The Science of Liberty - The Linkage Between Science and Liberal Democracy

“Men have asked for freedom, justice and respect precisely as the scientific spirit has spread among them.? The dilemma of today is not that the human values cannot control a mechanical science.? It is the other way about:? The scientific spirit is more human than the machinery of governments.”? - Jacob Bronowski?

??????????? I’ve been writing about the Humanities 1 class that I used to teach.? It had the title “On Being Human” and I complemented the other faculty from art, philosophy, history, and literature by giving a series of lectures on “Humans as Scientists.”? A class like that forces you, or perhaps allows you, to think out loud about more general subjects than your day job, your usual teaching assignment - the discipline related classes with a fairly strict standard curriculum dictated by transfer requirements or future professional situations and duties.

? ????????? I encountered Timothy Ferris’ book “The Science of Liberty” and wove it into the class discussion.? I knew Ferris from his other popular books, mainly on cosmology, like “The Whole Shebang,” and this seemed like a departure for him.? The book’s theme overlapped with my fascination with what we learned in school as “The Industrial Revolution” and it also made me rewatch some segments of Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man.” I also completed a few lecture series from “The Great Courses” on The Industrial Revolution and a book that I read “Coal: A Human History” by Barbara Freese.? ?

??????????? There was unique new idea in “The Science of Liberty” book, and I found the argument compelling.? In the past the ideas that I always heard did argue that the Renaissance ultimately triggered the rise of the revolution in scientific thinking; in parallel the intellectual revolution that we call ?“the Enlightenment” formed independently and later this led to a call for democratic self-rule through the American Revolution and then the French Revolution.? Ferris argued in a new thought – new to me anyway – scientific advances caused political advances.? The Industrial Revolution caused the American Revolution which caused the French Revolution which caused modern political scientific thought.? I find this argument compelling.?

??????????? To follow the argument we must place ourselves into the entire milieu of eighteenth century society, and for the sake of this argument it’s easiest to focus on Great Britain and our forebears in British North America.? No meritocracy exists.? Your birth situation dictates your place in society.? The aristocracy supplies the political class, the business class, and the military class.? Midshipmen in His Majesty’s Navy are drawn from the sons of the well-born, and officers are Lord this and Baron that - you cannot say officer without gentleman.? But then individuals of extraordinary talent begin to produce cracks in the system.

??????????? Captain James Cook’s father was a farm laborer rather than a gentlemen.? Cook worked his way up from the merchant marine and recognition of his talent moved him up the ranks of the Royal Navy where he explored North America and led expeditions in the Pacific and around the world.? He made contributions in navigation technology, cartography, and naval nutrition (advocating vegetables to prevent scurvy) – he commanded expeditions where he didn’t lose a single sailor, unheard of in the time. ?He had such extraordinary intellect and talent that he could buck the system and rise through the ranks.? ?

??????????? A later example, Michael Faraday, born to a blacksmith, invented our modern thought on electricity and magnetism despite having relatively little formal education (the fact that he didn’t get farther than trigonometry allowed him to simplify Maxwell’s equations into the form that we use today).? His modest upbringing turned out to be an advantage.?

??????????? But the best example of this rising meritocracy is James Watt, whose improved design for a steam engine largely powered the Industrial Revolution.? He was born to a shipwright and ultimately moved to Glasgow as an instrument maker.? He fell into the intellectual class at the University of Glasgow when he began to repair their instruments.? His rise out of the trades, rather than the university class, gave him the ability to build practical engines before the theoretical explanations came out of the field that would be known as thermodynamics.? Add coal as an energy source and voila, the Industrial Revolution.

??????????? And then came the staggering change.? Bridges forded chasms that had stymied travel, steam engines drove manufacturing of textiles and other goods and made them affordable to the working class, railroads began to crisscross the landscape resulting in dramatically reduced transportation costs, and steam power made ships able to sail against the wind and upstream.? Everyone saw this obvious change.

??????????? And you can’t help but see that an engineer would turn to Viscount this or Baron that to say, “I can build a bridge – what can you do?? What value do you have other than having been born into that family?”? And you can imagine citizens in British North America beginning to apply this reasoning to even question the King’s authority – something unthinkable before the Enlightenment and before the rise of science.?

??????????? In Ferris’ book, he bases his argument that science flourishes only in liberal democracies on five assertions:

Science is antianthoritarian

Science is self-correcting

Science must draw on all available intellectual resources

Science is powerful

Science is a social activity

? ????????? Science gives us the ultimate meritocracy = I will present an idea and it’s your job to knock it down.?

??????????? It’s the same for liberal democracy, at least in its ideal form.? Here is an idea that will promote political freedom – let’s see if it will stand the test of time.? And science only flourishes when freed from dogma – political or religious.? Although “political science” is not really a science (not to disparage it, is just isn’t), it is a co-dependent with science.?

? ????????? The word revolution comes from the description of the movement of the planets by Copernicus – it is a scientific idea.? Copernicus idea of the revolution of the planets became an intellectual revolution as set down in the book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.? (Conveniently published after his death).? ?That “Revolution” idea fundamentally shook up and shattered existing intellectual dogma and only later was applied to the idea of a political “revolution.”?

??????????? Even in this primary and important word, science and democracy are linked.?