The Science of Liberty - how science and democracy are intertwinned

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That is the theme of Timothy Ferris’s new book The Science of Liberty (HarperCollins, 2010) I plan to find as soon as possible. While I have not read the book, I have read the review in the September 2010 Scientific American magazine by Michael Shermer (Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and author of The Mind of the Market).

Democracy's Laboratory: Are Science and Politics Interrelated?

Mixing science and politics is tricky but necessary for a functioning polity

By Michael Shermer August 31, 2010

Do you believe in evolution? I do. But when I say "I believe in evolution," I mean something rather different than when I say “I believe in liberal democracy.” Evolutionary theory is a science. Liberal democracy is a political philosophy that most of us think has little to do with science.

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Democratic elections are scientific experiments: every couple of years you carefully alter the variables with an election and observe the results. If you want different results, change the variables. “The founders often spoke of the new nation as an ‘experiment,’” Ferris writes. “Procedurally, it involved deliberations about how to facilitate both liberty and order, matters about which the individual states experimented considerably during the eleven years between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” As ­Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1804: “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.”

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For example, the political belief of John Locke that people should be treated equally under the law—which factored heavily in the construction of the U.S. Constitution—was an untested theory in the 17th century. In fact, Ferris told me in an interview, “few thinkers prior to the advent of the American liberal-democratic experiment thought democracy could work in any but the most limited forms” and that most political theorists believed that “the common people are too stupid and ignorant to be trusted electing their leaders.” And yet, Ferris continued, “liberal democracy did succeed and is today the stated preference of the majority of the world’s peoples, including both those who live in democratic nations and those who don’t.” What would constitute a failed experiment in the political laboratory? "If it ceased to exist in the nation under examination and was replaced by something else. Such was widely predicted to be the fate of the liberal democracies, but the verdict of experiment was otherwise: liberal democracy turned out to be the most stable and long-lasting form of government ever instituted."

But, I protest, aren’t all political claims types of beliefs? No, Ferris responded: “Liberalism and science are methods, not ideologies. Both incorporate feedback loops through which actions (e.g., laws) can be evaluated to see whether they continue to meet with general approval. Neither science nor liberalism makes any doctrinaire claims beyond the efficacy of its respective methods—that is, that science obtains knowledge and that liberalism produces social orders generally acceptable to free peoples.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=democracys-laboratory

This makes sense to me and it explains why liberalism has such a hard time making headway in today's America with the rampart and willful ignorance that is so popular. I can't wait to read the entire book!