From the Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, 

--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:


For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

 

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The Science of Liberty

Liberty's Kids

Libraries of the Founders

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave

Rebels: A Well-Regulated Militia

Charles Babbage: Codebreaker

Few names stand out in the history of computing as do Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine. The Difference Engine was only a demonstration model in his lifetime. Larger more complete engines have been built in our time by museums. He also proposed a more complex and sophisticated Analytical Engine, again, never built at all in his own time but constructed in our time by museums from his plans. You may also know about his work with Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace. The daughter of George Gordon, Lord Byron, she was arguably the first computer programmer. What you may not know is that among Babbage’s hobbies were cryptology and lock picking. He said that lock picking and cryptology were very similar pursuits intellectually. 

(This is based on a presentation to the Austin OWASP Crypto Party held at National Instruments Bldg. C, January 23, 2018.)

At this time – we are talking the middle third of the 19^thcentury, say 1823 to 1868—codes and ciphers were all the rage. In America, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” laid bare for public consumption the means for breaking any mono-alphabetic substitution cipher. 

Newspapers ran columns known as “Miseries.” They were Lonely Hearts messages by which lovers set up rendezvous, and they typically relied on some kind of encryption, most often single alphabet substitutions, sometimes transpositions. 

This is where Babbage comes in and wherein lies some mystery about his work. The polyalphabetic cipher goes back to the late Renaissance. We call them Vigenere ciphers. They are commonly attributed to Blaise de Vigene in the year 1585. However, the first publication can be attributed to Gian Battista Belaso in 1553. In fact, the means of breaking monoalphabetic ciphers also goes back to this time, but was not widely known outside of the black chambers of governments.

This is a 26x26 Vigenere Table. German with its umlauts would have 29 letters. Greek would have 24 letters. You encipher your message down the rows, the 13th letter being encrypted against the 13th row.

As you can see, the two Es are enciphered differently. The consecutive Rs in MARRY are enciphered to different outputs.

The man sees the end of the line.

The most common letter in English is E. The most common trigraph is THE. As you can see, the letters E all are encrypted differently. The three instances of THE have different outputs. It is for this reason that for 300 years, the Vigenere cipher was called the indecipherable cipher. It could not be broken.

But there was a war on.  The Crimean War saw Russia pitted against the UK, France, and the Ottoman Empire. Secret codes were essential to military communication. 

Enter Babbage.

First of all, Babbage promised but never published his treatise on cryptanalysis. That was unusual because he had an ego big enough to fill this room. Babbage was one of a handful of liberal scientists who purposely and purposefully restructured their society. Among them were Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace and Charles Darwin, William Herschel, and William Whewell. It was Whewell who coined the word scientist in an ad hoc debate with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science on June 24, 1833. 

Several scholars today theorize that Babbage was working for the War Department. So, he did publish some insights and suggestions in his autobiography of 1864. But he never let the cat out of the bag.

Babbage created a massive set of dictionaries of the English language organized by word length and then sorted by initial letters and then printed up by their second letters. He made tables of common digraphs and trigraphs. He listed all of the words with repeated letters. He could do this because he was independently wealthy, having inherited from his father an estate valued at £100,000, call it $50 million in our money. All of that just prepared his mind to attack the unbreakable cipher, which he did.

Not Babbage but a hacker at DefCon 512

Like all codebreakers, Babbage attacked the human element. We say in hacking that amateurs target systems while professionals target people. Babbage’s study of language and cryptography opened the door … and we do not know for sure just what door that was. He kept it secret. But he did mention it in passing in his autobiography. As big as his ego was, he was a man of his word. He meant what he said and proved it with mathematics. He held the same Lucasian Chair at Cambridge as Sir Isaac Newton.

The way the Vigenere worked in practice is that each agent, each minister or other user would be given a word, preferably a long word, and ideally with no repeating letters.

In the example above…

The message was I LOVE YOU. MARRY ME and the key word was UNPREDICTABLY which gave us 13 different ciphers. However, the longer the message the more likely that you will cycle through the key and eventually encipher the same words or at least the same letters with the same keys. 

Babbage figured out that you do not need to find the key of you can find the length of the key.

 

 “It may have been as efficacious as it is formidable,
but neither an index to its symbolism,
nor any clue to its purpose exist.” – 
David Kahn, The Codebreakers, Chapter 6,
“The Contributions of the Dilettantes,” pg. 207

Babbage had a lifelong interest in cryptology and cryptanalysis. He and his friends William Whelwell and William Herschel among other savants of the day all dabbled in it. Babbage and his nephew exchanged challenges, which Charles Babbage deconstructed to its table based on the word SOMERSET by guessing that it began with DEAR UNCLE and ended with NEPHEW HENRY. That was in 1846. Babbage later took apart another small Vigenere that a dentist, John Thwaite, was attempting to get patented in 1854, shortly after the start of the Crimean War. Babbage broke that cipher, and though he promised to publish fully, he never did.

Passages from The Life of a Philosopher
Edited autobiography of Charles Babbage

Unfortunately, all we have is tantalizing scraps from his personal notes and notebooks. He never published a definitive treatise.

I read through about a dozen books – 14 in all, I think – by and about Babbage. You can get lost in his work. Because of his wealth and station, he was involved in almost every aspect of this revolutionary time from the most advanced mathematics to the most advanced manufacturing. Of all those books, The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder (Broadway Books, 2011) is the one volume that I recommend as the best overview. 

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The Philosophical Breakfast Club 

Passwords 

The Unremarkable Origin of Species 

Austin Security Alliance 

Postmodernism

On The Federalist blog is a recent essay identifying Pres. Donald Trump as an anti-postmodernist. (“Donald Trump is the First President to Turn Postmodernism Against Itself” by David Ernst, January 23, 2017, here .)  As interesting as it was, I have a different understanding of the anti-hero.

(This is based on my post on this subject at Rebirth of Reason here. )

Earlier on RoR, I suggested that The Thomas Crowne Affair from 1968 portrayed an anti-hero. Played by Steve McQueen, Thomas Crowne lost interest in his orchestrated heist. I contrasted that with the 1999 remake where the screenplay gave Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crowne a heroic stance.  See RoR here.)  There, I also pointed to Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Man by Thomas Mann (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, which I read in a high school German class).  It is not that the anti-hero has bad values, but that he has none. 

Writing for The Federalist blog, David Ernst pointed to Tony Soprano as an example of the anti-hero.  (We tried the first episode of The Sopranos, and as much as I liked the ending, it was not compelling.) But I get the point from other stories in the genre such as Goodfellas and The Godfather. In the movie version of The Godfather, at Sonny's wedding, Michael's wife Kay Adams is taken aback by the gangsters around her.  "My father is just a powerful man, like a governor or a senator," Michael says.  "Governors and senators don't have people killed!" she protests.  "You're naive, Kay," he replies.  But if the dons did not care, if they put their men into losing battles just for the fun of it, if they walked away from a deal with all the money on the table because money means nothing, they would anti-heroes. In fact, Michael Corleone is a hero in the romantic sense. (As a side note, under Don Vito, the family never dealt in drugs. He found them immoral. Sonny took the family into drugs by disobeying his father; and his own lack of judgment, his lack of values, got him killed.)

Donald Trump does have values. He is not only not an Objectivist in any sense of the word, his values apparently are not even objective. (Your life is an absolute value. Your career is an objective value. You can choose from many, but to be good for you, your career must meet the absolute standard of promoting your life. In a discussion with her attorney, Henry Mark Holzer, on legal theory, Ayn Rand pointed out that Roman Law was objective. It was not primarily or even necessarily concerned with individual rights. But it was publicly posted for all to know, and it was uniformly enforced. For Rand, the evils in a dictatorship were reflected in arbitrary enforcement of secret laws.) 

The Federalist article by David Ernst does make an interesting point, though. When Donald Trump gave money to Democrat Party candidates, no one complained.  My point here is that Donald Trump contributed to the party that buttered his bread. If he tossed contributions to any party, willy-nilly, that would have been anti-heroic.

On the matter of post-modernism, Objectivish writers have been cogent and incisive in pointing out that despite their protests of innocence, the postmodernists are not "value free." They are solidly ethno-centric. I refer to Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks reviewed on RoR . I did not read this book.  But I did have a graduate class in postmodernist theory; and later, here in Austin, at the local Ayn Rand Meet-Up, one of the others at our table, who did read it, spoke well to the truth.  

In my class (criminology theory), my classmates were going on and on about cultural relativism and all cultures being equal and all that.  So, I brought up the then-current investigation of insurance wholesalers by Eliot Spitzer, and the Bernie Madoff scandal.  "They just cheated other rich people. And it's the rules of their own game.  So why do you care? Don't they have a right to capitalist culture?"  Of course, no one had anything to say...

Postmodernists are not cultural relativists.  Postmodernism is an assault on reality, reason, and integrity in order to dominate anyone and everyone by the destruction of other people's values in order to impose their own rule.

De-construction (so-called) can be a valid intellectual tool -- if your goal is to understand how something is constructed. But "de-contruction" is an anti-concept. The concept is analysis.  Ayn Rand was excellent at "taking apart" the intellectual framework of modern politics, showing that collectivism rests on altruism which rests on mysticism. But her point was not to demonstrate that all ideas are meaningless mutterings taught by your local subjective culture. And it was not her goal to impose her own rule to fill the vacuum.

I have had a hard time getting people Galt's Gulch Online to understand why Ayn Rand valued the liberals of her time. She admired Adlai Stevenson, but disagreed completely with his politics. The liberals of that earlier time offered an intellectual approach to politics: they identified problems and offered solutions based on a theory of human action. She disagreed with all of the particulars.  But she also vehemently opposed the "me-too" traditional conservatives who had no ideas except to keep whatever it was we seem to have inherited from the past.  The liberals and progressives of the previous century were wrong in many particulars, but were right in their approach. When the conservatives of Europe wanted to ban comic books, Eleanor Roosevelt spoke up for freedom of the press.

That is a conflict of values, on both sides. The postmodernist anti-hero has no values because those who preach postmodernism want to impose their own rule for no other reason except to rule. Power is an end in itself. All of that was explained well in Ayn Rand's fiction and non-fiction. The most dramatic statement I know on that point is found in George Orwell’s 1984: “Imagine a boot stepping on a man’s face – forever.”  That is the goal of postmodernism.

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The Science of Liberty

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Sokal Affair

Apollo 11: Task Accomplished

Newtonmas 2016: Great Man or Social Forces?

December 25 is the traditional birthday of Sir Isaac Newton(1).  So, some fans and followers of physics, and perhaps some professionals, celebrate Newtonmas on December 25.  The TV sitcom, The Big Bang Theory brought the holiday to millions who had not heard of it.(2)  The question remains: Why celebrate Newton, rather than Descartes, Einstein, or many other scientists?

• Sir Isaac Newton represented Cambridge at Parliament.
• He offered an original proof of the binomial theorem, what in high school we learn as “Pascal’s Triangle.”
• He developed an algorithm for rapidly approximating square roots.
• He investigated light and demonstrated that “white” light is composed of discrete colors.
• Based on his experiments with light, he invented the reflecting telescope.
• He invented calculus.
• He invented calculus as part of his general proof of the laws of motion, including the motion of bodies under the influence of gravity. He showed that motion on Earth is not different from motion in the heavens. That was a radical departure from 2000 years of philosophy.
• He served as warden and master of the British Royal Mint for 30 years. His tenure began with his rescuing the British economy from near certain collapse. He had himself sworn as a magistrate so that he could investigate counterfeiting, going in disguise to pubs.

If he had done any one of those, he would have earned a place in history.  He did all of them. 

That brings up the problem of “the great man” versus “social forces.”  If Newton had died in infancy, as he was truthfully at risk, would someone else –Robert Hooke, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz – have filled the void?  Would we have waited until 1800 or 1900 for the next Newton to invent calculus and achieve all of those other heights?  Did we wait until 1680 because some previous Newton of 1300 died at birth? 

For all of Newton’s specific achievements, his greatest glory may be in being the exemplar of the Age of Reason and the gateway to the Enlightenment.  The Newtonian Revolution was not just about the orbit of the planets.  The American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution are consequences of the work of Sir Isaac Newton. The founders of our republic sought natural laws to inform their designs for a just and workable republic with a balance of powers.  As late at the 1830s, diametrically opposed philosophers August Comte and Herbert Spencer attempted to devise “social physics” as a science of human action. They each gave up on that label and settled for mere “sociology.”

(1) Note: Newton was born in 1742.  The English Parliament passed the Calendar Act in 1750 to take effect on 2 September 1752, which was followed by 14 September 1752.   Newton’s birthday (New Style) is January 4. Similarly, George Washington was born on February 11, 1732, which became February 22 when the calendar was set forward. The Gregorian reform of the Julian calendar realigned the solar year with the vernal equinox in order to keep Easter in the spring. 

(2) Note: The first Newtonmas was actually celebrated in Japan before 1890.  I recorded a Newtonmas message for the Community Commentator series of WKAR AM/FM, East Lansing, in 1982 or ’83. I sent Newtonmas cards to my friends off and on over several years.  Meanwhile, Kwanza was invented. Then, Seinfeld introduced “Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us.”  Organized atheists began offering Newtonmas as an antidote to Christmas.  Whether and to what extent Newton would have felt honored or horrified is open to debate. Counterfactuals can be unresolvable. 

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Newtonmas 2011

Newtonmas 2012

Newtonmas 2013

Newtonmas 2014

Newtonmas 2015

The Problem of Cultural Patrimony

From Agent Presse France 
via Al-Arabiya online here 

On February 18, 2015, news services (Reuters here) reported that a group of amateur undersea divers from Israel found 2000 gold coins from about 1000 CE, off the coast of the ancient city of Caesarea which is now in the modern state called Israel.  The coins were struck during  the Fatimid Caliphate.  Speculation by archaeologists from the Israeli Antiquities Authority included the suggestion that the coins were taxes collected for the ruling center of the time at Cairo in Egypt.  An alternate theory is that the coins came from a private merchant ship moving from port to port.  No article cited the problem of patrimony.

Fatimid dinars feature the names of the caliphs they were minted under, as well as the date and location where they were minted. "They're first-class historical documents," explains Robert Kool, curator of the IAA's Coin Department.  […] A cursory study reveals that the earliest coin from the hoard was minted in Palermo, Sicily, while the majority came from official Fatimid mints in Egypt and other parts of North Africa and date to the reigns of Caliphs al-Hakim (A.D. 996-1021) and his son al-Zahir (A.D. 1021-1036).  -- National Geographic News online here.

UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) has a broad mandate.  In the past fifteen years, it has arranged with national governments around the world – chief among them, the United States of America – for the passage of laws requiring that “cultural patrimony” be returned to the country of origin.  The Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Getty Museum are among the most newsworthy victims. Several problems haunt the laws. The problem of patrimony is multidimensional. The claims of UNESCO and their allies suffer from internal contradictions because they have no objective basis in epistemology: no standard of value exists for identifying right from wrong.

First, modern nations did not exist in ancient times.  The Boston Museum returned to Turkey a statue called “The Weary Herakles” from 200 BCE. But there was no “Turkey” in 200 BCE.   They called it “Helliades” – and you need to understand what that means.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Greeks called themselves “Achaeans.”  About 400 years later, during the Hellenistic Era, they called themselves “Hellenes.”  Hellas is the modern Greek name for Greece.  But grammatically Helliades is much wider than Hellinike. 

Hellenike would be any Greek city with ties to the old homeland.  Tarentum in Italy was Taras; Naples (Napoli) was Neopolis.  Marseilles in France was Marsalla.  Benghazi in Libya was Berenike.  They were Greek cities.  Greeks built them; Greeks inhabited them.  Sicilians are not Italians.  Italy is a peninsula. Sicily is an island. They are different places.  The people of eastern Sicily are Greeks. In the west, they are Carthaginian.

However, after Alexander the Great, many cities of diverse ethnicities came into the Greek sphere. The orator Demosthenes said, “The name ‘Hellene’ no long applies to a race, but to a state of mind.”

 

Ancient Coin Collectors Guild
lobbied for the rights of private citizens

On that basis, should not every coin from Pakistan to Spain, from Egypt to England go back to Athens? In truth, as the laws are applied, coins from Greek cities of Sicily do not go back to the government museums of Greece: they go to the government museums of Italy. 

Consider the Roman Empire.  In addition to the central mint, coins were struck in what are today Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, France, and England.   Moreover, Roman legions came from all across the empire, but could be stationed anywhere.  The legion name (cognomen) could reflect where they were drawn from or where they won a battle.  We have epigraphic evidence to show that Legio IX Hispanica served in England from 65 to 120 CE. Legio III Cyrenica (modern Libya) served in what are today Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Legio III Italica was stationed in what is Regensburg for 200 years, from 165 CE.  Galba reorganized former marines into Legio I Adiutrix (“Rescuer”) in 68 AD, and stationed them in what is today Mainz.  However, for most of the second century (106 to 198) their base was in a town later known for many years as Szőny in Hungary, but which is now called Komárom on the border with the Slovak Republic.  So, when a hoard of coins found in England contains the product of a mint from Croatia to pay Roman troops from Spain, whose patrimony is it?

Second, the assumption of UNESCO and the co-operating national governments is that the national public museums have a moral right to first claim.  Private collectors are rebuked as looters of protected sites. 

Old World traditions acknowledge the ruler as the owner of all property. The king could grant a title and land to go with it because all of his realm was his to dispose of as he saw fit.  In America today, that continues as eminent domain: the state can take what it needs.  So, when a farmer in Egypt or England finds an ancient coin on his land, it is not his at all: it belongs to the national government.  (England relaxed its “treasure trove” laws; but even that granting of latitude was from the rulers down to their subjects.) The governments of Turkey, Greece, Italy claim that these artifacts were "looted" from "historic sites" but it is easy to make any place historic if other people ever lived there before you did.  Historicity is just an excuse.  In their minds, private property does not exist.

“I’ve been reading only about the Italians and Greeks 

and how they’ve succeeded,’’ said [former Turkish 

cultural official Engin] Ozgen.  “This will show the world 

that the Turks are not ignorant anymore, that they will fight 

for their past and their heritage.’’ This statue is attributed 
as a Roman copy of a lost Greek work.  
It comes from the city of Antalya in modern Turkey.
The town was founded by Attalus II of Pergamon in 180 BCE. 

 Seljuk Turks entered the area about 1500 years later. 

The Boston Museum of Fine Art returned this 
statue of "The Weary Herakles" to the city of Antalya. 

Read here.

Third, why is a museum in Rome more entitled to these artifacts than I am?  It is my patrimony as well.  And, like most Americans, I have a lot of patrimony.  In addition to the Sicilians (Greeks), my mother’s side of the family was loosely identified as “Hungarian.” However, my maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Croatian.  The family just moved up the river inside of a large, multi-ethnic empire in central Europe.  My maternal grandfather’s immigration records identify him as German-Hungarian.  Are not the artifacts of the legions also my cultural inheritance?

Fourth and more to the point, I cite Demosthenes above: “Hellene” is a state of mind.  UNESCO and the national governments couch their claims in the language of race, ethnicity, and genetics.  The fact of the matter is that we are creatures of intellect living in a planetary society.  Seiji Ozawa (Japanese; born in China) and Yo-Yo Ma (Chinese; born in Paris) have as much right to buy Beethoven’s belt buckle as do any of the current inhabitants of Bonn.  

Fifth, national borders are fluid.  Economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and his brother, mathematician Richard von Mises (1883-1953), were born in a town called Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian empire.  Treaty of Versailles put the town in the Ukraine, where today it is called L’viv.  According to the UNESCO theory of culture, the people there lost their patrimonic right to enjoy the artifacts of one milieu, but were given the consolation prize of another matrix of icons and exemplars. 

Coin of Sinope in modern Turkey, struck about 375 BCE 


when Diogenes the Cynic was mint master.  


Accused of debasing the coinage, he moved to Athens 

and became a philosopher. 

Under the eagle's wing DIO below the dolphin, SINO. 

The test cut shows that the coin was suspected 
of being false.

The ANA measured the specific gravity and found it 

to be only 
90% pure silver, acceptable to us, 


but debased to the ancients.

Ultimately, the ideological nationalization of museums contradicts the fundamental intention of a museum.  Every leading institution seeks to own and display as broad a collection as possible. That motivation derives from the liberal Enlightenment theory of humanity.  Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, I benefited from time spent at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It seemed to me then – and is still supportable today – that the entirety of human culture was housed there. 

A hundred yards away, the Natural Science Museum displayed meteorites and dinosaur fossils.  Those, too, are arguably someone else’s patrimony. One of the displays about Humans was a panel explaining Culture. I do not know if the Jivaro would be culturally enhanced by the return of their shrunken heads, or if the Inuit need another old canoe; but I certainly am better for having studied them without trekking to Peru and Alaska.

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Circumference

Numismatics: History as Market

Newton versus the Counterfeiter

Accounting for Civilization

The Science of Liberty

The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris is excellent assembly of cogent essays is an extended argument for freedom and science. The scientific revolution and liberal democracy are inseparable.  To limit one is to defeat the other.  According to Ferris, the scientific method is the root of political freedom.  In that, he continues the case made long ago by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies.  

Like Popper, Ferris misses the center of the target.  It is not “liberal democracy” but capitalism that enabled and was empowered by the Enlightenment philosophy of rational-empiricism that we know today as Objectivism. To be fair, though, Ferris does devote an entire chapter to “The Science of Wealth” where he praises both free market capitalism and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

Anyone who values freedom and science will find this book is well worth the time invested.  The essays are crisp, insightful, and backed by citation.  While Ferris does good work building up the material benefits of the scientific method and the human values in liberal democracy, the core of the book is a total demolition of claims that centralism and totalitarianism can lead to good science.  In one chapter, plus other material throughout, Ferris shows that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were scientifically bankrupt, and technologically inferior to the liberal democracies they opposed. 

In just under 300 pages, Ferris delivers a close and informative history of the scientific method, centered on Sir Francis Bacon's creation - and betrayal - of it.  Ancient Greeks such as Aristarchos and Demokritos, guessed correctly, reasoning well, that the Earth orbits the sun, and that matter is comprised of atoms.  But that was not science.  Science is a method of observation, questioning, investigation, tests, and reporting.  (To see why Aristotle's description of the chick embryo does qualify as science, see my review of Great Scientific Experiments, here.)  Science did not exist before the Renaissance; the creation of science led to the political Enlightenment. Like the chicken and the egg, of course, which came first is a moot point: you cannot have one without the other.  More to the point, Ferris argues well, the essence of liberal democracy, what it is that makes freedom work, is precisely the scientific method applied to social problems.

That said, Ferris is well aware of the essential weakness in liberal politics: experimental programs become permanent.  According to the scientific method as applied to civics, we, the people, vote on certain remedies, try them out, and if they fail, we pragmatically try something else.  Actually, that last never happens.  We go on to new attempts, but the old failures continue to be funded and staffed and enforced.  He has no solution for that.

Ferris does deliver a good history, especially of the American revolution as the triumph of citizen scientists.

In another chapter on “Academic Antiscience” Ferris reveals how Karl Popper’s theory of falsification and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of “paradigm” were misapplied at first innocently, and then wantonly, by “post modernists.”  Claiming that theirs was an agenda of liberation, Paul Feyerabend and those who followed him quickly moved on to demanding an end to science and an end to material prosperity.

Supplementing that demonstration is a chapter on Progress.  Post-modernists decry and deny it.  They claim that material progress leaves us spiritually impoverished.  Politically, they claim that progress is illusory, being only the looting of the poor by the rich. Ferris takes the second claim and shreds it with facts.  Even if the claim were true that the rich are evermore far richer than the poorest, the sheer numbers of the poor, multiplied by their material advantages today, bury any claims to injustice from progress.  The poorest are far better off than they were 50 or 100 years ago. 

The book closes with a chapter on global warming and the consequent ice age that will come “unless we do something.”  What is that “we” must “do” is less clear.  Once again, Ferris is mindful of the precarious state of the world’s poor.  Reducing greenhouse gases, however accomplished, must not come by taking their lives. Who can afford to make which sacrifices today in order to secure the future is a tough question for which Ferris has no answer.

“The point is that lightswitch ethics—pounding the table and insisting, “We must save the lives of our grandchildren” or alternately, “We must leave free enterprise alone”—are inadequate. … Responsible stewardship requires dealing in quantities and probabilties, with little recourse to comforting certitudes.” 

Ferris closes by comparing the universal, invariant nature of science with the universal and invariant nature of liberalism.  Both depend on and advocate truths that apply to all people in all times and places.

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