Jefferson spent a significant portion of his prodigious intellectual energy over a long lifetime just trying to figure out what this New World was like. This is a somewhat different side of Jefferson than the one enshrined at the Memorial. We seem to have lost the threads that connect Jefferson the Scientist to Jefferson the Politician and Political Theorist, that connect the collection of skulls and maps and seeds that filled up the front hall at Monticello to the Declaration of Independence . The threads, though, are there. Doubt is wisdom .
Ignorance is preferable to error.
Remain open to the possibility that, just as we do not know everything there is to know about the animal and plant life in this place, we do not know everything there is to know about the ways that human communities can form and take on life there. This is an attitude we need to cultivate as we look about us in cyberspace. Cyberspace, like the New World, presents us with a wonderful opportunity B to think the unthinkable and to re-think received ideas. We need to stop assuming that we know everything we need to know about how to govern here. We may see things there we have not seen before, we may be able to do things there we have never been able to do before.