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February 5 - November 28, 2021
Never mind how sure you feel, says Locke; you have to be checked. Understandably, many strongly persuaded people say, “No, thank you.” Our Platonic instinct rebels: Why allow the foolish to check the wise? Why allow the wrong to rule? Why allow moronic racists or benighted atheists to go around spreading their toxic manure?
Moreover, it is not easy to love a system which never finally ends an argument. No final say; no final knowledge. That is the rule.
The game of liberal science satisfies our craving for new beauties but not our appetite for final truth: No final say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please,—you can never have both.”
No artist has made anything nearly as vast and beautiful and challenging as our protean, dazzling, mystifying, enlightening, damnable vision of reality.
In its very strangeness, its messiness, and its amorphous vastness lies its redemption.
Liberal science—science in its broadest sense—is not a system of beliefs or a constellation of authorities.
The sorting is the harder half of the job. We can all have three new ideas every day before breakfast; the trouble is, they will almost always be bad ideas. The hard part is figuring out who has a good idea.
Authoritarian intellectual regimes confer advantage, not upon the sturdiest ideas, but upon the ones that the leadership likes. You can always count on them to waste their energy on controversies that begin with stupid ideas and lead nowhere.
although both make use of the method of trial and error-elimination, the amoeba dislikes erring while Einstein is intrigued by it: he consciously searches for his errors in the hope of learning by their discovery and elimination.”
Curiosity is not merely a desire to find truth, as such; it is also a desire to find error: to find new beliefs which correct the inadequacies of old ones.
A critical society—a community of error-seekers—stimulates curiosity by rewarding people, rather than punishing them, for finding mistakes.
The system’s institutionalization of curiosity and its insistence on checking are the keys to its rapid adaptability.
The genius of liberal science lies not in doing away with dogma and prejudice; it lies in channeling dogma and prejudice—making them socially productive by pitting dogma against dogma and prejudice against prejudice.
What is to be condemned is not bias but unchecked bias.
in practice eliminating prejudice through central authority means eliminating all but one prejudice—that of whoever is most politically powerful.
It avoids any attempt to stamp out prejudice, because stamping out prejudice inevitably means making everybody share the same prejudice, and thus killing science. Rather, it pits people’s prejudices against each other. Then it sits back and watches knowledge evolve.
First, liberal science makes a lot of mistakes. Second, however, it corrects its mistakes by rewarding those who find them.
“Inspired error”: no two words could better capture the intellectual spirit of a liberal society. The notion that error is never a crime—may indeed be an inspiration—frees us to think imaginatively, even ridiculously.
Herd-thinking and fad-following will always be part of human life, but over time liberal science does tend to correct itself. It shares with evolution, capitalism, and democracy this advantage of liberal systems: the capacity to be self-regulating, to be “led by an invisible hand” (order without authority).
Liberal science has two invaluable social skills. First, it is very good at resolving conflicts. Second, it is very good at not resolving conflicts.
A critical society is capacious. Because no one claims the final say, people leave each other room to disagree, and then to agree to disagree—which is surely one of science’s most important tools.
Indeed, the best way to think of liberal science is not as a consensus of opinion or a body of knowledge, but as a self-organizing swirl of disagreements.
Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants. Yes, but more important still is that liberal science allows each of us to stand on the shoulders of millions of ordinary inquirers, not just the few great ones.
Liberal science is successful as a problem-solver above all because of its prowess as a problem-finder and a problem-attacker.
As we check and criticize and find common ground, as we propose ideas and they fall apart and we try again, our knowledge advances.
The core of our present knowledge (the earth revolves around the sun) is pretty well settled, but the edges are an exploratory riot. And the whole clamorous affair reinvents itself as it goes along.
By imposing upon us the obligation to check our opinions and to cultivate rather than curtail criticism, the science rules deprive intellectual authoritarians of all moral force.
If you believe in the liberal ethic of criticism and checking, then you will also believe that all attempts to exert political control over knowledge and belief are wicked.
We take the absence of purges and inquisitions among those who play the science game so much for granted that we forget how extraordinary the absence really is.
The Inquisition died, not because people dispensed with faith, but because they learned to put their faith in liberal social institutions.
“Truth has been specially entrusted to the apostles and their successors,” Pope John Paul II declared in 1989.28 In a liberal culture, that kind of claim—a power grab, really—is illicit and repugnant.
Anyone—pope, propagandist, anti-Communist, anti-racist—who wants to silence criticism or regulate an argument in order to keep wrong-thinking people out of power has no moral claim to be anything but ignored.
One way to settle disputes about the nature of reality is to look for a common test and, if none is found, agree to disagree and keep looking. That’s liberal science.
In a culture in which people take seriously the possibility that the other guy might be right, killing him or shutting him up cannot even in principle advance the cause of knowledge.
The followers of Thomas say, finally: knowledge cannot be had except where criticism is unfettered and doubt is never rebuked. That is the modern liberal’s skeptical faith.
One of the signal advantages of liberal science is that it does not force anyone to renounce, for instance, his belief in a divine being
The reason liberal science can afford its hands-off policy is that it limits its domain to public knowledge:
In any case, moral disagreement is a problem in all societies, liberal or no; the question is whether you harness it or violently repress it.
Liberal science’s regime of criticism did not “prove” slavery wrong but clearly did help to kill it.
We still need compassion, honesty, decency, loyalty, respect for the future, and so on. All societies need those things.
Though the rules of the game do not allow majorities to repress other people’s opinions, they do give them every right to shrug them off.
Fundamentalism—the intellectual style, not the religious movement—is the strong disinclination to take seriously the notion that you might be wrong.
In Washington I can show you anti-drug fundamentalism and animal-rights fundamentalism and environmental fundamentalism and feminist fundamentalism and plenty more.
Eventually they forced me to two realizations. First, you’re not wrong just because you’re a fundamentalist. Second, to some extent we are all fundamentalists, each and every one of us.
What distinguishes the ethic of liberal science is not that liberals are undogmatic; it is that liberals believe they must check their beliefs, or submit them for checking, however sure they feel.
What distinguishes them is not the rightness or wrongness of their beliefs, or even that they believe strongly. It is that they show no interest in checking.
A society run on liberal intellectual rules benefits from its dogmatists and true believers by making them argue with each other.
You might think that the fundamentalist, so secure in his belief, would feel the least need to trouble others who were in error. But the reverse is true. One reason is political, another moral.
There is no question where there can be only one answer. The game of science can be played only where belief is not fixed.
