My enjoyment of science books has been sorely tempered by an allergy to dull writing. Academia, the source of most modern science, is infamous for precisely that. Years ago I discovered Timothy Ferris's "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" and loved his contagious sense of wonder, the dramatic narrative of our ongoing discovery of our place in the cosmos, and his lucid prose and ingenious analogies. I've been avidly reading his astronomy & cosmology books ever since.
"The Science of Liberty" is arguably his best book: it has all his trademark eloquence and a vastly more relevant topic. But the huge popularity of his earlier books won't repeat here. Ferris has stepped from neutral ground onto a morally charged minefield to forcefully argue that individual liberty and scientific inquiry are historically and inseparably linked, and that together they form the principal engine of human progress. Any book taking a passionate and unequivocal moral stand will provoke loud protests from someone. Neither science nor liberty have historically lacked powerful and visible enemies: religions, monarchies, dictatorships, holy terrorists, etc. Their heirs won't be reading this book. The incandescently obvious success of (small "l") liberal democracies and scientists in improving human life on our planet has forced most of its modern adversaries underground--where they chip away at the basic assumptions of science and lobby for ever tighter limits on freedom. They will hate this book and you'll surely be hearing from some of them on this page.
A prefatory note: The title isn't meant to imply that liberty or liberal governance is a science. The author means to show that science and liberty were siblings born of common parents. Much of the book details the intertwined emergence of human rights and scientific experimentation with original observations, and unusual examples. It reveals in anecdotes & capsule biographies the conspicuous overlap of in proponents of liberty and iconic early scientists--even the odd lapses of overlap. A paraphrase from Lewis Thomas sets a basic pillar of this thesis: "...the greatest discovery of modern science was of the dimensions, not of cosmic space and time, but of human ignorance." (My note: That perceived ignorance was enormous then, and is growing rather than shrinking. The notion that all worth knowing is already known is as old as humanity, and thrives today--not just in Waziristan.)
The common ground of science and democracy is broad: the inherent messiness, the need for freedoms of association, speech, inquiry and press, the diffusion of authority through consensus, the permanent mutability of judgment. These are repellent to people who prefer direct acts of dictatorial intervention, unchallengeable moral axioms, or permanent (capital"T") Truths. We easily imagine the stereotype forms of this opposition, but Ferris extends his criticism of illiberal ideas beyond the usual suspects. Coercive agendas are reentering modern politics in force. In America the Republican & Democratic parties both include majority factions who see ideas they wish suppressed, research they wish limited, trade they want prevented, liberties they want canceled.
Ferris has his own chart of contemporary politics. He proposes replacing the 1-dimensional Left/Right paradigm with a 2-D space showing the political spectrum shown as a triangle: Left & Right on the bottom corners, labeled "Progressive" & "Conservative" with (small "l") "liberal" at the upper apex. (This denotes liberalism in its original sense, a principled devotion to individual freedom, before before the word evolved to describe advocacy of a progressively expanding sphere of regulatory governance. (Ferris could as well have named his apex corner "Libertarian" and left the Liberal label on the left.) Later on he appends a second lower triangle to this 3-D graph to accommodate a "Totalitarian" corner at bottom center (thus forming a de facto square--an idea suggested long ago by a Libertarian writer whose name I've forgotten).
His relatively light chastisement "progressives" and "conservatives" is prudent and sensible: most of them support science in general and most pay at least occasional lip service to liberty. The gloves come off when exposing dictatorships (expected) and the radical anti-science fringe and police state-friendly professors within academia (not as expected), particularly the "deconstructionists" and the countless academic cranks who've made profitable careers attacking science, liberty, & virtually anything associated with Western Civilization. There's a good bibliography if you're skeptical of his descriptions of academic intolerance.
Clarity of prose is a fair indicator of clarity of mind. A good idea can be presented boringly, but a bad idea clearly expressed won't travel far. Compare the transparent clarity of this book with obfuscatory jargon of "Postmodern" academic neo-medievalists and you'll know why they write so opaquely--and what makes this book by contrast so well thought out, so utterly wise, necessary, and best of all, so wonderfully readable.
