Transcript of Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for coming. Thank you, Annette, for that, I thought suspiciously terse introduction. (LAUGH) I think I should resume, resume my jacket as a mark of respect to, to our third president. (LAUGH) I, I usually try and arrange it so that when I talk on any topic, the people in the audience know less about it than I do. (LAUGH) And I've conspicuously failed in this set up. Because I'm not only speaking in the presence of Professor Gordon-Reed but also Professor Merrill Peterson, without whom it would have been quite impossible for me to do my book. And I, I think it, I would not be overstating it if I said that all those who've toiled in this vineyard since the publication of his work would have to say the same. Would have to acknowledge the same debt.
So, I may appear insouciant to you, but in fact, I'm seething with nerves. (LAUGH) And, and amateurism. My, my fellow countryman, Winston Churchill, when he first addressed the joint session of the Congress, said that if his father had been an American and his mother an Englishman, an Englishwoman, instead of the other way around, he might have made it to Capitol Hill on his own, as it were. (LAUGH)
I can't quite say that about, about Monticello, though it was the very first place that I came to visit, as soon as I emigrated to the United States in 1981. And I've been many times since, and was impressed and touched to discover on one of those visits that President Jefferson and I share the same date of birth. It was also thanks to Mr. William Appleton Coolidge, the late Mr. William Appleton Coolidge of Topsville, Massachusetts, himself a descendent of the alliance between Martha Jefferson Randolph, and Thomas Mann Randolph, whose scholarship endowment of the Coolidge Atlantic Crossing scholarship, first brought me to America in, in 1970 as a young student. And I therefore seem to have, perhaps, begun to repay some of this debt, and settle some of this account with the publication of my little book.
Reading people like Dr Gordon-Reed, and reading people like doctor, Professor Mel Peterson has half admitted me now into a sort of very strange, and, and I think honorable (word?) of men and women to whom Thomas Jefferson is and always will be the most fascinating of the founding fathers, as an individual, and as a politician. I'm, I'm aware of having succumbed to the, the fever of this interest. It's quite a good club of sufferers to, to join, if you have to have a support group of any sort. (LAUGH)
And I thought really I would talk this evening, I, I'll try not to talk for more than 25 minutes to a half an hour, because I prefer the question period. Because there's always a chance that there will be somebody who knows less than I do. (LAUGH) I thought I would talk about why, perhaps why it is that he is so, he remains so fascinating to us. And I thought I would do it under, perhaps, four headings. That of enlightenment and it's counterpart, secularism. War, nation building, and slavery. Inescapably, slavery.
Part 2
To say that Philadelphia in the latter part of the eighteenth century was the equivalent of fifth century Athens would be certainly an exaggeration. But I don’t know of another period of human history, really, except perhaps Paris at the same time, where there were so many great minds assembled in, within such a small compass. And acting and reacting upon one another in revolutionary and enlightening ways. Everybody knows, of course, the Philadelphia of Benjamin Franklin, and the way in which it grew and develops as a center of learning and education, of printing, of medicine.
The way in which he became a magnet for others. My two favorite examples, I suppose, would be two of my fellow countrymen. Joseph Priestly, the discoverer of oxygen, who after his laboratory in Birmingham in England had been wrecked by a Christian mob egged on by Tory Monarchists and demagogues for his support for the American Revolution and for his scientific and anti-religious inquiries, decided very well. I will take ship to Philadelphia, where efforts of this sort are understood and appreciated, and can be conducted without hindrance. And of course, once he's there, he meets Dr Benjamin Rush, who's one of the founds of the American Anti-Slavery Society. And then, after a little while, oddly enough, bearing with him a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin, and there, there is wafted the great Thomas Paine, bringing with him the whole tradition of the English Protestant revolutionary inheritance at precisely the germinal and catalytic moment, when it's going to be most needed.
When I want to make crowds laugh, as you can see, at least I can make them giggle sometimes, I, I also sometimes want to make them cry. And if I want to make a crowd weep and get moist and reach for its hankie, I ask them to consider the candidates in the election from 1796, Jefferson versus Adams, where you had your choice of a candidate who was the chairman of the American Society Of Arts And Letters, and another candidate who was the president of the American Academy Of Sciences (actually American Philosophical Society). Something seems to have gone wrong with our candidate pool. (LAUGH) No, you're supposed to cry, you're supposed to cry.
Never mind. I'm losing my touch. (LAUGH) The, the, that wouldn’t have been considered uncommon. Furthermore, this can cheer you up, if you like, under those rules in those days, you could vote for both of them, because the runner up would be the vice president. So this was a country of great learning, and great enlightenment. And, and of course, it, it's been said of Mr. Jefferson that he was one of the great polymaths of his time. He was interested in agriculture, and developed his own plough, as you know. When there was, at one point, a matter of a, a very arcane point of a treaty about whaling, he decided to write a treatise on whaling, in order to clarify his mind on the nature and scope of his treaty. Made himself an expert on the subject of whales.
He was interested in the air balloon, as you probably also know, not just as a means of warfare, which many had thought of it as, but as a means of transport, as a means of liberating people. And I should say that all, under all these headings that I want to touch on, the, the, the element of enlightenment is not simply the scientific discovery and objective free inquiry are yoked together in order to banish ignorance, but it is hoped that the burdens of daily life can be lightened for people. That for example, Mr. Jefferson spent a good deal of time working on the smallpox vaccine, and not just on distributing it and administering it indeed to the lowest of the staff from this estate, but also working out a means by which it could be transported in hot conditions, and kept cool. Because it had, it showed a tendency to weaken when it traveled. All of these projects, in other words, were designed to lighten the load of the, of the worker, to ease the misery of the, the sick, to prevent curable illness, where this is possible. And also, of course, to combat ignorance and stupidity.
Dr Timothy Dwight, whose reputation as a, as a university president is a mystery to me, one of the great divines, so considered, at the time, said that it was quite wrong to be administering smallpox vaccinations, because it was an interference with God's design. Well, I suppose if you believe that God designed a world full of smallpox for children, that would be true. But I hope some people, at least, can see the fallacy in the intelligence of that design at that point. Anyway, Mr. Jefferson had no difficulty in seeing through imposters of this kind, and preferred the, the real thoughts of science, and admired the sort of people who know that these things had practical and humanistic implications and applications.
Part 3
Um, I think, it's, this is of the first importance also because, as I may have hinted, the, the counterpart of this enlightenment project has to be what we would perhaps now rather smugly call the secular world view. It is a remarkable thing. I often think that those of you who are not immigrants to this country may not appreciate it enough, that your birthright is written, charted, codified, freedoms, rights, and liberties, and circumscriptions of the power of government. There is no, out of this intellectual ferment in Philadelphia, there comes a great work in progress.
Which is why I decided to move to the United States and write about you, because I realize I had found the great, inexhaustible subject that every writer hopes for. Something that you can never get bored with. The American enterprise, the American project. And since it is a work in progress, and has been, and is still subject to revision, it's a marvelous opportunity for anyone who tries to make their living by language and by words. And everybody knows how long it took, and what efforts had to be made to extend these rights and liberties under the great roof of the Constitution to everyone who dwelt under it.
And the most important precondition, in my view, and the most important stipulation, and it is again found in the document of no other country, and the law of no other state, is that government shall make no law respecting the establishment of any religion. In other words, that all religions are free from government interference, and all are free from the interference of religion, and neither, as I think it's, Dante says at one point, the pope is still fornicating with the emperor. The state doesn’t corrupt the church, and the church doesn’t corrupt the state. You have freedom of, and very important, freedom from the, the practice of religion.
And though Mr. Jefferson was very clever, you’ll notice, if you pick up my short and condensed and very easily read and quite cheap book, (LAUGH) a recurrent thing about his political genius was he, he seems to have somehow known when it was clever to be absent. Perfect to be in Paris instead of, for once, not a good idea to be in Philadelphia when the Constitutional Convention was underway. You might be, you might be forced to take a position there might, it might be awkward. You might get caught up in faction. Much better to comment from a distance in, in Paris, and to interject with a few letters to Madison about how things might be steered. Very clever. His brief interregnum, also after the secretaryship of the state, was, I thought, rather marvelously timed.
So he doesn’t have anything to do with the actual drafting of the Constitution, but I don’t think anybody who reads the wording of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, which is in Jefferson's third, first greatest achievement, I believe. I've just been to his grave, I should know. No, second. Author of the Declaration Of Independence, of the Statue Of Virginia for Religious Freedom and the University of Virginia . Right, well, his second greatest achievement. There is no doubt that the constituent elements of that statute formed the, the core and the spine of our, of our First Amendment, which is rightly called our first one.
Until that point, for example, if you were in Maryland, you more or less had to be a Catholic. Georgia said that its state religion was Protestantism, whatever that might turn out to be. There was certainly plenty of room for schism within that, between Baptists, and Congregationalists, and others. In New York, you could be Jewish, but, and run for office, I think, but in Massachusetts, you could not. And there were various places it was dangerous to be a Quaker, and you know the story. Every state had its own violation of, of the, its own form of the violation of the separation clause, or the establishment clause, as we call it.
And only in Virginia was it decided that this will stop. That no one will be forced to pay tithes to any church, or to all churches. There is, there is only one way, and it is separation. And it, it's, it's a clear, intelligible, unarguable presentation, and it, it is the basis of this marvelous, documented beginning. And I believe that it is the, this secular aspect is, is the natural, logical, and indeed necessary, in the counterpart of the enlightenment idea. So, we must give great credit, I think, under that score, because these arguments are with us still. And indeed, are recurring, and becoming more virulent. It's another reason why we will always find ourselves returning to, to the work and the, and the words of, of Thomas Jefferson.
Part 4
I wanted to discuss him also under the heading of war. He was not at all a man of violence, and though I think he may have been jealous of Alexander Hamilton's military panache in the Revolutionary War, never showed any inclination to take up arms. And clearly shrunk from, from violence and cruelty, and didn’t want, really, there to be much of a standing army.
Of course, the Constitution doesn’t mention an army in any case. He was in favor of a small navy. But, he was a man who in the right sense of this term, never forgot an insult, and always was ready to cancel an outrage. And it's my belief that looking as he was at the system of theocratic enslavement that then dominated the North African coast, and the approaches of the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, what, what we vulgarly call the Barbary States, the, actually, it's the, the North African states of the Ottoman Empire. Tunisia, what is now Tunisia and Libya, Morocco and Nigeria, had been regularly taking ships and taking human cargo from them.
And enslaving them. We estimate now, the best historian on this, I think, recently, is Professor Linda Colley, formerly of Cambridge University, I believe now Princeton. Her wonderful book Captives has given us an estimate of, perhaps, nearly two million North Americans and Europeans taken off into slavery by, by the Barbary powers. Between, say, about 1750 and about 1810. An extraordinary story, very little understood or appreciated by, but I have a chapter on it, actually, in my strangely so far neglected, small biography. (LAUGH) There's a whole chapter devoted to this.
Now, Jefferson knew this was going on, and I think that the reference in the Declaration of Independence, where he compares King George's attitude toward slavery with the, with the depredations of, of barbaric, or barbarous powers is a, is a deliberate reference to it. At any rate, we know that he and John Adams waited upon the ambassador of Tripoli, I believe it was, Mr. Abdul Rahman (Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja) in London in therefore, you can guess it, about 1786, and demanded to know by what right he made war on America, and on American civilians, killing them, stealing their property, and taking them into slavery.
And we're, we're told in round terms that the Ottoman Empire had the permission of the Qur'an to do this, because all infidels were legitimate targets. And at that point, Jefferson said to Adams, I think we should build a navy and put this down. And Adams said, I don’t think we should. Though, another lucky break for Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Adams did build a navy while Mr. Jefferson was conveniently in opposition. And the first thing Mr. Jefferson did when he got to power was to dispatch this navy to the other side of the world. He didn’t think it was necessary to trouble Congress with such an agonizing decision. (LAUGH)
He waited until the fleet was far out of sight and beyond recall, and told them not to come back until they had reduced the, the pirate harbors, and the emirs of the slave takers and under the practice and the threat of bombardment, induce them to cease and desist. And he had been, for a long time, training John Paul Jones in, in exile, for such an operation, and trying to keep together the force of highly motivated officers who would one day take on this task. It shows, I think, to me, a quite extraordinary tenacity, that he, he, he waited, evolving and revolving this plan for so long. And so, carefully, and so ruthlessly, and with such complete success.
By the end of this, not only has this trade been ended, but Europe, which was just emerging from Napoleonic tussle, is suddenly aware that there is a, a power to be taken seriously on the other side of the Atlantic. And that it, that it has done, in their own backyard, what they have failed to do. And furthermore, this power has a strong navy which has been battle tested, and that's going to be very useful in the War of 1812. So these are extremely important, long run efforts by Mr. Jefferson to say, as he firmly and always believed, that the United States and its, its Constitution, and its liberties, and its revolutionary principles, were not for North America alone. That these were to be universally emulated, and that American aid would be forthcoming to anyone who, who so to say (unintelligible). You, you get the same sense, or I do, of, of a very strong and, and willful, and highly organized, highly evolved intelligence when you come to my next heading, which will be sort of nation building, as I call it.
Part 5
The Fourth of July, 1801, I think, 1802? I should know. But anyway, on the Fourth of July, when the Louisiana Purchase is gazetted, is announced in the Washington press, we can now tell you that the size of the United States has been doubled in a day at 15 cents an acre. And we have control of the Mississippi, which Jefferson has long wanted. It was also the day on which the Louis and Clark expedition got its oars set up for the west. And neither of these, this, these amazing convergences on that Fourth Of July, one always looks for numinous dates, or at least I do, since I think April the thirteenth is such an important day (LAUGH) given events.
Both of these are the products of very, very long planning. Jefferson has seen coming for a very long time the possibility that Napoleon Bonaparte will get into such difficulty in Europe that he will have to sell at least some of what he had gained from the Spanish Empire. In what we, the area around what we are now forced to think about so miserably all day, of the great city of New Orleans.
Well, as it, I can only give you one, I can give you several, but I'll give you one very solid, emblematic example of how much this mattered to him, how important it was for all of his career as secretary of state, as minister to France, as an arguer in political debate, and as vice president. He had been identified, and not unfairly, with what might be called the French interest in America. Or the, the view that America's interests were better served by an alliance with France and with the French Revolution, who gains the British crown. So that must be one of the strongest elements of Mr. Jefferson's character, politically.
And, and it's the source of many of his mistakes, and many of his triumphs. But it's one of the things about him that you would think he would be unlikely to compromise. Well, he writes to the French and says, if you fail to comply with our suggestion about this offer, and if we do not possess the mouth of the Mississippi, there is nothing we will not do by this, deciding he'd better spell it out, as one often has to in diplomatic dealings with Paris, he says, (LAUGH) by this we mean we would make an immediately military and naval alliance with the British Empire.
Now, this is an, an, an amazing political sacrifice, and if you like, an amazing political concession for him to make. But that's how much it matters to him, and that's what he has driven through by his envoys in Past. In, in fact, Mssr. Talleyrand eventually offers him far more land than he thought he could get. And for some time, there's a, there's a disagreement about how far the extent of this, of this new America really is. No one is quite sure where its borders are, it's so big.
And the suggestion seems to have come, by the way, from Thomas Paine, who is another proof, in my view, of Jefferson's commitment to both enlightenment science and to secularism. In that he always tried to help Thomas Paine with his project for a single span iron bridge that wouldn’t crack in the winter. And always defended him from the charges that he was irreligious and, and a scoundrelly, non-respecter of the bible. Anyway, it was, it seems to be out of the conversation with Paine that the initiative on Louisiana is taken. But Louis and Clark, who set out that day, have not set out on the news there's suddenly a lot more America to be claimed and explored. They’d been preparing for this expedition for four or five years. Jefferson had been sending them to and from Philadelphia, to be trained by, among others, Dr. Benjamin Rush in medicine.
By others in astronomy, in, in map reading, in map making. And Indian languages. I mean, everything that you would need for an enlightenment project. You can't call it Orientalism. You can call it Occidentalism, if you wish. The idea that they will tame and measure and map and make accessible to, to civilization this vast, uncharted tract. And every, every, they’re, they’re taught how to administer smallpox vaccinations to the Indians that they meet. They’re taught some of the, the courtesies that, that will be expected of them, and the respect that is due to the leaders of the American Indian nations.
But on this day, Jefferson can add to them a further instruction. You can say, you can tell these Indian leaders, when you meet them, that they already live in the United States, and that there is no more European empire dominating any part of this continent. And now we know, we know that one day, the United States will become a continental power, and will reach to the west coast. And that, in my opinion,American history. From now on, it's absolutely certain that this country is not going to end up, as it might have been, my, my, my imagine of it, or allegory, analogy, if you prefer, is that of Chile to the southern neighbor, cone of our continent, a long, thin, literal coastal country jammed between the ocean and the mountains, which is what the United States was when Jefferson first became president.
And if you look at what Henry Adams describes as the power and reach of the United States at the end of the Jefferson administration, compared to what it was at the beginning, it's a night and day difference. It's a military power, it's a naval power, it's a land power, it's a sea power, it's an economic power. And it is, it's securely deployed all the treasures and wonders of modern scientific endeavor, in order to modernize itself much faster than the exhausted and despotic, hereditary-dominated regimes of old Europe are doing.
Part 6
For example, not all technology turns out to be liberating. Mr. Eli Whitney's cotton gin, which is demonstrated to admiring audiences, including Jefferson himself in Philadelphia, turns out to be the mechanical instrument by which chattel slavery is made more profitable. Is deepened, prolonged, and extended. It can't be said that the invention of the cotton gin was an emancipating, enlightening piece of technology. The, the, the hideousness of slavery ironizes even ostensibly labor-saving mechanization. Touching the matter of warfare and nation building, I'm afraid to say that Jefferson never acknowledged his debt to the revolutionary people of Haiti, who, under the leadership of General Toussaint Louverture, organized the first successful slave rebellion in history, and set up the first independent Black republic. Jefferson viewed that prospect with absolute horror, and did his best to try and contain it, referring it, to it at one point as an Algiers in the Caribbean. Which was the rudest thing he could think of to say.
I fear the spread of its example, but if it wasn't for the heroism of the Haitian rebels, Napoleon's army would not have been destroyed, and his navy would not have been sunk. And he wouldn’t have to have done business, to put it crudely, over the sale of the Louisiana territory. So, everybody under this canopy has a debt that they may not know, but that they should acknowledge, to the heroism of the slave rebellion in Haiti. But it would not have happened of Mr. Jefferson had had anything to do with it.
And though we may say that he was able to put down the slave system and the slave trade in the Barbary case, and all credit to him for doing so, he makes it the worse that he couldn’t decide to follow the same course in his own country. And that's why, for me, the most tragic moment in, in, in my book, and the most tragic moment that I came across is the moment when Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow go to Jefferson, about the Louisiania discussion. And these two great men of the, of the radical enlightenment say to him, Mr. President, we have the chance to begin again with this vast new territory. Let us not import any slaves into this, into, into this new, wonderful land of opportunity and, and, and innovation. Let's start again without this horrible system.
And Jefferson says no. We need to get the sugar crop in now. The tyranny of sugar in Louisiana is, is as great as the tyranny of cotton in other parts of the south, and we're gonna need some slaves. They said, Mr. President, no, you could take free Blacks, put them there, and give them new land. And you can settle thrifty, industrious, Protestant German immigrants, who will make the area flourish in no time. But no, the chance, the chance was missed, and it was missed, in a sense, deliberately. And we know from that time onwards that it was going to be a civil war. Because the number of new states that would be cloned and carved out of the new territory would eventually equalize with the number of free ones, and the, the point where the, where the country becomes half slave and half free, in a famous phrase, is the point where war is inevitable.
So the other numinous date for me in history is the twelfth of February, 1809, on which day are born Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. I think I regard Darwin as the greater of the two emancipators, but that was a good day for human history. It was a good day for laying down your future emancipations. And both of these men were able to see further than Mr. Jefferson in point of science, and in point of scientific advancement, and one of them was to have to finish the job that he had begun, and calling it, and, and call it a second American Revolution, with appalling and noble and tragic and ghastly loss of human life. So, I suspect, and I'll close on this, I think, I may have trespassed too much on, on, on my time and yours, that that provides the final reason why Mr. Thomas Jefferson is for us such an endless topic of fascination.
Because this was not just a matter of his own politics, or the political ironies of his time. It was also a matter, as Annette has very brilliantly described in her book, of something that, that ran through the corridors and, and avenues of his very own private life. It used to be fashionable to say the decade, perhaps, before Annette was wearing those shoulder pads it came into the vogue of saying that the, the personal is political. I always thought it was a slightly idiotic tautology, but it, there's an undoubted truth to it. And in, in the life of Mr. Jefferson, we can see individualized, humanized, and incarnated, if you will, all of the contradictions of the American Revolution.
All the contradictions of the American experiment. And so in closing, I, I will deploy the words, I think, of, of Horace. He says Mutato nomine, et de te fabula narratur . Change only the name, and the story is about you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much. (APPLAUSE)
Questions
Question 1
In light of Senator Frist and President Bush jumping into the intelligent design debate, I would be interested in your comment in the claim from the right that the founding fathers' real intent was for a religious nation and a Christian nation.
Yes. I've, Annette [Gordon-Reed] was telling me, I didn’t see it, that there was a conference, televised on Labor Day, of some group, I'm going to get it, saying, going through, as it were, father by father, saying how, how Christian and how devout they were. The proof in Jefferson's case is that he went to church on official occasions. Which, you know, I do that. (LAUGH) And I'm not even an atheist. I'm anti-theist. I think that, (LAUGH) I think it's a good thing that there's no evidence for the existence of god. I think it would be awful if there was a god who supervised us all the time. It would be like living in a celestial North Korea. And you can die and leave North Korea, but you can't die and leave permanent divine supervision. So I think it's a horrible idea, and I'm very glad there's absolutely no evidence for it.
But if I go to a bar mitzvah or a, a wedding, you will see me observe all the customary forms, of course. I know how to behave. I was relatively well brought up. (LAUGH) The, the, but that, that's what they say about Mr. Jefferson, who towards the end of his life takes a razor blade in one hand, and a copy of the bible in the other, and cuts out all the passages of it that are absurd or inane or evil or wicked or unbelievable. Which leaves him with a very abridged text. (LAUGH)
Which was actually first published long after his death by, by, by Congress itself. It used to be given as a present to all new, newly sworn in members of Congress. It’s called The Jefferson Bible. The Unitarians will give it to you. Forest Church has done an introduction to it. It's jolly good, it's better than the original, at any rate. (LAUGH) Well, and who, a man who says very calmly to many people as his death comes, because this is often the test at the time. People say, ah ha ha, they may not be religious, but, you know, Thomas Paine will scream for a priest when the time comes. Or David Hume. And we know that they didn’t.
And we know of Mr. Jefferson, that he said he faced the prospect without hope and without fear. Now, if you have neither of those feelings in the presence of imminent death, it can be safely said you’re not a Christian. As to whether or not he was a deist, or what kind of deist he was, it's not really safe to say. But that's why I wanted to close on Darwin. Because after all, in his arguments with people like de Buffon and others about the natural topography of Virginia and related matters, they had to keep asking themselves questions like how did the seashells get that high up on the mountains?
And there was no way they could know. The Beagle had not yet set sail. They were living, in that sense, in the age of prehistory, and there were the, the, the Darwinian world view that essentially overthrows the, the philosophy of William Paley, that the world is a, a clock, or a watch, which I think Jefferson did, there's evidence he did have some sympathy for that form of theism, is destroyed. So, that's just to stay on the subject of one founding father. It's, it's utter nonsense to say this, the Constitution doesn’t mention the word god once. When Benjamin Franklin, perhaps being sarcastic, tried to break a deadlock in Philadelphia by suggesting a break for prayers, it was not voted that the motion not be passed, it was voted that the notion be not even put. Not even discussed.
There's no god in the Constitution. Wherever, wherever religion is mentioned in the founding documents, it's always as to how to restrain it. Always. There are no other mentions of religion except as to how to keep it in bounds. It's very plain indeed that the, the lesson had been learned correctly from the country of say, my birth, and well, in, in a way, the country of this country's birth, where the queen is, or the king is the head of the church as well as the head of the state, and the armed forces. And by the way, you can see what happens, as you have seen recently, perhaps, to the family values of a royal family that founded a church on the family values of Henry VIII. (LAUGH)
I could have warned them this wasn't going to work out. Well, the clearest lesson of all, it was the, the, that's the one thing we're not going to do. So this is not an irreligious society, nor is it an irreligious country. But it is a country where there is not, and must not ever be, any official religion. Now, in my view, the teaching of so called intelligent design in publicly financed schools would be a clear, crass, evident, self-evident violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. As well as the filling of the heads of children with garbage.
I mean, every day I get up, (APPLAUSE) every day I get up to see that there are two things that still annoy me with my daily press. I, because I, I like to start the day with a charge of irritation. (LAUGH) And, but it never fails. Does the New York Times still have on its front page, all the news that's fit to print in that silly little box? Yes. (LAUGH) Still has it today. Damn. And does the Washington Post still publish a horoscope in its (UNINTELLIGIBLE) . (LAUGH) And I just check that every day, and I'm, and I'm pissed off.
Well, who, who was going to say, why don’t we teach astrology in the astronomy class? Why not? It's fun. It doesn’t, you don’t have to do any work. The teachers don’t have to know anything. It's just like intelligent design. (LAUGH) Well, the question answers itself, doesn’t it? By the way, it's, it's a victory, is it not, for them to have got it called intelligent design. I think we should stop doing that. I have only one point of agreement with Osama Bin Laden. I don’t call it Saudi Arabia, either. I don’t think the luckless people of the Arabian peninsula deserve to have their country called after their royal family. We can call it Arabia, if we like. I don’t say Saudi Arabia, and I'm not gonna call it intelligent design anymore.
And I think that that's probably the greatest victory they’ve won, because they haven’t been able to produce one single challenge to any one stage of any argument about evolution. They have no evidence. Their hands are empty. They, they pull up an empty net. And they want equal time for it. They only want equal time because they’re no, no longer in a position to do what they used to do, which was insist that only that be taught, and Darwinism not be taught.
And Darwinism is not the theory of evolution, as you, I'm sure you know. It is a theory of evolution. The proof of the scientific character of the evolutionist enterprise is that Stephen J. Gould, for example, and Richard Dawkins, for example, disagree very strongly about the punctuations of the process. That's because it can be verified, it can be falsified, it can be discussed, it's scientific. Intelligent design can make no such claim.
Question 2
How might you compare and contrast Jefferson sending his navy to deal with the Barbary pirates to our current president's approach to the Middle East?
Well, sure, because there, there are those who, who want to say that this is not a religious war. Or it's not a war about religion. And it's not a quarrel with Islam. And the president, indeed, has said that it's known as a religion of peace. Which is a fatuous remark. I know why he made it, and I, I sort of understand the, the motives, and in a way, admire them. He was seeking to make American Muslims feel at home and unthreatened. But the fact of the matter is that in this state, there's a madrasa not far from where I live, in Washington, DC, which teaches the holy war and the destruction of the United States Of America.
And is financed by Saudi Arabian money. No one's going to tell me this is a secular undertaking. The Wahabi version of the Qur'an, which is a very ferocious Wahabi's revision and interpretation of the Qur'an, that mandates warfare against all unbelievers and all Jews and all Christians is distributed free in our prison system. Storing up trouble, I suspect, for the future. If, I don’t see why people who have been given Qur'ans in Guantanamo at public expense, either, it's obviously a violation of the establishment clause.
And if they'd be thrown into a toilet instead, it would have been a lot less trouble, if you see what I mean. We're making up, we're making a huge store of future trouble for ourselves by pretending that theocracy isn't an enemy, and that, and that at the moment, the most menacing form of theocracy is Islamic. There's a cultural tragedy involved here, in my opinion, because while the president is clear on the point and so are his supporters, that, that jihadism must be confronted and defeated, they’re not clear on the idea that it's generally a bad thing to try and force religion into politics.
And to the, au contraire, if you will, or by contrast, many of the secular and liberal leftist voices have not much of a stomach for a fight in the Middle East or in Afghanistan, and think that the only theocratic danger comes from the Christian Coalition. This is a real pity, because I think what one needs to train up thinking citizens who haven't been educated in schools full of superstition, who will take their stand again on the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, and on the principles that underlie it, and say, we will defend secular society here and there, and we won't give any ground on it.
We don’t have a day of our lives to be cringing in front of priests and mullahs and rabbis. Civilization begins where that kind of thing stops. And yes, it's worth fighting for, and killing for, and dying for. And since it has to be fought for, in any case, we might as well relish the chance, 'cause it's coming to us anyway.
This irony, by the way, where the, the best, some of the best lack all conviction, which is a big problem, my big problem with the so called antiwar movement also has historical roots. One of the ways you can prove, in an argument with a fundamentalist now, that America is not a Christian government and was never intended to be is the Treaty Of Tripoli of 1796, I believe, which you can look up, where it is explicitly stated as, and, and was voted on, and passed unanimously by Congress, the preamble and core of the treaty is the United States considers itself to be in no sense a Christian country. And further as, to have no quarrel with what it calls the Mussleman religion. Very interesting and very useful admission, and at the time, quite uncontroversially passed by Congress. Unfortunately, this, this treaty was an attempt to appease the Barbary states.
It was an attempt to come to terms with them. To agree to a certain amount of tribute on, on the payment of which the taking of slaves and hostages, and the depredations of, against peaceful, ocean-going commercial vessels would cease. So it, it isn’t the most noble treaty, alas, which in, that's what I mean by an irony of history. You get one part of what you want, you don’t get the other. Well, we're in the same fix today. But I think we can think our way out of it, don’t you? I think we should.
Question 3
You mentioned you could think of no other nation which has a clause similar to our First Amendment. The constitution of the Turkish Republic specifically calls for a secular state and abolishes a state-supported religion.
Yes, that's a very, was the question audible to all? Yeah. No, that's a very good observation, but I wouldn’t take my stand on (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Turkism, quite. For, for this reason. Though he did break the power of the mullahs, and in some ways, actually persecuted Islam in Turkey, I mean, it can't be denied that, you know, quite a number of, of imams were, were put to death for, for not agreeing with, with the Ataturk constitution, which by the way was modeled on the one drawn up by Mussolini. But it also was very dangerous to practice any other religion but Islam in Turkey, and it still is, and always has been.
Very difficult, very difficult to be a Christian or a Jew there. And very difficult to belong to certain sects of Islam, and notably the Sufi one. These people have had to life in fear in secular Turkey. So there's a difference, all the difference in the world, and I, I speak as a harshly recovered Marxist. (LAUGH) Between a, between a, a, an atheist state and a secular state. I mean, the Albanian constitution said that you couldn’t go to church. That's obviously different. I think Atatuken secularism is a, is a little less good when it comes to respecting the free exercise of religion, which is also part of the First Amendment.
Question 4
Can you elaborate a little more on the contrasting the military strategies between Jefferson and the Barbaries and current events in Iraq?
The two differences, in respect to Jefferson's policy, just to take your points in order, would be these. He didn’t demand a regime change in these states. I mean, the, the emirs and the, the sultans were left in power. But he did insist on regime behavior modification. He said, we'll keep bombing you until you stop doing this. But after that, we're not, we're not going to occupy or take you over.
And the other thing, I suppose, which I should have mentioned more about anyway is that he dispatched John Paul Jones to see the Empress Catherine. Sometimes called the great, of Russia. To whom he presented a newly minted copy of the US Constitution, as a matter of fact. So that he could help her construct a navy that could fight against the Turks in the Black Sea. And eventually, to chase them in the Mediterranean, as well, and what, what Jones wanted to do was to make life miserable for the Turks by helping the Russians in the Black Sea. But finally, to, to, to intervene and cut off their commerce, the imperial commerce between Istanbul, Constantinople, and Cairo. And he was declared an apostate and had a price put on his head for this by the emir, I think, of Algiers.
So segueing, if I could, from that last point, just to go to the place where the problem is isn’t quite enough. You have to try and do a bit more to get the enemy on the defensive. And if I got the point of your question about Iraq, it's, it's this. Iraq is the keystone state, if you look at the map, between the Shiite theocracy, crumbling as it is, but still menacing in Iran, and the Wahabi theocracy in Saudi Arabia. A change of regime and a system there, and the removal of the psychopathic crime family that controlled it, has, has the intention of altering the balance of power in the region. And not just of the internal politics of Iraq itself. And that's why I think it's such a well crafted strategy, and why it was so necessary, and why it should have been embarked upon much sooner than it was.
© Christopher HitchensSeptember 2005