people in many different disciplines using many different structures other than the one of original sin as

articulated in the Bible I think it was Sigmund Freud who talked about man fearfully between Thanatos and Eros between knowledge of his own finiteness his death and fear of his own sexuality and where unbridled sexuality can carry a human being but but I think the point has been made by a number of scholars throughout history that that that human beings are are are imbalanced that we are looking for a point of of balance we find all sorts of systems to try to create balance for ourselves but that we are by nature imbalanced well perhaps but I think we need to look on the bright side and also to emphasize education if you take a child and that child there's a there's a pastry there's a cake the child wants all of it but if you say to the child if you just left the child alone the child would eat all the cake and then the other the other child would

be angry and horrified and and without that cake so you take a child and you and you use a socratic method and you say well well how would you feel if the other child ate all of your cake and you use a socratic method to train a child into principles of basic fairness and once they understand this you can see a kind of light come into their eyes but they realize I would like to have that whole pastry but I see now that I wouldn't like that if somebody else did that and I will therefore reluctantly agree to a social a an unspoken social compact about fairness about sharing this happens in every family that doesn't mean that the child is some wicked sinful Calvinist creature who wants all the cake it means that there is social training that's required for us to be fully civilized and that that's the purpose of family values and private ethics it's to a certain degree the the work of formal religious systems although you find very little common

sense I think in most theologies and it's the work of our educational systems and our civic training and I think that that's that's what we need to do to teach people the consequences of thoughtless action so I would rather talk about error and thoughtlessness than sin and greed and depravity and we will allow you that sir as you were talking about the socratic methods and the lessons of of life I was thinking of my own family and my own children after enduring such lectures theft would take place there'd be clandestine clandestine acquisition it just seems to me as you were talking and I was reflecting it through my own life experience the need for good government comes to mind again and again and again well you are clearly a child of pessimism I'm an optimist and I can't help it I have to speak to my way of thinking you know but my point is that I'm not a fool it's not that I didn't see the world around me but I think that the world is

largely what we project on to it and I think that if you grew up in France in the 18th century when the aristocrats had everything and the commoners had nothing and the commoners were systematically abused by the state by the church by the landlord by the tax collector by the censor they were beaten they were pummeled their their daughters were raped that these people are not free and therefore their responses are not free responses now you may say there's an analogy to American slavery I'll accept that but we haven't seen what human nature can be because we've lived under these failed institutions well and in the people of France revolted they in many cases executed those who had held them in slavery and after themselves being sated by access promptly surrendered their liberty to a despot the revolution worked out badly but it they went too far too fast but I do believe that the revolution was an extremely important human event and that it was a necessary

one and then I would not have wished that it had never occurred thank you mr. Jefferson we'll move on this is the Thomas Jefferson hour your weekly conversation with the third president who has answered a listener's question Paul Morningstar asked is greed a social disease or personal imbalance mr. Jefferson if if I get your drift you answered the question by saying it need not exist in an enlightened human being whatever the cost I think we can enlighten ourselves to a very remarkable degree and George Washington did on the question of slavery for example and and George Washington did on renouncing power after two terms and Adams did when he he thwarted the radical federalists and refused to fight the war that they so desperately wanted him to fight in France and I had my own moments of of this sort of what I'd call virtue virtue is not automatic but virtue is a part of the human character and I think if we emphasize that we we get a much more happy garden than we do if we have saying Augustine pruning us mr. Jefferson

we have a another question this one comes from John Miller and I must read it it is a very erudite piece please listen carefully in a recent show about judicial review you made a remark to the effect that Aaron Burr's activity was equally as treacherous as Benedict Arnold's based on the latest information that is defaming Arnold of course no one ever does something for just one reason but Arnold's overarching reason for what he did was to end the war before the country descended to the level of a failed state of which there are several examples around the world in 2004 that is also why he tried to capture Governor Jefferson and the Virginia legislature three times in 1780 1781 the quickest way to end the war at Williamsburg Richmond and Charlottesville that is why he advised Clinton to station Cornwallis at Yorktown in late 1781 so he could roll up Virginia the following spring it didn't work but the war ended pretty pretty quickly anyway and that is

why he advised George the third in 1785 to assist the US materially David McCullough in his biography of Adams inexplicably misses this episode in Adams career but then he misses a lot George the third offered Adams that the Royal Navy would guard US merchant ships against Mediterranean and other pirates as if they were British merchant ships and that way Congress was able to put the continental navy out of business immediately so the last three frigates and save enough money to have the US avoid becoming a failed state it worked for almost 12 years at which point reportedly almost 2 million Frenchmen lined up along the channel coast to invade the British Isles so the British withdrew their ships from the Mediterranean to guard their coast and the pirates ate up US merchant ships prompting Congress to establish the US navy with the USS Constitution as one of its first three ships without that respite from having to pay for a navy the US might never have taken off very likely it would not have taken off thank you Benedict Arnold

perhaps you can spare some time in a future show to rehabilitate Arnold a bit I think he and Stephen Hopkins were probably the two most important people in gaining American independence and yet the former is maligned and the latter is completely forgotten all his papers were carefully collected in his house at Providence Road Island after his death in 1785 so scholars could study the papers of the man who founded the Stamp Act Congress the committees of correspondence and the continental Congress just some of his many many achievements and the worst hurricane on records swept the waters of Narragansett Bay through the house in 1815 destroying all the papers even though the house itself is still there open to the public no biography of Hopkins has been written since the 1880s i am historian john fits you miller new port house in Williamsburg Virginia my wife and I really enjoy the show whenever we can tune in please keep up the good work well let me say you cannot defame Benedict Arnold

he he suggests that there is rehabilitation in order i i certainly disagree Arnold committed treason i actually said there should be a reward of five thousand pounds sterling offered for anyone who can bring him in debt or alive i get safe to say he won the battle of saratoga which was the greatest battle i think in the american revolution brilliant general but he turned on his own country and this gentleman is suggesting that he had a larger global perspective and that he was trying to spare the united states by avoiding prolonged conflict that could not be won in that form and so on and so forth i i simply don't accept that i think that when you are a citizen of of the united states if you have if you have made a vow of loyalty to our constitution or to our armed services that if you commit an act that is that is treasonous by the standards of our system that there is no justification for it in higher law that your duty is to be loyal to your country into your commander in chief and that when you go over to the enemy side even if you think you are

doing it for good reason you have betrayed your country and you deserve the deepest and foul list rebuke by history and i think that we should historians should try to clarify these issues and and to say for Arnold what they can but anyone who thinks that Arnold can be rehabilitated on this on this front i think is mistaken as to Hopkins i think what a pity we don't have more of his papers thank you mr. Jefferson hopefully in a later program we'll be able to talk about some of these issues at greater length particularly mr. Hopkins we haven't had much to say about him in the past it would be very interesting general Arnold he he remains in an american enigma thank you very much mr. Jefferson we'll be back in just a moment to meet the scholar standing behind you clay jenkinson welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour mr. Jefferson today discussed a couple of listener

questions clay how do you how do you feel when you're Thomas Jefferson answering a question about whether greed is a social disease or a personal imbalance well you know i'm of two minds about this bill or maybe i'm of several minds i'm sure you are too on the one hand i am a Jeffersonian i believe that human nature is actually much better than it historically has been thought to be and that there is that we can that we could really blossom into rather remarkable human beings and that that what holds us back is laziness and in undisciplined behavior much more than anything else but i know that the moral that what Jefferson said about the moral sense is true

i know that in my life every time that i have done something ignoble i have known it i have never done an ignoble thing innocently i've always done it by my squelching my moral sense so i do believe he's right about that i think the Scottish enlightenment was correct that we do have a moral sense and i think that it's inherent it's certainly also nurtured but i think that there it's inherently the case that we have a sense of basic justice basic fairness and nothing upsets a child more than perceived or real unfairness that's when the children really begin to spin out of control when parents don't follow through on promises or when a child perceives that one child's getting more than the next child or that that that there's a that there's a capricious sense of standards that are applied one day and not applied the next that's what children find most frustrating and so i do i do believe that i also believe in the goodness of man up to a certain point i think that we have not really tried to to liberate human goodness i think we have we if you listen to

evangelicals and i mean Islamic evangelicals or Baptist evangelicals they have such a dark view of life that they are constantly preaching at people how they must behave and i think that that is absolutely wrong i think that it's counterproductive socially i think that it's arrogant and i think that they lent they almost all of them wind up exhibiting themselves as profound hypocrites i'm a Freudian in addition to being a Jeffersonian i believe that that for all of the possibilities of humankind that there is a a fissure in a crack at the center of us somewhere you can call it original sin you i think that Conrad Loren said there's an aggressive gene in us you know different people have had different ways of formulating but i think there's a crack at the center of human cult of human nature and that some of us are able to overcome it most of us fall in from time to time some of us live in the crack it's interesting right hold neighbor in the in the 1930s rediscovered

the term original sin to describe what he thought was a human condition intellectuals his peers throughout the world i thought he was absolutely potty because you know who could possibly believe an original sin he didn't believe in it as you know this Adam and Eve phenomenon but he did see like Adams i think in human beings we are wonderfully talented and gifted and pretentious on the one hand but yet on the other hand we we are man against himself at inevitably in most of our lives and you see it in the in the case of some of the founding fathers that they'll do something that's so damn self-destructive that they know that it just flies in the face of so much that they had done that was so remarkable that we are flawed human beings for neighbor that was an argument as for Adams for good government or a neighbor's case for for justice to be the approximation of the the impossible ideal love the Jeffersonian ideal and that we needed to spend more time on our institutions but it's interesting that this kind of dialogue has been

going on to this very day is there something in us that you know as you've described as a crack or a fissure or a gene that keeps us from being what we ought to be well if you go to the prisons and i've gone to them a lot in and out of character not a lot but a a dozen or two times it is universally the case that that hardened criminals were savaged as as infants beaten raped abused neglected that they that whatever they were whatever they were going to become was desperately distorted by other human beings at the time when they were without any capacity to defend themselves if you go to the world of pornography and and sex slavery and so on virtually every woman in pornography was raped by a father an uncle a stepfather a brother or a neighbor there is no question in my mind that most of the so-called anti-social

behavior in the world is the direct result of child abuse and that that child abuse had had been prevented might have produced a very different outcome not a perfect human being but certainly somebody who is not living in that fissure that seems to me to be a profound revelation in a certain way the nature versus nurture argument i think is nature is maybe not as good as Jefferson posited but most of what is wrong in the world is wrong by nurture and if we could take every child born in america at this moment or for example for that matter every child born in the Islamic world at this moment and place them in a situation where they were treated with dignity and respect i wonder how much anti-social behavior there would be 20 years from now that's a great thing to contemplate yet at the same time you know we do have 200 years of american history you know a land in which access to education is unparalleled pretty much in the history of the world and

and yet look at how broken and flawed our society is today you wonder if Jefferson's argument really does hold water well it's a question of how where you trace it because all right let's say that i'm right that a serial murderer was not wired to become a serial murderer who this is not him working out his original sinfulness this is the fact that he was heavily distorted by adults that he was in a trust relationship with we still have to arrest him and put him away so there's i'm not suggesting that that we become too sympathetic on the basis of this but it does i think requires to have a deeper understanding but then even if that's true why were his parents and neighbors this way and what made his their parents and neighbors that way so how far does this go back and i think Jefferson was trying to say you can break the cycle it's a new continent it's a new constitution it's a new republic founded on new principles i think Jefferson thought we're going to break a cycle here and we don't have a church that's going to tell us what to believe there won't be an established church and we're not going to have landlords who force us to vote

in a certain way we're going to be yoman farmers and we're not going to have a kingship like an absolutist kingship in Britain where you can be tired and feathered or whipped or or head of your head chopped off for saying the wrong thing i think Jefferson thought if you break that cycle of superstition and institutional abuse and absolutist power structures that probably at that point all sorts of goodness will start to blossom forth you have to admit that's a very very attractive and compelling argument and if ever it was going to happen that was the time that it was going to happen as you have said slavery is this glaring problem at the center of all this believing it alone for the moment someone like Adams would say to Jefferson are you crazy if you if you if you take the noblest person who ever lived in the ignobleest person who ever lived and put them in a sack and roll them down a hill a schnook is going to come out first every time that there is Adams view was we can force ourselves into virtue by rigid self discipline but that we are basically scamps

and that there's no way around that mr. Jefferson there's no training there's no textbook there's no farm there's no garden there's no better constitution than no matter what you do man has this rage for distinction that i want to be stronger than you handsomer than you i want to have access to better women than you i want more money than you i want more power than you i want a better house than you and i'll do virtually anything i think i can get away with in order to achieve it that's Adams i think and that's a that's putting Adams in a dark light but i think Adams said that's human nature let's let's not pretend otherwise it's not pretty but it's pervasive you're listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour Clay Jenkinson out of character now no longer speaking for Thomas Jefferson is struggling with what i think must be a question that if Jefferson had had to tackle during his life he would have he would have run from that this is just a this is the at the heart of who Jefferson is Jefferson can't admit that human beings are are mired creatures hit and his whole attractive vision the vision that draws us in so so profoundly that that has kept

Jefferson at the at the center of of American mythology is is an attractive one as you said we don't want to admit that there's a scoundrel going to come out of the bag every time well maybe maybe Jefferson's right and we're just not trying hard enough i mean no i'm serious okay i i believe that Jefferson was a social engineer and i believe that Adams was was a social realist and that's a very profound difference and that's why Jefferson can be likened to Lenin or likened to Marx or likened by his detractors even to Paul Pot because Jefferson really does want to refashion humankind by creating a better environmental infrastructure to nurture what he takes to be the goodness of man and anyone who wants to come in and reform human culture is going to is going to have certain despotic energies in his character because it means you're not enough now but wait till i'm done fixing you and that there's that element in in Jefferson Adams i think looks around i think he doesn't look around with an onjanda style i think he looks around with a with a

dark glasses but nevertheless he's closer to the truth in my opinion than Jefferson was but i think Jefferson would say what do you know why is that going to take you but as you said to me is Jefferson uh you know okay you've stopped conversation where you know okay if we if we acknowledge that you're right then we have nothing to say to one another and it seems to me the enduring legacy of Jefferson is that we always have something to say or one another we can disagree is rational friends let's educate uh Jefferson would say that education is the panacea and if we ever really got serious about education that we could we could close the gap we couldn't maybe finish the job but we could close the gap so 65 million of us wouldn't be voting on the american idol probably if we really got serious about education well i think if if if president bush got on national television tonight and said i want each one of you to go to your neighbor and knock on the door and say five complete sentences that that have intelligence in a row i wonder what percentage of 65

million people would do it what can i say i'm i'm speechless so i i rock back and forth with this i have to be Jefferson and the reason i'm attracted to Jefferson is because he believes in optimism and that he believes that the world can be perfected and he believes that this country could really be the world's remarkable exemplar of of hope in good sense the lamp on the lamp stand the city on the hill yeah the secular version of the new england dream you know most recently articulated by Ronald Reagan into a certain extent by president clinton the idea that america can be a shining example to the world i believe that and that that's that's the basis that's my civic faith but it is faith and most of the things that one sees around one in the world from economics to war to race relations to pop culture to environmental degradation to the continuing problem of our food supply and then the ways in which goods and services are produced in the world

and under what labor conditions if you if you take a look from the moon at down at humankind you think well here it is the 21st century and we have a cell phone that can bring you child saying goodnight to you from the other side of the planet you can be standing in the middle of north koto are on mount everest and you can talk to your child on the other side of the planet or you can put a shunt in somebody's aorta that allows them to live 35 more years when they would have died certainly in the age of Jefferson you see that you think my god this is what humans are what a piece of work is a man how noble and reason how infinite and faculties inform and moving how express an admirable in action how like an angel an apprehension how like a god that's what Hamlet said and then at the same time you look at somebody you know beating the living daylights out of a black prisoner in a Texas or New Jersey jail you see the dark side and you see that we're still fighting wars and we're still taking advantage and we're still dumping whatever pollutants we think we can get away with and we're cutting down every redwood that isn't protected by somebody

and if you see the this other side you think wow my god how can the one hand you have advertisements on television that's saying it's going to be the best time in the history of the world and it certainly is for the halves and on the other side you realize it's also going to be the worst time in the history of the world because the the capacities for mayhem have grown so democratic and so so enormous and you I don't know if I if I speak for you Bill but I'm sure I speak for many of our listeners when I am just like a yo yo I am just back and forth some days I can't function I'm so beset by confusion and angst over this and other days I think I can't wait to get to office max to buy the latest gadget that will allow me to even have a more splendid and glittering life and I think that's where we are as a people in this moment of where we're Jefferson's technology but we're Augustine's society and it's a it's a horrible horrible mismatch and it has to get resolved thank you very much Clay take care Bill humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson is recently completed a chap book which is a pocket-sized booklet on Lewis and Clark in Iowa this booklet is made up of a

series of questions that are posed and then answered regarding Lewis and Clark's time in Iowa and Nebraska the questions range from what happened on the Lewis and Clark expedition in Iowa to what did the expedition eat well in Iowa to what are some of the first that are associated with Lewis and Clark and Iowa and Nebraska to what is revealed about the character of Maryweather Lewis and William Clark in Iowa plus many many more questions here's a quick excerpt from the book this is just a note on the artificiality of state boundaries humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson writes when Lewis and Clark ascended the Missouri River in the summer of 1804 they could not anticipate the state boundaries that would eventually be imposed on the 828,000 square miles of the Louisiana purchase during the 39 days that they spent on the stretch of the Missouri River along what is now Iowa they had no idea that they were exploring what would become the border between Iowa and Nebraska their choice of campsites had nothing to do with modern jurisdictions they simply chose the best

campsite that appeared at the time when the expedition needed to stop forward progress for the night any study of Lewis and Clark in Iowa is necessarily a study of Lewis and Clark in Iowa and Nebraska this chap book makes no attempt to prefer Iowa over Nebraska focus on Iowa events to the exclusion of Nebraska or pretend that events that occurred in today's Nebraska occurred in Iowa this chap books general focus on Iowa has more to do with the location of the institutions that commissioned it and paid for it than with any geographic parochialism the Thomas Jefferson hours offering this booklet as a fundraiser for a donation of $15 we will send you Clay's latest chap book Lewis and Clark in Iowa this offer ends August 31st 2004 please call 1-800-274-1240 again that is 1-800-274-1240 and ask for Ian or Janie or go to our website www.th-Jefferson.org where you will find further donation instructions music for the Thomas Jefferson hour was provided by Steven Swinford of Reno Nevada

the Thomas Jefferson hours produced by high planes public radio and new enlightenment radio network thank you for listening and we hope you join us again next week for another entertaining historically accurate and thought-provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson