Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

by Alice Domurat Dreger

Science and social justice require each other to be healthy, and both are critically important to human freedom. Without a just system, you cannot be free to do science, including science designed to better understand human identity; without science, and especially scientific understandings of human behaviors, you cannot know how to create a sustainably just system. As a consequence of this trip, I have come to understand that the pursuit of evidence is probably the most pressing moral imperative of our time.

central idea of the Enlightenment: that we get to know for ourselves who we are, by seeking evidence, using reason, and coming to thoughtful consensus on truth. Science and democracy grew up together in Europe and North America, as twins; it is no coincidence that so many of America’s Founding Fathers were science geeks. The “American” freedoms to think, to know, to learn, to speak—these were the freedoms that the radical Galileo had seized, long before they were finally written into our laws. As much as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and George Washington, Galileo Galilei ultimately made our democracy possible.

Temporal depth perception spanning millennia means you not only can see the potential to enact meaningful social change in terms of identity politics, but also you can see that, no matter what you do, you’ll eventually be forgotten. There’s something really liberating in knowing you don’t matter.