When We Are No More

by Abby Smith Rumsey

  But Jefferson’s vision of libraries is very much alive. In a country that has granted greater prestige and accommodation to private property than to public goods—even in the realm of ideas—American libraries became sanctuaries for a shared ambition of self-improvement, like great public gardens of the mind. They serve an individual, a community, or a society as a central gathering place where you can find all the fruits of civilization, the harvest of a cultivated mental landscape that has been tended for generations. True to the Jeffersonian model, every great library has its fair share of exotics—things that surprise, delight, scandalize, or amuse because they testify to the essential idiosyncratic nature of humans and their interests. A great library is always well stocked with extinct species of human thought and creativity, cultivars that were created generations ago and preserved from societies that have been lost to time. All these fruits of human labor and imagination are worth care and keeping, because, as Jefferson suggested, in a democracy there is no subject of which we might not need knowledge.

  Thomas Jefferson gave Americans the ideal of a universal collection that must include the unique, the quirky, the nonconforming—the “free radicals” in society that Americans like to think of as agents of innovation and progress. He and his peers also gave us the idea that free access to information is the sole guarantor of self-rule.

  HEROES OF TIME

  The Founders mandated that access to information be guaranteed in a democracy. Subsequent generations backed that mandate up by building publicly funded institutions to provide that access to multiple generations. Where the government did not assume full financial responsibility for schools and libraries, its successors in Congress created financial incentives for private groups to support them. Further they mandated that in a democracy these institutions should be dedicated to the public good and have political autonomy, protected by the government and supported by the public. As Jefferson knew, private collections are the vanguard of our collective memory, but their value is realized only when they pass into the public sphere.

  Although libraries are perennially cash-strapped and struggle to create a public image that will attract donor dollars and public support, the mission of libraries is best served by maintaining a low profile, even at the risk of appearing unglamorous and stodgy. They need to be protected from the whims of private taste and demands of political expediency. As Daniel Kahneman has pointed out in another context, institutions are important for functions that must persist over long durations of time. Their job is to slow us down, to add friction to the flow of thought, foster inertia, and carve out from the fleeting moment a place for deliberation. But because they move slowly and keep their eyes fixed on the long horizon, cultural institutions can miss the action happening on the ground, right before their eyes.

  That is why collectors are so valuable a part of an information ecosystem. The faster the present moves, the more valuable they become. Collectors historically have acted as the first-line defense against the physical loss of our cultural legacy. They collect and curate the artifacts of knowledge on our behalf. While the motives of individual collectors can vary between the poles of intellectual curiosity and personal vanity, great collectors have some larger purpose they wish to accomplish and to which they dedicate enormous amounts of time and treasure. They are the ones who keep the strategic reserve of memory rich, saving various fossils of extinct cultures and ensuring that the collective memory of mankind does not become a monoculture. Collectors are heroes of time, marrying their private passion with a public purpose, foreseeing what will have value tomorrow but can only be collected and preserved today.

  Over the nineteenth century, as libraries came to assume public purposes and receive public support, the relationship between the individual collector and political society changed irrevocably. Public libraries serving local populations grew in scope and value, and individuals such as Andrew Carnegie who pursued private wealth returned some of that treasure through building libraries for the public. At the same time, libraries never lost their sense of being private sanctuaries, like Montaigne’s tower. Even in the age of large, publicly accessible libraries and the even larger and more accessible Internet, the library lives in our imagination as a private place. Each of us assembles our own library over the course of our lives, the collection of all the bits of information, knowledge, music, and art that we cannot part with. Whatever their form and wherever we keep them—paper or computer chip, on a bookshelf or in the cloud—they are the things that we call our own, to use and control as we wish. With dismay and fear, we are learning how easy it is to invade private spaces online and how little control we have over our own content once it is online.

  Thomas Jefferson has deeded to us a vision of the library comprehensive in ambition, if not literally in scope, and organized for use. When web natives go online, they expect to find a universal collection of knowledge. As far as they know, if it is not on the web, it does not exist. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (the latter the son of a librarian) aspire to “organize the world’s information.” The technology entrepreneur Brewster Kahle has created the Internet Archive to ensure “universal access to all knowledge.” Dozens of libraries, public and private, have come together to build the Digital Public Library of America, designed to become a virtual front door to the collective holdings of libraries across the country. Europeana is yet more ambitious. Over two thousand institutions have contributed digital scans of books and manuscripts, archives, films, paintings, and sculptures in an effort to broaden access to European culture. Before the Enlightenment, the idea of a right to access, let alone to a universal collection, would have been nonsensical. Now it is the default expectation.

  On Christmas Eve of 1851, a quarter of a century after Jefferson’s death, fire again destroyed the Library of Congress. More than 35,000 volumes perished, including two thirds of the 6,487 volumes in the original Jefferson collection. The library room in the Capitol building was rebuilt the following year in cast iron. And within two decades, after the Copyright Office was moved into the congressional library, the shelves began to groan under the weight of copyright deposit books, journals, sheet music, and other records of the creativity of the American people. The library’s holdings reached scales that were previously unimaginable. The collections eventually required the building of three immense edifices on Capitol Hill, with collections also housed in secondary storage buildings in Maryland and Pennsylvania. And in 2007, the library opened a brand-new center for its audiovisual collections, among the richest yet most ephemeral records of life. A high-security Federal Reserve storage facility, decommissioned after the Cold War, was converted into a center for the library’s collections of over 1.1 million film, television, and video holdings, together with 3.5 million sound recordings. The Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation is in Culpeper, a small town in Northern Virginia, just off the road to Monticello.

  PART TWO

  WHERE WE ARE

  In Los Alamos, I met physicists and other “natural” scientists, and consorted mainly, if not exclusively, with theoreticians. It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.

  —STANISLAW ULAM, PREFACE TO HIS MEMOIR ADVENTURES OF A MATHEMATICIAN, 1976

  CHAPTER SIX

  MATERIALISM: THE WORLD IS VERY OLD AND KNOWS EVERYTHING

  —Say it, no ideas but in things—

  —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, “THE DELINEAMENTS OF

  THE GIANTS,” PATERSON

  When Jefferson retired in 1809, he wrote to a friend that “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.” Jefferson fully expected that after the exertions of the revolutionary generation to establish the Rep
ublic, the tides of political passion would ebb. The advancement of science and learning would ensure political stability and economic prosperity. But Jefferson’s belief that the pursuit of knowledge would keep enemies from the pursuit of each other was proven false in the testing of it.

  He wrote this letter two weeks after the birth of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. (Both were born on February 12, 1809.) In the space of just fifty years, the “enormities of the times” had not diminished. On the contrary, the struggles to secure liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all led the country to the brink of civil war. In 1859, Lincoln entered the presidential race, setting sail on the high seas of political passions and marking a course to a port from which there was no return.

  And in 1859, science, rather than continuing tranquilly in the pursuit of truth, on the contrary entered a fateful and fractious boom time that continues to transform the daily lives of people across the globe. Darwin, who had spent decades quietly pursuing his studies of barnacles and pigeon breeding, rushed On the Origin of Species into print. Fully aware of the calamitous implications of evolution for the understanding of human origins and struggling with intense anxiety about its reception, he had steadfastly procrastinated writing up his theory. Then one day he learned he was about to be scooped. An obscure scientist fourteen years his junior, Alfred Russel Wallace, had reached the same conclusion and was seeking to publish his findings. In the event, they copublished the seminal paper that announced evolution to the world, and Darwin went on to write his own treatment in The Origin. Immediately upon its publication, the scientific pursuit of knowledge itself became a boisterous ocean of passions.

  Within a few decades of Jefferson’s death in 1826, a new science, anchored firmly in the bedrock of materialism, had superseded natural philosophy and natural history as the normative method of understanding the world. As one historian notes,

  The word “science” (from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge or wisdom) tended to designate any body of properly constituted knowledge (that is, knowledge of necessary universal truths), while inquiries into what sorts of things existed in nature and into the causal structure of the natural world were referred to, respectively, as “natural history” and “natural philosophy.”

  These two arenas were separate and distinct, practiced by two separate groups of individuals, with the philosophers claiming greater intellectual prestige than historians. After the two fields converged in the nineteenth century, it became impossible to understand any material phenomenon or effect without mapping its underlying material cause.

  The technologically advanced, data-rich world we live in today all devolves from one central discovery made in the nineteenth century: The universe was created in deep time, extends infinitely across deep space, and leaves a record of its own history in matter. The material universe is itself an archive and the Earth writes its autobiography in matter.

  The discoveries produced by the new evidence-based science engendered a permanent revolution of thought about Nature and human nature that is still spinning out today. The definition of what constitutes a material effect has broadened to include all states of Nature, including mental states. As a consequence of the scientific revolution that began in the seventeenth century, when men (and a handful of women) of science explained away the mysteries of natural events such as lightning and magnetic fields, people began to see Nature acting according to laws that were accessible to human reason. They increasingly accepted and eventually preferred these explanations to the heavenly interventions and supernatural powers they had routinely deferred to. These ideas undergird all our technologies today, from airplanes to X-ray machines. Whatever our philosophical or religious orientations, these ideas have been assimilated into culture for political, military, and economic reasons as much as for their intellectual persuasiveness.

  Rather than viewing the discovery of evolution as an act of a singular genius, we see now it was only a matter of time, once naturalists had come to believe that the world is very old and matter is a form of memory. Gradually but resolutely, they abandoned the notion that our body of natural knowledge comprised a set of truths revealed through scripture and prophets. They came instead to trust their powers of observation and deduction. In their eyes, the world itself was transformed into a vast landscape of clues to knowledge hidden in plain sight. This perceptual shift gained ground among men of learning obscurely, quietly, unnoticed by the world at large, as certain inquisitive naturalists took to the fields and looked very closely at the earth beneath their feet. As the industrial age got under way in the late eighteenth century, mining engineers blasted through quiet landscapes to carve canals for moving raw materials to manufacturing sites and manufactured goods to commercial centers. As they did so, they laid bare distinctly stratified layers of rocks buried under feet of soil. On close inspection of freshly exposed terrains, the naturalists came to the awkward and shocking conclusion that the rocks and fossilized life forms embedded in them predated the creation of the Earth. Something was wrong here. They concluded that it was the received wisdom that was in error, not the rocks.

  We now take for granted that our planet is 4.5 billion years old and the universe 13.75 billion years, give or take. We think that the future will unfold over more billions of years toward an uncertain fate—either a slow and cold paralysis, or a rapid and violent implosion back into the seed of another universe. However it turns out, we will be long gone.

  But two hundred years ago, such numbers and notions were preposterous. Then the common view was that the world had a birth date—the days of creation as told in the book of Genesis. And it had an end date—the Second Coming of Christ (TBD). In 1650 Bishop Ussher, primate of all Ireland (1581–1656), published a learned chronology that established with exquisite mathematical precision that the world was created in 4004 B.C. His method of calculation, based on rigorous and painstakingly detailed research into the Old Testament, was widely accepted. This chronology fit nicely into the common view of history as a sacred narrative, progressing purposefully from an intentional beginning toward a promised consummation—in short, a teleology. Like many of his peers, Jefferson subscribed to Ussher’s time frame. He was the proud owner of mastodon bones, but he did not recognize them as fossils and he rejected the idea that species ever go extinct.

  In Jefferson’s day, “science” denoted reason-based inquiry into and systematic knowledge of all subjects, from the origins of rocks and the nature of lightning to the political economy and Homeric poetics. Science, being “reason in action,” was hailed as a force for liberation and expansion of the human spirit. As Jefferson wrote, “Freedom [is] the first-born daughter of science.” The American Philosophical Society, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 to “promote useful knowledge,” “add to the common stock of knowledge,” and pursue “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniencies or Pleasures of Life,” counted Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and many other political figures among its membership. Jefferson was elected its president in 1797, the same year he became vice president of the United States. As his political adversaries were fond of pointing out, Jefferson was usually as attentive to the duties of the former as he was to the latter. He held this office until 1814, throughout his vice presidency and presidency of the United States, only stepping down when he was in his seventies.

  As Jefferson wrote to the president of Harvard, men of their generation “have spent the prime of our lives in procuring [young people] the precious blessing of liberty. Let them spend theirs in shewing [sic] that it is the great parent of science and virtue; and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free.” Jefferson made the pursuit of knowledge a matter of state policy and national defense. “Science is important to the preservation of our republican government, essential to its protection against foreign power.” He identified the growth of knowledge with the growth of freedom, bu
t also with the growth of the United States’ economy, population, and political territory. Jefferson used his political office to extend not only the borders of the Republic, but also the boundaries of knowledge about the continent and beyond. He commissioned ambitious geographical and scientific explorations and sponsored the collection of artifacts, specimens, maps, and documentation from the far reaches of the continent. As soon as he had secured the Louisiana Purchase, he sent Lewis and Clark off to find out just what was out there (as well as to map it for use in boundary disputes bound to arise between nations). During his residence at the White House, the East Room was fully kitted out with his collection of paleontological wonders. He would show these off to visitors as he discussed the particular features of the flora and fauna of the New World, attending with particular care to the size of things relative to those found in the Old World. Visitors wrote with awe about exotic live specimens of wondrous American fauna kept on hand to dazzle them. Grizzly bears and a prairie dog, living souvenirs of the Lewis and Clark expedition, graced the lawns of the newly built White House and delighted his startled visitors.

  THE FACULTIES OF THE MIND

  Even as Jefferson was president, the Age of Reason was yielding quickly to the Age of Matter, when empirical science rigorously based on evidence superseded natural philosophy and natural history. This shift is manifest in the evolution of Jefferson’s theory of knowledge, vividly documented in his correspondence and book catalogs, like fMRIs of his intellectual migration to materialism. While he was an exceptional man, his embrace of materialism was very much of its time. Jefferson organized his library according to a practice that dated back to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), one of his idols. The enlightened philosophes in France used the same scheme in their systemization of all knowledge, published in the multivolume encyclopedia.