杏吧原创

WHEN my liberal scientist friends express concern about threats to free scientific inquiry, they talk mostly about the Bush administration and the religious right. Yet many of our fellow liberals are just as eager to constrain science as the right-wingers and bible-thumpers.

Prominent among them are socialistic liberals, who are quite happy to have the government regulate science in order to promote socially beneficial scientific developments (non-polluting energy sources, for example) while discouraging potentially harmful ones (grey goo). The shortcomings of innumerable past regulatory schemes, imposed on everything from airlines to nuclear waste disposal, do little to dampen their enthusiasm for new regulations. Nor are they put off by the fact that it is difficult to think of a past scientific discovery that humanity would be better off not having made. Their agenda is thus quite different from that of classical liberals, who believe that government has no more business regulating science than it has regulating songwriting. And yet, confusingly, in the US both camps are lumped together as 鈥渓iberals鈥�.

Granted, any broad political label harbours contradictions. Among American conservatives you will find environmentalists and polluters, libertarians and authoritarians, people who support increased funding for the National Science Foundation and others who open the newspaper each morning hoping to read that Darwin has at last been proved wrong. But the conflation of socialistic with classical liberalism is particularly vexing for us friends of science, since it perpetuates the myth that opponents of science are all irrational. That is not the case: many socialistic liberals are quite rational. What they are not 鈥� and this should be crucially important to all working scientists 鈥� is particularly empirical.

Classical liberals, by contrast, stress the importance of free experimentation, while recognising that experimenting is inherently inefficient and unpredictable. As the economist Samuel Bailey observed in 1821, 鈥淚t seems to be a necessary condition of human science, that we should learn many useless things, in order to become acquainted with those which are of service.鈥� Since we cannot know in advance which discoveries will be the more useful, Bailey concluded, 鈥淭he only way in which mankind can secure all the advantages of knowledge is to prosecute their inquiries in every possible direction.鈥� The more creative a scientific inquiry, the less predictable it is 鈥� and, therefore, the less well suited to social planning. In the words of the economist Friedrich Hayek, a classical liberal whom the American press persists in calling a conservative, even though he wrote a celebrated essay entitled Why I Am Not a Conservative: 鈥淣owhere is freedom more important than where our ignorance is greatest 鈥� at the boundaries of knowledge, in other words, where nobody can predict what lies a step ahead.鈥�

The case for free empirical inquiry as opposed to rationalistic social planning snaps into focus when, rather than trembling before the threat of some looming catastrophe that we imagine might occur should computers get too smart or genetic mapping too sophisticated, we instead look back into history and ask, 鈥淥f what existing scientific knowledge would we prefer that humanity had remained ignorant?鈥� Recently I talked with a number of socialistic liberals eager to regulate 鈥� of all things 鈥� stem-cell research. They expressed alarm about the prospect of rich people buying brainpower that poor people cannot afford, smart chimps being put to work cleaning up radioactive spills, and other potential generators of social inequality. When asked to name a past programme of scientific research that ought to have been prohibited, several replied, predictably, that nuclear weapons should never have been developed.

鈥淔reedom beats control hands-down at feeding people, improving their health, expanding their horizons and enlivening their minds鈥�

OK, so let鈥檚 see. Does this mean that the Swiss government ought to have prevented Einstein from publishing his special relativity paper in 1905, or that the UK Parliament ought to have padlocked Rutherford鈥檚 laboratory before he could infer the structure of the atomic nucleus? And even if the leaders of all the western nations had mustered such astonishing prescience 鈥� which, of course, they could not have done 鈥� what would the cold war have been like had the Soviets failed to demonstrate similar restraint? The point is that government restrictions on scientific research seldom if ever make sense, except of course to enforce existing laws against broader abuses, such as fraud and assault, because they assume a 20/20 foresight that neither the government nor anyone else possesses.

Insofar as science relies on both rationality and empiricism 鈥� walks on two legs, in the customary metaphor 鈥� both the rationalism of socialistic liberals and the empiricism of classical liberals can claim to be scientific. But the two legs are not equally strong: science resembles less a walking man than a crab, with one small claw and one big one. The small claw is rationalism, which was around for a long time before science arose and which could scarcely have created science on its own. The big claw is organised empiricism, incarnated in the rise of scientific laboratories, societies, professorships and publications. Organised science didn鈥檛 reason its way to dark energy and the double helix, although reason certainly played a role; it got there mostly through a more-or-less random walk of observation and experiment. Its cardinal contribution was not so much to legitimise clear thinking as to establish a method by which clear and muddy thinkers alike 鈥� so long as they weren鈥檛 too muddy, or too clear 鈥� could contrive to get at the facts.

In that sense it may be said that the success of science has done as much to expose the limitations of rationalism as to demonstrate its virtues. Prior to the rise of science, rationalists and mystics alike maintained that the world would be a better place if only everybody heeded the irrefutable words of a given text. Science revealed that, to the contrary, even the most rigorous thinkers were woefully ignorant of the material world, and the way to reduce ignorance was less by memorising the Bible or the Koran or Kant or Hegel than by muddling through with persistent experimentation on just about every front that anyone cared to explore.

Which is pretty much how the liberal democracies proceed. Like working scientific laboratories, they are customarily confounded and dishevelled, yet their shambling careers have produced results demonstrably superior to those of charismatic despots and haughty planners alike. Their strengths are inconspicuous, leading journalists to speak carelessly of 鈥渇ragile鈥� democracy (as if the UK and the US, whose democratic governments date from the 17th and 18th centuries, were fragile) and 鈥渨estern-style鈥� democracy (as if Japan and India weren鈥檛 democracies, or were democracies of some peculiar kind). Yet their futures are bright, if only because it is there that science has taken root and grown.

Things might have been otherwise. It might have been, as so many intellectuals once believed, that socialistic and totalitarian systems were more efficient at advancing science and technology than were the liberal democracies, whose futures would therefore have looked dim. But it turns out that we do not live in that universe. Instead, freedom beats control hands-down at feeding people, improving their health, expanding their horizons and enlivening their minds. This happy discovery would make science worth fighting for even if it were the only discovery science had ever made.