Good day Thomas Jefferson Hour podcast listeners as always. Thank you so much for listening. We so appreciate it and to get it out of the way go to Jefferson Hour dot com for all sorts of information about the show and for ways to support the Thomas Jefferson Hour if you have the means and the desire to do so and we so appreciate that you can also find listings of upcoming events of clays in

including his online courses, his cultural tours and his books. So with that, sir, welcome to this week's podcast edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour and you could perhaps tell our listeners who our special guest is this weekend what you talk about.

Well, once again, Dr Lindsey Chervinsky has agreed to be interviewed or really more in a conversation about the world of Thomas Jefferson and our subject today was the enlightenment. It was actually fascinating to talk about the enlightenment and its perceived their real weaknesses and the question we asked is it is self correcting mechanism that will lead us into greater and greater commitment to human rights and progress or is it now our actual

philosophy in jeopardy is it sort of on trial in this disillusioned age and so I found that very interesting also quoted passage from my book repairing Jefferson's America guide disability and enlightened citizenship and that's a book that that's my attempt to say, well, we may not collectively continue to really understand and to promote the enlightenment, but we can individually and this sort of an almost a how to book.

About how each of us can be more Jeffersonian can be more rational can use evidence in our discussions can be more civil can be more tolerant can develop our own little Republic of letters in which we communicate thanks are incredible social media with like-minded people around the country and around the world and so on and I had a passage on what is the enlightenment that I that I read and it just strikes me.

Whenever I think about the enlightenment I I'm thrilled I'm thrilled that this thing happened that at a certain point in the history of Western civilization when the Middle Ages had ended in the Renaissance and scientific revolutions sort of gotten working then along came this massive dissemination machine that we call the enlightenment and you know the doctor Franklin created the American philosophical society in 1743 the same year that Jefferson was born.

And it was dedicated to the dissemination of practical knowledge that that the idea was to ameliorate the condition of humankind to make life more comfortable less onerous more rational more reasonable for the great mass of people from lending libraries to lightning rods and Dr. Franklin is one great American exemplar of the enlightenment and Thomas Jefferson is another and another

you know the point we came back to again and again David is how much we take it for granted because it's so fundamental to the way we see that if you and Lindsay said if you're at the dinner table and somebody says how high is the Mount Everest today we go to a smartphone but 30 years ago we would have gone to the World Book and Cyclopedia and that we take for granted the encyclopedia

and then we take back notion of the enlightenment that knowledge can be understood and digested and made into a form for ready access it's the ready access you know that we know how to find stuff and and and Google's search engine or any of the great search engines would be

absolutely flabbergasting to Thomas Jefferson and members of the enlightenment they would have thought they had died and gone to enlightenment heaven if they could type in a little query into Google and it would say here are the top

ten mountains in the world and their heights and here's the when each of them was first climbed and here's the number of people who go to them here's the number of people who died last year on Mount Everest here's here's the weather forecast for Everest next week here are the books that have been written about Everest adventures you know here are the here are the first woman to climb Everest the first child to climb Everest the first person who was an octogenarian to climb Everest why did how did Everest get its name what are the Himalayas and what

were the geologic dynamics that that pushed them to be the highest mountains in the world what are the when the rival geopolitical entities that have controlled them and controlled access to the Himalayas what's the fourth largest fourth highest mountain in the world you can go on and on and on and on this is all this knowledge is just dripping from your phone into your head if you want it and that's to the enlightenment that's to the encyclopedia what the encyclopedia

was to the book of Genesis you know that just an explosion of organized human knowledge and the second part of that is the application that now that we have that knowledge how can it improve the lives of average human beings here and elsewhere and so it's breath taking and I don't think we ever can say enough that's positive about that movement.

You and I are both old enough to remember how important having the encyclopedia Britannica or the world book encyclopedia was during our youth but in in the show you mentioned its counterpart nowadays being Wikipedia so I'll pitch for them to I I go to Wikipedia nearly every day and today I got a request for a donation and I'll tell you every time they requested.

I I respond and and people should even in a small way it makes a huge difference and I think there are four million entries in English alone you know forget swahili forget French forget Portuguese forget Russian forget mandarin Chinese or Vietnamese but there are four million entries I think that at its height.

Encyclopedia Britannica had around 50,000 entries now you have four million and I would urge anyone who's listening and I know there are critics of Wikipedia and everyone should be a little cautious but I urge anyone who's listening to pick some completely random and obscure topic whatever it might be history of lipstick you know or how to when we're the nose rings and pigs.

First introduced pick something that's you know arbitrary picking you and minor random and you will find a reference in Wikipedia to that and the plus there is usually a bibliography so that if you don't trust what you see you can take it to some of the references and check them out there's no day in my life if I'm not climbing some hill somewhere or canoeing on a river somewhere.

When I don't consult Wikipedia and I don't share the the anti Wikipedia righteousness of some academic circles clearly you want to be very careful in what you examine on Wikipedia as you would be in any encyclopedia or any digestive knowledge but it's actually been shown that it is as accurate and sometimes more.

Then most of the written the published encyclopedias of the world I was just going to say you're talking about looking for obscure things on Wikipedia and actually you can look up the time is Jefferson hour on Wikipedia with that sir shall we go to the show.

You just to say the Steinbeck cultural tour for next March still has a few places the two winter encampments at locks are large one on dickens I've been rereading dickens and just having a thrilled.

Time doing it David and the other is on winter in the Lewis and Clark expedition and then there's Cuba and in the summer back to back Lewis and Clark trips on the wild and scenic Missouri and up on low low trail and then we're going to France next.

October so people can start to look for that we're going to have a magnificent time in France it's all pure joy and we so appreciate that also courses the the need courses is already underway but the the constitution course for November will be looking at the constitution as we move forward you know if we revised.

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