WEBVTT NOTE Timothy Ferris and Lynn Hunt: The Cause of Liberty 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.400 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:10.400 --> 00:00:13.720 Jeff Brigenbach. 3 00:00:13.720 --> 00:00:20.160 Timothy Ferris is a science writer and documentary filmmaker whose articles and essays have appeared 4 00:00:20.160 --> 00:00:26.320 in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Playboy, The New York Review of 5 00:00:26.320 --> 00:00:34.640 of Books, Forbes, Smithsonian, Harper's, Time, Newsweek, Wired, Scientific American, 6 00:00:34.640 --> 00:00:37.600 The Nation and The New Republic. 7 00:00:37.600 --> 00:00:41.780 His films have been shown in prime time on PBS. 8 00:00:41.780 --> 00:00:47.400 He teaches at the University of California Graduate School of Journalism in Berkeley. 9 00:00:47.400 --> 00:00:53.560 He is the author of at least a dozen books, the latest of which, The Science of Liberty, 10 00:00:53.560 --> 00:01:00.760 Democracy, Reason and the Laws of Nature was published about six weeks ago in early February by Harper. 11 00:01:01.880 --> 00:01:04.480 What is the Science of Liberty about? 12 00:01:05.240 --> 00:01:12.260 Here's how Ferris dealt with that question in a presentation he made at the Cato Institute in Washington DC in 13 00:01:12.700 --> 00:01:17.560 February. My thesis is that there is a symbiotic relationship between science and 14 00:01:18.760 --> 00:01:20.240 liberalism, let me 15 00:01:20.240 --> 00:01:27.680 I'd like to quickly define my terms. By science, I mean what sometimes is called modern science, 16 00:01:27.680 --> 00:01:34.560 which is to say the entire social institution of a scientific establishment that has professional 17 00:01:34.560 --> 00:01:40.500 scientists, university departments, laboratories, refereed journals, scientific conferences 18 00:01:40.500 --> 00:01:42.160 and all the rest of it. 19 00:01:42.160 --> 00:01:48.440 Ferris thinks modern science in this sense dates back to the beginning of the 17th century 20 00:01:48.440 --> 00:01:53.760 and has since developed into something truly unprecedented in human history. 21 00:01:53.760 --> 00:01:59.360 There's never been in history anything like the scientific establishment we have today. 22 00:01:59.360 --> 00:02:04.200 And it does have a method despite the efforts of hundreds of scholars to claim otherwise. 23 00:02:04.200 --> 00:02:08.920 And the essence of this method is a kind of feedback loop. 24 00:02:08.920 --> 00:02:13.960 You have an idea and instead of just testing it either by its internal logic 25 00:02:13.960 --> 00:02:19.400 or by testing it against other competing ideas which Aristotle had identified as the only 26 00:02:19.400 --> 00:02:26.480 two ways to evaluate an idea before science, you conduct an experiment. 27 00:02:26.480 --> 00:02:32.360 And then based on the experiment you might affirm, revise or deny the hypothesis. 28 00:02:32.360 --> 00:02:37.600 That really is how science works as far as I can tell in 40 years of covering it, even 29 00:02:37.600 --> 00:02:41.120 though many people seem to think otherwise. 30 00:02:41.120 --> 00:02:47.560 So much then for what Ferris means by science when he speaks of a symbiotic relationship 31 00:02:47.560 --> 00:02:50.760 between science and liberalism. 32 00:02:50.760 --> 00:02:53.960 What does he mean by liberalism? 33 00:02:53.960 --> 00:02:58.080 Now by liberalism I have in mind classical, what is sometimes called classical liberalism. 34 00:02:58.080 --> 00:03:03.160 In my opinion liberalism like science is not a term that benefits from modifiers. 35 00:03:03.160 --> 00:03:06.600 I don't think there's any need to talk about modern science or classical liberalism. 36 00:03:06.600 --> 00:03:10.440 To me liberalism is just liberalism enshrined in the Bill of Rights and so forth. 37 00:03:11.120 --> 00:03:21.120 Farris had been a little more exact the day before when he explained his new book to WNYC radio interviewer Leonard Lopate. 38 00:03:21.120 --> 00:03:31.120 I use liberalism in the original sense as the original political philosophy invented primarily by John Locke and a few others 39 00:03:31.120 --> 00:03:37.120 and embodied in the American Bill of Rights and the British Bill of Rights a century earlier. 40 00:03:37.120 --> 00:03:43.620 It's a philosophy that people can be trusted to be free, and it's the basis of liberal democracy. 41 00:03:43.620 --> 00:03:50.120 Democracy, liberal democracy is just a government in which people can vote to do just about anything 42 00:03:50.120 --> 00:03:53.120 except abridge the rights of their fellow citizens. 43 00:03:53.120 --> 00:04:01.120 Ferris told his audience at the Cato Institute that modern science and classical liberalism have much in common. 44 00:04:01.120 --> 00:04:07.640 Now, liberalism does have in common with science that, at least in terms of liberal democracy, 45 00:04:07.640 --> 00:04:14.240 one constructs experiments. They are inherent to the system. Every election is an experiment. 46 00:04:14.240 --> 00:04:19.360 Every act of legislation is an experiment. This isn't the way we talk about it so much 47 00:04:19.360 --> 00:04:25.560 now, but the founders did talk in experimental terms. Jefferson's Second Inaugural is one 48 00:04:25.560 --> 00:04:50.360 More important, the two are operationally interdependent. 49 00:04:50.360 --> 00:04:58.080 For example, as Ferris told Leonard Lopate, science can thrive only in a liberal environment. 50 00:04:58.080 --> 00:05:02.980 If you're going to nurture science, you've got to have a free country, and that's just 51 00:05:02.980 --> 00:05:08.360 empirically the fact. It's a fact that emerges from the historical record. 52 00:05:08.360 --> 00:05:12.520 Consider the case of China, Ferris urged Lopate. 53 00:05:12.520 --> 00:05:17.360 No matter how much money China spends trying to become a first-rate Chinese power, and 54 00:05:17.360 --> 00:05:47.000 All right, so science needs liberalism. But does liberalism need science? Ferris thinks 55 00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:55.640 Science, he writes, was the innovative ingredient, the crystal dropped in the supersaturated liquid, 56 00:05:55.640 --> 00:06:02.200 suddenly solidifying it, without which the democratic revolution would not have occurred. 57 00:06:02.200 --> 00:06:07.400 The truth is, according to Ferris, that the democratic revolution was sparked. 58 00:06:07.400 --> 00:06:13.600 Caused, is perhaps not too strong a word, by the scientific revolution, and science 59 00:06:13.600 --> 00:06:17.440 Science continues to foster political freedom today. 60 00:06:17.440 --> 00:06:24.960 Science, Ferris writes, is an ongoing enterprise that requires freedom of speech, travel and 61 00:06:24.960 --> 00:06:26.400 association. 62 00:06:26.400 --> 00:06:32.640 Moreover, scientific skepticism is corrosive to authoritarianism. 63 00:06:32.640 --> 00:06:38.360 Overall, science promotes liberty and democracy. 64 00:06:38.360 --> 00:06:45.880 Science, you see, depends on unfamiliar and sometimes unpopular ideas being freely promulgated, 65 00:06:45.880 --> 00:06:49.880 discussed and, in some instances, accepted. 66 00:06:49.880 --> 00:06:56.360 The fact that millions of people today are open to new ideas and skeptical about political 67 00:06:56.360 --> 00:07:01.880 or intellectual authority is largely due to the rise of science. 68 00:07:01.880 --> 00:07:07.440 The history of the last few hundred years, then, may be summed up by saying that science 69 00:07:07.440 --> 00:07:14.160 Ferris demanded liberty and demonstrated its social benefits, creating a symbiotic relationship 70 00:07:14.160 --> 00:07:20.120 in which the freer nations were better able to carry on the scientific enterprise, which 71 00:07:20.120 --> 00:07:25.040 in return rewarded them with knowledge, wealth and power. 72 00:07:25.040 --> 00:07:32.220 Consider the record, Ferris told WNYCFM interviewer Leonard Lopate. 73 00:07:32.220 --> 00:07:39.360 As he had written in chapter 1 of his book, in 1900 there was not a single liberal democracy 74 00:07:39.360 --> 00:07:48.360 in the world, since none yet had universal suffrage. By 1950 there were 22. And today? 75 00:07:48.360 --> 00:07:55.560 46% of the people in the world now live in liberal democracies. The other half want to 76 00:07:55.560 --> 00:08:00.440 live in liberal democracies. Everyone wants the benefits of science and many people are 77 00:08:00.440 --> 00:08:13.120 Ferris told his audience at the Cato Institute in February that it's not difficult to figure 78 00:08:13.120 --> 00:08:20.360 out why liberal democracy has spread so rapidly, nor is it hard to guess why people want to 79 00:08:20.360 --> 00:08:23.180 live under such a system. 80 00:08:23.180 --> 00:08:27.040 This combination of science and liberalism has quite a number of attainments. 81 00:08:27.040 --> 00:08:32.540 In the book, I try to boil down some of them to what I think are fairly universal values. 82 00:08:32.540 --> 00:08:40.040 What can everyone agree it's good for people to have, like health, wealth and happiness? 83 00:08:40.040 --> 00:08:48.340 In terms of health, thanks to science and free enterprise and such, the average expectation 84 00:08:48.340 --> 00:08:53.980 of a baby born in the world today is more than twice what it was in 1800. 85 00:08:53.980 --> 00:09:02.980 The production is up 52% per person despite the increase in population just since 1961 and that's actually just to 2001. 86 00:09:02.980 --> 00:09:07.980 And the reason of course for that is that agriculture is much more productive. 87 00:09:07.980 --> 00:09:16.980 It's not productive because some scientific council got together and made up a set of precepts that were then carried out. 88 00:09:16.980 --> 00:09:21.980 It's productive because of experimentation and that's what I've tried to emphasize in the Science of Liberty 89 00:09:21.980 --> 00:09:51.980 So much for health, what about wealth? 90 00:09:51.980 --> 00:10:13.780 And can Ferris really prove that liberal democracy has increased human happiness? 91 00:10:13.780 --> 00:10:14.860 Happiness is hard to measure. 92 00:10:14.860 --> 00:10:19.160 One thing I looked at is literacy because clearly people are better off if they can 93 00:10:19.160 --> 00:10:23.960 and Read and Write and feel better off and more in contact with the world and their community. 94 00:10:23.960 --> 00:10:32.480 World literacy went from 63% in 1970 up 10% by 1985 and over 80% today. 95 00:10:32.480 --> 00:10:37.740 Now if you were sitting in a coffee house in 1700 in London, let's say on Change Alley 96 00:10:37.740 --> 00:10:43.480 where a lot of the science-minded people would gather, and you were all science aficionados 97 00:10:43.480 --> 00:10:48.000 and you were trying to guess what the future might bring, you might have been, you know, 98 00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:51.840 Francis Bacon did this. This was a guy who was smart enough that a lot of people think 99 00:10:51.840 --> 00:10:58.080 he was Shakespeare. Francis Bacon saw some of what was coming with science and tried 100 00:10:58.080 --> 00:11:03.120 to predict it, and it's very difficult to do. It's hard to make predictions, as Niels 101 00:11:03.120 --> 00:11:14.340 Bohr said, especially about the future. Had you said at such an assembly that by somewhere 102 00:11:14.340 --> 00:11:31.180 Reading through Ferris's new book, its full title again, is The Science of Liberty, Democracy, 103 00:11:31.180 --> 00:11:33.420 Reason and the Laws of Nature. 104 00:11:33.420 --> 00:11:38.920 I was repeatedly reminded of another book, a book I read a few years ago. 105 00:11:38.920 --> 00:11:43.100 This book was called Inventing Human Rights, a History. 106 00:11:43.100 --> 00:11:49.540 It was the work of a UCLA professor of modern European history named Lynn Hunt, and it was 107 00:11:49.540 --> 00:11:55.660 published in 2007 by W. W. Norton and Company. 108 00:11:55.660 --> 00:12:01.380 According to Hunt, the story behind inventing human rights was a fairly simple one. 109 00:12:01.380 --> 00:12:06.760 The longer she thought about the events of the 18th century, particularly the American 110 00:12:06.760 --> 00:12:12.220 and French revolutions, the more she was struck by how very quickly the fundamental 111 00:12:12.220 --> 00:12:42.220 What I was really interested in was a very simple question, but the simple questions always turn out to be difficult, which is what made people in the 18th century think that universal human rights 112 00:12:42.220 --> 00:12:50.060 was were self-evident an implication that they must always exist when they 113 00:12:50.060 --> 00:12:55.380 hadn't been considered self-evident previously so how could something become 114 00:12:55.380 --> 00:12:59.300 self-evident and because it's self-evident it's a little bit hard to 115 00:12:59.300 --> 00:13:05.420 get at, Jefferson's we hold these truths to be self-evident, when you think 116 00:13:05.420 --> 00:13:09.980 something is self-evident you tend not to give long arguments for why it is so 117 00:13:09.980 --> 00:13:27.740 In the same book discussion recorded at UCLA in May 2008, Hunt also called attention to 118 00:13:27.740 --> 00:13:34.980 the very rapid changes in public opinion in the 18th century about torture and cruel punishment. 119 00:13:34.980 --> 00:13:40.980 New attitudes about torture and cruel punishment develop quite suddenly. 120 00:13:40.980 --> 00:13:48.980 Why do practices that have been accepted for centuries suddenly come apart at the seams? 121 00:13:48.980 --> 00:13:52.980 What happened in the 1760s and 1770s? 122 00:13:52.980 --> 00:14:01.980 Enlightenment reformers claimed explicitly in print that what happened was that when you applied reason to the practices 123 00:14:31.980 --> 00:14:34.900 It wasn't satisfied with that reasoning. 124 00:14:34.900 --> 00:14:38.260 She wanted to pose a more fundamental question. 125 00:14:38.260 --> 00:14:45.300 Why was it that when the idea salesmen went out into the public square in the 1760s and 126 00:14:45.300 --> 00:14:51.840 1770s with their rational ideas about human rights, they suddenly found so many ready 127 00:14:51.840 --> 00:14:55.120 and enthusiastic buyers? 128 00:14:55.120 --> 00:15:00.700 As she investigated this question, she came to understand, she says, that the buyers had 129 00:15:00.700 --> 00:15:06.300 had a kind of learning curve to deal with when they considered buying, say, the idea 130 00:15:06.300 --> 00:15:12.060 that everyone in a free society enjoys equal rights before the law. 131 00:15:12.060 --> 00:15:17.540 Alexis de Tocqueville recounts a story told by Voltaire's secretary about a woman named 132 00:15:17.540 --> 00:15:23.920 Madame de Chatelet, who did not hesitate to undress in front of her servants, who quote 133 00:15:23.920 --> 00:15:30.120 him not considering it a proven fact that valets were men. 134 00:15:30.120 --> 00:15:37.020 Before the 18th century and indeed long after the 18th century too, hierarchy, dominance 135 00:15:37.020 --> 00:15:44.420 and subordination were the natural ways of social relationship. The lesson is that equality 136 00:15:44.420 --> 00:15:52.420 has to be learned, that historically dominance and subordination have been much more common 137 00:15:52.420 --> 00:15:55.840 and seemingly natural. 138 00:15:55.840 --> 00:16:02.100 One might well retort that dominance and subordination had to be learned every bit as much as the 139 00:16:02.100 --> 00:16:10.140 idea of equality of rights, but we must avoid digressions, the clock is ever ticking. 140 00:16:10.140 --> 00:16:15.640 Given that equality of rights had to be learned before those who learned it could be expected 141 00:16:15.640 --> 00:16:22.080 to lend public support to such a radical idea, before they could reasonably be expected to 142 00:16:22.080 --> 00:16:35.920 Human rights take on self-evidence from the middle of the 18th century onward, really 143 00:16:35.920 --> 00:16:44.560 in the decade or so before 1776, thanks in part, and let me underline, in part, to the 144 00:16:44.560 --> 00:16:50.460 emotional effect of reading a new genre, the epistolary novel, that is the novel based 145 00:16:50.460 --> 00:16:54.980 on the Putative Exchange of Letters. 146 00:16:54.980 --> 00:17:00.380 And how would an epistolary novel educate a person so that the person would be more 147 00:17:00.380 --> 00:17:05.160 receptive to a pitch for equal rights for everyone? 148 00:17:05.160 --> 00:17:13.160 The narrative form of the epistolary novel as it develops after 1740 induces readers 149 00:17:13.160 --> 00:17:19.380 by its form to empathize with ordinary people unknown to them. 150 00:17:19.380 --> 00:17:26.660 This forces readers to see that the most ordinary people, even servants like Pamela, the heroine 151 00:17:26.660 --> 00:17:33.700 of Richardson's novel by that name, have inner selves just like their own. 152 00:17:33.700 --> 00:17:40.980 The term rights of man, which was the French term, widely adopted in the late 18th and 153 00:17:40.980 --> 00:17:46.020 early 19th century, including by Jefferson at that time, emerges, the term rights of 154 00:17:46.020 --> 00:17:53.440 Man emerges in the 1760s, and I believe that the ground is prepared, in part, by the epistolary 155 00:17:53.440 --> 00:18:01.140 novel. It is fascinating, though hardly conclusive, that the inventor of the phrase rights of man 156 00:18:01.140 --> 00:18:09.900 in French was also the 18th century's best-selling novelist in French, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 157 00:18:09.900 --> 00:18:15.740 that one of the first to seize upon the political power of natural rights, another common term, 158 00:18:15.740 --> 00:18:36.420 So you see then why Hunt's book is like Ferris's book. 159 00:18:36.420 --> 00:18:43.380 Both authors are trying to explain what seems to them like a sudden shift in public opinion. 160 00:18:43.380 --> 00:18:50.060 Ferris calls that shift in public opinion the democratic revolution, Hunt calls it the invention 161 00:18:50.060 --> 00:18:56.900 of human rights, and both authors seek to explain this change by finding a single cause 162 00:18:56.900 --> 00:18:58.540 for it. 163 00:18:58.540 --> 00:19:03.220 For Ferris, science caused the democratic revolution. 164 00:19:03.220 --> 00:19:09.460 For Hunt, the rise of the novel and the memoir in the early years of the 18th century caused 165 00:19:09.460 --> 00:19:12.780 the invention of human rights. 166 00:19:12.780 --> 00:19:15.020 And they're both right, of course. 167 00:19:15.020 --> 00:19:18.660 They're both right, and they're both wrong. 168 00:19:18.660 --> 00:19:24.340 What they're trying to do is like trying to explain why a new product suddenly swept 169 00:19:24.340 --> 00:19:26.660 through the marketplace. 170 00:19:26.660 --> 00:19:33.920 Why did millions of individuals in the marketplace of ideas, uncoordinated by any master plan 171 00:19:33.920 --> 00:19:42.200 or any manual or instruction booklet, simultaneously make the particular decisions they made? 172 00:19:42.200 --> 00:19:46.440 There is never a single answer to such a question. 173 00:19:46.440 --> 00:19:49.920 Different people were persuaded by different things. 174 00:19:49.920 --> 00:19:55.600 All we can do is name some of the factors that probably influenced the thinking and 175 00:19:55.600 --> 00:19:59.480 decisions of some of the people involved. 176 00:19:59.480 --> 00:20:04.480 In the case of the democratic revolution, the invention of human rights, one of the 177 00:20:04.480 --> 00:20:08.040 important factors was the rise of science. 178 00:20:08.040 --> 00:20:15.120 Another was the rise of fiction and memoir. Hunt, at least, knows all this. You'll note 179 00:20:15.120 --> 00:20:21.040 that she was careful to say that it was the reading of novels that, in part, accounted 180 00:20:21.040 --> 00:20:26.920 for the sudden growth of the idea that equal rights were self-evident. 181 00:20:26.920 --> 00:20:33.200 There are many ways to approach rights, and I am not at all arguing against other approaches. 182 00:20:33.200 --> 00:20:38.800 One could talk about Christian origins, origins in Greek and Roman Stoicism. 183 00:20:38.800 --> 00:20:41.120 One could talk about Catholic natural law. 184 00:20:41.120 --> 00:20:43.880 There are many other ways. 185 00:20:43.880 --> 00:20:49.640 People have talked about the resonance with the Indian, Chinese, Muslim, Native American 186 00:20:49.640 --> 00:20:50.720 traditions. 187 00:20:50.720 --> 00:20:57.060 And I don't in any way mean to say that these don't matter or are somehow unimportant. 188 00:20:57.060 --> 00:21:02.000 But I really focused in, for reasons of my own expertise, but also because I think there's 189 00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:19.820 We've all encountered the rival theories Hunt is talking about here. 190 00:21:19.820 --> 00:21:24.600 The thinkers like Max Weber, who believed that the rise of liberalism was caused by 191 00:21:24.600 --> 00:21:26.840 the Puritan work ethic. 192 00:21:26.840 --> 00:21:32.840 The thinkers who believe that the rise of liberalism was made inevitable by Christian ideas about 193 00:21:32.840 --> 00:21:36.720 the individual soul, and so forth. 194 00:21:36.720 --> 00:21:41.380 Take all such theories with a grain or two of salt, I implore you. 195 00:21:41.380 --> 00:21:46.080 When you're attempting to explain market processes, whether in the marketplace for 196 00:21:46.080 --> 00:21:53.020 goods and services, or the marketplace of ideas, it's never that simple. 197 00:21:53.020 --> 00:22:08.300 This is Jeff Rigenbach.