Book: The Science of Liberty

I finished reading Timothy Ferris's book, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature. Actually, I read most of it twice and I can enthusiastically recommend it [1]. Ferris argues that science was a critical ingredient in the political and social changes that gave us liberal democracy. In the process the reader is taken on a tour of the world that includes topics ranging from politics to economics to Islamism. He sets up the topic in a way that rings true to my own educational experience.

The senario most of us learned in school presents the transformation in three acts--the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. In the Renaissance...classical Greek and Roman writings became available to Europeans through trade with the Arab world, producing an outpouring of humanistic art and thought along with a few green shoots of science--as when Copernicus in 1543 demonstrated that the motions of planets in the sky could as readily be explained by the earth orbiting the sun as by the old earth-centered cosmology. The resulting brew of humanistic and scientific thinking eventually produced the Enlightenment, which in turn sparked the democratic revolution...Meanwhile there was for some reason a scientific revolution, and so the modern world emerged. [p. 1-2]

and

Historians agree that the democratic revolution grew out of the Enlightenment, but if you ask what caused the Enlightenment, you are likely to be presented with a list of philosophers...who for some reason suddenly began singing in unison on behalf of reason and rights. Unless this was a coincidence, something must have happened--something of lasting consequence, capable of shifting the balance away from traditional belief and toward the enlightenment values of inquiry, invention, and improvement. [p. 57]

Science was an important ingredient in part because of its own revolutionary nature. Rather than mining ancient texts for their wisdom, men began to interrogate nature for themselves and in many cases found that ancient wisdom was wrong. Newton's publication of Principa Mathematica was a bombshell whose reverberations were felt in political philosophy as Enlightenment philosophers came to see human rights as universal as Newton's laws of motion. And those Enlightenment philosophers in turn inspired men such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, who were themselves either part-time scientists or highly interested in science. Further, the founders viewed the new nation as an experiment as to whether a free democracy could work, and they fashioned it as an ongoing experiment in that results could feedback to inform government.

The book is filled with interesting nuggets, pithy quotes, and historical examples that seem relevant today. It may serve as a springboard for more focused posts later, but for now I will simply quote some passages that caught my attention, along with a little context, in order to give you a taste of the book.

Ferris really hits his stride as he critiques anti-science forces, both political and academic. According to Ferris, the reputation of the Nazis and the Soviets as having made great scientific advances because of their focused will is in fact wrong. Their high-profile successes belied their lack of depth, and such is the case with all totalitarian regimes.

Science demands free, open discussion and publication, not only in order to circulate fresh information and ideas but to expose them to lively criticism. A totalitarian regime can afford little of either. Having seized a measure of power to which it has no legitimate claim, in order to solve real or imaginary problems that it cannot in fact solve, such a regime is highly vulnerable to criticism and so must stifle it. [p. 199]

And in the department of pithy quotes, here is one that follows a 2005 Chinese statement on democratic reform:

This is vintage rhetoric from communist functionaries, who are always talking about how hard they work and struggle but whose toil seems mainly aimed at degrading the meanings of words. [p. 233]

As for academic anti-science in the form of postmodernism, Ferris writes:

How did it come to pass that so many teachers and students, in some of the freest and most scientifically accomplished nations in the world, entertained such an illiberal, illogical, and politically repressive account of the relationship between science and society? Part of the answer may be that universities generally, and humanities departments in particular, are more backward than is universally recognized. For most of their history, universities functioned primarily as repositories of tradition. It was professors, not priests, who refused to look through Galileo's telescope, and who drove genuinely progressive students like Francis Bacon and John Locke to distraction with their endless logic-chopping and parsing of ancient texts. Similarly it was twentieth-century humanitites professors who, confronted with the glories of modern science and the triumph of the liberal democracies over totalitarianism, responded by denigrating virtually every political philosphy except totalitarianism. [p. 257-8]

Ouch. I should add that Ferris makes clear that he is not condemning academics in general, since many debunkers of postmodernism's excesses have been academics.

I wasn't expecting a chapter devoted to economics, but in spite of its common reputation as being a wishy-washy field of study, Ferris sees it as particularly important.

Indeed, economics has done so much to analyze problems and identify remedies that it may one day be ranked with the agricultural and medical sciences when it comes to saving lives and improving their quality. [p. 170]

And again, in the department of pithy quotes:

If any deep spiritual gratification is to be realized by being poor and unhealthy, nothing of it shows up in the social-science polls. [p. 156]

In at least one instance, the book would have profited from a delay in publication. Toward the beginning, Ferris explains that the usual conception of American politics as ranging from progressive (left) to conservative (right) is actually a distortion. He sees a triangle with progressives, conservatives, and (classical) liberals at the corners as more accurate. As an example of how this is mapped onto political concensus making, he uses the example of a hypothetical bill to reduce carbon emissions.

One option is to take a command-and-control approach, empowering the [EPA] to regulate limits on carbon emissions, and fining or shutting down power plants that exceed the mandated limits. That appeals to progressives, since it uses the government's power to get rapid results, but is unpalatable for conservatives, since it would be bad for business, and for liberals, since it reduces personal freedom and enhances the power of government. More likely to gain support is a cap-and-trade approach that sets limits while establishing a carbon market in which the greener factories earn credits which they can sell to firms whose dirtier operations put them over the cap. [p. 23]

Poor Ferris. How could he have known that conservatives would bolt from their own legacy around the time he submitted his final draft to the publisher?

One of the overarching messages of the book is to be wary of ideology, particularly those that do not allow for feedback when results are poor. Readers of all political persuasions will find occasions to cheer and boo, but it's more important to learn. Imperfect as it may be, for Ferris, America's strength lies in its diversity and experimentation, with an under-girding of guaranteed human rights. The American experiment continues. Thank you, science!


Notes:

1. I also highly recommend Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way.

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