Religion & Spirituality
A Q&A with Steven Johnson (Continued...)
What enabled Priestley to take part in so many intellectual revolutions simultaneously? His personal qualities? The nature of his times? Luck?
That's one of the great questions that I try to wrestle with in the book: why this particular guy at that point in time? Because as interesting as the story is, I think it's just as important to try to figure out why the story happened the way it did. And the answer is that there were multiple, interacting causes that made Priestley's ideas so revolutionary and influential. Some of them had to do with his temperament and his methodology (he was a brilliant improviser—a hacker of sorts, in the modern idiom—but not a theorizer); some of them had to do with the information networks that he participated in, with the Honest Whigs and the Lunar Society; some of it had to do with accidents of history and personal biography; for instance, he got interested in air in part because he happened to move into a house that was next door to a brewery, which ultimately led to what he called his "happiest discovery": he invented soda water.
What do you mean by the Long Zoom approach to history?
This is a theme that runs through all of my books, and was central to the approach of Ghost Map as well. The idea is that you can't properly answer the question of why things happen—why big ideas emerge and change the world, for instance—purely on the level of "Great Man" or "Social" historical accounts. The biographical details of an individual's life are important, of course, as are social movements, but there are many other levels that need to be explored, each of them existing on different scales of experience. One key theme of Invention of Air is the changing flows of energy through natural and human systems, but I also talk about the impact of coffeehouses on Enlightenment science. That's the long zoom, the conceptual movement from the very large to the very small, that tries to build explanatory bridges between each level.
Why was Priestley driven out of England by violent mobs?
He had, in a sense, become the Salman Rushdie of his day: an intellectual whose challenging religious and political views made him public enemy number one. As one of the founders of Unitarianism, he had offended many members of the church establishment, and his support of the American and French Revolutions had brought accusations that he wished to overthrow the monarchy altogether. Eventually, a mob of enraged "Church and King" supporters burned down his house and library, along with dozens of other buildings in and around Birmingham.
What kind of reception did he receive in America?
Well, Priestley himself wrote back to a friend in England that it was "too flattering." He was effectively greeted as a hero, the first great scientist-exile to arrive on American shores seeking intellectual freedom. Almost all the leading politicians of the day paid him a call, and the newspapers were filled with accounts of the great doctor's decision to make his home in the New World. He had tea several times with President Washington, and spent many hours with both Adams and Jefferson over the coming years.
What role did Priestley play in the bitter personal and political feud between Adams and Jefferson, and in their ultimate reconciliation?
This is one of the narrative threads in the book that I most enjoyed piecing together, because it's a story of three men and their shifting relationships that simultaneously plays out on a much larger scale. Priestley ultimately allied himself with Jefferson's emerging Republican party during the Adams administration, and nearly got himself arrested under the notorious Alien and Sedition acts. (Priestley's neighbor and collaborator was one of the few people who actually served time under the controversial laws.) Shortly after he was sworn into office in 1803, Jefferson wrote to Priestley to apologize for the shameful (and unconstitutional) treatment he had suffered at the hands of the Adams administration. Ten years later, well after Priestley's death, a copy of that private letter between Priestley and Jefferson fell into Adams' hands. Adams, of course, was notoriously thin-skinned, and he erupted at the betrayal and the contempt that he read in Jefferson's words. The debate that follows is really the core turning point in the Jefferson-Adams correspondence, and we have Joseph Priestley to thank for it.
What have we lost by separating science and politics into largely separate spheres today?
I start the book with a quote from a presidential debate from 2007, where a leading candidate—I won't mention his name—was asked whether he believed in the theory of evolution. "It's interesting that that question would even be asked of someone running for president," he responded. "I'm not planning on writing the curriculum for an 8th grade science book. I'm asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States." To be so willingly, so openly removed from the insights of science would have appalled Priestley and the Founding Fathers. (In part the whole dispute between Adams and Jefferson erupted because Jefferson called Adams anti-science in his letters to Priestley.) And it would have appalled them for good reason, because we live in age where both everyday experience and global politics are hugely effected by the path of scientific innovation and understanding: think global warming, stem cell research, genomics, computer science, and so on. To happily profess your ignorance of that world while simultaneously asking to be elected to public office is clearly irresponsible. But it's also something more than that, given the story that I tell in this book. It's downright un-American.
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