Steven Johnson is the author of the new book, The Invention of Air which focuses on the life of scientist/author, Joseph Priestley. Those unfamiliar with Johnson's work shouldn't think his topics are restricted to the 18th century. He was a co-founder of "Feed" webzine and discussion site Plastic.com, both of which prefigured the popularity of blogs. His previous books include Everything Bad Is Good for You, which explains how our entertainment sources have become increasingly challenging, complex and important. His wide ranging writing on science and information has covered epidemics and ants, the founding of America and the importance of computer interfaces.
He'll be appearing on the Steven Colbert Show tomorrow night, but today you get the chance to ask your questions first.
Steven will be on the site for the next hour, so get your questions in!
Q: When people think about America's Founders, we often return to the same names -- Washington, Adams, Jefferson. We even know relatively obscure characters of the Revolutionary War period like Paul Revere. But Joseph Priestley is not a name that comes frequently to mind. If you polled a thousand people, you might find a few that paired Priestley's name with the discovery of oxygen, but (at least among those who haven't yet read your book) I'm willing to bet that none would mark Priestley as having a significant impact on American culture and politics. What are we missing?
SBJ: A lot! Though he was British by birth, Priestley had an immense influence on the American founders, both intellectually and as an active participant in the early years of the U.S. He was one of Franklin's closest friends and allies in London; in fact, he was the first person to write in any detail about the iconic story of Franklin and the kite, in his best-selling History of Electricity, published in 1767. Jefferson said repeatedly that Priestley's book on the Corruptions of Christianity had the single biggest impact on his religious values, directly inspiring the famous Jefferson Bible -- Jefferson's empirical "remix" of the Bible that cut out all the supernatural elements. After an angry mob burned down his house in England, Priestley emigrated in 1794 to America, becoming our first great scientist-exile. Within a few years his old friend John Adams almost had him exiled under the Alien and Sedition Acts. And years after his death, the emergence of an old letter he had written years before to Jefferson played a pivotal role in the legendary Adams-Jefferson correspondence.
He's kind of a Zelig of early American history -- he keeps popping up at all these crucial turning points. And he was just a fascinating and admirable person in his own right. Yet, as you say, even hardcore Founding Fathers history buffs barely recognize the name. So I thought it was time to shine some light in his direction.
Q: Benjamin Franklin is chiefly remembered today for pithy sayings, bifocals, and fiddling around with a kite, but Priestley seemed to have a great reverence for Franklin. How important a figure was Ben Franklin to science during the Enlightenment?
SBJ: Franklin was a scientist of the first order, though like Priestley he was a dabbler, constantly moving from problem to problem, and from field to field. One of the main reasons I wrote the book was to remind us how central science -- or natural philosophy, as they called it back then -- was to the Founders, particularly Franklin and Jefferson. We have a tendency to think of their scientific interests as a kind of hobby, as a colorful backdrop to the mainstage of their political actions. But I think that's not quite right. In many ways, their political values -- their fundamental belief in progress and the possibility of radical change -- came from the tremendous explosion of understanding that science had triggered over the preceding century. This is why they revered Priestley -- because he had drawn the most direct connection between scientific and political progress.
What a contrast that makes to the last eight years in this country! So part of my intention with this book was to remind people that when our leaders take defiantly anti-science positions, they're not just being anti-intellectual and inaccurate. On some basic level, they're being un-American. They're betraying one of the core values that shaped the Founders.
Q: Priestley was a clergyman, though his views on religion made it hard for him to find and hold onto a pulpit. What was it about his attitude that made him more admired in America than at home, and how do Priestley's religious fights match up against what we see today?
SBJ: One thing I find fascinating about Priestley is that he was a great believer in the light of reason and the empirical method, who never seems to have had a serious moment of doubt about the existence of the Christian God. Jefferson, of course, was much more tortured, and Priestley actually calls Franklin an "unbeliever" in his memoirs. (Ever the optimist, Priestley thought that Franklin would have come around if hadn't been too busy to read all the religious tracts that Priestley kept recommending to him.) So there is in the story of Priestley's life a kind of model for the possibility of reconciling science and religious faith. On the other hand, Priestley's empiricism forced him to make some serious modifications to the basic tenets of Christianity. As a Unitarian, he did not believe in Christ's divinity, or a "holy ghost," or any of the supernatural elements of the Bible. These were hardly easy changes to make to the story -- in fact, his vision of Christianity was one of the main reasons an angry mob burned his house down and drove him to America.
Q: The way in which scientific discoveries were shared during the Enlightenment doesn't seem all that similar to the corporate-sponsored, patent-heavy world of science today. The 18th century scientists seemed to have a fierce need to communicate every discovery and build on each other's work. Are there other communities that more closely mimic the pattern of Priestley and his "electrician" friends today?
SBJ: Definitely -- we're having this conversation in one of those communities. One of the core values that Priestley, Franklin and Jefferson shared was the importance of the open flow of information, open both in the sense of resisting legal restrictions, and in the sense of crossing disciplinary boundaries. There's a distinctly Web 2.0/open source vibe to a lot of the discussion back then; Franklin has a great line where he explains why he releases all his ideas as early and as widely as possible--so they will attract the "attentions of the ingenious," who will then improve on the ideas. The whole point of having a good idea was to allow it to circulate freely. (I did a very fun discussion about these issues with Larry Lessig and Shepard Fairey--of Obama HOPE fame--at the New York Public Library last week -- they just posted a video of the event.)
There are more questions after the break, and don't forget to pose your own puzzlers while you can.
Q: In Priestley's day, it seemed that anyone with a few tools could make fundamental discoveries about basic science (though having enough money to devote hours to tinkering certainly didn't hurt). These days, basic scientific discoveries seem more and more removed from the capabilities of an average person, even if that person is well-educated in the subject matter. Do you think that makes a difference in the way we look at science?
SBJ: Invention Of Air is in many ways a celebration of amateur expertise, of cross-disciplinary dabblers. (Another connection to our Web 2.0 world!) Priestley alone made important contributions to chemistry, physics, physiology, environmental science, linguistics, political theory, and theology. He had little formal training in any of these fields, and never taught in a university department. But of course that was true of almost every important thinker during the Enlightenment. On some fundamental level, you couldn't be a professional scientist in the 1770; all the important work was being done by amateurs. Today, we have vast institutions devoted to specific fields, with a whole system for funding and approving work. And on a certain level, this is a sign of progress. You can't discover elemental gases in your home lab today, the way Priestley did in the 1770s, because we've found them all! To make serious advances, you have to have years, even decades, of training. That is as it should be.
But the ethos of amateur expertise, and of connecting across disciplines, has never been more important when it comes to our political and social views. Think how many crucial issues today revolve around science: global warming, neuroscience, genomics, stem cell research, behavioral economics, computer science and so on. So, no, we don't have to be pioneering chemists like Priestley. But we do need to engage with these issues, and have an amateur's passion for them. We should expect the same intellectual engagement from our leaders as well. And when it's possible to pick an a Nobel Laureate as a cabinet secretary, that's great too.
Q: In your book Everything Bad is Good for You, you defended video games and watching television as activities that were much better for you than most people believe. Are they better for you than reading, say, a book about a bunch guys from two hundred years ago fiddling around with science and politics? What about blogging? If video games are good, blogging is even better. Right?
SBJ: They're all so different that it's impossible to say that one is simply better than another. If you're trying to understand a complex moment in history, and the role of a fascinating individual like Priestley in that moment, you can't beat reading a book. But that's not the only kind of intellectual activity we should be supporting. My argument in Everything Bad Is Good For You was that we needed a balanced diet of media, each form exercising a different set of cognitive muscles: the deep immersion of book reading, the participatory energy of blogs, the rich decision-making of games -- even the complex narrative structure of new TV shows like The Wire or Lost.
Q: In addition to your books, you've taken a day job running outside.in, another site that you helped to found. What are you trying to achieve with that site?
SBJ: I'm no longer running it -- we now have a great CEO, Mark Josephson -- but it's still a big part of my day-to-day work life. We're trying to do for local communities -- on the scale of neighborhoods and blocks -- what sites like DailyKos have done for politics. We're helping to cultivate the peer production of local news, with a platform that can anchor specific comments, blog posts, or news items to precise locations, so you can literally walk around a neighborhood -- using our new iPhone app, for instance -- and ask: what are people talking about within 1,000 feet of where I'm standing right now? The best description of what we've been up to at outside.in is in a blog post I wrote last year called "The Pothole Paradox: Why The Geographic Web Is Hard And Why It's Worth Doing."